Metaphysical Objections to Normative Truth (Thomas Scanlon)

Thomas M. Scanlon gives a talk on some objections to normative truth at a conference on the nature of normativity in 2011 at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. The idea that there are irreducibly normative truths about reasons for action, which we can discover by thinking carefully about reasons in the usual way, has been thought to be subject to three kinds of objections: metaphysical, epistemological, and motivational (practical). Metaphysical objections claim that a belief in irreducibly normative truths would commit us to facts or entities that would be metaphysically odd, incompatible, it is sometimes said, with a scientific view of the world. In this talk, Thomas Scanlon argues that the idea that there are irreducibly normative truths has no problematic metaphysical implications. Explaining why this is so requires an explanation of what "ontological commitment“ comes to. It also requires an explanation of the relation between normative facts and non-normative facts, and how normative facts can depend on ("supervene on“) non-normative facts without being reducible to them.

#Philosophy #Ethics #Ontology