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In this study I examine how the human being naturally comes to understand the human good and practical truth according to a Thomistic perspective. I begin with a claim that St. Thomas Aquinas draws from the Christian tradition as my starting premise: that the human being is created by God with an intellectual nature and natural intellectual aptitude to participate in God's understanding and loving. In Part I, which includes chapters 1 and 2, I examine, broadly speaking, what are two poles of contemporary Thomistic discourse on natural understanding of the human good and practical truth, namely, the theories of John Bowlin and John Finnis. After concluding that each author articulates an overly determinative account of practical truth, I consider in Part II the implications of Aquinas' claim that practical thinking depends on speculative thinking. My approach in Part II takes three turns. First, I turn in chapter 3 to the topic of simple truth. I recognize that a Thomistic theory of practical truth relies on a clear account of how simple judgment of affirmation (i.e., natural assent) arises distinctly in act. I observe both a need for clarity in Aquinas' account and a tendency in Thomistic interpretations to conflate the operation's logical and natural species. Second, I turn in chapter 4 to consider Robert Sokolowski's descriptive account of human engagement in truth. In dialogue with Sokolowski, I realize that to explain how simple judgment arises, I need to distinguish it from another species of assent that is already a practical activity, namely, judgment of affirmation by inductive inference. Therefore, third, I turn in chapter 5 to clarify a Thomistic speculative account of simple judgment in terms of its natural causal principles, and then to articulate the beginnings of an account of natural understanding of the human good and practical truth in terms of this.

We are subject to many different norms telling us how to act, from moral norms to etiquette rules and the law. While some norms may simply be ignored, we live under the impression that others matter for what we ought to do. How can we make sense of this normative authority some norms have? Does it fit into our naturalist worldview? Many philosophers claim it does not. Normativity is conceived to be distinct from ordinary natural properties, making it mysterious. The mystery fuels a radical yet prominent scepticism about the existence of normative properties: if they are too strange to actually exist, there is nothing we ought to do. Some take this to mean, moreover, that nothing is morally right or wrong. We must critically examine the ideas behind these theories, which put both morality and normativity in general on the line. The aim of this thesis is to unravel the mystery of normativity. It uncovers and objects to the influential non-natural conception of it, arguing that we can capture normativity with natural properties. In particular, it explores how the authority of norms can be explained by the commitments of the people subject to them. In connection to this, it challenges the conceptual claim behind the view that all moral judgements are mistaken. Finally, it reveals that treating morality as a mere fiction has revolutionary practical implications. This emphasises the importance of the overall conclusion: we need not conceive of either moral or normative properties as too mysterious to exist.

This thesis attempts to answer the question of what morality actually is, as well as judgements of 'good', 'bad/evil' from a scientific perspective. I review scientific literature and extract what I think is the best explanation for the foundations of moral judgements, how it evolved and what is judged. Essentially, I derive a fully naturalistic metaethical theory from the scientific literature. This I have called 'The Power Theory of Morality' as it shows that morality and judgements of good and bad are based on and can be reduced to power relational evaluations. From this the thesis naturally flows from the findings of a power-based morality, psychology and metaphysics, to an exploration of Nietzsche's philosophy, particularly his stance on metaphysics and ethics and its relationship to science. Importantly, Nietzsche relied on the empirical findings and theories of the late nineteenth century, and these have been significantly updated in our time. My thesis goes some way to critiquing his ideas in relation to contemporary understandings of the nature of power and its relationship to morality-a notion vital to Nietzsche's philosophy. This analysis should provide new perspectives for evaluating Nietzschean ideas, particularly the 'will to power' and 'master/slave' morality origins. This thesis provides support for the 'will to power' as a description of the metaphysical principle underpinning nature, life and psychology and that power is at the heart of 'moral', 'good', 'bad/evil' evaluations, but it argues that Nietzsche's 'genealogy' is implausible and that the 'master/slave' distinction requires modification in light of scientific findings since his day.

This thesis concerns the meta-metaphysics of morality and of normativity more generally. Normative metaphysics often proceeds without much engagement with meta-metaphysics. My first aim is to rectify this neglect and encourage its broader correction. I do this by offering a sympathetic yet critical discussion of the so-called 'quietist' or 'relaxed' normative realism of Derek Parfit, John Skorupski, and Tim Scanlon. This discussion illustrates how attention to meta-metaphysics can demystify such views and explain their attractive features, the difficulties they face, and what meta-ethicists and meta-metaphysicians stand to gain from engagement with one another. My second aim is to explore two questions my discussion raises: is the moral error theory epistemically possible and, if so, what follows? And is there a way to generate a view in the spirit of 'quietist' views that appeals to assumptions likely held by their opponents? Chapter 1 sympathetically develops Parfit's non-realist cognitivism by appeal to truthmaker theory and reveals a troubling dilemma. Chapter 2 develops a response to this dilemma that suggests that non-realist cognitivism can be plausibly developed into what I call normative trivialism. Chapter 3 concerns Skorupski's irrealist cognitivism and Meinongian meta-ethical theories in general, where I argue that we have good reason to pay attention to such views, dispel some misunderstandings of them, and argue that Skorupski's irrealist cognitivism faces strong objections. Chapter 4 develops Scanlon's novel theory and the background meta-metaphysics it relies upon, arguing that whilst my development can respond to common objections to Scanlon's theory, it highlights novel challenges. Chapter 5 offers an argument from the epistemic possibility of the moral error theory against each of the aforementioned views, as well as any form of moral non-cognitivism and moral naturalism. Chapter 6 argues that if three widely held views are true, then the naturalism/non-naturalism debate is settled by ethical debate and concerned meta-ethicists should do normative ethics instead. I conclude whilst noting that, properly understood, 'meta-ethical quietism' is anything but quiet.

1. Are Moral Norms Rooted in Instincts? The Sibling Incest Taboo as a Case Study According to Westermarck's widely accepted explanation of the incest taboo, cultural prohibitions on sibling sex are rooted in an evolved biological disposition to feel sexual aversion toward our childhood coresidents. Bernard Williams posed the "representation problem" for Westermarck's theory: the content of the hypothesized instinct (avoid sex with childhood coresidents) is different from the content of the incest taboo (avoid sex with siblings)-thus the former cannot be causally responsible for the latter. Arthur Wolf posed the related "moralization problem": the instinct concerns personal behavior whereas the prohibition concerns everyone. This paper reviews possible ways of defending Westermarck's theory from the representation and moralization problems, and concludes that the theory is untenable. A recent study purports to support Westermarck's account by showing that unrelated children raised in the same peer groups on kibbutzim feel sexual aversion toward each other and morally oppose third-party intra-peer-group sex, but this study has been misinterpreted. I argue that the representation and moralization problems are general problems that could potentially undermine many popular evolutionary explanations of social/moral norms. The cultural evolution of morality is not tightly constrained by our biological endowment in the way some philosophers and evolutionary psychologists believe. 2. Power in Cultural Evolution and the Spread of Prosocial Norms According to cultural evolutionary theory in the tradition of Boyd and Richerson, cultural evolution is driven by individuals' learning biases, natural selection, and random forces. Learning biases lead people to preferentially acquire cultural variants with certain contents or in certain contexts. Natural selection favors individuals or groups with fitness-promoting variants. Durham (1991) argued that Boyd and Richerson's approach is based on a "radical individualism" that fails to recognize that cultural variants are often "imposed" on people regardless of their individual decisions. Fracchia and Lewontin (2005) raised a similar challenge, suggesting that the success of a variant is often determined by the degree of power backing it. With power, a ruler can impose beliefs or practices on a whole population by diktat, rendering all of the forces represented in cultural evolutionary models irrelevant. It is argued here, based on work by Boehm (1999, 2012), that, from at least the time of the early Middle Paleolithic, human bands were controlled by powerful coalitions of the majority that deliberately guided the development of moral norms to promote the common good. Cultural evolutionary models of the evolution of morality have been based on false premises. However, Durham (1991) and Fracchia and Lewontin's (2005) challenge does not undermine cultural evolutionary modeling in nonmoral domains. 3. A Debunking Explanation for Moral Progress According to "debunking arguments," our moral beliefs are explained by evolutionary and cultural processes that do not track objective, mind-independent moral truth. Therefore (the debunkers say) we ought to be skeptics about moral realism. Huemer counters that "moral progress"-the cross-cultural convergence on liberalism-cannot be explained by debunking arguments. According to him, the best explanation for this phenomenon is that people have come to recognize the objective correctness of liberalism. Although Huemer may be the first philosopher to make this explicit empirical argument for moral realism, the idea that societies will eventually converge on the same moral beliefs is a notable theme in realist thinking. Antirealists, on the other hand, often point to seemingly intractable cross-cultural moral disagreement as evidence against realism (the "argument from disagreement"). This paper argues that the trend toward liberalism is susceptible to a debunking explanation, being driven by two related non-truth-tracking processes. First, large numbers of people gravitate to liberal values for reasons of self-interest. Second, as societies become more prosperous and advanced, they become more effective at suppressing violence, and they create conditions where people are more likely to empathize with others, which encourages liberalism. The latter process is not truth tracking (or so this paper argues) because empathy-based moral beliefs are themselves susceptible to an evolutionary debunking argument. Cross-cultural convergence on liberalism per se does not support either realism or antirealism. 4. Realist Social Selection: How Gene-Culture Coevolution Can (but Probably Did Not) Track Mind-Independent Moral Truth Standard evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs) in metaethics target moral beliefs by attributing them to natural selection. According to the debunkers, natural selection does not track mind-independent moral truth, so the discovery that our moral beliefs (realistically construed) were caused by natural selection renders them unjustified. I argue that our innate moral faculty is likely not the product of natural selection, but rather social selection. Social selection is a kind of gene-culture coevolution driven by the enforcement of collectively agreed-upon rules. Unlike natural selection, social selection is teleological and could potentially track mind-independent moral truth by a process that I term realist social selection: early humans could have acquired moral knowledge via reason and enforced rules based on that knowledge, thereby creating selection pressures that drove the evolution of our innate moral faculty. Given anthropological evidence that early humans designed rules with the conscious aim of preserving individual autonomy and advancing their collective interests, realist social selection appears to be an attractive theory for moral realists. However, I propose a new EDA to show that realist social selection is unlikely to have occurred. 5. A Debunking How-Possibly Explanation for the Principle of Universal Benevolence According to Street's evolutionary debunking argument (EDA), evolutionary biology provides "powerful" explanations of our "basic evaluative judgements." The discovery that our moral beliefs (realistically construed) are "saturated with evolutionary influence" renders them unjustified, since natural selection does not track mind-independent moral truth. De Lazari-Radek and Singer agree that most of our commonsense moral beliefs are debunked in the way Street claims, but they argue that belief in Sidgwick's principle of universal benevolence cannot be explained by natural selection and is therefore immune from EDAs. I argue that Street oversold the power of her evolutionary explanations, thus leaving an opening for realists to claim that moral beliefs with less powerful evolutionary explanations can escape debunking. In fact, all naturalistic theories of morality-including those invoked by Street and de Lazari-Radek and Singer-are speculative "how-possibly" explanations. If how-possibly explanations are not debunking, then both Street's (global) and de Lazari-Radek and Singer's (selective) debunking arguments fail. If how-possibly explanations are debunking, then selective debunkers must show that there is no plausible way that naturalistic forces could have produced the beliefs they want to defend. I argue that naturalistic how-possibly explanations can debunk moral beliefs by appealing to ontological parsimony, and provide a debunking how-possibly explanation for belief in the principle of universal benevolence.

