The de dicto account of moral worth

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Date

2025

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University of the Western Cape

Abstract

The de re/de dicto debate takes as its starting point the observation that not all morally correct actions have moral worth; the agent has to act for the right reasons in order to be morally praiseworthy. According to the traditional de dicto view, the “right reason” is that the agent recognises that the action is the morally correct one, that it falls under the description “…is morally right”; whereas, according to the de re view that has recently supplanted it, the “right reason” is that the agent recognises the action’s right-making features, the reasons that make the action right in the first place. The de re view currently holds sway, with Nomy Arpaly being its main advocate. Many of the key arguments in the de re/de dicto literature appeal to thought experiments, such as Arpaly’s Huck Finn and Williams’ ‘one thought too many’. However, several experimental philosophers, such as Edouard Machery, have critiqued traditional analytic philosophy’s reliance on thought experiments. For this reason, I designed a simple study to empirically test our de re/de dicto intuitions. This is the first time this literature has been subjected to empirical testing. Over one hundred participants of a range of ages, races, genders and familiarity with formal Philosophy were polled randomly. The results are presented in this paper. As we will see, though the de re view continues to be the predominant one amongst contemporary philosophers, empirical testing reveals that there is more intuitive support for the de dicto view than the literature has assumed. I hope in this paper to show that the traditional, de dicto account of moral worth deserves a second chance.

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Keywords

Humanities, Moral philosophy, Dataset, University of the Western Cape, UWC

Citation

Lerm, J. (2025). The de dicto account of moral worth. Dataset. University of the Western Cape. https://hdl.handle.net/10566/20679

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https://hdl.handle.net/10566/20679

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