Brentano on Normativity in Logic and Ethics

Abstract Today, Brentano’s ethics is understood as a special case of the fitting attitude account of normativity. Fitting attitude accounts explain the goodness of objects in terms of the fittingness of a positive attitude towards the object. There is an important difference, though, between standard fitting attitude accounts of moral normativity and Brentano’s meta-ethics. Brentano’s phenomenological approach to the problem of normativity makes use of the notion of the act’s inner rightness, experienced as such by the agent. It is this first-personal notion that is to give the foundation of normativity in logic and ethics. Brentano thus makes use of a notion of objectivity that is neither to be understood in Platonic, nor in naturalistic terms. G. E. Moore has rightly pointed to a problem in Brentano’s moral notion of inner rightness that also arises for his account of truth; in the end, a modification of Brentano’s theory is proposed that seems not affected by this issue.