Ethical Naturalism ppt
Bạn đang xem bản rút gọn của tài liệu. Xem và tải ngay bản đầy đủ của tài liệu tại đây (1.38 MB, 272 trang )
ETHICAL NATURALISM
Ethical naturalism is narrowly construed as the doctrine that there
are moral properties and facts, at least some of which are natural
properties and facts. Perhaps owing to its having faced, early on,
intuitively forceful objections by eliminativists and non-naturalists,
ethical naturalism has only recently become a central player in the
debates about the status of moral properties and facts which have
occupied philosophers over the last century. It has now become a
driving force in those debates, one with sucient resources to chal-
lenge not only eliminativism, especially in its various non-cognitivist
forms, but also the most sophisticated versions of non-naturalism.
is volume brings together twelve new essays which make it clear
that, in light of recent developments in analytic philosophy and the
social sciences, there are novel grounds for reassessing the doctrines
at stake in these debates.
is Professor of Philosophy at St. Cloud
State University, Minnesota. She is editor of New Essays on Semantic
Externalism and Self-Knowledge () and, with Gary Seay,
Philosophy of Language: e Central Topics (). She is the author
of Latin American ought: Philosophical Problems and Arguments
().
is Professor of Philosophy at Medgar Evers College,
City University New York. With Susana Nuccetelli, he is co-author
of How to ink Logically () and Latin American Philosophy
(), and co-editor of emes from G. E. Moore: New Essays in
Epistemology and Ethics ().
ETHICAL NATURALISM
Current Debates
SUSANA NUCCETELLI
GARY SEAY
AND
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,
Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
e Edinburgh Building, Cambridge , UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/
© Cambridge University Press
is publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data
Ethical naturalism : current debates / [edited by] Susana Nuccetelli, Gary Seay.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
---- (hardback)
. Ethics, Evolutionary. . Naturalism. I. Nuccetelli, Susana. II. Seay, Gary.
.
′.–dc
---- Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or
accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in
this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is,
or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
v
Contents
List of contributors page vii
Introduction
Naturalism in moral philosophy
Gilbert Harman
Normativity and reasons: ve arguments from Part against
normative naturalism
David Copp
Naturalism: feel the width
Roger Crisp
On ethical naturalism and the philosophy of language
Frank Jackson
Metaethical pluralism: how both moral naturalism and moral
skepticism may be permissible positions
Richard Joyce
Moral naturalism and categorical reasons
Terence Cuneo
Does analytical moral naturalism rest on a mistake?
Susana Nuccetelli and Gary Seay
Supervenience and the nature of normativity
Michael Ridge
Can normativity be naturalized?
Robert Audi
Ethical non-naturalism and experimental philosophy
Robert Shaver
Contentsvi
Externalism, motivation, and moral knowledge
Sergio Tenenbaum
Naturalism, absolutism, relativism
Michael Smith
Bibliography
Index
vii
Contributors
is O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Notre Dame.
is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California
at Davis.
is Uehiro Fellow and tutor in philosophy at St Anne’s
College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor at Boston University.
is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Vermont.
is James S. McDonnell Distinguished University
Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University.
is Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Princeton
University and holds fractional research positions at the Australian
National University and La Trobe University.
is Professor of Philosophy at Victoria University of
Wellington, New Zealand
is Professor of Philosophy at St. Cloud State
University, Minnesota.
is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of
Edinburgh.
is Professor of Philosophy at Medgar Evers College of the
City University of New York.
List of contributorsviii
is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Manitoba.
is McCosh Professor of Philosophy at Princeton
University.
is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Toronto.
