Akrasia and the Desire to Become Someone Else: Venturinha on Moral Matters

Abstract

Nuno Venturinha's book, Descriptions of Situations, provides a concise, but remarkably wide-ranging account of language and thought from what can be called a practice-based perspective. This type of perspective takes as its starting point the situated study of our discursive practices in particular contexts. One of the main challenges faced by such an approach, as I see it, is to show how our practices can come to be governed by objective standards, that is standards that go beyond the evaluative stances of the participants in the practice.This challenge is especially pressing in relation to moral practices, the topic of the last chapter of Venturinha's book. Our epistemic practices concerning empirical issues involve perception and practical interactions with our surroundings, which arguably introduce sufficient friction with the world for objective standards to arise. It is not obvious what could play an analogous role to perception in the case of moral thought (one can perhaps argue that moral intuitions bring us into contact with objective, mindindependent moral facts, but this is surely a controversial idea). Not surprisingly, therefore, it has been common in the literature to endorse some form of non-objectivism about our moral practices. Instances of such non-objectivism can be found in different versions of moral emotivism, relativism, expressivism and constructivism (see, among many others, Ayer