title: Robust Metanormative Realism: A Critical Defence of David Enoch's View
Creators: name: Swaine-Jameson, Tom
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2023

description: I argue for robust metanormative realism (RMR), the view that there are sui generis normative facts. I distinguish between formal normativity and the authoritative normativity which I take to be the object of RMR. Drawing principally from David Enoch’s arguments – his indispensability argument alongside his arguments against rivals to RMR – I amend and bolster those arguments to strengthen his case for the view. I conclude that RMR is stronger than its rivals, but nonetheless confronts pressing challenges. In Chapter One, I define RMR in terms of its commitment to (i) the existence of normative facts (and, relatedly, normative truths, reasons, properties, values, and so on) and (ii) those facts (and other normative items) being metaphysically sui generis. I contrast this characterisation of RMR with characterisations that focus on RMR’s objectivism; I conclude that, in treating RMR as a commitment to metanormative factualism coupled with a distinct commitment to the robustness of the relevant normative facts, we better align our conception of RMR with the best case for the view. Specifically, I argue that the best case for RMR comprises a factual stage argument for the existence of normative facts, followed by a distinct robust stage argument for a conception of those facts as sui generis. The facts purportedly established in the factual stage are open to a variety of distinct factualist interpretations – from quasi-realist, through fictionalist, constructivist, reductive and non-reductive naturalist, to robustly realist – where the robust stage purports to establish their sui generis status. In Chapter Two, I consider the factual stage of the case for RMR, and I present Enoch’s indispensability argument as an argument for the existence of normative facts. Enoch argues: that we are permitted to infer to the indispensables of rationally non-optional projects; that deliberation is one such project; that a commitment to normative facts is deliberatively indispensable; and that we may therefore infer to the existence of normative facts. I concede to the objection that this begs the question against the metanormative nonfactualist. I argue that it does this (i) by treating as (authoritatively) normative our permission to infer to the indispensables of rationally non-optional projects and (ii) by understanding rational non-optionality itself normatively. I present an alternative formulation of the argument where both the permission to infer to the indispensables of the rationally non-optional, and rational non-optionality itself, are understood rationally, not (authoritatively) normatively. While rationality is formally normative, I argue that we can nonetheless maintain an (at least prima facie) conceptual distinction between rationality and authoritative normativity, such that any overlap in the extension of those concepts would be non-trivial. This, I argue, is all that is required to rationally pressure the nonfactualist to abandon her nonfactualism. In Chapter Three, I consider the robust stage of the case for RMR, which purports to take the normative facts established by the factual stage and show that they are metaphysically sui generis. I present the Euthyphronic argument, most often deployed against constructivism, and argue that it can be generalised against all non-robust metanormative factualisms. The Euthyphronic argument grants the coextensiveness of normative and natural facts, but then asks what explains this relation: the normative side, or the prima facie non-normative side? Neither answer, I argue, is sustainable for non-robust factualisms. I focus on the application of this Euthyphronic argument to constitutivism and constructivism, and then to idealising response-dependence naturalisms, after which I extend the argument to naturalisms in general and to non-metaphysical metanormative non-naturalist realisms. While I argue that RMR is stronger than its rivals, it nonetheless faces pressing challenges. While I do not attempt to answer these challenges, I do point to the way in which I take them, and their potential solutions, to be connected. Specifically, I suggest that provision of an adequate epistemology of robust normativity would help to solve problems emerging from motivation and supervenience.