This thesis has two distinct aims. The first is to shed light on our practice of attributing rationality to others. To begin, Chapter 2 demonstrates that we cannot rely on questions of what rationality requires to make sense of this practice. Chapter 3 explores a different strategy and directly engages with rationality attributions. It lays out some desiderata for an adequate account of such attributions. Chapter 4 develops a novel account of rationality attributions. This account focusses on explicitly mentioning sets of an agent's attitudes, and also includes a measure for the attribution's robustness. Thanks to these features, the account meets the desiderata, and also allows for progress on persisting disagreements in the debate. Chapter 5 further illustrates the account by contrasting it with an alternative contextualist understanding of rationality attributions. The second aim of this thesis is to defend the Normativity of Rationality. In Chapter 6, I consider problems for a reasons-based understanding of the Normativity of Rationality which arise from so-called transmission principles, and point out strategies to defend rationality's normativity. Chapter 7 provides further support for one of these strategies. Finally, Chapter 8 presents my positive argument. I propose to understand rationality's normativity in terms of commitment - if you are rationally required to x, you are committed to x. Commitment can avoid the counter-examples of alternative understandings in terms of reasons or ought by combining features of both notions. This makes commitment a promising normative notion in its own right.

This thesis provides a restatement of Kantian constructivism, with the aim of avoiding some of the objections and clearing up some of the ambiguities that have haunted previous versions of the view. I restate Kantian constructivism as the view that morality's normativity has its source in the form of second-personal reasoning, a mode of practical reasoning in which we engage when we address demands person-to-person. By advancing a position about the source of moral normativity, Kantian constructivism addresses a metaethical question, albeit one that is distinct from the questions that many traditional metaethical positions, such as moral realism, focus on. Kantian constructivism has an advantage over competing views of the source of moral normativity when it comes to answering the so-called Normative Question, which I interpret as the question of why we are rationally required to do what we take to be our moral obligation. Kantian constructivism can answer this question because, unlike its competitors, it does not conceive of practical reason as a receptive faculty that is determined by external inputs. Instead, it regards the very form of second-personal reasoning as grounding the fact that morality is normative, thus explaining morality's rational authority. Although second-personal reasoning is fundamentally distinct from the merely first-personal mode of reasoning that we must engage in insofar as we are agents, all those agents whom we would ordinarily consider bound by moral obligations seem to engage in it. Indeed, although it involves irreducibly second-personal notions, such as accountability and the authority to address legitimate demands, second-personal reasoning is not to be mistaken for a social practice. Instead, it can be applied to purely self-regarding contexts, such as that of committing oneself to a personal project and thereby holding oneself accountable for pursuing it, as well as to interactions with others.

This thesis critically assesses ‘relaxed realism’ – a group of views that have entered the metaethical debate recently (Dworkin, 1996; Kramer, 2009; Parfit, 2011; Scanlon, 2014). Relaxed realism promises a novel perspective on our normative practice. In particular, it aims for a view that is genuinely distinct from traditional non-naturalism on the one hand, and sophisticated forms of expressivism on the other. This thesis calls into question whether such an aspiration can be met. The approach is twofold. First, the thesis argues that relaxed realism can meet various of its objectives better by relying on theoretical resources that expressivism offers. To argue for this claim, it discusses three challenges that relaxed realism should be able to meet according to its own objectives. With regards to each challenge, it then shows that as it stands relaxed realist views fail to adequately respond to it. Finally, the thesis suggests that relaxed realism can better respond to the respective challenges – and hence, better meet their own objectives – by endorsing certain expressivist resources. Second, the thesis argues that relaxed realism is an inherently unstable view. It does so by raising a dilemma. Either relaxed realism fails to establish the desired difference to expressivism or it succeeds, but at the expense of erasing the difference to traditional non-naturalism. The conclusion of the thesis is critical: the relaxed realist aspiration for a novel take on our normative practice – distinct from both traditional non-naturalism and expressivism – remains unmet.

I aim to show in this thesis that human beings are morally concerned to the core; that a concern for moral goodness is a necessary part of our humanity. Central to my account of the foundations of morality is what I call 'primary recognition', which I argue is the source of our moral thinking. By primary recognition, I mean our basic apprehension of other human beings as objects of some moral concern. I take this to be a 'basic moral certainty', in accord with the notion recently introduced by Nigel Pleasants in the debate on moral foundations, which he drew from the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein on the notion of basic empirical certainty, found in On Certainty (1969). Building on Pleasants' notion of 'basic moral certainty' I bring to bear Danièle Moyal-Sharrock's distinction between universal and local forms of basic certainty in an effort to make sense of the co-existence of universal moral beliefs and local, often conflicting, moral beliefs. I offer and defend two examples of universal basic moral certainties: 'At least some killings are wrong' and 'Some wrongs are more serious, more wrong, than others', which I take to be necessarily indubitable for any moral agent. I then examine examples of local moral certainties: the wrongness of pig sacrifice in ancient Judaism, the goodness of hospitality among the modern Pashtun, and the wrongness of cannibalism for the ancient Greeks. These examinations lead me to conclude that basic moral certainties come in both local and universal varieties in just the same way as basic empirical certainties, and that holding certain local moral beliefs is definitional for membership in certain epistemic communities. I go on to consider some challenges to the view that morality has its foundations in basic moral certainty, in particular that made by G.E.M Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre that modern moral thought lacks any foundations. I reply by reiterating the nonrational nature of the foundations of morality, modern or otherwise. I conclude the thesis by outlining some of the outcomes of this account of moral certainty for contemporary moral philosophy.

The thesis is a defence of an original position in the philosophy of action. It argues for a pluralist view of actions dubbed Strong Pluralism. One of the key questions of philosophy of action since the early 20th century has been taken to be 'What are actions'? In my thesis I argue that there is no single correct answer to this question. I put forward two positive claims which explain why this is so: 1. That 'action' is ambiguous and can mean either doing or thing done. 2. That not all doings fall into the same metaphysical category because they can have different constitutive structures: some of them are causings, some are events, and others are processes. I demonstrate in the thesis that these two claims can be held coherently, and I identify the resulting view as Strong Pluralism about action. The thesis divides into two parts. In the first part I lay out and offer a defence of the view in question and in the second I discuss how my pluralist view of relates to the three major types of views of action: events, causings, and process views. The first part of the thesis consists of three steps of the main argument of my thesis, each step outlined and argued for in a chapter. In the first chapter I offer an overview of the answers provided to the 'What is action'? question offered by philosophers in the last 80 years. I identify a trend common to these views to advance monist answers, that is, they offer views of action which are committed to 'action' meaning one thing and all actions fitting into the same metaphysical category. I argue that the monist answers are unsatisfactory and monism about actions cannot be maintained. In chapter two I offer an alternative to monism in the form of pluralism about actions. I defend pluralism by arguing that 'action' is ambiguous between doing and things done, and by showing that it is a as suitable substitute for monism. I provide an overview of the four most important ways in which the doing/thing done distinction has been made, and I suggest and defend a further version of it. In chapter three, I outline three possible pluralist views of actions, and defend the view which I call Strong Pluralism. Strong Pluralism is committed to the claims that there are both doings and things done, and that there are doings which have different constitutions from other doings, hence it is correct to think that some doings are events, some are causings, and some are processes. In the three chapters which constitute the second part of the thesis I engage successively with views which have claimed that actions are events, that they are causings, and that actions are processes. I argue in each chapter that there are doings which can be said to belong into the category discussed and I provide positive accounts and examples of when this is so. I offer a categorization of doings which helps us to decide which doings fall into the group of events, which into that of causings, and which into that of processes. Throughout these three chapters I critically discuss the most influential events, causings, and process views and point out several aspects in which they are too limiting or mistaken about doings. The view of doings and things done worked out in thesis helps to resolve long standing issues in the philosophy of action by clarifying what we take to be the object of explanation, knowledge, and evaluation when we discuss actions in ethics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, epistemology (esp. debates about knowledge of action) and other fields of philosophy. The view can have broader applications in the fields of moral psychology and cognitive science by helping to sharpen our account of what researchers are discussing when they are discussing actions.

