This week is a continuation of my response to this tweet from Dominik:
I mean... it's basically impossible to have a productive discussion with Bush because he either lacks concepts which every normal being has or he pretends not to have them. while at the same time being so arrogant to assume that the majority of ethicists are deeply confused
2.4 On the charge of arrogance
Next, Dominik claims that it’s arrogant of me to claim that a majority of ethicists are deeply confused. I can confirm that I do, in fact, think that a majority of ethicists are confused. In fact, Dominik understates my view. To be clear, I don’t just think moral realists are deeply confused, I think most antirealists are also deeply confused. But even that isn’t going far enough. I don’t just think most metaethicists are confused, I think most analytic philosophers are deeply confused, including those outside of ethics. The audacity!
There are a lot of problems with describing my view on the matter as “arrogant.”
The central problem with the “arrogance” accusation is that my position on why most philosophers are mistaken isn’t, in any obvious way, any more arrogant than the reasons moral realists and antirealists would typically have for thinking one another are wrong. That is, there’s nothing distinctively presumptuous or arrogant about why I think most moral realists (and many antirealists) are mistaken. In fact, I’ll argue that in some ways my view is, if anything, less susceptible to charges of arrogance than the reasons metaethicists would have for regarding one another as mistaken.
To begin with, anyone who holds any view on anything which is contrary to anyone else’s view, unless they endorse certain forms of relativism, thinks everyone else is wrong. The only question is why they think everyone else is wrong. For those operating within the traditions of analytic philosophy, there are a variety of reasons why one might think others are mistaken: maybe they haven’t read what you have, and if they were aware of the arguments you were aware of, they’d change their mind. In which case, one apparently thinks their colleagues are poor scholars or are lazy or at the very least ignorant, perhaps culpably so. Another reason your colleagues could be mistaken colleagues is that they are subject to motivated reasoning and don’t respond to the same arguments and evidence in the same (virtuous) way as you do. In which case they’re apparently poor reasoners. Or maybe they’re aware of the arguments and evidence, but are too stubborn, or have too strong of priors, or are for whatever other reason unable or unwilling to change their mind. In which case their errors are a result of character defects or cognitive dysfunction. Maybe they’re just too incompetent to understand why they’re wrong.
There are many reasons why one might think their colleagues are wrong, and many of these reasons involve attributing unflattering traits to one’s colleagues: they must be making an error for some reason. Sure, many philosophers might insist that there are reasonable arguments on both sides of the aisle, but they still think their colleagues are getting it wrong. If you think moral realism is false, then you think 62% of moral philosophers are mistaken. Is that arrogant? If not, why not? Why is it more arrogant to think they’re mistaken because of some fundamental methodological presumption endemic to the field, rather than thinking they’re fully equipped with the appropriate methods and with adequate arguments and evidence to resolve the matter, and so on, but they still manage to get it wrong?
For comparison, which is more arrogant: thinking that most experts in a field are mistaken about a particular issue because:
(a) a bug in the code they all used to analyze their data (this isn’t implausible; errors in code account for an astonishing amount of mistakes in genetics, see here), or a commitment to a mistaken theory that they all took to be correct, or some other shared mistake upstream in one’s methods or presuppositions
or
(b) thinking that each one, individually, is too ignorant, stubborn, lazy, dishonest, or incompetent to arrive at the correct conclusion despite having the correct presuppositions, employing the correct methods, and having access to precisely the same resources that led you to draw the correct conclusions?
I think the former accounts for why most contemporary analytic metaethicists are mistaken, whereas the latter would be a more suitable explanation for why philosophers operating within a shared paradigm regard one another as mistaken. When one sees what passes for a standard objection to rival views, it’s hard to draw any other conclusion.
Many objections to rival metaethical views are so blunt and flat-footed that it’s hard to see how one wouldn’t be committed to something like the incompetence or the unvirtuous intransigence of one’s colleagues. Critics of noncognitivism who think the Frege-Geach problem decisively refutes the view must contend with the fact that ~15% of specialists in metaethics nevertheless endorse expressivism. I don’t know how many endorse views subject to the Frege-Geach problem, but it’s not zero. If noncognitivist views were so easy to refute, why do they persist? Are they all quasi-realists? If so, realists are going to think quasi-realism is mistaken for some other reason.
