Ethics, Fitting Attitudes, and Practical Reason: A Theory of Normative Facts.

Abstract

In this dissertation I present an account of what we mean when we make ethical claims and of why we have reason to be ethical. I argue that we can analyze ethical concepts in terms of the rationality of certain motivational states. We can, for instance, analyze good outcomes as outcomes we should desire, and we can analyze wrongful acts as acts we should feel obligated not to perform. I proceed to argue that having reason to perform an act is a matter of the act’s contributing to an end at which we should aim - an end, that is, that we should be motivated to bring about. Since ethical judgments are judgments about how we should be motivated, and how we should be motivated determines what we should do, it is actually a conceptual truth that we should be ethical. An act’s wrongness, for instance, entails that we should feel obligated and thus be moved not to perform it, but this entails that we have reason not to perform it. I use this account to explain why we have intrinsic reason to pursue ethical ends, and why we have conclusive reason not to do moral wrong.

I go on to offer an analysis, which I call ‘Norm Descriptivism’, of what it is to have reason to have an attitude or perform an action. On this analysis, to judge that an agent has reason to have a response is to judge that the most fundamental norms she accepts prescribe that she have it. Facts about the most fundamental norms an agent accepts are facts about her psychology, and the agent can access these facts by constructing a best explanation of her normative intuitions. At the same time, an agent only counts as accepting a norm if representations that the norm prescribes a response tend to cause her to have it. I argue that Norm Descriptivism provides the best explanation of how normative judgments are both factual and essentially action guiding, how there can be such things as normative facts, and how our methods of philosophical inquiry can hook onto them.