سید عباس کاظمی اسکویی

Theological Voluntarism is the view according to which certain moral properties or statuses have to be explained in terms of God’s commands, will, or other voluntary states of God. In his God and Moral Law, Mark Murphy criticizes theological voluntarism in general and Adams’ divine command theory of the nature of moral obligations in particular. Furthermore, he puts forward the first sketches for a theory of moral obligation that is not voluntaristic. In this paper I will first introduce Murphy’s proposed theory and will show that it is implausible. Then, drawing on Adams’ views of the nature of goodness and virtue, articulated in Finite and Infinite Goods and A theory of Virtue, I will try to put forward the first sketches of a viable theory of moral obligations that does not appeal to divine commands in explaining moral obligations and explains them in terms of goodness/badness. An important feature of morality that voluntarists appeal to for motivating their view and criticizing views that explain obligations in terms of goodness is the existence of supererogatory actions, i.e., actions that are good but not required. I will focus on this feature of morality and try to show how a theory of moral obligation that explains the obligations in terms of goodness can accommodate this feature.

Saul (2002) criticizes a view on the relationship between speaker meaning and conversational implicatures according to which speaker meaning is exhaustively comprised of what is said and what is implicated. In the course of making her points, she develops a couple of new notions which she calls “utterer-implicature” and “audience-implicature”. She then makes certain claims about the relationship between the intersection of those two notions and successful communication and also about the difference between conversational implicature and the intersection of utterer and audience implicatures. Finally, she tries to figure out the role and importance of conversational implicature in communication. Her claim on this issue is that conversational implicature plays a normative role in communication. In this paper, I will introduce her views on the above issues and critically engage some of them. I will show that her identification of successful communication with the intersection of utterer and audience implicatures is wrong. I will then show that her views on the difference between conversational implicature and the intersection of utterer and audience implicature run to several problems. Finally, appealing to what she says in Saul (2010) I try to make her claim about the normative character of conversational implicature more accurate.