1
Introduction
is collection oers 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 proper-
ties and facts are natural properties and facts. us 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 nat-
uralism does not entail ethical naturalism, for it is compatible also with
eliminativist accounts of morality that either reject the ethical naturalist’s
core theses altogether (as in the error theory) or deate 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 natural-
ists until near the century’s end, perhaps as a result of having faced, early
on, intuitively forceful objections such as G. E. Moore’s 1903 open ques-
tion 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-in-
dependent. On this, ethical naturalists compete with non- naturalists, who
also hold a thesis with a realist gloss, in conjunction with their dening
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. us non-naturalism, in spite of its initial
inuence, has appeared less attractive to naturalistically minded philoso-
phers for whom the very notion of a non-natural property or fact seems
Introduction2
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). ese and other
apparently compelling objections to non-naturalism are among the factors
that have contributed indirectly to the current attraction of ethical natur-
alism 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 naturalist’s puzzle of how to place morality in the nat-
ural 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, rep-
resentationalism about moral terms and sentences. For realist ethical nat-
uralism can capture the common intuition that at least some moral terms
denote legitimate natural properties, and some moral sentences represent
how things are morally. is follows from the ethical naturalist’s view
that at least some moral sentences have truth conditions of the sort coun-
tenanced by a robust moral realist theory.
Beyond the two core theses mentioned above, however, ethical natu-
ralists nd much to disagree about. Some read those theses with a realist
gloss. Others favor a relativist interpretation. Ethical naturalists are also
divided on whether moral properties and facts are reducible without nor-
mative remainder to purely natural properties and facts. A further dis-
agreement among them concerns whether moral terms and sentences are
semantically equivalent to natural terms and sentences. What is some-
times called “analytical naturalism” holds that they are, while “metaphys-
ical naturalism” maintains that the relevant relationship between the
moral and the natural involves properties and facts exclusively.
Such controversies are the subject of extended treatment in the pre-
sent collection. e rst set of chapters focuses on epistemic and meta-
physical problems thought to arise for a number of ethical naturalist
doctrines. Among them is a well-known epistemic challenge to reductive
ethical naturalism: namely, that no empirical methods can be invoked
to decide among rival ethical theories. is challenge is one of Gilbert
Introduction 3
Harman’s concerns in his contribution. On Harman’s view, although
the naturalistic reduction associated with normative functionalism can-
not meet what he regards as the main epistemic challenge facing eth-
ical naturalism, the response-dependent and social convention theories
have the resources to avoid that challenge. Other concerns in his essay
include the prospects of naturalistic approaches current in moral psych-
ology that attempt evolutionary debunking accounts, a possible parallel
between morality and language, and the roles (if any) of guilt and char-
acter in morality.
David Copp’s contribution considers a recent objection to ethical nat-
uralism by Derek Part (2011) that is now attracting considerable atten-
tion. According to this objection, ethical naturalism is unable to account
for the normativity of moral properties and facts. But Copp sees no nor-
mativity problem for ethical naturalist doctrines that, like his, are reduc-
tionist, non-analytic, and realist. He sets out to substantiate this claim
by looking closely at ve attempts to raise the normativity problem for
ethical naturalists, most of them by Part and some by Jonathan Dancy
(2006) and by David McNaughton and Piers Rawling (2003). On Copp’s
assessment, none of these attempts succeeds in showing that no natural
property or fact could also be normative.
Roger Crisp’s essay questions the common assumption that all versions
of ethical naturalism are incompatible with non-naturalism. Given his
argument, at least some forms of ethical naturalism might be consistent
with non-naturalism of the sort recently defended by Part. is conicts,
of course, with a widely held view of ethical naturalism as being incom-
patible with non-naturalism. Crisp himself begins his essay by noting that
there seems to be an irresolvable disagreement between realist, non-ana-
lytic naturalists and their non-naturalist opponents. eir disputes often
lead to a dialectical stando, which Crisp illustrates by considering how
ethical naturalists could respond to Part’s recent attempt to raise a nor-
mativity problem for ethical naturalism. Contra Part, there seems to be
logical space for naturalists to vindicate their central claim that normative
facts and properties are nothing over and above natural facts and prop-
erties, a thesis roundly denied by non-naturalists. e main dierence
between the two parties, Crisp thinks, concerns their goals: naturalists
seek to anchor normativity in the natural world, while non-naturalists
aim at accounting for the distinctiveness of normative properties (by con-
trast with those of science). But there is room for a compromise, for if
Crisp is right, ethical naturalists and non-naturalists could both embrace
a non-reductive, supervenience account of normative properties couched
Introduction4
in terms of emergentism – which he conceives as amounting to the meta-
ethical analogue of emergentism in the philosophy of mind.
