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The unity of the normative

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Notes

  1. This way of understanding the “natural” may also be unsatisfactory. For example, some psychological concepts may be held to be normative (although perhaps not in the sense I am here discussing). But I will adopt this characterization for present purposes.

  2. This improves on the idea of standards, which I mentioned initially, since purposes or interests provide normative explanation, without which standards seem arbitrary.

  3. This makes Ziff’s account preferable to the one offered by Rawls, which seems to tie the criteria of goodness of a kind too closely to the way in which things of that kind currently figure in our lives.

References

  • Rawls, J. (1999). A theory of justice, revised edition (pp. 350–351). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  • Ziff, P. (1963). Semantic analysis (p. 247). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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  1. Harvard University, Emerson Hall 209a, 25 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    T. M. Scanlon

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  1. T. M. Scanlon
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Correspondence to T. M. Scanlon.

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Scanlon, T.M. The unity of the normative. Philos Stud 154, 443–450 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9736-z

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