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"How to Decide What to Do"
Abstract:
Suppose you are faced with some moment of decision: which dish to order from the menu, or which job to accept from a set of offers; what to do with a free afternoon, or with the rest of your life. What are you up to when you try, in such moments, to decide what to do? In this talk, I bring ideas from the philosophy of mind into dialogue with metaethics in order to argue that what you are doing is looking outwards, towards a world that comes laden with value, and it is this value that you seek to guide you in making your decision. At least in the moment of deliberation, that is, you are necessarily a metaethical realist about value: you understand it to be something that you encounter in the world, and not merely a product or projection or construction of your own desires or evaluative commitments.