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Nathan Robert Howard, Getting Attitudes Right, Analysis, 2025;, anae112, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anae112
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In 1903, G. E. Moore provoked generations of philosophers by placing goodness at the centre of ethics. Derek Parfit, Jonathan Dancy and T. M. Scanlon did the same nearly a century later using reasons. Now, Conor McHugh and Jonathan Way have followed suit by resurrecting broader interest in fittingness. Their lucid and comprehensive Getting Things Right argues that the normative realm is built atop fitting attitudes, i.e., that fittingness – not goodness, not ‘oughts’, not reasons – explains all normative claims.
The title states the book’s guiding idea that an attitude is fitting just when ‘it gets things right’. An attitude gets things right, according to the authors, when it matches its object, where different objects match with different attitudes in different ways. For example, a belief matches its object when the object is a fact; a desire matches its object when the object is desirable; a fear matches its object when that object is fearsome and so on. An attitude is fitting, we are led to think, when ordained by the world through this match. McHugh and Way approvingly cite Selim Berker’s metaphors of a puzzle piece fitting into place or a key fitting a lock to further illustrate this guiding idea (2022a: 77).
