Good as Usual: Anti-Exceptionalist Essays on Values, Norms, and Action

Good as Usual argues that contemporary discussion on the nature of norms and values goes wrong by treating them as exceptional and mysterious, since they do not fit popular philosophical assumptions about metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language. Timothy Williamson shows that, once we throw out those preconceived and outdated ideas, we can understand moral and evaluative features of reality as similar to its other features, and capable of being known and described in similar ways. The result is a new and anti-reductionist form of moral and evaluative realism and cognitivism. Williamson applies the same approach to practical reasoning about what to do, criticizing the subjectivist assumptions of standard decision theory, showing how the desires as well as the beliefs on which we act can amount to knowledge, and how connections between the justification of belief and the justification of action can benefit epistemology. Light is cast on the nature of rationality by a sharp distinction between rational beliefs and rational believers. Subtle logical fallacies about permissibility, obligation, and reasons are shown to have confused our normative thinking. This volume brings together and expands all of the author's work on normativity and value; it can be understood as the application to practical philosophy of the approach to theoretical philosophy developed in earlier work.