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Evolution and the Normativity of Epistemic Reasons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Sharon Street
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Extract

Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.- Quine (1969)

We think that some facts - for example, the fact that someone is suffering, or the fact that all previously encountered tigers were carnivorous – supply us with normative reasons for action and belief. The former fact, we think, is a reason to help the suffering person; the latter fact is a reason to believe that the next tiger we see will also be carnivorous. But how is the reason-giving status of such facts best understood? In particular, is it best understood as ultimately “conferred” upon these facts by our own evaluative attitudes, or do at least some facts possess normative reason-giving status in a way that is robustly independent of our attitudes? This is the modern, secular version of Plato's “Euthyphro question” - couched here in the philosophically useful, though not essential, language of normative reasons.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 35: Belief and Agency , 2009 , pp. 213 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2009

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