This dissertation explores a number of interrelated metaphysical and epistemological issues regarding pleasure, suffering and their apparent value and disvalue, thematically tied together by the broad idea that pleasant and unpleasant experiences are, respectively, experienced as good and bad. More specifically, I try, firstly, to advance the debate regarding the nature of pleasure by arguing for what I shall call the "Self-Experiential View" - the view that pleasant experiences are pleasant in virtue of being experienced as good. Secondly, I assess the merits of the "Hedonic-Evaluative Acquaintance Thesis" - the natural conjecture, expressed by a number of authors, that our especially intimate experiential relationship ("acquaintance") with the evaluative features of our hedonic experiences grounds a particularly robust kind of epistemic status enjoyed by our hedonic-evaluative beliefs, which makes them less vulnerable to sceptical doubt. In chapter 1, I lay some groundwork for the ensuing discussion, by introducing a number of background claims which help to motivate these two theses. Moreover, I isolate two specific important ways of unpacking the Hedonic-Evaluative Acquaintance Thesis and clarify some central concepts which feature prominently in the subsequent chapters. In chapter 2, I defend the "Self-Experiential View." I proceed by addressing a number of objections which have been levelled against the view in the literature, and locate it in relation to the views which currently dominate the debate regarding the nature of pleasure. In chapter 3, I assess and ultimately reject the first important version of the Hedonic-Evaluative Acquaintance Thesis singled out in chapter 1, the "Naïve Realist Hedonic-Evaluative Acquaintance Thesis," which states that Naïve Realist acquaintance with pleasure's evaluative nature grounds a distinctive, especially robust kind of epistemic status enjoyed by our hedonic-evaluative beliefs. In chapter 4, I assess the "Introspective Hedonic-Evaluative Acquaintance Thesis", the attempt to vindicate the Hedonic-Evaluative Acquaintance Thesis by extending an acquaintance account of phenomenal introspective justification to the hedonic-evaluative case. By carefully unpacking a range of different candidate conceptions of introspective acquaintance, I home in on what I consider the most appealing acquaintance account of phenomenal introspection, and argue that it should not be extended to the hedonic-evaluative case, which means that this proposal also fails. A brief concluding chapter summarises the key conclusions of the dissertation and highlights some questions raised in the course of my discussion which would seem to warrant further investigation.

In this thesis I discuss one way in which evolutionary theory has been brought to bear on the evaluation of competing meta-normative views in epistemology. More specifically, I investigate whether normative realism in epistemology (epistemic realism) is compatible with the view that we are justified in holding many of the epistemic beliefs we hold, on the assumption that those beliefs can be explained in evolutionary terms. In Part I I discuss normativity in epistemology and meta-epistemology. I begin by drawing attention to the fact that there are very different ways of understanding which concepts in epistemology are normative and what their normativity consists in. I focus on the concept of an epistemic reason to illustrate this point. I then discuss, in some detail, how different interpretations of epistemic-normativity will affect the form which normative-realist views in epistemology can take. I conclude by drawing a taxonomy of epistemic-realist views which is mindful of the different interpretations of epistemic normativity which I distinguished. In Part II I turn to discuss the topic of Darwinian arguments against normative-realist views in epistemology. I begin by considering the form which Darwinian arguments have taken in recent metaethical literature. I argue that Darwinian arguments of a kind which is meant to raise a distinctively epistemological challenge for normative-realist views – I call those 'Darwinian-epistemological' arguments – represent a more interesting object of philosophical investigation than Darwinian arguments of a different 'metaphysical' kind. I then formulate a Darwinian-epistemological argument which targets normative-realist views in epistemology (DEA), explain how it works, and spend some time discussing its key premises. In Part III I engage with the Darwinian-epistemological challenge against realism about epistemic normativity that Sharon Street presents in her paper 'Evolution and the Normativity of Epistemic Reasons' (2009). I argue that Street’s epistemological challenge is best viewed as an instance of a Darwinian-epistemological argument of the kind I formulated (DEA). I then go on to reply to Street’s argument on behalf of the epistemic realist. I conclude that arguments with the form of DEA do not represent a serious threat for normative realist views in epistemology.

In context of the possibility of aging interventions leading to significant or radical extensions in human lifespan, this thesis seeks primarily to address the question of the value of life’s continuance to persons, as the most fundamental motivating factor behind the project specifically to extend life beyond the classic endogenous maximum span. In so doing, its chief focus will therefore be upon the nature of persons themselves, especially in terms of the structure of personhood as a category of being. Much of the investigation will therefore be of an ontological nature, with the nature of value itself, and the relation of value both to persons in particular, and living organisms and the natural realm in general, being a critical theme. The consideration of the latter cases is necessitated by the requirement to analyse the structure of persons in whole, and especially because the primary positive thesis is that persons are processes which are motivated at base by a conative driver which itself is constitutive of their being at all. The analysis of the nature and function of this primary driver of persons as processes, in context of its relation to their secondary instrumental valuation of themselves, which lies at the core of the thesis will generate the conclusion that life’s continuance constitutes an inalienable value to persons that is profound to the degree that it obtains irrespective even of their own evaluative judgements. This analysis suggests a grounding in the question of the manner in which persons arise from the category of other living organisms in general, and the manner in which these arise from the background matter in the universe. The latter will be analysed and the nature of the conative driver will be asserted to be a physical principle which is a defining condition of living organisms in general. Additionally, the analysis of the category of the natural will constitute a critical theme for other reasons, which involve the reliance by certain commentators in the discourse concerning the ethics of aging intervention and life extension upon assertions as to naturalness, and the ethics of human alteration of or interference with the natural, the sacred, the normal, and the given. These latter will be argued to constitute a cluster concept, which will be analysed and demonstrated largely to be lacking in soundness, validity and real cohesion. Further, common ethical arguments against the wisdom of radical life extension in the personal case will be analysed, and mostly found wanting. The core thesis represents a re-evaluation of the classic liberal concept of persons as selfconscious, autonomous, rational valuing agents. This classic analysis will be shown to be faulty in certain key respects, and a correction will be proposed along the lines mentioned above. The fact that these faulty aspects of the classic liberal position constitute key points of attack for conservative personhood theorists, and that the correction offered by the revised liberal version generates a picture of the stability of the value of persons to themselves (and therefore generally) that at least matches that of the various conservative positions (considered to be their main strength by their proponents), largely neutralises such critiques, as well as removes a key rationale for those opting for the conservative positions in their rejection of the general subjectivist liberal picture of personhood. The conservative conception of value in general, and the value of life and persons in particular is critiqued and found wanting. Aside from being commonly based upon a false conception of naturalness, in which supernatural entities, substances or beings are considered to operate, a significant aspect of the failure of this conservative picture arises from the false conception of persons as substantial in nature, or as substances. Accordingly, a critique of the concept of substance in universal ontology is conducted in the first section of the thesis, which will attempt to demonstrate the ontological primacy of process over substance.

This dissertation is an exercise in Theistic moral apologetics. It will be developing both a critique of secular nonnaturalist moral theory (moral Platonism) at the level of metaethics, as well as a positive form of the moral argument for the existence of God that follows from this critique. The critique will focus on the work of five prominent metaethical theorists of secular moral non-naturalism: David Enoch, Eric Wielenberg, Russ Shafer-Landau, Michael Huemer, and Christopher Kulp. Each of these thinkers will be critically examined. Following this critique, the positive moral argument for the existence of God will be developed, combining a cumulative, abductive argument that follows from filling in the content of a succinct apagogic argument. The cumulative abductive argument and the apagogic argument together, with a transcendental and modal component, will be presented to make the case that Theism is the best explanation for the kind of moral, rational beings we are and the kind of universe in which we live, a rational intelligible universe.

In the meta-ethical debates about moral knowledge, there are many theoretical positions to consider. If one is to have an account of moral knowledge, that will inevitably be affected by how one thinks about knowledge in general. I will be transferring a general theory of knowledge and epistemic justification to the more specific domain of ethics, through the lens of epistemic fallibilism. My goal, in applying this epistemic framework to moral discourse, is to outline how moral fallibilism (my theory) can provide a unique and attractive account of moral knowledge. I will accomplish the application of epistemology to ethical theory by implementing Stewart Cohen’s account of fallibilism (with its central notion of “relevance”), and by highlighting the aim and position of moral fallibilism by contrasting it with Mackie’s error theory. Finally, I will illustrate moral fallibilism by applying it to contemporary moral concerns; the debate about abortion, in particular. Ultimately, I propose a fresh theory of moral knowledge that emphasizes the varying degrees of justification for our ethical beliefs while defending, at the same time, a moderate account of moral objectivity.

