Derek Parfit presents the third volume of On What Matters, his landmark work of moral philosophy. Parfit develops further his influential treatment of reasons. Jussi Suikkanen and John Cottingham (Editors), Essays on Derek Parfit's On What Matters (Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). External links.

The first two volumes of On What Matters started out as Climbing the Mountain, a shorter work of normative ethics aimed at showing how three seemingly diverse approaches to normative questions (rule consequentialism, Kantian normative ethics, and contractualism) were all getting at the same normative truths from different directions. Program De Cantat La Tastatura Organs. Automotive Sensors John Turner Pdf Viewer on this page. At some point Parfit decided he had also to defend metaethical non-naturalism as part of this project, so he added a second volume. As he admits (54), the ecumenical treatment of normative diversity in the first volume did not extend to the rival metaethical views discussed in its sequel. His oppositions to rival views was stark.

Naturalism, noncognitivism and subjectivism had to be fundamentally mistaken, or nothing would in fact matter. In Volume III, Parfit labors to extend his ecumenicism to metaethics, though not to every metaethical view. He works to understand other theorists as attempting to get at the same fundamental normative reality as he is, and to view seeming disagreement as masking an underlying harmony. Parfit found it deeply unsettling that people such as Bernard Williams, Alan Gibbard, Peter Railton, Sharon Street and Friedrich Nietzsche would find views at odds with his own compelling. If his arguments are really as strong as he took them to be, how could these brilliant theorists not be persuaded? Volume III is his attempt to grapple with the issue, show that there is less disagreement than meets the eye, and argue that remaining disagreements should be resolved to vindicate his variety of non-naturalism, 'Non-realist Cognitivism.' It also includes a final section where he returns to the first-order normative issues that were the original focus when he was still most interested in climbing the normative mountain.

The book is partly a response to a companion volume edited by Peter Singer, Does Anything Really Matter? In that volume various leading lights, including Gibbard and Railton, respond to OWM I and II. While some of these theorists make clear they think Parfit is just wrong, Gibbard and Railton are more concessive, at least in tone. This allows Parfit to argue that they really do (nearly) agree after all and to retain his confidence in Non-realist Cognitivism. Unfortunately, this somewhat obscures the exact contours of his own position by allowing him to avoid confronting more direct challenges to it and also to avoid confronting some of the main worries about his arguments for that position. And unless these particular theorists (along with those who already accept non-naturalism) are his only true epistemic peers, it isn't obvious the underlying worry has been dissolved.

For unsurprisingly, there's little consensus about the best views among metaethicists in general. Non-realist Cognitivism is a newfangled variant of non-naturalism. Moral and normative judgements are cognitive and have objective purport.

Normative claims predicate normative properties of objects and actions and are not equivalent to any claims predicating natural properties of these same objects. Normative properties are non-natural.

They cannot be identified with any natural properties captured by nonmoral terms (56-7), nor can they be reduced to natural properties via some asymmetric grounding relation (145 ff.). They can be analyzed in terms of normative reasons, but with reasons we hit bedrock. We can say that normative reasons count in favor of this or that option, but that claim is itself normative and should not be confused with any claims about psychology or motivation since such claims would be natural and not normative. (57) So far, this position looks like a version of old fashioned non-naturalism, committing itself to properties distinct from natural properties. But, in an attempt to avoid objections to the underlying metaphysics, Parfit's denies that these non-natural properties are 'ontologically weighty.' (3) Taking his cue from the observation that any claim that is overtly about properties can be paraphrased by an ordinary predication using a property term, he suggests that property talk is merely pleonastic. (66) Just as 'The ball has the property of being red' says neither more nor less than 'The ball is red,' 'Some actions have the property of being wrong' says no more and no less than 'Some actions are wrong.'