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I first show how one might argue for a mind-independent conception of beauty and artistic merit. I then discuss whether this makes aesthetic judgements suitable to undermine skeptical worries about the existence of mind-independent moral value and categorical reasons.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to distinguish between two kinds of companions in guilt strategy: by analogy, and by entailment. It explores the methodology of companions in guilt arguments and argues that proponents of guilt argument assume that the error theory is comprised of a single argument. The book provides one of the first sustained discussions and critiques of Terence Cuneo’s illocutionary companions in guilt argument. It also argues that if epistemic normativity can be analysed in terms of truth, then prudential normativity can be analysed in terms of pleasure. The book discusses the prospects for companions in guilt arguments that take aesthetic judgments or properties as a companion for their moral counterparts. It shows that a version of guilt argument based on the metaphysics of the thick evaluative or on what it is to understand thick evaluative concepts fails.

Evidence based-policy (EBP) is a popular research paradigm in the applied social sciences and within government agencies. Informally, EBP represents an explicit commitment to applying scientific methods to public affairs, in contrast to ideologically-driven or merely intuitive “common-sense” approaches to public policy. More specifically, the EBP paradigm places great weight on the results of experimental research designs, especially randomised controlled trials (RCTs), and systematic literature reviews that place evidential weight on experimental results. One hope is that such research designs and approaches to analysing the scientific literature are sufficiently robust that they can settle what really ‘works’ in public policy. Can EBP succeed in displacing reliance on domain-specific expertise? On our account, this is seldom, if ever, the case. The key reason for this is that underlying this approach is generally an appeal to argument by induction, which always requires further assumptions to underwrite its validity, and if not induction, some other argument form that also requires assumptions that are very often not validated for the case at hand.

Iris Murdoch both argues that perceptual experience itself can be evaluatively significant, and that the best way of making sense of this claim is to say that experience is shaped by the concepts that subjects possess and deploy as situated historical agents with a stance upon the world. This paper examines the implications of Murdoch’s distinctive conception of moral perception as a form of ‘vision’ revelatory of value for recent companions in guilt arguments for moral objectivism from thick evaluative concepts and speech act theory. I question the underlying motivation for holding that conventional norms that pertain to speech are themselves moral norms in developing a metaethical view of moral value (see Cuneo, 2014). Instead, I argue that there is an essentially relational dimension to realistic and continuous self-cultivation in concept application that is helpfully understood in terms of virtue. This, if I am right, brings into view a new perspective on the so-called companions in guilt strategy in metaethics.