Metaethics is a field of philosophy that addresses fundamental questions about the nature of morality. One of the central disputes in metaethics is whether moral realism is true. Moral realism is the claim that there are stance-independent moral facts, moral facts that are true independent of the standards or values of individuals or groups, much like scientific facts (e.g., the shape of the earth) aren’t made true by personal preference or cultural consensus. Moral antirealism is the claim that there are no stance-independent moral facts. Research on folk metaethics studies whether ordinary people (i.e., nonphilosophers) endorse realism or antirealism, or speak and think in ways that commit them to one of these views. Some researchers maintain that nearly everyone endorses either realism or antirealism, but not both. Yet most research suggests significant interpersonal and intrapersonal variation in folk metaethics: some people are more inclined towards realism, and others antirealism, while most people are metaethical pluralists: they are moral realists about some moral issues and antirealists about others. Regardless of the account in question, all existing research presumes that there is a determinate fact about whether people are realists or antirealists. I argue that existing evidence does not support this conclusion. Instead, the best account of folk metaethics may be metaethical indeterminacy: ordinary people are neither realists nor antirealists, and neither best explains the way people speak or think. The case for metaethical indeterminacy proceeds in two steps. First, I argue that all published studies on folk metaethics rely on invalid measures. Second, I present empirical evidence that challenges the validity of existing research on folk metaethics and supports metaethical indeterminacy. I evaluate the proportion of people who interpret questions about metaethics as intended, using open response questions, as well as multiple choice questions and Likert scale items. These studies show that most people do not interpret questions about metaethics as researchers intend. I conclude with a study that demonstrates how forced choice paradigms can create the misleading appearance of a genuine pattern of determinate folk philosophical views, even where none plausibly exist.

I articulate a realist and objectivist conception of metaethics which is objectivist not inspite of our subjective attitudes and desires, but because of them. I name this conception“subjectivity objectified,” a phrase I take from Peter Railton’s classic work in metaethics. My paper has three parts. First, I interpret Railton as an objectivist and argue that his coreconception of value is the conception of subjectivity objectified. I then draw on critiquesfirst made by David Sobel to argue that Railton’s proposal assumes a problematic notionof essential personality traits. Finally, I show that this problematic notion need not beassumed for the conception of subjectivity objectified, and I do so by articulating aversion of it which is inspired by the work of Kate Manne.

Certain contemporary Nietzsche scholars claim to have discovered Nietzsche’s position on metaethics through a careful reading and interpretation of his texts. Whose account is most accurate? Unfortunately, Nietzsche’s texts underdetermine his views on metaethics; we lack the textual evidence to settle these debates decisively. Does this mean that the historical Nietzsche’s metaethical beliefs, ultimately inaccessable, are of little use to contemporary metaethical study? Or instead, must metaethicists interested in Nietzsche fundamentally change how Nietzsche’s works are to be understood? While I present scholars who argue that Nietzsche’s corpus as a whole should be understood in radically different ways, I ultimately argue that we can avoid both of the above questions if scholars working in the history of philosophy tradition pivot their focus from attempting to offer a descriptive account of Nietzsche’s metaethical view and instead embrace appropriation.

The overarching aim of this dissertation is to supplement Philipa Foot’s metaethical naturalism, called the theory of natural goodness, with a cognitivist account of affective sensibility. My account provides a receptive ground for moral judgment that appropriately anchors it in the world as a species of evaluation capable of motivating actions through elicited feelings that are necessarily connected to the conceptual structure of worldly situations. I first present and defend the fundamental tenets of the theory of natural goodness, specifically its aspirations toward securing the objective validity of moral judgment, but I then criticize Foot’s treatment of the theory as suffering from a blindspot which leaves her view incomplete and in need of modification. Foot takes as her theoretical point of departure a well founded criticism of non-cognitivism and the emotivist approach to grounding moral judgments in subjective, affective states of mind. Although I agree that a qualified criticism of non-cognitivism is in order on this front, in my view Foot responds to this aspect of the non-cognitivist thesis too strongly, such that she ends up making it seem as if there is absolutely no logical role for affective states of mind to play in a cognitivist theory such as her own. Effectively, the role of sensibility in its capacity to elicit “moody” responses to something in the world that inherently aim at the fulfillment of necessary and objective ends—this insight goes untreated in Foot’s view. As a variety of cognitivism, then, the upshot of my supplemental account of affective sensibility is that it respects the receptive component of moral judgment which non-cognitivism locates in subjective states of mind, while simultaneously preserving the objective import of moral judgments that render knowledge of moral value, as professed by the theory of natural goodness. Lastly, through a reading of Kant that connects his notion of disinterested pleasure in the third Critique to his larger theory of cognition, I argue that my cognitivist account of the affective grounds of moral judgment is plausible not only because we have reason to place empirical evaluations and their corresponding forms of knowledge on affective grounds, but rather because we have reason to place all empirical knowledge on affective grounds as a condition for the possibility of its normative, rule-like structure.

This dissertation examines an argument that John McDowell’s view is structurally analogous to Protagoreanism, and that arguments structurally analogous to Plato’s arguments against Protagoreanism apply to McDowell’s view. Through philosophical investigation, the dissertation shows that Plato’s arguments do not perfectly apply to McDowell’s view, but that the view nevertheless is unable to address the metastasized problem of constraint. The metastasized problem of constraint arises in at least two kinds of circumstances: situations where cultural relativism is a concern, and situations where there is pressure to adapt to unforeseeable natural developments.

Global normative error theorists argue that there are no authoritative normative reasons of any kind. Thus, according to the error theory, the normative demands of law, prudence, morality, etc. are of no greater normative significance than the most absurd standards we can conceive of. Because the error theory is a radically revisionary view, theorists who accept it only do so because they maintain the view is supported by the best available arguments. In this dissertation, I argue that error theory entails that it is impossible that there are successful arguments for anything, thus defenses of error theory are in tension with the view, itself. My argument begins with the observation that it is natural to think a successful argument is one that gives us an authoritative normative reason to believe its conclusion. Error theory entails that there are no authoritative reasons to believe anything. What are arguments for error theory even supposed to accomplish? Error theorists may respond that their arguments are solely intended to get at the truth. I argue that this reply fails. One problem is that it cannot make sense of why in practice even error theorists still want evidence for the premises of sound arguments. Error theorists may try to capture the importance of evidence by appeal to our social norms or goals. I argue that this answer is indistinguishable from the view that our social practices or goals generate authoritative normative requirements. Thus, attempts to defend the coherence of arguing for error theory are either unacceptably revisionary or they are inconsistent with error theory. While this result is a problem for error theory, it seems consistent with highly relativistic accounts of normative authority. In the future, I plan to explore whether my core arguments can be extended to defend authoritative, universal scope normative requirements (e.g. of prudence and morality).

I describe a debate among metaethicists about how to explain our reliability about value, showing that it is no mere coincidence. The “epistemic challenge” is to give such an explanation.It can appear that some metaethical views—that is, views about what values and norms are, most basically, like—have an easier time than others in answering the epistemic challenge. This makes the challenge relevant to evaluating such views, since metaethicists agree that successfully giving this explanation is one demand on a satisfying metaethical theory. This consensus is premature, however. Metaethicists have not adequately explained why we should want an explanation of our evaluative reliability at all. Until we have clarified whether and why an explanation of our evaluative reliability is worth having, we should not make such an explanation a goal of a metaethical theory. Metaethicists sometimes suggest that, unless there is such an explanation, knowledge and epistemically justified beliefs about values and norms would be impossible. However, they are not explicit about why achieving knowledge and epistemic justification in evaluative thought matters. To make this explicit, we should focus on valuable features associated with knowledge and epistemic justification. Our question is whether our evaluative beliefs would lose these features if we lacked an explanation of our evaluative reliability. I consider three such features: the admirability of our evaluative beliefs, their stability, and their reasonableness. In each case, I argue that the relevant feature is not threatened by a failure to answer the epistemic challenge. Even if a failure to answer the challenge does not threaten the valuable features of our evaluative beliefs, we might still have a reason to give the sort of explanation desired by the challenger—an explanation that makes this reliability no coincidence. I consider two arguments on behalf of the epistemic challenger for the claim that it is good to have such an explanation. On the one hand, commitment to falsehoods is a bad thing, and we consider some things highly likely to have an explanation. If our evaluative reliability is such a thing, then metaethicists have a reason to answer the epistemic challenge, because otherwise they would be committed to a likely falsehood. I argue, however, that no one is yet in a position to say that our evaluative reliability is highly likely to have an explanation. So we cannot yet claim that this is a reason to explain our evaluative reliability. On the other hand, we often take explanations to have great intellectual value. It seems straightforward to conclude that if we cannot answer the epistemic challenge, we miss out on an explanation, and so on something of intellectual value. I argue that this is not as obvious as it seems, by showing that on one prominent view of explanatory value, we cannot draw this conclusion. If the value of explanation lies in unification, as this view suggests, it is not obvious that explaining our evaluative reliability in a way that makes this “no coincidence” would yield greater value than an alternative explanation. To appeal to explanatory value to motivate answering the challenge, we cannot simply invoke that value, but must show how the relevant explanation better promotes that value than its competitors. One result of this project is that, for all we have seen, a key question that has interested metaethicists may have no importance. We may have no reason to engage with the epistemic challenge. This should inspire further thought about the proper tasks of metaethics, and about what we should want in a metaethical theory.

The aim of this work is to demarcate, develop, and defend the commitments andconsequences of metaethical minimalism. Very roughly, this is the position that acommitment to objective moral truths does not require any accompanying ontologicalcommitments. While there are few, if any, who call themselves “metaethical minimalists”, Iendeavor to uncover existing articulations of metaethical minimalism which have beenpresented under different names, attempting to identify the common ground betweenthem. As I interpret the position, all metaethical minimalists are committed to the samepositive pair of claims (what I call the Objectivity Thesis): “a) Moral truths are stronglymind-independent; b) there are moral truths.” Taken by itself, however, this pair of claimsis not sufficient for differentiating their view from the moral realist’s. Consequently, theminimalist must also articulate that which they are denying about the non-minimalistapproach, or what I call the “negative ontological thesis”. I offer my own version of thisnegative thesis and argue for its dialectical advantages.In Chapters 3 and 4, I focus my attention on attacks on the viability of metaethicalminimalism in the form of two “challenges” that aim to problematize a commitment toobjective moral truths absent any accompanying ontological commitment. Thebig-picture takeaway from these chapters is that minimalism can defend itself by playing tothe dialectical advantage I find for it in Chapter 2 as well as by being creative aboutminimalist constructions/reworkings of plausible principles/lines of reasoning that seemto contradict it.The temptation to embrace quietism is strong among minimalists, but in Chapters5, 6, and 7 I aim to show that there is a positive alternative available for the minimalistinterested in developing a full picture of their position. Chapter 5 is aimed at providing anadequate understanding of the distinction between the objects of purely normativethoughts and objects of thoughts about reality. Building on this are Chapters 6 and 7,which argue in favor of an account of the relationship between emotion and evaluativeknowledge that is consistent with metaethical minimalism.

