Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Gunnar Björnsson and Stephen Finlay, "Metaethical Contextualism Defended

• We are pleased to announce the next installment of our collaboration withEthics, in which we host a discussion of one article from each issue of the journal.  The article selected from Volume 121, Issue 1 is Gunnar Björnssonand Stephen Finlay, "Metaethical Contextualism Defended."  We are very pleased that Ralph Wedgwood will be providing a précis of the article to introduce the discussion.Professor Wedgwood's précis will appear, and discussion of the article will begin, on Monday, December 13.  The open-access version of Björnsson and Finlay's article is here.  Abstract:We defend a contextualist account of normative judgments as relativized both to (i) information and to (ii) standards or ends against recent objections that turn on practices of normative disagreement. Niko Kolodny and John MacFarlane argue that information-relative contextualism cannot accommodate the connection between deliberation and advice. In response, we suggest that they misidentify the basic concerns of deliberating agents, which are not to settle the truth of particular propositions but to promote certain values. For pragmatic reasons, semantic assessments of normative claims sometimes are evaluations of propositions other than those asserted. Other writers have raised parallel objections to standard-relative contextualism, particularly about moral claims; we argue for a parallel solution. 

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Filosofi, etik och religion -- Filosofi (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Philosophy, Ethics and Religion -- Philosophy (hsv//eng)

Keyword

metaethical contextualism

epistemic relativism

standard relativism

normative disagreement

Practical philosophy

Praktisk filosofi

Theoretical philosophy

Teoretisk filosofi

Publication and Content Type

pop (subject category)

ovr (subject category)