The Autonomy of Normativity

While the Is-Ought Gap has recently been a topic of growing interest, most contributions are firmly fixed on logical, often quite technical accounts of the autonomy thesis. This book defends two complementary autonomy theses—a modal and ground-based thesis—that provide a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the nature of normativity.

The autonomy thesis is often motivated by claims about the nature of the normative domain and its categorical difference from the non-normative domain. This book develops two novel interpretations of the autonomy thesis, one based on the notion of grounding and the other based on a notion of logical-semantic entailment, developed within a framework of truthmaker semantics. Together these accounts capture best the informal idea that we cannot ‘get’ something normative from the non-normative. The proposal is based on an analysis of what it means to say that certain propositional content parts are relevant to the instantiation of entailment and grounding relations. Moreover, the book relates the autonomy debate to other important metaethical debates, and it offers a more explicit account of the theoretical commitments of an autonomist position. Finally, it develops simple and elegant formal equivalents of the proposed autonomy theses which facilitate the evaluation of structurally complex proposed counterexamples, which have impeded a substantive autonomy debate.

The Autonomy of Normativity will appeal to researchers and graduate students working in metaethics, metaphysics, and philosophical logic.