Slaves of the Passions

Essentially Grounded Non-Naturalism and Normative Supervenience

“…Many philosophers think it does. For example, Mark Schroeder (2007) argues that for some consideration to be a reason for an agent to perform some action just is for the truth of this consideration to help to explain why performing the action promotes the satisfaction of the agent's goals. But Schroeder's view is a prime example of a naturalistic account of normative properties.…”

Cognitivism, Motivation, and Dual-Process Approaches to Normative Judgment

“…But given that expressivism is a problematic account of the meaning of normative statements, it is now much less clear why we would find such accounts attractive. For any of the other purported benefits of expressivism-such as legitimizing our normative discourse in a world without irreducibly normative facts-can be offered by a number of alternative views that accept truthconditional accounts of normative discourse (e.g., Joyce 2001: Chapter 8;Olson 2014: Chapter 9;railton 1986;Schroeder 2007). indeed, even the coordinating functions of normative discourse can readily be explained without incurring the costs of an expressivist semantics (Bar-On & Chrisman 2009;Strandberg 2011).…”

Taking Something as a Reason for Action

“…Or one begins with an intuitively plausible account of desire, which is then identified as an account of reason-taking. It is rather unlikely that either one of the two approaches will ever lead to an persuasive outcome, because it is rather unlikely that a plausible account of reason- Mark Schroeder (2007) has also proposed a directed-attention account of desire that seems to address this problem. In normal cases, so Schroeder, the considerations that one takes as reasons are considerations about the means to one's ends that strike one with a 'certain kind of salience', in the sense that 'you find yourself thinking about them' when you think about the action (156).…”

“…It says, basically, that what comes into view, from the agent's perspective, are not desires, but desired ends. Given this, proponents of the view may assume that desires are operative in the background (Pettit & Smith 1990), or that they are efficacious background conditions (Schroeder 2007). It is worth noting that the former formulation of this background version of the desire-belief model gives rise to a worry that can be mitigated by the latter.…”