Moral Supervenience

In this paper I discuss five meta-ethical challenges to Naturalistic Moral Realism, which includes secular moral codes such as Secular Humanism that, in my view, naturalists need to address to keep their commitment to moral realism from looking like special pleading. The five challenges are as follows: 1. The Ontological Problem (OP): How do such moral principles exist? 2. The Epistemic Problem (EP): How does our moral sense/intuition track such principles? 3. The Influence Problem (IP): What authority does the existence (...) of such principles have to supervene on our behavior? 4. The Axiological Problem (AP): What entities have moral value and deserve moral consideration? 5. Methodological Problem (MP): How do we go about arbitrating between moral claims when they conflict? (shrink)

Explaining the supervenience of the moral on the natural is, perhaps, the central metaphysical challenge for the non-naturalist. However, Scanlon (2014) and Fogal and Risberg (2020) have developed a strategy which purports to explain supervenience rather simply. Fogal and Risberg call it the 'Divide and Conquer' strategy. The key idea is to postulate explanatory moral principles linking the natural and the moral. The moral principles are metaphysically necessary, so trivially supervene on the natural. All other moral facts are determined by (...) the necessary moral principles and the natural facts, so they supervene on the natural too. -/- I argue that there are two versions of the Divide and Conquer strategy and both fail. The first strategy doesn’t give an adequate explanation of supervenience because it doesn't properly identify what makes a difference to the holding of supervenience. The second perhaps does give an adequate explanation of supervenience, but only by introducing something similarly puzzling that needs explanation. -/- Consequently, non-naturalists need additional metaphysical machinery to develop their view -- just appealing to moral principles or metaphysical laws won't do the job. (shrink)

Non-naturalist realism is the view that normative properties are unique kind of stance-independent properties. It has been argued that such views fail to explain why two actions that are exactly alike otherwise must also have the same normative properties. Mark Schroeder and Knut Olav Skarsaune have recently suggested that non-naturalist realists can respond to this supervenience challenge by taking the primary bearers of normative properties to be action-kinds. This paper develops their response in two ways. Firstly, it provides additional motivation (...) for the previous claim about the bearers of normative properties by drawing from the work of H.A. Prichard. Secondly, and more importantly, it formulates a plausible metaphysical framework based on the contemporary trope theory to explain why action-kinds would have their second-order properties, including their normative properties, necessarily. (shrink)

I argue for the viability of one neglected way of developing supervenience-based objections to metaethical non-naturalism. This way goes through a principle known as ‘Hume’s Dictum’, according to which there are no necessary connections between distinct existences. I challenge several objections to the Hume’s Dictum-based argument. In the course of doing so, I formulate and motivate modest and precise versions of Hume’s Dictum, illustrate how arguments employing these principles might proceed, and argue that the Hume’s Dictum argument enjoys some advantages (...) relative to other supervenience-based objections to non-naturalism. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that a realist account of the modality of moral supervenience is superior to a non-cognitivist account. According to the recommended realist account, moral supervenience amounts to strong supervenience where the outer ‘necessary’ is conceptual and the inner metaphysical. It is argued that non-cognitivism faces a critical choice between weak and strong supervenience where both options are implausible on this view. However, non-cognitivism seems to have an important advantage: It can explain why the outer ‘necessary’ is (...) conceptual by reference to the function of moral language to influence behaviour. In the main part of the paper, I argue that realism is able to explain why ‘necessary’ in moral supervenience needs to be understood in the recommended manner by reference to the connection between moral properties and moral reasons. Moreover, I argue that the realist account has other attractive features. In contrast to non-cognitivism, it can unify the normative sphere by being generalizable to other normative notions. In addition, it can be part of an explanation of why moral language can have the function to influence behaviour. (shrink)

