J.L. mackie (1917–1981) är mest känd för sina inflytelserika arbeteninom metafysik, religionsfilosofi och kanske i synnerhet inom metaetik. Hans bok Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong från 1977 präglarfortfarande stora delar av den metaetiska diskussionen, och dess inflytande tycks inte avta – snarare tvärtom. I Ethics försvarar Mackie sinmisstagsteori om moraliskt tänkande och språkbruk, som (enligt envanlig tolkning) går ut på att alla moraliska uppfattningar och utsagorär falska. Skälet är att de involverar ett »anspråk på objektivitet» somvärlden inte kan tillgodose.

John Leslie Mackie (1917-1981) was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His published works spanned many areas, but he is not well known as a political philosopher. In the late 1970s, however, Mackie turned his attention to issues concerning justice.

In a series of writings, Mackie built a case for a unique right-based approach to political philosophy, in part by delivering incisive critiques of theories dominant at the time. His most comprehensive work in this area is Theories of Justice and Rights—a previously unpublished manuscript that finally sees the light of day in this volume. Also included are two of Mackie's previously published papers, written during the same period: 'Can There Be a Right-Based Moral Theory?' (1978) and 'Rights, Utility, and External Costs' (1985). Some of Mackie's arguments in these works draw on the metaethical conclusions in his seminal book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977). The editorial introduction canvasses the initially puzzling relation between Mackie's moral error theory and his account of justice and rights, addresses some exegetical queries, and connects to present-day debates. In addition, the introduction provides summaries of Mackie's theory of rights, his critique of Rawls's liberalism, and of Nozick's libertarianism.

Uriah Kriegel's Brentano's Philosophical System: Mind, Being, and Value is a good illustration of how fascinating a subject the history of philosophy can be. It contextualizes and scrutinizes Brentano's philosophy and explains the many ways in which it offers alternatives to currently dominant paradigms. Although the book is written in a spirit clearly sympathetic to Brentano's system, Kriegel is up front about its weakness and shortcomings. This is not to say, however, that his attempts to mend them are all satisfactory.

My focus will be on the book's third part, which is about Brentano's theory of value. I shall consider three problems, the first two of which Kriegel also considers. The first is that Brentano's analysis of value in terms of fittingness gets the order of explanation backwards. In Section 3, I shall argue that Kriegel's conclusion that there is a good response available to Brentano can be bolstered if Kriegel's formulation of Brentano's “fitting attitude” account is revised. The second problem, to be discussed in Section 4, is that Brentano's account lacks the resources to accommodate betterness and worseness and degrees of value. In Section 5, finally, I consider briefly the “partiality problem” for the fitting attitude account of value, and how it applies to Brentano's version of it.

First of all, I provide some necessary background concerning relevant parts of Brentano's philosophy, which I intend not to be in tension with Kriegel's interpretation.

The central challenges for moral fictionalism are twofold: first, to explain how its recommendation that we abandon moral belief and assertion can be reconciled with its rationale of preserving the motivational efficacy of moral thought and discourse; second, to explain what the point is of replacing moral belief and assertion to begin with. This chapter clarifies these challenges and argues that Richard Joyce’s recent “metaphorist” version of fictionalism fares no better with respect to them than his earlier “narrationist” version. Just like its narrationist predecessor, metaphorist fictionalism fails to secure the motivational efficacy of moral thought and talk. The authors also find faults with yet more recent attempts at answering the above challenges for moral fictionalism, leaving the conservationist recommendation a more attractive alternative. This conclusion could be overturned if the conservationist proposal were sufficiently problematic in other respects, but the authors argue that it isn’t.

This paper considers and argues against old and recent readings of Hume according to which his account of moral judgement is non-cognitivist. In previous discussions of this topic, crucial metaethical distinctions—between sentimentalism and non-cognitivism and between psychological and semantic non-cognitivism—are often blurred. The paper aims to remedy this and argues that making the appropriate metaethical distinctions undermines alleged support for non-cognitivist interpretations of Hume. The paper focuses in particular on Hume’s so-called ‘motivation argument’ and argues that it is a poor basis for non-cognitivist interpretations. While there is textual support for attributing to Hume what may be called ‘modally weak’ motivational internalism, there is no solid textual support for attributing to him either psychological or semantic non-cognitivism. The paper also challenges briefly some further alleged support for non-cognitivist interpretations. It concludes by offering some positive evidence against such interpretations, namely that Hume appears to hold that there are moral beliefs and moral knowledge.

Just as we can be more or less certain that there is extraterrestrial life or that Goldbach’s conjecture is correct, we can be more or less certain about normative matters, such as whether euthanasia is permissible or whether utilitarianism is true. However, accommodating the phenomenon of degrees of normative certitude is a difficult challenge for non-cognitivist and expressivist views, according to which normative judgements are desire-like attitudes rather than beliefs (Smith, in: Evaluation, Uncertainty, and Motivation. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 5: 305–320, 2002). Several attempts have been made on behalf of non-cognitivism and expressivism to meet the challenge (Lenman in: Non-cognitivism and the dimensions of evaluative judgment, Brown Electronic Article Review Service, 2003; Ridge in Synthese 2003. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1884-7; Ridge in: Shafer-Landau (ed) Studies in metaethics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007; Sepielli in Philos Stud 160: 191–207, 2012; Eriksson and Francén Olinder in Aust J Philos 94: 719–735, 2016). These attempts have all been found wanting (Bykvist and Olson in Philos Q 59:202–215, 2009, Aust J Philos 95:794–799, 2017; Bykvist and Olson 2012). Michael Ridge has recently offered a quasi-realist solution, according to which expressivists can say exactly what cognitivists say about certitude, including normative certitude. In this paper, we explain the basic problem and Ridge’s quasi-realist solution. We then argue that the quasi-realist account of normative certitude faces severe difficulties that do not arise for cognitivist accounts, according to which normative judgements are beliefs.