University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Rethinking reductive realism in ethics

(USC Thesis Other)

Rethinking reductive realism in ethics

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

Rethinking Reductive Realism in Ethics
Nicholas Laskowski

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(PHILOSOPHY)
August 2017

Doctoral Committee:
Professor of Philosophy, Mark Schroeder, Chair
Professor of Philosophy, Stephen Finlay
Professor of Philosophy, Janet Levin
Professor of Philosophy, Ralph Wedgwood
Associate Professor of English, Rebecca Lemon, External Member
ii
Contents
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
iv
v
xi

I. THE DISPENSABILITY OBJECTION
1 Are Normative Concepts Essentially Deliberative? 1
1 Stage Setting
1.1 Realism, Robust and Reductive
1.2 The Dispensability Objection, Broadly Characterized
1.3 The Dispensability Objection, Through the Eyes of Parfit
2 Responding to the Dispensability Objection
2.1 The Deliberative Response
2.2 Deliberation and Reasons
2.3 Deliberation and Goodness
2
2
3
5
7
7
8
12
2 Epistemic Modesty in Ethics 16
1 Stage Setting
1.1 New Resources for Defending Reductive Realism
1.2 Dispensing with Concepts, Correctly
1.3 The Dispensability Objection, Revived
2 The Epistemology of “First-Order” Theorizing
2.1 Standard Approaches
2.2 The Method of Cases, Illustration
2.3 The Method of Cases, Discussion
2.4 The Role of Principles
2.5 Clarifying the Idea of Epistemic Modesty
2.6 Responding to the Revived Dispensability Objection
18
18
19
20
22
22
23
27
32
34
37

II. THE SENSE OF INCREDIBILITY OBJECTION
3 Why Normative Properties Seem “Different” 40
1 Clearing the Stage
1.1 Existing Explanations of the Sense of Incredibility
1.2 Parfit and Enoch on the Sense of Incredibility
1.3 Wedgwood on the Sense of Incredibility
42
42
43
44
iii
2 The Sense of Incredibility in the Philosophy of Mind
2.1 The Phenomenal Concept Strategy
3 Hybridism
3.1 Normative Language Hybridism
3.2 Normative Thought Hybridism
3.3 Normative Concept Hybridism
3.4 An Attempt to Explain the Sense of Incredibility
3.5 Introducing LUNCH
46
46
49
49
51
54
56
59
4 Conceiving of Failures of Supervenience in Ethics 67
1 Conceivability in the Philosophy of Mind
1.1 Zombies
2 Conceivability in Ethics
2.1 Hybridism and Failures of Supervenience in Ethics
2.2 LUNCH and Conceivability, First Pass
2.3 An Alternative Explanation?
2.4 LUNCH and Conceivability, Second Pass
70
70
72
72
75
77
79

III. THE NORMATIVITY OBJECTION
5 Phenomenal, Mathematical, and Normative Concepts 81
1 The Normativity Objection, Introduced
1.1 Copp and Fleming on the Normativity Objection
2 Phenomenal Concepts
2.1 The Structure of Phenomenal Concepts
3 The Normativity Objection, Redux
3.1 Normative and Mathematical Concepts
3.2 Why Reductive Realists Still Need Not Worry
84
84
88
88
91
91
96
References 101

iv

In loving memory of my grandmother, Carol Glennon

v
Preface

[This]…fits into a Larger Project—trying to understand what it is that makes
nonreductive realists in various domains of philosophical inquiry so thoroughly
resistant to the idea of philosophical reduction. Reductions, after all, are at least
in principle supposed to be theoretically fruitful. They can help us to explain
supervenience theses and other kinds of metaphysical impossibilities. They are
supposed to make smooth the ways of the epistemology of many domains. They
give us a grip on how our terms could ever have managed to refer to properties or
entities in the reduced domain, and what makes us able to have thoughts about it.
And…they are supposed to make the reduced domain simply less mysterious, by
telling us a little bit of what it is about. Non-reductivists are understandably
uncompelled…They typically hold that it is only certain kinds of naturalist or
physicalist prejudices which typically make reductivists think that the reduced
domains are philosophically mysterious in the first place. That is
understandable. But non-reductivists typically…profess to be unmoved by the
[alleged theoretical advantages] of reduction…often they are so averse to
reduction that they are content to tell us that we can just tell by intuition whether
something is good, or that phenomenological qualia are simply transparent to
the mind…These theorists find reduction so unpalatable that they are typically
unmoved by even the legitimate explanatory theoretical aspirations of reductive
theorists. But it is far from clear that the arguments which nonreductivists claim
to be their reasons for rejecting reduction are so decisive.
1

I came to USC with the intention of defending theses in normative ethics – theses
in debates between Consequentialists and Deontologists, for example. I also had
it in mind that I might explore questions concerning the moral status of non-
human animals, the norms governing war and conflict, and other topics in applied
ethics. I even thought there was a solid chance that I would end up spending my
graduate career writing on the legitimacy of the state in political philosophy.
But during my first two years of graduate school, I was swept up in all of the
enthusiasm surrounding metaethics at USC. Between a seminar with Stephen
Finlay on moral psychology and then another with him on a draft of his first book
manuscript, seminars with Mark Schroeder on highlights from the history of
ethics in the 20
th
century and the place of reasons in epistemology, and then
Ralph Wedgwood joining the department, I was hooked. My interest in
normative ethics, applied ethics, and political philosophy took something of a
back seat.

1
Schroeder (2005: 3, original emphasis)
vi
After coursework, toward the end of the second year review, it became time to
start thinking of which sub-field of metaethics I would master over the course of
preparing for my “area” (i.e. comprehensive) exam, on the way to developing a
dissertation topic. I don’t quite remember how it happened, but I wound up
thinking at the time that it could be fun, and perhaps somewhat novel, to self-
consciously pursue a project in metaethics from the perspective of the philosophy
of mind. Mark Schroeder confirmed my suspicions, and suggested that I might
have something interesting to say about the nature of moral and more broadly
normative
2
thought and concepts, if we worked together through the area exam
list on expressivism.
Then, at some time around the end of my area exam preparation, Mark and I
began discussing one of Derek Parfit’s arguments from On What Matters against
Reductive Realism about the metaphysical nature of ethics – an argument I call
the Dispensability Objection. It seemed that the success of this argument
depended on an undefended assumption about the nature of normative thought
and concepts that Reductive Realists need not accept. Around the same time, too,
I noticed that there were more objections to Reductive Realism that were like the
Dispensability Objection, in drawing ambitious metaphysical conclusions about
the falsity of Reductive Realism from premises about the nature of normative
thought and concepts. Indeed, I started to think, like many Physicalists in debates
about the metaphysical nature of consciousness in the philosophy of mind, that
much of the seemingly profound and pervasive resistance to Reductive Realism in
metaethics, might ultimately trace to the distinctive nature of normative thought
and concepts, instead of the distinctive metaphysical nature of ethics.
In this dissertation, I defend Reductive Realism about the metaphysical nature of
ethics, by leveraging insights from debates about the reduction of consciousness in
the philosophy of mind to motivate various underappreciated theses about the
nature of normative thought and concepts. But I don’t do so as a card-carrying
Reductive Realist. In fact, in addition to formerly avowing Robust Realism, I
recently defend a version of it elsewhere.
3
Instead of defending Reductive Realism
as a committed Reductive Realist, then, I defend it from a place of deep sympathy

2
I’ll be using ‘moral’, ‘ethical’, and ‘normative’ more or less interchangeably throughout the
dissertation.
3
See Laskowski (2014). More evidence of my neutrality can also be found in a defense that
Stephen Finlay and I offer of a different version of Reductive Realism than the one I defend in
this dissertation. See Laskowski and Finlay (2017).
vii
for many of the concerns that have led moral philosophers to embrace Robust
Realism. While I’m officially neutral about the correct view of the metaphysical
nature of ethics, I do think, as the epigraph of this preface suggests, that many of
the most influential arguments against Reductive Realism advanced by
contemporary Robust Realists fail. At bottom, I’m interested in getting the
standards of evidence right in these debates.
Though I think many of the arguments against Reductive Realism from Robust
Realists fail, I also think they do so in a way that should lead us to rethink the
nature of normative thought and concepts, which brings me to one last point
about the dissertation at hand. I view philosophy as a collaborative enterprise –
one that does not live up to the stereotype of a thinker alone in a room. It is a
conversation. Since the very best conversations tend to occur when participants
constructively engage with one another, I aimed to carry out this dissertation in
that spirit. And I suspect that it is precisely because I took up this approach that I
was able to develop my arguments concerning the nature of normative thought
and concepts. It is safe to say, too, that anything that might be of value in this
dissertation is in some way attributable to the following people that I’ve shared
conversations with along the way.

Acknowledgements
This dissertation is the culmination of more than a decade of philosophical
development, from my time at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey,
where I was a first-generation undergraduate student, through the two years I was
working as a Technical Assistant at Teachers College, Columbia University in
New York City while preparing to apply to graduate schools in philosophy, to the
end of my time as a graduate student at the University of Southern California.
There are a lot of people who deserve my gratitude.
My philosophical career began in an Introduction to Philosophy course during the
Spring 2004 semester, as an undeclared undergraduate student at Rutgers
University. Martha Bolton, Mark Colby (RIP), Alvin Goldman, Brian Loar
(RIP), Vishnya Maudlin, James Simmons, Ernest Sosa, Carrie Swanson, and
Jonathan Winterbottom all played a part in cultivating my interest in philosophy.
But the philosophers who deserve the most blame in this regard are the moral
viii
philosophers
4
with whom I had the honor of working closely with at Rutgers,
including Ruth Chang, Jeff McMahan, Derek Parfit (RIP), Holly Smith, and
Larry Temkin. Of these moral philosophers, Jeff McMahan deserves special
recognition. It is not an overstatement to say that I would not have made it to
graduate school without his unwavering support.
The next step of my philosophical career began when I accepted my admission to
USC. I am forever grateful to the members of the graduate admissions committee
at the time, of whom I still remain ignorant. My admission into USC changed
everything. I mean that in a good way.
As a student, teaching assistant, and job market candidate at USC, I learned a
tremendous amount from many faculty members about how to do philosophy,
how to teach, and how to do philosophy and teach in such a way where academic
institutions would hire me to continue doing so for them. These faculty members
include John Dreher, Kenny Easwaran, John Hawthorne, James Higginbotham
(RIP), Robin Jeshion, Shieva Kleinschmidt, Frank Lewis, Sharon Lloyd, Andrei
Marmor, Ed McCann, Jon Quong, Jake Ross, Jeff Russell, Scott Soames, Gabriel
Uzquiano-Cruz, James van Cleve, David Wallace, Gary Watson, and Gideon
Yaffe. Many current and former members of the administrative support staff also
deserve thanks, including Tomiko Higuchi, Cynthia Lugo, J.G.N. Nikolai, Corey
Resnick, Natalie Schaad, and Barrington Smith-Seetachitt.
In these capacities, too, I also learned a great deal from many of my current and
fellow graduate students at USC, including Greg Ackerman, Mike Ashfield, Ara
Astourian, Matt Babb, Rima Basu, Steve Bero, Renee Jorgensen Bolinger, Josh
Crabill, Justin Dallmann, Kory DeClark, Sean Donahue, Erik Encarnacion,
Maegan Fairchild, Marina Folescu, Paul Garofalo, August Gorman, Keith Hall,
Thomas Hall, Frank Hong, Michael Hatcher, Ryan Hay, Jennifer Head, Nicola
Kemp, Ben Lennertz, Alida Liberman, Matt Lutz, Shyam Nair, Elli Neufeld,
Dan Pallies, Kenny Pearce, Christa Peterson, Michael Pressman, Indrek Reiland,
Sam Shpall, Justin Snedegar, Julia Staffel, Aaron Veek, Douglas Wadle, Aness
Webster, Jesse Wilson, and Jon Wright.
In addition to teaching me quite a bit about how to do philosophy and how to
teach, I learned a tremendous amount from the following group of USC graduate
students: Nathan Robert Howard, Tanya Kostochka, Woo Ram Lee, Michael
Milona, Caleb Perl, and Abelard Podgorski. These are the original members of

4
I use ‘ethics’ and ‘moral philosophy’ more or less interchangeably
ix
Mark Schroeder’s advisee work-in-progress workshop, known as “Markshop.” But
this list would not be complete without the USC graduate student who gave
Markshop its imaginative name – Alex Dietz. Nor would it be complete without
another USC graduate student, Joe Horton, who, like Alex, read as much if not
more of my dissertation than the original members of Markshop, except for
Nathan, who deserves more than a single shout out.
Many philosophers from outside of USC also helped shape this dissertation.
Unfortunately, I have to admit that I have not been great about keeping track of
all the people in this category, especially the people in this category that I have
met during conference travel. But several do come to mind, including David
Copp, Terence Cuneo, Timothy Schroeder, and Daniel Wodak, all of whom
provided invaluable feedback on drafts of this dissertation.
It is difficult to find the words to adequately express my appreciation for the
people I still have yet to thank, since I owe them such an awesome debt of
gratitude. To the extent that this dissertation is worth reading, it is because of the
brilliance and generosity of my dissertation committee, including Stephen Finlay,
Janet Levin, and Ralph Wedgwood. Thanks, Steve, for never pulling your
punches, and always improving my work. Thanks, Janet, for helping me speak the
language of not only moral philosophy but also the philosophy of mind. Thanks,
Ralph, for consistently reassuring me of the strength of my arguments, for sharing
with me your infectious philosophical curiosity. Thanks, also, to the external
member of my committee, Rebecca Lemon, for being an ally from outside of
philosophy.
There is one member of my committee that I have yet to mention, or one member
of the entire philosophical community, for that matter, who deserves extra special
thanks: Mark Schroeder, the chair of my dissertation committee. I am convinced
that I have accumulated an inarticuable debt of gratitude to you, Mark. Thanks
for being generous, attentive, and supportive to an otherworldly degree – for being
in my corner. Thanks for bringing out the very best in me, philosophically. This
dissertation would not exist without you, Mark. I’m certain, too, that I would not
have finished graduate school were it not for your mentoring. It is because of you
more than anyone else that I am the philosopher I am today.
There are also a number of family members from back east and very close friends
from Los Angeles that deserve my thanks for their emotional support over the
course of this long journey, including my uncles, Jeff Glennon and Charles
x
Laskowski, two aunts, Deborah Glennon and Maryann Laskowski, my father-in-
law – Ron Prunesti, mother-in-law – Janice Prunesti, brother-in-law – Andrew
Prunesti, sister-in-law – Meredith Poley, cousin-in-law – Cheyne Hessler,
Christina & Nick Korn, Mike Kriebel, Kayla Kurisu, Clo Pazera, Chris & Megan
Wall, Myles Webster, and Ilana Winter. My two closest friends of all time, Matt
Schimkowitz and Sara Mados, also deserve my thanks. You two are the best. I
should also thank my companion, Kjeks. She was quite literally by my side for
most of the time I wrote this dissertation, eagerly waiting for me to take breaks so
we could play outside.
And a very special shout out to my friends Kenneth Silver, Julian Stone-
Kronberg, and Ryan Walsh, who have been there with me in Los Angeles since
day one.
Finally, I owe the biggest debt of gratitude to the love of my life, my wife,
Amanda Prunesti. Your enviable creativity, joyfulness, and beauty are only
outmatched by your patience, as evidenced by the fact that you put up with me
while I wrote this dissertation. I’d dedicate it to you, but you know I can’t. Not
this time, at least. I promise, and you already know this, but the first book
dedication is yours, love.
No, this particular monograph is dedicated to the memory of the woman
responsible for saving my life, the woman who sacrificed everything to raise me –
Carol Glennon. She passed away in 2014 before she had a chance to read any of
this dissertation. But I’m sure that nothing in this world would have made her
more proud. I love you, grandma.

xi
Introduction

Just about everyone has thoughts about morality. Some believe, for example, that
it is morally wrong to financially support factory farming, while others hope, for
the sake of their taste buds, that it is not. Thoughts about morality are at least as
ubiquitous as platitudinous opening sentences in academic monographs. Despite
their ubiquity, however, thoughts about morality are philosophically perplexing –
they raise a number of vexing foundational questions in moral philosophy,
including the question of whether thoughts about morality are really about
anything at all.
Traditionally, it is said that Cognitivists answer this question affirmatively,
whereas Noncognitivists answer it negatively. It is also traditionally said that
Cognitivists hold, roughly, that thoughts about morality are like ordinary
thoughts about non-moral subject matters. Just as the ordinary non-moral belief
that financially supporting factory farming is common is about, or picks out, or
refers to the property of being common, the moral belief that financially supporting
factory farming is morally wrong refers to the property of being morally wrong. In
contrast, Noncognitivists are said to hold, roughly, that thoughts about morality
are not like ordinary thoughts about non-moral subject matters. While non-moral
beliefs have the function of referring to properties, non-moral beliefs don’t. The
belief that it is morally wrong to financially support factory farming doesn’t refer
to the property of being morally wrong and ascribe it to the activity of financially
supporting factory farming, according to Noncognitivists. Instead, such a moral
belief is more like a state of mind of disliking financially supporting factory
farming or desiring not to do it – states of mind that much less obviously function
to pick out or refer to properties.
Unsurprisingly, both answers point toward a host of still more philosophically
vexing questions. One family of such questions traces to the Cognitivist answer
that thoughts about morality refer to properties. Assuming that a thought like the
belief that it is wrong to financially support factory farming really does refer to the
property of being morally wrong, we can reasonably ask: What is the property of
being morally wrong? What is its nature? Such metaphysical questions occupy a
central place in the history of moral philosophy. As it happens, such questions are
also a primary concern of this dissertation.
xii
Contemporary moral philosophers tend to be one of either two minds about the
nature of moral properties. In particular, moral philosophers tend to be of one of
either two minds about the relationship between moral and non-moral properties.
On the one hand, Robust Realists maintain that moral properties and normative
properties more generally are not fully analyzable in terms of naturalistic,
supernaturalistic, or any other kind of non-normative properties. Reductive
Realists, on the other hand, maintain that normative properties are fully
analyzable in terms of non-normative properties.
The turn of the 21st century has seen Robust Realism become as dominant as it
once was around the time of G.E. Moore in the early 20th century. This
resurgence is attributable to a new set of provocative objections to Reductive
Realism that Robust Realists have advanced over the course of the past two
decades. One striking aspect of this resurgence is that Reductive Realists have had
very little to say about these objections. Indeed, Robust Realism’s recent rise
seems in part due to the fact that, by and large, Reductive Realists have been
dismissive of these objections. This appears to have a led to a situation in moral
philosophy where many of its most outspoken practitioners aren’t even talking
past one another. In an attempt to remedy the situation, and generate a kind of
meeting of the minds between proponents of Robust and Reductive Realism
alike, I have organized this dissertation into three Parts, corresponding to three of
these recently influential objections to Reductive Realism.

I. THE DISPENSABILITY OBJECTION
In Chapter 1, I introduce what I call the Dispensability Objection to Reductive
Realism. At its core, Reductive Realism is the idea that it is possible to
understand morality and normativity more generally in terms of which we are
more familiar. In the hands of proponents of the most influential version of this
idea, Reductive Naturalists, normative properties are fully analyzable in terms of
properties that are discoverable via the empirical sciences. On such a view, for
example, it might be that the normative property of being wrong is fully
analyzable in terms of the non-normative property of failing to maximize pleasure.
But if such a view were true, according to proponents of the Dispensability
Objection, then it would imply that we would not need or have reason to use the
normative concept WRONG
5
in deliberating about how to act. After all, if such a

5
Small caps denote concepts.
xiii
view were true, then we could think about wrongness with both the normative
concept WRONG and the non-normative concept FAILING TO MAXIMIZE
PLEASURE. But if so, then it seems like the normative concept WRONG would be,
as it were, functionally redundant. And if so, then it looks like we wouldn’t need
or have reason to use the normative concept WRONG to think about wrongness;
we could just as well get by with using the non-normative concepts FAILING TO
MAXIMIZE PLEASURE to think about wrongness in deliberating about how to act.
But proponents of the Dispensability Objection think this implication is false, so
they think it follows that Reductive Realism is false as well.
After introducing the Dispensability Objection, I offer a response to it. I suggest
that if normative concepts have a unique and essential function to them, in
addition to their function of referring to properties, then Reductive Realism
would not imply that we would not need or have reason to use normative
concepts. Since normative concepts seem to frequently accompany deliberations,
it could be, for example, that in addition to referring to properties, normative
concepts have the unique and essential function of settling deliberation.
Nevertheless, in the second half of Chapter 1, I show that several direct
arguments for this claim about normative concepts, at worst, contain a false
premise, and at best, contain a premise that is more controversial than the claim
that normative concepts have a uniquely deliberative function.
This motivates a search for a more compelling solution to the Dispensability
Objection in Chapter 2. In addition to assuming that, on Reductive Realism, it
would be psychologically possible for us to stop using normative concepts and
replace using them with corresponding non-normative concepts, proponents of
the Dispensability Objection also appear to assume, on Reductive Realism, that it
would be correct to dispense with normative concepts in this way. But I argue that
this is far from obvious. In particular, I suggest that having knowledge of
Reductive Realism is a condition on correctly dispensing with normative concepts,
and argue that it is not possible for us to have such knowledge. By showing that
we cannot correctly dispense with normative concepts, Reductive Realists can
explain why we would need or have reason to use normative concepts on their
view.

xiv
II. THE SENSE OF INCREDIBILITY OBJECTION
In Chapter 3, I introduce what I call the Sense of Incredibility Objection to
Reductive Realism. It turns out that many moral philosophers have a relatively
difficult time getting themselves to believe particular reductive theses about the
nature of normative properties. Normative properties are often said to be “just too
different” from non-normative properties to be analyzable in terms of them. I call
this psychological difficulty the sense of incredibility. Since it is available to
opponents of Reductive Realism to say that the best explanation of the sense of
incredibility is the falsity of Reductive Realism, it is a challenge to proponents of
Reductive Realism to explain why their view would be so difficult to believe if it
were true.
The solution that I develop starts with the observation that many philosophers of
mind appear to experience an analogous sense of incredibility with respect to
reductive theses concerning the nature of phenomenal properties, like the
property of being in pain. Unlike in moral philosophy, there are well developed
accounts of the sense of incredibility from those philosophers of mind who are
sympathetic to Reductive Realism about phenomenal consciousness. In particular,
proponents of what is known as the Phenomenal Concept Strategy suggest that
the sense of incredibility isn’t the result of the distinctness of phenomenal
properties, but rather the distinctness of the way we use phenomenal concepts to
think about them. I develop an analogous strategy regarding normative concepts
to explain away the sense of incredibility in moral philosophy – one that builds on
the work of Hybridists about the nature of normative language and thought, who
maintain that our use of such language and thought is similarly distinct.
In addition to appealing to the special nature of phenomenal concepts to explain
away the sense of incredibility in the philosophy of mind, proponents of the
Phenomenal Concept Strategy make such an appeal to explain much more. For
example, proponents of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy appeal to the special
nature of phenomenal concepts to explain why failures of supervenience in the
philosophy of mind, “Zombie” cases, are easy to conceive. Insofar as I defend a
normative analogue of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy, it might be thought
that I am similarly committed to explaining why failures of supervenience in
moral philosophy are easy to conceive. This could be problematic, because it is
widely held in moral philosophy that such failures are extraordinarily difficult to
conceive. In Chapter 4, then, I argue that the kind of hybrid view of normative
concepts I defend does not have this commitment. In other words, I show why,
xv
on my view of normative concepts, failures of conceivability in moral philosophy
are not easy to conceive.

III. THE NORMATIVITY OBJECTION
In Chapter 5, the final chapter, I introduce and discuss the Normativity Objection
to Reductive Realism. According to proponents of the Normativity Objection,
our competence with normative concepts alone is enough to reveal that no
reductive thesis about the nature of normative properties could be true. Since
proponents of the Normativity Objection do not tend to show how it could be the
case that our competence with normative concepts could establish the ambitious
claim that no reductive thesis could be true, I again look to discussions about the
nature of phenomenal concepts in the philosophy of mind for inspiration. There,
many prominent philosophers of mind argue that phenomenal concepts have a
rich structure to them that reveals itself to anyone competent with such concepts.
Such debates license optimism that normative concepts might work similarly.
To fill out what the structure of normative concepts might look like, I then look
to recent attempts to analogize normative concepts to mathematical concepts.
Putting these sources of inspiration together yields an interesting version of the
Normativity Objection. Yet I ultimately argue that this version the Normativity
Objection is dialectically inert.
What the Dispensability Objection, the Sense of Incredibility Objection, and the
Normativity Objection have in common is that they are all high-level objections
that purport to show that no reductive thesis in moral philosophy could be true.
Moreover, each of these objections sets out to establish this striking conclusion
from premises about the nature of normative thought and normative concepts. In
essence, these objections purport to show that no version of Reductive Realism is
compatible with any picture of the mind that takes normativity seriously. The
central theme that emerges from my dissertation is that some of the most recently
influential puzzles which seem to generate profound resistance to Reductive
Realism are more revealing of the distinctive nature of normative thought and
concepts than they are the distinctive nature of normative properties. Another, no
less central theme that emerges from this dissertation is that it pays to take the
time to understand why our fellow philosophers might find our most cherished
views to be completely and obviously wrongheaded. In the context at hand, while
the case for Robust Realism is less compelling than its prominence in
xvi
contemporary moral philosophy suggests, the arguments for it force Reductive
Realists to completely rethink the nature of normative thought and concepts.

1
1. Are Normative Concepts Essentially Deliberative?
Robust Realism in moral philosophy is the view that a metaphysical account of
everything, at the most fundamental level, includes at least some normative
properties or relations.
6
Many Robust Realists, including Jonathan Dancy (2006),
William FitzPatrick (2008), and David Enoch (2011), have recently been on the
offensive against Reductive Realism, the view that while at least some normative
properties or relations figure in a metaphysical account of everything, none of
them do so at the most fundamental level.
7
In arguing against Reductive Realism,
Robust Realists tend to take seriously the intuitive idea that we need to think
about the world in a distinctively normative way in deciding on how to act in it.
We need to think, for example, that we ought to phi or that we have decisive
reason to phi to settle the deliberative question of whether to phi.
According to such Robust Realists, however, Reductive Realism implies that we
do not need to think about the world in a distinctively normative way to settle
deliberative questions about how to act in it – we can dispense with doing so and
instead think about the world in those ways that are associated with whichever
properties and relations are fundamental on the Reductive Realist’s view. For
example, we could think, following Peter Railton (1986), that phi-ing promotes
human interests from the social point of view; or think, following David Copp
(1995, 2007), that phi-ing is in accordance with the requirements of a system of
standards the currency of which in society would do most to enable the society to
meet its needs; or think, following Mark Schroeder (2007), that some fact in part
explains why phi-ing promotes an object of one’s desire. Or so at least proponents
of what I call the Dispensability Objection allege.
In Section 1, I will introduce the Dispensability Objection and zero in on a
version of it from Derek Parfit (2011) to keep discussion sharp.
8
Since the crux of

6
I will be formulating these views in terms of properties (rather than, say, facts). As far as I can
tell, nothing hinges on this choice.
7
All references to these authors will be to these works by them, unless otherwise noted.
8
While Parfit is a clear advocate of the Dispensability Objection, he would likely resist
categorizing himself as a Robust Realist. This is because, as I am understanding it, Robust
Realism is a view about the metaphysics of morality, but Parfit self-ascribes to what he calls a
“non-ontological” or “non-metaphysical” view, according to which “There are some claims that are
irreducibly normative in the reason-involving sense, and are in the strongest sense true. But these
truths have no ontological implications. For such claims to be true, these reason-involving
properties need not exist either as natural properties in the spatio-temporal world, or in some non-
spatio-temporal part of reality.” (486, my emphasis) See Cowie (2014) and Suikkanen (2016) for
criticisms of this kind of view.
2
the Dispensability Objection is the seemingly implausible idea that normative
concepts would be functionally superfluous if Reductive Realism were true, I
suggest in Section 2 that proponents of Reductive Realism might respond to the
objection, by claiming that normative concepts essentially serve their own unique
function, like the function of settling deliberation. In the end, however, I show
that not only does a natural kind of argument for this claim contain premises that
are more controversial than its conclusion, but that the very idea that normative
concepts are essentially and uniquely deliberative might be false.

1 Stage Setting
1.1 Realism, Robust and Reductive
Proponents of Robust Realism in moral philosophy maintain that at least some
normative properties or relations figure in a metaphysical account of everything at
the most fundamental level. This is to say that at least some normative properties
9

are constituents of the basic furniture of reality, in the sense that it is possible to
appeal to such properties to explain or account for other properties, but not
possible to appeal to other properties to fully account for them. In other words, as
I’ll say for short, Robust Realists hold that at least some normative properties are
metaphysically fundamental or primitive. Robust realists, then, are skeptical of the
possibility of providing a complete metaphysical explanation of at least some
normative properties, or skeptical of the possibility of metaphysically explaining at
least some normative properties in a way that still preserves all the appearances.
10

As Enoch (2011: 8) candidly writes, “I pre-theoretically feel that nothing short of
a fairly strong…realism will vindicate our taking morality seriously.”
In contrast, proponents of Reductive Realism are not skeptical of the possibility of
providing complete metaphysical explanations in moral philosophy. Reductive
Realists hold that while a metaphysical account of everything includes at least
some normative properties, it is possible to fully account for all of them in terms
of non-normative properties, such that no normative property is fundamental or
primitive. This characterization of Reductive Realism is purposefully minimal,

9
I’ll omit reference to ‘relations’ from here on for ease of exposition.
10
The sense of “metaphysical explanation” I have in mind traces to Fine (2012), who writes that
“…in addition to scientific or causal explanation, there may be a distinctive kind of metaphysical
explanation, in which explanans and explanandum are connected, not through some sort of causal
mechanism, but through some constitutive form of determination.”
3
because ‘reduction’ is a term of art that is understood in a variety of ways in moral
philosophy.
11

Fortunately, it is not necessary to state the conditions under which Realist views
count as reductive for the purposes of this dissertation, since this minimal
characterization captures everything that Robust Realists tend to find unsatisfying
about reductive views in moral philosophy, including more familiar reductive
views like Reductive Naturalism. On this common view, the most fundamental
account of everything does not include normative properties, because it is possible
to fully account for normative properties with naturalistic properties, or those
properties that are, roughly, discoverable via ordinary scientific practice.
12
But
Robust Realists do not object to Reductive Naturalism on the grounds that
naturalistic properties, qua naturalistic properties, are the incorrect candidate
property-kind to fully account for normative properties. Instead, Robust Realists
object to Reductive Realism on the ground that it is not possible to fully account
for at least some normative properties with any non-normative property-kind,
naturalistic, supernaturalistic, or otherwise. Insofar as I discuss objections to
Reductive Naturalism in this dissertation, then, I will be understanding them as
objections to the minimal characterization of Reductive Realism on which
normative properties figure in a metaphysical account of everything, but none of
them so figure at the most fundamental level.

