Volume 23, Number 2
November 2022
ARTICLE

Moral Vagueness and Epistemicism

Volume 23, Number 2, November 2022, Pages 214–247
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v23i2.1602
PDFPDF

Abstract

Epistemicism is one of the main approaches to the phenomenon of vagueness. But how does it fare in its treatment of moral vagueness? This paper has two goals. First, I shall explain why various recent arguments against an epistemicist approach to moral vagueness are unsuccessful. Second, I shall explain how, in my view, reflection on the Sorites can inform normative ethics in powerful and interesting ways. In this connection, I shall be putting the epistemicist treatment to work, engaging with a family of somewhat neglected issues concerning continuity that lie at the interface of metaphysics and ethics.
Copyright © 2022 John Hawthorne
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
|

The Eligibility of Rule Utilitarianism

David Mokriski

Non-Naturalism and Reference

Jussi Suikkanen

Are Moral Error Theorists Intellectually Vicious?

Stephen Ingram

Moral Fixed Points and Conceptual Deficiency: Reply to Ingram

Christos Kyriacou

The Moral Fixed Points: Reply to Cuneo and Shafer-Landau

Stephen Ingram

Moral Error Theory and the Argument from Epistemic Reasons

Rach Cosker-Rowland

Evolutionary Debunking, Moral Realism and Moral Knowledge

Russ Shafer-Landau

A Danger of Definition: Polar Predicates in Moral Theory

Mark Alfano

A Unified Moral Terrain?

Stephen Everson

On the Metaphysics of Relation-Response Properties; or, Why You Shouldn’t Collapse Response-Dependent Properties into Their Grounds

Spencer M. Smith

Contextualizing, Clarifying, and Defending the Doctrine of Double Effect

Melissa Moschella

Alienation and the Metaphysics of Normativity: On the Quality of Our Relations with the World

Jack Samuel

Portico