Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment

by Allan Gibbard

'Choices can be wise or foolish, and feelings can be apt or off the mark.' Since this is how we judge, it would be good to know what content these normative judgements carry. Gibbard offers an answer, and elaborates it. His theory explores what is at issue in narrowly moral questions, and in questions of rational thought and conduct in general. It helps to explain why normative thought and talk so pervade human life, and why our highly social species might have evolved to be gripped by these questions. Gibbard asks how, if his theory is right, we can interpret our normative puzzles, and thus proceed toward finding answers to them. Not available from O.U.P. in the U.S.A., Canada, Japan or the Phillippines.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychology

360 pages, Paperback

First published February 26, 1990

Reviews

[Corbin]

Gibbard offers extremely interesting suggestions, presenting them in a plausible narrative that takes seriously both evolutionary naturalism and normative reasoning. I even agree with many of Gibbard's suggestions--or at least, take these suggestions to be worth considering seriously. Overall, though, the book lacks argumentation and is incredibly repetitive; the same points could have been made in half or even a third of the pages actually used. Thus my lowered rating: I suspect that Gibbard relied on redundancy to increase plausibility for his narrative, thus reducing the audience's demand for justification. One could probably read the following chapters and get the gist (thus saving time and leaving one's critical eye unglossed): 1-2, 6-7, 11-13, and 17. I think this book is still worth reading, even though Gibbard changes his views in important ways in his later works, and it is particularly interesting for materialist/naturalist thinkers who resist ontologizing normativity (i.e., positing normative or evaluative entities).

Gibbard suggests that moral feelings motivate us to coordinate our thoughts, feelings, and actions with others. Particularly fruitful for such coordination are anger and guilt, and we can even narrowly conceive morality in terms of these feelings: we feel something is bad or wrong if we think it makes sense for others to be angry at my doing the act and for me to feel guilty for doing it. Different people will have different initial moral intuitions due to differences in influences and background experiences and knowledge, but because these moral feelings are social, they open us to affecting and being affected by others, thus helping us coordinate not only our actions but also our norms for action and feeling (and our norms for these norms, etc.). Gibbard explores how plausible and rich morality can be under the assumption of norm expressivism (i.e., the idea that moral statements are not cognitive judgments with content and reference to actual entities, but rather express one's feelings and attitudes). He presents a narrative trying to account for things such as the tendency in moral thinking to seek consistency and objectivity in our values, constraining the narrative by appeal to psychological and biological mechanisms in accordance with evolutionary theory. Along the way, Gibbard considers the debates between parochialists (dogmatists/absolutists) and relativists, between utilitarians and deontologists, between egoists and altruists, etc., offering interesting ways to make sense of these debates that provides some warrant for each position without accepting the extremes. Again, Gibbard's reflections are interesting but speculative--rather than arguing for naturalist moral expressivism, he offers a description of such a view to see whether it seems plausible and whether it can inform our moral theorizing. And I think Gibbard succeeds on both accounts, even if these successes are of minor import.

[Craig]

Several interesting ideas, reaching into many fields of study to formulate a moral theory. However as has been stated before me, there is much room for improvement as far as argumentation goes. It is very much a demonstration and presentation, than a derivation, which can be fine depending on your audience. Woukd give a 3.5 if I could

[Reuben HF]

I agree with Blackburn - it is difficult to praise this book highly enough. Vastly insightful, sensitively human, and, it is hard not to feel, in large part just plain correct.

[Jacob Williams]

some comments at https://brokensandals.net/2026/august...

[Anthony]

i just finished this book, and it's about mother-flippin' time - i started it some 9 months ago. there were several factors that kept me from finishing this book more quickly that have nothing to do with its content. nevertheless, i have to confess that it let me down in certain ways. part of the reason is that i had much greater ambitions for this book, but that's not a reason to criticize (it's to gibbard's credit that he has such modest aims). i was also somewhat disappointed simply because gibbard's view is intuitively plausible to me, and i was therefore not shocked (i don't know why i thought i was going to be shocked, but it was a let down all the same).

that, in a nutshell, is why i didn't give this book four stars. if you've ever thought about normative language, and what it is we're doing when we use it, and what exactly we should aim for with moral inquiry, i highly recommend you read this book. it's likely to open your eyes, no matter what perspective you're coming from.

[Foppe]

Very interesting taxonomical work, which tries to give an account of how and why humans are moral animals making and accepting normative statements. Lacks a personal-level account of how we arrive at justified normative utterances.

[TJ]

Phil 469