1.2 The Dispensability Objection
Many Robust Realists have set out to defend their view by arguing against rivals
to it. In particular, many Robust Realists have been setting their sights on
Reductive Realism, and have been marshaling an especially ambitious line of
objection to it. Rather than argue against one reductive view or another, for
example, many Robust Realists attempt to use high-level objections to show that

11
Compare Jackson (1998) and Shafer-Landau (2003), who understand Reductive Realism in the
metaphysical ideology of identity, to Chang (2013) and Schroeder (2007), who understand it in
the ideology of metaphysical constitution, ground, and analysis, and who are broadly in line with
contemporary metaphysicians like Bennett (2011) and Schaffer (2009). See also Schroeder (2005)
and Dunaway (Manuscript) for discussions of the relationship between Reductivism and realism.
12
See Boyd (1988) for a canonical defense.
4
no reductive view could even be true.
13
In his discussion of a handful of reductive
views
14
, for example, Dancy (142, emphasis mine) writes that “Our claim is that
whatever [Reductivists] come up with, it will be impossible to identify these
normative facts with any fact that they can allow to be natural.” Similarly, Enoch
(108, emphasis mine) claims that “No natural fact by itself can have normative
force.”
15
Moreover, on top of arguing against all reductive views in one fell swoop,
much of what Robust Realists say about Reductivism suggests that they endorse
one of the very same kind of high-level challenges to the view.
To get a feel for the challenge it would be instructive to suppose that an arbitrary
reductive view is true, like the reductive Benthamite Act Utilitarian view that
what it is for an action to be morally obligatory is for it to be an action that
maximizes pleasure. To see that such a view and any view like it is false, on this
line of thought, all we have to do is note that it seems to imply that we would not
need to use normative concepts to think about the world in deciding on how to act
in it. For if all there is to the normative property of being morally obligatory is the
non-normative property of maximizing pleasure, as it were, then it seems like
settling whether a subject has an obligation to phi or decisive reason to phi is just
a matter of settling whether phi-ing maximizes pleasure.
But this implication tends to strike Robust Realists as profoundly mistaken. As
Dancy (142) writes, “If we do not use normative concepts, we cannot address the
question what is practically relevant and what is not.” Similarly, FitzPatrick (176,
emphasis mine) claims that “we are not aiming at discovering [any non-normative
property in deliberation], but at discovering…the truth about what is good (or
right, or what there is reason to do, and so on), as such.” As Enoch (108) also puts

13
FitzPatrick (2014, emphasis mine) almost aspires to the same level of ambition: “I am skeptical
about all naturalizing projects in the practical sphere, at least where they claim to capture the most
important forms of normativity, such as ethics and facts about unqualified reasons. Ideally, one
might have liked to have a general, abstract argument that applies neatly to all naturalizing views
and undermines them all at once, but I am not optimistic about the possibility of such an
argument. Instead, I think we do better to proceed by examining some of the most prominent
types of naturalizing strategy and exploring some revealing ways in which they seem to fall short.
While this is not a fully general line of attack on the naturalization of normativity and cannot
claim to constitute anything as strong as an argument from elimination in favor of non-naturalism,
it is also not merely a critique of the idiosyncrasies of a few selected views. Instead, the hope is to
bring to light various difficulties that can be expected to plague a wide variety of naturalizing
projects of the various types.”
14
I’ll use ‘Reductivists’ and ‘Reductivism’ for ease of exposition from here on.
15
Echoing this sentiment, Parfit (326, emphasis mine) proclaims, too, that “normative and natural
facts differ too deeply for any form of Naturalism to succeed.”
5
it: “When I ask myself what I should do, it seems that just answering ‘Oh,
pressing the blue button will maximize happiness’ is a complete non-starter, it
completely fails to address the question [of whether to push it].”
I call this high-level challenge to Reductivism the Dispensability Objection, since
its core idea is that, on Reductivism, normative concepts are dispensable, in the
sense that we could stop using them and replace using them with those non-
normative concepts that are associated with those properties that are the most
fundamental.
16
Much of what Dancy, Enoch, and FitzPatrick have to say strongly
suggests that they endorse the Dispensability Objection, or at least something
very much like it. But these three authors, as it happens, are mostly suggestive
about the objection. Fortunately, Parfit
17
develops a version of the argument in
detail, so for the purposes of this chapter I’ll be assuming that Dancy, Enoch, and
FitzPatrick endorse the Dispensability Objection, or at least the spirit of it, and
I’ll be discussing Parfit’s particular version of the objection from here on.

1.3 The Dispensability Objection, Through the Eyes of Parfit
According to Parfit (364), Reductivism comes in two flavors: “Hard” and “Soft.”
Hard and Soft Reductivists alike accept that that no normative properties are
primitive, while Soft but not Hard Reductivists accept the further claim that we
need or have reason to use normative concepts to think about normative
properties in deciding on how to act. In other words, Parfit distinguishes
Reductivists who accept the core premise of the Dispensability Objection –
namely, that if Reductivism is true, then we do not need or have reason to use
normative concepts to think about the world in deciding how to act in it – and
those who reject it.
If, according to Parfit, Reductivism is Hard, then it is false. If, however,
Reductivism is Soft, then it is incoherent. So, Parfit claims, Reductivism is either
false or incoherent. Of course, the main goal of this chapter is to investigate how
Reductivists might respond to the Dispensability Objection. Since the premise
that if Reductivism is true, then we do not need or have reason to use normative

16
‘The Dispensability Objection’ is a wink to ‘The Indispensability Objection’ from Enoch, who
argues that we ought to conclude that there are primitive normative properties since we can’t avoid
committing ourselves to the truth of them.
17
Again, however, I am merely counting Parfit as a proponent of the Dispensability Objection,
and not as a Robust Realist, since he would likely resist the label.
6
concepts to think about the world in deciding how to act in it forms the core of it,
I’ll be setting aside Parfit’s objections to Hard Reductivists from here on to focus
entirely on his worries about Soft Reductivism, instead.
18

Parfit defends the claim that Soft Reductivism
19
is incoherent with an auxiliary
argument, and he begins by assuming the truth of Reductivism for reductio. If,
according to Parfit, we need or have reason to use normative concepts, then we
need or have reason to use them because there are primitive normative properties
that we can only think about with them. Thus, we need or have reason to use
normative concepts because there are primitive normative properties that we can
only think about with them. But it is part of Reductivism, Parfit claims, that there
are no primitive normative properties. Thus, Reductivism implies the incoherent
claim that there are and are not primitive normative properties.
Parfit does not defend his claim that if we need or have reason to use normative
concepts then we need or have reason to use them because there are primitive
normative properties that we can only think about with them. Nevertheless, it is
easy to see why he thinks that Reductivism implies it. Parfit claims that it is part
of Reductivism that normative concepts “state facts,”
20
which is to say that it is
part of Reductivism that we use normative concepts to think about normative
properties. But if there are no normative properties that are primitive, as
Reductivists maintain, then it looks like we could think about all normative
properties with non-normative concepts.
If, however, we could think about all normative properties with non-normative
concepts, then it looks like we do not need or have reason to use normative
concepts to think about any of them. Parfit’s idea seems to be that there isn’t
anything for us to need or have reason to use normative concepts to do if we can
just use non-normative concepts to do it all, so to speak. This flies in the face of
Reductivism’s commitment to the idea that we need or have reason to use
normative concepts to think about normative properties. Or so at least Parfit
suggests.

18
See Parfit (368-77) for his worries about Hard Reductivism.
19
I’ll omit ‘soft’ from here on for ease of exposition.
20
“…[Reductivists] assume that normative claims are intended to state facts.” (365)

7
Note, however, that there seems to be at least one possible line of response
immediately available to Reductivists for short-circuiting the Dispensability
Objection. Reductivists could grant that we need or have reason to use normative
concepts in virtue of the fact that we use them to think about normative
properties, but in addition to this, claim that we also need or have reason to use
normative concepts in virtue of the fact that we use them to do something other
than think about normative properties.
This suggestion points towards the question of what else it could be that we need
or have reason to use normative concepts to do other than using them to think
about normative properties. And one answer immediately comes to mind.
Intuitively, normative concepts appear intimately wound up with action, at least
in the sense that normative concepts always seem present when we’re deliberating
about how to act. In deliberating about whether to continue working today, for
example, I seem to think of it as good that I do so. It could be, then, that we use
normative concepts to think about normative properties and use them to
deliberate about how to act. Making such a claim would allow Reductivists to
insist that such a unique, secondary feature of normative concepts is why we need
or have reason to use them, and deny that their view implies that if we need or
have reason to use normative concepts then we need or have reason to use them
only because there are primitive normative properties that we can only think about
with them.
It appears that at least some Reductivists, namely, those who reject an apparent
assumption of the Dispensability Objection that our need or reason to use
normative concepts derives solely from our using them to think about or refer to
normative properties, might be able to answer the challenge that the objection
poses. In the next section, I’ll explore the viability of the idea that normative
concepts are special, in the sense that they have a unique, deliberative function.

2 Responding to the Dispensability Objection
2.1 The Deliberative Response
In the previous section, I claimed that the Dispensability Objection rests on an
assumption – that our need or reason to use normative concepts derives solely
from our need or reason to think about or refer to normative properties. But
Reductivists can reject this assumption in favor of the idea that we need or have
8
reason to use normative concepts to refer to normative properties and to do
something else. Since normative concepts are plausibly related in some important
way to practical deliberation, I claimed that the ‘something else’ that we might
need or have reason to use normative concepts to do is to deliberate. In this
section, I am going to explore the strongest version of this response – one on
which using normative concepts is necessary for deliberating because deliberating
essentially involves the use of normative concepts.
The relationship between normative concepts and deliberation has received
surprisingly little explicit and focused discussion. As such, it is hard to find direct
arguments for the claim that normative concepts are necessary for deliberation.
Nevertheless, many philosophers seem to commit themselves to versions of this
idea. For example, some appear to maintain that deliberation necessarily involves
thinking of reasons as such, while others suggest that deliberation necessarily
involves thinking of goodness as such. The main lesson will be that arguments for
the conclusion that normative concepts are necessary for deliberation contain
premises that are more controversial than their conclusions. The upshot of this
section will not quite be, then, that it is false that normative concepts are
necessary for deliberation, although I will offer reasons to think so. Rather, the
upshot will be that it is difficult to support the claim that normative concepts are
necessary for deliberation, and hence difficult to marshal this line of response to
the Dispensability Objection.

2.2 Deliberation and Reasons
Like most phenomena of philosophical interest, deliberation is one that nearly
every philosopher recognizes even though there is very little if any consensus
regarding its analysis. This lack of consensus isn’t especially surprising, since few
if any explicit analyses of deliberation have ever even been put forward. Yet there
are several aspects of deliberation for which there is widespread agreement. Many
agree, for example, that sequences of mental acts partially constitute deliberation
21

– sequences of mental acts that an agent initiates to settle a question.
22
Many also
agree that such sequences include acts like the act of forming a thought about

21
Arpaly and Schroeder (2014: 22)
22
Arpaly and Schroeder (2014: 22), Gibbard (2003), Mele (2003: Ch.9), Ryle (2000: 343),
Shepherd (2015: 8).
9
considerations that are relevant to settling such questions.
23
Since these
assumptions are all we need to discuss the central issues of this section, I will be
taking them on in lieu of offering anything approaching a full analysis of
deliberation.
Another aspect of deliberation for which there is widespread agreement is that
deliberation in some way involves reasons. It’s an idea that is often found in
discussions concerning what it is to engage in “good” reasoning, “sound”
deliberation, or “rational” action. For example, in their discussion of John
Broome’s view about the nature of reasons, Stephen Kearns and Daniel Star
(2014: 237, emphasis mine) write that they “take it to be a truism about reasons
that they play an essential role in actual deliberation with respect to answering the
question “what ought I do?””; in his diagnosis of the source of contemporary
resistance to Humeanism about reasons, Mark Schroeder (2007: 26, emphasis
mine) introduces what he calls the “Deliberative Constraint” according to which
“when [an agent] is reasoning well, the kinds of thing about which [they] should
be thinking are [their] reasons”; and at one point in defending her brand of
Humeanism about reasons, Kate Manne (2016: 125, emphasis mine) invites her
readers to follow “many contemporary normative theorists” in assuming “that
reasons are the basis for sound practical deliberation.”
24

Against the background of understanding deliberation as an initiation of
sequences of mental acts to settle questions concerning what to do, it is natural to
understand Kearns and Star, Schroeder, and Manne as suggesting that insofar as
deliberation involves reasons, it does so at the level of thought. Reasons are what
we think about when we form thoughts that are parts of sequences of mental acts
that agents initiate to settle questions concerning what to do. But while it is
natural to read them as committing themselves to the idea that deliberation
involves thoughts about reasons, Kearns and Star, Schroeder, and Manne do not
say enough about the relationship between reasons and deliberation for us to
impute the further claim that deliberation involves thoughts about reasons as such,
rather than thoughts about that which constitute reasons.

23
Arpaly and Schroeder (2014: 27): “Deliberation, at the least, requires bringing to mind ideas or
images meant to have some rational relation to the topic being considered, in the service of
reaching a conclusion about what to think or do.”
24
This is only a tiny sampling of all those who seem to endorse the idea that deliberation involves
reasons. Others include Boghossian (2014), Enoch (2011: 74), Finlay (2014: 160), Hacker (2007:
239), Kolodny (2005: 520), McCall (1987: 277), Owens (2008: 262), and Wedgwood (2006).
10
But others seem to hold precisely such a view. For example, according to Melissa
Barry (2007: 232, emphasis mine), “For rational action to be possible...the agent
must, at some level of awareness, conceptualize the features to which she is
responding as reason-giving”; Christine Korsgaard (2009: Page, emphasis mine)
writes, “What would have been the cause of our belief or action...becomes
something experienced as a consideration in favor of a certain belief or action
instead, one we can endorse or reject.” Similarly, in interpreting Paul Boghossian’s
views about what it is to make an inference, Broome (2012: 24, emphasis mine)
writes “...Boghossian suggests that the thinker must take the premises to be
reasons for believing the conclusion. This is to impute a normative thought to the
reasoner.” Barry, Korsgaard, and Boghossian appear to commit themselves to the
idea, then, that part of what it is to deliberate is to form thoughts about reasons as
such, which is an idea that we can use as a lynchpin in an argument for the claim
that normative concepts are necessary for deliberation.
Plausibly, part of what it is to think about a reason as such is deploy or use the
normative concept REASON. So, part of what it is to deliberate is to deploy the
normative concept REASON. If, however, part of what it is to deliberate is to
deploy the normative concept REASON, then deploying the normative concept
REASON is necessary for deliberation. Thus, deploying the normative concept
REASON is necessary for deliberation. Call this argument Reasons Indispensability.
If Reasons Indispensability is successful, then Reductivists have an answer to the
Dispensability Objection. To quickly illustrate, suppose it were true that we could
use both normative and non-normative concepts to think about the same
properties. Even so, it wouldn’t follow that we wouldn’t have any need or reason
to continue using normative concepts, because it is plausible to think that we need
or have reason to deliberate, and normative concepts are necessary to do so. Or so
at least if Reasons Indispensability is on the right track.
On the face of it, Reasons Indispensability is valid. Moreover, it seems hard to
deny both that part of what it is to think about a reason as such is to deploy the
normative concept REASON and that if part of what it is to deliberate is to deploy
REASON then deploying REASON is necessary for deliberation. This leaves us with
the premise that part of what it is to deliberate is to form thoughts about reasons
as such. Perhaps having a thought about a reason as such is sufficient for
deliberating. But the claim of this premise is that part of what it is to deliberate is
to form thoughts about reasons – it is the claim that thoughts about reasons as
11
such are necessary and sufficient for deliberating. And there at least two problems
with this idea.
First, it is unintuitive. It is easy to describe cases where it seems like protagonists
are deliberating and yet there are no thoughts about reasons as such. Imagine, for
example, that I am working on campus one Sunday afternoon and I am trying to
settle the question of whether to stay on campus to write another 500 words of my
dissertation. In doing so, I form the thought that the Dodgers are playing. This
thought leads me to remember that the their game is the final home game of the
season, and the final home game called by legendary broadcaster Vin Scully,
which also leads me to recall, somewhat unrelatedly, that I tend to be more
productive when I take weekends off from philosophy than when I do not. I then
form the thought that I will drive home from campus to catch the remainder of
the game and that I will not write another 500 words today. This seems like a
vignette in which a protagonist is deliberating even though it does not involve any
thoughts about reasons as such.
Of course, such intuitions are hardly decisive. At the very least, however, as we’ll
now see, the claim that part of what it is to deliberate is to form thoughts about
reasons as such is highly controversial. Broome (2012) is clearly against it. In
discussing the nature of inference, he interprets Boghossian (2008) as maintaining
that inference-makers “must take the premises to be reasons for believing the
conclusion.” But, according to Broome (25), “You cannot take something to be a
reason unless you know what it is for something to be a reason.” Since Broome
doesn’t think we know this but does think we make inferences, he rejects the idea
that he attributes to Boghossian that thoughts about reasons as such are necessary
for deliberating.
Whether Broome is right is not especially important for our purposes. What is
especially important is that he is one among many who seem to deny that part of
what it is to deliberate is to form thoughts about reasons as such. In addition to
Broome, Connor McHugh and Jonathan Way (forthcoming) also seem opposed
to this idea. In his review of Schroeder’s Slaves of the Passions (2007), David Sobel
(2009) also briefly describes cases in which agents appear to deliberate and yet
never form any thoughts about reasons as such. And in one of the most
comprehensive discussions of the nature of deliberation in contemporary
philosophy, Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroder (2014) present a picture of the
nature of deliberation that reserves no essential role for thoughts about reasons as
such. Finally, Peter Stone (2014) drives the point home. He writes, “there exist
12
clear alternatives to the standard model of reasoned decision-making, ways of
making decisions without any reference to reasons.”
Of course, the fact that many philosophers reject the idea that part of what it is to
deliberate is to form thoughts about reasons as such does not settle the
philosophical question of the nature of deliberation. I am not, then, citing the fact
that many philosophers reject the idea to adjudicate this philosophical dispute. I
have already provided some (intuitive) considerations in favor of the view that it is
not the case that part of what it is to deliberate is to form thoughts about reasons
as such. Instead, because it is controversial that part of what it is to deliberate is to
form thoughts about reasons as such, I am suggesting that Reductivists cannot
help themselves to this idea without supplying further auxiliary arguments for it in
responding to the Dispensability Objection. Since such arguments are not easy to
come by, as we’ve just witnessed, there are good dialectical reasons for
Reductivists to pursue another line of argument.
Since, however, the idea that part of what it is to deliberate is to form thoughts
about reasons as such is just one species of the idea that part of what it is to
deliberate is to form thoughts involving normative concepts, up next, I will
explore another version of Reasons Indispensability. In particular, I am going to
explore the prominent Scholastic idea that part of what it is to deliberate is to
form thoughts about goodness as such. Even though the kind of argument I will
explore is structurally identical to Reasons Indispensability, and even though the
kind of response I will give to it is also identical to the kind of response I gave
above to Reasons Indispensability, I nevertheless think that the idea that goodness
has an essential role to play in deliberation is influential enough to warrant its
own discussion. Moreover, considerations of completeness and systematicity also
license pursuing the issue.

2.3 Deliberation and Goodness
The idea that deliberation involves reasons is perhaps the most recently influential
version of the idea that deliberation involves normative concepts. But another
historically influential idea is that deliberation involves goodness. For example,
Stephen Darwall (1983: 69, emphasis mine) suggests that deliberation involves
choices, and that choices are best understood, or at least an important subset of
them, as beliefs about what is best all things considered. As he writes in drawing a
distinction between choosing and picking in deliberation, “What appear to
13
distinguish choosings [is]...the chooser’s judgment that the chosen alternative is
better in some crucial respect...than the alternatives forgone.”
25
Philip Pettit (2010,
emphasis mine) appears to endorse a similar view of deliberation. His idea is that
deliberation involves decisions, and suggests understanding them as about
goodness.
26
He writes, “I shall assume in what follows that deliberation is a
process in which an agent explicitly or implicitly considers the features of the
options available in a certain choice and, all going well, is led to the decision
which those features recommend as being the best.”
27

Darwall and Pettit seem to be endorsing the idea that deliberation involves
goodness at the level of thought. But just as we saw with Kearns and Star,
Schroeder, and Manne with respect to the idea that deliberation involves thoughts
about reasons, Darwall and Pettit do not say enough for us to impute to them the
further view that deliberation involves thoughts about goodness as such, instead of
that which constitutes goodness. Indeed, despite the popularity of views that fall
under the “guise of the good” umbrella – views on which desires or intentions are
said to be beliefs or appearances concerning goodness, it’s not obvious that anyone
holds the view that deliberation involves thoughts about goodness as such. One
exception might be Sergio Tenenbaum (2007), although in his response (2008) to
Schroeder (2008), he denies that such states have evaluative content at all.
Nevertheless, it’s possible that deliberation involves beliefs or some other kind of
mental state about goodness as such, and so for our purposes it’s a view worth
considering, whether anyone explicitly commits themselves to it or not.
Start, then, with the idea that deliberation involves beliefs about goodness as such,
or with the idea that part of what it is to deliberate is to form thoughts about
goodness as such. Plausibly, part of what it is to form a thought about goodness as
such is to deploy the normative concept GOOD. So, part of what it is to deliberate
is to deploy the normative concept GOOD. But if part of what it is to deliberate is
to deploy the normative concept GOOD, then deploying GOOD is necessary for

25
It should be noted that Darwall seems to be committed to the view that goodness is best
understood in terms of reasons. While this suggests that Darwall should be interpreted as a
“deliberation involves reasons” theorist along with the others above, I am interpreting him as a
“deliberation involves goodness” theorist for the purposes of this chapter.
26
Shepherd (2015: 9) understands deliberation as involving decisions as well, and suggests the
related but distinct idea that decisions involve the normative concept of “appropriateness.”
27
Hlobil (Manuscript, 25) also seems to hold a view of this sort. He writes, “On my view, to make
a practical inference is to attach inferential force to a practical argument. So if you make a practical
inference, you take your inference to be good.”
14
deliberating. Thus, GOOD is necessary for deliberating. Call this argument for the
idea that normative concepts are necessary for deliberation Good Indispensability.
Like Reasons Indispensability, Good Indispensability seems valid. Like Reasons
Indispensability, too, Good Indispensability has two premises that seem true: The
claim that part of what it is to form a thought about goodness as such is to deploy
the normative concept GOOD and the claim that if part of what it is to deliberate
is to deploy the normative concept GOOD then deploying GOOD is necessary for
deliberating. This leaves us with the premise that part of what it is to deliberate is
to form thoughts about goodness as such.
This premise seems to suffer from the same two problems as the claim that part of
what it is to deliberate is to form thoughts about reasons as such that figures in
Reasons Indispensability. First, the claim that part of what it is to deliberate is to
form thoughts about goodness as such is unintuitive. The concept GOOD does not
seem to play a role in my deliberation in the case above concerning whether to
stay on campus and write another 500 words or leave to watch the Dodgers.
Second, it is a controversial claim. Or at least, it would be if the same
philosophers who deny that thoughts about reasons as such are necessary for
deliberating were to consider it. Since these philosophers are motivated by the
idea that all it takes to deliberate is to think about that which constitutes your
reasons, it is plausible to think that they would likewise conclude that all it takes
to deliberate is to think about that which constitutes goodness.
28

Because it is controversial that part of what it is to deliberate is to form thoughts
about goodness as such, and because it might simply be false, Reductivists have
reason not to appeal to Good Indispensability in responding to the Dispensability
Objection. Since, as we’ve seen, Reductivists also have reason not to appeal to
Reasons Indispensability in responding to the Dispensability Objection, it would
seem best for Reductivists to pursue another line of response to this objection,
instead of responses that employ the idea that normative concepts are necessary
for deliberation.

28
Moreover, in the context of defending consequentialism, Railton (1984) argues against the
similar idea that thoughts about goodness as such are necessary for moral deliberation, and so he
would plausibly also disagree with the idea that thoughts about goodness as such are necessary for
practical deliberation more generally. Relatedly, many philosophers, including Frank Jackson
(1998), Smith (1994), Arpaly (2002), and Weatherson (2014), are committed to versions of the
idea that morally virtuous agents do not form de dicto thoughts about morality. It isn’t a stretch to
think, then, that such philosophers would also deny that thoughts about goodness as such are
necessary for deliberation.
15
Conclusion
In this chapter, I offered two arguments – Reasons Indispensability and Good
Indispensability – in support of the conclusion that normative concepts are
necessary for deliberation. In addition to suggesting that both arguments are
unsound on intuitive grounds, I argued that both arguments contain premises
about the relationship between deliberation and normative concepts that are more
controversial than their conclusions. This matters because I suggested that
Reductivists might be able to successfully respond to the Dispensability Objection
by appealing to a “secondary” function of normative concepts to show why we
need or have reason to use them apart from our need or reason to use them to
think about or refer properties. The arguments of this chapter don’t quite show
that this line of response to the Dispensability Objection is unavailable to
Reductivists. But they do strongly suggest that successfully marshaling such a
response is no easy task. This gives us strong reason to develop a different
response to the Dispensability Objection in the next chapter.

16
2. Epistemic Modesty in Ethics
In the previous chapter, I suggested a way for Reductive Naturalists and
Reductivists more generally to respond to the Dispensability Objection. To briefly
summarize, consider the reductive idea that the property of being wrong is fully
reducible to the property of failing to maximize pleasure. On such a view, it is
possible to think about wrongness with both the normative concept WRONG and
the non-normative concept FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE. But if so, according
to proponents of the Dispensability Objection, then it doesn’t seem like we need
or have reason to use the normative concept WRONG, because we could also use
the non-normative concept FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE to think about
wrongness. Since it seems like we do need or have reason to use WRONG, it
follows that Reductivism is false. Or so proponents of the Dispensability
Objections allege.
In response, I claimed that this objection rests on an assumption – that our need
or reason to use normative concepts derives solely from our need or reason to
think about or refer to normative properties. But Reductivists can reject this
assumption in favor of the idea that we need or have reason to use normative
concepts to refer to normative properties and do “something else.” Since
normative concepts are plausibly related in some important way to deliberation, I
claimed that the “something else” that we might need or have reason to use
normative concepts to do is to deliberate. In the end, however, we saw that several
direct arguments for the claim that normative concepts are deliberative in virtue of
being necessary for deliberation, at best, contain premises that are at least as
controversial as their conclusions. This motivates seeking a more compelling
answer to the Dispensability Objection.
My route to such an answer will run through the epistemology of moral
theorizing. There are many concerns about the epistemology of moral theorizing
that moral philosophers tend to bracket. It is not very common to find articles or
books in moral philosophy that begin with responses to epistemological objections
from disagreement or evolution, for example. Moral philosophers appear to
proceed on the reasonable assumption that such objections can be successfully met
another day. Yet there is one concern about the epistemology of moral theorizing
that many prominent moral philosophers are willing to concede – a concern about
our capacity to carry out the project of moral philosophy to its limit. Thomas
Scanlon (1998: 361) writes, for example, “Working out the terms of moral
justification is an unending task”; Shelly Kagan (1998: 16) says, similarly, “...the
17
process of evaluation and justification [of theories in moral philosophy] can
perhaps never be completely finished”; and John Rawls (1974: 289) writes,
echoing the same sentiment, “Taking [moral theorizing] to the limit, one seeks
the conception, or plurality of conceptions, that would survive the rational
consideration of all feasible conceptions and all rational arguments for them. We
cannot, of course, actually do this…”
However, while it is often conceded, it is a concern about the epistemology of
moral theorizing that has received very little explicit and focused discussion. It is
perhaps unsurprising, then, that its implications have not been sufficiently
appreciated, including, among such implications, an answer to the Dispensability
Objection – one with roots in a striking kind of epistemic humility. Or so at least
I’ll argue in this chapter.
After briefly reintroducing the Dispensability Objection in Section 1, I will argue
in Section 2 that Reductivism does not straightforwardly imply that we do not
need to think in a distinctively normative way to settle deliberative questions
about how to act. Rather, it implies that we do not need to think in a distinctively
normative way only if it implies that we are in a position to have knowledge of the
correct reduction. However, in Section 3, I will argue that the relationship
between the nature of morality and substantive theorizing in moral philosophy is
such that we have strong reason to believe that even if there is a correct reductive
thesis that we will never know it.
This chapter, along with the previous one, concerns an objection to Reductivism
that has been advanced by many of the view’s most outspoken contemporary
critics, but one which has not as of yet received sustained treatment. It is perhaps
no surprise, then, that it has been my overwhelming experience in discussing the
objection that it tends to provoke either of the following responses to it. On the
one hand, half of any given audience to the objection thinks that there isn’t any
answer to it worth discussing because it is so obviously compelling, while the
other half of any given audience, on the other hand, thinks that there isn’t any
answer to the objection worth discussing because it is so wrongheaded that
answering it lends more credit to it than it deserves. Unsurprisingly, it is my view
that these are both overreactions. Since I think the objection brings out a possible
line of response to it that is interesting in its own right, I trust, perhaps naively,
that the answer to the objection that I develop in this chapter offers something to
everyone – namely, at the very least, a fresh perspective from which to reflect on
18
the relationship between the nature of morality and first-order theorizing in moral
philosophy.