Frank Jackson’s contribution addresses what he regards as an old chal-
lenge for ethical naturalists who are also cognitivists: can they accom-
modate both substantial agreement about how moral language represents
things to be and also widespread dissension over any attempted identi-
cations of ethical properties with natural properties? To do that, ethical
naturalists must draw on a plausible semantics for moral terms, one that
can account for their informative role among competent users of moral
language. To Jackson, although a currently popular, externalist semantic
theory fails to meet this condition, his own “network account” satises
it. Given the network account, ethical terms/concepts form an interlock-
ing system about whose informative role there is substantial agreement
among competent users, even though the network itself is in part under
negotiation. e possibility of such an agreement is consistent with there
being widespread dissension about the identication of moral properties
with natural properties.
Richard Joyce’s essay addresses a dierent sort of issue that might be
a problem not only for ethical naturalism but also for moral skepticism
(i.e., the error theory and non-cognitivism): namely, that these apparently
contrary accounts are based exclusively on conceptual reasons that might
be equally indeterminate. For there might be no fact of the matter as to
which of these apparently rival accounts is correct. at is, if Joyce is
right, such apparently contrary accounts might both be aected by inde-
terminacy of the sort claimed by Quine in the case of theories of meaning.
To support a radical claim along these lines, Joyce draws on early work by
David Lewis, together with some evidence stemming from the ambiguity
of notions, such as “assertion,” commonly invoked in the dispute between
ethical naturalists and moral skeptics. To make matters worse, no prag-
matic reasons seem available for any attempt to resolve the indeterminacy
problem facing ethical naturalism and moral skepticism.
To say that moral naturalism and moral skepticism might both be
aected by Quinean indeterminacy commits Joyce to a kind of meta-
ethical pluralism. But elsewhere Joyce (2001, 2006) has oered reasons
for preferring the error theory over rival views, including ethical natural-
ism. Terence Cuneo’s essay takes issue with one of Joyce’s arguments for
that conclusion, the so-called categoricity argument. On Cuneo’s view,
this argument suers from an “arbitrariness problem,” since it arbitrar-
ily counts certain features of ordinary moral practices while discounting
others. In addition, if Cuneo is right, Joyce’s defense of the error theory
Introduction 5
faces another problem: moral naturalism seems to square better than the
error theory with Joyce’s own standards for the acceptability of a moral
theory.
Even if, as Cuneo contends, ethical naturalism can meet the chal-
lenge raised by Joyce’s categoricity argument, it may still need to respond
to other objections before it can get its two core theses o the ground.
Prominent among them is G. E. Moore’s “open question argument,”
which he famously oered together with the “naturalistic fallacy” charge.
Although there is consensus that this extended inference fails to under-
mine all varieties of moral naturalism, the open question argument is
often vindicated as having some intuitive force against analytical moral
naturalism. By contrast, the charge that analytical naturalism commits
the naturalistic fallacy usually nds no takers at all. In their essay here,
Nuccetelli and Seay revisit each of these Moorean arguments with an eye
to showing that analytical naturalism of the sort recently proposed by
Frank Jackson (1998, 2003) and Michael Smith (2000) does after all rest
on a mistake – though perhaps not the one Moore had in mind when he
made the naturalistic fallacy charge.
