This book articulates and defends a novel view of thick concepts extremely carefully and rigorously. It is an excellent example of how method and theory from other areas, in this case philosophy of language and linguistics, can be brought fruitfully to bear on debates in metaethics. And it takes on a topic with a deserved reputation for being obscure and performs much needed clarifications. In short, The Lewd, the Rude and the Nasty makes considerable advances not only in the thick concepts debate but in metaethics and metanormative philosophy in general. One standard characterization of thick terms and concepts-'lewd' and 'rude' are examples here-is that they have both evaluative and nonevaluative content, in contrast to thinðnerÞ concepts like 'good', 'bad', and perhaps 'nasty', which are wholly or more purely evaluative in content. Many philosophers have claimed that thick concepts have deep and distinctive philosophical significance. The book begins by pointing out how the many different ways in which thick concepts have been held to have deep and distinctive philosophical significance all presuppose that thick concepts are evaluative concepts. These many different ways are likely familiar-thick concepts have had star billing in arguments against noncognitivism and the fact-value distinction and in arguments for certain accounts of objectivity in ethics, reasons for action, and the nature of evaluative thought and discourse. Pekka Väyrynen claims that these arguments all fail. This is not because he thinks ðin line with a familiar response to these argumentsÞ that thick concepts have evaluative and descriptive content that can be separated out or 'disentangled'. It is because he thinks that thick concepts have no evaluative content ðor at least not any that could give them distinctive significanceÞ in the first place. Väyrynen's main aim is to deflate the philosophical significance of thick concepts. His main conclusion is that thick concepts are not inherently evaluative. The case for his view is an argument for the claim that the global evaluations most closely associated with thick terms and concepts are not a part of the meanings of those terms and concepts. 'Inherently evaluative' here is shorthand for 'inherently evaluative with respect to global evaluations'. Thick terms and concepts are inherently evaluative in this sense if these global evaluations are a part of their meaning. Call this the semantic view. Instead, Väyrynen argues that the best explanation of the relationship between thick terms and concepts and global evaluation, is pragmatic. I discuss each of these in turn. An evaluation 'most closely associated with' a thick term or concept is global if that evaluation applies to all the features that distinguish the things falling under that term or concept. This is in contrast to embedded evaluations, which are

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This paper concerns non‐causal normative explanations such as ‘This act is wrong because/in virtue of__’ (where the blank is often filled out in non‐normative terms, such as ‘it causes pain’). The familiar intuition that normative facts aren't brute or ungrounded but anchored in non‐normative facts seems to be in tension with the equally familiar idea that no normative fact can be fully explained in purely non‐normative terms. I ask whether the tension could be resolved by treating the explanatory relation in normative explanations as the sort of ‘grounding’ relation that receives extensive discussion in recent metaphysics. I argue that this would help only under controversial assumptions about the nature of normative facts, and perhaps not even then. I won't try to resolve the tension, but draw a distinction between two different sorts of normative explanations (one concerning ‘bearers’, the other concerning ‘sources’ of normativity) which helps to identify constraints on a resolution. One distinctive constraint on normative explanations in particular might be that they should be able to play a role in normative justification.

The core doctrine of ethical intuitionism is that some of our ethical knowledge is non-inferential. This paper develops a qualified defense of intuitionism against a recent objection, due to Nicholas Sturgeon: if ethical intuitionists accept a certain plausible rationale for the autonomy of ethics, then their further commitment to foundationalism leads them to an implausible epistemology outside ethics. The good news is that, irrespective of whether ethical intuitionists take non-inferential ethical knowledge to be a priori or a posteriori, their commitment to the autonomy of ethics and foundationalism doesn't commit them to the existence of non-inferential knowledge in areas outside ethics (such as the past, the future, or the unobservable) where its existence would be implausible.The bad news is that our support for ethical intuitionism should for now remain merely conditional, because each form of intuitionism requires a controversial stand on certain unresolved issues outside ethics.

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