Volume 15, Issue 1

During the last century of meta-ethical debates, moral realism was much criticized for its ontological assumptions. These assumptions arise from the semantic intuition that lies at the heart of realist theories – namely, the intuition that language represents states of affairs. This makes moral realism hardly compatible with a naturalist world view and gives rise to consider ontologically more economic approaches. Moral constructivists can explain objectivity in ethics without inheriting the realist’s ontological burden. Nevertheless, constructivists tend to ignore the semantic task of giving an account of what moral sentences mean. The semantics of moral discourse, however, cannot be considered representational because, then, constructivism would lapse back into realism. I argue that semantic pragmatism is an appropriate partner for moral constructivism. Thereby, we can see the personal standpoint as an engagement in asserting moral sentences.

I will start by noting that Harry Frankfurt’s concept of wholeheartedness is in conflict with the intuition that free will should be efficacious in general rather than pertain only to a small subset of decisions. To replace wholeheartedness I introduce a heuristic account for deliberation and decisions. I will show that introspective activity can lead to the individual having two types of “introspective revelations”. By the onset of the introspective revelations, a self-perpetuating loop is initiated. The loop consists of two elements positively reinforcing each other. The two elements are introspective activity and introspective revelations. The effect is a propensity to ask oneself “what do I want?” whenever faced with a choice. This propensity, I submit, can give us what we want if we want free will.

This essay examines the largely forgotten debate from 1949 between Dewey and White over the status of value judgments. It argues that White does not criticize Dewey’s moral philosophy as a misguided attempt to derive an “ought” from “is”, rather he maintains that Dewey’s ethical naturalism cannot provide an empirical definition of moral judgments that preserves their status as moral obligations. Although White is mistaken in presenting Dewey’s view as a failed theory of moral obligation, Dewey’s reply suggests that White is correct in understanding the connections between scientific and moral inquiry in normative terms. This further reveals that value judgments concerning what we should do, what Dewey calls “practical judgments”, are not moral obligations as White suggests, but are fallible directives for addressing problems disruptive of human activity. By presenting Dewey’s view as a failed attempt to reduce moral terms to an acceptable empirical vocabulary, White assumes a logical separation between the descriptive and that normative that is untenable from the perspective of Dewey’s account of human inquiry.

Modern society is characterised by the constant production, commodification, and distribution of risks, which has also become an increasingly important political issue. Given the commodification and the resulting distributability of risks, risks have become an issue of distributive justice instead of mere reason for precautionary concerns. This is particularly pronounced in the case of financial risks. In this article, we analyze how choices related to distributive justice inform the systems of risk distribution. Our main aim is to apply the Rawlsian notion of “division of moral labor” in the context of financial risks. By an analysis of the scope of financial risks, we will show that the libertarian choice of division of moral labour rests on an unnecessarily narrow idea of the scope of the distribution of risks.