Possessing Moral Concepts

Merli, David

doi:10.1007/s11406-009-9180-x

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Here I repurpose David Merli's (2009, 540–545) arguments against Ralph Wedgwood's Conceptual Role Semantics. Though Wedgwood's metaethics is explicitly inflationary, Merli's arguments have equal force for a deflationary, dispositional version of metaethical inferentialism.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Metaethicists of any stripe must deal with the potential conflicts between (1) their theoretical commitments, whatever they may be, regarding the foundation of meaning for moral claims, and (2) our common-sense judgments about ethical univocity, which seem to systematically outstrip these commitments. David Merli (2007a, 2007b, 2009) points out that this gives us a way to undermine accounts of genuine disagreement across the metaethical spectrum; let us call it Merli's Strategy :…”

Section: Genuine Disagreement For Expressivistsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Building bridges with words: an inferential account of ethical univocity

Warren

2018

Can. J. of Philosophy

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Explaining genuine moral disagreement is a challenge for metaethical theories. For expressivists, this challenge comes from the plausibility of agents making seemingly univocal claims while expressing incongruent conative attitudes. I argue that metaethical inferentialism – a deflationary cousin to expressivism, which locates meaning in the inferential import of our moral assertions rather than the attitudes they express – offers a unique solution to this problem. Because inferentialism doesn’t locate the source of moral disagreements in a clash between attitudes, but instead in conflicts between the inferential import of ethical assertions, the traditional problem for expressivism can be avoided. After considering two forms of inferentialism that lead to revenge versions of the problem, I conclude by recommending that we understand the semantics of moral disagreements pragmatically: the source of univocity does not come from moral or semantic facts waiting to be described, but instead from the needs that ethical and semantic discourses answer – a solution to the problems of what we are to do and how we are to talk about it.

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Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Genuine Disagreement For Expressivistsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building bridges with words: an inferential account of ethical univocity

Warren

2018

Can. J. of Philosophy

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“…Just as sharing a normative concept may not require a lot of uniformity in inputs to its application, it may not require a lot of uniformity in the practical upshots of its application (cf. Merli 2009). As regards metasemantics, normative naturalists of course have work to do in explaining the reference of concepts like PRACTICAL OUGHT.…”

Section: Organon Fmentioning

confidence: 99%

Normative Naturalism on Its Own Terms

Väyrynen¹

2021

orgf

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Normative naturalism is primarily a metaphysical doctrine: there are normative facts and properties, and these fall into the class of natural facts and properties. Many objections to naturalism rely on additional assumptions about language or thought, but often without adequate consideration of just how normative properties would have to figure in our thought and talk if naturalism were true. In the first part of the paper, I explain why naturalists needn't think that normative properties can be represented or ascribed in wholly nonnormative terms. If so, certain prominent objections to normative naturalism fail. In the second part, I consider the objection that normative properties are "just too different" from (other) natural properties to themselves be natural properties. I argue that naturalists have no distinctive trouble making sense of thought and talk involving forms of "genuine" or "authoritative" normativity which can drive a non-question-begging form of the objection.

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“…Others think that moral evaluations are evaluations of a person's will, intentions, or character. In other words, there is substantial disagreement at every level of moral discourse (Merli 2009). Perhaps no other concepts are as disputed as moral concepts.…”

Section: Moral Modelingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Friendly Superintelligent AI: All You Need Is Love

Prinzing¹

2018

Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics

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There is a non-trivial chance that sometime in the (perhaps somewhat distant) future, someone will build an artificial general intelligence that will surpass human-level cognitive proficiency and go on to become "superintelligent", vastly outperforming humans. The advent of superintelligent AI has great potential, for good or ill. It is therefore imperative that we find a way to ensure-long before one arrives-that any superintelligence we build will consistently act in ways congenial to our interests. This is a very difficult challenge in part because most of the final goals we could give an AI admit of so-called "perverse instantiations". I propose a novel solution to this puzzle: instruct the AI to love humanity. The proposal is compared with Yudkowsky's Coherent Extrapolated Volition, and Bostrom's Moral Modeling proposals.

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Possessing Moral Concepts

Cited by 7 publications

References 24 publications

Building bridges with words: an inferential account of ethical univocity

Building bridges with words: an inferential account of ethical univocity

Normative Naturalism on Its Own Terms

Friendly Superintelligent AI: All You Need Is Love

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