Moral realism and ethical naturalism are both highly attractive ethical positions but historically they have often been thought to be irreconcilable. Since the late 1980s defenders of Cornell Realism have argued that the two positions can consistently be combined. They make three constitutive claims: (i) Moral properties are natural kind properties that (ii) are identical to (or supervene) on descriptive functional properties, which (iii) causally regulate our use of moral terms. We offer new arguments against the feasibility of Cornell realism (...) and then show that there is a way to be a naturalistic realist that avoids internal inconsistency and uniquely provides for moral normativity. (shrink)

The death of a person is a tragedy while the explosion of a lifeless galaxy is a mere firework. The moral difference is grounded in the nature of humans: humans have intrinsic worth, a worth that makes their fate really matter. This is the worth proposed as the foundation of ethics. Ethics in the usual sense of right and wrong actions, rights and virtues, and how to live a good life, is founded on something more basic that is not itself (...) about actions, namely the worth of persons. Human moral worth arises from certain properties that distinguish humans from the rest of creation (though some animals share a lesser degree of those properties): rationality, consciousness, the ability to act for reasons, emotional structure and love, individuality. This complex package makes humans the "piece of work" of which Hamlet says, “How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty." The Worth of Persons establishes a foundation for ethics in the equal worth of persons, which makes ethics absolutely objective and immune to relativist attacks because it is based on the metaphysical truth about humans. Endless debate about ethical dilemmas, rules, and principles fails to connect with what is really important ethically, that is, what makes humans matter. (shrink)

Moral realists often disagree about the nature of moral properties. These properties can be natural (as per naturalistic moral realism) or non-natural. But it is unclear how we should understand the notion of naturalness employed in these discussions. In this paper I propose a novel account of moral naturalness. I suggest that a property F is natural iff F falls within the scope of a natural law. In turn, a law is natural when it figures in a nomic nexus involving (...) the laws of physics. (shrink)

A central issue in practical philosophy concerns the relation between moral blameworthiness and normative reasons. As there has been little of direct exchange between the debate on reasons and the debate on blameworthiness, this topic has not received the attention it deserves. In this paper, I consider two notions about blameworthiness and reasons that are fundamental in respective field. The two notions might seem incontrovertible when considered individually, but I argue that they together entail claims that are highly contentious. In (...) particular, I maintain that they entail unreasonable and contradictory claims since the practices of moral blame and rational criticism diverge with regard to three dimensions: justification, response, and function. Thus, we need to give up one of the principal notions. The solutions to this puzzle suggest that the connection between reasons and rationality is weaker than standardly presumed in metaethics. (shrink)

Expressivism is supposed to have an advantage over moral realism, in that it can explain why it is a conceptual truth that the moral supervenes on the natural, even though the natural does not entail the moral. I develop an analogy between expressivism and a version of theistic moral realism, and argue that this version of theistic moral realism shares any advantage that expressivism might have. It may be that the alleged advantage that expressivism has over moral realism is overstated. (...) Nevertheless, possible analogies between expressivism and theistic moral realism have received very little attention in the past, and are worth considering for their own sake. (shrink)

There is an alternative to the type of moral standing that hypothetically supervenes on other, base or subvenient, properties. Attributed moral standing results when people who have a naturally sel...

Ethics normally proceeds by establishing some kind of ground from which norms can be derived for human action. However, no such terra firma is found in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, which instead lays down a sedimentary soil consisting of a blend of nothingness and contingency. This paper aims to show how Sartre is able to build an ethical theory from this seemingly groundless mixture, and it proceeds in three sections. Section one aims to disentangle the relation between the for-itself (...) (pour-soi) and the in-itself (en-soi) from antithetical characterizations by placing them in a state of supervenience. Section two works to explain how both the in-itself and the for-itself are not divided ontologically, but are both in the same ontological state, namely, contingency. And in section three, it is argued that Sartre’s ethics reveals that because human beings share the same thrownness with Others in a world, they have to take title for such a world. Within a Sartrean ethics of nothingness, one’s nothingness leads one to the shared nothingness of Others, of which one must take responsibility. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that if normative terms are analyzable in descriptive terms, as claimed by analytic reductionists, this provides an easy explanation why normative supervenience would be a conceptual truth. This chapter argues that our knowledge of normative supervenience has two important features this explanation fails to account for: first, the idea that normative properties supervene on descriptive properties seems obvious to us and, secondly, we don’t come to accept this thesis distributively by finding it plausible in each of (...) its particular instances but rather by seeing a pattern that all normative properties must conform to. An alternative is suggested, an expressivist account of normative supervenience that allows us to explain both of these features. The chapter closes by arguing that they require explanation even on the assumption that normative supervenience is not a conceptual truth. This makes the explanation problem concerning our knowledge of normative supervenience more general than previously thought. (shrink)

