Long claimed to be the dominant conception of practical reason, the Humean theory that reasons for action are instrumental, or explained by desires, is the basis for a range of worries about the objective prescriptivity of morality. As a result, it has come under intense attack in recent decades. A wide variety of arguments have been advanced which purport to show that it is false, or surprisingly, even that it is incoherent. Slaves of the Passions aims to set the record straight, by advancing a version of the Humean theory of reasons which withstands this sophisticated array of objections....
Long claimed to be the dominant conception of practical reason, the Humean theory that reasons for action are instrumental, or explained by desires, i...
Long claimed to be the dominant conception of practical reason, the Humean theory that reasons for action are instrumental, or explained by desires, is the basis for a range of worries about the objective prescriptivity of morality. As a result, it has come under intense attack in recent decades. A wide variety of arguments have been advanced which purport to show that it is false, or surprisingly, even that it is incoherent. Slaves of the Passions aims to set the record straight, by advancing a version of the Humean theory of reasons which withstands this sophisticated array of objections....
Long claimed to be the dominant conception of practical reason, the Humean theory that reasons for action are instrumental, or explained by desires, i...
Expressivism--the sophisticated contemporary incarnation of the noncognitivist research program of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare--is no longer the province of metaethicists alone. Its comprehensive view about the nature of both normative language and normative thought has also recently been applied to many topics elsewhere in philosophy -- including logic, probability, mental and linguistic content, knowledge, epistemic modals, belief, the a priori, and even quantifiers.
Expressivism--the sophisticated contemporary incarnation of the noncognitivist research program of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare--is no longer the provinc...
Normative ethical theories generally purport to be explanatory--to tell us not just what is good, or what conduct is right, but why. Drawing on both historical and contemporary approaches, Mark Schroeder offers a distinctive picture of how such explanations must work, and of the specific commitments that they incur. According to Schroeder, explanatory moral theories can be perfectly general only if they are reductive, offering accounts of what it is for something to be good, right, or what someone ought to do. So ambitious, highly general normative ethical theorizing is continuous with...
Normative ethical theories generally purport to be explanatory--to tell us not just what is good, or what conduct is right, but why. Drawing on both h...
When the logical positivists espoused emotivism as a theory of moral discourse, they assumed that their general theories of meaning could be straightforwardly applied to the subject of metaethics. The philosophical research program of expressivism, emotivism's contemporary heir, has called this assumption into question. In this volume Mark Schroeder argues that the only plausible ways of developing expressivism or similar views require us to re-think what we may have thought that we knew about propositions, truth, and the nature of attitudes like belief and desire. Informed by detailed...
When the logical positivists espoused emotivism as a theory of moral discourse, they assumed that their general theories of meaning could be straightf...