e non-naturalist opponents of ethical naturalism, of course, face
problems of their own, not least of which is their seeming inability to
account for the supervenience of the moral on the natural, a widely
accepted relation sometimes invoked by the slogan, “Necessarily, no nor-
mative dierence without descriptive dierence.” In his contribution to
this volume, Michael Ridge reconstructs the supervenience objection
against non-naturalism. Standardly construed, the objection points to the
non-naturalist’s apparent inability to explain how irreducibly non-natural
properties and facts could supervene on entirely natural properties and
facts. To Ridge, the objection can be sharpened so that it covers also the
non-naturalist’s apparent inability to explain why there should be any such
irreducible non-natural properties at all. Although a recent non-naturalist
account by Ralph Wedgwood (2007) might be beyond the reach of the
supervenience objection standardly construed, on Ridge’s view it does not
escape it when sharpened in the way proposed in his contribution to this
volume.
Another problem for non-naturalism that arose early on, at least for
Mooreans, is that the doctrine appears incompatible with a plausible
moral epistemology. But that wouldn’t be so if a perception-based epis-
temology for moral properties and facts, of the sort outlined by Robert
Audi in his essay included here, could get o the ground. For Audi’s
project amounts to a naturalistic epistemology for moral properties and
Introduction6
facts that seems available to non-naturalists. One building block of
Audi’s project is the claim that at least some judgments ascribing moral
properties are epistemically grounded in a kind of perception, though
not of a representational sort. If so, such perceptions aord a type of per-
ceptual knowledge, and this is the “naturalistic anchor” which is avail-
able not only to ethical naturalism but also to “non-reductive realism.”
Audi’s non-reductive realism is a “consequentiality” doctrine holding
that there are irreducible moral properties that are consequential upon
natural properties. us construed, the thesis is consistent with the non-
reductive realist view of classical non-naturalists such as Moore (e.g., in
his “Conception of Intrinsic Value” [1922a]). If Audi’s proposal is found
compelling, then non-naturalism, cast as non-reductive realism, might
after all avoid the epistemic version of the “queerness” objection often
taken to undermine it.
Yet recent work in experimental philosophy and some branches of
empirical psychology might undermine the epistemology of non-nat-
uralism by pointing to its extreme dependence on unreliable methods
based on thought experiment and intuition. Robert Shaver explores some
consequences of this work for non-naturalism. His paper looks closely at
whether the argumentation strategy of non-naturalists could succeed in
supporting their views, given that the strategy is often heavily dependent
on thought experiments, as charged by experimentalists. He also consid-
ers the empirical strategies of experimental philosophers. Close examin-
ation of the strategies used by each of these parties appears to show that
there is logical space for skepticism about any across-the-board advan-
tage to be found in the experimentalist strategies over the a priori strat-
egies of non-naturalists. But Shaver’s paper invokes some recent results
of empirical tests that appear to undermine one of the two types of a pri-
ori argument preferred by non-naturalists, the so-called wrong-reasons
argument.
Sergio Tenenbaum’s contribution asks whether certain varieties of real-
ist moral naturalism are compatible with an externalist, Humean theory
of motivation. Given Michael Smith’s 1994 “fetishism objection,” argues
Tenenbaum, they are not. For virtuous agents must have non-derivative
motivations to pursue specic ends they believe to be morally right, and
externalist theory ascribes to the virtuous agent only a direct de dicto
desire to do what is morally right. After reconstructing Smith’s objection,
Tenenbaum contends that there is an understanding of virtuous motiv-
ation, available to realist moral naturalists, that is immune to Smith’s
objection.