Expressivists traditionally explain normative supervenience by saying it is a conceptual truth. I argue against this tradition in two steps. First, I show the modal claim that stands in need of explanation has been stated imprecisely. Classic arguments in metaethics for normative supervenience and those that rely on it as a premise presuppose a constraint on the supervenience base that is rarely (if ever) made explicit: the repeatability of the non-normative properties on which the normative supervenes. Non-normative properties are repeatable (...) when it is possible for numerically distinct individuals to share them. Second, I show if the modal truth that stands in need of explanation entails that there are individuals exactly alike in repeatable non-normative respects that cannot normatively differ, then standard expressivist accounts of normative supervenience as a conceptual truth are unsuccessful. Expressivist metasemantics for normative terms, together with constitutive facts about the non-cognitive attitudes essentially involved in normative thought, strongly suggest that repeatable supervenience could not be a conceptual truth. I argue, finally, that although repeatable supervenience bears the marks of a conceptual truth, expressivists should be content to treat it as an ordinary normative truth, and to explain it the same way they explain other normative truths. (shrink)

It’s commonly held that particular moral facts are explained by ‘natural’ or ‘descriptive’ facts, though there’s disagreement over how such explanations work. We defend the view that general moral principles also play a role in explaining particular moral facts. More specifically, we argue that this view best makes sense of some intuitive data points, including the supervenience of the moral upon the natural. We consider two alternative accounts of the nature and structure of moral principles—’the nomic view’ and ‘moral platonism’—before (...) considering in what sense such principles obtain of necessity. (shrink)

Ethicists struggle to take reductive views seriously. They also have trouble conceiving of some supervenience failures. Understanding why provides further evidence for a kind of hybrid view of normative concept use.

Mooreans claim that intrinsic goodness is a conceptual primitive. Fitting-attitude theorists object: they say that goodness should be defined in terms of what it is fitting for us to value. The Moorean view is often considered a relic; the fitting-attitude view is increasingly popular. I think this unfortunate. Though the fitting-attitude analysis is powerful, the Moorean view is still attractive. I dedicate myself to the influential arguments marshaled against Moore’s program, including those advanced by Scanlon, Stratton-Lake and Hooker, and Jacobson; (...) I argue that they do not succeed. (shrink)

A través de un relato mítico inspirado en el "Mito de Jones", escrito por Wilfrid Sellars, se ilustra la posibilidad de que los conceptos morales, aprendidos simultáneamente con el aprendizaje del lenguaje, sean el producto de la evolución. El mecanismo principal, plausiblemente no el único, es el de refuerzo y sanción de los actos verbales y no verbales. Algunas conductas son reforzadas y tenidas como “buenas” y otras sancionadas como “malas”, durante un proceso de aprendizaje que tiene tanto episodios de (...) aprendizaje formal, en la escuela y la familia, como episodios cotidianos, informales, involuntarios, que involucran a las distintas personas con las que interactúan los sujetos desde su infancia. Con seguridad, la mayoría de los episodios en la vida de las personas son de este último tipo. ¿Acaso los conceptos morales son resultados de la evolución natural, siguiendo los patrones de sobrevivencia y reproducción de la especie? ¿Podemos compatibilizar el punto de vista moral con el punto de vista evolutivo? (shrink)

