Realism and relativism about the normative

ABSTRACT

I defend normative realism—the claim that there are mind-independent, absolute normative facts—mostly by arguing against its rivals. Against mind-dependent theories of normativity, I argue that at least one highly influential version of such a view, Lewis's dispositional theory of value, is subject to at least three severe problems: the problem of the implausible contingency of value, the problem of ideal conditions, and the problem of lack of convergence. Against relativistic conceptions of normativity, I argue that either they fail to evade a commitment to absolute normative truths, or they fail to distinguish themselves from Nihilism. Finally, against Nihilism, I argue that it is not a coherent option at least for the normative domain of rationality, since facts about rationality are presupposed by any judgment, including any judgment meant to express a skepticism about facts about rationality.

KEYWORDS:

• Normative realism
• John Mackie
• mind-dependence
• David Lewis
• dispositional theory of value
• relativism
• nihilism
• rationality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For more on this distinction see my (2022), ‘The Normativity of Meaning Revisited.’

2 I discuss the esthetic in my ‘A Challenge to an Objectivist Conception of Beauty,’ (ms.).

3 Many think that, in addition, there is an Expressivist option. I have yet to see a formulation of Expressivism that manages to avoid both a crude non-cognitivism and collapse into a view that any realist could accept.

4 My discussion of moral relativism in this paper draws heavily on my (2017).

5 This ‘no privilege’ clause is important; unless we impose it, absolute facts about motion or simultaneity can be defined as those that obtain relative to the privileged frame. My characterization of moral relativism obviously takes its inspiration from the ground-breaking work of Harman (1996), although I depart from certain idiosyncrasies of Harman’s characterization.

6 Some philosophers have thought that if we worked with an alethic version of relativism, rather than a property version, as I have been doing, we would evade this difficulty. I explain in detail why that is not so in Boghossian (2011). There are many further problems with Thoroughgoing Relativism some of which are also explained in the aforementioned paper.

7 This paper was written before I became acquainted with Terence Cuneo’s (2010); in that book, Cuneo does a wonderful job of showing how difficult it is to defend an anti-realism about the normative once one takes seriously that the normative includes the rational as well as the moral.

8 I am grateful to audiences at the University of Vienna, the Wittgenstein Conference in Kirchberg in the summer of 2015, the launch of MESAP at the American University of Cairo, and to David Velleman, Sharon Street and Yu Guo for helpful comments on the material in this paper.