In Joyce's Myth of Morality, Joyce proposes an error theory about morality. He then argues that, once we accept an error theory, we have three options: we can be abolitionists and jettison moral discourse, be conservationists and maintain our false moral beliefs, or be revolutionary fictionalists and assent to and act in accordance with moral discourse while believing it's false. In this paper, I argue that Joyce has ignored a fourth option—limited revisionism, or slightly changing our moral terms to avoid problematic commitments—and that this option is superior to the three aforementioned possibilities. Along the way, I show that Joyce has unfairly ignored limited revisionism because of faulty views about what makes a concept or term normative, and that limited revisionism ignores some expected pitfalls, such as overgeneralizing to legitimately error-theoretic discourses.

This dissertation consists of three independent papers that are linked by two threads. The first thread is the question of what sorts of explanatory roles can be played by propositions and semantic values. The first paper, “Doing without Minimal Propositions”, explores this question by looking at the role of semantic values in conversation, in particular examining the claim that only a small range of linguistic expressions need context in order for sentences containing them to have a proposition as their semantic content. I argue to the contrary that the largely context-insensitive propositions posited by such a view are not needed to explain the range of linguistic facts that motivates them. My second paper, “Problems for Metasemantic Expressivism”, explores the question of whether the semantic values standardly assigned to normative expressions can help explain the special connection that normative thought and discourse seem to have to non-cognitive mental states: states like desire that play a special role in motivating action. I argue against the metasemantic expressivist attempt to do this, which is a version of expressivism that states that normative expressions have their (standard) semantic values in virtue of expressing non-cognitive mental states. Specifically, I claim that there is no way for an expressivist theory to give a satisfactory explanation of in virtue of what normative predicates have their extensions. My final paper, “Referential Normativity and the Metaphysical Commitments of Normative Realism”, is linked to my second one by the other thread: the question of whether non-cognitive mental states play a central role in grounding the content of normative language and thought. The issue examined in this paper is whether every concept with a certain normative role, which connects uses of that concept to non-cognitive mental states, must refer to the same thing, and if so whether this fact could result in a version of normative realism that does without controversial metaphysical commitments to irreducible normative properties or objects. I argue that the realist motivations that lead theorists to posit this explanatory role for non-cognitive mental states could not be satisfied by a theory that avoids controversial metaphysical commitments.

If we grant that some moral claims are true, what is it that makes them true? Throughout the vast majority of history, it was believed that God was the source of morality. But the twentieth century saw a shift in ethics. Influenced by logical positivism and a broadly naturalistic worldview, scholars sought to develop a theory of ethics that did not depend on God's existence. One leading approach was moral naturalism, the view that moral properties are natural and thus can be investigated by scientific methods. But this view was plagued with problems, leading many to conclude that moral and natural facts were just too different to be one and the same.Having rejected a divine conception of ethics and moral naturalism, some scholars turned to moral non-naturalism - the view that moral properties are not natural. One particular form of moral non-naturalism entails that moral properties are sui generis. I call this view Moorean realism.The current trend suggests that Moorean realism is preferable to divine command theory, a competing form of moral non-naturalism wherein moral properties are reducible to supernatural properties. But, as far as the salient objections go, divine command theory is at least as plausible as Moorean realism. Indeed, if we look closely at the traditional versions of these views and the common objections to them, divine command theory offers compelling responses and Moorean realism has a difficult time meeting many of these challenges. In chapter one, I argue that divine command theory is as plausible as Moorean realism.In chapter two, I consider the viability of a non-traditional form of Moorean realism - the view that moral truths are conceptual truths. I argue that the thesis that moral truths are conceptual faces a serious dilemma which renders the view in question implausible.In chapter three, I argue that it is indeed the traditional divine command theory and not the intriguing deflationary one whereby God need not exist, that deserves the revival.If moral properties are not natural, it is very plausible that they are supernatural. Divine command theory - the traditional non-deflationary form - is alive and well.

Abstract: Ethical reasoning in normative and practical ethics is typically conducted by working back and forth between intuitions about both general moral principles (e.g., suffering is bad) and particular cases (e.g., that I must prevent a specific person from suffering). These two types of intuitions—which I refer to as principle-intuitions and case-intuitions—are fundamental tools that ethicists unavoidably use to answer ethical questions. However, principle-intuitions and case-intuitions often conflict: a principle such as lying is wrong could be inconsistent with the intuition that it is permissible to lie to the Nazis to save some refugees. What should one do when conflicts like these arise? Should one give more weight to the principle-intuition, to the case-intuition, or equally to both? Or could it be that there is, in fact, no justificatory relation between the two elements but a different one? For example, perhaps case-intuitions only serve to help us clarify or suggest plausible principles but not justify principles themselves? Although the question of how should case-intuitions weight against principle-intuitions underlies almost any ethical deliberation and debate in normative and practical ethics, there is no universally-accepted answer to it. In other words, there is no unanimous agreement on what our ethical methodology should be. Thus, this thesis seeks to contribute to the literature by arguing in favor of one version of the most commonly-used method: reflective equilibrium. Among other things, reflective equilibrium holds that, all else being equal, case-intuitions carry the same epistemic weight as principle-intuitions. The first part of this thesis (Chapters 1-2) offers an argument in favor of reflective equilibrium. This argument seeks to establish reflective equilibrium as the default methodology in a way that, I believe, has not been articulated in the literature, although it arrives at similar conclusions as those of other supporters of this method. My claim is that we have reason to give credence to both case-intuitions and principle-intuitions because a) we should give credence to a judgment if it seems plausible to us, b) both cases and principles can seem plausible to us to an equal degree, and c) there is no reason at the outset of inquiry to think that case-intuitions are unreliable in a systematic way. The second part of the thesis (Chapters 3-4) offers a reply to two objections that have been raised against reflective equilibrium. Chapter 3 addresses whether case-intuitions are systematically unreliable due to their evolutionary, cultural, social, and emotional influences. Chapter 4 examines whether case-intuitions are unreliable because they change in response to morally irrelevant features, such as the wording of a case, the force of habit, or the emotions we might experience while thinking about a case.

Metaethical contextualism is a form of moderate contextualism according to which the truth-conditions of normative utterances are sensitive to some salient standard, norm, or theory that is determined by the context of utterance. Metaethical contextualism implies that two speakers might utter grammatically contradictory normative sentences without expressing contradictory propositions, leaving the view vulnerable to the 'problem of lost disagreement'. The problem of lost disagreement occurs when two parties to a dispute disagree, but their utterances don't express exclusionary truth-conditional content: they might both be right. While metaethical contextualists have proposed plausible solutions to the problem of lost disagreement, these solutions are ultimately unsatisfying, at least in contexts where one would expect exclusionary truth-conditional content. In this paper, I develop a form of metaethical contextualism that predicts exclusionary truth-conditional content in some contexts of disagreement, thereby assuaging any concerns that metaethical contextualism fails to adequately account for normative disagreement.

This dissertation concerns deontic moral experience, especially guilt. I follow Gabriele Taylor’s view that when feeling guilty, one represents oneself as having violated one’s obligations and as being stained by that violation. On the basis of this view of guilt, I develop several claims in metaethics and normative ethics. I first debunk G.E.M. Anscombe’s genealogical attack on the intelligibility of deontic concepts in secular moral philosophy: that guilt, an emotion partly constituted by deontic concepts, is present outside the Abrahamic Occident is evidence that the deontic moral concepts are intelligible without a religious background. I then defend the intelligibility of deontic concept directly, showing how the British Intuitionists explained the content of a simple concept like ought without defining it. Second, I argue that given that the notion of wrongdoing is constitutive of guilt, normative ethicists must be careful about what they say about rightness and wrongness lest they sow chronic guilt in those who accept their theories. I claim that this is a special problem for consequentialists and that Peter Railton and Derek Parfit’s notion of blameless wrongdoing does not solve it. Rather, a distinction must be made between what is right all things considered (maximization in every action) and what is one’s duty (cultivating maximizing character traits, etc.). Third, I argue that guilt holds the key to explaining what T.M. Scanlon has called the priority and importance of moral obligations vis-à-vis nonmoral reasons. I defend Taylor’s moral staining view of guilt and use it to show how moral stains ground the priority and importance of moral obligations. To explain moral stains, I turn to Christine Korsgaard’s view that our actions are constitutive of our personal identities. Finally, in my last chapter, I elaborate on the connection between guilt, personal identity, and despair through a study of Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death.

We all say that certain moral views – true or false, agreed to or not – are reasonable, rational or justified. When we say this, we mean, roughly, that the agent who has come to these views has answered her ethical questions in a responsible way and that her beliefs are defensible from her own perspective. Whether or not these beliefs turn out true, they have some epistemic merit. This work is an investigation into that notion of epistemic merit. It asks, "What makes a moral belief justified?"

