Is the unity of normativity safe?

Whiting, Daniel (2025) Is the unity of normativity safe? In, Kirchin, Simon (ed.) The Future of Normativity. Oxford University Press, pp. 91-113. (doi:10.1093/9780198927761.003.0004).

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

A guiding assumption of much recent work on normativity is that it is uniform across domains. Normative notions are to be understood in the same way whether they concern moral, epistemic, prudential, aesthetic, and so on matters. This assumption is widespread but also contentious. In epistemology, it is commonplace to analyse knowledge and, more recently, justification by appeal to modal notions; that is, in terms of what is possible. Justification is a normative notion that applies across domains. Given the uniformity assumption, we should expect modal notions to appear in analyses of justification in, say, ethics. But that is not what we find. Instead, the tendency there is to explain justification in terms of reasons. While there are many theories of reasons in circulation, modal notions do not figure prominently, if at all, in them. So, there is a mismatch between the way in which normative notions are understood in epistemology and in ethics. This chapter tries to resolve this situation by developing a novel theory of reasons—specifically, of how fundamental reasons relate to derivative reasons—that makes central appeal to modal notions. In this way, the chapter suggests, we can reconcile the way ethicists and epistemologists understand reasons and, in turn, justification, thereby preserving the uniformity assumption.

This record has no associated files available for download.