Pekka Väyrynen
Biographic Data
| ID | 1052126 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Pekka Väyrynen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Pekka |
| FAMILY NAME | Väyrynen |
| SIGNATURE | VÄYRYNEN P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Leeds |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4066-8577 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 35 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
High Standards
Evaluative adjectives are gradable. The standard for falling under a gradable adjective “ F ” is either context‐relative or absolute. Some philosophers have recently used general linguistic tests to argue that “rational” and (moral) “good” are maximum‐degree absolute gradable adjectives: Only what's perfectly morally good strictly counts as morally “good,” and only what's optimally rational strictly counts as “rational.” Against maximalism, I def…
Practical Commitment in Normative Discourse
Many normative judgments play a practical role in our thought. This paper concerns how their practical role is reflected in language. It is natural to wonder whether the phenomenon is semantic or pragmatic. The standard assumption in moral philosophy is that at least terms which can be used to express “thin” normative concepts—such as ‘good’, ‘right’, and ‘ought’—are associated with certain practical roles somehow as a matter of meaning. But this…
Normative explanation unchained
Normative theories aim to explain why things have the normative features they have. This paper argues that, contrary to some plausible existing views, one important kind of normative explanations which first‐order normative theories aim to formulate and defend can fail to transmit downward along chains of metaphysical determination of normative facts by non‐normative facts. Normative explanation is plausibly subject to a kind of a justification c…
Reasons and Moral Principles
Moral particularism and generalism are families of views united by their denial or affirmation (respectively) that general moral principles play some fundamental role in morality. In this survey of the generalism/particularism debate, I distinguish between contributory and overall moral principles and between two distinct roles, standards and guides, which either sort of principles might be claimed to play. Next I describe three different forms w…
Essential Contestability and Evaluation
Evaluative and normative terms and concepts are often said to be "essentially contestable". This notion has been used in political and legal theory and applied ethics to analyze disputes concerning the proper usage of terms like "democracy", "freedom", "genocide", "rape", "coercion", and "the rule of law". Many philosophers have also thought that essential contestability tells us something important about the evaluative in particular. Gallie (who…
The Lewd, the Rude and the Nasty
In addition to 'thin' concepts like the good, the bad and the ugly, our evaluative thought and talk appeals to 'thick' concepts like the lewd and the rude, the selfish and the cruel, the courageous and the kind - concepts that somehow combine evaluation and nonevaluative description. Thick terms and concepts are almost universally assumed to be inherently evaluative in meaning or content. And many philosophers have claimed them to have deep and d…
A Wrong Turn to Reasons
Much of recent metaethics, and meta-normative inquiry more generally, displays a turn to reasons. In the air wafts a confidence, even if not a definite program easily attributable to particular people, that appealing to reasons — in the normative sense in which reasons are good grounds for acting, thinking, or feeling in certain ways — will better enable us to account for various normative and evaluative phenomena than appealing to value or any o…
Objectionable Thick Concepts in Denials
So-called "thick" moral concepts are distinctive in that they somehow "hold together" evaluation and description. But how? This paper argues against the standard view that the evaluations which thick concepts may be used to convey belong to sense or semantic content. That view cannot explain linguistic data concerning how thick concepts behave in a distinctive type of disagreements and denials which arise when one speaker regards another's thick …
Normative Appeals to the Natural
Surprisingly, many ethical realists and anti‐realists, naturalists and not, all accept some version of the following normative appeal to the natural (NAN): evaluative and normative facts hold solely in virtue of natural facts, where their naturalness is part of what fits them for the job. This paper argues not that NAN is false but that NAN has no adequate non‐parochial justification (a justification that relies only on premises which can be acce…
Some Good and Bad News for Ethical Intuitionism
The core doctrine of ethical intuitionism is that some of our ethical knowledge is non‐inferential. Against this, Sturgeon has recently objected that if ethical intuitionists accept a certain plausible rationale for the autonomy of ethics, then their foundationalism commits them to an implausible epistemology outside ethics. I show that irrespective of whether ethical intuitionists take non‐inferential ethical knowledge to be a priori or a poster…
