Abstract

It has been maintained that cognitivist views, which interpret normative judgments as a kind of belief, are unable to account for the role of such judgments in explaining (“motivating”) actions. The chapter argues that the connection between normative judgment and action is adequately explained by the idea of a rational agent, and that expressivist views appeal to this same notion, in slightly different ways. Given that there are no serious metaphysical objections to the idea of irreducibly normative truths, a cognitivist account of normative judgments is preferable to an expressivist one, since it offers a more satisfactory account of the role of such judgments in both intrapersonal and interpersonal reasoning.