Whatever the reason, their proponents of such can’t fall back on having nonobvious mistaken presuppositions if we’re granting that analytic methods are viable (since to do otherwise would be arrogant), and yet they’re still wrong. So what should we conclude? That some of our colleagues are morons who don’t understand how their position is easily refuted by objections taught in undergraduate courses? Yet somehow I’m arrogant for thinking the mistakes are more fundamental and less obvious than this?
The persistence of seemingly decisive refutations of this or that metaethical position are belied by the persistence of those views in spite of such objections. For instance, some philosophers argue that error theory is self-defeating (Case, 2018). If the argument for this is solid, why are there any error theorists? If it isn’t, why did Case make the argument? Someone is making a mistake here. Is it no longer arrogant if the errors one attributes to others are sufficiently circumscribed? Presumably not: a realist who thinks error theorists are mistaken for a particular reason is still going to think all the other antirealists are mistaken for other reasons. And given the sheer number of realist and antirealist positions out there, almost every realist and antirealist is going to think almost everyone else is wrong, possibly about almost everything. If you’re an expressivist, then all non-naturalist realists are wrong, all naturalist realists are wrong, all error theorists are wrong, all constructivists are wrong, etc.; that’s almost everyone in the field. Expressivists make up only about 10.6% of the field. So apparently nearly 90% of the field is wrong. How arrogant!
Note, again, that in such cases many philosophers may believe that their colleagues are using the correct methods and aren’t subject to mistaken presuppositions but they still seem to get it wrong. The mistakes could be shallow and proximal: they fail to see the force of an argument, or they haven’t encountered a compelling case for it. Yet others may be more fundamental, e.g., a realist may think an antirealist has settled on antirealist because of their other philosophical beliefs. Perhaps the antirealist is mistakenly committed to physicalism and is highly disposed towards a reductionist view of philosophy. Yet this might be due to mistaken notions about the plausibility of more metaphysically robust positions, or a mistakenly dogmatic commitment to naturalism, or some other array of mistaken philosophical beliefs that inhibit the antirealist from recognizing realism is correct. In such cases, the reasons why the antirealist would be mistaken are starting to look suspiciously close to my own: it’s not that they made a basic mistake in analyzing a syllogism for realism, but that they reject premises in the arguments for realism because they have a bunch of other mistaken philosophical beliefs. It isn’t just a philosophical error in a single branch, but a rot that goes all the way to the trunk, and perhaps even to the roots.
In short, one might think that people persist in holding mistaken views about one particular philosophical view because they have deeper and more fundamental commitments that are also mistaken. Such mistakes may be entangled so deeply in their network of belief that the only way they could arrive at the correct conclusion on any given issue would be to start unwinding the knots all the way down. Note, too, that in such cases, thinking that someone is wrong about a particular issue is merely the tip of a much deeper iceberg of wrongness: philosophers routinely disagree with others on dozens of positions. Thinking lots (perhaps most) of one's colleagues are mistaken about lots (perhaps most) things is typical of the field.
Perhaps the arrogance emerges at the level of metaphilosophical disagreement. If so, it’s not clear why. Why would disagreeing about philosophical methods be any more arrogant than disagreeing with the application of a given set of methods? Are all pragmatists or Wittgensteinians arrogant for holding uncommon views? Such views may entail, by their very nature, that all or most of one’s contemporaries are mistaken in fundamental ways, because the views area, by their very nature, stances on the fundamental nature of philosophy. It would be profoundly strange to maintain that metaphilosophical divergence from mainstream analytic philosophy is, by its very nature, arrogant; yet it is precisely in virtue of such differences that I hold the position that I do.
This is just a sketch of the sort of view one might have as to why others are mistaken that doesn’t draw on their metaphilosophical errors, but simply locates the mistake in their philosophical views. I locate what I take to be the mistakes at one step more fundamental than this. It remains unclear to me why this is objectionably arrogant in comparison. The alternatives to why I think analytic philosophers are mistaken are not at all obviously any more flattering than why I think they’re mistaken.
There is also nothing necessarily arrogant about thinking most people are making a mistake. What matters is why you think they’re making that mistake, and the quality of the arguments and reasons you have for holding the view that you do. Any view that eventually wins others over begins without a command of majority assent. It does us no good to point to the credentials and intelligence of some community of thinkers and declare challenges to whether they’re misguided as some kind of affront, as though such challenges are necessarily a sign of arrogance on the part of the challenger. The methods of analytic philosophy are not beyond reproach, and contemporary analytic philosophers have hardly done much to demonstrate that their methods, and the discipline, is so worthy of our esteem that to challenge mainstream views in the field is some kind of ridiculous and pompous notion that isn’t worth taking seriously.