Ethical Theories and Moral Guidance
Let the Guidance Constraint be the following norm for evaluating ethical theories: Other things being at least roughly equal, ethical theories are better to the extent that they provide adequate moral guidance . I offer an account of why ethical theories are subject to the Guidance Constraint, if indeed they are. We can explain central facts about adequate moral guidance, and their relevance to ethical theory, by appealing to certain forms of aut…
Moral Particularism
This paper is a survey of the generalism-particularism debate in ethics
Moral Particularism
Book Review| July 01 2002 Moral Particularism Brad Hooker and Margaret Little, Moral Particularism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv, 317. Pekka Väyrynen Pekka Väyrynen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2002) 111 (3): 478–483. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-111-3-478 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Pekka Väyrynen;…
The Lewd, the Rude and the Nasty
In addition to 'thin' concepts like the good, the bad and the ugly, our evaluative thought and talk appeals to 'thick' concepts like the lewd and the rude, the selfish and the cruel, the courageous and the kind - concepts that somehow combine evaluation and nonevaluative description. Thick terms and concepts are almost universally assumed to be inherently evaluative in meaning or content. And many philosophers have claimed them to have deep and d…
Objectionable Thick Concepts in Denials
So-called "thick" moral concepts are distinctive in that they somehow "hold together" evaluation and description. But how? This paper argues against the standard view that the evaluations which thick concepts may be used to convey belong to sense or semantic content. That view cannot explain linguistic data concerning how thick concepts behave in a distinctive type of disagreements and denials which arise when one speaker regards another's thick …
Some Good and Bad News for Ethical Intuitionism
The core doctrine of ethical intuitionism is that some of our ethical knowledge is non‐inferential. Against this, Sturgeon has recently objected that if ethical intuitionists accept a certain plausible rationale for the autonomy of ethics, then their foundationalism commits them to an implausible epistemology outside ethics. I show that irrespective of whether ethical intuitionists take non‐inferential ethical knowledge to be a priori or a poster…
Normative Appeals to the Natural
Surprisingly, many ethical realists and anti‐realists, naturalists and not, all accept some version of the following normative appeal to the natural (NAN): evaluative and normative facts hold solely in virtue of natural facts, where their naturalness is part of what fits them for the job. This paper argues not that NAN is false but that NAN has no adequate non‐parochial justification (a justification that relies only on premises which can be acce…
Ethical Theories and Moral Guidance
Let the Guidance Constraint be the following norm for evaluating ethical theories: Other things being at least roughly equal, ethical theories are better to the extent that they provide adequate moral guidance . I offer an account of why ethical theories are subject to the Guidance Constraint, if indeed they are. We can explain central facts about adequate moral guidance, and their relevance to ethical theory, by appealing to certain forms of aut…
Normative explanation unchained
Normative theories aim to explain why things have the normative features they have. This paper argues that, contrary to some plausible existing views, one important kind of normative explanations which first‐order normative theories aim to formulate and defend can fail to transmit downward along chains of metaphysical determination of normative facts by non‐normative facts. Normative explanation is plausibly subject to a kind of a justification c…
Reasons and Moral Principles
Moral particularism and generalism are families of views united by their denial or affirmation (respectively) that general moral principles play some fundamental role in morality. In this survey of the generalism/particularism debate, I distinguish between contributory and overall moral principles and between two distinct roles, standards and guides, which either sort of principles might be claimed to play. Next I describe three different forms w…
Moral Particularism
This paper is a survey of the generalism-particularism debate in ethics
Moral Particularism
Book Review| July 01 2002 Moral Particularism Brad Hooker and Margaret Little, Moral Particularism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv, 317. Pekka Väyrynen Pekka Väyrynen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2002) 111 (3): 478–483. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-111-3-478 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Pekka Väyrynen;…
Ethical Theories and Moral Guidance
Let the Guidance Constraint be the following norm for evaluating ethical theories: Other things being at least roughly equal, ethical theories are better to the extent that they provide adequate moral guidance . I offer an account of why ethical theories are subject to the Guidance Constraint, if indeed they are. We can explain central facts about adequate moral guidance, and their relevance to ethical theory, by appealing to certain forms of aut…
