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Non-Optional Projects: Mathematical And Ethical, Alan Richard Baker

Philosophy Faculty Works

This chapter examines how the general framework for indispensability arguments developed by Enoch in the metaethical context plays out in its ancestral home, the philosophy of mathematics. Enoch’s framework is inspired by the Quine–Putnam type of indispensability argument in mathematics and is liable to inherit the latter’s holism. But once this holism is expunged from Enoch’s framework it turns out that Enoch’s indispensability argument is stronger in the moral than in the mathematical case, since it is more plausible that normative entities are indispensible to all projects of practical deliberation than it is that mathematical entities are indispensible to all …