1 Stage Setting
1.1 New Resources for Defending Reductive Realism
As we saw in Chapter 1, Reductivists in moral philosophy claim that while
normative properties figure in a metaphysical explanation of everything, no such
properties figure in a metaphysical explanation of everything at the most
fundamental level. On such views, normative properties are not among the basic
building blocks of the world; instead, normative properties are fully constituted
by, fully analyzable in terms of, fully grounded in, or as I will say for ease of
exposition, fully reducible to other properties that are among the basic building
blocks of the world.
Many opponents of Reductivism, as we also saw in the previous chapter, seem to
think that Reductivism falls prey to the Dispensability Objection, the basic idea of
which is that Reductivism falsely implies that we can dispense with normative
concepts or stop using them and replace using them to settle deliberative
questions about how to act with those non-normative concepts that are associated
with those properties that are the most fundamental on Reductivism.
In this section, I am going to attempt to develop a new line of response on behalf
of Reductivists.
29
In effect, I am going to argue for the claim that Reductivism
does not imply that we can dispense with normative concepts, even if it turns out
that normative concepts are not at all special, in the sense that they do not have
any unique and essential secondary function. I will be starting from the ground up
with a brief discussion of the norms governing the relatively unfamiliar activity of
dispensing with concepts, in cases in which we use concepts to think about non-
moral subject matters. The goal is to learn about the conditions under which it is
possible to stop using concepts and replace using them with other concepts in
general, and apply those lessons back to normative concepts.

29
To be clear, I am not claiming that the more fully general line of response that I will be offering
is the only possible response of its kind.
19
1.2 Dispensing with Concepts, Correctly
Let’s start by imagining Greg, who possesses the concept GROUNDHOG that he
uses to think about groundhogs. Because GROUNDHOG is the only concept that
he possesses for thinking about groundhogs it seems that Greg needs this concept
to think about them. Moreover, because Greg needs the concept GROUNDHOG to
think about groundhogs it also seems that he has reason to use this concept to
think about them. Today, however, Greg has a conversation with his zoologist
friend Zoey, who tells him all about a kind of small furry mammal that she uses
the concept WOODCHUCK to think about. Indeed, Zoey eventually informs Greg
that groundhogs just are woodchucks.
Now, it might be that by the end of his conversation with Zoey, Greg no longer
needs his concept GROUNDHOG to think about groundhogs-woodchucks and
hence that he no longer has reason to use it, because it might be that by the end of
the conversation, Greg is in a position to use more than one concept to think
about groundhogs-woodchucks (namely, his original concept GROUNDHOG and
his newly acquired concept WOODCHUCK).
30
Nevertheless, it seems that before
his conversation with Zoey, Greg cannot stop using GROUNDHOG and replace
using it with WOODCHUCK, since he doesn’t yet know that he could use
WOODCHUCK to think about groundhogs-woodchucks. This suggests that the
conditions under which it is possible to stop using a concept and replace using it
with another concept, without suffering any kind of loss or committing any kind
of error, or the conditions under which it is correct to dispense with a concept, are
in part epistemic, as the following principle captures:
Don’t Know? Don’t Dispense (DKDD): Necessarily, for any subject
S, concepts C 1 and C 2, and act-type A, S can correctly stop using
concept C 1 to perform actions of act-type A and replace using it
with C 2 to perform actions of act-type A only if S knows that it is
possible to use C 2 to perform actions of act-type A
DKDD appears to capture at least one important aspect of the norms governing
the activity of dispensing with concepts. If so, however, and if DKDD governs
the correctness of dispensing with normative concepts, as it seems to govern the

30
I claim that it ‘might’ be that by the end of his conversation with Zoey, Greg has more than one
concept for thinking about groundhogs-woodchucks, because it could be that there really is only
one concept for groundhogs-woodchucks that we use more than one word (e.g. ‘groundhog’ and
‘woodchuck’) to express.
20
correctness of dispensing with concepts of small furry mammals, then Reductivists
have another response to the Dispensability Objection available to them.
For Reductivism implies, then, that a subject does not need or have reason to use
normative concepts only if it implies that such a subject satisfies DKDD or knows
that she can use some other non-normative concept to think about the same
properties that she uses her normative concepts to think about, which is just to say
that Reductivism implies that a subject does not need or have reason to use
normative concepts only if Reductivism implies that a subject has knowledge of
Reductivism. The problem with the Dispensability Objection is that Reductivism
doesn’t imply that anyone has such knowledge. But if Reductivism doesn’t imply
that anyone has knowledge of it, and hence doesn’t imply that anyone can
correctly dispense with normative concepts, then it seems as though everyone has
reason to continue using normative concepts, contra proponents of the
Dispensability Objection.
31

1.3 The Dispensability Objection, Revived
I have been emphasizing that Reductivism doesn’t imply that we satisfy DKDD,
because Reductivism doesn’t imply that we have knowledge of Reductivism.
Nevertheless, while Reductivism doesn’t imply that we satisfy DKDD, because it
doesn’t imply that we have knowledge of Reductivism, it could be that we satisfy
DKDD, because we will eventually have knowledge of Reductivism. But if
Reductivism is true and we will eventually know it, on this line of response, then
we do not, in principle, need or have reason to use normative concepts. Thus,
proponents of the Dispensability Objection might insist that all it takes for the
objection to have teeth is merely the claim that it is possible have knowledge of
Reductivism.
But to see that this revived version of the Dispensability Objection ultimately
poses no threat to Reductivism, too, we have to come to better grips with the
premise that if Reductivism is true and it is possible to know it, then we do not
need or have reason to use normative concepts to settle deliberative questions
concerning how to act.

31
Note that this is compatible with it being the case that no one can correctly dispense with
normative concepts for other reasons that are unrelated to our lack of knowledge.
21
To do this it would be instructive to reflect on someone like Carol, who knows
that some reductive thesis is true, but doesn’t know which one. Supposing that
Carol can correctly stop using her normative concepts, like the normative concept
MORALLY OBLIGATORY, on the basis of her knowledge that some reductive thesis
is true, is like supposing, however, that Lois Lane can correctly stop using the
concept SUPERMAN on the basis of knowing that Superman works at the Daily
Planet. For just as it seems like it would be a mistake for Lois to feel relief upon
thinking to herself that someone at the Daily Planet is on the way to save the day
when it could be that someone without any superpowers is on the way, it seems
like it would be a mistake for Carol to decide to phi upon thinking, say, that phi-
ing contributes to the maximization of total impersonal pleasure, since it could be
that what it is for an action to be morally obligatory is for it to be an action that
contributes to the maximization of average impersonal pleasure. Without
knowledge of what exactly it is for something to be morally obligatory, Carol risks
being radically mistaken about how to act in dispensing with the concept
MORALLY OBLIGATORY.
This suggests that the crucial premise of the revived version of the Dispensability
Objection should be read as the claim that if a particular reductive thesis is true
and it is possible to know it, then we do not need or have reason to use normative
concepts to settle deliberative questions concerning how to act. Observe, however,
as Tristram McPherson (2008) and Mark Schroeder (2017) do, that metaphysical
theses about the nature of normative properties in moral philosophy, including
particular reductive metaphysical theses about the nature of normative properties,
entail substantive generalizations. For example, it follows from the particular
reductive Benthamite Act Utilitarian thesis that what it is for an action to be
morally obligatory is for it to be an action that maximizes pleasure that for all x, x
is morally obligatory just in case x maximizes pleasure. This isn’t altogether
surprising, since it seems that metaphysical theses in general entail such
generalizations. Indeed, the claim that groundhogs are identical with woodchucks
looks like it implies that for all x, x is a groundhog just in case x is a woodchuck.
If, however, a particular reductive thesis about the nature of morality like
Benthamite Act Utilitarianism were true, and were to entail a substantive
22
generalization like this, then if it is possible to know a particular reductive thesis,
then, plausibly, it is possible to know such a generalization.
32

But in the next section I will begin to argue that we have strong reason to believe
that it is not possible to know a particular reductive thesis in moral philosophy,
because we have strong reason to believe that it is not possible to know the
substantive moral generalization that would follow from it if it were true. In other
words, I am going to argue that it is not possible to know “the holy grail of the
most ambitious and general kind of explanatory normative moral theory”
33
and
that it follows from this that it is not possible to know a particular reductive thesis
about the nature of morality. I will do so by first showing that some of the most
popular views of the epistemology of substantive theorizing in moral philosophy
straightforwardly do not imply the possibility of knowing such maximally precise
substantive generalizations.

2 The Epistemology of “First-Order” Theorizing
2.1 Standard Approaches
One of the central questions of “ “first-order” moral philosophy, or simply moral
philosophy, as I will often refer to it, is the question of how to live. Mark
Timmons (2013: 16) writes, for example, that moral philosophy “attempts to
answer very general moral questions about what to do and how to be.” Kagan
(1998: 2, emphasis his) says, too, that it “involves substantive proposals about how
to act, how to live, and what kind of person to be.” The most general and hence
comprehensive proposal for answering the question of how to live would take the
form of a substantive theory on which for all x, x is N just in case x is F, where N
is a moral feature such as morally obligatory and F is a non-trivial condition such as
optimific. The focus of this section is the epistemology of such comprehensive
theories. To fix ideas, we can start with a strong thesis of epistemic modesty in
moral philosophy – one that we will refine as we go along.

32
“Once we know what it is to be [morally obligatory],” as Schroeder writes, “we will know a
condition that is necessary and sufficient for something to be [morally obligatory] - indeed, we will
know the most fundamental and explanatory such condition, in virtue of which all other
generalizations about what is wrong are true.”
33
Ibid
23
Too Strong Necessarily, for any subject S and any
comprehensive moral theory P, S does not know P
Throughout much of the history of moral philosophy it has been thought that
moral knowledge comes from reflection on cases and principles, which suggests
that whatever moral knowledge it is possible for S to know is likely to come from
such reflection.
34
I will call a sequence of reflection that begins with judgments
about cases the method of cases. A close look at the method of cases will reveal why
it is the wrong kind of thing to give us knowledge of a comprehensive moral
theory. This doesn’t quite vindicate Too Strong, but I will explain how it gets us
something close to it.

2.2 The Method of Cases, Illustration
Let’s begin with a simple case from Fred Feldman (1986) where a subject s has
three actions available at time t 1 that will lead them to experience various levels of
pleasure.
(a1) work in garden + 12
(a2) go to dump + 08
(a3) start painting house - 15
Intuitively, s ought to work in the garden at t 1 because doing so will lead them to
experience more pleasure than going to the dump and starting to paint the house.
A theory that this intuition might lead one to embrace is a version of Act
Utilitarianism in the tradition of Bentham, which says that for any action x, agent
s, and any time t, s is morally obligated to x at t just in case s’s performing x
maximizes pleasure at t. This view seems to capture the intuition that s ought to
work in the garden at t 1 by predicting that s ought to work in the garden at t 1,
because doing so will lead s to experience more pleasure than the alternative
actions available at the time.
But to get a handle on exactly how Benthamite Act Utilitarianism works and a
feel for its extensional adequacy it seems necessary to test it against more cases.
Let’s continue to follow Feldman in imagining, then, that s wouldn’t enjoy any of

34
As McMahan (Forthcoming) notes, in the context of a discussion of the role of cases in moral
philosophy, “Hypothetical examples, even when used as a means of understanding the most
serious of moral issues, have been deployed by philosophers at least since Plato appealed to the
ring of Gyges...”.
24
the preparation that they would have to do at t 0 to work in the garden at t 1 such as
gathering tools from the shed. Imagine, too, that s would enjoy some of the other
actions that they could perform at t 0 such as loading the dump truck. All told, s
has the following options available at t 0.
(a4) gather tools - 01
(a5) load truck + 01
(a6) mix paint - 02
Even though s would find gathering tools mildly unpleasant, it intuitively seems
like they ought to do so, since s would then be in a position at t 1 to perform the
thoroughly enjoyable act of gardening. However, on Benthamite Act
Utilitarianism, s has an obligation to load the truck at t 0, since doing so maximizes
pleasure at t 0. Moreover, s also has an obligation to garden at t 1 on Benthamite
Act Utilitarianism. But if s loads the truck at t 0 then they can’t fulfill their
obligation to work in the garden at t 1. Intuitively, s can’t have an obligation to
perform an action at t 0 that puts s out of a position to fulfill another moral
obligation at t 1, so it seems like the method of cases reveals that Benthamite Act
Utilitarianism is extensionally inadequate, since it fails to accord with intuitions
about this case.
At this point, some readers might be thinking that they don’t share these
judgments about Feldman’s cases and might reasonably be feeling a bit restless
about the discussion as a result. But allow me to urge such readers not to fret. It’s
true that my discussion in this section is proceeding on the assumption that my
judgments about cases are probative. However, it is an assumption that not only
makes the exposition easier to follow, but actually makes the job of explaining
why we have excellent reason to accept a thesis of epistemic modesty in moral
philosophy even harder, since diversity among judgments about cases itself
provides strong reason to be epistemically modest in moral philosophy.
Taking a second look at Benthamite Act Utilitarianism, it isn’t clear that we have
a counterexample to the view that we had in mind. Instead, the second version of
Feldman’s case seems to serve as a counterexample to a version of Benthamite Act
Utilitarianism that is non-sequentialist, as I’ll call it. A sequentialist version of
Benthamite Act Utilitarianism says that for any action x, agent s, and time t, s is
morally obligated to x at time t n just in case x is part of sequence of actions available
to s to initiate at t n that maximizes more pleasure than any other sequence
available to s to initiate at t n. A sequentialist version of Benthamite Act
25
Utilitarianism does not seem to predict that s has an obligation at t 0 that puts s
out of a position to fulfill their obligation at t 1, because such a version says that s is
obligated to perform whichever sequence of actions produces more pleasure than
any other available sequence of actions, which in this case is a4 and a1. So, if
anything, it looks like we have a counterexample to Benthamite Act Non-
Sequentialist Utilitarianism but not Benthamite Act Sequentialist Utilitarianism.
To ensure that we have a firm understanding of the view under consideration in
Benthamite Act Sequentialist Utilitarianism it seems necessary to apply it to more
cases. Consider, then, a case from Michael Zimmerman (2008: 120), who
imagines Brenda inviting her ex-fiancé Alf to her wedding. As Zimmerman
describes the case, the best thing for Alf to do would be to accept the invitation,
show up, and behave, the worst thing would be to show up and misbehave, and
the second best thing would be for Alf to decline and not show up at all.
However, Alf is far from mature, and he would not behave if he were to accept his
invitation to the wedding.
Intuitively, it seems like Alf ought to decline the invitation to avoid misbehaving.
But because the sequence of actions available to Alf to initiate at t 0 that maximizes
pleasure is the one that involves accepting the invitation, attending the wedding,
and behaving, Benthamite Sequentialist Act Utilitarianism seems to predict that
Alf ought to initiate it. Thus, Benthamite Sequentialist Act Utilitarianism seems
extensionally inadequate, because it yields unintuitive predictions about this case.
Again, however, upon closer inspection, it isn’t clear that we have a
counterexample to the theory that we had in mind in Benthamite Sequentialist
Act Utilitarianism. For it seems that it is a version of Benthamite Sequentialist
Act Utilitarianism that is Possibilist in form that is extensionally inadequate, on
which for any action x, agent s, and time t, agent s is morally obligated to x at t n
just in case x is part of a sequence of actions available to s at t n that s can initiate
and the amount of pleasure that could result if s did initiate it is greater than the
amount of pleasure that could result if s did not initiate it. What this
counterexample does not seem to reveal is that a version of Benthamite
Sequentialist Act Utilitarian that is Actualist is extensionally inadequate, on which
for any action x, agent s, and time t, s is morally obligated to x at t n just in case x is
part of a sequence of actions available to s at t n that s can initiate and the amount
26
of pleasure that would result if s did initiate it is greater than the amount of
pleasure that would result if s did not initiate it.
35

But to ensure that we have a handle on Benthamite Actualist Sequentialist Act
Utilitarianism, it again seems necessary to consult our intuitions about more cases.
To this end we might follow Allan Gibbard (1965) in supposing that you and I
have a pair of buttons in front of us – A and B. If we both push B, then that
would produce more pleasure than any other available sequence of actions. If we
both push A, then that would produce the second most amount of pleasure out of
the sequences of actions available to us. But if I push A and you push B, or vice
versa, then that would produce vastly more pain than other sequences of actions.
36

Intuitively, it seems like we have an obligation to push B and that we violate this
obligation by doing anything else. But suppose that we both push A. According
to Benthamite Actualist Sequentialist Act Utilitarianism, we do not fail to carry
out any obligations, since at t 0 I am initiating a sequence of actions that would
produce more pleasure than the amount of pleasure that would be produced if I
did not initiate it, and at t 0 you are initiating a sequence of actions that would
produce more pleasure than the amount of pleasure that would be produced if you
did not initiate it. So, it seems that we have a counterexample to Benthamite
Actualist Sequentialist Act Utilitarianism.
It isn’t likely to come as much of a surprise at this point that things are again not
quite as they appear. On a second pass of the case, we can see that we don’t have a
counterexample to a view that is Benthamite Actualist Sequentialist Act
Utilitarian in kind, but rather to a Benthamite Actualist Sequential Act Utilitarian
view that is what I will call Individualist, in the sense that moral obligation is not
a matter of what we together ought to do, over and above what agents ought to do
individually. So, it looks like we have a counterexample to Benthamite Actualist
Sequentialist Individualist Act Utilitarianism, but not a version of Benthamite
Actualist Sequential Act Utilitarianism that I will call Collectivist, a view that

35
For some defenses of actualism, see Goldman (1976), Sobel (1976), Jackson and Pargetter
(1986), and Goble (1993). For some defenses of possibilism, see Goldman (1978), Greenspan
(1978), Thomason (1981), Humberstone (1983), Feldman (1986), and Zimmerman (1996). For
some defenses of other views on the topic, see Portmore (2011), Ross (2013), and Timmerman
(2015).
36
See also Regan (1980).
27
predicts that while you and I are each fulfilling our individual obligations, we are
failing to fulfill further obligations as a group.
37

I’ll spare the reader from engaging in another round of the method of cases in an
assessment of Benthamite Collectivist Actualist Sequentialist Act Utilitarianism.
At this point, I think we have enough in front of us to begin explaining why we
have excellent reason to believe a modest thesis about epistemic modesty in moral
philosophy.

2.3 The Method of Cases, Discussion
This illustration of the method of cases brings out something important about us:
We do not have an antecedent grasp of all the morally significant features of the
world that the true moral theory captures if there is one (I’ll assume there is one
from here on for ease of exposition). This was first made apparent in our
assessment of Benthamite Act Utilitarianism, when we saw that it didn’t account
for the moral significance of sequences of actions. It was made more apparent in
our assessment of Benthamite Sequential Act Utilitarianism, when we saw that it
didn’t account for the moral significance of the modal profiles of such sequences.
And it was made even more apparent in our assessment of Benthamite Actualist
Sequential Act Utilitarianism, when we saw that it didn’t account for the moral
significance of collective obligations.
38

But if we do not have an antecedent grasp of all the morally significant features of
the world that the true moral theory captures, then it seems that we do not have
the concepts to believe the true moral theory. Think back to the moment before
we made the Individualist/Collectivist distinction, when we were only employing
the Benthamite Actualist Sequentialist Act Utilitarian idea that moral obligation
is analyzable in terms of the amount of pleasure in the consequences of sequences
of actions that would result from our initiating them. Because we did not yet have
a grasp of the Individualist/Collectivist distinction, it wasn’t until we used the

37
See Jackson (1987) and especially Dietz (2016).
38
Ross (2006) also appears to highlight this phenomenon. “…in general, the more we reflect on
questions of moral theory, the greater is the number of moral theories among which our credence
is divided. What initially appears to be a single moral theory often turns out to be specifiable in a
number of ways, each of which has some plausibility. And when a problem arises for an initial
formulation of a theory, it is often possible to solve this problem by modifying the theory in any of
several ways, revealing once more a multiplicity of theories, each having some degree of
plausibility."
28
method of cases to reveal it that our concept CONSEQUENCE was fine-grained
enough for us to incorporate the Collectivist component in formulating the true
moral theory. But then it seems that it wasn’t until after we used the method of
cases in this way that we were able to believe this moral theory.
That we do not have a grasp of all the world’s morally significant features that the
true moral theory captures is hardly a revelation in light of the fact, however, that
many moral philosophers still have jobs! Of course, few would likely claim that we
currently know the true moral theory. But that we do not have such a grasp raises
the important question of whether we will eventually have it.
Yet the answer to this question also seems to be ‘No’. Our use of the method of
cases over the course of the history of moral theorizing, a microcosm of which is
on display in the previous section, looks like it constitutes excellent inductive
evidence for the claim that there will always be morally significant features of
which we are unaware.
39
But if there will always be at least some morally
significant features of the world of which we are unaware, then it seems to be the
case that we will never believe the true, fully-specified moral theory.
40
And if we
will never believe the true moral theory then it is plausible to think that we will
never know it.
In other words, the problem with the method of cases is not that it yields
unreliable beliefs, unjustified beliefs, or that we cannot use it to satisfy whichever
condition it is that distinguishes having a true belief about a comprehensive moral
theory and having knowledge of such a theory. Indeed, Section 2.2 looks like a
detailed illustration of how our intuitions about cases might license believing one
theory in moral philosophy over another.
41
The epistemic problem with the
method of cases is ultimately alethic: We will never know the true moral theory
because we will never believe it.
42

39
In a similar spirit, Tannsjo (2015: xi) writes, "It is not possible to show that a moral principle is
true in the abstract. Moral principles always surprise us in concrete applications."
40
See Carlson (1995) for a striking illustration of refinements it is possible to make to existing
moral theories, particularly moral theories in the tradition of consequentialism.
41
While intuitions about cases would seem to play a major role in licensing beliefs about
comprehensive moral theories on the method of cases, it seems open to friends of the method of
cases to also admit that consistency, generality, internal and external support, and other
epistemically relevant features of theories might factor into such licensing.
42
Thanks to Caleb Perl for help with clarifying this point.
29
Note that this explanation doesn’t imply that it is impossible to have knowledge
of the moral significance of any feature of the world, and hence it doesn’t imply
that it is impossible to know anything at all about the true moral theory. For on
the simplifying assumption that my intuitive judgments are probative, the
application of the method of cases above clearly illustrates its effectiveness. After
all, it seems like it is possible to know that the true moral theory is not a version
of Benthamite Act Utilitarianism that is non-sequentialist, possibilist, or
individualist. This is a point that comes from Scanlon, Kagan, and Rawls, as the
epigraphs of this chapter indicate. It is also a point that is hard to overstate. That
we will never know the true, fully-specified moral theory is compatible with
knowing quite a bit about it.
It might be tempting to think that this line of explanation is merely a new spin on
a kind of underdetermination of moral theory by evidence. After all, I have been
focusing on the idea that moral theories purport to tell us how to live, by telling us
which actions are morally obligatory for any action. But on an alternative
conception of moral theorizing
43
, moral theories also purport to explain why such
actions are morally obligatory. And on such a conception, it might be said that
our intuitive judgments about which actions we morally ought to perform in
particular cases is consistent with many explanations from different moral theories.
For example, the intuitive judgment that s morally ought to work in the garden
seems consistent with the Benthamite Act Utilitarian explanation that he morally
ought to do so because it would maximize pleasure and the Divine Command
Theorist explanation that he ought to do so because God forbids him to do
otherwise.
But such appearances are misleading. Even if we understand moral theorizing
under this alternative conception, the illustration of the method of cases in
Section 2.2 suggests that the full set of possible intuitive judgments maximally
discriminates among the full set of possible moral theories. In other words, the
evidence ultimately supports the one true moral theory, which means that the idea
of underdetermination of (moral) theory by evidence does not figure in the
explanation above of why we will never know the true moral theory.
It is also worth noting that the explanation does not rely on any sort of pessimism
about moral induction on which we are not in a position to have knowledge of the
moral features in case n+1 on the basis of our knowledge of the moral features in

43
See Schroeder (2005)
30
case n. For the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral suggests that we are
in a position to know that case n+1 has the very same moral features as case n insofar
as case n+1 has the same non-moral features as case n. Yet the supervenience of the
moral on the non-moral is also compatible with expecting different moral features
in case n+1 if the non-moral features of case n+1 are different from the non-moral
features of case n. The problem isn’t that there is no way to guarantee the reliability
of induction in moral philosophy, but rather that cases involving novel non-moral
features that we have yet to reflect upon tend to have surprising moral features
that outstrip our best available theories.
Since the explanation of why we will never know the true moral theory is not
obviously an explanation that relies upon familiar ideas concerning the
underdetermination of theory by evidence, nor familiar ideas concerning
pessimism about induction, it is not an explanation we can obviously resist by
appealing to familiar replies to these issues. Nor, too, does it help to point out
that moral theories often have ceteris paribus clauses built into them, such that
many of them are immune to counterexamples from one-off cases. This is because
the true moral theory specifies all of the ways in which cetera fail to be paria. Yet
the very fact that we include ceteris paribus clauses into moral theories is a tacit
acknowledgment that specifying how all of the ways in which cetera can fail to be
paria is out of our reach, since if it wasn’t so then there wouldn’t be any reason not
to simply specify all the exceptions.
Neither does the explanation above trade on any idiosyncrasies of using the
method of cases to assess theories in the consequentialist tradition. We need not
look further than debates in moral philosophy about the nature of principles of
reasonable rejection and whether aggregative principles are consistent with them
to see that non-consequentialist theories are also subject to indefinite levels of
refinement in accounting for all of the world’s morally significant features.
44
The
true moral theory makes correct predictions about all possible cases, whether or
not such a theory ultimately takes a consequentialist or non-consequentialist
shape.
In might also be tempting to invoke Rawls (1972) to cast doubt on the
explanation. In particular, it might be tempting to invoke the idea that is
sometimes attributed to him that we need not heed all of our judgments about

44
See Taurek (1977), Kamm (1998), and Walden (2014) for a sampling of one such line of
debate.
31
cases. Why, one might wonder, couldn’t a proponent of Benthamite Non-
Sequential Act Utilitarianism stick to their view by dismissing the judgment in
the second case from Feldman that the protagonist intuitively could not have an
obligation at t 0 (to load the truck) that takes them out of a position to fulfill a
different obligation at t 1 (to garden)?
But sticking to one’s guns in this way is to fail to appreciate the excellent inductive
evidence from the history of moral theorizing that there will always be morally
significant features of which we are.
45
Indeed, it seems like an especially egregious
failing in light of the explosion of moral theorizing in the second half of the 20
th

century. Take the moral philosophy of war, for example.
46
Some moral
philosophers
47
have thought that we should divide up the subject matter of the
moral philosophy of war into the categories of jus ad bellum (resort to war) and
jus in bello (conduct in war). But others
48
more recently suggest that we should
also add the category of jus post bellum (actions after war), while still others
49

even more recently suggest that we should also add jus ex bello (exiting war). In
each of these categories, too, there are a dizzying array of subtle issues for which
many fine distinctions are currently being made to accommodate them. No less
than six principles are traditionally said to be necessary and sufficient for jus ad
bellum. Yet further scrutiny has yielded even finer distinctions. And the moral
philosophy of war is just one among very many examples. At this point in time,

45
Moreover, as the quote above indicates, it’s not clear that Rawls (1974: 289) doesn’t accept
epistemic modesty in moral philosophy. He writes, “Taking this process to the limit, one seeks the
conception, or plurality of conceptions, that would survive the rational consideration of all feasible
conceptions and all rational arguments for them. We cannot, of course, actually do this…” It’s true
that he goes on to write, “…but we can do what seems like the next best thing, namely, to
characterize the structures of the predominant conceptions familiar to us from the philosophical
tradition, and to work out the further refinements of these that strike us at most promising." But
even if one were to think that Consequentialism, Deontology, Virtue Moral philosophy, and other
“predominant conceptions familiar to us from the [Western] philosophical tradition” were
exhaustive of the space of conceptions available to us for rational consideration, the illustration of
the method of cases in Section 2.2 still suggests that there is no limit to possible refinements to
these views that would strike as “most promising.”
46
War is a familiar recent topic of intense interest that seems to expand our sense of the space of
possible views in moral philosophy. But new and fascinating topics seem to crop up in moral
philosophy regularly, at least on our best days. See Horton (forthcoming) for a discussion of an
underappreciated topic that seems likely to powerfully further illustrate this same phenomenon.
47
See Walzer (1992)
48
Bass (2004)
49
See Moellendorf (2008)
32
W.D. Ross’s (1930) idea that there were less than a dozen morally significant
features of the world seems quaint.
50

So far I have been explaining why there is excellent inductive evidence for the
claim that we will never know the true moral theory. But I have been
understanding the method of cases as a sequence of reflections on cases and
principles that begins with cases. This leaves it open that it is possible to know the
true moral theory by initiating a sequence of reflections on cases and principles
that begins with principles. Up next, I will complete the explanation by explaining
why we shouldn’t expect such sequences of reflections to provide any relief.

2.4 The Role of Principles
Instead of reasoning from particular cases to principles and to more judgments
about particular cases and back again, as we do when we use the method of cases,
it might be said that an alternative approach starts with principles. To fix ideas, I
will focus on an exemplar of such an approach, Henry Sidgwick (1907), who
attempts to extract the true moral theory from “axioms” that he took to be self-
evident. In particular, Sidgwick (380-382) famously claims that Utilitarianism
derives, in some sense, from the following two principles:
Principle of Benevolence: “…each one is morally bound to regard the
good of any other individual as much as his own, except in so far as
he judges it to be less, when impartially viewed, or less certainly
knowable or attainable by him.”
Principle of Justice: “It cannot be right for A to treat B in a manner
in which it would be wrong for B to treat A, merely on the ground
that they are two different individuals, and without there being any
difference between the natures or circumstances of the two which
can be stated as a reasonable ground for difference of treatment.”

50
MacAskill (2016: 1000) echoes a similar sentiment: “Despite thousands of years of thought, we
are little closer to knowing what constitutes a good life than when we started. Indeed, progress in
moral philosophy seems to have found more problems than it has solved. This is true, for example,
of progress in population moral philosophy and animal moral philosophy. It may even be that,
given the difficulty of the subject matter, we should never be certain of one particular normative
view—our normative evidence and experiences will always be limited, always open to many
reasonable interpretations, and there will always be judgment calls involved in weighing different
epistemic virtues."
33
For our purposes, Sidgwick seems to be suggesting that it is possible to know the
true moral theory in virtue of it being possible to know self-evident principles, and
it being possible to derive the true moral theory from them.
One problem with this idea is that it is a matter of tremendous controversy
whether it is possible to derive, in any sense, the true moral theory from such
principles.
51
But even if we grant that it is possible to do so, it seems as though the
picture of the epistemology of moral theorizing on display from Sidgwick suffers
from the same sort of problem as the method of cases. As we saw above, the
fundamental issue with the method of cases is that there is excellent inductive
evidence for the claim that there will always be morally significant features of
which we are unaware, which suggests that it is not possible to believe and hence
know the true moral theory. Similarly, it seems that there is also excellent
inductive evidence for the claim that there will always be axioms or refinements to
such axioms for capturing morally significant features of the world of which we
are unaware.
This is no more apparent than in Sidgwick’s very own refinement of the principles
of benevolence and justice over the course of The Method of Ethics. Indeed,
Sidgwick devotes much of his seven editions of The Method of Ethics at nearly 600
pages a piece to tweaking his formulations of the principles of Benevolence and
Justice, which powerfully suggests that even if it is possible to derive the true
moral theory from self-evident principles or axioms, that there will always be self-
evident principles or axioms or refinements to them of which we are unaware. But
if so then it is plausible to think that we will also never know the true moral
theory by initiating a sequence of reflections starting with principles.
That neither initiating a sequence of reflections starting with particular cases nor
initiating a sequence of reflections starting with principles does the trick, still
leaves it open that we will know the true moral theory in virtue of initiating a
sequence of reflections starting with both particular cases and principles. But since
it is hard to see why such a sequence wouldn’t suffer from the same limitations as
the other two, we are left without any other sequences of reflections that could
underwrite the possibility of knowing the true moral theory. This completes the
explanation of why we will never be in a position to know the true moral theory.