It is widely held, even among nonnaturalists, that the moral supervenes on the natural. This is to say that for any two metaphysically possible worlds w and w′, and for any entities x in w and y in w′, any isomorphism between x and y that preserves the natural properties preserves the moral properties. In this paper, I put forward a conceivability argument against moral supervenience, assuming non-naturalism. First, I argue that though utilitarianism may be true, and the trolley driver (...) is permitted to kill the one to save the five, there is a conceivable scenario that is just like our world in all natural respects, yet at which deontology is true, and the trolly driver is not permitted to kill the one to save the five. I then argue that in the special case of morality, it is possible to infer from the conceivability of such a scenario to its possibility. It follows that supervenience is false. (shrink)

According to many, that the normative supervenes on the non-normative is a truism of normative discourse. This chapter argues that those committed to more specific moral, aesthetic, and epistemic supervenience theses should also hold : As a matter of conceptual necessity, whenever something has a normative property, it has a base property or collection of base properties that metaphysically necessitates the normative one. The main aim in this chapter is to show that none of the available arguments establish, or indeed (...) the relevant epistemic, aesthetic, and moral supervenience theses. is not a conceptual truth. This has considerable dialectical importance. One interesting upshot is that it affords non-reductivists and non-naturalists a novel way of resisting certain prominent supervenience-based objections to their views, including objections that formulate supervenience as a purely metaphysical thesis. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that normative properties supervene on natural properties. Non-naturalists face a distinctive challenge to explain this relation. Stephanie Leary argues that non-naturalists can meet this explanatory demand by positing the existence of hybrid normative properties. I argue that this proposal does not meet the supervenience challenge.

Simon Blackburn’s supervenience argument—focusing on the mysterious “ban on mixed worlds”—is still subject to a variety of conflicting interpretations. In this paper, I hope to provide a defense of the argument that clarifies both the argument and the objections it must overcome. Many of the extant objections, I will argue, fail to engage the argument in its true form. And to counter the more compelling objections, it will be necessary to bring in additional argumentation that Blackburn himself does not clearly (...) provide. One important upshot of this discussion is that moral realism is not the only target of the argument: it raises trouble for a variety of metaethical views wed to realist-friendly construals of moral evaluation. Rightly understood, this argument not only survives the prominent responses, but turns out to be more powerful than his critics and Blackburn himself have recognized. (shrink)

The claim that the normative depends on the non-normative is just as entrenched in metanormative theory as the claim that the normative supervenes on the non-normative. It is widely held to be a genuine truism, a conceptual truth that operates as a constraint on competence with normative concepts. Call it the dependence constraint. I argue that this status is unwarranted. While it is true that the normative is dependent, it is not a genuine truism, or a conceptual truth, that it (...) depends on the nonnormative. I argue for the following inadequacy claim: that when we cull all the normative terms from our language, and so the concepts that they stand for, what we will be left with will not necessarily be sufficient to adequately describe, conceptualize or represent what it is that we are supposed to be making normative judgements in virtue of. This has implications for both ascriptive and metaphysical understandings of the dependence constraint, and the potential to radically reshape the dialectic in metanormative theory. (shrink)

This paper is a survey of the supervenience challenge to non-naturalist moral realism. I formulate a version of the challenge, consider the most promising non-naturalist replies to it, and suggest that no fully effective reply has yet been given.

This article is a short book review of Erik Wielenberg's book Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism.

In Against Absolute Goodness Richard Kraut aims to show that absolute goodness (or badness) is not reason-giving; it plays no role is justifying or requiring certain attitudes and no role in reasoning about what to do. It passes the buck (it never adds to the weightiness of more specific reasons) and so for practical purposes can be ignored. However, he claims that the notions of ‘a good R’ (e.g. a good play) and ‘good for S’ do justify certain attitudes and (...) play important roles in practical reasoning and do not pass the buck. In this review I critique Kraut’s argument that the notions of ‘a good R’ (e.g. a good play) and ‘good for S’ differ from absolute goodness in these ways. Moreover, I discuss and defend Aristotle’s notion of ‘the fine’ or ‘noble’ (καλόν) and Kant’s notion of unconditional goodness. (shrink)

