Nuccetelli Susana - Ethical naturalism: current debates

EDITED BY

SUSANA NUCCETELLI AND GARY SEAY

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK

www.cambridge.org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521192422

Robert Audi

David Copp

Roger Crisp

Terence Cuneo

Gilbert Harman

Frank Jackson

Richard Joyce

Susana Nuccetelli

Michael Ridge

Gary Seay

Robert Shaver

Michael Smith

Sergio Tenenbaum

This collection offers new perspectives on ethical naturalism, narrowly construed as the conjunction of two core theses. One holds that there are moral properties and facts, the other that at least some such properties and facts are natural properties and facts. Thus understood, ethical naturalism is distinct from, though usually motivated by, philosophical naturalism, a more general metaphysical outlook according to which all there is is the world as conceived by science. Clearly, philosophical naturalism does not entail ethical naturalism, for it is compatible also with eliminativist accounts of morality that either reject the ethical naturalists core theses altogether (as in the error theory) or deflate them substantially (as in quasi-realism). But while eliminativism, especially in its various non-cognitivist forms, was a driving force through much of the twentieth century, ethical naturalism fell out of favor among philosophical naturalists until near the centurys end, perhaps as a result of having faced, early on, intuitively forceful objections such as G. E. Moores open question argument. In the last thirty years, however, increasing doubts about the cogency of those objections, together with some key developments in philosophy of mind and language, have contributed to a widespread renewal of interest in ethical naturalism.

For many philosophical naturalists now, one appeal of ethical naturalism is its core thesis that there are moral properties and facts, especially when read as claiming that such properties and facts are mind - and language-independent . On this, ethical naturalists compete with non-naturalists, who also hold a thesis with a realist gloss, in conjunction with their defining claim that at least some such moral properties and facts are irreducible, non-natural properties and facts. But the latter claim appears to commit non-naturalists to a moral ontology and an epistemology that are at odds with philosophical naturalism. Thus non-naturalism, in spite of its initial influence, has appeared less attractive to naturalistically minded philosophers for whom the very notion of a non-natural property or fact seems metaphysically extravagant. Moreover, although it is now widely accepted that the moral supervenes on the natural, critics doubt that non-naturalists can explain how irreducible moral properties and facts could supervene on natural properties and facts (see Ridge, this volume). These and other apparently compelling objections to non-naturalism are among the factors that have contributed indirectly to the current attraction of ethical naturalism for philosophers inclined toward moral realism.

But the appeal of ethical naturalism is undoubtedly also owing to its apparent ability to accommodate both a general philosophical-naturalist outlook and a representationalist account of moral language. On the one hand, ethical naturalism promises to deliver a non-eliminativist account of morality that might resolve the problem of locating moral value in the world as conceived by modern science. If ethical naturalism is correct, the philosophical naturalists puzzle of how to place morality in the natural order simply dissolves. For then, at least some moral properties and facts are supervenient on, and perhaps identical to, natural properties and facts. On the other hand, ethical naturalism promises to dissolve that puzzle without abandoning another attractive thesis in metaethics, representationalism about moral terms and sentences. For realist ethical naturalism can capture the common intuition that at least some moral terms denote legitimate natural properties, and some moral sentences represent how things are morally. This follows from the ethical naturalists view that at least some moral sentences have truth conditions of the sort countenanced by a robust moral realist theory.