Introduction 7
In his own essay for the volume, Michael Smith challenges Gilbert
Harman’s (2000a) contention that moral relativism is favored by philo-
sophical naturalism over its competitor, “moral absolutism.” On Smith’s
view, not only is naturalism silent about whether moral relativism or
absolutism is right, but Harman has failed to identify the real source of
disagreement between these doctrines. As reconstructed by Smith, moral
absolutism is a version of moral rationalism, a set of doctrines attractive
to many current theorists inspired either by Kant or by Brentano and
Ewing. To Smith, Harman’s argument appears sound only if we assume
certain principles that supposedly govern the formation of an agent’s
intentions. But there are rival assumptions equally compatible with nat-
uralism that may be available to moral absolutists. Once those assump-
tions are taken into account, the disagreement between absolutists and
relativists (and among the absolutists themselves) can be seen to turn not
on naturalism but instead on whether it is the relativist characterization
of the functional roles of beliefs and desires that is the correct one or
that oered by the absolutist. us, if Smith’s response to Harman is on
the right track, Harman’s argument for the claim that naturalism favors
moral relativism would be unsound, for it would rest after all on a claim
in need of support: namely, a certain disputed assumption about the con-
nection between moral demands and sucient reasons.
Naturalism in moral philosophy
Gilbert Harman
.
1.1.1 Narrow and wide conceptions of philosophy
and philosophical method
Naturalism in philosophy is a special case of a more general conception
of philosophy. In this conception there is no special philosophical method
and no special philosophical subject matter.
Consider some of the ways in which philosophy interacts with and is
continuous with other disciplines.
Aesthetics is obviously pursued in philosophy departments and in
departments of literature, music, and art. Monroe Beardsley, who wrote
the most important survey of aesthetics in the twentieth century, was one
of the authors of an important statement of a central aspect of the “New
Criticism.”
More recently, Richard Wollheim (who may have invented the expres-
sion “minimal art”) and Arthur Danto have had a signicant inuence
on art theory and criticism. ey themselves have been important critics.
Alexander Nehamas is another important contemporary example.
Anthropology. Anthropologists are often involved with philosophy and
philosophers have sometimes acted as anthropologists to study the mor-
alities of one or another culture. Richard Brandt lived with the Hopi in
order to study their ethics. John Ladd lived with the Navaho in order to
study their ethics. e anthropologist Dan Sperber is the same person as
the philosopher Dan Sperber.
Economics. Recent gures include Robert Nozick, Amartya Sen, maybe
John Rawls, David Gauthier, Allan Gibbard, John Broome, Philip Pettit,
For example, Brandt (); Ladd (); Sperber (); and Sperber and Wilson ().
Naturalism in moral philosophy
and many more. Political theory is of course a related example with many
of the same players.
Linguistics is another very clear case. Philosophers were involved early
in the development of generative grammar (e.g., Jerry Katz and Jerry
Fodor). Many more wrote about Chomsky’s ideas and argued with them
(e.g., Paul Zi, Hilary Putnam). Famously, at the end of the rst chap-
ter of A eory of Justice, John Rawls suggested that generative grammar
might be a good model for moral theory.
Earlier Robert Nozick tried to
sketch how that might work.
John Mikhail has been developing this idea
in some detail.
In recent years there has been philosophical interest in and inter-
action with developments in linguistics. And there has been much
interdisciplinary research in semantics involving philosophers and
linguists.
Psychology is another clear case. In his eory of Justice Rawls suggested
that an adequate moral theory had to be sensitive to developmental psych-
ology, especially in Piaget. Rawls’ early work on justice in turn inuenced
the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s (, ) adaptation of Piaget.
Donald Davidson more or less regularly discussed rationality with psy-
chologists like Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, trying to get them
to accept that there were limits on how irrational people could be inter-
preted to be.
J. L. Austin’s (–) study of excuses was inuential on psychological
studies of children’s development by John Darley and his colleagues.
In recent years there has been considerable back and forth between
psychologists and philosophers on many issues. Relevant philosophers
include Daniel Dennett, Stephen Stich, and many younger people work-
ing in the general area of (real) moral psychology.
One important issue has concerned whether social psychology under-
mines ordinary conceptions of character traits and threatens certain forms
of virtue ethics. But there are many other issues too.