Drawing on a rich pragmatist tradition, this book offers an account of the different kinds of ‘oughts’, or varieties of normativity, that we are subject to contends that there is no conflict between normativity and the world as science describes it. The authors argue that normative claims aim to evaluate, to urge us to do or not do something, and to tell us how a state of affairs ought to be. These claims articulate forms of action-guidance that are different in (...) kind from descriptive claims, with a wholly distinct practical and expressive character. This account suggests that there are no normative facts, and so nothing that needs any troublesome shoehorning into a scientific account of the world. This work explains that nevertheless, normative claims are constrained by the world, and answerable to reason and argumentation, in a way that makes them truth-apt and objective. (shrink)

Perhaps the actual world does not contain moral properties. But might moral properties be impossible because no world, possible or actual, contains them? Two metaethical theories can be argued to entail just that conclusion; viz., emotivism and error theory. This paper works towards the strongest formulation of the emotivist argument for the impossibility of moral properties, but ultimately rejects it. It then uses the reason why the emotivist argument fails to argue that error-theoretic arguments for the impossibility of moral properties (...) face the same conclusion. Finally the paper argues that these arguments for the possibility of moral properties might have consequences for our thinking about their actuality, regardless of whether we accept emotivism or error theory. (shrink)

Contrary to popular opinion, non-natural realism can explain both why normative properties supervene on descriptive properties, and why this pattern is analytic. The explanation proceeds by positing a subtle polysemy in normative predicates like “good”. Such predicates express slightly different senses when they are applied to particulars (like Florence Nightingale) and to kinds (like altruism). The former sense, “goodPAR”, can be defined in terms of the latter, “goodKIN”, as follows: x is goodPAR iff there is a kind K such that (...) x is a token of K, and K is goodKIN. Now if x and y are descriptively exactly similar, then they are tokens of exactly the same kinds, so x is a token of a goodKIN kind if and only if y is. Therefore, by the definition, x is goodPAR if and only if y is. Supervenience just falls out of the definition of “goodPAR”. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the implications of moral vagueness (viz., the vagueness of moral predicates) for non-naturalist metaethical theories like those recently championed by Shafer-Landau, Parfit, and others. I characterise non-naturalism in terms of its commitment to 7 theses: Cognitivism, Correspondence, Atomism, Objectivism, Supervenience, Non-reductivism, and Rationalism. I start by offering a number of reasons for thinking that moral predicates are vague in the same way in which ‘red’, ‘tall’, and ‘heap’ are said to be. I then argue that (...) the moral non-naturalist seeking to countenance moral vagueness faces a dilemma: are moral properties vague, or perfectly sharp? On either horn of the dilemma, serious problems arise for some of the central tenets of non-naturalism: vague properties seem to threaten Objectivism, Supervenience, and Non-reductivism; on the other hand, sharp properties raise problems for Supervenience and Rationalism. The difficulties on each horn of the dilemma are real, and while they may not be insuperable, they do, at the very least, drastically limit the things non-naturalists can consistently say about moral properties, facts, and reasons. (shrink)

Our project in this essay is to showcase nonnaturalistic moral realism’s resources for responding to metaphysical and epistemological objections by taking the view in some new directions. The central thesis we will argue for is that there is a battery of substantive moral propositions that are also nonnaturalistic conceptual truths. We call these propositions the moral fixed points. We will argue that they must find a place in any system of moral norms that applies to beings like us, in worlds (...) similar to our own. By committing themselves to true propositions of these sorts, nonnaturalists can fashion a view that is highly attractive in its own right, and resistant to the most prominent objections that have been pressed against it. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Metaethics is traditionally understood as a non-moral discipline that examines moral judgements from a standpoint outside of ethics. This orthodox understanding has recently come under pressure from anti-Archimedeans, such as Ronald Dworkin and Matthew Kramer, who proclaim that rather than assessing morality from an external perspective, metaethical theses are themselves substantive moral claims. In this paper, I scrutinise this anti-Archimedean challenge as applied to the metaethical position of expressivism. More precisely, I examine the claim that expressivists do not avoid moral (...) commitments when accounting for moral thought, but instead presuppose them; they do not look at ethics from the outside, but operate from within ethics. This paper defends the non-moral status of expressivism against anti-Archimedeanism by rejecting a new anti-Archimedean challenge which, on the basis of Hume’s Law, aims to exploit expressivist explanations of supervenience in order to show that expressivism is a substantive moral position. (shrink)

