DPhil Seminar (Wednesday - Week 3, HT24)

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Recent years have seen a growing number of philosophers come to defend normative nihilism. Even if their arguments do not induce in many a belief in normative nihilism, there may be good grounds on which to be less than certain about the falsity of normative nihilism. How, then, can we accommodate the possibility of normative nihilism when deliberating about what to do? In this article, I defend two theses. First, I distinguish between normative questions and deliberative questions and argue that the question “what am I to do under uncertainty about the truth of normative nihilism?” is best understood as an example of the latter. Second, I propose a novel framework for deliberation under uncertainty about the truth of normative nihilism: Maximise Expected Decision-Relevance. A striking upshot of this article is that there is an important sense in which we make no mistake by flouting normative considerations under uncertainty about the truth of normative nihilism.

See the DPhil Seminar website for details.


DPhil Seminar Convenors: Lewis Williams and Kyle van Oosterum