Normative Concepts and Action-Guidingness

Francois Schroeter (University of Melbourne), Laura Schroeter (University of Melbourne)

Core normative concepts, such as morally right or all-told right, play a characteristic action-guiding role: rational agents attempt to conform their intentions and actions to judgments deploying these concepts. Many metaethicists have appealed to this action-guiding role in order to challenge cognitivist and naturalist approaches to normative judgments and normative concepts. In doing so, they have typically relied on very schematic characterizations of the action-guiding role of normative concepts.

In this paper, we clarify the nature of the action-guiding role of normative concepts, highlighting the distinctive phenomenology and egocentric character of paradigmatic normative judgments. We also show how these distinctive features don’t threaten metaethical cognitivism and naturalism.