Hi Ralph thanks for this - very interesting. Just a couple of quick comments: A) I wasn't sure whether you wanted to draw from the conclusion that Fine's argument to the conclusion that normative necessity is distinct from metaphysical necessity fails a further conclusion that normative necessity really is metaphysical necessity. It seems to me that, even if the failure of this argument means that as far as this argument is concerned normative necessity can be a form of metaphysical necessity, it would be still be nice to have positive reasons for thinking that it is. I wasn't sure whether there were such positive reasons here apart from the rhetorical questions. 2. I have a guess of what might be going on in Fine's argument. Maybe he is thinking that normativity is always a relational property - that is, what is normative is something like a reason relation between a fact and an act (and properties like badness can be reduced to such relations). He might be then thinking that metaphysical necessities in 1 that are based on the essence of a thing must be monadic, non-relational intrinsic properties any duplicate would share no matter what relations it was in. This would be a reason to think that normative properties as relational properties are not a part of the metaphysical necessities. My inclination to resist this argument would be to argue that relational properties, especially dispositional ones, can be a part of a thing's essence.

Hi sorry to be so late on this - very interesting discussion. I just wanted to give a quick response of the number 1 type. The uncertainty in question is uncertainty about whether something is wrong overall. Ross predicted that this type of uncertainty is widespread. We've got certainty about what makes acts wrong to a degree but we are rarely certain about where the balance of wrongness lies given that how wrong a consideration makes an act in an individual case varies in different contexts. So, consider a person who thinks that there are various things that make eating meat wrong to a degree (causes pain to the animal, leads to global warming and so on) and various considerations that make eating meat right to a degree (the animal is not a person, it's tasty and so on). If this person is uncertain about where the strenghts of these considerations lies, she might conclude that eating meat might be wrong. Assume then that internalism is true about wrong- and right-making judgments: you can sincerely think that something makes an act right/wrong to a degree only if you are motivated to pursue/avoid that thing (this makes my response a variation of your response). This would mean that the person who thinks that eating meat might be wrong would have to care de re about the things that make that act right and wrong even if they are uncertain about the overall judgment. If this person then decides not to eat meat on the grounds that it might be wrong, it is guaranteed that she will have appropriate motivations.