We conceive of ourselves as beings capable of acting in response to normative reasons. Given that our normative reasons are usually facts, this self-conception entails that we are capable of acting in response to facts. Arguments from error cases might seem to force us to deflate that self-conception, for they seem to show that to act in light of a fact must simply be a way of acting in light of a belief. The goal of this article is to argue against this deflationary view. I offer a counterexample to it and argue that in order to reject the argument from error on which it is grounded we should adopt a disjunctive view of acting in light of a consideration. According to this view there are two subjectively indistinguishable but distinct ways of acting in light of a consideration: acting in light of a fact and acting in light of a belief. This view allows us to take seriously the idea that our motivating reasons can be identical to facts and not mere true considerations and thus to take seriously our self-conception as beings that respond to and are capable of being moved by normative reasons for action.
It is commonly held that the goals at which an action aims are specified by the pro-attitude/belief pairs in light of which the action seems appealing to the agent. I argue that the existence of multiple-incentives cases (i.e., cases in which the agent has more than one incentive to act but in which her motive corresponds to only one of these incentives) shows this thesis to be false. In order to account for such cases we have to ascribe to agents the capacity to actively determine the goals at which their actions aim. I refer to this capacity as the agent’s “will”. Agents endowed with a will are capable not only of determining their own behavior but also their motives. I conclude that the existence of multiple-incentives cases shows that agents have this capacity.
Moral Naturalism is the view that moral judgments aim at describing moral facts and that these are ordinary garden-variety natural facts. Moral Naturalism has trouble accounting for the intuition that we cannot outsource moral judgments, i.e., we cannot ground a moral conviction that p on the fact that a reliable moral adviser holds that p. There have been, however, several attempts to explain this intuition away or to discredit the intuition pumps that bring it forward. I argue that moral naturalists are not in a position to deny this intuition. Moral Naturalism embodies a conception of the minimal conditions for someone to qualify as capable of making moral judgments; among these conditions is the acknowledgment of the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral; given the naturalist's conception of what it takes for someone to be capable of moral judgment, if we allow agents to outsource their moral judgments we come to situations in which the convictions of moral agents do not comply with the acknowledgment of moral supervenience. The naturalist must, therefore, deny the possibility of moral outsourcing. Moral Naturalism, then, faces the problem of making sense of the ban on moral outsourcing. --
Kant has often been accused of being a phenomenalist, i.e., of reducing spatial objects to representations that exist only in our minds. I argue against this reading. Given Kant’s claim that appearances are mere representations, the only way to avoid the accusation of phenomenalism is to provide an alternative conception of “representation” according to which the claim that something is a mere representation does not entail that it is a mere mental item (or an organized collection of mental items). I offer evidence that Kant does not conceive of representations as mental items and outline an alternative conception of representations.
Em seu "Argumentos de superveniência contra o realismo moral robusto", Wilson Mendonça defende o realismo moral robusto (a tese de que propriedades morais não são idênticas a propriedades naturais) do Argumento Explanatório a partir da Superveniência. Segundo esse argumento, o realismo robusto é incapaz de dar conta de fatos específicos de superveniência moral; dado que a identificação de propriedades morais e naturais permite dar conta desses fatos, o realismo robusto tem uma desvantagem explanatória vis-à-vis o realismo redutivo. A resposta de Mendonça consiste em sustentar (i) que o realismo redutivo enfrenta dificuldades para dar conta do caráter assimétrico de fatos específicos de superveniência e (ii) que a noção de redução por análise, que permite explicar fatos específicos de superveniência, dá suporte apenas a uma forma fraca de redutivismo compatível com o realismo robusto. Eu sustento que essas alegações são falsas e que, portanto, as considerações de Mendonça não mostram que o Argumento Explanatório não seja uma ameaça ao realismo robusto.
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