What does it take to count as competent with the meaning of a thin evaluative predicate like 'is the right thing to do'? According to minimalists like Allan Gibbard and Ralph Wedgwood, competent speakers must simply use the predicate to express their own motivational states. According to analytic descriptivists like Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit and Christopher Peacocke, competent speakers must grasp a particular criterion for identifying the property picked out by the term. Both approaches face serious difficulties. We suggest that these difficulties derive from a shared background assumption that competence conditions must be explained in terms of a determinate conceptual role. We propose a new way of characterizing competence with evaluative terms: what's required for competence is participation in a shared epistemic practice with a term. Our approach, we argue, better explains the nature of evaluative inquiry and the extent of disagreement about evaluative questions.
We take self-governance or autonomy to be a central feature of human agency: we believe that our actions normally occur under our guidance and at our command. A common criticism of the standard theory of action is that it leaves the agent out of his actions and thus mischaracterizes our autonomy. According to proponents of the endorsement model of autonomy, such as Harry Frankfurt and David Velleman, the standard theory simply needs to be supplemented with the agent's actual endorsement of his actions in order to make room for our autonomy. I argue that their proposal fails and that a more substantive enrichment of the standard theory is called for.According to Hobbes, what common sense calls 'the will' is simply the desire which is present to the mind of the agent at the end of deliberation. In Hobbes's view, it is this desire which causes the action. Make room in this picture for the role of beliefs as co-responsible for the causation of action and you get a sketch of the standard theory of action.'The standard theory--or at least refined versions of it-has been and still is in the background of many of the recent debates in ethics as well as in the philosophy of mind and action. A much-advertised advantage of the standard theory is its psychological parsimony. Indeed, it promises to explain human action without invoking what Donald Davidson has called "mysterious acts of the will, or kinds of causation foreign to science" (Davidson 1980, 83). However, the picture of human agency that the standard theory proposes is hardly uncontroversial. One of the main shortcomings often attributed to the standad theory is that it leaves the agent out of his actions and thus fails to account for a central feature of human agency-our self-governance or autonomy. In normal circumstances, human actions are executed under the guidance and at the command of the agents performing them. It seems just plain wrong ' See Leviathan, Part 1, chap. 6. David Hume's formulation of the Hobbesian view has been especially influential. The most important contemporary proponent of the standard theory of action is, of course, Donald Davidson. See Davidson 1980, essays 1-5. In what follows, 'action' will refer only to overt actions, actions essentially involving peripheral bodily movements.
This paper surveys recent work on moral expertise. Much of that work defends an asymmetry thesis according to which the cognitive deference to expertise that characterizes other areas of inquiry is out of place in morality. There are two reasons why you might think asymmetry holds. The problem might lie in the existence of expertise or in deferring to it. We argue that both types of arguments for asymmetry fail. They appear to be stronger than they are because of their focus on moral expertise regarding all-in judgments about rightness. We reject this emphasis on all-in judgment in favor of an account of moral expertise as typically multi-stranded and domain limited. This account of moral expertise is better able to address the problem of how to identify those who have expertise. It also o ers a more nuanced picture of the contrast between accepting a moral claim on one's own and accepting it on testimony.
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