Computer science. Articial intelligence, machine learning, and related
topics have been considered highly relevant to philosophy of mind. For
example, the philosopher John Pollock () studied epistemology by
designing computer programs to simulate reasoning in accord with one
or another set of epistemic principles.
Rawls (: section ).
Nozick ().
Doris (); Sinnott-Armstrong (a).
Philosophy of science is another obvious example. Philosophers discuss-
ing the interpretation of quantum eld theory may publish in physics
journals (for example, my colleague Hans Halvorson).
I went into philosophy because it allowed me to pursue interests in lin-
guistics, articial intelligence, and cognitive science. My earliest publica-
tion was in linguistics.
Soon after that Donald Davidson and I organized
workshops that brought linguists and philosophers together.
Later the psychologist George Miller and I started the Princeton
University Cognitive Science Laboratory and an undergraduate program
in Cognitive Studies. More recently, I have co-taught courses with faculty
in linguistics, psychology, computer science, and engineering.
Most of my colleagues at Princeton take a wide view of philosophy in
one or another respect.
1.1.2 Naturalism
Philosophical naturalism is a special instance of the wider conception of
philosophy, taking the subject matter and methods of philosophy to be
continuous with the subject matters and methods of other disciplines,
especially including the natural sciences. From a naturalistic perspective,
productive philosophers are those who (among other things) produce
fruitful more or less speculative theoretical ideas, with no sharp distinc-
tion between such theorizing by members of philosophy departments
and such theorizing by members of other departments. (In my view,
department boundaries are of interest only to administrators.)
Naturalism also often has an ontological or metaphysical aspect in sup-
posing that the world is the natural world, the world that is studied by the
natural sciences, the world that is available to methodological naturalism.
But the main naturalistic theme is methodological.
In what follows, I discuss certain prospects for naturalism in moral phil-
osophy. I begin with metaphysical issues of the sort just mentioned, having
to do with naturalistic reduction in ethics. I then say something about a
few recent naturalistic methodological approaches in moral psychology.
.
Naturalistic reduction in ethics attempts to locate the place of value in a
world of (naturalistically conceived) facts.
Harman ().
See Davidson and Harman ().
Naturalism in moral philosophy
In one view, goodness and evil, and rightness and wrongness are not
features that have a place in the naturalistic world as described by science.
Naturalists who take this view either abandon ethics altogether or try to
provide a nonfactual account of it.
Alternatively, naturalists might try to identify an act’s being morally
right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust, etc., with certain natural
properties of the act.
e most straightforward naturalistic reductive strategy appeals to
the supervenience of the moral on the natural facts. Any change in what
the agent ought morally to do requires a change in the (natural) facts of
the case. is appears to imply that there is a more or less complex nat-
ural relation between an agent, a possible act, and the agent’s situation
(conceived as a whole possible world) that holds when and only when the
agent in that situation is morally permitted to do that act. e idea then
is to identify the property of being what an agent is morally permitted to
do in a given situation with the property of being a possible act for which
this natural relation holds.
For example, suppose that act utilitarianism provided the correct
account of what an agent is morally permitted to do. Given that suppos-
ition, the supervenience strategy identies a possible act’s being what an
agent is morally permitted to do in a given situation with its being an act
that maximizes utility in that situation.
More generally, the strategy identies a possible act’s being what an
agent is morally permitted to do in a given situation with the holding of
the relevant natural relation, whatever it is, which exists between agent,
act, and situation if and only if the agent is morally permitted to do that
act in that situation.
It is not a good objection that such an identication fails to capture the
meaning of “morally permitted.” To suppose that water can be identied
with H
O is not to say what the word “water” means as used by ordinary
people.
It is true that the moral case raises a methodological issue for natur-
alism, since dierent moral theories disagree with each other. ere are
competing versions of utilitarianism, social contract theory, virtue theory,
Kantianism, and many others. Is there a naturalistically acceptable way
to resolve these disputes by testing them against the world as competing
scientic theories can be tested?
