Speech-act theories of meaning have enjoyed a rise in prominence with Hanks (2015) and Soames (2015). Both focus the vast majority of their attention on providing an analysis of the semantic contents of assertions, and more or less assume the extension of their accounts to questions and commands. This paper examines two foundational issues that arise when attempting to extend the speech-act analysis to imperatives. The first issue is that because imperatives successfully embed under logical operators like disjunction, a version of the Frege-Geach problem arises. The second issue is that embedding under negation forces any such theory to make transparent how contradictory commands are to be represented. We argue that both issues can be adequately addressed by an extension of the account in Hanks (2015), and therefore Hanks’ view should be considered a viable overall theory for the semantics of imperatives.

Piety belongs on a short list of virtues that are indispensable for a flourishing life. Its sphere of concern includes not only the divine, but all of those agents thanks to whose efforts we acquired the sense that some things are worthwhile even though they may not be pleasant. This sense is a structural feature that results from almost all upbringings and it is a benefit. This means that even if we reject the specific ways our sources attempted to transmit to us, we owe them a response of gratitude. The virtue of piety is an important one not because ingratitude is always disturbing, but because impiety is distorting for the central human good of cultural participation. Someone who cannot see that they have been shaped by the intentions of others will find it difficult to become a source of being for others in turn.

 

Searle held that ‘thank you’ is an expressive illocutionary act that expresses the gratitude of the speaker. Although this view has been very influential, I argue that it must be rejected because it has counterintuitive implications about when a speaker is being insincere and when she is not. A more satisfactory account can be given if we take ‘thank you’ to express the normative judgment that a grateful response is required. Although I defend the judgment account from misinterpretations and objections, I ultimately add to it to explain how ‘thank you’ can pay respect and not just communicate it. I explain this by saying that ‘thank you’ has an effective use that allows us to pay our respects even if we don’t judge that a grateful response is necessary.

 

Hanks (Propositional content, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2015) develops a theory of propositions as speech-act types. Because speech acts play a role in the contents themselves, the view overturns Frege’s force/content distinction, and as such, faces the challenge of explaining how propositions embed under logical operators like negation. The attempt to solve this problem has lead Hanks and his recent commentators to adopt theoretically exotic resources, none of which, we argue, is ultimately successful. The problem is that although there are three different ways of negating the sentence “Mary’s card is an ace”, current speech-act theories of propositions can only accommodate two of them. We distinguish between (1) “It is false that Mary’s card is an ace” (sentence negation), (2) “Mary’s card is a non-ace” (predicate negation), and (3) “Mary’s card is not an ace” (content negation) and show that Hanks and his commentators cannot explain content negation. We call this Hanks’ Negation Problem. The problem is significant because content negation is the negation required for logic. Fortunately, we think there is a natural way for Hanks to accommodate content negation (and all the other logical operators) as successive acts of predication. The view solves Hanks’ Negation Problem with only resources internal to Hanks’ own view.

 

The status of constructivism as a metaethical or metanormative theory is unclear partly due to the lack of a clear semantics for central normative terms such as ‘reason’ and ‘ought’. In a series of recent papers, Sharon Street has attempted to clarify the central commitments of constructivism by focusing on the idea of a practical point of view and what follows from it. We improve upon the informal understanding provided by Street and attempt to provide a semantics for ‘ought’. Our semantics respects the core intuition of the constructivist that normative claims are made true because of our practical commitments as agents and also reflects the constructivist’s commitment to the centrality of practical deliberation to normative truth. On our view, a normative claim of the form 0S ought to /1 is true if / is entailed from S’s set of evaluative attitudes. We argue that a virtue of our definition is that it allows us to see precisely what is distinctive about constructivism as opposed to realism and expressivism.

