Ohio State University 'Moral twin Earth' thought experiments constitute a central semantic challenge to naturalistic normative realism. this paper first outlines a general framework for understanding the challenge, according to which (i) central normative terms are semantically stable in ways that contrast with many other paradigmatic descriptive terms, and (ii) realists should expect to have a unified metasemantic theory that explains the difference in stability between the normative and descriptive terms in question. the most attractive way of meeting this challenge, we argue, appeals to the idea of reference magnetism. according to this influential idea, some properties are reference magnets, which (roughly) means that they are comparatively easy to refer to. We argue that (together with other plausible assumptions) reference magnetism can provide an attractive explanation of both the general phenomenon of varying semantic stability, and the distinctive semantic stability of normative terms. We illustrate this by showing that reference magnetism can smoothly vindicate plausible judgments about Moral twin Earth cases. We conclude by offering an alternative gloss on our account, for those wary of the metaphysical commitments we propose. the alternative account adapts our proposal to provide a debunking explanation of the apparent semantic stability of normative terms. i t is a striking fact that some important normative terms appear to refer to the same property stably, even given significant changes in speaker usage, and the environment in which speakers use them. For example, the prevailing pattern of application of the term 'ought' has shifted substantially over the last century, but this does not seem to signal a change in the term's referent. this is Contact: Billy Dunaway <
This paper looks at the phenomenon of ethical vagueness by asking the question, how ought one to reason about what to do when confronted with a case of ethical vagueness? I begin by arguing that we must confront this question, since ethical vagueness is inescapable. I then outline one attractive answer to the question: we ought to maximize expected moral value when confronted with ethical vagueness. This idea yields determinate results for what one rationally ought to do in cases of ethical vagueness. But what it recommends is dependent on which substantive theory of vagueness is true; one can't draw conclusions about how to reason about vagueness in ethics in the absence of concrete assumptions about the nature of vagueness.
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