Analytic philosophy has hardly established the credibility of its conclusions about anything in the way the sciences have. My initial reaction to a non-biologist claiming all evolutionary biologists are wildly confused about natural selection might be that this person is arrogant and ill-informed. And the same would hold for an outsider challenging well-established views in any of the sciences. But (a) I’m not an outsider, I’ve been part of academic philosophy for years and (b) mainstream analytic philosophy is not so well established that challenges to the most common views, or even challenges to the field itself, are on similarly questionable footing as challenging mainstream science.
Views like mine, views that challenge the presuppositions endemic to much of contemporary metaethics, are neither novel nor without representatives. It’s just that most of us aren’t working in metaethics. Academic fields can and do develop a degree of insularity that renders them unwelcome to outsiders who don’t share the presuppositions (or, one might suggest the less flattering dogmas). Is it any surprise that despite the fact that a significant majority of respondents to the 2020 PhilPapers survey are atheists, that this completely reverses when one looks at specialists in philosophy of religion, most of whom are theists? No: those disposed towards theism are more likely to study philosophy of religion. Unless you’re inclined to think that (a) there are no significant selection effects that prompt those disposed towards theism to study philosophy of religion at greater rates than those not disposed towards theism and that (b) arguments for theism are so compelling that those who specialize in philosophy of religion and get extra exposure to these arguments are highly disposed towards becoming theists, but that in spite of this effect, nonspecialist philosophers are largely unaffected. That is far more of a stretch than the simpler explanation: theists study philosophy of religion at greater rates.
Is it outside the bounds of possibility, even plausibility, that those with a disposition to endorse and favor the methods of contemporary analytic philosophy would be more likely to obtain PhDs in analytic philosophy and continue to work in the field? Because the respondents to these surveys are mostly analytic philosophers currently working in the Anglophone world. Why should I think those who study analytic philosophy would reach the same conclusions as those who don’t? I find it highly plausible that those working in biology, chemistry, or physics would be more likely to endorse antirealism on reflection than those who happen to work in philosophy. This is an empirical hypothesis, though. Perhaps we’d see reliable convergence on moral realism regardless of the disposition of those who studied the topic, so long as they studied it well. At present, however, we simply don’t know.
Consider someone with my philosophical disposition. Like Wittgenstein, I suspect that a great deal of philosophy is riddled with pseudoproblems and that we can dissolve these problems through careful attention to language. Given such an outlook, I view most contemporary analytic philosophy to be a catastrophic waste of time. How many people with such an outlook, or who would develop this view were they to persist in studying philosophy, are likely to stick around?
I suspect not many would. Who wants to pursue a discipline where one thinks most of its central questions are confused nonsense? How many chemists would want to persist in the Department of Alchemy, and dedicate their lives to attempting to convince their colleagues that alchemy is nonsense? Such persistence must be maintained in spite of the profoundly enervating experiences one must endure…not the least of which includes people that suggest you’re lying if you don’t think exactly like they do or that accuse you of arrogance for having the audacity to challenge the “experts.”
Perhaps the problem isn’t my arrogance, but the collective (if admittedly metaphorical) arrogance of the field of analytic philosophy itself. Perhaps the field is arrogant for presenting itself, in its current form, as having sole jurisdiction over the questions it addresses. Why should I grant that analytic philosophy has equipped its practitioners with the proper tools? I’ve witnessed outright contempt for experimental philosophy, while pragmatists, positivists, and ordinary language philosophers, whatever flaws one might believe they have, still raise what I take to be legitimate criticisms of the field’s aspirations. Yet, while they may be nominally acknowledged, I still see a field (at least in metaethics) that has mostly relegated these criticisms and the approaches that spawned them to a perfunctory acknowledgement, not a legitimate working paradigm to employ. The mainstream approach is still employing precisely those methods and presumptions that I find baffling and misguided.
