Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Some time ago, I don't know how long, I wrote in this blog about the book MORAL SKEPTICISMS by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. After a long time away from that book I returned to it recently. Here is a summary. Although the title, and the programmatic parts of the book, sound as if the plan was the emphasize the diversity of forms that moral skepticism might take, most of the book is devoted to a single argument, which may simply be resisted by moral cognitivists for different reasons. So the real debate is between moral skepticism singular and moral cognitivisms plural.  Before I get to the argument, one critical semantic point. There is a distinction, among meta-ethical philosophers, between a normative proposition and a moral proposition. Some thinkers use "normative" as a broader term than "moral" and "normative but not moral" is a sort of intermediary thing between "is" statements and "ought" statements. So if we can't get from n...

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, the fellow portrayed here, is the author of MORAL SKEPTICISMS. This is not to be confused with an anthology called MORAL SKEPTICISM (singular), edited by Diego Machuca, which I included recently on my list of a dozen forthcoming books on epistemology. Actually, I confused the two myself, and am now re-writing this entry to straighten that out. I'm happy to report that Sinnott-Armstrong, at least, is not a moral skeptic.  Happy because, as I trust my readers know, I am a cognitivist in meta-ethics and moral epistemology. I very much believe there is a fact of the matter that one either hits or one misses when one says, for example, "it would be right to switch the track on that trolley." Further, I see cognitivism as central to my Jamesianism, and thus to the mission of this humble blog. So I'm happy to see that Sinnott-Armstrong is an ally on this matter, and that his book is about moral skepticism, not for it. Sinnott-Armstrong i...