Instead of trying to answer this question directly, let us consider three
kinds of naturalistic reduction, associated with theories of normative func-
tionalism, response-dependent theories, and social convention theories.
1.2.1 Normative functionalism and virtue ethics
One kind of virtue ethics
appeals to a normative functionalism that seeks
to derive normative results from assumptions about functions – about
designed or natural functions, purposes, roles, etc. For example, the most
important function of a clock is to keep time. Whether something is a
clock depends on its function, not on what it is made of or what it looks
like, as long as it can serve to indicate to an observer what the time is.
Furthermore, a clock can be evaluated in terms of its function. So, a
good clock is one that keeps time accurately. at’s what a clock ought to
do. If it does not do so, something is wrong with it. It is defective. e fea-
tures of a good clock that contribute to its accurate functioning are virtues
of the clock.
Bodily organs are also dened by their proper functions. A heart is
an organ whose nature or function is to pump blood steadily. Lungs are
organs that function in breathing. Whether something counts as a heart
or lung is not a matter of its shape or what it is made of, but whether it
has the relevant function. One that actually does so is to that extent a
good heart or lung. A heart that fullls its function poorly, by irregular
pumping, or by leaking blood, is a bad heart and something is wrong with
it. e virtues of a heart include steady pumping and not leaking.
People who have social roles have associated functions or purposes.
A good teacher is one who teaches well, who enables students to learn.
Something is wrong with a teacher whose students do not learn. Virtues
in a teacher are those characteristics that enable the teacher’s students to
learn as well as they can. A teacher who cannot get students to learn is not
a good example of a teacher, not a real teacher.
It is in the nature of human beings and certain other animate beings
(bees and chimpanzees, for example) that they are social beings. A good
human being has various virtues, like courage and compassion. Lack of
courage or compassion is a defect. A man lacking courage is not a good
example of a man, not a real man.
Various issues arise for views that attempt to derive moral assessments
from functionalism. Do human beings have functions or purposes as part
of their nature as human beings? Is the relevant function or purpose to lead
a good life, or even the best life? Can this function or purpose be charac-
terized naturalistically? Most important, from a naturalistic perspective, is
Foot (); Hursthouse (); omson (a).
Naturalism in moral philosophy
there a way of testing competing views of the best life these views against
the world in the way that scientic hypotheses can be tested?
1.2.2 Response-dependent theories and social
convention theories
Another rather dierent naturalistic approach identies moral categor-
ies in terms of something about human responses to the consideration of
possibilities, in the way in which colors are sometimes identied in terms
of something about the responses of normal human perceivers.
In this approach, an act’s being wrong might be identied with the
dispositions of impartial unbiased sympathetic people to feel moral
disapproval of the act on being made vividly aware of the facts of the
situation.
David Hume and Adam Smith defend dierent versions based on
dierent interpretations of sympathy. Hume has a tuning-fork account
of sympathy: Humean sympathy leads someone to vibrate in tune with
others and feel similarly (if less intensely) what others are perceived to
be feeling. is yields a utilitarian result. Since people would rather be
happy than unhappy, they will favor situations in which there is more net
happiness.
Smith objects that Hume’s conception of sympathy cannot account for
the fact that unhappy people crave sympathy and feel better when they
receive it. Humean sympathetic vibrations would make an acquaintance
of an unhappy person sympathetically unhappy and then the unhappy
person would vibrate with the acquaintance’s unhappiness, making the
originally unhappy person even more unhappy. Since the sympathy of an
acquaintance makes an unhappy person less unhappy, Hume is wrong
about what sympathy is.
