The Natural and the Normative

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1992

Proceedings of the 31th International Ludwig Wittgenstein-Symposium in Kirchberg, 2008

According to objective moral realism, there exist moral properties that are not dependent on our beliefs or our attitudes about them. In Mackie's famous first chapter of his book Ethics, he gives three arguments against this theory. His first argument is that the nature and quantity of moral disagreement gives us reason to deny that there are any objective moral properties. His second argument is that the very nature of putative objective moral properties or moral facts-as essentially motivational (or perhaps, essentially normative)-is reason to doubt that any such thing could exist. Moral realists have not been too impressed by these arguments, however. It is perfectly clear that moral properties can coexist with widespread and persistent disagreement about their nature. In response to the queerness argument, moral realists have either opted for naturalism, trying to show that moral properties are not really peculiar at all-in fact they simply are natural properties-or they have conceded that moral properties are non-natural and that at least to that extent they are queer, but have argued that this is not a sufficient reason to deny that they exist. The third argument, concerning supervenience, has been comparatively neglected, however, though it was taken up by Simon Blackburn, with responses from a variety of moral realists. In the following sections I will make the supervenience argument against moral realism more precise, showing that it must be directed at non-naturalist forms of moral realism. I will consider one possible response to the argument: I will look at the possibility of denying that supervenience is true.

Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1995

NICK ZANGWILL t is commonly held that moral properties supervene on natural properties. But I what is the status of this claim? And what does it tell us about the nature of morality? I want to pursue these questions by examining an argument against moral realism that Simon Blackburn has developed.' In parts 1 and 2, I consider his argument in some detail. And in parts 3 and 4, I give a Kantian diagnosis of the argument and present my own views about moral supervenience and the role that it plays in our moral thought.

J Value Inquiry, 2003

Philosophical studies, 1987

Oxford Studies in Metaethics, ed. by Russ Shafer-Landau, Vol. 3, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008

One of our most fundamental notions of morality is that in so far as objects have moral properties, they have non-moral properties that make them have moral properties.

**Accurate page available in Res Philosophica, Special Issue on Non-Naturalism (October, 2014). Please download the journal version through your library, or contact me if your library doesn't have access.** The distribution of moral properties supervenes on the distribution of natural properties, and this provides a puzzle for non-naturalism: what could explain supervenience if moral properties are not natural properties? Enoch claims moral principles explain supervenience. But this solution is incomplete without an account of what moral principles and properties are, and what relation holds between them. This paper begins to develop such an account by exploring analogous issues for Realism about Laws of nature in philosophy of science. Appealing to Mumford’s Central Dilemma for Realism about Laws, I argue that for moral principles to explain supervenience, moral properties must be ontologically dependent on the principles. I suggest that moral properties are relations between moral principles and natural properties. I also explore what it would take to adapt this explanation to a pluralistic theory of morality. Contributory reasons avoid the Cartwright Problem for Laws in a way component forces cannot.

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 1999

The Normative and the Natural, 2016

In the previous chapter, we argued that not even moderate naturalism could do away with normativity altogether. In Chap. 3, we address a large swath of the naturalist literature that attempts to place properties of normative discourse within the terrain of entities posited by the natural sciences. Two dominant naturalist approaches to fitting normativity within a naturalist worldview are reduction and supervenience. In Chap. 3 we explain both approaches and why they are both ultimately unsatisfactory. Reduction simply tries to equate normative properties with some scientific or social-scientific property. For example, just like water is H2O, a normative property (like moral goodness) will just turn out to be some measurable thing like preference satisfaction. Chap. 3 explains how these reductive accounts fail to do justice to the central feature of the normative, which is its prescriptive element: the central point of normative claims is not to describe something, but to prescribe or proscribe. Supervenience simply claims that if two cases differ morally, then there also must be some non-moral difference between the two cases. For example, if one lie is morally wrong and one is morally permissible, there must be some difference between the two situations, a difference we can identify in non-moral terms. In Chap. 3 we show that supervenience accounts fall into one of two traps. Either they are too weak to do any actual work in explaining the relation between normative claims and the non-normative world; or if the relation is made stronger, such accounts simply collapse into reductionism (which we rejected for the reasons stated above). In rejecting both reduction and supervenience accounts, we pave the way for our account, in which normative claims are not in the business of describing the natural world, or of stating facts, in the first place.

In this paper, I will argue that moral naturalism is committed to a supervenience relation that faces a serious problem of metaphysical queerness, and that this problem has been under-appreciated by proponents of moral naturalism. I argue that a sufficiently robust moral realism renders any supposed supervenience relations between natural facts and moral facts unintelligible. If the moral naturalist tries to avoid this problem by arguing for a less robust standard for what counts as a genuinely objective and real moral fact, then this entails certain commitments the moral naturalist will want to avoid (and ought to avoid). (Please skip to page 15 if one is pressed for time and wants to get a basic sense of my line of argument)