51
See Schneewind (1977), Nakano-Okuno (2011), Parfit (2011), Phillips (2011), de Lazari-Radek
and Singer (2014), Shaver (2014), Hurka (2014), and Crisp (2015).
34
At this point, it would be instructive to take a step back. In Sections 2.2-2.4, I
explained why we will know the true moral theory via (i) sequences of reflections
beginning with cases, (ii) sequences of reflections beginning with principles, or
(iii) sequences of reflections beginning with both cases and principles. It is easy to
come away with the impression that the explanation vindicates the thesis I
introduced in the beginning of Section 1.0.
Too Strong Necessarily, for any subject S and any
comprehensive moral theory P, S does not know P
But as I’ll clarify in the next section, the explanation in Sections 2.2-2.4 vindicates
a weaker and much more plausible thesis about the epistemology of moral
theorizing.

2.5 Clarifying the Idea of Epistemic Modesty
As we’ve seen, the history of standard epistemological approaches to moral
theorizing constitutes strong inductive evidence for the claim that there will
always be morally significant features of the world of which we are unaware,
which suggests that we’ll never have the conceptual resources to believe and hence
know the true moral theory. Recall, however, that standard epistemological
approaches to moral theorizing are not epistemologically bankrupt. Indeed,
Section 2.2 highlights that the method of cases is an effective tool for cataloguing
the world’s morally significant features. It seems, then, that the reason why it is
plausible to think that there will always be morally significant features of the
world of which we are unaware, and hence the reason why it is plausible to think
that we will never know the true moral theory, doesn’t solely trace to some kind of
deficiency with standard approaches to the epistemology of moral theorizing.
Rather, it seems that it traces to some feature of our use of such approaches.
To see this, we might imagine an entity like God using the method of cases to
become aware of all the world’s morally significant features. For if we can use the
method of cases to make ourselves aware of some of the world’s morally
significant feature, then surely God can use the method of cases to become
acquainted with many more such features. Indeed, it seems as though the nature
of God is such that God could use the method of cases indefinitely. And if so, it
seems as though all the world’s morally significant features would be within God’s
reach. This suggests that the explanation from Section 2.2-2.4 doesn’t imply that it
35
is metaphysically impossible to know the true moral theory. Instead of Too Strong,
the explanation on offer supports a much more modest thesis of epistemic
modesty in moral philosophy.
Modest Necessarily, for any subject S like us in a world like
ours and any comprehensive moral theory P, S does
not know P
This thesis says that our limitations as finite creatures are such that we cannot use
standard approaches to the epistemology of moral theorizing to know the true
moral theory. It does not, however, rule out that non-finite entities like God
could use such approaches to know the true moral theory. Yet if God could
indefinitely reflect in such a way as to know the true moral theory, isn’t it natural
to think that we could also know it in virtue of God telling it to us?
Perhaps. But a number of conditions would have to be met for this to be the case.
In addition to it being the case that God exists, it has to be the case that God’s
nature is such that God interacts with the world. Moreover, and perhaps more
interestingly, it has to be that case that God could tell someone the true moral
theory in a way where the person could recognize it as such. But it is plausible to
think that the class of people who could recognize that God is communicating the
true moral theory to them in a way where they could recognize it is exceptionally
limited. Such a person would plausibly not only have to be a theist, but a theist
who believes that God’s nature is such that God interacts with the world. Such a
theist would plausibly also have to understand what moral theories even look like,
and moreover, that she has some antecedent sympathy on her part for
Consequentialism, Deontology, or whichever theory it is that God is telling them
is true. This isn’t to say that a scenario in which God communicates the true
moral theory to a Theistic Interactionist Consequentialist (or Deontologist or
whatever) Moral Philosopher in a way where they believe it is metaphysically
impossible. But it is to say that such a scenario doesn’t seem to lend very strong
support for the claim that it is possible for us to know the true moral theory.
Of course, many people believe that a scenario like this in fact took place. After
all, it is often said that God told Moses the true moral theory upon
communicating the Ten Commandments. Yet in addition to such a scenario
depending on all the same controversial assumptions above, there is another
problem with it that is more in the spirit of the explanation of why we should be
epistemically modest in moral philosophy. It seems like it would take an awful lot
36
of work to come to know the Ten Commandments as a moral theory that tells us
which actions are morally obligatory for any action. For example, it’s hard to tell
which actions the Ten Commandments prescribes s to perform in Feldman’s
garden case, and which actions you and I morally ought to perform in Gibbard’s
case. To figure this, it seems like s, and us, would need to reflect on such cases,
and likewise for any case we have yet to reflect upon. This looks like the same
problem all over again.
There is another reason to think that the explanation in Sections 2.2-2.4 supports
Modest over Too Strong. Imagine an intelligent being from outside our solar
system who has been observing the location of molecules in our solar system over
the last 150 thousand years, such that it knows the correct theory of reference
determination and all the facts about our world, or at least all the facts about our
world that are relevant to determining the referents of ‘obligatory’, ‘wrong’, and
other paradigmatic normative words in English. Assuming that the correct theory
of reference determination is naturalistic, such a being would plausibly know
whether any particular action instantiates the property that ‘wrong’ picks out.
52

But if the intelligent being is a speaker of our language, and it is appropriate for
speakers to use sentences just in case they know that such sentences are true, and
speakers know that the sentences that they are using are true just in case they
know that the entities picked out by them are instantiated, then it is plausible to
think that the intelligent being knows all the word’s morally significant features.
After all, such a creature would know all the conditions under which uses of
‘wrong’ are true. Thus, via semantic descent
53
, such a being would know how to
formulate a theory that accounts for all of the world’s morally significant features.
It could be, then, that we will know the true moral theory in virtue of such a being
telling it to us. But such a scenario seems to lend as little support to the idea that
we will know the true moral theory as the divine testimony scenario above. Not
only does it depend on the controversial idea of a highly intelligent being knowing
all the facts that are relevant to reference determination, it also depends, perhaps
more interestingly, on the controversial assumption that if an entity knows all the

52
See Gibbard (2014) for doubts about such an assumption.
53
That is, moving from claims about the semantic properties of words to claims about the
properties of entities picked out by them.
37
facts about how words in English are used, then it knows all the morally
significant features that figure in the true moral theory.
54

To be clear, nothing about the explanation of Modest on offer rules out the
metaphysical possibility of knowing the true moral theory, nor does anything
about it rule out that we will know the true moral theory in virtue of divine or
alien testimony. All the explanation says is that there is excellent inductive
evidence for the claim that there is a limit on the capacity of creatures like us in a
world like ours to use the epistemological methods for moral theorizing that are
most plausibly available to us, such as initiating sequences of reflection starting
from particular cases or principles.

2.6 Responding to the Revived Dispensability Objection
Yet this result is enough to generate a powerful response to the Dispensability
Objection. We already saw that epistemic modesty in moral philosophy entails
epistemic modesty about the nature of moral philosophy. Since we will never
know the true, fully specified moral theory, we will never know the true reductive
theory from which it follows. But if we will never have such knowledge, then we
will never satisfy the knowledge condition DKDD on correctly dispensing with
normative concepts suggested above. But if we will never satisfy such a condition,
then Reductivism doesn’t imply that it is possible for us to correctly dispense with
using normative concepts in settling deliberative questions about how to act,
contra the Dispensability Objection.
Some readers will no doubt think that this is all too quick – that I haven’t taken
the Dispensability Objection seriously enough. Indeed, some readers might
believe that it is possible to again revive the Dispensability Objection. The core
premise of such an argument might be not that Reductivism implies that creatures
like us in a world like ours can correctly dispense with using normative concepts,
but rather Reductivism implies that, so long as it is metaphysically possible to
know it, which the God and alien scenarios above support, it is possible to
correctly dispense with using normative concepts in principle. The thought then
might be that since it is not in principle possible to correctly dispense with using
normative concepts, Reductivism is false. At the end of the day, then, one might
believe that Reductivism still succumbs to the Dispensability Objection.

54
See McKeown‐Green, Pettigrove, and Webster (2015)
38
Since I think the first and second versions of the Dispensability Objection
represents the full force of the objection, I’m inclined to think it is a mistake to
believe that it is possible to revive the Dispensability Objection a third time in this
way. Since it is hard to even get a grip on the idea of it being possible to correctly
dispense with using normative concepts in principle, it is hard to take claims
about the alleged implications of Reductivism in cases that depend on it seriously.
But even if we were to have a grip on such an idea, and even if Reductivism were
to imply that it is possible to correctly dispense with using normative concepts in
principle, it is hard to see why this would be a problem for Reductivism, and
nothing that proponents of the original Dispensability Objection have said
provide us with any indication.
55

At this point in the dialectic, it seems to me that the philosophical grounds for
attempting to further revive the Dispensability Objection are quite thin. Indeed,
in light of there being such thin philosophical grounds on which to attempt to
further revive the Dispensability Objection, I conjecture that attempts to do so are
evidence of a deep and widespread psychological resistance among moral
philosophers toward accepting reductive theses. Accordingly, in the next chapter,
I will attempt to diagnose and explain away this psychological resistance.

Conclusion
In this chapter, I set out to develop a new response to the Dispensability
Objection – one that does not depend on the hard-to-defend claim from the
previous chapter that in addition to having a referential function, normative
concepts have a deliberative function. The route to this new response was a long
and indirect one. I explained that because creatures like us in a world like ours will

55
It might be said that this is where Parfit’s (2011: 368) objections to “hard naturalism,” or
reductive views that accept the dispensability of normative concepts, kick in. In discussing Brandt,
Parfit makes it clear (375) that his problem with such views is that claims involving normative
concepts ultimately come out as “trivial.” But Parfit either means that such claims would be trivial
for creatures like us in a world like ours or not. If he means the former, it’s hard to see why
Reductivists (Hard or otherwise) should worry about what Parfit has to say, since such
Reductivists can simply claim that because analyses can be non-obvious, claims involving
normative concepts aren’t guaranteed to be trivial. If he means the latter, it’s still hard to see why
Reductivists should worry. After all, the conditions under which claims involving normative
concepts would be trivial for God or highly intelligent aliens are far from clear. Moreover, again,
it’s even less clear why it would be a problem if such claims were trivial for them, which is precisely
what we were hoping to find in this appeal to Parfit’s objections to Hard Naturalism.
39
never know the true moral theory, we will never know the true reductive theory
from which such a theory follows. I then argued that because knowing the true
reductive theory is a condition on correctly dispensing with normative concepts,
we never can correctly dispense with normative concepts. And since we never can
correctly dispense with normative concepts, we will always have reason to use
normative concepts. Epistemic modesty in moral philosophy implies a new and
more compelling response to the Dispensability Objection. This implication is
interesting not just because Reductivists can use it to answer a prominent
objection to their view, but because it seems implicit in some discussions
56
of
Reductivism that Reductivists can be distinguished by whether they accept that it
is possible for us to know the true moral theory a priori or a posteriori. But if the
explanation and arguments of this chapter are on the right track, it might be that
such discussions are based on the false assumption that it is possible for us to
know the true moral theory, at all.

56
See Heathwood (2013)
40
3. Why Normative Properties Seem “Different”
Try to remember your early exposure to moral philosophy. My guess is that will
involve fuzzy images of you as an undergraduate in a course with a name like
Ethical Theory and Practice or Current Moral and Social Issues. In particular, try
to remember your introduction to a reductive idea regarding the metaphysics of
morality, like the view that what it is for an action to be morally obligatory is for it
to be an action that maximizes pleasure. If your experience was anything like
mine, then it might have been difficult for you to take such an idea seriously. You
might have found it incredible to even suppose that all there is to moral
obligation, as it were, is pleasure maximization. Or you might, at the very least,
have found it more incredible than reductive ideas outside of moral philosophy,
like the idea from chemistry that what it is to be pure grain alcohol is to be an
ionic compound of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, or the idea from geometry that
what it is to be an ellipse is to be the set of points in a plane whose summed
distance from each of two fixed points is the same. I call this psychological
difficulty in forming reductive thoughts concerning normative properties the sense
of incredibility.
57

You might not have ever had the sense of incredibility, but you need not take my
word for it that many philosophers seem to have had it. For example, Derek Parfit
(1997: 121, my emphasis) writes, in discussing reductive views on which
normative facts are reducible to natural facts, that “These two kinds of fact are as
different as the chairs and propositions that, in a dream, Moore once confused”;
Michael Huemer (2005: 94, my emphasis) claims that “value properties are
radically different from natural properties”; Jonathan Dancy (2005: 136, my
emphasis) says that “There remains a stubborn feeling that [normative] facts about
what is right or wrong, what is good or bad, and what we have reason to do have
something distinctive in common, and that this common feature is something that
a natural fact could not have”; and in a statement that has become a slogan, David
Enoch (2011: 4, emphasis mine) writes that “Normative facts are just too different
from natural ones to be a subset thereof.”
58

57
Following Andrew Melnyk (manuscript)
58
Famously, Thomas Nagel (1986: 138, my emphasis) has written that “If values are objective,
they must be so in their own right, and not through reducibility to some other kind of objective
fact. They have to be objective values, not objective anything else.” More recently, too, Richard
Yetter-Chappell (Manuscript, emphasis mine) states that “Normativity is, intuitively, so
fundamentally different in kind from natural phenomena that a reduction of the former to the
latter may seem hopeless or even absurd.”
41
That so many moral philosophers claim that normative properties are too
“different” to be reducible, or as I understand it, that so many philosophers
experience the sense of incredibility, would be puzzling on some views about the
metaphysics of normativity. In particular, it would be puzzling if Reductivism
were true. Reductivists should want to resolve this puzzle in its own right. But it
is also incumbent upon them to do so, since Robust Realists can be understood as
suggesting that the best explanation of the sense of incredibility involves the
falsity of Reductivism.
59
The goal of this chapter is to meet this challenge – it is to
explain away the sense of incredibility in moral philosophy.
In Section 1, I will canvass existing explanations of the sense of incredibility,
arguing that one such explanation from Ralph Wedgwood is inadequate but
ultimately suggestive of the right kind of explanation. I’ll then detour in Section 2
to the philosophy of mind, where Katalin Balog (2012), David Papineau (2002),
and other Reductive Physicalists about phenomenal consciousness, who hold that
phenomenal properties are fully reducible to physical properties, explain a similar
resistance to Reductivism about phenomenal consciousness by appealing to the
special nature of the phenomenal concepts that we use in thinking about
phenomenal properties. I’ll suggest that an analogous view about normative
concepts might hold the key to understanding the sense of incredibility in
metaethics philosophy.
In particular, in Section 3 – the heart of this chapter – I will argue that an
analogous view that takes inspiration from so-called Hybrid views about the
nature of normative language and thought offers a promising approach to
explaining it. I’ll do this by using existing resources available to Hybridists about
normative language and thought to develop a Hybrid view of normative concepts.
Not only will I show that the best version of Hybridism carries with it an
explanation of the sense of incredibility, but I will also show how it answers
related challenges to hybrid views from Mark Schroeder (2009) and David Copp.

59
Apart from very brief remarks from Stephen Finlay (2014), Andrew Forcehimes (2015),
Tristram McPherson (2015), Mark van Roojen (2015), Laura Schroeter and Francois Schroeter
(Manuscript), and Ralph Wedgwood (2013), very few philosophers have taken the sense of
incredibility seriously from a Reductivist perspective. Copp (Manuscript) is an exception.
Schroeder is an exception, too, (2005) although he does not discuss the sense of incredibility itself,
his discussion is in the same spirit as what I am aiming to accomplish in this chapter.
42
1 Clearing the Stage
1.1 Existing Explanations of the Sense of Incredibility
The sense of incredibility is a subject’s awareness of the psychological difficulty of
believing reductive theses concerning normative properties. It is an awareness of
the psychological difficulty of following, say, Peter Railton (1986) in believing
that normative properties are fully reducible to properties concerning the
promotion of human interests from the social point of view, David Copp (1995,
2007) in believing that normative properties are fully reducible to properties
concerning standards that enable societies to meet their needs, or Schroeder
(2007) in believing that normative properties are fully reducible to properties
concerning explanations of the promotion of our desires.
Since, however, Railton, Copp, Schroeder and other Reductivists believe their
own views, I am not saying that the sense of incredibility is an awareness of the
psychological impossibility of believing reductive theses. Rather, it is an awareness
of a modest kind of psychological difficulty that many people seem to experience
in believing reductive theses concerning normative properties – a difficulty in
believing reductive theses that we do not typically find outside of moral
philosophy, in domains such as chemistry and geometry, for example. It could be
that Railton, Copp, Schroeder and other philosophers who believe reductive
theses have experienced the sense of incredibility but have over come it. It could
be, too, that these philosophers have never experienced the sense of incredibility
at all. At any rate, it seems like many philosophers have experienced the sense of
incredibility, and in this section, I’ll discuss existing explanations of why that
might be – one from Parfit and Enoch and another from Wedgwood.
Before I begin, I should note that Parfit and Enoch do not explicitly offer an
explanation of the sense of incredibility. Rather, Parfit and Enoch offer critical
remarks about Reductivism, from which I will be reading off such an explanation.
Indeed, the explanation of the sense of incredibility I will glean from Parfit and
Enoch’s critical remarks about Reductivism is arguably compatible with
Reductivism. Nevertheless, as I will show, everyone, including Reductivists, have
strong reason to doubt that the explanation of the sense of incredibility that I will
extract from Parfit and Enoch is successful.

43
1.2 Parfit and Enoch on the Sense of Incredibility
After claiming that “normative and natural facts differ too deeply for any form of
[Reductivism] to succeed,” Parfit (2011: 326) immediately invites his readers to
imagine themselves deliberating about whether to jump into a canal from a
burning hotel to save their lives. In particular, Parfit invites his readers to imagine
entertaining the normative thought that they ought to jump, in an effort to
illustrate the significance from the perspective of first personal deliberation of
normative concepts.
In the same spirit, after claiming that “Normative facts sure seem different from
natural facts,” Enoch (2011: 108) develops the flipside of Parfit’s idea in
imagining himself entertaining the non-normative thought that “pressing the blue
button will maximize pleasure” in a scenario in which he is deliberating about
whether to push it, and claims that such a thought “is a complete non-starter, it
completely fails to address the question [of whether to push the button].” We can
understand Parfit and Enoch as suggesting that those who experience the sense of
incredibility do so as a result of recognizing the differences in deliberative
significance between normative and non-normative concepts on reflection.
It is hard not to agree with Parfit and Enoch that thoughts containing normative
concepts play a characteristic role in deliberation that thoughts lacking such
concepts do not, and hence that there is a difference in deliberative significance
between normative and non-normative concepts. Nevertheless, we have strong
reason to doubt that the differences in deliberative significance between such
concepts explains the sense of incredibility. For if the sense of incredibility is due
to a such differences, then we should also expect the sense of incredibility to pop
up elsewhere.
Take a thought containing an indexical concept, such as the thought that I am
typing. Indexical concepts tend to be more deliberatively significant than non-
indexical concepts. Importantly, however, no one seems to experience the sense of
incredibility while entertaining thoughts containing indexical and non-indexical
concepts, or at least no one seems to experience it to quite the degree that it is so
in metaethics. I, for example, do not have any trouble believing that the person
with brown hair typing is me, or I have far less trouble believing it than I do
believing that wrongness is failing to maximize pleasure. But the view on offer
from Parfit and Enoch seems to imply that I would have an analogous sense of
incredibility, since there is a difference in deliberative significance in the person
44
with brown hair typing and me. Thus, the view on offer from Parfit and Enoch
seems inadequate, at least in part because it overgenerates.
60

While I do not have a response to this objection, I have little doubt that there is
something to be said on behalf of Parfit and Enoch. It is for this reason that I
stop short of claiming that this is a decisive problem for the explanation.
However, it does provide strong reason to search for a better explanation of the
sense of incredibility. In the next section, I will discuss one such explanation from
Wedgwood.

1.3 Wedgwood on the Sense of Incredibility
In Wedgwood’s (2013: 392) review of Enoch’s Taking Morality Seriously,
Wedgwood writes that “[Enoch] describes [his] argument [against Reductivism]
as based on the ‘just-too-different intuition’ (p. 107) – the intuition that the
normative and the natural are just too different for the former to be reducible to
the latter.” As I said in the introduction, I am understanding claims of the alleged
distinctness of normative properties as expressions of the sense of incredibility,

60
Parfit and Enoch also suggest that we can infer that normative properties are distinct from other
kinds of properties from the fact that normative concepts are deliberatively distinct from non-
normative concepts. But these authors look to be substantively assuming, without argument, that
differences in concepts corresponds to differences in the properties that such concepts pick out.
This is a problematic assumption, as Moore pointed out long ago, and Laura Schroeter and
Francois Schroeter (Manuscript) also point out recently. Schroeter and Schroeter also appeal to
thoughts containing indexical concepts to highlight this. Just as we wouldn’t make any
assumptions about the irreducibility of the object picked out by the indexical concept ME (namely,
me) from the fact that ME plays a distinct role in deliberation, according to Schroeter and
Schroeter, we shouldn’t conclude that normative properties are distinct from other kinds of
properties in virtue of the differences in deliberative significance indexical and non-indexical
concepts.
But Schroeter and Schroeter also seem to agree with Parfit and Enoch that differences in
deliberative significance between normative and non-normative concepts explains the sense of
incredibility. In a section concerning the sense of incredibility, Schroeter and Schroeter write,
“The fact that a [normative] concept normally plays [the justificatory and action-guiding] role in
your cognitive economy seems sufficient to explain the difference in cognitive significance between
[normative and naturalistic] concept[s].”
It does not appear to occur to Schroeter and Schroeter that the very cases involving indexical
concepts that they use to show that the sense of incredibility is compatible with Reductivism also
seems to undermine their explanation that those who experience the sense of incredibility do so as
a result of recognizing the difference in deliberative significance between normative concepts and
non-normative concepts. Since, again, we don’t seem to have the sense of incredibility while
entertaining thoughts containing indexical and non-indexical concepts, or at least we don’t seem
to have it to quite the degree that we do in moral philosophy.
45
including appeals to the so-called “just too different” intuition. Accordingly, I am
understanding Wedgwood as offering an explanation of the sense of incredibility.
According to Wedgwood, once we make the broadly Fregean distinction between
sense and reference and distinguish normative properties (referents) from
normative concepts (senses), then “We can explain away the ‘just-too-different
intuition’ as arising from the fact that normative concepts and naturalistic
concepts are so different that there is no possibility of defining normative
concepts by means of naturalistic concepts.” He goes on to note that “if that is all
there is to the ‘just-too-different intuition’, it is quite compatible with an
ontological reduction of the normative to the natural.”
There seem to be two ideas on offer from Wedgwood. First, the sense of
incredibility results from the falsity of Analytic Reductivism in moral philosophy,
according to which normative concepts are fully analyzable in terms of non-
normative concepts and it is possible to reveal such analyses via conceptual
analysis alone.
61
The idea would presumably be that a subject who, say, entertains
the Benthamite metaphysical thesis that what it is for an action to be morally
obligatory is for it to be an action that maximizes pleasure might experience the
sense of incredibility in virtue of the fact that MORALLY OBLIGATORY is not fully
analyzable in terms of MAXIMIZING PLEASURE (or any other concept).
Second, Wedgwood is also suggesting that the sense of incredibility is ultimately
no threat to at least some species of Reductivism. For it could be that Analytic
Reductivism is false but Non-Analytic Reductivism in moral philosophy is true,
according to which normative concepts are not fully analyzable in terms of non-
normative concepts yet normative properties are fully analyzable in terms of other
kinds of properties. In other words, it could be that MORALLY OBLIGATORY is
not fully analyzable in terms of MAXIMIZING PLEASURE or any other concept,
that we experience the sense of incredibility as a result of attempting to believe
reductive theses involving this unanalyzable concept, but that the property of
being morally obligatory nevertheless reduces to some other kind of property.
While Wedgwood’s second idea that Non-analytic Reductivism is compatible
with the sense of incredibility resulting from the falsity of Analytic Reductivism is
plausible, his first idea that the sense of incredibility is due to the falsity of
Analytic Reductivism seems doubtful. The problem with this explanation of the
sense of incredibility is that it also appears to overgenerate. For example, it is

61
See Finlay (2014) for a compelling recent defense of Analytic Reductivism in moral philosophy.
46
unlikely that a concept like WATER is fully analyzable in terms of a concept like
H 2O. Yet no one seems to experience an analogous sense of incredibility about the
reductive thesis that the property of being water is fully analyzable in terms of the
property of being H 2O, or at least, no seems to experience it to quite the same
degree after learning a bit about chemistry. Compare: No professional chemist
who spends their life studying the nature of chemical reality appears to express
strong resistance to believing reductive views about the nature of water, whereas at
least many professional moral philosophers who spend their lives studying the
nature of moral reality, as we’ve seen, do seem to express strong resistance to
believing reductive views about the nature of normativity. Thus, Wedgwood’s
explanation of the sense of incredibility also seems problematic, because it too
appears to overgenerate.
Though I do not have a response to this overgeneration problem, I am again sure
there is something to be said on behalf of Wedgwood. So, while it might not be a
decisive problem for Wedgwood’s explanation, it does license searching for a
different explanation. But I do not think that we have to look very far for a new
and promising explanation. As we’ll see, Wedgwood’s idea that the sense of
incredibility has its roots in the concepts that we use in thinking about normative
properties might be on the right track. For a similar idea has been influential in an
analogous debate playing out in the philosophy of mind regarding the reducibility
of consciousness, as we’ll see in the next section.

2 The Sense of Incredibility in the Philosophy of Mind
2.1 The Phenomenal Concept Strategy
Many moral philosophers seem to experience the sense of incredibility, as we’ve
already seen. Yet many philosophers of mind also appear to experience an
analogous sense of incredibility with respect to claims concerning the reducibility
of phenomenal properties to other kinds of properties, like the claim that the
property of being in pain is fully analyzable in terms of the neural property of
being the firing of C-fibers in the brain.
62
For example, Colin McGinn (2014, my
emphasis) writes, “…consciousness as it presents itself to introspection appears to
be just a different kind of thing from activity in the brain.” And in describing what
he call the “intuition of distinctness,” Papineau (2002: 2) says that it is “the

62
‘C-fibers firing in the brain’ is a standard placeholder for the correct neural property, whatever
that might be.
47
compelling intuition that the mind is ontologically distinct from the material
world.”
However, unlike in moral philosophy, the sense of incredibility has widely been
seen as a threat to be taken seriously against Reductivism about phenomenal
consciousness, the metaphysical view in the philosophy of mind that phenomenal
properties are fully analyzable in terms of other kinds of properties. Unlike in
moral philosophy, too, Reductivists in the philosophy of mind have an influential
explanation of it.
On the so-called Phenomenal Concept Strategy that has been put forward by
Reductivists such as Balog (2012) and Papineau (1993), we start with the
observation that thinking about reductive theses concerning phenomenal
properties involves using or deploying both phenomenal and non-phenomenal
concepts.
63
Next, it is said that the deployment of phenomenal concepts but not
the deployment of non-phenomenal concepts involves the activation of
phenomenal states or at least proto-phenomenal states.
64
For example, when a
subject reflects on the claim that the phenomenal property of being in pain is
reducible to the neural property of being the firing of C-fibers, the deployment of
the phenomenal concept PAIN activates a version of the corresponding
phenomenal state in the subject, whereas no such state is activated in the
deployment of the non-phenomenal concept C-FIBERS FIRING. In other words, a
subject literally has an experience of being in pain upon deploying PAIN whereas
no such experience is had in deploying C-FIBERS FIRING.
This mismatch is said to generate the intuition of distinctness. As Papineau
(2007) writes, “[Non-phenomenal concepts]…do not activate [experiences], by
contrast with phenomenal concepts, which do activate the experiences…This then
offers a natural account of the intuitive feeling that conscious experiences must be
distinct from any material states.” For as Loar (1997: 302) puts it, “When we then

63
Many other philosophers advance versions of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy, including
Christopher Hill (1997), William Lycan (1987), Brian Loar (1997), Janet Levin (2006), Nagel
(1974), Scott Sturgeon (1994), and Michael Tye (2003). See Par Sundström (2011) for an
overview.
64
While all Phenomenal Concept Strategists seem committed to the claim that we activate
phenomenal states when acquiring phenomenal concepts, not all Phenomenal Concept Strategists
maintain that every deployment of a phenomenal concept activates phenomenal states. For
example, while Papineau and Balog appear to have advocated for such a view, Levin and Loar have
not. At best, Loar maintains that we activate such states in the context of deploying phenomenal
concepts during philosophical reflection on the nature of consciousness. The differences between
these views are subtle, but ultimately not crucial for our purposes.
48
bring phenomenal and physical-theoretical concepts together in our philosophical
ruminations, those cognitive states are phenomenally so different that the illusion
may be created that their references must be different.”
65

The Phenomenal Concept Strategy trades on the relationship between
phenomenal concepts and phenomenal experiences, but unless we were to think
that normative concepts are just a special case of phenomenal concepts, we
shouldn’t expect normative concepts to work exactly the same way. The core idea
of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy is just that some concepts have different
deployment conditions. When we apply this idea in the philosophy of mind, it’s
the idea that we deploy one kind of concept (a phenomenal concept) that results
in picking out phenomenal properties and results in “something else” – something
that doesn’t happen when we deploy the other kind of concept (a non-
phenomenal concept) involved in entertaining a reductive thesis. We can
construct an analogous version of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy in moral
philosophy by claiming that deploying normative concepts results in picking out
normative properties and in “something else”.
66
In the next section, I will offer an
answer to what this something else might be, by focusing on a recently influential
family of views about the nature of normative language that have come to be
known as Hybridism, the key insight of which is that normative language has a
“dual” nature.

