ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most difficult issue in Sellars scholarship concerns the question of how normativity fits into a naturalistic picture of the world. At the heart of Sellars’s system of thought is the idea that the ‘manifest’ and the ‘scientific’ image can be brought together to form a single synoptic vision. Sellars does not attempt to refute this intuitionist view head on. Instead, he provides an alternative account in which he tries to show that it is possible to give an explanation of how Jones came to think that he ought to pay his debts that does not need to posit normative facts. In accounting for moral behaviour, Sellars thereby replaces a conception of moral Ought as “an intruder in the natural order” with “the view that the causal efficacy of the embodied core generalizations of rules is ultimately grounded on the Law of Effect, that is to say, the role of rewards and punishments in shaping behavior”.