Recent literature seems to have opened up space for naturalistic theistic metaethics in a contemporary context, as proponents of divine command theories have tended to be restricted to either supernatural or theistic non-natural theories within existing taxonomies of normative theory. While perhaps encouraging for theists, would theism add anything substantive to theories of ethical naturalism? In this paper, I examine this question. I argue that theistic naturalism appears to incur certain objections as well as provide a plausible and explanatory constraint on content for theories of ethical naturalism. As a result, a corresponding challenge to non-theistic variants is raised.

My research focuses on the moral evaluation of people’s motivations. A popular recent view in Philosophy is that good people are motivated by the considerations that make actions morally right (the “right-making features”). For example, this view entails that a Black Lives Matter protester can be a good person if she is motivated to engage in protest by the thought that it will bring about equality, or justice, since this is what makes engaging in protest morally right. But this view entails that the protester cannot be a good person if she engages in protest because it is morally right. I think that this is a serious mistake. My view is that it is good to be explicitly committed to acting rightly and motivated by the moral rightness of one’s actions. More specifically, I explore the nature and defend the value of a complex state that I call "trying to act rightly". This comprises (a) wanting to act rightly, (b) thinking about which actions are right, and (c) doing the things that you think are right, because they are right. The three papers of my Dissertation each make part of the case for trying to act rightly. My first paper, “Praiseworthy Motivations”, addresses the view that it is good to be motivated by the right-making features but not good to be motivated to act rightly. I argue that this view rests on poorly-drawn comparison cases that are not genuine minimal pairs, and that well-constructed cases show these two types of motivation to be equally good. I address the worry that trying to act rightly leads people with false moral beliefs to act wrongly, by noting that this also applies to motivation by right-making features, since people can be motivated by a right-making feature while being mistaken about which acts have this feature. I then argue that we should distinguish carefully between motivations, actions, and beliefs when evaluating these well-meaning but morally mistaken agents. The second paper, “We Can Have Our Buck and Pass It, Too”, addresses the view that the fact that an act is morally right is not a genuine reason to perform it, and that our reasons for action are instead provided by the right-making features. I argue that this view rests on a confused picture of moral metaphysics, which would rule out any case in which one reason to perform an act is partially metaphysically constituted by another fact that is also a reason to perform the same act – as, for example, when a salad both is healthy and contains vegetables. I then sketch an alternative picture of moral metaphysics, on which genuine reasons for action can be metaphysically related to one another. My third paper, “Accidentally Doing the Right Thing”, uses general reflections on the nature of deliberate action and its relationship to praiseworthiness to argue that someone is only praiseworthy for acting rightly if she was trying to act rightly. I apply this idea to the philosophical debate on moral worth, defending the Kantian view that actions have moral worth just in case they are instances of someone’s trying to act rightly and succeeding. This is a radical departure from the most popular contemporary view on moral worth, and requires a re-evaluation of the main case discussed in this literature: that of Huckleberry Finn.

Theory of mind refers to the process of representing others’ mental states. This process consistently elicits activity in a network of brain regions: the theory of mind network (ToMN). Typically, theory of mind has been understood in terms of content, i.e. representing the semantic content of someone’s beliefs. However, recent work has proposed that ToMN activity could be better understood in the context of social prediction; or, more specifically, prediction error—the difference between observed and predicted information. Social predictions can be represented in multiple forms—e.g. dispositional predictions about who a person is, prescriptive norms about what people should do, and descriptive norms about what people frequently do. Part 1 examined the relationship between social prediction error and ToMN activity, finding that the activity in the ToMN was related to both dispositional, and prescriptive predictions. Part 2 examined the semantic content represented by moral claims. Prior work has suggested that morals are generally represented and understood as objective, i.e. akin to facts. Instead, we found that moral claims are represented as far more social than prior work had anticipated, eliciting a great deal of activity across the ToMN. Part 3 examined the relationship between ToMN activity and metaethical status, i.e. the extent that morals were perceived as objective or subjective. Objective moral claims elicited less ToMN activity, whereas subjective moral claimed elicited more. We argue that this relationship is best understood in the context of prediction, where objective moral claims represent strong social priors about what most people will believe. Finally, I expand on this finding and argue that a theoretical approach incorporating social prediction has serious implications for morality, or more specifically, for the motivations underlying normative compliance. People may be compelled to observe moral rules because doing so maintains a predictable social environment.

This is an essay at the intersection of metaethics and the history of contemporary analytic philosophy. It explores the relationships between Allan Gibbard’s mature quasi-realist expressivism and (i) three non-naturalistic varieties of what I call “non-inflationary realism” and (ii) moral fictionalism. Moral or normative realism is frequently (if mistakenly) taken to involve certain existence-affirming external assumptions about the metaphysical status of substantive normative thought and discourse. The non-inflationary realists seek to embrace moral or normative objectivity and truth without any distinctly—as they see it, “inflated”—moral or normative ontology. This position, along with a shared emphasis on the primacy of substantive moral or normative thought and discourse, brings them very close to Gibbard, and so to what it is tempting to treat as a strikingly different metaethical account. Focusing on the non-inflationary realists Ronald Dworkin, T.M. Scanlon, and Derek Parfit, I examine similarities among their views, and between each of these views and Gibbard’s. I argue that the non-inflationary realist project should be understood as including the work not only of these figures, characteristically seen as among its paradigmatic representatives, but also, crucially, that of Gibbard. They all agree that our moral or normative claims purport to state normative truths and that such claims are capable of being true or false and that when true they do not depend on the particular standpoint anyone happens to take. Our moral or normative thoughts can be characterized as beliefs. We can have moral knowledge. There are substantive moral and normative facts. These facts are not reducible to non-normative facts. Normative concepts cannot be analyzed in purely naturalistic terms; and normative facts do not depend on any robustly existent truth-makers. Focusing on these shared commitments enables me to home in on the apparent differences that nonetheless remain. They differ in significant respects, for instance, about whether—and, if so, to what extent—we can make any meaningful external (non-substantive) judgments about the moral or normative and about whether there is a role for property-based explanations that minimalism about the normative fails to capture. By investigating these and other differences, I shed light on what is at stake in giving an adequate account of our moral and normative thought and talk. I pursue this aim further by considering why it might seem that quasi-realist expressivism was a form of normative fictionalism or error theory—though it is not. I attempt here to clear up confusions stemming from common assumptions associated with terms like “realism,” “cognitivism,” or “fictionalism” with respect to morality or normativity. I distinguish some differences in the ways in which normative properties can be understood by non-inflationary realists and the roles they can play in explaining normativity. I underscore the implausibility of treating the moral domain as completely autonomous. And I attempt to offer suggestions regarding some conceptual options that remain to be further explored. I maintain that Gibbard makes explicit otherwise unacknowledged implications of Scanlon’s or Dworkin’s accounts, implications regarding deep differences between normative or moral and other domains, implications which might help explain the uneasiness that prompts Scanlon and Dworkin to resist Gibbard’s account and that pushes Parfit toward what seems to be a sort of intermediate position between non-inflationary and more ontologically committed realism. Non-inflationary realism forces us to rethink metaethics in interesting and promising ways.

Contractualism is often seen as a kind of self-interested bargaining in which individuals engage to preserve their own desired outcome. If individuals are only out for themselves, then no one achieves his or her desired end. Yet, if individuals constrain some of their desires and are assured that others will do the same, then, the contractors can avoid mutual destruction. It is not hard to see why Contractualism is often viewed as a way to explain the origins of morality within civil society. In this paper, I take up a version of Contractualism espoused by Nicholas Southwood called Deliberative Contractualism. The outcome of a perfectly deliberative rational process is what grounds morality or says Southwood. I consider two objections against Southwood’s account. I first consider the way Southwood criticizes a nearby Contractualist view and demonstrate that the same criticisms that Southwood levels against that account apply to Southwood’s. I end with a modest conclusion. While I don’t resolve the problems in either account, I do think I give more clarity to the debate about what it takes to ground morality.

Error theory turns on a particular presupposition about the conceptual commitments of moral realism, namely that the moral facts posited by realists need to be categorical. True moral propositions are said to have an absolute authority in their prescriptions in the sense that an agent, regardless of her own ends, needs or desires, is categorically obligated and has reason to act in accordance with their prescriptions. But, nothing in the world has such a queer property as categoricity, and therefore we ought to be suspect of the enterprise of moral discourse. Some philosophers, like Stephen Finlay, have argued that this categoricity is not a necessary feature of moral language, and in so doing hope to have shown that the error theoretic critique is thus refuted. In this article I offer a survey of the literature on this topic and then contribute independent motivations for siding with those who think moral facts need not be categorical (and that a powerful argument for error theory is defused).

The focus of this dissertation is a special type of moral ignorance: non-culpable ignorance of truths of the form I am obligated to do/not do X. Call ignorance of this type NCFPO ignorance (for Non-Culpable First-Person Obligation ignorance). Many philosophers believe that NCFPO ignorance exists. But whether NCFPO ignorance is possible hangs on the issue of whether a person can be obligated to perform an action that, for good reason, she does not believe that she is obligated to perform-an issue about which philosophers disagree. Is it the case, then, that NCFPO ignorance is possible? And if it is, just how extreme can a person's NCFPO ignorance be? Is it possible for a person to be non-culpably ignorant of all of her moral obligations? If so, under what conditions is this possible? I argue here that NCFPO ignorance is not only possible, but it is possible for a person to be non-culpably ignorant of all of her moral obligations. This conclusion sheds light on several previously unexplored connections between epistemologists' views of external world skepticism and ethicists' views of moral skepticism. It also has implications concerning moral practice, since, as I argue in the dissertation, NCFPO ignorance constitutes an excuse for wrongdoing.

