Search

Metaethicists often specify non-naturalism in different ways: some take it to be about identity, while others take it to be about grounding. But few directly address the taxonomical question of what the best way to understand non-naturalism is. That’s the task of this paper. This isn’t a merely terminological question about how to use the term “non-naturalism”, but a substantive philosophical one about what metaphysical ideology we need to capture the pre-theoretical concerns of non-naturalists. I argue that, contrary to popular opinion, non-naturalism is best characterized not in terms of identity or grounding, but in terms of essence. First, I lay out some desiderata for a good characterization of non-naturalism: it should (i) speak to and elucidate the non-naturalist’s core pre-theoretical commitments, (ii) render non-naturalism a substantive, local claim about normativity, and (iii) provide the most general characterization of the view possible (iv) in a way that best fits the spirit of paradigm non-naturalist views. I then argue that identity characterizations fail to satisfy the former two desiderata, while grounding characterizations at best don’t satisfy the latter two. So, I propose a new essence characterization of non-naturalism and argue that it does a better job of satisfying all four desiderata. Moreover, I argue that this essence characterization has important implications for both metaethical and metaphysical theorizing.

For a long time, the normativity literature took for granted that ‘right-kind reasons’ for attitudes are authoritatively normative reasons. However, in the last several years, this view has come under attack. One argument against the authoritative normativity of right-kind reasons claims that right-kind reasons are facts that contribute to the constitutive correctness of the responses they purportedly favour; hence, since constitutive correctness lacks authoritative normativity, so too do right-kind reasons. And according to a recent argument from Barry Maguire (2018), right-kind reasons for attitudes aren’t reasons at all and hence a fortiori aren’t authoritative reasons. This chapter argues that these recent arguments against the authoritative normativity of right-kind reasons fail. It also argues that the intuitive data suggests that right-kind reasons are authoritative. Thus, the authoritative normativity of right-kind reasons is defended. Since right-kind reasons are facts that contribute to an attitude’s fittingness, the chapter’s defence doubles as a defence of the authoritative normativity of fit.

The literature surrounding Horgan and Timmons’s Moral Twin Earth scenarios has focused on whether such scenarios present a metasemantic problem for naturalist realists. But in Choosing Normative Co...

People who suffer brain damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VM patients) have a puzzling psychological profile: they seem to retain high intellect and practical reasoning skills after their brain injuries, but continually make poor decisions in many aspects of their lives. Adina Roskies argues that their behavior is explained by the fact that, although VM patients make correct judgments about what they ought to do, they are entirely unmotivated by those judgments. Roskies thus takes VM patients to be real-world counterexamples to motivational internalism: the thesis that, necessarily, if S judges that she ought to φ in circumstances C, then S is somewhat motivated to φ in C. In this paper, however, I argue that the neuropsychological evidence that Roskies appeals to does not actually show that VM patients are entirely unmotivated by their normative judgments. Rather, I argue, the evidence suggests that VM patients form weaker normative judgments than normals during practical deliberati...

Many meta-ethicists are alethists: they claim that practical considerations can constitute normative reasons for action, but not for belief. But the alethist owes us an account of the relevant difference between action and belief, which thereby explains this normative difference. Here, I argue that two salient strategies for discharging this burden fail. According to the first strategy, the relevant difference between action and belief is that truth is the constitutive standard of correctness for belief, but not for action, while according to the second strategy, it is that practical considerations can constitute motivating reasons for action, but not for belief. But the former claim only shifts the alethist's explanatory burden, and the latter claim is wrong—we can believe for practical reasons. Until the alethist can offer a better account, then, I argue that we should accept that there are practical reasons for belief.

This chapter argues that the best way for a non-naturalist to explain why the normative supervenes on the natural is to claim that, while there are some sui generis normative properties whose essences cannot be fully specified in non-normative terms and do not specify any non-normative sufficient conditions for their instantiation, there are certain hybrid normative properties whose essences specify both naturalistic sufficient conditions for their own instantiation and sufficient conditions for the instantiation of certain sui generis normative properties. This is the only metaphysical explanation for supervenience on offer, the chapter argues, that can both clearly maintain the pre-theoretical commitments of non-naturalism, and provide a metaphysical explanation not just for supervenience, but for all metaphysical necessities involving natural and normative properties.

WordPress is database-driven, so it’s not quite as fast at serving up individual pages as a CMS that writes static files to the server. However, there are a number of things you can do to improve its performance, starting with caching dynamic output to static pages. I’ll explain how caching works and show you how to set it up. I’ll also show you some ways to identify performance problems in your installation.

Now that you’ve configured your site and created some content, it’s time to make it look good! First, you’ll learn a few ways to change your site’s appearance: using the theme customizer, widgets, the menu manager, and uploading custom header and background images.

Most of the time, working with plugins is straightforward. The plugin developer has written a readme file with comprehensive description of the plugin’s features, good installation instructions, and a FAQ. The installation goes smoothly and what you see matches the plugin’s screenshots.

WordPress has five built-in user roles with escalating permissions. The basic role and notification systems work well for many blogs. For more complex content management, you can change the fields in the basic user profile, modify roles, create whole new roles, and add notifications using a couple of plugins. I’ll look at the built-in features first, and then show you the plugins required to extend them.

Up to this point, you’ve looked at using WordPress to manage a single website. However, WordPress can be used to create a network of related sites similar to wordpress.com or edublogs.com . Even if you don’t need to create a whole network of user sites, you could use the network features to manage multiple sites rather than installing WordPress separately for each one. This would be especially useful if your group of sites shares the same pool of users, since they would each have one account instead of several.

WordPress is famous for its five-minute installation. Many commercial web hosts offer one-click installation from their account control panels. If your host does not, you can upload the WordPress files to your web directory and complete the installation using the web interface.

Once you’ve logged in and changed your password, it’s time to go exploring. In this chapter, I’ll take you on a tour of the WordPress administration screens (often collectively referred to as the Dashboard, although only the introductory screen actually goes by that name). You’ll learn about all the administrative settings and how they affect the display of your site.

WordPress comes with several basic content types: posts, pages, and media files. In addition, you can create your own content types, which I’ll talk more about in Chapter 14.

There’s a lot of overlap between theme and plugin development in WordPress. Both themes and plugins rely on core functions and APIs, especially the Options API. In this chapter, you’ll learn about these common functions and development concepts, and how WordPress theme and plugin files are organized.

In the preceding chapters, I’ve shown you how to bend posts, pages, categories, and tags to your needs. However, these types of content aren’t always sufficient, and sometimes it’s just not feasible to have several kinds of content jumbled together under Posts.

Now that you’ve configured your site and created some content, it’s time to make it look good! First, you’ll create a basic custom theme, starting with a standard HTML file. I’ll walk you through the various WordPress template files you can use to make parts of your site look different based on context.

If you’re switching to WordPress from some other platform, you probably need to import some content. There is a plethora of WordPress plugins to import content from other blogging and content management systems. In addition, the WordPress API makes it relatively easy to import content from any MySQL-based content management system.