65
If this sounds similar to the “pathetic fallacy” familiar in moral philosophy from many
philosophers, including David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Santayana, John Mackie,
Simon Blackburn, that’s because it is a play on it. As Papineau (1993: 177) says in discussing
resistance to believing reductive theses, “I propose to call the…fallacy the 'antipathetic fallacy'.
Ruskin coined the phrase 'pathetic fallacy' for the poetic figure of speech which attributes human
feelings to nature ('the deep and gloomy wood', 'the shady sadness of a vale'). I am currently
discussing a converse fallacy, where we refuse to recognize that conscious feelings inhere in certain
parts of nature, namely, the brains of conscious beings.”
66
Yetter-Chappell and Yetter-Chappell (2013) were the first to suggest that Reductivists in moral
philosophy might benefit from an analog of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy. However, by their
own admission, the authors merely offer a sketch of such an analog and conclude their paper by
claiming that “The remaining challenge for the [Reductivist] who wants to adopt [the
Phenomenal Concept] [S]trategy is to flesh it out by providing an account of [normative]
concepts…” The sections to come can be read as an attempt to rise up to this challenge.
49
3 Hybridism
3.1 Normative Language Hybridism
The idea on the table from the Phenomenal Concept Strategy in the philosophy
of mind is that we can explain the sense of incredibility in moral philosophy by
appealing to the deployment conditions of normative concepts. Just as deploying
phenomenal concepts results in picking out properties and the activation of
phenomenal states, it might be that deploying normative concepts results in
picking out properties and something else. The task of this section is to identify
this ‘something else’. One place to look for inspiration is recent work on the
alleged “dual” nature of normative language.
The dominant approach to the study of linguistic meaning in the history of
philosophy of language has been broadly Descriptivist or Cognitivist or Truth-
conditional, in that it has been widely thought that the best kind of explanation of
the meanings of words appeals to what they describe or what they’re about or the
contribution they make to conditions under which sentences containing them are
true. However, going all the way at least back to C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards
(1923), A. J. Ayer (1936), and C. L. Stevenson (1937), many philosophers have
doubted whether the best explanation of the meanings of normative words is
Descriptivist or Cognitivist or Truth-conditional (I’ll stick to ‘Cognitivist’ from
here on for ease of exposition). For it is a lot less obvious what a paradigmatically
normative word like ‘good’ could be about than a paradigmatically non-normative
word like ‘tall’. Moreover, among other reasons, such philosophers have also
thought that normative words seem more closely correlated with action than non-
normative words.
Taken by such observations, Ogden and Richards, Ayer, Stevenson, and many
philosophers began developing a Noncognitivist approach to linguistic meaning,
where the meanings of normative words are not explained by what they are about
or characterized through a compositional characterization of truth-conditions.
Rather, according to such philosophers, the best explanation of the meanings of
normative words adverts to the non-cognitive states of mind that are expressed by
our use of such words. A word like ‘wrong’ does not ascribe any kind of property
when a speaker utters it in a sentence like ‘stealing is wrong’, on this sort of view,
but instead expresses a noncognitive state of mind such as a desire not to steal.
Against this background, some philosophers began to doubt the apparent
presupposition of this debate that we must choose between cognitive and
50
noncognitive approaches to the study of linguistic meaning. So-called Hybridists
have suggested that the best explanation of the meanings of words appeals to both
what they are about and the states of mind that are associated with their
utterance.
One influential family of contemporary Hybridist views in metaethics philosophy,
among the wide variety of contemporary Hybridist views of normative language
67
,
traces to Copp (2001), and takes as its starting point plausible observations about
the semantic nature of sentences containing slurs. For example, it seems like a use
of the sentence ‘Patrick is a mick’ not only describes Patrick as being Irish, but
also expresses a negative noncognitive attitude like a desire to avoid Irish people.
As such, it seems plausible to maintain that the meanings of slurs are well
explained by appeal both to the cognitive (e.g. ordinary beliefs about descriptive
properties) and noncognitive (e.g. desires) states of mind that our use of such
sentences expresses. With slurs as their license for optimism, many Hybridists
claim that moral words are also best understood in terms of the cognitive and
noncognitive states of mind that uses of them express. For example, it might be
that a use of ‘wrong’ in the sentence ‘stealing is wrong’ expresses the cognitive
belief that stealing has some property, like the property of failing to maximize
pleasure, and the noncognitive attitude of desiring not to do whatever has the
property of failing to maximize pleasure.
In an influential article that surveys the costs and benefits of various versions of
Hybridism, including versions that use slurs as their model, Schroeder (2009)
argues that the best version of Hybridism is one on which sentences containing
normative words carry a single meaning that is invariant across all speakers and
uses, as opposed to a view on which the meanings of such terms shifts across
contexts or a view on which uses of such words express different states of mind
across speakers or across uses. He recommends that Hybridists follow theorists
like Daniel Boisvert (2008) in holding that any use of a normative word like
‘wrong’ out of the mouth of any speaker always picks out the same property and
expresses the same noncognitive state.
68

To fix ideas, and so as not to put words in anyone’s mouth (no pun intended), I’ll
work with a toy version of invariant Hybridism in the tradition of Bentham, on
which a use of ‘wrong’ in a sentence like ‘stealing is wrong’ always expresses the

67
See Ridge and Fletcher (2014) for a recent collection of articles from philosophers espousing
different hybrid views.
68
Ryan Hay (2013) also offers a view in this vein.
51
belief that stealing fails to maximize pleasure and the desire not to do whatever
fails to maximize pleasure. Of course, it could very well be that wrongness has
nothing to do with pleasure maximization. But nothing hinges on the decision to
use this idea for illustrative purposes. We could just as well develop another
version of Invariant Hybridism in the tradition of Kant to illustrate Invariant
Hybridism, and maintain that every use of ‘wrong’ out of the mouth of every
speaker picks out the property of failing to conform to the categorical
imperative.
69
For ease of exposition, I will call Benthamite Invariant Hybridism
Normative Language Hybridism (NLH). I’ll also continue to use ‘wrong’ in the
sentence ‘stealing is wrong’ as an illustrative example throughout the next several
sections.
Remember that the goal is to construct a normative analogue of the Phenomenal
Concept Strategy, a theory about the nature of normative concepts on which
deploying them results in picking out properties and results in something else.
Discussing hybrid views about normative language is useful because it gives us
clues as to what this “something else” might be. But since Hybridism is first and
foremost a family of theories about language, not concepts, our route to such a
view is less than direct. Nevertheless, as we’ll begin to see, a theory of the dual
nature of normative concepts is only a couple of short steps away from a Hybridist
theory of the nature of normative language.

3.2 Normative Thought Hybridism
For much of the history of Hybridism, Hybridists have generally taken themselves
only to be offering theories of the meanings of normative words. However,
observations concerning our use of normative words, like the observation that our
use of them is closely correlated with action, also seem to extend to normative

69
This is not to downplay the burden that proponents of Invariant Hybridism face in explaining
how normative language has come to be about a single property. Doubts about whether it is
possible to discharge this explanatory burden arguably serve as one of the principal motivations for
Contextualist views of normative language on offer from theorists like Finlay (2014). However, in
defending a version of Contextualism about normative language, I argue that it could be that what
it is for a range of uses of language to be distinctly normative or moral is for it to be about
particular properties. See Laskowski (2014).
52
thoughts.
70
After all, people who think that they ought to recycle tend to do so and
people who believe that torturing children for the fun of it is wrong are disposed
to avoid torturing children for the fun of it. To get from a hybrid view of
normative language to a hybrid view of normative thought that we can articulate
in English, as Schroeder (2014) argues, we have to claim that the semantics for
thought-words like ‘believes’ interacts with the semantics for normative words in
the right way.
71

In particular, one way to do this is to hold that a use of the word ‘believes’ in a
sentence like ‘s believes that stealing is wrong’ attributes to its subject the states of
mind expressed by uses of ‘wrong’. Since, on NLH, uses of ‘wrong’ always express
beliefs about the property of failing to maximize pleasure and desires concerning
this property, uses of such a term in attitude ascriptions will always ascribe these
states to its subject. By putting together this claim about attitude ascriptions
together with NLH, and semantically descending, we can say that s believes that
stealing is wrong just in case s has the belief that stealing fails to maximize
pleasure and the desire not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure. It is natural
to then go further and claim that what it is to believe that stealing is wrong is to
be in the conjunctive state of believing that stealing fails to maximize pleasure and
desiring not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure. For ease of exposition I’ll
call this view Normative Thought Hybridism (NTH). See Figure 1 for
illustration.

70
Copp (2014) is an exception, since he explicitly discusses the nature of normative thought as a
Hybridist about normative language. However, his view is that there is ultimately nothing
distinctive about the nature of normative thought itself, since on his view thinking a normative
thought like the thought that stealing is wrong amounts to having an ordinary belief toward a
normative proposition. If there is anything distinct about the nature of normative thought for
Copp, it is that it is associated with norms that are distinctive of normative assertion. For on his
view, thinking that stealing is wrong is “accepting” the normative proposition that stealing is
wrong, and “accepting” the normative proposition that stealing is wrong is being in the
psychological state that one would express if one were to assert ‘stealing is wrong’.
71
Another route to normative thought Hybridism is to first offer an analysis of normative thought,
as Jon Tresan (2006) seems to do so, and then offer a semantics for thought-words, in order to
make sense of the language necessary for stating such a view.
53

Note that NLH and NTH that results from it, both play fast and loose with the
noncognitive attitudinal component in their respective analyses. For example, in
my gloss of NTH, I claim that believing that stealing is wrong consists in
believing that stealing fails to maximize pleasure and desiring not to do whatever
fails to maximize pleasure. Such a gloss might reasonably lead one to think that
NTH carries a commitment to a kind of Strong Motivational Internalism,
according to which, necessarily, if s thinks that x is wrong, then x has a motivation
not to x. However, Hay (2014) persuasively argues that it is possible to
characterize the noncognitive attitudinal component of such analyses in a way that
doesn’t commit to Strong Motivational Internalism.
72
So, I do not take my gloss

72
His idea is to characterize them as generalized attitudes towards types. Instead of saying that s
desires not to do whatever has the property of failing to maximize pleasure, for example, Hay
might recommend we understand s as desiring not to do actions of the type that fail to maximize
pleasure. Plausibly, it doesn’t follow from s desiring not to do actions of the type fail to maximize
pleasure that s desires not to do every particular action of that type. And if this is right, then it
doesn’t seem like s would necessarily be motivated upon thinking that a particular action fails to
maximize pleasure.
54
on such views to commit them to Strong Motivational Internalism, and I will
continue to gloss them in the way that I have been for ease of exposition.
Recall, again, that we are using insights from Hybridism about normative
language to inform an account of the nature of normative concepts on the model
of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy in the philosophy of mind. So far we have
made the move from NLH to NTH. There is only one more step from NTH to
Hybridism about normative concepts, as we’ll see next.

3.3 Normative Concept Hybridism
Moving from NTH to a hybrid view of normative concepts is straightforward. In
the general theory of concepts it is widely held that concepts are the constituents
of thoughts.
73
If we embrace this claim together with the claim that what it is to
have a normative belief about wrongness is to have a belief about the property of
failing to maximize pleasure and a suitably related desire, as NTH does, then it is
natural to go on to claim that what it is to deploy the normative concept WRONG
in a belief is to deploy the concept FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE in a belief and
a suitably related desire. For example, a subject deploys the normative concept
WRONG in the belief that stealing is wrong just in case the subject deploys the
concept FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE in the belief that stealing fails to
maximize pleasure and in the desire not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure.

The resulting view is a hybrid view of the normative concept WRONG. This is
because deploying WRONG partially consists in deploying the concept FAILS TO
MAXIMIZE PLEASURE in a belief that picks out the property of failing to maximize
pleasure. But it is also partially consists in the activation of a desire, because
deploying WRONG partially consists in deploying FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE
in a belief that is coordinated with desiring not to do whatever fails to maximize
pleasure. This activation is the “something else” that we’ve been trying to find.

73
See Fodor (1998: 26), Margolis and Laurence (2004: 190), Prinz (2002). For criticism of the
idea, see Machery (2009: 26).
55
For ease of exposition I’ll call this view Normative Concept Hybridism (NCH).
See Figure 2 for illustration.
74

We set out in Section 3 to develop a hybrid view of normative concepts. With
Hybridism about normative language as our inspiration, we were led to
Hybridism about normative thought, which has in turn led to normative concept
Hybridism. The question now is whether our journey from Normative Language
Hybridism to Normative Concept Hybridism can help explain the sense of
incredibility, which I will turn to in the next section.

74
Normative Concept Hybridism is built out of the resources of Normative Thought Hybridism,
which is built out of the Invariant Hybridist resources of Normative Language Hybridism. It is
worth keeping in mind that these views are ultimately built from Invariant Hybridist resources,
because one of the main motivations for Invariant Hybridism is its capacity to accommodate
familiar Frege-Geach type worries. As Boisvert (2008) and Schroeder (2009) both emphasize,
Invariant Hybridism doesn’t have any trouble capturing the embedding and logical properties of
normative language, because Invariant Hybridism piggy backs on standard Descriptivist accounts
of such properties. As far as I can tell, Normative Concept Hybridism simply inherits the
Invariant Hybridist solution to Frege-Geach type concerns.
56
3.4 An Attempt to Explain the Sense of Incredibility
Recall that philosophers of mind who endorse the Phenomenal Concept Strategy
claim that we activate phenomenal states when we deploy phenomenal concepts,
but that we do not activate such states when we deploy non-phenomenal
concepts. On such a picture, when we entertain a reductive thesis like the
metaphysical claim that what it is to be in pain is to be the firing of C-fibers in
the brain, we deploy the phenomenal concept PAIN, which activates a phenomenal
pain-like state, and we deploy the non-phenomenal concept C-FIBERS FIRING,
which doesn’t involve any kind of phenomenal state activation. This mismatch
makes it difficult to believe reductive theses involving PAIN and C-FIBERS FIRING,
according to Phenomenal Concept Strategists. Intuitively, it is hard to believe that
PAIN and C-FIBERS FIRING pick out the same property when deploying PAIN
brings an experience of pain to the forefront of our minds while deploying C-
FIBERS FIRING brings no such experience.
NCH predicts a similar mismatch. Take the reductive metaphysical idea that
what it is for an action to be wrong is for it to fail to maximize pleasure. On
NCH, deploying WRONG partially consists in deploying FAILS TO MAXIMIZE
PLEASURE in the desire not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure, while
deploying the non-normative concept FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE involves no
such desire. It could be that this mismatch leads to the sense of incredibility,
which would give us a new, Reductivist-friendly explanation of the sense of
incredibility.
But this seems too quick. Again, consider the reductive metaphysical idea that
what it is for an action to be wrong is for it to be an action that fails to maximize
pleasure. It’s true, on NCH, that deploying the normative concept WRONG
involves desiring in a way that deploying the non-normative concept FAILS TO
MAXIMIZE PLEASURE does not. But, and this is important, the full NCH view
says that deploying the normative concept WRONG in a belief is to deploy the
non-normative concept FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE in a belief while
deploying FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE in a desire not to do whatever fails to
maximize pleasure. This means that a proponent of NCH would maintain that
what is going on inside the head when a subject believes that what it is for an
action to be wrong is for it to fail to maximize pleasure is that the subject believes
that what it is for an action to fail to maximize pleasure is for it to fail to maximize
pleasure while desiring not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure. Thus, not
57
only is it unclear that NCH explains the sense of incredibility, it is unclear that
there would even be any sense of incredibility to explain on NCH.
This kind of problem comes from Schroeder (2009: 300). It isn’t a surprise that
NCH suffers from this problem, because NCH is built on NLH and NTH,
which Schroeder argues suffer from this very problem. Recall that on NLH, uses
of the normative word ‘wrong’ always express a belief ascribing the property of
failing to maximize pleasure and a desire not to do whatever fails to maximize
pleasure. When we combine this commitment with the claim that uses of
thought-words like ‘believes’ attribute the states of mind that utterances of
normative words express to the subject of attribution-sentences containing them,
we end up with a hybrid view of normative belief like NTH, according to which
what it is to believe, say, that stealing is wrong is to believe that stealing fails to
maximize pleasure while desiring not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure.
However, Schroeder points out that it’s a commitment of a view like NTH that
anyone who has had any normative belief about wrongness at all has the desire
not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure. This includes believing that
stealing is wrong; believing that killing for fun is wrong; believing that if stealing
is wrong then killing for fun is wrong; and even believing that nothing is wrong.
But – and this is important – if a subject has any views about wrongness, then
when they, say, form the belief that stealing fails to maximize pleasure they ipso
facto count as believing that stealing is wrong. For all it takes to believe that
stealing is wrong is to believe that stealing fails to maximize pleasure while
desiring not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure.
This makes it tremendously difficult for a proponent of NTH to vindicate
ordinary patterns of reasoning, like concluding in believing that stealing is wrong
on the basis of believing that stealing fails to maximize pleasure. After all, as soon
as a subject forms the belief that stealing fails to maximize pleasure, while already
desiring not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure, they automatically count as
believing that stealing is wrong. I call this “Schroeder’s Challenge.”
To be clear, NCH inherits this problem from NTH. For on NCH, deploying
WRONG always involves desiring not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure,
including when deploying it in believing that killing is wrong; believing that
torturing children for the fun of it is wrong; believing that at least some things are
wrong; and even believing that nothing is wrong. But then anyone who has had
any normative belief about wrongness at all has the necessary desire not to do
whatever fails to maximize pleasure for deploying WRONG. Thus, NCH ends up
58
facing the same problem as NTH. To make the point that NCH is vulnerable to
Schroeder’s Challenge crystal clear, consider the following vignette.
Imagine that Stan is deliberating about whether to steal at time t 1. Intuitively,
Stan should be able to deploy the concept FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE in the
belief that stealing fails to maximize pleasure and then conclude in virtue of this at
t 2 that stealing is wrong. Moreover, he intuitively should be able to do this while
also believing that stealing fails to maximize pleasure and desiring not to do
whatever fails to maximize pleasure, without any issue.
But compare this intuitive characterization with the picture that emerges when we
imagine that NCH is true and that Stan is again deliberating. Like any of us, Stan
has had some normative beliefs about wrongness at one point or another over the
course of his life. On NCH, this means that Stan has the desire not to do
whatever fails to maximize pleasure during his deliberation about whether to steal
at t 1. Imagine at t 1 that Stan deploys the concept FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE
in forming the belief that stealing fails to maximize pleasure. By deploying the
concept FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE in forming the belief that stealing fails to
maximize pleasure in his deliberation at t 1, Stan is deploying this concept while
desiring not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure. Thus, Stan ipso facto
counts as deploying WRONG and hence believing that stealing is wrong at t 1. This
is a big problem. After all, we usually reason from a belief like stealing fails to
maximize pleasure to a belief like stealing is wrong.
Note that in light of Schroeder’s Challenge, again, it’s no longer clear that NCH
has the resources to explain the central puzzle of this chapter – the sense of
incredibility. In order to form the reductive metaphysical belief, say, that the
property of being wrong is fully analyzable in terms of the property of failing to
maximize pleasure, it is necessary that a subject already have the desire not to do
whatever fails to maximize pleasure. If, however, a subject already has this desire,
forming the reductive metaphysical belief that the property of being wrong is fully
analyzable in terms of the property of failing to maximize pleasure is to form the
belief that the property of failing to maximize pleasure is fully analyzable in terms of
the property of failing to maximize pleasure. Thus, again, not only does NCH not
seem to have the resources to explain the sense of incredibility, it’s not even clear
that there would be a sense of incredibility to explain on NCH.
In the next section, I will show how to amend NCH to avoid Schroeder’s
Challenge. In so doing, I will be in a position to develop a normative analogue of
59
the Phenomenal Concept Strategy that offers a promising explanation of the
sense of incredibility in moral philosophy.

3.5 Introducing LUNCH
The first step to amending NCH in a way that allows us to answer Schroeder’s
Challenge and explain the sense of incredibility is to assume that we have a
simple, unanalyzable concept that picks out the same property of failing to
maximize pleasure that the complex concept FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE
picks out. Note that while I am assuming that we have such a concept, I am not
assuming that we have a word for it. So, I will introduce a word for it. Call this
unanalyzable concept ‘gnorw’. The next step is to replace FAILS TO MAXIMIZE
PLEASURE with GNORW in the NCH-analysis of WRONG. Instead of saying that
what it is for a subject to deploy WRONG in a belief is for the subject to deploy
FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE in a belief and in a desire not to do whatever fails
to maximize pleasure, I claim that what it is for a subject to deploy WRONG in a
belief is for the subject to deploy GNORW in a belief and in a desire not to do
whatever is gnorw. The following figure illustrates Laskowski’s Unanalyzable
Normative Concept Hybridism (LUNCH).
60

Let’s return to Stan to see exactly how LUNCH answers Schroeder’s Challenge.
Imagine that Stan has had a few normative thoughts about wrongness in his day,
such that when he deliberates about whether to steal he has the desire not to do
whatever is gnorw. In deliberating about whether to steal, we can imagine that
Stan deploys the concept FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE in forming the belief
that stealing fails to maximize pleasure. Even though Stan forms the belief that
stealing fails to maximize pleasure against the backdrop of desiring not to do
whatever is gnorw, Stan does not count as deploying WRONG and hence believing
that stealing is wrong. To believe that stealing is wrong Stan would have to
deploy GNORW in the belief that stealing is gnorw against the background of
desiring not do whatever is gnorw. But Stan does not do this. Yes, he desires not
to do whatever is gnorw. Yet he forms the belief that stealing fails to maximize
pleasure, not the belief that stealing is gnorw. Thus, Stan can believe that stealing
fails to maximize pleasure and not ipso facto count as deploying WRONG and
61
hence not ipso fact believe that stealing is wrong. See the following figure for
illustration.
75

The trick to solving Schroeder’s Challenge is to sever the connection between
deploying WRONG and deploying FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE. By
substituting FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE for GNORW in the NCH-analysis of
WRONG, it is possible to believe that something fails to maximize pleasure
without ipso facto deploying WRONG and hence without ipso facto believing that
stealing is wrong. Thus, LUNCH avoids Schroeder’s Challenge, as the following
figure illustrates.
76

75
It’s worth also noting, by way of further clarifying LUNCH, that it is not possible to deploy
WRONG in believing that x is wrong, deploy GNORW in believing that y is gnorw, but fail to
believe that y is wrong (and deploy WRONG again). This is because when a subject deploys
WRONG in believing that x is wrong, the subject deploys GNORW in the thought that x is gnorw
and in desiring not to do whatever is gnorw. And once the subject deploys GNORW in believing
that y is gnorw against the background of this desire, she satisfies all the conditions for
automatically deploying WRONG in believing that y is wrong.
76
Note that I am only claiming that this is one way to avoid Schroeder’s Challenge. I am not
claiming that LUNCH is the only way to go in response. While it is the best response of which I
am aware, I am not suggesting that no alternative fix to NCH is available. Another natural
response to Schroeder’s Challenge might go as follows.
62

NCH says that what it is to deploy WRONG in the belief that stealing is wrong is to deploy FAILS
TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE in the belief that stealing fails to maximize pleasure and desire not to do
whatever fails to maximize pleasure. On the assumption that Stan has ever had any belief involving
WRONG at all, he has the desire not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure. According to
Schroeder, the problem with this is that once he forms the belief that stealing fails to maximize
pleasure Stan ipso facto counts as believing that stealing is wrong.
But instead of claiming that we have another concept that picks out the property of failing to
maximize pleasure, one might claim that what it is to deploy WRONG in the belief that stealing is
wrong is to deploy FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE in the belief that stealing fails to maximize
pleasure while occurrently desire not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure. Such a view would
yield the result that Stan could have the desire not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure in
virtue of having had some beliefs about wrongness in his day, believe that stealing fails to
maximize pleasure, and not ipso fact count as believing that stealing is wrong.
This view appears to circumvent Schroeder’s Challenge. Yet it’s not clear to me that it does so as
well as LUNCH. Plausibly, on the rival view under consideration, as soon as Stan wonders
whether stealing is wrong he occurrently desire not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure.
Then, when Stan forms the belief that stealing fails to maximize pleasure while wondering
whether stealing is wrong, he ipso facts counts as believing that stealing is wrong. This still looks
too easy for Stan to believe that stealing is wrong.
63
In addition to answering Schroeder’s Challenge, LUNCH also appears to have
the resources to answer a closely related problem – one that we might think of as
the flipside of Schroeder’s Challenge. Again, Schroeder’s Challenge highlights
that NCH makes the connection between WRONG and FAILS TO MAXIMIZE
PLEASURE too tight. In illustrating the problem, I focused on cases where a
subject deploys FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE while already desiring not to do
whatever fails to maximize pleasure. We saw that once Stan deploys FAILS TO
MAXIMIZE PLEASURE in believing that stealing fails to maximize pleasure while
desiring not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure, he ipso facto counts as
deploying WRONG and hence believing that stealing is wrong. But this kind of
case only illustrates one side of Schroeder’s Challenge.
The other side is brought out when we consider a case in which Stan is
deliberating about whether to steal, and deploys WRONG in believing that stealing
is wrong. On NCH, Stan also ipso facto counts as believing that stealing fails to
maximize pleasure in virtue of believing that stealing is wrong. But that’s a
problem. Like the rest of us, Stan is unlikely to have any beliefs at all about
whether any actions maximize pleasure. Because David Copp made me aware of
this perspective on Schroeder’s Challenge, I call this “Copp’s Challenge.”
Just as LUNCH could answer Schroeder’s Challenge, LUNCH also has an
answer to Copp’s Challenge. On LUNCH, when Stan forms the beliefs that
stealing is wrong over the course of his deliberation about whether to steal, he
deploys GNORW in the belief that stealing is gnorw while desiring not to do
whatever is gnorw. Since the concept GNORW has no connection to the concept
FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE, Stan does not ipso facto count as also deploying
FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE. LUNCH straightforwardly answers Copp’s
Challenge, too.
Moreover, LUNCH seems to offer a promising explanation of the sense of
incredibility. It predicts that anyone who has the sense of incredibility has it as a
result of deploying concepts with different deployment conditions. Imagine, for
example, that a subject is having the sense of incredibility while entertaining the
reductive claim that wrongness is fully analyzable in terms of failing to maximize
pleasure. Entertaining this thesis involves deploying the normative concept
WRONG and the non-normative concept FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE. What is
happening in the head on LUNCH is that the subject is deploying the concept
GNORW that is coordinated with desiring not to do whatever is gnorw in
deploying WRONG. But no such coordination is happening when the subject is
64
deploying FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE. It is this mismatch in the deployment
conditions associated with normative and non-normative concepts that makes it
difficult to believe reductive these concerning normative properties.
One advantage of this explanation of the sense of incredibility over existing
explanations of it is that it doesn’t obviously overgenerate. We saw above that the
problem with the Enochian/Parfitian idea that the sense of incredibility is due to
a mismatch in deliberative significance between concepts is that it predicts that we
should also experience the sense of incredibility while entertaining claims
involving indexical and non-indexical concepts, since indexical concepts tend to
be more deliberatively significant than non-indexical concepts. Yet we do not. We
also saw above that the problem with the Wedgwoodian idea that the sense of
incredibility is due to the falsity of analytic Reductivism is that it predicts that we
should experience the sense of incredibility while entertaining claims about water
and H2O, since WATER is not plausibly analyzable. Yet we do not. What explains
the sense of incredibility on LUNCH is that deploying normative concepts
involves the coordination of desires and the deployment of non-normative
concepts does not. Since deploying indexical concepts and concepts like water
does not appear to involve the coordination of desires, LUNCH does not predict
that we should experience the sense of incredibility while entertaining claims
involving such concepts.
However, LUNCH is built out of resources from NTH and NTH is built out of
resources from NLH, which is inspired by the idea that the best explanation of
the meanings of slurs appeals to the desire-like attitude that uses of them express.
It is natural to think, then, that LUNCH overgenerates to cases involving slurs if
LUNCH overgenerates at all.
Reverse-engineering LUNCH to provide an account of deploying a slur concept
like MICK leaves us with the view that deploying MICK in the belief that Patrick is
a mick involves deploying IRISH in the belief that Patrick is Irish while feeling
contempt for people who are Irish. Since deploying MICK looks like it involves the
coordination of a feeling of contempt, the explanation of the sense of incredibility
in moral philosophy on offer from LUNCH predicts that we should experience
the sense of incredibility while entertaining reductive claims concerning the
property of being a mick.
But determining whether the sense of incredibility accompanies such claims is
tricky, because one has to have a feeling of contempt for people who are Irish to
even deploy the concept MICK on the view under consideration. We can try the
65
next best thing in imagining a subject who has such a feeling entertaining the
claim that the property of being a mick is fully reducible to the property of being
Irish. My admittedly anecdotal impression is that such a subject would find it
difficult to believe that the property of being a mick is fully reducible to the
property of being Irish, just as the view predicts. For it is not uncommon to find
racists who use slurs for a certain group of people nevertheless resisting the use of
such slurs to describe their own friends and acquaintances who happen to belong
to such groups.
LUNCH might sound like an unusual solution to Schroeder’s Challenge and
explanation of the sense of incredibility. But think of it this way. I am proposing a
marriage between two familiar kinds of views in moral philosophy. Cornell
Realists from the 1980s maintain that some normative concepts pick out the same
properties as non-normative concepts, but seem to suggest that all normative
concepts do is pick out properties. Hybridists from the last two decades maintain
that the meanings of normative words (and hence thoughts and hence concepts)
involve both a descriptive component and a noncognitive component, but seem to
suggest that the descriptive component is fully explicable. I am suggesting that the
Cornell Realists were right in maintaining that some normative concepts pick out
the same properties as non-normative concepts but that the suggestion that all
normative concepts do is pick out properties is mistaken. I am also suggesting that
Hybridists are right in maintaining that normative concepts involve both a
descriptive component and a noncognitive component, but that the suggestion
that the descriptive component is fully explicable is mistaken. On LUNCH, the
normative concept WRONG is analyzable in terms of the unanalyzable descriptive
concept GNORW that is a proper part of it along with the desire not to do
whatever is gnorw.