Universal egoism runs rampant in Western ethics. Too many theories justify intrinsic moral value only in terms of some moral 'self' that is defined by a concrete set of identity conditions. Such theories have failed to justify the value of non-human natural phenomena such as landscapes, plants, and animals because these theories require a basic similarity, or shared identity that grants them moral status. Understanding and acting upon the value of others, especially radically different others becomes increasingly important in a time of melting polar ice, rising sea levels and increasingly polarized political discourse. Only if we supplement identity arguments with alterity arguments can we create an ethics that not only overcomes universal egoism but also offers insight into how we face new ecological consciousness and crisis. Alterity arguments differ from identity arguments because the characterization of the other need not be particular, epistemically closed or metaphysically secure. An ethics of alterity can be grounded in resources from the phenomenal-existential tradition. Relying on insights from classic phenomenology and West-coast phenomenology, alterity arguments can justify intrinsic moral value for non-human natural phenomena such as landscapes, plants, and animals. Indeed, when paired with identity arguments, we can justify action-guiding norms and principles as well. Using resources from the phenomenological-existential tradition also allows us to reconceptualize ethics in a way that addresses both the is/ought distinction and the relationship between metaethics, ethics, and applied ethics.

In this paper, I call into question the thesis known as judgment internalism about moral motivation. Broadly construed, this thesis holds that there is a non-contingent relation between moral judgment and moral motivation. The difficulty for judgment internalism arises because of amoral agents: when an agent both knows the right and yet fails to be motivated to act on this knowledge. Specifically, I cite John Milton's Satan from Paradise Lost. This is a problem because it calls into question the non-contingent relation between moral judgment and moral motivation. I argue that in order for judgment internalism to be viable in reconciling judgment internalism and amoralism, it must provide plausible accounts of both (a) the relationship between judging and motivation, and (b) the conditions for defeasibility. While crude versions of the thesis fail to do this, I provide a revised thesis which I call Narrative Internalism, which assumes a narrative theory of the self. This thesis has the dual strength that it can account for both why one would typically be motivated to Φ upon judging that it is right to Φ and also the conditions that might obtain such that one would fail to be motivated. This account of moral psychology explains both (a) the relationship between judging and motivation, and (b) the conditions for defeasibility by giving an account of plausible defeasibility conditions. I conclude that unless there are more plausible accounts of judgment internalism in the offing, which doesn't seem apparent to me, we should adopt Narrative Internalism.

This series of essays offers a critique of Information Studies, taken as a discipline largely concerned with informational objects and their representations on the one hand and the control of these same by means of other informational objects and their representations on the other. Specifically, the critique put forward here attends to the ways that the common practices of Information Studies may reinforce representationalist ideologies that are historically problematic and that are likely to continue to be so into the future if allowed to persist. Such ideologies are bound up with histories of oppression, colonialism, and cognitive injustice in ways that seem likely to be undesirable to most practitioners upon consideration. The critique offered seeks to point out this conjunction of aesthetic and ethical issues in our practical epistemological constructs, opening out largely untried avenues of exploration with regard to our axiological habits--axiology being defined here as the inquiry that includes ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology--and the architectonic structures of meaning and understanding that we deploy with ever increasing density in (and occasionally as) the world.In the related field of semiotics, an assumption, bordering on a principle, obtains that meaning has structure and that that meaning is intelligible. The work of semiotic theorists has shown that this is not likely to be exclusively a logocentric prejudice. The works of Gilles Deleuze and his sometimes partner Felix Guattari, along with those of C.S. Peirce and Justus Buchler, each postulate in their own way that meaning and its structure are continuous with the world, and, going further, that the structures of meaning that exist in the world have no intrinsic limit to their complexity in a general sense other than the availability of resources to build that complexity. This is not equivalent to saying that the forms of such complexity are unlimited in the sense that they could take all possible forms, though the number of possible form-states may be infinite in principle when the availability of resources is bracketed off as a concern. That indicates to us the likelihood that no single ideology gives us a complete picture of all possible semiotic modalities and that, with sufficient resources, multiple modalities may coexist and interact in a single system, event, or order. All of this places semiosis in a thermodynamic milieu between complex systems theory and computation theory, even while suggesting analogies to ecophenomenology and ecosystems thinking as an interpretation of Peircean "infinite semiosis."While semiotics, as an architectonic discipline, traces continuities with the Kantian paradigm, the Deleuzean approach represents a turn in philosophy both in expressive style and ways of doing philosophy, such that both a reinvestigation of semiotic structures and the production of new rhetorical modes are suggested in light of it--though Deleuze is a threshold for such matters, not a container. Making use of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Niklas Luhmann, Luciano Floridi, and François Laruelle (as well as Patrick Wilson, Marcia Bates, and Jonathan Furner) to construct an ordinal semiotic compatible with various structural realisms, the arguments here commit to a pataphysical and hermetic swerve that aligns with the "Dark Deleuzean" aesthetics of Nick Land and Reza Negarestani, exploring the metaphor of darkness itself by way of the immanence theories of Timothy Morton and Eugene Thacker. The argument pattern described can be seen as an affirmation of possibly novel values of global, transspecies cognitive justice and "cognitive veganism" at least partially consistent with the ethical concerns and images of thought of such thinkers as Richard Kahn and Stephen David Ross. Due to the emphasis on continuity with the world, the above motivates us to take seriously various posthumanistic rhetorics' priorities: cybernetics, informatics, thermodynamics, complex and autopoietic systems, codality, cognitive and neuro-diversity, enhanced and artificial intelligence, postvitalist ecology, and perhaps even Singularity. Because of that same continuity, each of these should be necessarily thought in relation to planetarity and global history. Through that thought we can understand semiotic processes and ecologies as bound up with what Land has called a "terraprocess." Information Studies, as a discipline emerging into full fruition within the context of a posthumanistic moment, situated in turn within the Anthropocene Era, should understand and engage with this terraprocess as the architectonic syntax for a more fundamental informatic and metainformatic axiology.

I critically examine and evaluate the cogency of four kinds of evolutionary debunking arguments in the literature. Specifically, I focus on Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, an argument aimed at establishing the conclusion that naturalism and evolution lead to an epistemic defeater that renders the conjoined belief in both irrational; Michael Ruse’s Evolutionary Ethics, aimed at establishing that an evolutionary genealogy of our moral sentiments proves morality to be an illusion; Sharon Street’s Darwinian Dilemma Against Realist Theories of Value, which aims to establish the implausibility of natural selection having produced cognitive faculties that accurately track the sort of moral facts posited by moral realists; and Richard Joyce’s Evolutionary Debunking of Morality, an argument to show that our moral judgments are unjustified and we ought to therefore adopt moral agnosticism. I argue that Alvin Plantinga fails to prove that the conjunction of naturalism and evolution lead to radical skepticism. Second, I argue that Michael Ruse draws the wrong conclusions from his evolutionary genealogy of morals and as a consequence fails to give a compelling argument against moral realism. By contrast, I defend Richard Joyce's and Sharon Street's arguments against various criticisms and conclude that they present a compelling epistemic challenge to justifications for moral realism.

Many ethical theories depend on the existence of natural teleology as a source of normativity. Natural Teleology, the purposive goal-directedness of non-conscious biological processes, is also embraced to some degree by a majority of philosophers of biology who agree that the teleological concepts of purpose, goal, defect, proper function and malfunction are legitimate, perhaps necessary, in biological explanations. In my dissertation I provide a substantive argument against the reduction of teleology to natural facts and argue that ethical theories that rely on it cannot be naturalistic. Several ethical theories could be my target, but I focus on the most overt example: neo-Aristotelian ethics. The project is in two sections, one in ethical theory and the other in philosophy of biology. In the first section of the dissertation, primarily using Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson as models, I illustrate how Neo-Aristotelian theories rest on natural teleology. I offer a metaethical analysis of teleology, arguing that it does not belong to the good nor the right nor mere description, but rather the proper. I call this category of concept protonormativity. I claim that protonormativity, of which teleology is a paradigmatic example, does not yield normative facts and is not reducible to natural facts; it is a distinct conceptual category. In the second section I give a novel argument for why natural teleology cannot be reduced to natural facts. Teleological concepts such as design and proper function imply standards of correctness for phenotypic outcome. They entail norms for the way an item is to be in the end: functional or malfunctional, good or defective. However, since a phenotype is the result of a genotype in some set of environmental conditions, there can only be a proper phenotype if there exists a proper environment for the item to inhabit. Regarding artifacts, a designer is capable of setting a proper environment, but I argue science does not admit of proper environments for organisms in nature. The concept proper environment cannot be reduced to any set of natural facts. Therefore metaethical naturalists must abandon proper phenotypes, natural teleology, and ethical theories that rely on it.

In this paper I examine Peter Railton's theory of moral realism. I begin with his account of non-moral value and continue with his account of moral rightness. Railton's theory is a version of reductive naturalistic moral realism. I next examine some objections applicable to this theory raised by Derek Parfit and Connie Rosati. Parfit argues that an acceptable account of value most invoke non-natural irreducibly normative reasons. Rosati argues that Railton's theory of non-moral value fails as an account of the good for a person. I defend Railton's theory and ultimately conclude that Railton's theory has the resources to overcome these objections.