Two fundamental assumptions of Kant’s procedure for testing a maxim’s morality via the Formula of Universal Law are that a contradiction in will is 1) generated by the universal practice of immoral maxims, and 2) constituted by the impossibility of an agent’s therein satisfying certain ends. These features are the source of two types of false positive counter-examples, involving maxims where 1) the harmful effects of the maxims are non-linear and hence vanish when universalized, and 2) even the universal practice (...) of a harmful maxim makes it less likely that certain ends can be satisfied, but not impossible. The test can be fixed by replacing these two features with the criteria of moral supervenience and requiring that agents will end-satisfaction probability maximization respectively. (shrink)

Virtually everyone takes the moral supervenience thesis to be a basic conceptual truth about morality. As a result, if a metaethical theory has difficulties respecting or adequately explaining the supervenience relationship it is deemed to be in big trouble. However, the moral supervenience thesis is a not a conceptual truth (though it may be true) and as such it is not a problem if a metaethical theory cannot respect or explain it.

Jonathan Dancy thinks that there are irreducibly normative properties. Frank Jackson has given a well-known argument against this view, and I have elsewhere defended this argument against many objections, including one made by Dancy. But Dancy remains unconvinced. In this chapter, I hope to convince him.

Moral particularism, on some interpretations, is committed to a shapeless thesis: the moral is shapeless with respect to the natural. (Call this version of moral particularism ‘shapeless moral particularism’). In more detail, the shapeless thesis is that the actions a moral concept or predicate can be correctly applied to have no natural commonality (or shape) amongst them. Jackson et al. (Ethical particularism and patterns, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000) argue, however, that the shapeless thesis violates the platitude ‘predication supervenes on (...) nature’—predicates or concepts apply because of how things are, and therefore ought to be rejected. I defend shapeless moral particularism by arguing that Jackson et al’s contention is less compelling than it firstly appears. My defense is limited in the sense that it does not prove shapeless moral particularism to be right and it leaves open the possibility that shapeless moral particularism might attract criticisms different from the ones advanced by Jackson et al. But at the very least, I hope to say enough to undermine Jackson et al’s powerful attack against it. The plan of this paper is as follows. Section 1 glosses the view of moral particularism and why it is taken to be essentially committed to the shapeless thesis. Section 2 examines a Wittgensteinian argument for the shapeless thesis. I shall argue that the Canberrans’ counter-arguments against it on grounds of disjunctive commonality and conceptual competence do not succeed. Section 3 explicates Canberrans’ predication supervenience argument against the shapeless thesis. Section 4 offers my criticisms of the Canberrans’ predication supervenience argument. In view of the above discussions, in Sect. 5, I conclude that there is no compelling argument (from the Canberrans) to believe that the shapeless thesis fails (as I have argued in Sect. 4). In fact, there is some good reason for us to believe it (as I have argued in Sect. 2). If so, I contend that moral particularism, when construed as essentially committed to the shapeless thesis, still remains as a live option. (shrink)

This paper considers normative naturalism, understood as the view that (i) normative sentences are descriptive of the way things are, and (ii) their truth/falsity does not require ontology beyond the ontology of the natural world. Assuming (i) for the sake of argument, I here show that (ii) is false not only as applied to ethics, but more generally as applied to practical and epistemic normativity across the board. The argument is a descendant of Moore's Open Question Argument and Hume's Is-Ought (...) Gap. It goes roughly as follows: to ensure that natural ontology suffices for normative truth, there must be semantically grounded entailments from the natural truths to the normative truths. There are none. So natural ontology does not suffice for normative truth. (shrink)

