Choosing Normative Concepts

Abstract

Theorists working on metaethics and the nature of normativity typically study goodness, rightness, what ought to be done, etc. In their investigations they employ and consider our actual normative concepts. But the actual concepts of goodness, rightness, and what ought to be done are only some of the possible normative concepts. There are other possible concepts, ascribing different properties. In this book, the consequences of this are explored, for example for the debate over normative realism and for the debate over what it is for concepts and properties to be normative. In recent years, conceptual engineering—the project of considering how our concepts can be replaced by better ones—has become a central topic in philosophy. The present work applies this proposed methodology to central normative concepts and discusses the special complications that arise in this case. For example, how should we, in the context, understand talk of a concept being better than another?

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 374 citations exist upstream.