Conclusion
The goal of this chapter was to address the challenge of explaining why it is
seemingly so psychologically difficult to believe reductive theses in moral
philosophy. After arguing that existing explanations of this phenomenon are
problematic, I went on to explore whether we could explain it by appealing to the
special nature of normative concepts, since a similar idea has been put to
influential use with the Phenomenal Concept Strategy in the philosophy of mind.
Taking inspiration from this approach together with hybrid views of normative
language, I suggested that the sense of incredibility might be due a mismatch
66
between the deployment conditions on normative and non-normative concepts.
But I argued that some applications of this idea such as NCH are vulnerable to
Schroeder’s Challenge. However, I also argued that not only do the best versions
of Hybridism like LUNCH escape Schroeder’s Challenge and Copp’s Challenge
but that they also carry with them an explanation of the sense of incredibility.
This isn’t to say that LUNCH should leave Reductivists satiated. Indeed,
LUNCH raises a number of difficult questions itself. How could it be that
everyone competent with the concept WRONG has the same property in mind?
How did we acquire an unanalyzable concept such as GNORW? Why is it
unanalyzable? Why do we have such a concept but no word that we
conventionally use to express it? How did it end up picking out a natural
property? The list goes on. So, while I think LUNCH solves important problems
in moral philosophy (Schroeder’s Challenge and Copp’s Challenge) and has
something promising to say about other issues (the sense of incredibility), I also
think there is much more work to be done to construct a plausible picture of the
mind from the perspective of a Reductivist who takes challenges from Robust
Realists seriously.
But before Reductivists who enjoy LUNCH begin tackling such questions about
the nature of normative concepts, it seems to me that there is a more pressing
question about the view that Reductivists ought to address. To begin to see the
urgency of the question, it is instructive to observe that one of the central aims of
the Phenomenal Concept Strategy is to explain why the connection between
phenomenal and non-phenomenal concepts is as loose as it seems to be. It seems
possible to imagine, for example, two physically identical worlds that are not
phenomenologically identical. Since LUNCH is a normative analogue of the
Phenomenal Concept Strategy, it is tempting to think that the connection
between normative and non-normative concepts would be at least as loose as the
connection between phenomenal and non-phenomenal concepts. But that might
be a serious problem, because the vast majority of moral philosophers think that
the connection between normative and non-normative concepts is exceptionally
tight; after all, just about everyone denies that it is possible to imagine two
naturalistically identical worlds that are normatively different. In the next chapter,
then, I will explain why LUNCH does not have this implication.

67
4. Conceiving of Failures of Supervenience in Ethics
In Chapter 3, I developed a hybrid view of normative concepts that parallels the
Phenomenal Concept Strategy in the philosophy of mind. As a hybrid view of
normative concepts, the basic idea is that using or deploying normative concepts
involves the coordination of both cognitive and noncognitive elements of the
mind. And as a view that parallels the Phenomenal Concept Strategy, the view
says, in essence, that the distinctive nature of normative concepts explains away
several problems for Reductivism in moral philosophy. We’ve seen, for example,
how hybrid views of normative concepts on the model of the Phenomenal
Concept Strategy can answer the challenge of explaining the sense of incredibility
in moral philosophy.
But proponents of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy put it to use in explaining
much more than the sense of incredibility in the philosophy of mind.
77
For
example, while there is tremendous controversy in the philosophy of mind over
the question of whether failures of supervenience of phenomenal properties on
physical properties are metaphysically possible, it is widely held that such failures
are at the very least easy to conceive, like a world that is a molecule-for-molecule
duplicate of ours that lacks phenomenal experiences.
78
According to many
proponents of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy, one of the main selling points
of their view is that it can explain why it is easy to imagine such failures, even
though they might not be metaphysically possible.
This puts an advocate of a normative analogue of the Phenomenal Concept
Strategy in an awkward spot. For it is widely held in moral philosophy not only
that failures of supervenience of normative properties on natural properties are
metaphysically impossible
79
, but that such failures are extraordinarily difficult to

77
See Katalin Balog (2009) and Par Sundström (2011) for overviews.
78
As Michael Tye (2003) puts it, “Physicalists about consciousness typically agree with the
following claims: a) Absent qualia are conceivable. We can conceive of physical duplicates, one of
whom has experiences while the other has no experiences at all. Such duplicates may be
metaphysically impossible, but they are conceivable.”
79
Simon Blackburn (1993: 114): "It is widely held that moral properties are supervenient or
consequential upon naturalistic ones."
Tristram McPherson (2012: page): “...the supervenience of the ethical has been a rare locus of
near-consensus in moral philosophy.”
Pekka Väyrynen (manuscript): "Virtually all metaethical theories seek to accommodate in some
way the [core] idea [of supervenience] that there can be no moral difference without some other
difference."
68
conceive.
80
Many moral philosophers would no doubt have trouble imagining two
worlds that are non-normatively identical to one another but normatively
different, in that an act of torturing an innocent child for the fun of it is horribly
wrong in one world but not so in the other. It seems, then, that in defending a
hybrid view of normative concepts that is analogous to the Phenomenal Concept
Strategy, that there is pressure to say either that the Phenomenal Concept Strategy
fails to explain why it is easy to imagine failures of supervenience, or that the view
I defend about normative concepts predicts that failures of supervenience of
normative properties on natural properties are not easy to conceive. The goal of
this chapter is to show how the kind of hybrid view I defend can explain why
failures of supervenience of normative properties on natural properties are not easy
to conceive.
In Section 1, I will provide a brief and high-level outline of how proponents of
the Phenomenal Concept Strategy purport to explain the conceivability of failures
of supervenience of phenomenal properties on physical properties. In Section 2, I
will explain why failures of supervenience of normative properties on natural
properties are not easy to conceive on hybrid theories in moral philosophy that
take the Phenomenal Concept Strategy as inspiration, despite what we might

80
R.M. Hare (1952: 145): "...take that characteristic of “good” which has been called its
supervenience. Suppose we say that ‘St. Francis was a good man.’ It is logically impossible to say
this and to maintain at the same time that there might have been another man placed in exactly
the same circumstances as St. Francis, and who behaved in exactly the same way, but who differed
from St. Francis in this respect only, that he was not a good man."
Russ Shafer-Landau (2003: 78): "We cannot conceive of a plausible moral order that licenses
different moral ascriptions for situations that are in all other respects identical."
Michael Ridge (2007: 335, original emphasis): “(S) is extremely plausible, to the point that
someone who denied it would thereby betray incompetence with normative concepts. To deny (S)
would be to allow, for all that has been said so far, that it could have been the case that the world
was exactly like the actual world in all of its non-normative and descriptive features, yet Hitler’s
actions were not wrong. Since all the non-normative and descriptive facts are the same in this
possible world it will still be true that Hitler killed the same people, had the same intentions, etc.
Such bare normative differences seem inconceivable.”
Tristram McPherson (2009: 77): "...try to imagine two physically and phenomenally identical
possible worlds, in one of which a certain causing of pain is wrong, while in the other, it is not. I
find that I cannot believe that such a pair of worlds could both be possible. Nor can I believe of
such a pair of worlds that one contains a person thinking about modal logic, while the other does
not. Call this intuitive result the ban on co-possibility. The crucial point is that the ban on co-
possibility is strikingly intuitively plausible for normative and intentional properties, but not for
phenomenal properties."
69
expect.
81
Along the way, I will argue that this explanation has a lot going for it, by
arguing that it is better than one prominent explanation on offer in the literature
from Alison Hills (2009).

1 Conceivability in the Philosophy of Mind
1.1 Zombies
Non-Analytical Reductive Realism in the philosophy of mind, more popularly
known as Type-B Materialism, consists in the metaphysical idea that phenomenal
properties are identical with, fully constituted by, fully grounded in, fully
analyzable in terms of, or as I’ll put it, fully reducible to physical properties, and
the epistemological idea that phenomenal concepts have no analytic connections
to physical concepts that are a priori accessible to us. For example, Type-B
Materialists, or Physicalists, as I’ll say, might claim that the phenomenal property
of being in pain is fully reducible to the physical property of C-fibers firing in the
brain, and that such a reduction is knowable only a posteriori and hence not
knowable via conceptual analysis, or at least not conceptual analysis alone.
While Physicalism is subject to a number of influential objections, many
Physicalists who endorse the Phenomenal Concept Strategy maintain that these
objections appear much less forceful, once we appreciate the distinctive nature of
phenomenal concepts, or the psychological resources employed in and enabling us
to have thoughts about phenomenal properties. As we saw in Chapter 3, for
example, it is often said to be a problem for Physicalism that many people find it
difficult to form reductive beliefs about phenomenal properties. That is, many
people experience the sense of incredibility. Many Physicalist proponents of the
Phenomenal Concept Strategy purport to block the claim that the best
explanation of the sense of incredibility involves the falsity of Physicalism, by
claiming that unlike non-phenomenal concepts, such as physical concepts,
deploying phenomenal concepts results not only in picking out properties, but also
in the activation of phenomenal or proto-phenomenal states. It is then said that
the sense of incredibility is attributable to this mismatch in the deployment
conditions of phenomenal and physical concepts.

81
Debbie Roberts (manuscript) suggests that it isn’t possible to provide such an explanation. As
she writes, "So is it possible to conceive of an individual identical to X in terms of base properties
but different in terms of normative properties? As far as what our concepts allow it doesn’t seem
possible to give a definite ‘no’ answer here."
70
However, another important objection to Physicalism that proponents of the
Phenomenal Concept Strategy purport to answer is the Conceivability Objection,
which David Chalmers (1996) has done much to popularize. In brief, the
objection starts with the commonly held claim in the philosophy of mind that
philosophical zombies are conceivable, which is to say that it is possible to
imagine a creature that is physically identical to us that lacks phenomenal
experiences. But if zombies are conceivable, according to advocates of the
Conceivability Objection, then zombies are metaphysically possible. So, zombies
are metaphysically possible. But if so, then Physicalism is false, since Physicalism
is the idea that, necessarily, phenomenal properties are reducible to physical
properties. Thus, Physicalism is false.
Many Physicalist proponents of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy respond to the
Conceivability Objection by denying that if zombies are conceivable then zombies
are metaphysically possible, or denying that conceivability provides a guide to
metaphysical possibility. According to these proponents, the reason that zombies
are easy to conceive has nothing to do with the fact that they might be possible,
and everything to do with the nature of the concepts that we use in thinking
about them. In particular, Phenomenal Concept Strategists claim, in essence, that
the reason it is easy to imagine two worlds that are physically identical yet
phenomenologically different is that the physical concepts we use in imagining
such worlds do not have any analytic connections to phenomenal concepts that are
a priori knowable to us. This is why it is easy to deploy such physical concepts
without thereby applying any phenomenal concepts, and vice versa. In other
words, the fact that phenomenal concepts are “conceptually isolated,” as it is often
put, explains why it is easy to imagine zombies, or why failures of supervenience
of phenomenal properties on physical properties are easy to conceive.
82

Of course, as we saw in Chapter 3, I develop a hybrid view of normative concepts
on the model of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy in the philosophy of mind.
Insofar as my view is analogous to the Phenomenal Concept Strategy, it is natural
to think that my view predicts, likewise, that failures of supervenience of
normative properties on natural properties are also easy to conceive. That could be
a problem, because in moral philosophy, it is widely held that such failures are

82
While Phenomenal Concept Strategists offer different explanations of the reason why
phenomenal concepts are conceptually isolated, all Phenomenal Concept Strategists seem to hold
that it is a lack of analytic connections that are a priori knowable between phenomenal and
physical concepts that explains why it is easy to conceive of zombies.
71
extraordinarily difficult to conceive. In the next section, I will quickly rehearse the
core ideas of the kind of hybrid view I defend, before showing how the view
predicts that failures of supervenience of normative properties on natural
properties are not easy to conceive.

2 Conceivability in Ethics
2.1 Hybridism
Hybridism about normative concepts is the view that there are two components to
deploying normative concepts – a cognitive component and a noncognitive
component. The kind of hybrid view of normative concepts that I develop in
Chapter 3 is a descendant of a particular version of Hybridism about normative
language recently developed by Daniel Boisvert (2008) and Ryan Hay (2013).
83

Recall that on the toy Benthamite version of this kind of view that I use in
Chapter 3, when someone uses the word ‘wrong’ in the sentence ‘stealing is
wrong’, they are expressing the belief that stealing fails to maximize pleasure while
desiring not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure. This is a hybrid view of
normative language – Normative Language Hybridism (NLH) – because it
analyzes the meaning of normative words in terms of both cognitive and
noncognitive states of mind.
To develop a hybrid view of normative thought that we can articulate in English,
as we saw in Chapter 3, we need to adopt the right sort of view about thought-
words like ‘belief’. One claim that allows us to develop such a view is the claim
that any use of a sentence containing the word ‘belief’ ascribes the states of mind
expressed by the use of it to the subject of the sentence. For example, an utterance
of the sentence ‘s believes that stealing is wrong’ attributes to s the state of mind
of believing that stealing fails to maximize pleasure and the desire not to do
whatever fails to maximize pleasure. If we embrace this claim about thought-
attribution together with NLH, and semantically descend, we arrive at the view
that s believes that stealing is wrong if and only if s believes that stealing fails to
maximize pleasure and desires not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure. And
once we arrive at this view, it is natural to take it one step further, by claiming
that what it is for s to believe that stealing is wrong is for s to believe that stealing

83
There are many different versions of Hybrid Theories in moral philosophy. See Fletcher and
Ridge (2014) for a collection of articles that cover a range of different hybrid views in moral
philosophy.
72
fails to maximize pleasure while desiring not to do whatever fails to maximize
pleasure. This is a hybrid view of normative thought – Normative Thought
Hybridism – because it analyzes the nature of normative thought in terms of both
cognitive and noncognitive states of mind.
There are two more steps from Normative Thought Hybridism (NTH) to the
kind of hybrid view of normative concepts that I introduce in Chapter 3. But
before we take them, I will explain why NTH is a hybrid view with the resources
to predict that failures of supervenience of normative properties on natural
properties are not easy to conceive. Start with the idea of a scenario in which
someone performs an act of torturing an innocent child for the fun of it. Let’s use
the letter ‘T’ to denote such an act and use the letter ‘N’ to denote a complete
naturalistic description of it. Many moral philosophers would agree that it is
difficult to believe that T is N but not wrong. The goal is to explain why this is so.
Most people have thoughts about wrongness. Some believe that stealing is wrong,
that if stealing is wrong then getting your little brother to steal is also wrong, that
either stealing is wrong or not wrong, and even that nothing is wrong. Let’s use a
name to denote a person who has at some point in their lives had a thought about
wrongness. Call this person ‘Winnow’. Like us, Winnow believes that T is wrong
and she finds it difficult to believe that T is N but not wrong. We want to know
why. On NTH, normative beliefs about wrongness in part consist in desiring not
to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure. It is a necessary condition on forming
any kind of normative belief concerning wrongness at all that a subject has this
desire. Since Winnow has had at least one thought about wrongness over the
course of her life, she has the desire not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure.
Now imagine that Winnow forms the belief that T is N. Plausibly, in forming
this belief, Winnow believes that T fails to maximize pleasure, since the complete
naturalistic description N of T plausibly includes ‘fails to maximize pleasure’. But
in believing that T fails to maximize pleasure while desiring not to do whatever
fails to maximize pleasure, Winnow ipso facto counts as believing that T is wrong.
That’s because all it takes on NTH to form a normative belief about wrongness is
to believe that x fails to maximize pleasure while desiring not to do whatever fails
to maximize pleasure. Winnow satisfies both of these conditions. Thus, the
reason it is difficult for Winnow to believe that T is N but not wrong is that in
believing that T is N while desiring not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure,
Winnow automatically counts as believing that T is wrong. NTH can explain why
failures of supervenience of normative properties on natural properties are not easy
73
to conceive, at least for people who have had ever had a thought about wrongness
at some point in their lives.
84

Recall, however, that I do not defend NTH in Chapter 3. Instead, I defend a
version of Hybridism about normative concepts – Laskowski’s Unanalyzable
Normative Concept Hybridism (LUNCH) – a view that is built from Normative
Concept Hybridism (NCH), which itself is built from NTH. So, let’s quickly
rehearse the move from NTH to NCH, and then explain how NCH can explain
why failures of supervenience of normative properties on natural properties are not
easy to conceive.
85

The move from NTH to NCH is straightforward. We start with NTH, which
says that what it is for s to believe that stealing is wrong is for s to believe that
stealing fails to maximize pleasure while desiring not to do whatever fails to
maximize pleasure. We then package NTH with the plausible claim that concepts
are the constituents of thoughts, or that concepts are the psychological resources
used or deployed in and enabling us to have thoughts. We can then say that s
deploys the normative concept WRONG in the belief that stealing is wrong just in
case s deploys the cognitive concept FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE in the belief
that stealing fails to maximize pleasure and deploys FAILS TO MAXIMIZE
PLEASURE in the desire not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure. We can
then make the natural claim that what it is to deploy WRONG in a normative
belief is to deploy FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE in an ordinary cognitive belief
while deploying FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE in desiring not to do whatever
fails to maximize pleasure. This is a hybrid view of normative concepts because it
analyzes our use or deployment of them in terms of cognitive and noncognitive
elements.
86
Our question is whether NCH can explain why it is difficult to
conceive of a scenario in which a person performs an act of torturing an innocent

84
Of course, an even simpler Non-Hybrid Cognitivist view, on which s believes that x is wrong
just in case x believe that stealing fails to maximize pleasure, has an even simpler explanation of
why it is not easy to conceive of T as N without also conceiving of it as wrong: Believing that T is
N in part involves believing that T fails to maximize pleasure and hence in part involves believing
that T is wrong!
85
This is not the only route to the explanation we want. We could have bypassed NTH by starting
with NLH and simply noting that concepts are often understood to be the meanings of concepts.
Nevertheless, it is instructive to work through the route I have chosen.
86
As we saw in the last chapter, I do not endorse NCH. In addition to not endorsing it for failing
to answer Schroeder’s Challenge and Copp’s Challenge, NCH arguably fails Moore’s Open
Question test.
74
child for the fun of it as N but not wrong, i.e. why it is difficult to conceive of T
as N but not wrong.
Let’s again focus on Winnow. Since she’s had some thoughts about wrongness
here and there over the course of her life, she’s deployed WRONG here and there as
well, which means that she has the desire not to do whatever fails to maximize
pleasure. Now imagine that Winnow conceives of T as N. Since, again, N is a
complete naturalistic description of T, conceiving of T as N plausibly in part
involves conceiving of T as failing to maximize pleasure. But in conceiving of T as
failing to maximize pleasure while desiring not to do whatever fails to maximize
pleasure, Winnow ipso facto counts as conceiving of T as wrong. That’s because
all it takes on NCH to deploy WRONG is to deploy FAILS TO MAXIMIZE
PLEASURE while desiring not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure. NCH
can explain why failures of supervenience of normative properties on natural
properties are not easy to conceive, at least for people who have ever had a
thought about wrongness, and hence deployed the concept WRONG, at some
point in their lives.
Now that we know that the hybrid views from which my view of normative
concepts are built are capable of explaining why at least some failures of
supervenience of normative properties on natural properties are not easy to
conceive, we are in a position to determine whether the view of normative
concepts that I endorse in Chapter 3 also has this capacity.

2.2 LUNCH and Conceivability, First Pass
Laskowski’s Unanalyzable Normative Concept Hybridism (LUNCH), is similar
to NCH. Like NCH, deploying WRONG in the belief that stealing is wrong
involves deploying a naturalistic concept in an ordinary belief and in a desire. The
only difference between NCH and LUNCH is that the naturalistic concept is
simple and unanalyzable. I assume we have it and that it picks out that the same
property as the complex naturalistic concept that is used in the analysis of WRONG
on NCH, i.e. the complex naturalistic concept FAILS TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE.
However, it’s a concept we don’t have a name for yet. So, I call the unanalyzable
concept ‘gnorw’. LUNCH says that what it is to deploy WRONG in the belief that
stealing is wrong is to deploy GNORW in the belief that stealing is gnorw and in
the desire not to do whatever is gnorw. Our question is whether LUNCH can
75
explain why failures of supervenience of normative properties on natural
properties are not easy to conceive.
Return to Winnow. She has the desire not to do whatever is gnorw, because she
has had some thoughts about wrongness over the course of her life. She thinks T
is wrong but she can’t bring herself to conceive of T as N without also conceiving
of it as wrong. We want to explain this. The big question is whether conceiving of
T as N involves conceiving of it as gnorw. If so, then we can offer the same kind
of explanation on LUNCH as we did on NTH and NCH. By conceiving of T as
gnorw while desiring not to do whatever is gnorw, Winnow would automatically
be conceiving of T as wrong.
Unfortunately, it’s not clear that conceiving of T as N – that is, conceiving of T
under a complete naturalistic description, involves conceiving of it as gnorw. And
that’s what we need to offer the same successful style of explanation on LUNCH
as NTH and NCH. Why isn’t it clear that conceiving of T as N involves
conceiving of it as gnorw? To see why we might harbor such a doubt, recall that
the concept GNORW picks out the same naturalistic property as the concept FAILS
TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE. But conceiving of T as N – that is, again, conceiving of
T under a complete naturalistic description, might not include more than one entry
for the property of failing to maximize pleasure. And since it is plausible to think
that a complete naturalistic description would itemize all of the naturalistic
features of T in their full complexity, and since the complex concept FAILS TO
MAXIMIZE PLEASURE better captures the complexity of the property of failing to
maximize pleasure than the simple concept GNORW, it might be plausible to think
that conceiving of T as N would involve the concept FAILS TO MAXIMIZE
PLEASURE but not the concept GNORW.
On the face of it, these considerations suggest that conceiving of T as N doesn’t
involve conceiving of it as gnorw, which suggests that LUNCH doesn’t have the
resources to explain why failures of supervenience of normative properties on
natural properties are not easy to conceive. But we have to be careful about
reading too much into these considerations, for a few reasons. Firstly, the above
line of argument seems to be built on the assumption that there is only one
complete naturalistic description of T. Since we might think there are many ways
to offer a complete naturalistic description of T, and since we might think that at
least one of them involves the concept GNORW, we might not have to worry much
about this line of objection.
76
Secondly, it might be said that the above line of objection is also built on a
substantive assumption about what it is to conceptualize something. In particular,
it might be that the above line of objection is built on the assumption that
conceiving of T as N involves, to put it slightly metaphorically, something like the
use of words to create a long list of every naturalistic feature of T and proceeding as
if every item on the list is true. Granting this assumption, if we are taking the idea
of the list being complete seriously, then we have to acknowledge and appreciate
just how much idealization such conceptualizing would involve. Surely no creature
like us in a world like ours could come close to carrying out this kind of cognitive
operation. And if that’s right then we would have at least one way of explaining
why failures of supervenience in moral philosophy are not easy to conceive - we
can’t do it because we lack the cognitive wherewithal to do so.
But we shouldn’t settle for this explanation. This is because it predicts not only
that conceiving of T as N but not wrong is difficult to conceive, but also that
failures of supervenience of phenomenal properties on physical properties are
difficult to conceive for the same kind of reason. We surely would have trouble
conceiving of a world that is a complete physical duplicate as ours lacking
phenomenal properties, if we understand doing so as involving listing all its
physical features and proceeding as if every item on the list is true.
To avoid settling for this subpar explanation, it seems to me that we should reject
the substantive assumption that led us to it, namely, that conceiving of T as N
involves a process of listing every naturalistic feature and proceeding as if every
such feature is true. In the next section, I will explore auxiliary hypotheses about
the nature of such conceptualization that we can pair with LUNCH to offer the
kind of explanation we are seeking of why failures of supervenience in moral
philosophy are difficult to conceive. But since, as we’ll see, the hypotheses that we
might need are speculative, I am first going to discuss and problematize a rival
explanation of why failures of supervenience in moral philosophy are difficult to
conceive. In arguing against it, we’ll see that however speculative LUNCH might
end up being, it still represents one of the better explanations of available.

2.3 An Alternative Explanation?
In “Supervenience and Moral Realism,” Alison Hills (2009) sets out to answer the
challenge of explaining the truth of supervenience in moral philosophy on behalf
of Robust Realists, by exploring an “extreme” response to it: Denying the truth of
77
supervenience. Since, according to Hills (170), “the connection
between...inconceivability and impossibility...is at the root of many people’s
acceptance of supervenience,” Hills argues that failures of supervenience of
normative properties on natural properties are in principle conceivable.
However, Hills recognizes that we are often “resistant” to imagining some failures
of supervenience in moral philosophy. To explain why we sometimes find
ourselves resistant to conceiving of such scenarios, Hills borrows an explanation
from Tamar Gendler (2006). The reason for such resistance is that there is
something about imagining a scenario like T – a scenario in which a person
performs an act of torturing an innocent child for the fun of it – that is itself
horribly wrong and we have a desire not to engage in such wrongful imaginings.
Although Gendler doesn’t say why we desire not to engage in wrongful
imaginings, Hills suggests that the reason might be that such imaginings are
“contaminating” and risk us forming “bad habits.” In short, according to Hills,
when we are resistant to conceiving of failures of supervenience of normative
properties on natural properties, it is because we don’t want to do so.
There are a number of reasons to doubt this explanation. To list a few, it’s not
obvious that imaginings could be wrong; that they could be contaminating; that
anyone really desires not to engage in such imaginings; that anyone desires not to
engage in such imaginings to avoid contaminating themselves; or that someone
couldn’t have a strong counterbalancing desire to engage in such imaginings even
if they thought that such imaginings were wrong.
But there is an even more compelling problem with Hills’ explanation. According
to Hills, it is metaphysically possible for normative properties to fail to supervene
on natural properties. In other words, on her view, there are no necessary
normative truths. If not, however, then her suggestion that it is wrong to imagine
failures of supervenience is itself not necessary, which means that there will be
some possible world that is non-normatively identical to ours, where it is not
wrong to imagine failures of supervenience. Since, plausibly, what it is possible to
conceive is a physical process, it doesn’t seem as though normative laws have any
bearing on the nature of such a process.
Another problem for Hills’ explanation is one that I admittedly have a difficult
time articulating. The idea that it is wrong to imagine that T is N but not wrong,
and that we want to avoid engaging in such wrongful imaginings, seems
problematic, because it takes place too far down stream. It’s not that we imagine
78
T as N, catch ourselves in the act, and quickly stop ourselves from imagining T as
wrong. It’s that it feels impossible to imagine T as N and anything but wrong.
There is something utterly incoherent about a scenario where T is N but not
wrong. It feels like something is stopping us from imagining T as N but not
wrong. This phenomenon is what fundamentally cries out for explanation, and it’s
far from clear whether we can use Hills’ explanation to account for it. Having
lowered the dialectical bar, I’ll begin exploring how we might supplement
LUNCH to account for why it is difficult to imagine failures of supervenience in
moral philosophy.

2.4 LUNCH and Conceivability, Second Pass
On LUNCH, deploying WRONG involves deploying a simple and unanalyzable
naturalistic concept GNORW while desiring not to do whatever is gnorw. We ran
into a bit of trouble using LUNCH to explain why it is difficult to conceive of T
as N but not wrong. This was because it’s wasn’t obvious what is constitutive of
conceiving of T as N. In particular, it’s not obvious whether, and if so how,
conceiving of T as N would in part involve conceiving of T as gnorw. For on the
assumption that conceiving of T as N involves listing all of T’s naturalistic
features and proceeding as if they are all true, doing so might involve conceiving
of T with the complex concept FAILING TO MAXIMIZE PLEASURE rather than
with the simple concept GNORW. If we could figure out how conceiving of T as N
might involve conceiving of T as gnorw, then we could offer the same kind of
explanation of why Winnow cannot imagine T as N but not wrong as we did on
NTH and NCH.
Here’s a two-part suggestion. Elizabeth Camp (2007) makes a strong case for the
idea that creatures like us in a world like ours (‘we’ from here on) not only think in
words, as proponents of various versions of the Language of Thought Hypothesis
contend
87
, but that we also think in pictures or maps. According to Camp (160),
pictures have “high semantic density and syntactic complexity.” Moreover, Camp
says, pictures “have the ability to present lots of information simultaneously in a
compact way.” This, she says, makes picture-thoughts and word-thoughts better
suited for different cognitive tasks. For example, we are likely to reason in word-
thoughts but not picture-thoughts, because reasoning would be too cognitively
demanding otherwise.

87
See especially Jerry Fodor (1987) and Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn (1988)
79
But if Camp is right, then it might be plausible to think that picturing T as N;
that is, bringing an image of a scenario in which a person performs an act of
torturing an innocent child for the fun of it to mind, is the best we can do to
conceive of such a scenario. This would be to say that we are capable of
conceiving of T as N, or conceiving of a completely naturalistically described
scenario in which a person performs an act of torturing an innocent child for the
fun of it, insofar as we are capable of visualizing it. In conceiving of this scenario,
we would be holding an image of it at the forefront of our minds in introspection.
How does this help? It doesn’t, in itself. But it might if we borrow another idea
from Phenomenal Concept Strategists. Or at least, if we borrow an idea from
Phenomenal Concept Strategists like Brian Loar (1990) and Janet Levin (2006)
who maintain that phenomenal concepts are Recognitional Type-Demonstrative
concepts. Loar and Levin hold that phenomenal concepts are concepts that we
acquire via introspection, and deploy in recognizing phenomenal experiences as
another one of those (pointing in) kinds of experiences.
Suppose that the concept GNORW is similarly recognitional, in that we acquire it
in virtue of our recognitional capacities, and deploy it in response to recognized
stimuli. It could be that in picturing T as N; that is, in bringing an image of an act
of torturing an innocent child for the fun of it to mind in introspection, Winnow
would then deploy GNORW in virtue of recognizing the image. It could be that
deploying GNORW is not totally unlike deploying concepts like ELLIPSE, SQUARE,
PARALLEL, RELATIVE SIZE or other seemingly recognitional concepts that we
deploy upon the recognition of visual stimuli.
88

But if so, then Winnow would be deploying GNORW while desiring not to do
whatever is gnorw, since Winnow has had thoughts about wrongness over the
course of her life. Thus, on LUNCH, Winnow would ipso facto count as
conceiving of T as wrong. In other words, on the assumption that Winnow has
had some thoughts about wrongness over the course of her life, on the assumption
that imagining T as N involves picturing T as N, and on the assumption that
GNORW is a recognitional concept, LUNCH can account for the difficulty of
conceiving of failures of supervenience in moral philosophy.

