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Normative Reality: Reasons Fundamentalism, Irreducibility, and Metaethical Noncentralism

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Normative Reality: Reasons Fundamentalism, Irreducibility, and Metaethical Noncentralism Normative Reality: Reasons Fundamentalism, Irreducibility, and Metaethical Noncentralism Nicholas Engel Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2017 © 2017 Nicholas Engel All rights reserved ABSTRACT Normative Reality: Reasons Fundamentalism, Irreducibility, and Metaethical Noncentralism Nicholas Engel Reasons fundamentalists assert that normative reality is constituted by exemplifications of the normative reasons relation: an irreducible, sui generis relation that strongly super- venes on non-normative reality. In this dissertation, I argue that reasons fundamentalists cannot explain why exemplifications of the normative reasons relation strongly supervene on non-normative reality. Irreduciblists about normativity can avoid this problem by as- serting, contra the reasons fundamentalist, that normative reality is constituted by exempli- fications of thick properties, which provide material for a conceptual analysis of normative reasons. The theory that results analyzes normative reasons for action as answers to ques- tions why an action promotes a thick property. Nearly every normative theorist affirms what I call Additive Normative Supervenience (ANS): Normatively discernible worlds must be non-normatively discernible. ANS asserts that, if Edward Snowden is morally good, then Snowden’s counterparts in worlds that are indiscernible in all non-normative respects must be good. Reasons funda- mentalists struggle to explain why ANS is true. I consider and reject potential explanations of ANS that appeal to conceptual entailment and a posteriori necessity. Rosen has recently offered an argument against ANS. Rejecting ANS, however, problematizes irreduciblist accounts of normative explanation and normative epistemology. Irreduciblists can avoid this dilemma by arguing that ANS is either incoherent or false and adopting an alternative formulation of normative supervenience. Bilgrami’s arguments against the intelligibility of normative supervenience doctrines purport to show that ANS is in fact unintelligible, and Merricks’ arguments against the supervenience of consciousness on microphysical properties can be extended to show that ANS is false. Neither argument, however, establishes the falsity or unintelligibility of a modified for- mulation of normative supervenience, Transformative Normative Supervenience (TNS): Normatively discernible worlds must be descriptively discernible, where descriptive discernibility is just discernibility with respect to non-normative prop- erties or thick normative properties. Irreduciblists can explain the truth of TNS by adopting non-centralism about normative reasons–that is to say, by maintaining, contra the reasons fundamentalist, that normative reality is constituted most fundamentally by exemplifica- tions of thick properties. This allows the irreduciblist to provide an account of normative explanation and normative epistemology, analyze normative reasons in terms of thick prop- erties, and preserve buck-passing accounts of thin normative properties. Scanlon has argued that the reasons relation is a four-place relation, relating the facts that are reasons for an agent to perform an action in a given circumstance. I argue that facts are also reasons for an action with respect to a thick property that that action will promote, in contrast to sets of distinct actions that the agent could perform instead. The resulting six- place relation turns out to be an instance of the relation that holds between why-questions and answers. What it is to be a normative reason for an agent to do something is to be a correct answer to a question why that agent’s doing that action will promote a thick property. Decades ago, Anscombe had also suggested that reasons were answers to why-questions of a certain kind. The attractiveness of this position has been relatively underappreciated in the philosophy of normative reasons, in part because Anscombe had offered the reasons- as-answers thesis as a thesis about motivating reasons rather than normative reasons. The reasons-as-answers thesis also provides resources for those irreduciblists about reasons who reject my non-centralist conclusions to avoid the wrong kind of reason problem for buck- passing accounts of normativity: they can distinguish between right and wrong kinds of reasons by distinguishing between answers to distinct kinds of why-questions. Contents Acknowledgements iii 1 Normative Reasons 1 1.1 Introducing reasons . 1 1.2 Introducing metaethics . 5 1.3 Introducing reasons fundamentalism . 11 1.4 The thesis . 18 2 Reasons Fundamentalism 21 2.1 Centrality . 23 2.2 Relationality . 27 2.3 Primitivity . 30 2.4 Irreducibility . 41 2.5 Supervenience . 74 3 Irreducibility and Supervenience 113 3.1 Explaining supervenience . 113 3.2 The Supervenience Dilemma . 124 i 4 Avoiding Brute Entailment 137 4.1 Conceivability . 138 4.2 Causal regulation . 169 4.3 Neo-essentialism . 193 5 Saving Irreducibility 203 5.1 What are thick properties? . 208 5.2 Transformative Supervenience and Brute Entailment . 213 5.3 Does Additive Supervenience entail Transformative Supervenience? . 217 5.4 Reasons as answers . 242 5.5 Answers and thick properties . 277 5.6 Thick properties and Thin Centrality . 280 5.7 A note on thick properties and normative motivation . 283 Acknowledgements I wrote most of the material for this dissertation from the spring of 2013 through the spring of 2016. I am grateful to Columbia University for providing dissertation and teaching fel- lowships for this period, and am also grateful to Katja Vogt, Maia Bernstein, Stacey Quar- taro, and Wolfgang Mann for their help to me in securing fellowships for the 2014/2015 and 2015/2016 academic years. I thank the Columbia Graduate Philosophy Workshop, the Columbia Philosophy Thesis Preparation seminar, the Journal of Value Inquiry conference series, the Alliance program, and the Fordham Graduate Conference for opportunities to receive helpful feedback on earlier presentations of this work. I thank Carol Rovane, Akeel Bilgrami and Achille Varzi for their help throughout the writing of this dissertation, and to Carol Rovane in particular for sponsoring my doctoral candidacy. I thank my Hope College professors Carol Simon, Jack Mulder, Jim Allis, Joe LaPorte, and Nick Perovich, for cultivating my interest in philosophy and for encouraging me to pursue a philosophy PhD. Particular people who have provided helpful comments on early work include Alison Fernandes, Avery Archer, Borhane Blili Hamelin, Chris Whalin, Christine Susienka, Derek iii Parfit, John Morrison, Justin Clark-Doane, Katie Macintyre, Katja Vogt, Matt Moss, Max Hayward, Nathan Bice, Nemira Gasiunas, Rush Stewart, Ryan Kemp, and Yang Liu. I thank my many students at Columbia University and The Cooper Union for entertaining my occasional requests to think through my work with them. I thank Alan Klima, Whitney Kazemipour, Lisbeth Fuisz, and all the attention artists who have provided helpful writing momentum. Personal thanks are due to Francis Hittinger, Grace Delmolino, Isabella Florin, John and Charles Yost, Laura Przybysz, Mary Engel, Michael Klein, Nathan Bice, Robert Moore, Samuel Sawyer and Tommy Hawkins for helping me think through the many financial and social obstacles involved in being a young person and a graduate student in the humani- ties after the 2008 financial crisis. I thank the residents of Ford Hall, my JVC community, and my Mancation brethren for social support. I thank Lisa Williams for helping me orga- nize my life during the very busy spring 2014 semester. I thank parents for their perpetual support. Finally, I would like to thank all the normative reasons for being there to non-causally motivate me when I didn’t desire to write about them. I would also like to thank them because, while persons have characteristically gotten upset when I’ve become skeptical of their existence, the normative reasons never did. iv For Susanna and her mother v Chapter 1 Normative Reasons 1.1 Introducing reasons The many thoughts we have about the world (broadly construed) fall into two categories.1 A first category of thoughts concern the way the world is, what its components are, and how all these components are structured. These are thoughts about the world’s descriptive features. A second category of thoughts concern the way the world ought to be and how these oughts are structured. These are thoughts about the world’s normative features. The normative aspect of our thoughts about the world is a rich and complicated land- scape. We have deontological notions like those of oughts, norms, rules, rights, and duties. We have thinner evaluative notions like those of goodness, value, and pleasure and pain. We have thicker evaluative notions like “courage” (Aristotle, NE II.2) and “lewdness” (Black- burn and Gibbard 1992). Some concepts are concepts of properties that a thing can have more or less of (goodness is an example), and some, like our notion of rights, are of prop- erties that we have discretely. We have judgment-sensitive attitudes like belief and admi- ration, and other mental states and emotions that are, as Gibbard likes to say, tinged with a normative character. 1There are, of course, many other ways to categorize our thoughts than the categorization I am proposing here. 1 We also have predicative, attributive, and functional notions of goodness. Geach distin- guishes between predicative adjectives and attributive uses of adjectives
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