Alexander Pruss's Blog

Here is a very odd question that occurred to me: Is it good for there to be moral norms? Imagine a world just like this one, except that th...

People often talk of moral norms as overriding. The paradigm kind of case seems to be like this: You are N -forbidden to ϕ but morally re...

Some philosophers think that sometimes norms other than moral norms—e.g., prudential norms or norms of the meaningfulness of life—take prece...

Ought implies can. Most people can’t do Bayesian reasoning correctly. So Bayesian reasoning is not how they ought to reason. In particular, ...

If someone asks me to ϕ , typically that informs me that they want me to ϕ . But the normative effect of the request cannot be reduced to th...

Thursday November 11, 2021, at 4 pm Eastern (3 pm Central), the Rutgers Center for Philosophy of Religion and the Princeton Project in Philo...

Imagine a philosopher who argued that the norms of assertion are relative to culture on the grounds that in England we have the norm: Only...

I used to be quite averse to multiplying types of normativity until I realized that in an Aristotelian framework it makes perfect sense to m...

Grotius had a weird view: it is never permissible to lie, but “for purposes of natural law”, only assertions to people who had a right to th...

One obvious internal good of a game is victory. But victory generally isn’t everything, even when one restricts oneself to the internal good...

Most philosophers don’t talk much about games. But games actually highlight one of the really amazing powers of the human being: the power t...

A popular article of mine on “The Need for Human Nature” has just been posted on Sapientia . One can think of it as a precis of the main id...

One of our grad students brought to my attention a question I never thought about: Which communities have genuine authority? (Furthermore, t...

We can refer to norms. We can only refer to the kinds of things that cause effects in us. (Causal theory of reference.) So, norms are a k...

Consider: Purely physical things have only physical powers. Normative powers (i.e., powers of producing normative effects, such as promis...

I find some version of the following normative partial analysis of assertion very plausible: At least a part of what makes a speech act an...

I have begun work with a working title of Norms, Natures and God , which should be a book on how positing Aristotelian natures solves proble...

Suppose that to believe a proposition is to have a credence in that proposition above some (perhaps contextual) threshold p b where p b is...

On occasion, I’ve heard undergraduates suggest that naturalism faces a problem with emotions . They feel that a mere computational system wo...

Utterances cause a variety of outcomes. For instance, a request often causes an action by another person, while saying “Alexa, turn on the ...