Take, for instance, the continued insistence on characterizing metaethical positions in terms of, among other things, a semantic thesis: noncognitivism is the view that moral claims aren’t propositional, relativism holds that moral claims contain implicit indexicals, and so on. If Gill is correct, all of these theories are at best incomplete, and at worst, downright mistaken. And all of them appear, at least in their standard forms, on, at best highly questionable views about the nature of language and meaning (see Gill, 2009 on e.g., the UD assumption, among other problems with 20th century descriptive metaethics), and, at worst, consist of empirical hypotheses for which the proponents of these views (a) didn’t bother to collect or assess empirical data for nearly a century and (b) when such data finally was collected, it’s been almost completely ignored. Why should I feel obliged to respect the “expertise” of a field whose practitioners spent the better half of a century claiming that their goal was to capture what ordinary people mean when they make moral claims, but almost nobody ever bothered to do something as simple as studying how ordinary people use moral language in real-world situations? No, they relied almost entirely on armchair assessments of sentences they made up, as if one can extrapolate from a priori analysis of armchair analysis of made-up decontextualized sentences provides reliable information about what ordinary people mean in real-world contexts? Does it? I don’t know! That’s an empirical question, too! I doubt it does, though. I still see analytic philosophers insisting that moral realism is “the” commonsense view, despite virtually no studies, at least among adults, that find that virtually everyone is a moral realist. What you find is people giving mixed and inconsistent responses, at best, or, in more recent studies with better designs, you’ll often find consistently high rates of antirealism. There is virtually no evidence for this claim, yet philosophers repeat it like a mantra. I’m supposed to defer to that?
So philosophers spent decades using terrible methods that turned out to lead what appears to be most of them to draw conclusions about how ordinary people think that are probably mistaken, and for which we now have growing empirical data, yet I haven’t seen a single moral realist respond to this literature with an “Wow, we got it wrong” reaction (if you know of any, post them in the comments or email me; I’ll update this with a list if. If you don’t see a list it’s because nobody gave me any examples).
What I have seen are dozens of people, some professional philosophers, continuing to insist moral realism is “the” commonsense view, and that most people think or speak like moral realists. Are these empirical claims? According at least one article, the answer is no:
There are two ways to describe moral language. An internal project seeks to capture the psychological processes or representations that actually occur when people use moral language. However, contemporary realists and expressivists are not trying to do that. When Jackson and Pettit use networks of truisms or when Gibbard cites hyperstates, they surely know that these theoretical constructions do not reflect actual psychological entities or events. Instead, they want their theories to be externally adequate in capturing the outputs of our linguistic systems without necessarily reflecting the internal workings of that system. In this respect, their project is more like Chomskian grammar, which uses constructs without claiming psychological reality.
Overall, then, I take moral realism and expressivism to be trying to externally describe the semantics of all standard moral language. At least, that is the debate that I want to discuss. (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2009, p. 237)
So these accounts are allegedly not purporting to provide an accurate account of the psychological states associated with moral judgments. Never mind that I don’t think there’s a legitimate option other than the internal project described above (I think the external project is nonsensical), for now, consider some of remarks made by famous metaethicists Sinnott-Armstrong quotes in the article:
in every case in which one would commonly be said to be making an ethical judgment, the function of the relevant ethical word is purely ‘emotive’ (Ayer, 1935, p. 108)
The ordinary user of moral language means to say something about whatever it is he characterizes morally, for example a possible action, as it is in itself, or would be if it were realized, and not about, or even simply expressive of his or anyone else’s relation to it. (Mackie, 1977, p. 33)
we seem to think moral questions have correct answers; that the correct answers are made correct by objective moral facts . . . . (Smith, 1994, p. 6)
With normative language, we do mix plan with fact—on this point I insist. An everyday normative term, though, may not express a plan-laden concept at all straightforwardly (Timmons, 2003, p. 138)
What on earth could it possibly mean to talk about case in which one would be commonly said to be “making an ethical judgment,” and describing the function of that judgment as purely “emotive,” but this isn’t an empirical hypothesis about what the speaker is thinking or doing? And is Mackie’s claim about what an ordinary speaker means to say not an empirical claim? If so, what kind of claim is it? And am I to believe Smith’s remark that “we” (whoever “we” is; it’s not me!) think moral questions have correct answers isn’t a claim about human psychology? Or Timmons’s claim that “we” (again with the we; note how philosophers (a) aren’t precise about who they’re talking about and (b) seem to imply such remarks apply to all or most people, or at least all or most competent or reflective speakers) mix plan with fact; are plans not mental states, too? Note how baffling it would be if these remarks weren’t empirical claims about human psychology. If that’s the case, philosophers are using a lot of seemingly-empirical language in highly bizarre and unconventional ways. If they are empirical claims, great:
Why don’t most metaethicists making these claims study the moral judgments and linguistic practices of actual people? Maybe the reason why philosophers haven’t resolved these questions in a satisfactory way is because these claims only make sense if they’re understood as empirical hypotheses about human psychology, but most of those discussing these questions aren’t conducting or engaging in empirical research.