Some Good and Bad News for Ethical Intuitionism
The core doctrine of ethical intuitionism is that some of our ethical knowledge is non‐inferential. Against this, Sturgeon has recently objected that if ethical intuitionists accept a certain plausible rationale for the autonomy of ethics, then their foundationalism commits them to an implausible epistemology outside ethics. I show that irrespective of whether ethical intuitionists take non‐inferential ethical knowledge to be a priori or a poster…
Objectionable Thick Concepts in Denials
So-called "thick" moral concepts are distinctive in that they somehow "hold together" evaluation and description. But how? This paper argues against the standard view that the evaluations which thick concepts may be used to convey belong to sense or semantic content. That view cannot explain linguistic data concerning how thick concepts behave in a distinctive type of disagreements and denials which arise when one speaker regards another's thick …
Normative Appeals to the Natural
Surprisingly, many ethical realists and anti‐realists, naturalists and not, all accept some version of the following normative appeal to the natural (NAN): evaluative and normative facts hold solely in virtue of natural facts, where their naturalness is part of what fits them for the job. This paper argues not that NAN is false but that NAN has no adequate non‐parochial justification (a justification that relies only on premises which can be acce…
A Wrong Turn to Reasons
Much of recent metaethics, and meta-normative inquiry more generally, displays a turn to reasons. In the air wafts a confidence, even if not a definite program easily attributable to particular people, that appealing to reasons — in the normative sense in which reasons are good grounds for acting, thinking, or feeling in certain ways — will better enable us to account for various normative and evaluative phenomena than appealing to value or any o…
The Lewd, the Rude and the Nasty
In addition to 'thin' concepts like the good, the bad and the ugly, our evaluative thought and talk appeals to 'thick' concepts like the lewd and the rude, the selfish and the cruel, the courageous and the kind - concepts that somehow combine evaluation and nonevaluative description. Thick terms and concepts are almost universally assumed to be inherently evaluative in meaning or content. And many philosophers have claimed them to have deep and d…
Essential Contestability and Evaluation
Evaluative and normative terms and concepts are often said to be "essentially contestable". This notion has been used in political and legal theory and applied ethics to analyze disputes concerning the proper usage of terms like "democracy", "freedom", "genocide", "rape", "coercion", and "the rule of law". Many philosophers have also thought that essential contestability tells us something important about the evaluative in particular. Gallie (who…
Reasons and Moral Principles
Moral particularism and generalism are families of views united by their denial or affirmation (respectively) that general moral principles play some fundamental role in morality. In this survey of the generalism/particularism debate, I distinguish between contributory and overall moral principles and between two distinct roles, standards and guides, which either sort of principles might be claimed to play. Next I describe three different forms w…
Normative explanation unchained
Normative theories aim to explain why things have the normative features they have. This paper argues that, contrary to some plausible existing views, one important kind of normative explanations which first‐order normative theories aim to formulate and defend can fail to transmit downward along chains of metaphysical determination of normative facts by non‐normative facts. Normative explanation is plausibly subject to a kind of a justification c…
Practical Commitment in Normative Discourse
Many normative judgments play a practical role in our thought. This paper concerns how their practical role is reflected in language. It is natural to wonder whether the phenomenon is semantic or pragmatic. The standard assumption in moral philosophy is that at least terms which can be used to express “thin” normative concepts—such as ‘good’, ‘right’, and ‘ought’—are associated with certain practical roles somehow as a matter of meaning. But this…
High Standards
Evaluative adjectives are gradable. The standard for falling under a gradable adjective “ F ” is either context‐relative or absolute. Some philosophers have recently used general linguistic tests to argue that “rational” and (moral) “good” are maximum‐degree absolute gradable adjectives: Only what's perfectly morally good strictly counts as morally “good,” and only what's optimally rational strictly counts as “rational.” Against maximalism, I def…
Epistemology (9 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Normative (6 works) · Philosophical Ethics and Theory (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Law (4 works)