88
Since much of our normative thinking seems to occur “offline,” so to speak, from the armchair,
the analogy with visual-recognitional concepts can’t be too tight.
80
Conclusion
I began this chapter with the observation that insofar as I defend a normative
analogue of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy, it looks like I am committed to
saying either that the Phenomenal Concept Strategy fails to explain why failures
of supervenience of phenomenal properties on physical properties are easy to
conceive, or that the normative analogue of it that I defend doesn’t predict that
failures of supervenience of normative properties on natural properties are easy to
conceive.
I set out to establish the second disjunct. After showing that NTH and NCH can
explain why at least some failures of supervenience of normative properties on
natural properties are difficult to conceive, I argued that my version of Hybridism
about normative concepts – LUNCH – can offer the same kind of explanation.
However, we saw that carrying out such an explanation isn’t straightforward.
Nevertheless, I argued that one way to do so might be to package my view with
Camp’s claim that we sometimes think in pictures or maps and the
Loarian/Levinian idea that the concept GNORW is a recognitional concept. We
also saw that this package of claims appears to provide a better account than an
account on offer from Hills. In the next and final chapter of this dissertation, I’ll
attempt to defuse a third high-level objection to Reductivism that purports to
show that no reductive thesis could be true.

81
5. Phenomenal, Mathematical, and Normative Concepts
In Part 1 (Chapters 1 and 2) of this dissertation, I offered a response to a high-
level objection to Reductivism that I call the Dispensability Objection. In Part 2
(Chapters 3 and 4), I responded to another high-level objection to Reductivism
that I call the Sense of Incredibility Objection. In this chapter (Chapter 5), which
constitutes Part 3, I will offer a response to one more high-level objection to
Reductivism that is known as the Normativity Objection. Like the Dispensability
Objection and Sense of Incredibility Objection, the Normativity Objection
purports to show that no reductive thesis concerning the nature of normative
properties could be true. Like these objections, too, the Normativity Objection
employs premises concerning the nature of normative concepts in purporting to
establish this ambitious metaphysical claim concerning normative properties. In
the end, we’ll see that the Normativity Objection provides as little reason to doubt
Reductivism as the other two preceding it.
Twenty years ago, in “Reasons and Motivation,” (1997: 121) Derek Parfit began
introducing his distinctive brand of Primitivism in moral philosophy, a package of
Realist commitments in the tradition of Robust Realism on which, roughly,
normativity is neither conceptually nor metaphysically fully analyzable in terms of
non-normative concepts or non-normative metaphysical entities, respectively. He
also set himself an agenda for defending such a view. In addition to shouldering
the burden of answering several objections, Parfit thought that it was incumbent
to argue against rival views, including alternative brands of Realism (ibid) like
Reductivism. Among the many criticisms that he begins to develop in the article,
Parfit introduces one that is highly provocative, the heart of which is on display in
the quote below.
“Reductive views can be both nonanalytical and true when, and because,
the relevant concepts leave open certain possibilities, between which we
must choose on nonconceptual grounds. But many other possibilities are
conceptually excluded. Thus it was conceptually possible that heat should
turn out to be molecular kinetic energy. But heat could not have turned
out to be a shade of blue, or a medieval king. In the same way, while it
may not be conceptually excluded that experiences should turn out to be
neurophysiological events, experiences could not turn out to be patterns
of behaviour, or stones, or irrational numbers. Similar claims apply, I
believe, to [Reductivism].” (1997: 122)
In this passage, Parfit seems to be suggesting that sheer competence with
normative concepts allows us to see that no reductive view about the full
analyzability of normative properties in terms of non-normative properties could
82
be true. This is a striking suggestion. It would be nothing short of remarkable if
normative conceptual competence alone were sufficient for determining that every
reductive thesis about the metaphysics of normativity is “conceptually excluded.”
Yet as far as I can tell, Parfit’s suggestion, at least as he presents it in this passage,
has never received any explicit and focused attention. Nor has there ever been
such attention directed at similar remarks Parfit made nine years later in his
article “Normativity” (2006). This began to change, however, when Parfit went on
to reproduce these ideas in the second volume of his manuscript On What Matters
(2011), under the heading of the “Normativity Objection,” the core idea of which
is below.
"Of the reductive views that are both plausible and interesting, most are
not analytical. But these views must still be constrained by the relevant
concepts. These views are not analytical because the relevant concepts
leave open various possibilities, between which we must decide on
nonconceptual grounds. Many other possibilities are, however,
conceptually excluded. Thus, on a wider pre-scientific version of the
concept of heat, it was conceptually possible that heat should turn out to
be molecular kinetic energy, or should instead turn out to be, or to
involve, a substance, as the phlogiston theory claimed. But heat could not
have turned out to be a shade of blue, or a medieval king. And if we
claimed that rivers were sonnets, or that experiences were stones, we
could not defend these claims by saying that they were not intended to be
analytic, or conceptual truths. Others could rightly reply that, given the
meaning of these claims, they could not possibly be true. This, I believe,
is the way in which, though much less obviously, [Reductivism] could
not be true. (2011: 325)
As we can see, Parfit again puts forward the idea, nearly verbatim, that our
competence with normative concepts alone “excludes” reductive theses. It would
seem, too, that the third time’s a charm, since this particular reproduction of his
idea has been met with several close commentaries. In particular, as I’ll discuss in
the first section of this chapter, David Copp (2012) persuasively argues that the
Normativity Objection is at best question begging, at least as Parfit explicitly
presents it, and Patrick Fleming (2015) carefully shows that other reconstructions
of the argument ultimately provide proponents of Reductivism with little reason
to give up on their view.
But such criticisms did not deter Parfit from again reproducing the Normativity
Objection in the third volume of On What Matters (forthcoming), before his
83
unfortunate and untimely passing.
89
However, I will argue in Section 1 that Parfit
makes no mistake in continuing to advance the Normativity Objection. For
Copp’s and Fleming’s criticisms, while on target, do not cast doubt on an
important idea that might serve as the heart of Parfit’s worries about Reductivism.
This is not to suggest any fault on the part of Copp and Fleming, as Parfit’s
presentation of the Normativity Objection is compressed, as we can see above.
90

Nevertheless, Parfit’s presentation of the objection points toward a line of
criticism of Reductivism that is not obviously unviable. Indeed, as I’ll show in
Section 2, it is a line of criticism that plays an important role in debates in the
philosophy of mind regarding the nature of phenomenal concepts and in the
general theory of concepts regarding the nature of conceptual analysis. However,
in Section 3, I will ultimately conclude that the Normativity Objection has no
dialectical force against Reductive Realists.

1 The Normativity Objection, Introduced
1.1 Copp and Fleming on the Normativity Objection
According to Parfit, the nature of normative concepts is such that it is possible to
reflect on them to reveal that no reductive thesis concerning the metaphysical
nature of normative properties could be true. The possibility, for example, that the
normative property of being wrong is fully analyzable in terms of the non-
normative property of failing to maximize pleasure is “conceptually excluded” by
the normative concept WRONG, on this line of thought.
It might sound surprising to hear that our competence with normative concepts is
sufficient to rule out the possibility of not just one reductive thesis like this one,

89
"I have just stated the simplest and most straightforward objection to Normative Naturalism.
According to this
Normativity Objection: Irreducibly normative, reason-implying claims could not, if they were true,
state normative facts that were also natural facts.
These two kinds of fact are, I believe, in two different, non-overlapping categories. There are
many such different categories. It could not, for example, be a physical or legal fact that 7 X 8 =
56, nor could it be a legal or mathematical fact that galaxies rotate, nor could it be a physical or
mathematical fact that perjury is a crime. As these examples suggest, it would not be surprising if
no natural facts, such as causal, psychological, or sociological facts, could also be irreducibly
normative, reason-implying facts." (Parfit forthcoming: 55). All references to Parfit’s forthcoming
volume of On What Matters are to the January 31
st
2017 draft.
90
Copp (2012: 47) rightly characterizes it as “extremely thin”.
84
but all reductive theses in moral philosophy. After all, while it is perhaps plausible
to think that reflecting on normative concepts could reveal the falsity of some or
even all Analytic Reductivist theses
91
, or theses on which normative concepts are
fully analyzable in terms of non-normative concepts, it is much less obvious how
such reflection could reveal the falsity of Non-Analytic reductive theses that
principally concern not the nature of normative concepts but rather the nature of
normative properties. Reflecting on the normative concept WRONG might reveal
that it isn’t fully analyzable in terms of the non-normative concept FAILING TO
MAXIMIZE PELASURE, but how could it also reveal that the normative property of
being wrong is not fully analyzable in terms of the non-normative property of
failing to maximize pleasure?
Parfit suggests an answer. According to him, as we saw above, reductive theses are
Non-Analytic in virtue of the fact that the normative concepts constituting them
“leave open various [metaphysical] possibilities, between which we must decide on
non-conceptual grounds.” (2011: 325) Yet, Parfit says, there are various
metaphysical possibilities that are “conceptually excluded” by the normative
concepts constituting such theses. To illustrate this idea, Parfit appeals to an
analogy involving the concept HEAT. He points out that while it does not rule out
the metaphysical possibility that heat is the physical property of being mean
kinetic energy or the metaphysical possibility that heat is a substance, as
proponents of the phlogiston theory once held, the concept HEAT does rule out
the metaphysical possibility of it being a “shade of blue” or a “medieval king.”
This claim is as plausible as it is colorful, at least on the face of it.
Copp agrees. He writes, “It is plausible that the concept of heat rules out the
possibility that heat is a cabbage or a king.” (2012: 47) Indeed, Copp agrees with
Parfit that normative concepts rule out various metaphysical possibilities in just
this way, writing “that it is plausible that the concept of rightness rules out the
possibility that rightness is a rocket or a mountain lion or that it is the property of
being a yellow rose.”
But Copp stops short of agreeing with Parfit’s claim that such considerations rule
out the possibility of any reductive thesis. According to Copp, Parfit hasn’t given
proponents of Reductivism any reason to think that it follows from the fact that
the normative concept RIGHT rules out the particular possibility that rightness is a

91
Plausibly, however, as Stephen Finlay (2014) argues, it is not the case that such reflection could
rule out all analytic reductive theses.
85
rocket that it also rules out every other reductive possibility, like that rightness is
not conforming to standards that enable societies to meet their needs, as Copp
(2007) has argued elsewhere, or that rightness is some other reductive property
that we have yet to pin down. Copp rightly observes that, at least as Parfit
presents it, the Normativity Objection falls far short of establishing that no
reductive thesis about the metaphysical nature of normative properties could be
true.
Fleming (2015) shares Copp’s assessment. He goes further, too, by suggesting
that Parfit’s focus on concepts is a red herring. To see this, Fleming invites us to
reconsider Parfit’s analogy with the concept SONNET. Fleming suggests that we
do not need to appeal to the nature of the concept SONNET to understand how we
know that sonnets are not rivers. Instead, according to Fleming, all we have to do
is appeal to the metaphysical nature of the properties of being a sonnet and being
a river, and Leibniz’s Law. Sonnets have properties that rivers lack. For example,
it is possible to recite a sonnet, whereas it is not possible to recite a river. So,
sonnets are not rivers. This suggests that if the Normativity Objection is to have
any chance in succeeding, that we have to understand it in terms of failures of
Leibniz’s Law between normative properties and other candidate kinds of
reductive properties, not in terms of concepts ruling out various metaphysical
possibilities.
92

On behalf of Parfit, Fleming (2015: 424) sets out to identify a mismatch between
features of normative properties and features of any reductive candidate class of
properties, such as the reductive candidate class of properties that figure in
explanations from the empirical sciences, so-called “natural” properties. Following
David Enoch, Fleming explores the idea that normative “truths” (facts, entities)
appear to be capable of answering practical questions about how to act in ways
that natural truths do not. On the face of it, for example, both the natural fact
that you desire not to experience pain and the normative fact that experiencing
pain would be bad for you appear to be capable of answering the practical
question of whether you should avoid pain. However, Fleming suggests that a
proponent of the Normativity Objection could say that the natural fact that you
desire not to experience pain is arbitrary in a way that the normative fact that it
would be bad for you to experience it is not. Unlike the badness of pain, it just so
happens that you desire not to experience pain. Hence, natural facts are not
capable of answering practical questions, or as we might put it, normative facts

92
Fleming is here following Schroeder (2005)
86
but not natural facts have the property of guiding decisions. And by Leibniz’s Law,
it follows that natural facts are not normative facts. Or so at least it might on this
reading of the Normativity Objection.
But this version of the objection suffers from a number of problems, one of which
Fleming effectively highlights. Fleming suggests that it is hard to understand the
claim that natural facts are “arbitrary” as anything but the claim that natural facts
are contingent. Yet it is far from obvious why the contingency of natural facts
would make them incapable of answering practical questions. The fact that you
desire not to experience pain seems to settle the question of whether to avoid
experiencing pain just fine.
Fleming’s response to this version of the Normativity Objection is compelling.
But there are even more fundamental problems with the objection. Firstly, valiant
though his effort on behalf of Parfit might be, Fleming appears to follow Enoch
into what we might call a level-confusion. If there is such a property as the
property of guiding decision, it is plausibly a property of normative concepts, not
normative facts (properties, states of affairs, etc.). After all, “questions”, including
practical ones, seem to belong the category of speech acts. So, even if normative
but not non-normative concepts possess such a property, Leibniz’s Law isn’t
going to imply the metaphysical conclusion that Parfit wants.
Secondly, as Fleming rightly emphasizes, the Normativity Objection purports to
show that no reductive thesis about the metaphysical nature of normative
properties could be true, before we ever sit down to do the hard work of
evaluating particular versions of such theses. But even if we run a Leibniz’s Law
version of the objection at the metaphysical level, and this is something that
Fleming does not appear to appreciate, it seems like there is no way to guarantee
that a candidate reductive property lacks the property of guiding choice, or any
other alleged feature of normative properties, for that matter, without evaluating
particular reductive theses. This interpretation of the Normativity Objection does
not seem capable of securing Parfit’s ambition of establishing that no reductive
thesis could be true from our competence with normative concepts alone.
But if it is right to think that this reading of the Normativity Objection fails for
this reason, namely, because it does not allow the objection to yield the result that
no reductive thesis could be true in advance of evaluating every particular
reductive thesis, then it might be that Parfit’s original conceptual construal of the
objection really is the most plausible way to frame it, at least if we take on board a
87
few broad tenets of classical conceptual analysis, including a version of the
Definitionalist assumption that concepts fulfill their referential functions by
encoding necessary and sufficient conditions for something’s falling within their
extension, and the Essentialist assumption that the structure of concepts mirror
the structure of the entities they pick out.
93
After all, it is hard to see how else we
could show that no reductive thesis could be true immediately and without
investigation into particular reductive theses without building the falsity of
Reductivism into the very nature of normative concepts.
Of course, at the outset of this chapter, we observed that it would be remarkable if
we could enlist this kind of support against Reductivism. Yet this might have
been something of an overreaction. As we’ll see in the next section, many
philosophers of mind argue that the nature of phenomenal concepts is surprisingly
rich – rich enough to perhaps adjudicate debates about the metaphysical nature of
consciousness. And if that’s right in the domain of the philosophy of mind, it
could also be right in moral philosophy.

2 Phenomenal Concepts
2.1 The Structure of Phenomenal Concepts
In the philosophy of mind, Physicalism about phenomenal consciousness is the
view that, roughly, necessarily, phenomenal properties are fully analyzable in
terms of physical properties. It’s the idea that a property like the phenomenal
property of being in pain is fully analyzable in terms of the physical property of
the neural firing of C-fibers. As far as views in philosophy go, Physicalism is an
ontologically mundane one, and purportedly attractive precisely in virtue of it. It’s
a view that trades in familiar entities from the empirical sciences. Nevertheless,
there are many influential objections to Physicalism, including the Conceivability
Objection, as we saw in the previous chapter, and the Knowledge Argument,
whose popularity is chiefly attributable to Frank Jackson (1982). The force of such
objections have had a profound influence on the shape of contemporary
Physicalist views. Unlike old-school Physicalists
94
, who denied not only that there
are phenomenal properties over and above physical properties but also that there
are phenomenal concepts over and above physical concepts, many contemporary

93
See Laskowski and Finlay (2017)
94
See Armstrong (1968), Dretske (1995), Harman (1990).
88
Physicalists embrace the idea that there is a special class of phenomenal concepts
in our conceptual repertoire, in an effort to accommodate many of the intuitions
that drive the most powerful Anti-Physicalist objections.
For example, in response to the Conceivability Objection, as we’ve seen, many
contemporary Physicalist proponents of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy deny
the premise that if zombies are conceivable then they are metaphysically possible.
A Physicalist proponent of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy might claim, for
example, that even though the phenomenal property of being in pain is fully
analyzable in terms of the physical property of the firing of C-fibers, it is possible
to conceive of a zombie not experiencing pain because we not only have
phenomenal concepts in addition to possessing physical concepts, but that there
are no analytic connections between them that are a priori accessible to us. There
is no physical description that we can a priori discern connecting the phenomenal
concept PAIN with the physical concept C-FIBERS FIRING, and there is no
phenomenal description that we can a priori discern connecting C-FIBERS FIRING
to PAIN. As such, it is easy to deploy these concepts without recognizing that they
pick out the same property. Zombies are conceivable, on this response, but this
doesn’t imply anything about their metaphysical possibility. So, Physicalism lives
to see another day.
However, according to Stephen Yablo (2005), the claim that there are no a priori
connections that are a priori discernable between phenomenal and physical
concepts is problematic. While such a claim might accurately predict that it is easy
to conceive of zombies, it also seems to inaccurately predict that genuinely
inconceivable scenarios are conceivable. For example, if there are no a priori
connections that are a priori discernable between phenomenal and physical
concepts, then it would be possible to imagine rocks experiencing pain. But it is
not possible to imagine rocks experiencing pain, or at the very least it is much
more difficult to do so than it is to imagine zombies not experiencing pain. Thus,
the claim that there are no a priori connections that are a priori discernable
between phenomenal and physical concepts overgeneralizes, or at the very least
mischaracterizes the results of our imaginative capacities.
In response to this kind of worry, and with motivation from more general
considerations about the so-called “revelatory” nature of phenomenal concepts,
some Physicalist proponents of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy suggest that
there might be analytic connections between phenomenal and physical concepts
that are a priori available to us – enough connections available to us to imply the
89
inconceivability of rocks experiencing pain but not so many to also imply the
inconceivability of zombies.
In addition to phenomenal concepts being introspectively derived Recognitional
Type-Demonstrative concepts, Janet Levin suggests, following Thomas Nagel
(2000), that there might also be analytic necessary conditions for the application
of phenomenal concepts built into them. On this line of thought, phenomenal
concepts might be such that we acquire and deploy them by recognizing an
experience in introspection as something like INTERNAL STATE WHICH FEELS
LIKE THAT (pointing in). Moreover, phenomenal concepts might have more
structure and substance than even this – they might take the following shape –
INTERNAL STATE OF BIOLOGICAL ORGANISMS WHICH FEELS LIKE THAT. On a
first pass, at least, the inclusion of the ‘biological organism’ clause would seem to
imply the inconceivability of rocks experiencing pain, while at the same time the
demonstrative ‘that’ clause would build enough opacity into the concept to allow
the conceivability of zombies.
Given that the main goal of this chapter is to explore the nature of normative
concepts in assessing Parfit’s Normativity Objection, it would take us too deep
into the philosophy of mind to adjudicate the ultimate success of Levin’s plausible
response to Yablo. Nevertheless, Levin’s ideas are highly suggestive. At first blush,
recall, it was hard to see how it could be, as Parfit hints, that normative
conceptual competence alone is sufficient for ruling out the metaphysical
possibility of reductive theses. But now we have a clue. It could be that there are
analytic necessary conditions on the application of normative concepts, awareness
of which follows from mere competence with normative concepts.
This wouldn’t be an entirely happy result for Parfit, since it would mean
abandoning his commitment to full-blown Primitivism about normative concepts,
in favor of a brand of quasi-Definitionalism about normative concepts, on which
normative concepts occupy a space between the Primitivist idea that they aren’t
definable at all and the classical Definitionalist idea that they encode necessary
and sufficient conditions for their application. It would mean Parfit would have a
commitment to a Neoclassical view about normative concepts, where they encode
only necessary conditions for their application – conditions of which we’re
familiar with in virtue of mere conceptual competence, and that are articulable via
lexical semantic theorizing.
95
But this seems like a small concession to make – one

95
See Margolis and Laurence (1999) and Leben (2015)
90
that is well worth it to get an argument for the ambitious conclusion that no
reductive thesis concerning the metaphysical nature of normative properties could
be true off the ground.
Of course, while recent theorizing about the nature of phenomenal concepts
points toward a path to the idea that normative concepts encode necessary
conditions for their application that rule out all reductive theses, it’s not entirely
clear exactly where the path begins. But one place it might be useful to look is an
influential idea from Richard Price, which Mark Schroeder (2014) recently
explores, and Thomas Scanlon (2014) and Knut Olav Skarsaune (2015) defend.
It’s the idea that the domain of moral philosophy is a lot like the domain of
mathematics, as far as their modal status. To keep discussion sharp, in the next
section, I’ll focus on Skarsaune’s articulation and defense of the idea, before
turning back to the Normativity Objection.

3 The Normativity Objection, Redux
3.1 Normative and Mathematical Concepts
Robust Realists famously have trouble responding to the so-called Supervenience
Objection, which in the hands of Simon Blackburn (1971, 1985) amounts to the
challenge of explaining why it is analytic that normative properties supervene on
natural properties. To illustrate, Skarsaune observes that inferences from
(1) a is good,
and
(2) b is naturalistically exactly like a,
to
(3) b is good,
appear analytic, and hence “exemplify” the following two principles:
Strong normative-descriptive supervenience: for all possible x, y: if x
and y are alike in every naturalistic respect, then x and y are alike in
every normative respect.
Weak normative-descriptive supervenience: for all x, y in the same
possible world: if x and y are alike in every naturalistic respect, then
x and y are alike in every normative respect.
91
Blackburn’s complaint is that Robust Realists cannot explain why such
supervenience principles exemplified by inferential entailments between thoughts
like those above are analytic. This is because, according to Blackburn, Robust
Realists’ commitment to the unanalyzability of normative concepts prevents them
from pointing to any feature of them that could explain why such thoughts are
true in virtue of their nature. This allegedly forces Robust Realists to make the
unpalatable claim that it is simply a further basic fact about the nature of
normative concepts that they behave in this way.
To answer the challenge of the Supervenience Objection, Skarsaune begins with
the observation that, grammatically, normative predicates can apply to both
particulars and to kinds. For example, it is possible to felicitously claim not only
that the Against Malaria Foundation is good but that effective charitable giving is
good. While it is possible to understand the application of normative predicates to
kinds as covertly quantificational claims applying to particulars (e.g. analyzing the
claim that effective charitable giving is good as something like all or typical
instances of effective charitable giving are good), Skarsaune suggests that at least
some appearances really are as they seem, such that at least some uses of
normative predicates genuinely apply to kinds. According to Skarsaune, the claim
that effective charitable giving is good amounts the claim that the act-kind
effective charitable giving is itself good, and not just the claim that instances of
such an act-kind are good.
Next, Skarsaune suggests that Robust Realists should understand normative
claims about particulars in terms of normative claims about kinds, by
distinguishing, say, the normative concept GOOD PAR as a complex concept that
applies to particulars, and which is analyzable in terms of the primitive normative
concept GOOD KIN that applies to kinds. He calls the resulting view Cognitive
Universalism, and states it in the following way, where the following variable “K”
is taken to range over naturalistic kinds:
Cognitive Universalism: good par(x) ⟷def ∃K [token(x,K) &
good kin(K)].
In other words, according to Skarsaune, a particular is GOOD PAR just in case it is a
token of a GOOD KIN kind.
96
Skarsaune then uses Cognitive Universalism to answer

96
Skarsaune focuses on GOOD, but he seems to think all normative predicates admit of particular
and kind based reading. Daniel Fogal (2016) makes a similar suggestion with respect to the
concept REASON.
92
the challenge of Blackburn’s Supervenience Objection. Return to the entailment
from
(1) a is good,
and
(2) b is naturalistically like a,
to
(3) b is good.
From (1), and Cognitive Universalism, Skarsaune says, it follows “that there is
some kind, let us call it “L”, such that a is a token of L, and L is good kin.” Then
from (2), and the idea of a kind and the idea of a tokening-relation, it follows, he
says, “that b is a token of exactly the same kinds as a. So in particular, b is a token
of L, which...is good kin, and so by [Cognitive Universalism, (3)] b is good.”
It seems that Skarsaune’s suggestion improves the situation for Robust Realists.
Sure, Robust Realists still claim that at least some normative concepts (GOOD KIN)
are unanalyzable. But by adding to this that some of them are analyzable
(GOOD PAR), Robust Realists no longer seem to have to say, at least, that weak
supervenience is a brute conceptual necessity, since it seems to fall out of the
definition of GOOD PAR.
After presenting independent linguistic evidence from our uses of ordinary
naturalistic words to suggest that distinguishing GOOD KIN and GOOD PAR in the way
that he does is not ad hoc, Skarsaune sets out to then show that his approach can
explain how claims exemplifying the strong supervenience principle from above
are also analytic. To begin, take the claim that
(4) if Ted is good, then it is impossible to be just like Ted in every
naturalistic respect and not be good.
According to Skarsaune, Cognitive Universalism doesn’t itself predict that (4) is
analytic. Yes, the antecedent entails that there is some kind T such that Ted is a
token of T and T is good kin, and the consequent seems to say that no one in any
world is T but not good par. Yet it doesn’t follow from T’s being good kin in the
actual world, Skarsaune says, that T is good kin in all worlds. Cognitive
Universalism then seems to allow there to be people that are T but not GOOD PAR if
there is a world where T is not good kin. We need to pair Cognitive Universalism
with one further claim to show how claims like (4) exemplifying strong
93
supervenience are analytic. To warm up to the further claim, Skarsaune invites us
to consider mathematical claims like the following:
(5) 47 is prime today, but on Thursday it will not be.
According to Skarsaune, anyone who would claim (5) would seem to exhibit
conceptual confusion – they would not appear to understand the mathematical
concept PRIME. While claims involving the predicate ‘prime’ accept tense
syntactically, such claims, Skarsaune says, do not seem to accept tense
semantically. He then takes this to suggest that PRIME is a “tenseless” concept,
from which it is analytic that, say, if a number is prime, then it is always prime.
The result is that if you are competent with the concept PRIME, according to
Skarsaune, then you know that claims involving it are not of the sort that we
evaluate with respect to particular times. Skarsaune attributes this line of thought
to Kit Fine (2005), and in his words, the concept PRIME is “unworldly.” If you are
competent with it, then you know that claims involving the concept PRIME are
not evaluated with respect to any particular worlds. True claims involving such a
concept are so in virtue of holding independently of every world, not in every
world.
According to Skarsaune, an explanation of why claims that exemplify strong
supervenience are analytic like (4) falls out of the combination of Cognitive
Universalism and the claim that GOOD KIN is unworldly. By Cognitive
Universalism, from the antecedent it follows that Ted is a token of some kind T
such that T is good kin. Since GOOD KIN is unworldly, T is good kin, period. Cognitive
Universalism then establishes the consequent, because any possible thing that is T
is also good par. This seems to explain the analyticity of claims exemplifying Strong
Supervenience.
It seems, on Skarsaune’s view, that at least some normative concepts are almost
completely primitive, namely, those like GOOD KIN that apply to kinds. I say ‘almost
completely’, because it is an important feature of such concepts that reflecting on
them reveals that they are unworldly. Taking this idea, we can perhaps claim that
anyone competent with a normative concept like GOOD KIN understands that claims
involving it are not made true by anything in worlds. Sure, we have to check with
the actual world to determine whether the claim that the Against Malaria
Foundation is good, since it is a particular claim about a token of the act-kind of
effective charitable giving. But we do not need to first check with any world to
determine whether the claim that effective charitable giving is good is true. This
94
leaves us without much to say about why the act-kind of effective charitable
giving is good, but as Skarsaune points out, Robust Realists have always afforded
pride of place to first-order normative judgments of just this sort, and it doesn’t
seem like much of a theoretical cost to say that this is where normative
explanations come to an end. Why is the act-kind effective charitable giving
good? Why is agony bad? They just are good and bad kinds. That’s all we can say
about them.
It is also worth highlighting that Skarsaune’s picture of how the nature of
normative concepts patterns with the nature of mathematical concepts dovetails
quite well with analogies that Parfit has been hinting at between these concepts
over the course of the last twenty years, a representative passage of which is below.
“Since normative facts are in their own distinctive category, there is no close
analogy for their irreducibility to natural facts. One comparison would be with
proposed reductions of necessary truths—such as the truths of logic or mathematics—to
certain kinds of contingent truths. Given the depth of the difference between these
kinds of truth, we can be confident, I assume, that such reductions fail. There is
a similar difference, I believe, between normative and natural truths.” (Parfit
1997: 122, emphasis mine)
Finally, Skarsaune’s answers to Blackburn’s Supervenience Objection allows us to
see how it might be that the core idea of Parfit’s Normativity Objection is viable.
According to Parfit, mere competence with normative concepts allows us to
discern that no reductive thesis could be true. Following recent theorizing about
the nature of phenomenal concepts, and Skarsaune, we can say that the
explanation of this is that unworldly is a necessary application condition on at least
some normative concepts, which anyone competent with them is in a position to
see. If, however, it is part of the nature of such normative concepts that they are
unworldly, and the structure of the normative entities that these concepts pick out
at least partially mirror the structure of these concepts, then it seems to follow
that at least some normative entities are also unworldly. This sounds a lot like the
claim that no reductive thesis could be true of at least some normative entities.
It seems, then, that Skarsaune’s view about the nature of normative concepts
allows us to see how Parfit’s Normativity Objection could be correct. If at least
some normative concepts have a condition like unworldly built into them as a
condition for their application, then reflecting on them would reveal that at least
some normative properties are immune to reduction. In the next and final section,
however, I will argue that even this version of Parfit’s Normativity Objection
doesn’t give Reductive Realists anything to sweat about.
95
3.2 Why Reductive Realists Still Need Not Worry
Our primary concern in this chapter is whether Parfit’s Normativity Objection
spells trouble for Reductive Realists. In attempting to show that it might, we’ve
been appealing to recent theorizing according to which the domain of normativity
is much like the domain of mathematics. In particular, we’ve been using
Skarsaune’s mathematics-inspired account of the nature of normative of concepts
in service of strengthening Parfit’s Normativity Objection. On Skarsaune’s view,
the normative concept GOOD kin is not fully analyzable, but analyses of it suggest
that it has the analytic necessary application condition unworldly built into it. If
we make the Essentialist assumption that the nature of normative properties
mirror the nature of the normative concepts that pick them out, it follows on
Skarsaune’s view that there are unworldly normative properties. Since the core of
Parfit’s Normativity Objection is just the idea that competent users of normative
concepts can tell, on reflection, that no reductive thesis could be true, it looks like
Skarsaune’s view can help secure Parfit the conclusion that he wants.
Of course, if Skarsaune’s picture of normative concepts is true, then this alone
would be bad news for Reductive Realists. One important question, then, from
the line of reasoning on display above is whether Skarsaune is right. But another,
arguably more relevant question given the primary aim of this chapter is whether
Skarsaune’s view provides Parfit with any dialectical leverage with the Normativity
Objection over Reductive Realists. Before arguing that it doesn’t, I’ll first rehearse
some familiar reasons to think a view like Skarsaune’s can’t be right.
According to Skarsaune, something like an unworldly condition is built into
normative concepts. And as we’ve seen, if Essentialism about normative concepts
is true, then it follows that at least some normative properties lack worldly truth-
conditions. But if some normative properties really are unworldly, then it’s far
from clear how our corresponding normative concepts come to refer to them.
After all, if the normative property of being good kin is unworldly, then it doesn’t
seem like the kind of property that is causally efficacious. And if such a property
isn’t causally efficacious, then we can’t appeal to standard views of reference
determination, like causal-nomological accounts on which our concepts pick out
what they do in virtue of the causal-nomological relations they stand in with
properties.
97
Relatedly, if such normative properties are causally inefficacious in

97
In Laskowski and Finlay (2017), we offer a similar objection to Primitivist views of normative
concepts that are packaged with the claim that normative properties are causally inefficacious for
other reason (i.e. not because of their unworldliness).
96
virtue of their unworldliness, then it’s not clear how it could be that we acquire
such concepts, since standard accounts of concept acquisition also tend to be
causal-nomological in kind.
98

Turning now to whether Parfit’s Normativity Objection has any leverage against
Reductive Realists, in light of a view of normative concepts like Skarsaune’s. We
can attempt to adjudicate this issue, by starting with the following question: Is
there any reason why we ought to accept Skarsaune’s view of normative concepts
over alternative views? Skarsaune suggests that one reason to do so is that his view
alone captures the epistemology of normative theorizing. In particular, Skarsaune
suggests that the direction of epistemic justification in normative theorizing is
distinct, and that his view is uniquely suited to capture its distinctness.
On Skarsaune’s view, normative judgments about kinds play a privileged role – all
normative judgments bottom out in truth-conditions about kinds, since normative
judgments either purely concern kinds, in which case their truth-conditions
concern kinds, or they are mixed, involving both kinds and non-normative
elements, in which case it still looks like truth-conditions about kinds are part of
the picture. To see the role of normative judgments about kinds, Skarsaune invites
us to consider a paradigmatic instance of non-normative theorizing like the
following:
“(A) This bird sings in the morning and that bird sings in the
morning and yonder bird …—and come to think of it, they are all
robins! So it seems robins sing in the morning.”
According to Skarsaune, we do not carry out normative theorizing in this way,
which we can see by applying the kind of reasoning in (A) to the following
normative case:

98
Of course, at bottom, Skarsaune is following Fine in suggesting that normative concepts are
analogous to mathematical concepts. One way for Skarsaune to respond to these worries is to say,
then, that they are only serious problems for his view of normative concepts insofar as they are also
serious problems for similar accounts of mathematical concepts. But such a response is hardly
probative, as it merely raises the question of whether mathematical concepts are partners in guilt
or innocence. Since Reductionism is still a live option in the philosophy of mathematics, as
evidenced by Hale and Wright (2001), it’s far from obvious whether making such an appeal is
available to Skarsaune.