In short, these are empirical questions, then why are philosophers making claims about human psychology without providing adequate (and in most cases, any) empirical evidence? If they’re not empirical, what kinds of claims are they? Many of the people in the field spent decades making unfounded assumptions about human psychology, assumptions that are probably mistaken. And when the data has started to come in, they stubbornly maintain those same assumptions. Maybe this is a red flag, and maybe disputing what those working within this field think isn’t so much an indication of arrogance as an indication that I’m not buying what they’re selling.
The entire enterprise of 20th century metaethics was using the wrong methods. If it wasn’t asking an empirical question, then it was asking the wrong question. If it was asking an empirical question, it was using the wrong methods. It’s lose-lose. There is nothing arrogant about refusing to bow in obeisance before the “authority” of a field has spent decades demonstrating that it hasn’t earned it.
Analytic philosophers are often reproachful of scientists who overstep their bounds and either make foolish criticisms of philosophy, or engage (badly) in amateur philosophy and present a pile of blunders and superficial ideas as a solution to longstanding philosophical disputes. Yet philosophers routinely (at least in metaethics) make psychological claims that go unchallenged. There simply aren’t any psychologists around to chastise them. Now there are. We’ve got to start somewhere. These forays into bad armchair psychology are, to me, a sign of the inadequacy of the field’s methods. If you want to make empirical claims, either identify appropriate empirical data, or, if none exists, gather it yourself. If you don’t want to, the appropriate solution isn’t to presume your armchair ratiocinations are adequate. And just what are those methods, and what vaunted results have they bestowed us with?
Analytic philosophy simply hasn’t achieved what the sciences have, and isn’t anywhere near being in a position to dismiss critics of the field and its methods as “arrogant.” In any case, I’m disputing the intelligibility of a view endorsed only by about a quarter of (mostly) analytic philosophers; a number that may very well be lower were we to consult philosophers in other traditions. Only 26.6% of respondents to the 2020 PhilPapers survey endorsed non-naturalist realism, and that’s the main position I’m arguing is unintelligible. People who comprise only 26.6% of the people within a field have no business treating themselves as some kind of consensus.
There is nothing arrogant about challenging the foundations of analytic philosophy. As I’ve argued, there are at least some ways in which analytic philosophy has operated under a profound and pervasive arrogance, in presuming that the way its practitioners think, despite being an extremely narrow and highly unrepresentative body of thinkers typically drawn from populations that are psychological outliers with respect to most of the rest of the world’s population, nevertheless reflect how everyone, everywhere does or would think were they to reflect on the fundamental nature of reality. Indeed, analytic philosophers often maintain not only that all other humans would think the way they do, but that aliens or artificial intelligences would converge on their views. Perhaps that’s at least a little arrogant.
Much of the field consists of making psychological claims about how other people think (“it’s intuitive,” “most of us think that,” “it’s commonsensical that,” “it’s counterintuitive that…”), along with empirical claims about how people use language. One of its primary tools is psychology (i.e. intuitions), as well. Perhaps those engaging in the field should actually study the fields with the appropriate tools for addressing these questions, like psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and cognitive science. Perhaps there’s something a bit arrogant about presuming so much about psychology without doing any of the work to justify such claims, and if pressed on the matter, one can simply declare that one’s reflections aren’t empirical.
Here we have a discipline whose adherents have very little to show for themselves, whose practice remains in a perpetual state of seeming obsolescence, barely managing to shamble in through the 20th century only by coopting the pretense of clarity and rigor it parasitized from the sciences. This reaction came in response to science delivering an unmitigated stream of theoretical and practical victories for humanity, while analytic philosophy only sharpened its navel-gazing irrelevance by withdrawing further into their cloistered halls to whittle away at the most trivial and esoteric of pursuits.