 

According to a widespread interpretative consensus, Kant’s hypothetical imperatives are not really hypothetical at all. On this view, call it the jurisdiction view, all imperatives are categorical in form and differ only in whether they claim universal or local jurisdiction. While there are good textual and philosophical reasons for this view, in this paper, I will argue that the jurisdiction view is mistaken. In particular, I will argue that on a very natural reading of the Groundwork’s presentation of imperatives, they are the verbal expression of a kind of practical inference and that inferences, like judgments, are hypothetical if they manifest a ground-consequence relation. I will close by comparing my understanding with the jurisdiction view on the vexed issue of the status of what is called the Hypothetical Imperative.

 

Both metaethicists and Kant scholars alike use the phrase ‘Kantian
constructivism’ to refer to a kind of austere constructivism that holds that
substantive ethical conclusions can be derived from the practical
standpoint of rational agency as such. I argue that this widespread
understanding of Kant is incompatible with Kant’s claim that the
Categorical Imperative is a synthetic a priori practical judgement. Taking
this claim about the syntheticity of the Categorical Imperative seriously
implies that moral judgements follow from extra-logical but necessary
principles. These principles have to do not with the laws of practical
thinking but the laws of practical thought about an object. I conclude that
historical Kant was not what has come to be called a ‘Kantian
constructivist.’

 

In this article, I develop a novel interpretation of integrity that I believe ought to
be of special interest to business ethicists. According to a traditional understanding, integrity is the virtue of holding fast to one’s principles in the face of temptations. Against this, I suggest that integrity is the virtue that governs rather than forbids compromise. In other words, integrity does not just forbid compromise; it sometimes demands it. This virtue will sound paradoxical to some, and I spend much of the essay arguing for its plausibility and locating it within the larger philosophical tradition. In the second half of the essay, I try to connect this virtue to the essential aims of business as understood by shareholder theorists. If my argument is correct, it may explain why integrity is of such central concern for business ethicists. This article is published as part of a collection on integrity and its counterfeits.

 

The Negation Problem states that expressivism has insufficient structure to account for the various ways in which a moral sentence can be negated. We argue that the Negation Problem does not arise for expressivist accounts of all normative language but arises only for the specific examples on which expressivists usually focus. In support of this claim, we argue for the following three theses: 1) A problem that is structurally identical to the Negation Problem arises in non-normative cases, and this problem is solved once the hidden quantificational structure involved in such cases is uncovered; 2) the terms ‘required’, ‘permissible’, and ‘forbidden’ can also be analyzed in terms of hidden quantificational structure, and the Negation Problem disappears once this hidden structure is uncovered; 3) the Negation Problem does not arise for normative language that has no hidden quantificational structure. We conclude that the Negation Problem is not really a problem about expressivism at all but is rather a feature of the quantificational structure of the required, permitted, and forbidden.

 

The problem of the unity of the proposition asks what binds together the constituents of a proposition into a fully formed proposition that provides truth conditions for the assertoric sentence that expresses it, rather than merely a set of objects. Hanks’ solution is to reject the traditional distinction between content and force. If his theory is successful, then there is a plausible extension of it that readily solves the Frege–Geach problem for normative propositions. Unfortunately Hanks’ theory isn’t successful, but it does point to significant connections between expressivism, unity, and embedding.

 

Recently, the idea that every hypothetical imperative must
somehow be ‘backed up’ by a prior categorical imperative has gained a
certain influence among Kant interpreters and ethicists influenced by Kant.
Since instrumentalism is the position that holds that hypothetical
imperatives can by themselves and without the aid of categorical
imperatives explain all valid forms of practical reasoning, the influential
idea amounts to a rejection of instrumentalism as internally incoherent. This
paper argues against this prevailing view both as an interpretation of Kant
and as philosophical understanding of practical reason. In particular, it will
be argued that many of the arguments that claim to show that hypothetical
imperatives must be backed up by categorical imperatives mistakenly
assume that the form of practical reasoning must itself occur as a premise
within the reasoning. An alternative to this assumption will be offered. I will
conclude that while instrumentalism may well be false, there is no reason to
believe it is incoherent.