Who's on First?

Daniel Wodak (Virginia Tech)

According to 'X-Firsters', there's some essential feature that all normative properties and relations have in common in virtue of which they're normative. Much has been said about the debate between X-Firsters: proponents of Reasons-First, Value-First, and Fittingness-First disagree about what the best candidate for that essential feature is. But surprisingly little has been said about whether or why one should be an X-Firster about normativity. My goals are two-fold. First, I argue that one shouldn't be an X-Firster about normativity because X-First views are implausible for plenty of domains that are analogous to normativity (e.g., descriptive properties and relations need not have any essential feature in common). Second, I develop a natural alternative view that illustrates how rejecting X-First views makes available a range of interesting, plausible options in metaethics.