High Standards

Evaluative adjectives are gradable. The standard for falling under a gradable adjective “F” is either context-relative or absolute. Some philosophers have recently used general linguistic tests to argue that “rational” and (moral) “good” are maximum-degree absolute gradable adjectives: Only what's perfectly morally good strictly counts as morally “good,” and only what's optimally rational strictly counts as “rational.” Against maximalism, I defend a novel “high standards” account: counting as “rational” or morally “good” doesn't require the maximum degree of the relevant property, but “rational” and moral “good” are systematically associated with normatively demanding standards. Unlike maximalism, this account allows for scales of infinite value and that supererogation talk is coherent in its literal interpretation. One part of my argument draws on a broader range of linguistic phenomena than the debate has so far considered to undermine the linguistic case for maximalism. My results challenge the prevailing classification of gradable adjectives in linguistics into relative, maximum-degree, and minimum-degree absolute adjectives. Another part of my argument draws on special features of evaluative and normative discourse, which suggest that its standards tend to be demanding even when non-maximal.