This dissertation investigates how philosophy of language, ethics, and metaethics can mutually inform one another. Chapter 1 develops what I call condition semantics for normative language. I argue that, just as ordinary factual sentences distinguish among possible worlds (or test whether a possible world meets a certain condition), so do normative sentences distinguish among normative standards (or test whether a normative standard meets a certain condition). Normative sentences place conditions on normative standards, conditions those standards must satisfy in order for them to be characterized by those sentences. The framework of condition semantics offers a perspicuous way of posing classic ethical and metaethical questions — e.g., concerning expressivism, cognitivism, relativism, realism, and judgment internalism. This can encourage clearer, better motivated answers and suggest new ways the dialectic may proceed. Chapter 2 develops an account of the distinction between weak necessity modals (‘ought’, ‘should’) and strong necessity modals (‘must’, ‘have to’). I argue that what makes weak necessity modals “weak” is that they express a kind of conditional necessity, necessity on the supposition that the “applicability conditions” of certain premises are satisfied. The resulting analysis generalizes across readings of modals, elucidates a special role that ‘ought’ claims play in conversation, and captures a wide range of seemingly disparate linguistic phenomena. Greater sensitivity to differences among necessity modals can also improve theorizing on broader philosophical issues. I consider three: moral dilemmas, supererogation, and judgment internalism. It is common in ethics to distinguish what we objectively ought to do from what we subjectively ought to do — i.e., what we ought to do given all the facts about the world, known and unknown, from what we ought to do given our evidence, limited as it invariably is. But at first glance it appears that the standard analysis for modals from Angelika Kratzer implicitly assumes that we always ought to do what we objectively ought to do. I argue in Chapter 3 that, contrary to the standard semantics, relative deontic value between possibilities sometimes depends on which possibilities are live. I then develop an ordering semantics for modals and conditionals that captures this point.

Broadly and somewhat roughly speaking, metanormative theorists who maintain that there is normative truth fall into one of three camps: non-naturalist, naturalist and expressivist. I am interested in the prospects for normative truth, and thus in which, if any, of these positions offers hope for the discovery of such truth. In each of three chapters, I address one of these views. I conclude that our best hope is a view most closely related to naturalism (though I reject this classification for one that I believe better captures what is at stake in the literature I focus on).In Chapter 1, I target expressivism, according to which normative thought and language express non-cognitive attitudes. I explain why it will be difficult, if not impossible, for expressivists to account for a kind of commonplace nihilistic doubt that, I argue, is a symptom of the widely accepted “objective” nature of normativity. I conclude that an inability to account for such doubt should be considered a serious problem for expressivism.In Chapter 2, I address a prominent form of non-naturalism, according to which the normative is “metaphysically autonomous”—neither identical with, nor constituted by, nor constitutive of anything non-normative. I examine several important explanatory challenges non-naturalists face in normative epistemology, metaphysics and semantics. I argue that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to develop their view such that it meets these challenges while remaining plausible.The Open Question Argument and its contemporary cousin, Normative Twin Earth, are the most prominent objections to naturalism. In Chapter 3, I argue that because these arguments rely on semantic rather than metaphysical intuitions, they should be understood as targeting semantic rather than metaphysical views (e.g., not naturalism). I propose that the appropriate targets are views committed to a particular class of reference-fixing relations for normative terms. I then examine the prospects for developing a view along these lines that does not fall prey to the objections mentioned. I conclude that there is hope for realism of this kind, and close with a rough sketch of how such a view might be developed more fully.

Normative language is characteristically used in ethical discussions about what we must do, what we should do, and what we may do. It is also used to discuss rather mundane issues where we need to coordinate our activities, e.g. what to do for dinner tonight, and to describe rules and requirements, e.g. what the law requires of us. This dissertation isolates a distinctively linguistic debate about the nature of normative meanings: Do they function to convey information or do they function to direct action? Several groups of linguistic data are marshaled in support of a positive answer to both of these questions. In particular, in chapter one, similarities between the deontic modals 'must', 'may', and 'should' and imperative sentences like 'Do it!' are described in detail. Chapter two explains the linguistic data from chapter one by constructing a theory on which normative meanings include imperatival meanings. The distinctive feature of normative meanings is what they are used to do (to require, to advise, to permit) as well as what they are used to talk about (obligations, values). Chapter three extends the theory so that it explains how the meanings of complex sentences are determined compositionally by the meaning and arrangement of their parts. This responds to a trenchant objection from Peter Geach who claimed that such a compositional theory is impossible. This chapter also compares the theory with metaethical expressivism.

There is a puzzle about Hume's is-ought gap involving an epistemic `ought'. From the premise `Snow is white,' we can infer `Sophia's belief that snow is white is correct.' `Snow is white' is paradigmatically non-normative, and that Sophia's belief is correct, a claim about what belief she ought to have, seems to be normative. The argument seems valid, so the is-ought gap is supposed to block this kind of inference. The puzzle is over whether we should give up on the is-ought game or find another way to resolve the conflict. In the first chapter, I provide a formulation of the is-ought gap in a general semantic framework that avoids some other known problems. I turn in chapter 2 to discussing the puzzle about correct belief. I cast doubt on a solution proposed by Allan Gibbard by showing that it can admit of no epistemology of the normative. In chapter 3, I defend a solution to the puzzle while more directly tackling the question of the nature of oughts for belief. I offer a new explanation of why we ought to believe the truth. At the heart of the account is the idea that it's a conceptual truth beliefs ought to be true, which I provide a new argument for. I then claim that being an agent requires being subject to this norm of belief. This results in a non-moral, distinctly doxastic, account of why we ought to believe the truth. My conclusion is that asking why we ought to believe the truth is like asking why a bachelor must be unmarried: the answer is contained in the ideas that make up the question. In the final chapter, I respond to Gibbard's claim that an analogous story cannot work for `ought' claims for degreed belief. I pose a worry for Gibbard's proposed alternative explanation, and I undermine Gibbard's motivation for pursuing such an account in the first place. By taking belief to have an aim in a normative sense, I sketch how we can make sense of epistemic rationality in terms of that aim.

Naturalism is an ambiguous philosophical term that refers to one of two general philosophical theses: the metaphysical thesis that all facts, including moral facts, are natural facts, and the epistemological thesis that the methods of philosophical inquiry, including moral inquiry, are continuous with those of the empirical sciences. The metaphysical thesis has long been the default form of naturalism in ethics. The thesis of this dissertation is that, first, despite the convention, it the epistemological thesis—which I call “methodological naturalism”—that is genuinely naturalistic; and second, that existing forms of epistemological naturalism in contemporary ethics have largely failed to develop genuine continuity between moral inquiry and scientific inquiry and hence are not genuine forms of methodological naturalism. The argument proceeds in two parts. First, I examine a growing trend in moral philosophy toward the use of scientific data, especially from cognitive science, psychology, and psychiatry, for resolving longstanding philosophical disputes about the nature of morality and moral agency. This empirical strategy is widely regarded as naturalistic. I argue that many of these approaches fail to satisfy a fundamental requirement on genuine naturalism, namely the development of continuity with scientific inquiry, either because they wrongly take the metaphysical thesis rather than the methodological thesis as primary, or because despite rightly privileging the latter they nevertheless seek to resolve traditional philosophical disputes that are founded on an outmoded psychological framework, namely the framework of commonsense folk psychology. The traditional philosophical disputes in question are those that jointly constitute what Michael Smith (1994) calls the “Moral Problem,” the central organizing problem in metaethics. I focus in particular on the dispute surrounding the so-called Humean theory of moral motivation, according to which an agent’s being motivated to act morally requires not just a belief about what is morally right but also a desire to act in accordance with that belief.The second part of this dissertation applies naturalistic methodology to the Humeanism dispute. I synthesize data ranging from cellular-level neuroscience to cognitive science, social neuroscience, and neuroeconomics to sketch a philosophically informed scientific model of moral cognition and motivation. I argue that this model is in tension with the commonsense psychological framework presupposed by the Moral Problem and by the Humeanism dispute in particular. Central to this argument is the idea that cellular level data on decision-making, which is too often regarded as philosophically irrelevant, can be brought to bear directly on the kind of data from cognitive science that is frequently cited in moral philosophy. The model of moral judgment, decision, and motivation that results, I argue, is a much more promising starting point for philosophical inquiry into moral agency than the framework of commonsense folk psychology. Genuinely naturalistic approaches to ethics must aim to develop real continuity between philosophical inquiry into morality and scientific inquiry into human agency. This requires that we use the best available scientific data to vet the empirical assumptions at work in traditional philosophical theories rather than to merely use that data to adjudicate between them.

On a standard philosophical conception, being autonomous is roughly equivalent to having some particular natural capacity. This paper provides argues that this conception is incorrect, or at least incomplete. The first chapter suggests that adopting an alternative conception of autonomy promises to resolve to several objections to the metaethical constitutivism, and so promises to provide highly desirable theory of moral reasons. The second chapter first motivates a broadly Kantian account of autonomous action, and then gives reasons to think that Kant's own development of this theory runs into damaging action-theoretic problems. The way to address these problems, I argue, is to modify Kant's account of autonomy in a way that leaves no room for the standard conception of autonomy to do any work.

Richard Joyce claims sincerely uttering moral claims necessarily commits the moral claimant to endorsing false beliefs regarding the predication of nonexistent (non-)natural moral properties. For Joyce, any proposition containing a subject, x, saddled with the predicate “…is moral”[1] will have a truth-value of ‘false’, so long as the predicate fails to refer to anything real in the world. Furthermore, given the philosophical community’s present state of epistemic ignorance, we lack sufficient evidence to justify our endorsement of the existence of (non-)natural moral properties purportedly capable of serving as truth-makers for moral claims. My thesis offers a defense of Joyce’s moral error theory against two different lines of criticisms proffered by Russ Shafer-Landau—one conceptual in nature, and the other ontological. I argue that available evidence compels the informed agnostic about moral truth to suspend judgment on the matter, if not endorse Joyce’s stronger thesis that all moral claims are false.