red wine reduction

Reduction as Property Analysis

Schroeder’s answer to Hampton and Korsgaard in chapter 3 requires him to defend the claim that the best version of the Humean Theory of Reasons doesn’t just tell us which reasons you have, but it also tells us what it is for something to be a reason for you. It is, in his terms, a reductive analysis of reasons.

Recall from chapter 2 of The Moral Problem Smith’s classification of views with respect to what they say moral words describe. All of the view that Smith considers are forms of descriptivism, because they say that moral words describe - they pick out a way that things might be, or in other words, a moral property. Non-naturalists, in Smith’s terms, say that ‘good’ or ‘right’ pick out a non-natural property. Moore was our example of a non-naturalist. Smith then divides naturalists into definitional and non-definitional naturalists. Neither Smith nor Schroeder are non-definitional naturalists. Smith thinks that there are naturalistic definitions of ‘right’ and ‘reason’, and so does Schroeder (though he only discusses ‘reason’ in this book). But Smith and Schroeder offer different answers to Moore’s Open Question Argument. As you read, try to figure out how Schroeder’s answer to the Open Question Argument is different from Smith’s.