97
“(B) This act is wrong and that act is wrong and yonder act …—
and by golly, they are all sexual harassments! So it seems sexual
harassment is wrong.”
This comparison, Skarsaune suggests, highlights how the direction of epistemic
justification in non-normative reasoning is different from the direction of
epistemic justification in normative reasoning. In non-normative reasoning, we
move from judgments about particulars to judgments about kinds, whereas in
normative reasoning, we move from general normative judgments about kinds and
non-normative judgments about particulars to normative judgments about those
particulars.
According to Skarsaune, for example, a proponent of Benthamite Act
Utilitarianism would pair their general normative judgment that it is wrong to
perform actions that fail to maximize pleasure with their non-normative particular
judgment that the second US invasion of Iraq failed to maximize pleasure to make
the particular normative judgment that the second US invasion of Iraq is wrong,
and not the other way around. Since general normative judgments about kinds are
central to Cognitive Universalism, it looks well-positioned to capture the
epistemology of normative theory. This is reason to favor Cognitive Universalism.
Or so Skarsaune suggests.
Skarsaune is surely right that there is something off about the normative
reasoning on display above in (B). But the problem isn’t the direction of reasoning
from particular normative judgments to general judgments about normative kinds;
rather, the problem is the type of reasoning. And we can see this by comparing (B)
to (C) below:
(C) This act of catcalling seems wrong and seems to involve
making women feel unsafe and the mere objects of sexual
gratification and that act of propositioning a female employee for
sex seems wrong and seems to involve making women feel unsafe
and the mere objects of sexual gratification and yonder act …—
and by golly, they are all acts that involve making women feel
unsafe and mere objects of sexual gratification! So it seems sexual
harassment is wrong that what it is for such actions to be wrong is
for them to be actions that makes them feel unsafe and mere
objects of sexual gratification.
98
Unlike (B), (C) appears to exhibit correct normative reasoning. But the difference
between (B) and (C) isn’t the direction of reasoning. Instead, the difference is that
(C) begins with particular normative and non-normative judgments about cases
and concludes with a highly general but reductively constitutive claim about the
non-normative nature of a type of wrong action. Since the inclusion of this
constitutive claim seems to make all the difference, it seems that Skarsaune
misdiagnoses the problem with the reasoning in (B), which leads him to think
that his view alone can capture the epistemology of normative theorizing. But
Skarsaune’s view is not, as we can see, the only view that can do so.
At this point, we’ve seen some reasons to think that Skarsaune’s view of the
nature of normative concepts might be false, because it faces familiar problems
concerning reference determination and concept acquisition, and we’ve also seen
some reasons to think that there aren’t any advantages that distinctly accrue to his
view, because it isn’t uniquely suited to capture the epistemology of normative
theorizing. But let’s put these issues aside, and assume that Skarsaune’s view fares
about as well any Reductivist-friendly view of the nature of normative concepts,
like the sort of Hybrid view that I’ve been advancing in this dissertation. And now
let’s tackle the central question of this chapter directly: Does Skarsaune’s view of
normative concepts provide proponents of the Normativity Objection, like Parfit,
with any dialectical leverage against Reductive Realists?
It appears not, and there is an unexciting reason to think this, and an exciting one.
The unexciting reason is that the mere availability of a Nonreducivist-friendly
view of normative concepts like Skarsaune’s doesn’t force us into accepting such a
view. Without strong reason to go in for a view like Skarsaune’s it becomes very
easy to avoid a version of the Normativity Objection built upon one: Namely,
ditch such views for a Reductivist-friendly view of normative concepts.
The exciting reason is that the kind of view on offer from Skarsaune seems to
have a number of surprising affinities with Reductivist-friendly Hybrid views of
normative concepts. Again, on Skarsaune’s view, there is a distinction between
GOOD KIN and GOOD PAR, and claims involving the latter are analyzable in terms of
claims involving the former. To make the particular normative claim that the
Against Malaria Foundation is good is to say, roughly, that the Against Malaria
Foundation is a token of the good kin effective charitable organization. In other
words, the particular claim that the Against Malaria Foundation is good is one
that involves both a unworldly normative element (concerning effective charitable
organizations being good kin) and a worldly non-normative element (concerning
99
the Against Malaria Foundation). Of course, Hybridism is just the idea that
normative claims involve both cognitive (read: worldly) and non-cognitive (read:
unworldly) elements. So at a very high level of abstraction it seems like
Skarsaune’s view importantly overlaps with Hybridism in understanding particular
normative claims as involving a worldly element, and something else. But if it is a
live question whether this ‘something else’ should be understood from the
Reductivist-unfriendly perspective of the Robustly Realist or the Reductivist-
friendly perspective of the Noncognitivist, as it seems to be, then a proponent of
the Normativity Objection like Parfit can’t simply appeal to the nature of
normative concepts to construct an argument against Reductive Realism.
What makes this exciting is that, despite the seemingly deep disagreements
between Robust and Reductive Realists, advocates on both sides of the debate
appear to agree that the best views of normative concepts have a kind of hybrid
structure. This suggests that where the action is for further research is whether the
“unworldly” component of normative concepts should receive a Robustly Realist
or Noncognitivist treatment.

Conclusion
I began this chapter attempting to strengthen a provocative high-level objection
from Parfit on which our competence with normative concepts alone is sufficient
for determining that no reductive view could be true. By first looking to recent
theorizing about the nature of phenomenal concepts, we were able to see that
normative concepts might have enough structure to rule out reductive theses.
Then by looking to an influential line of thought in moral philosophy on vivid
display from Skarsaune, on which normative concepts are not unlike
mathematical concepts, we were then able to see that there really might be
something to the Normativity Objection, as Parfit has long suggested. But in the
end we saw that Reductivists need not worry about the Normativity Objection.

100
References

Arpaly, N. (2002). “Moral Worth”. Journal of Philosophy, 99 (5), 223–245.
Arpaly, N. and Schroeder, T. (2013). In Praise of Desire. Oxford University Press.
Ayer, A. (1936). Language, Truth, and Logic.
Balog, K. (2012). “Acquaintance and the Mind-Body Problem”. In C. Hill & S.
Gozzano (eds.), Identity Theory. Cambridge University Press
Balog, K. (2012). “In Defense of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy”. Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research 84 (1):1-23.
Balog, K. (2009). “Phenomenal Concepts”. In McLaughlin, Beckermann &
Walter (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind. Oxford University
Press.
Barry, M. (2007). “Realism, Rational Action, and the Humean Theory of
Motivation”. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10 , 231–42.
Bennett, E. (2011). “By Our Bootstraps”. Philosophical Perspectives 25 pp. 27-
41.
Blackburn, S. (1993). Essays in Quasi-Realism. Oxford University Press.
Boghossian, P. (2003). “Blind Reasoning”. Aristotelian Society Supplementary
Volume 77 (1):225–248.
Boghossian, P. (2014). “What is Inference?”. Philosophical Studies 169 (1):1-18.
Boisvert, D. (2008). “Expressive-Assertivism,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly
89(2): 169-203.
Boyd, R. (1988). “How to be a Moral Realist”. In G. Sayre-McCord (ed.), Essays
on Moral Realism. 181-228. Cornell University Press.
Brink, D. (1984). “Moral Realism and the Skeptical Arguments from
Disagreement and Queerness”. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 62: 111-25.
Brink, David. (1989). Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics. Cambridge
University Press.
101
Broome, J. (2012). “Comments on Boghossian”. Philosophical Studies 169
(1):19-25.
Camp, E. (2007). “Thinking with Maps”. Philosophical Perspectives 21 (1):145–
182.
Carlson, E. (1995). Consequentialism Reconsidered. Springer.
Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.
Oxford University Press.
Chang, R. (2013). “Grounding Practical Normativity: Going Hybrid”.
Philosophical Studies 164 pp. 163-187.
Copp, D. (2001). “Realist-Expressivism: A Neglected Option for Moral
Realism”. Social Philosophy and Policy 18.
Copp, D. (2007). Morality in a Natural World. Cambridge University Press.
Copp, D. (2012). “Normativity and Reasons: Five Arguments from Parfit Against
Normative Naturalism.” In Susana Nuccetelli and Gary Seay, eds., Ethical
Naturalism: Current Debates, 24-57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cowie, C. (2014). “A New Explanatory Challenge for Nonnaturalists”. Res
Philosophica 91 (4):661-679.
Crisp, R. (2015) The Cosmos of Duty. Oxford University Press.
Dancy, J. (2006). “Nonnaturalism.” In D. Copp (ed.) (2006). The Oxford
Handbook of Ethical Theory. Oxford University Press.
Darwall, S. (1983). Impartial Reason. Cornell University Press.
de Lazari-Radek, K. & Singer, P. (2014). The Point of View of the Universe:
Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics. Oxford University Press.
Dietz, A. (2016). “What We Together Ought to Do”. Ethics 126(4): 955-982.
Dreier, J. (1990) “Internalism and Speaker Relativism,” Ethics 101(1): 6-26.
Dunaway, B. (Manuscript). “The Metaphysical Conception of Realism”.
Available at
http://www.personal.umich.edu/~dunaway/MetaphysicalConception_MT2014.p
df
102
Enoch, D. (2011). Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism. Oxford
University Press.
Feldman, F. (1986). Doing the Best We Can: An Essay in Informal Deontic Logic. D.
Reidel Publishing Company.
Fine, K. (2012). “Guide to Ground”. In Fabrice Correia & Benjamin Schnieder
(eds.), Metaphysical Grounding. Cambridge University Press 37--80.
Finlay, S. (2014). Confusion of Tongues: A Theory of Normative Language. Oxford
University Press.
Fitzpatrick, W. (2008). “Robust Ethical Realism, Non-naturalism, and
Normativity.” Oxford Studies in Metaethics 3:159-205.
FitzPatrick, W. (2014). “Skepticism about Naturalizing Normativity: In Defense
of Ethical Nonnaturalism”. Res Philosophica 91 (4):559-588.
Fletcher, G. & Ridge, M. (2014). Having It Both Ways: Hybrid Theories and
Modern Metaethics. Oxford University Press.
Fodor, J. (1987). “Why There Still Has to Be a Language of Thought”. In
Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind. 135–154. MIT
Press.
Fodor, J. (1998). Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong. Oxford University
Press.
Fodor, J. and Pylyshyn, Z. (1988) “Connectionism and the Cognitive
Architecture of Mind”. Cognition 28, 3–71.
Forcehimes, A. (2015). “A Dilemma for Non‐Analytic Naturalism”. Pacific
Philosophical Quarterly 97 (1).
Gendler, T. (2006). “Imaginative Resistance Revisited”. In Shaun Nichols
(ed.), The Architecture of the Imagination. Oxford University Press. pp. 149-173.
Gibbard, A. (1965). “Rule-Utilitarianism: Merely an Illusory Alternative?”
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 43: 211-20.
Gibbard, A. (2003). Thinking How to Live. Harvard University Press.
Gibbard, A. (2014). Meaning and Normativity. Oxford University Press.
103
Goldman, H. (1976). “Dated Rightness and Moral Imperfection.” The
Philosophical Review, 85, 449–487.
Greenspan, P. (1978). “Oughts and Determinism: A Response to Goldman.” The
Philosophical Review, 87, 77–83.
Hacker, P. (2007). Human Nature: The Categorical Framework. Oxford University
Press.
Hare, R. (1952). The Language of Morals. Clarendon University Press.
Hay, R. (2013) “Hybrid Expressivism and the Analogy between Pejoratives and
Moral Language,” European Journal of Philosophy 21(3): 450-74.
Hay, R. (2014). “Attitudinal Requirements for Moral Thought and Language:
Noncognitive Type-Generality”. In Fletcher, G. & Ridge, M. (eds.) Having It
Both Ways: Hybrid Theories and Modern Metaethics. Oxford University Press.
Heathwood, C. (2013). “Reductionism in Ethics”. In Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The
International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Wiley.
Hill, C. (1997). “Imaginability, Conceivability, Possibility and the Mind-Body
Problem”. Philosophical Studies, 87, 61-85.
Hills, A. (2009). “Supervenience and Moral Realism”. In Alexander & Hannes
(eds.), Reduction, Abstraction, Analysis. 11—163. Ontos Verlag.
Hlobil, U. (Manuscript). “Inferential Force”.
Huemer, M. (2005). Ethical Intuitionism. Palgrave Macmillan.
Hurka, T. (2014). British Ethical Theorists from Sidgwick to Ewing. Oxford
University Press.
Jackson, F. and Pargetter, R. (1986). “Oughts, Options and Actualism.” The
Philosophical Review 95: 233-255.
Jackson, F. (1987). “Group Morality”. In J. J. C. Smart, Philip Pettit, Richard
Sylvan & Jean Norman (eds.), Metaphysics and Morality: Essays in Honour of J.J.C.
Smart. B. Blackwell.
Jackson, F. and Pettit, P. (1995) “Moral Functionalism and Moral Motivation,”
The Philosophical Quarterly 45(178): 20-40.
104
Jackson, F. (1998). From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis.
Oxford University Press.
Kagan, S. (1998). Normative Ethics. Monograph Collection.
Kamm, F. (1998). Morality, Mortality: Volume I: Death and Whom to Save From It.
Oxford University Press.
Kolodny, N. (2005). “Why Be Rational?”. Mind 114, 509–63.
Korsgaard , C. (2009). “The Activity of Reason”. Proceedings and Addresses of
the American Philosophical Association 83, 27–47.
Kripke, S. (1971). “Identity and Necessity”. In M.K. Munitz (ed.), Identity and
Individuation. New York University Press.
Laskowski, N. (2014). “How to Pull a Metaphysical Rabbit out of an End-
Relational Semantic Hat”. Res Philosophica 91 (4):589-607.
Laskowski, N. and Finlay, S. (2017) “Conceptual Analysis in Metaethics”. In
Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, eds. Tristram McPherson and David Plunkett.
Levin, J. (2006). “What is a Phenomenal Concept?”. In Alter & Walter
(eds.), Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on
Consciousness and Physicalism. Oxford University Press
Levin, J. (2008). “Taking Type-B Materialism Seriously”. Mind and Language 23
(4):402-425.
Loar, B. (1990). “Phenomenal States”. Philosophical Perspectives 4:81-108.
Loar, B. (1997) “Phenomenal States”. In N. Block, O. Flanagan & G. Güzeldere
(eds.), The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates. MIT Press.
Lycan, W. (1987) Consciousness. MIT Press.
MacAskill, W. (2016). “Normative Uncertainty as a Voting Problem”. Mind 125
(500):967-1004.
Machery, E. (2009) Doing Without Concepts. Oxford University Press.
Margolis, E. & Laurence, S. (2004). “Concepts”. In The Blackwell Guide to the
Philosophy of Mind, ed. T. A. Warfield and S. P. Stich, 190 213. Blackwell.
Margolis, E. & Laurence, S. (eds.) (1999). Concepts: Core Readings. MIT Press.
105
McCall, S. (1987). “Decision”. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (2):261 - 287.
Mcginn, C. (2014). “Reply”.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/06/19/brains-and-minds-exchange/
McHugh, C. and Way, J. (forthcoming). “Against the Taking
Condition”. Philosophical Issues.
McKeown‐Green, J.; Pettigrove, G. & Webster, A. (2015). “Conjuring Ethics
from Words”. Noûs 49 (1):71-93.
McMahan, J. (Forthcoming). “Torture and Method in Moral Philosophy”. In
Anderson, S. and Nussbaum, M. (eds.) Torture, Law, and War. University of
Chicago Press.
McPherson, T. (2008). “Metaethics & the Autonomy of Morality.” Philosophers'
Imprint 8 (6):1-16.
McPherson, T. (2009). “Unnatural Normativity? Critical Notice of Ralph
Wedgwood's Nature of Normativity”. Philosophical Books 50 (2):63-82.
McPherson, T. (2012). “Ethical Non-Naturalism and the Metaphysics of
Supervenience”. In Oxford Studies in Metaethics Vol 7. 205.
Mele, A. (2003). Motivation and Agency. Oxford University Press.
Melnyk, A. (Manuscript). “The Sense of Incredibility: A Physicalist
Explanation”.
Nagel, T. (1974). “What is it Like to be a Bat?”. The Philosophical Review, 83
(4), 435-450.
Nagel, T. (1986). The View From Nowhere. Oxford University Press.
Nakano-Okuno, M. (2011). Sidgwick and Contemporary Utilitarianism. Palgrave
Macmillan.
Ogden, C. and Richards, I. (1923). The Meaning of Meaning.
Owens, D. (2008). “Deliberation and the First Person”. In Anthony E.
Hatzimoysis (ed.), Self-Knowledge. Oxford University Press.
Papineau, D. (1993). “Physicalism, Consciousness, and the Antipathetic
Fallacy. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (2):169-83.
Papineau, D. (2002). Thinking About Consciousness. Oxford University Press.
106
Papineau, D. (2007). “Phenomenal and Perceptual Concepts”. In T. Alter & S.
Walter (eds.), Phenomenal concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on
Consciousness and Physicalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Parfit, D. (1997). “Reasons and Motivation”. Aristotelian Society Supplementary
Volume 71 (1):99–130.
Parfit, D. (2011). On What Matters Vol. 1 & 2. Oxford University Press.
Parfit, D. (forthcoming). On What Matters Vol. 3. Oxford University Press.
Perry, J. (1979). “The Essential Indexical”. Noûs 13:3--21.
Pettit, P. (2010). “Deliberation and Decision”. In Constantine Sandis and
Timothy O'Connor (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action. Blackwell.
Phillips, D. (2011). Sidgwickian Ethics. Oxford University Press.
Portmore, D. (2011). Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets
Rationality. Oxford University Press.
Prinz, J. (2002). Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and their Perceptual Basis. MIT
Press.
Railton, P. (1984). “Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of
Morality”. Philosophy and Public Affairs 13 (2):134-171.
Railton, P. (1986). “Moral Realism”. Philosophical Review 95 (2):163-207.
Rawls, J. (1972). A Theory of Justice. Clarendon Press.
Rawls, J. (1974). “The Independence of Moral Theory”. Proceedings and
Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 48:5 - 22.
Regan, D. (1980). Utilitarianism and Co-operation. Oxford University Press.
Ridge, M. (2007). “Anti-reductionism and Supervenience”. Journal of Moral
Philosophy.
Rosen, G. (2010). “Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction” in
Bob Hale & Aviv Hoffmann (eds.) Modality: Metaphysics, Logic, and Epistemology.
Oxford University Press. pp. 109-36.
Ross, J. (2006). “Rejecting Ethical Deflationism”. Ethics 116 (4):742-768.
107
Ross, J. (2013). “Actualism, Possibilism, and Beyond. In M. Timmons (Ed.),
Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ross, W. (2002). The Right and the Good. Oxford University Press.
Ryle, G. (2000). “Courses of Action or the Uncatchableness of Mental Acts”.
Philosophy 75/3: 331-44.
Scanlon, T. (1998). What We Owe to Each Other. Harvard University Press.
Schaffer, J. (2009). “On What Grounds What” in David Manley, David J.
Chalmers & Ryan Wasserman (eds.) Metametaphysics: New Essays on the
Foundations of Ontology. Oxford University Press, pp. 347-383.
Schneewind, J. B. (1977). Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy.
Clarendon Press.
Schroeder, M. (2005). “Realism and Reduction: The Quest for Robustness”.
Philosophers' Imprint 5 (1):1-18.
Schroeder, M. (2006). “Cudworth and Normative Explanations”. Journal of
Ethics and Social Philosophy 1 (3).
Schroeder, M. (2007). Slaves of the Passions. Oxford University Press.
Schroeder, M. (2008). “How Does the Good Appear To Us?”. Social Theory and
Practice 34 (1):119-130.
Schroeder, M. (2009). “Hybrid Expressivism: Virtues and Vices”. Ethics 119
(2):257-309.
Schroeder, M. (2011) “Review of On What Matters, Vols. 1 and 2 ,” Notre Dame
Philosophical Reviews , August 1.
Schroeder, M. (2013) “Tempered Expressivism,” in R. Shafer-Landau, ed.,
Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol. 8 , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 283-
314.
Schroeder, M. (2014) “Truth in Hybrid Semantics”. In Fletcher, G. & Ridge, M.
(eds.) Having It Both Ways: Hybrid Theories and Modern Metaethics. Oxford
University Press.
Schroeder, M. (2017). “Normative Ethics and Metaethics.” In T. McPherson &
D. Plunkett (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Metaethics.
108
Schroeter, L. and Schroeter, F. (Manuscript). “Deflationary Normative
Naturalism”.
Shafer-Landau, R. (2003). Moral Realism: A Defence. Oxford University Press.
Shaver, R. (2014). “Sidgwick's Axioms and Consequentialism”. Philosophical
Review 123 (2):173-204.
Shepherd, J. (2015). “Deciding as Intentional Action: Control over
Decisions”. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (2):335-351.
Sidgwick, H. (1907). The Methods of Ethics. Hackett.

Skarsaune, K. (2015). “How To Be a Moral Platonist”. in Oxford Studies in
Metaethics (10), ed. Shafer-Landau.
Smith, M. (1994). The Moral Problem. Blackwell.
Smith, M. (2004). Ethics and the A Priori. Cambridge University Press.
Sobel, D. (2009). “Review of Mark Schroeder, Slaves of the Passions”. Notre Dame
Philosophical Reviews 2009 (4).
Sobel, J. H. (1976). “Utilitarianism and Past and Future Mistakes.” Nous 10(2):
195-219.
Stevenson, C. (1937). ‘The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms.’ Reprinted in
Stevenson (1963), Facts and Values. Greenwood Press.
Stone, P. (2014). “Non-Reasoned Decision-making”. Economics and
Philosophy 30 (2):195-214.
Sturgeon, S. (1994). “The Epistemic View of Subjectivity”. The Journal of
Philosophy, 91 (5), 221-235.
Sturgeon, S. (2007) “Normative Judgment,” Philosophical Perspectives 21(1):
569-87.
Suikkanen, J. (2016). “Non-Realist Cognitivism, Truth, and Objectivity”. Acta
Analytica.
Sundström, P. (2011). “Phenomenal Concepts”. Philosophy Compass 6 (4):267-
281.
Tannsjo, T. (2015). Taking Life: Three Theories on the Ethics of Killing. Oxford
University Press.
109
Taurek, J. (1977). “Should the Numbers Count?” Philosophy and Public Affairs 6
(4):293-316.
Tenenbaum, S. (2007). Appearances of the Good: An Essay on the Nature of Practical
Reason. Cambridge University Press.
Thomason, R. (1981). “Deontic Logic and the Role of Freedom in Moral
Deliberation.” In Risto Hilpinen (ed.), New Studies in Deontic Logic. 177-186.
Timmerman, T. (2015). “Does Scrupulous Securitism Stand-up to Scrutiny? Two
Problems for Moral Securitism and How We Might Fix Them.” Philosophical
Studies 172 (6):1509-1528.
Timmons, M. (2012). Moral Theory: An Introduction. Rowman & Littlefield.
Toppinen, T. (2013) “Believing in Expressivism,” in R. Shafer-Landau, ed.,
Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol. 8 , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 252-
82.
Tresan, J. (2006) “De Dicto Internalist Cognitivism,” Noûs 40(1): 143-65.
Tye, M. (2003). “A Theory of Phenomenal Concepts. In O'Hear (ed.), Royal
Institute of Philosophy Supplement. Cambridge University Press 91-105.
van Roojen, M. (2015). Metaethics: A Contemporary Introduction. Routledge.
Väyrynen, P. (2017). “The Supervenience Challenge to Nonnatuarlism”. In
McPherson & Plunkett (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. Routledge.
Walden, K. (2014). “The Aid That Leaves Something to Chance”. Ethics 124
(2):231-241.
Weatherson, B. (2014). “Running Risks Morally”. Philosophical Studies 167
(1):141-163.
Wedgwood, R. (2006). “The Normative Force of Reasoning”. Noûs 40 (4):660–
686.
Wedgwood, R. (2007). The Nature of Normativity. Oxford University Press.
Wedgwood, R. (2013). “Review of David Enoch, "Taking Morality Seriously: A
Defense of Robust Realism"”. Philosophical Quarterly 63 (251):389-393.
Yetter-Chappell, H. & Yetter-Chappell, R. (2013). “Mind-Body Meets
Metaethics: A Moral Concept Strategy.” Philosophical Studies 165(3): 865-878.
110
Yetter-Chappell, R. (Manuscript). “Why Care About Non-Natural Reasons?”.
Zimmerman, M. (2008). Living with Uncertainty: The Moral Significance of
Ignorance. Cambridge University Press.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Reductive Realism in ethics is the view that it is possible to locate morality in the world as science and experience reveal it to us. Many opponents of Reductive Realism forcefully complain that the view fails to take morality seriously. I develop responses to several versions of this kind of criticism. Taking inspiration from well-developed debates about the nature of phenomenal consciousness in the philosophy of mind, I suggest that the apparent failure of Reductive Realism to respect the significance of morality stems not from the distinctive nature of morality, itself, but rather from our failure to appreciate the distinctive nature of the concepts that we use in thinking about morality.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Positivist realism

PDF

Process-oriented rationality

PDF

A perceptual model of evaluative knowledge

PDF

Describing authority

PDF

Contrastive reasons

PDF

A deontological explanation of accessibilism

PDF

Reasons, obligations, and the structure of good reasoning

PDF

Beliefs that wrong

PDF

Responsibility and the emotional structure of relationships

PDF

Units of agency in ethics

PDF

Extending credit

PDF

Feeling good and living well: on the nature of pleasure and its role in well-being

PDF

Rationality and the primacy of the occurrent

PDF

Belief as credal plan

PDF

The case for moral skepticism

PDF

Contract, from promise to commodity

PDF

Telling each other what to do: on imperative language

PDF

The moral basement: investigations into ethics and irony in contemporary fiction

PDF

Morality with Humean foundations: a proposal for a solution to the accommodation problem

PDF

Blood is the argument: discourses of blood, character, and affinity in early modern drama

Asset Metadata

Creator Laskowski, Nicholas (author)

Core Title Rethinking reductive realism in ethics

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Philosophy

Publication Date 06/13/2019

Defense Date 05/10/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag ethics,metaethics,normative concepts,OAI-PMH Harvest,reductive realism

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Schroeder, Mark (committee chair), Finlay, Stephen (committee member), Lemon, Rebecca (committee member), Levin, Janet (committee member), Wedgwood, Ralph (committee member)

Creator Email nicholaslaskowski@gmail.com,nlaskows@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-382088

Unique identifier UC11258084

Identifier etd-LaskowskiN-5397.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-382088 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-LaskowskiN-5397.pdf

Dmrecord 382088

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Laskowski, Nicholas

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA