Getting Things Right

Book excerpt: Some of our attitudes are fitting, others unfitting. It seems fitting to admire Mandela, but not Idi Amin, and to believe that the Seine flows through Paris, but not that the Thames does. Fitting attitudes get things right. Conor McHugh and Jonathan Way argue that fittingness is the key to understanding the normative domain—the domain of reasons, obligations, and value. They develop and defend a novel 'fittingness first' approach, on which fittingness is a normatively basic property and all other normative properties depend on fittingness. They show how this approach illuminates central questions in ethics and epistemology.