Rach Cosker-Rowland
I'm an Associate Professor in Moral and Political Philosophy at the University of Leeds. I work mainly on normativity, metaethics, and gender.
I think of my research as falling mostly into 4 projects.
First, a project on the structure of normativity, the relationship between different normative properties and their normative significance.
Second, a project on moral disagreement and its metaphysical, epistemological, practical, and political implications.
Third a project on the moral error theory and in particular the implications of the moral error theory for epistemic normativity.
Fourth, a project on gender identity, what it is, how it relates to gender more broadly, and the moral and political rights that gender identity generates. The big idea behind this project is that if we understand gender identities as consisting in normative experiences, and gender concepts and properties as normative properties, we can better understand and demystify gender identity, better understand the relationship between gender identity and gender, understand why gender identities merit respect, and better explain why there are such seemingly intransigent disagreements about gender.
Supervisors: Professor Brad Hooker and Professor Philip Stratton-Lake
I think of my research as falling mostly into 4 projects.
First, a project on the structure of normativity, the relationship between different normative properties and their normative significance.
Second, a project on moral disagreement and its metaphysical, epistemological, practical, and political implications.
Third a project on the moral error theory and in particular the implications of the moral error theory for epistemic normativity.
Fourth, a project on gender identity, what it is, how it relates to gender more broadly, and the moral and political rights that gender identity generates. The big idea behind this project is that if we understand gender identities as consisting in normative experiences, and gender concepts and properties as normative properties, we can better understand and demystify gender identity, better understand the relationship between gender identity and gender, understand why gender identities merit respect, and better explain why there are such seemingly intransigent disagreements about gender.
Supervisors: Professor Brad Hooker and Professor Philip Stratton-Lake
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These standards are all action-guiding standards. And there has been discussion about the authoritative/genuine normativity of action-guiding standards in the literature but little if any about the authoritative or genuine normativity of (fitting) attitudes’ standards. However, there is a similar intuitive difference regarding the normativity of attitudes’ standards. Attitudes have internal standards, which determine when those attitudes are fitting. Consider admiration. The standard of admiration is the admirable. When we admire someone, we see their features as admirable. And we have reasons to admire admirable people in virtue of their admirable features. So, the standard of admiration, the admirable, gives rise to reasons to admire admirable people. Our perceived evidence analogously guides our beliefs. When we believe something, we see it as true in light of our evidence. And our (perceived) evidence gives rise to reasons for us to believe things.
Some attitudes have standards that seem genuinely normative. Belief’s evidential standard seems authoritatively normative. If you don’t desire good things for yourself and your friends and family, you seem to be normatively criticisable and going wrong normatively. So, the standard of desire, the desirable, also seems to be genuinely normative. Other attitudinal standards do not seem to give rise to genuine/authoritative normativity. Perhaps the standards of boredom and depression are the boring and the depressing, but these standards are not authoritatively or genuinely normative: we are not criticisable or normatively missing something if we never get bored or depressed. Similarly, we are not normatively criticisable if we are never jealous or envious. So, the enviable and the standard of jealousy do not seem genuinely normative.
In this paper I propose a value-based account of what makes an attitude’s standard genuinely or authoritatively normative, I draw out the implications of this account for the normativity of certain attitudes’ standards, and argue that it can be generalized to provide a plausible and illuminating general account of which standards are genuinely normative.