“Frank is not a bad person though he does bad actions?” (Reblog)

Originally posted on The Horizon and The Fringe:
There is a lovely blog called AusomeAwestin, and for the purposes of this post, I will address the author as Awestin. I cannot tell to whom the blog belongs, but nobody just writes on Mark Timmons in metaethics without at the very least being either a graduate…

Ralph Wedgwood on The Metaphysics of Normative Facts

Part Two: The Metaphysics of Normative Facts In part two of The Nature of Normativity, Wedgwood delves into the messy metaphysics of normativity, and takes some pretty remarkable positions, which include, that “the intentional is normative”, that normative facts are causally efficacious, and that though normative facts and mental states are irreducible, his view is […]

Ralph Wedgwood on Cornell Realism and Australian Realism (moral semantics)

Having defeated expressivism (see here for his arguments) in a way that suggests the necessity of a truth-conditional semantics for normative statements, Wedgwood outlines what a factualist semantics must accomplish, and in so doing, reveals the failure of two factualist semantic theories: the causal theory put forward by the Cornell realists, and the conceptual analysis theory […]

Notes on Robert Audi’s Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character, pt II: Ethical Concepts and Moral Realism

Section II: Ethical Concepts and Moral Realism “Moral Epistemology and the Supervenience of Ethical Concepts” This essay focuses on the epistemological status of moral principles by attending to whether empiricism or rationalism is better suited for moral knowledge in light of the supervenience of moral properties on non-moral properties; Audi, unsurprisingly, concludes in favor of […]

House of Cards’ Frank Underwood (and virtue ethics, moral explanations, and counterfactuals)

I tend to be skeptical of virtue ethics, on a metaethical level, due to the implausibility of attributing moral properties to persons – for me, moral properties seem like the sort of entity that might only obtain for actions and states of affairs – but Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood in House of Cards seems to […]