Smith observes that ordinary sympathy involves approval. If someone
gets a minor bump and moans and complains, observers who are aware
of the minor pains involved will not sympathize, because they will not
approve of the complainer’s reactions. According to Smith, people want
sympathy because they want approval. Furthermore, in Smith’s view, the
relevant sort of approval tends to be an internalized reection of commu-
nity standards. My desire for the approval of others leads me to imagine
how they will react to me. I imagine being one of them to consider how
I would react, in this way internalizing their standards. is yields a dif-
ferent view of morality from Hume’s – one in which what counts as right
or wrong is more heavily inuenced by the conventional practices of one’s
society. Smith’s theory, while response-dependent, sees morality as more
of a matter of social convention than Hume’s does.
It is true that Hume takes social convention to be important for those
aspects of morality having to do with justice: people are disposed to
approve of those conventions that promote the general welfare. But for
Smith social conventions aect approval and disapproval more directly.
1.2.3 Worries about relativism
I think that the most promising naturalistic reductions have relativis-
tic implications. Adam Smith’s is explicitly relativistic, because what
captures one’s sympathy is directly aected by local customs. e point
generalizes to other response-dependent theories to the extent that the
relevant response, usually approval, is directly inuenced by varying cus-
toms or personal values. And functionalist theories may have to suppose
that moral conclusions are relative to one or another competing concep-
tion of the best life, the purpose of life, moral defects, etc.
Any absolutist (non-relativist) reduction of morality faces the epis-
temological problem of showing how that conception of morality is better
supported than its competitors. e problem is that there are competing
moral frameworks and no obvious way to test them against the world.
Compare the dispute between Cardinal Bellarmine and Galileo about
whether the earth is at rest. eir dispute assumed that there is such a
thing as being absolutely at rest. e correct resolution of their dispute is
that motion is always relative. is conclusion is grounded in the fact that
there is no empirical dierence between competing views about what is
at absolute rest.
Similarly, there appears to be no empirical dierence that would resolve
fundamental moral dierences, which suggests that, from a naturalistic
perspective, there may be no reason to believe in absolute right and wrong
(Harman ).
Some might respond that to believe in moral relativism would be to
accept moral nihilism, at least if one’s initial conception of moral values
is absolutist and not relativistic. But that would be like saying that to
believe in the relativity of motion would be to give up on the idea that
things move or are at rest!
Consider people who were brought up to believe that, when they said
that something was wrong, they intended to be saying that it violated
I say more about this dierence between Hume and Smith in Harman (b).
Naturalism in moral philosophy
God’s commands, but who have now become atheists. ey may have
at one time rmly believed that, if God had not existed, nothing would
have been morally prohibited. But now, having come to doubt that God
exists, they continue to accept the same moral principles as before (at least
as regards nonreligious matters) and instead have stopped believing that
morality is the expression of God’s will. In the same way, someone who
is initially committed to moral absolutism who later decides that moral
relativism is true can still accept (most of) the same moral principles as
before.
1.2.4 Naturalism as a response to evolutionary debunking
Some recent attempts to debunk nonutilitarian moral intuitions appeal
to possible explanations of the intuitions in terms of evolution by nat-
ural selection. e claim is that the relevant moral intuitions result from
factors having nothing to do with their truth, namely tendencies to
develop whatever intuitions might help to get one’s genes into following
generations.
While some theorists have argued that such evolutionary explanations
debunk intuitions that conict with utilitarianism, leaving utilitarianism
unchallenged as the correct normative view (Greene a; Singer ),
others say that if the explanations debunk nonutilitarian intuitions, they
also debunk intuitions that appear to support utilitarianism (Kahane,
).
Naturalism oers a response to these debunking arguments. Compare a
naturalistic response to a corresponding attempt at evolutionary debunk-
ing of color perception. e response is to identify colors as response-
dependent properties, determined by how we perceive them. If that is
right, an evolutionary account of how we happen to have the color experi-
ence is not a debunking account. Similarly if what is right or wrong is
response-dependent in one or another of the ways already considered,
an evolutionary account of moral intuitions is not a debunking account
(Street ).
is is all I am going to say about a possible naturalistic reduction of
morality.
.
I now want to consider how certain issues in moral psychology look from
a naturalistic point of view.