An important constraint on the nature of intrinsic value---the “Supervenience Principle” (SP)---holds that some object, event, or state of affairs ϕ is intrinsically valuable only if the value of ϕ supervenes entirely on ϕ 's intrinsic properties. In this paper, I argue that SP should be rejected. SP is inordinately restrictive. In particular, I argue that no SP-respecting conception of intrinsic value can accept the importance of psychological resonance, or the positive endorsement of persons, in explaining value.

In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant’s desiderata for a supreme principle of practical reasoning and morality require that the subjective conditions under which some action is thought of as justified via some maxim be sufficient for judging the same action as justified by any agent in those conditions. This describes the kind of universalization conditions now known as moral supervenience. But when he specifies his “formula of universal law” (FUL) Kant replaces this condition with a quite different (...) kind of universality: the judgment that some agent could rationally (i.e., without willing the frustration of his own valued ends) will his adoption of some maxim under the condition that this would cause all agents in his world to adopt it as well. Our wills typically lack this efficacy, so requiring that our wills conform to what would be rational for a hypothetical agent in this situation to will is a heteronomous requirement. Several intuitively wrong maxims pass Kant’s test but fail the test of supervenience, because they generate no contradiction in a world of universal compliance but do so in non-ideal worlds, demonstrating the inadequacy of the FUL and the logical superiority of moral supervenience. -/- NOTE: in the published version of this article's title, "became" is mistakenly, and ungrammatically, replaced with "become.". (shrink)

It is widely accepted that the ethical supervenes on the natural, where this is roughly the claim that it is impossible for two circumstances to be identical in all natural respects, but different in their ethical respects. This chapter refines and defends the traditional thought that this fact poses a significant challenge to ethical non-naturalism, a view on which ethical properties are fundamentally different in kind from natural properties. The challenge can be encapsulated in three core claims which the chapter (...) defends: that a defensible non-naturalism is committed to the supervenience of the ethical, that this commits the non-naturalist to a brute necessary connection between properties of distinct kinds, and that commitment to such brute connections counts against the non-naturalist’s view. Each of these claims has recently been challenged. Against Nicholas Sturgeon’s recent doubts about the dialectical force of supervenience, this chapter defends a supervenience thesis as deserving to be common ground among ethical realists. It is then argued that attempts to explain supervenience on behalf of the non-naturalist either fail as explanations, generate near-identical explanatory burdens elsewhere, or appeal to commitments that are inconsistent with core motivations for non-naturalism. The chapter concludes that, suitably refined, the traditional argument against nonnaturalism from supervenience is alive and well. (shrink)

One of the most familiar arguments for expressivist metaethics is the claim that the rival theory, moral realism, cannot provide a satisfying explanation of why moral properties supervene on natural properties. Non-cognitivism, however, has its own problems explaining supervenience. Expressivists try to establish supervenience either by second-order disapproval of type-inconsistent moral evaluations or by pragmatic considerations. But disapproval of inconsistency is merely a contingent attitude that people happen to have; and pragmatic justification does not allow for appraisers to take their (...) own moral attitudes seriously enough. What has been overlooked is a third alternative. The metaethical theory that can best account for supervenience is neither realist nor non-cognitivist but an objectivist version of constructivism. On the constructivist theory, right and wrong are determined by the principles that people would (hypothetically) consent to under ideal conditions. Type-consistency is a required feature of any principles regulating our conduct, if they are to be freely agreed to by ideally rational people. (shrink)

In a recent issue of this journal, Jorn Sonderholm presents two main criticisms of my 2008 case for a diachronic view of base property exemplification in metaethics. This essay contends that neither of Sonderholm’s criticisms hit their mark, and that there are additional reasons to adopt a diachronic view of base property exemplification. Thus, the case for a diachronic view of base property exemplification in metaethics is stronger than previously thought.