The Nature of Normativity presents a complete theory about the nature of normative thought – that is, the sort of thought that is concerned with what ought to be the case, or what we ought to do or think. (Normativity in Metaethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)). Ralph Wedgwood (Sir Ralph Wedgwood, 4th Baronet – Wikipedia) defends a kind of realism about the normative, according to which normative truths or facts are genuinely part of reality. The author declares in his introductory remarks that he has always been a moral realist and wishes to offer a philosophical defence of this position. He happily acknowledges his alignment with Plato.
Anti-realists, eg. ‘expressivists’ (Ethical Expressivism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy), often complain that realism gives rise to demands for explanation that it cannot adequately meet. What is the nature of these normative facts? How could we ever know them or even refer to them in language or thought? Wedgwood accepts that any adequate version of realism must answer these explanatory demands. However, he seeks to show that these demands can be met – in large part by relying on a version of the idea, which has been much discussed in recent work in the philosophy of mind, that the intentional is normative – that is, that there is no way of explaining the nature of the various sorts of mental states that have intentional or representational content (such as beliefs, judgments, desires, decisions, and so on), without stating normative facts.
On the basis of this idea, Wedgwood provides a detailed systematic theory that deals with the following three areas: the meaning of statements about what ought to be; the nature of the facts stated by these statements; and what justifies us in holding beliefs about what ought to be.
In his introduction, Wedgwood states the following: “…. if the point of the book could be summed up in one sentence, that sentence would be: ‘the normativity of the intentional is the key to metaethics‘. Specifically, the specific version of the normativity of the intentional that I defend is, in effect, a simultaneous account both of the nature of these mental states that have intentional content and of the various normative properties and relations – that is of the properties and relations that are referred to by terms like ‘ought’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’ and the like. Moreover, this version of the normativity of the intentional forms a crucial premise in my argument for the conclusion that these normative properties and relations are metaphysically irreducible and causally efficacious. In this way the, the normativity of the intentional forms the core of my metaphysical account of the nature of normative truths, properties and relations.”
The author concludes as follows: “I have argued in this chapter that it is possible after all to reconcile the thesis that normative and mental properties are irreducible with the strong naturalistic thesis that all contingent facts are necessarily realized in physical facts. The crucial point is that even if it is necessary that contingent mental and normative facts are realized in some physical facts or other, nothing in the constitutive essence of these mental and normative facts need determine exactly which physical facts they are realized in. That is something that is determined for each possible world by how things happen to be in that world.
“Thus, even though there is no actually possible world that is just like the actual world in all physical respects but unlike the actual world in mental or normative respects, no actual truth determines what realizes these mental or normative facts in possible worlds that are radically unlike the actual world in physical respects. This is what allows it to remain completely open, from the standpoint of the actual world, exactly which physical properties necessitate mental and normative properties in those remote worlds, and all these ways count as perfectly possible from the standpoint of the actual world. Of course, from the standpoint of one of those remote worlds, that world does not count as remote at all; and from that standpoint there is only one way in which physical properties can necessitate mental and normative properties in that world, even though from the standpoint of that world there are many incompatible ways in which physical properties might necessitate mental and normative properties in remote worlds.
“According to this picture, then, naturalism is true: at every world the mental and normative properties are tied down to specific physical properties at that world and all physically similar worlds. But reductionism fails: at no world is any normative mental property necessarily equivalent to any physical property. Since this picture seems to be quite consistent, we should conclude that it is in fact quite possible to reconcile naturalism and irreducibility.”
Check if this tightly argued work of meta-ethics is available at your local library here Home | South Lanarkshire Libraries (sllclibrary.co.uk)
308 pages in Oxford University Press
First published 2007
ISBN-13 : 978-0199251315
