Thinking How to Live

321 Pages·2003·0.8 MB·English

by  Allan Gibbard

Thinking How to Live
Thinking How to Live
Allan Gibbard
harvard university press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England 2003
Copyright © 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
The lyrics on p. 48, Chapter 3, are from Trial by Jury, by W. S. Gilbert
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gibbard, Allan.
Thinking how to live / Allan Gilbert.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-01167-8
1. Expressivism (Ethics) 2. Normativity (Ethics) I. Title.
BJ1500.E94G53 2003
170′.42—dc21 2003047801
To Beth with love
Contents
Preface ix
I Preliminaries
1 Introduction: A Possibility Proof 3
2 Intuitionism as Template: Emending Moore 21
II The Thing to Do
3 Planning and Ruling Out:
The Frege-Geach Problem 41
4 Judgment, Disagreement, Negation 60
5 Supervenience and Constitution 88
6 Character and Import 112
III Normative Concepts
7 Ordinary Oughts: Meaning and Motivation 137
8 Normative Kinds: Patterns of Engagement 159
9 What to Say about the Thing to Do:
The Expressivistic Turn and What It Gains Us 179
viii Thinking How to Live
IV Knowing What to Do
10 Explaining with Plans 199
11 Knowing What to Do 221
12 Ideal Response Concepts 236
13 Deep Vindication and Practical Confidence 251
14 Impasse and Dissent 268
References 289
Index 295
Preface
A family, a house, a book, or a career emerges from decisions by the
thousands. It is the upshot of answers to a multitude of questions:
whether to wed her, what flooring to use, what to explore next. The
aim of this book is to ask about these questions. I can ask myself how to
spend the next few minutes, whether to attend a conference, or how to
spend next year. I can ask myself too what to believe: Experts debate
the extent to which differences in genes from person to person make
for contrasting personalities, and I can investigate and ask myself what
to believe on this score, given the evidence. And I can ask myself how
to feel about a friend’s divorce or rivalry with a friend for a job.
These don’t strike us as questions of fact alone; in asking what to do,
I don’t seem to be seeking a fact of what to do. Facts, to be sure, do bear
on what to do: many facts bear, say, on whether to marry one’s love. But
is there a fact of whether to marry her? That might sound bizarre. Still,
closely related questions do have more the ring of fact. Ought I to wed
her? Does it make most sense to wed her? Is wedding her the thing to do?
And if it is, is that a fact? Talk of fact here might sound tendentious, but
a claim to facthood for oughts is one that philosophers do make; whole
branches of philosophy deal in such purported facts. Some philosophi-
cal theories of fact leave no doubt of facts like these—while others leave
no doubt that there are no such facts.
The hypothesis of this book is easy to state: Thinking what I ought to
ix