Against the Being For Account of Normative Certitude

Abstract

Just as we can be more or less certain about empirical matters, we can be more or less certain about normative matters. Recently, it has been argued that this is a challenge for noncognitivism about normativity. Michael Smith presented the challenge in a 2002 paper and James Lenman (2003) and Michael Ridge (2003, 2007) responded independently. Andrew Sepielli (forthcoming) has now joined the rescue operation. His basic idea is that noncognitivists should employ the notion of being for (Schroeder 2008) to account for normative certitude. We shall argue that the being for account of normative certitude is vulnerable to many problems shared by other noncognitivist theories. Furthermore, we shall argue that Sepielli’s account has its own problems: His favored normalization procedure for degrees of being for has highly problematic implications.