The field remains in an almost perpetual existential torpor as it obsesses over whether it has made any progress at all, and, in an unsurprising irony, there seems to be no definitive answer to even that question, just as it provides hardly any definitive answers to anything else. We don’t need to even ask if physics or medicine or engineering or biology have made progress or whether they’ve delivered us any definitive answers to anything. We can clone animals and put people on the moon. What can philosophy do? It’s even abandoned its original mandate to deliver us wisdom. All it seems to offer us these days are ruminations about obscure topics; meanwhile, the practical and applied wing of philosophy is relegated to second fiddle, dismissed with quiet disdain for its failure to grapple with the dazzling abstractions of prestigious philosophical endeavors. With respect to the latter, there’s a suspicious correlation between how irrelevant a philosophical field is, and how much status and prestige it is accorded in the field. One has to wonder whether philosophy’s priorities have been turned on their head.
The whole enterprise is, to an outsider, difficult to distinguish from a mystery cult that claims to receive divine revelations by huffing empty Pringles cans. And at least that would provide a clear method.
Of course, I’m accusing an impersonal branch of an academic discipline of arrogance in strained metaphors, and perhaps that’s a bit silly. Yet the general point is that my stance would only be arrogant if my accusations were so unwarranted and without merit that they reflected an exaggerated conception of my own abilities. Yet I am not claiming to be, in any way, exceptional in my intellectual capacities or philosophical insight. I don’t think it takes any special abilities or insight to recognize that there’s something wrong with mainstream analytic philosophy. Lots of people see it. I suspect, on some level, many of those engaged in it recognize something is amiss.
The problem is, ultimately, one of method. What we’d need to vindicate the field is an overwhelming reason to think contemporary analytic philosophy rests on firm and respectable methods. If it doesn’t, it’s unclear why we should defer to its members as authorities.
Would it be arrogant, for instance, to suggest that most astrologers are wildly mistaken or confused? Or that most cryptozoologists aren’t just wrong about Bigfoot’s eating habits, but fundamentally confused about science and epistemology? I don’t think so, because we recognize that deep confusions are a plausible explanation for why people would be drawn into pseudosciences and faulty systems of thought and inference.
I have seen little from analytic philosophy to suggest that it should be accorded so much respect that it is arrogant to suggest that some of the people within the field could be wildly mistaken.
Finally, what if I actually make a good case? Would it still be arrogant of me to think that philosophers are conceptually confused? I’m not the first or only person who has taken a quietistic view towards one or another of various philosophical issues. Take, for instance, Pete Mandik’s qualia quietism. One could likewise accuse Mandik of “arrogance” for suggesting that most philosophers are confused about the concept of qualia. But I think these accusations are unfounded and deeply misguided. That a particular position is the result of a conceptual or linguistic confusion is the inevitable consequence of adopting a particular perspective on how language and meaning work (or don’t work), or it could be a natural and inescapable conclusion that one reaches in virtue of their own reflection on the matter. A quietist stance towards a given issue does not require one to think those who have made a conceptual or linguistic mistake are any less competent than someone who attributes the mistake to something more mundane. The charge of “arrogance,” thus has no teeth: nothing about my view requires that I think any less of a moral realist for the error I think they’re making than what an error theorist or noncognitivist would be disposed to think.
In addition, it’s difficult to establish that someone is arrogant merely by considering the position they endorse. One would think that why they think what they do matters. Perhaps more importantly, they act in interpersonal contexts matters. If one treats those they disagree with respect, but nevertheless maintains their views, are they arrogant? I am confident, but I hope I’ve done my best to be polite and respectful towards moral realists, even while disagreeing with them. At the very least, I do not recall any instances of publicly accusing people I’ve never spoken to of pretending to hold their views without a shred of evidence. Dominik has. It’s a bit weird to object to my character in the very same tweet where you broadcast the shortcomings of your own.
References
Ayer, A. J. (1935). Language, truth, and logic. London, UK: Gollantz.
Mackie, J. L. (1977). Ethics: Inventing right and wrong. New York, NY: Penguin.
Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2009). Mixed-up meta-ethics. Philosophical Issues, 19, 235-256.
Smith, M. (1994). The Moral Problem. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Timmons, M. (1998). Morality Without Foundations. New York, NY: Oxford University Press .