Capacities and the good: How can capacities contribute to explaining normativity and value?

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Erasmus Mayr; Professorin Dr. Barbara Vetter
• Subject Area: Practical Philosophy ; Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439616221

Throughout the last decades, there has been a notable rediscovery of human capacities in epistemology and ethics. In particular, a growing number of philosophers in both areas have come to refer to capacities in order to answer questions of value or normativity. Thus, many virtue epistemologists have come to argue that knowledge is better than mere true belief in virtue of stemming from the agent’s epistemic capacities, while many virtue ethicists hold that the value of good action can be explained, at least in part, by its issuing from a particular type of capacities, i.e. the virtues. This development ties in with the enormous revival of interest in powers and dispositions which contemporary metaphysics has witnessed over the last 25 years – and, indeed, many virtue epistemologists and virtue ethicists refer to precisely this revival to bolster their appeal to capacities (which, presumably, are a subset of powers). But while the latter philosophers expect the appeal to capacities to do specific normative or evaluative work, questions of normativity and value are conspicuously absent from debates on powers and dispositions in contemporary metaphysics. So the question naturally arises of how powers, as discussed in contemporary metaphysics, and capacities are meant to do the work that is expected of them in virtue epistemology and virtue ethics.Strikingly, there is a marked lack of reflection on this question, despite the prominence of capacities in the various debates mentioned above. The aim of the proposed project is to fill this lacuna by undertaking a systematic investigation both into the features of capacities which seem especially relevant for grounding evaluative and normative truths, and into the two main „mechanisms“ discussed in contemporary metaethics, which could explain how capacities could give rise to value or normativity, namely ethical naturalism and ethical constitutivism. In doing so, we do not only want to answer a set of questions which have become important in the different areas in their own right, but also provide an intra-disciplinary dialogue that ties together various areas and questions from philosophy through their shared concern in capacities.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants