Abstract
Scott Woodcock has levied a number of objections against Aristotelian naturalism which claims that ethical norms are grounded by reason and biology. His most recent “membership objection” is a synthesis of earlier objections and consists in a trilemma. If Aristotelian naturalists answer the first horn of the trilemma by stipulating that determinations of species-membership are grounded non-empirically, and the second horn of the trilemma by stipulating rationality is species-specific, then they are confronted by a moral outsider—someone who claims that they have non-empirically determined their species membership and are thus guided by different norms of rationality than the rest of us. This permits the moral outsider to act heinously without moral sanction from Aristotelian naturalism. Critics have neglected Alasdair MacIntyre’s Aristotelian naturalism. And he has faced moral-outsider-type counterexamples before. I develop a new response to counterexamples MacIntyre’s account has faced and argue that MacIntyre’s Aristotelian naturalism is able to answer Woodcock’s membership objection. I do this by developing an empirical taxonomy-based approach that enables us to justify the moral outsider’s responsibilities while preserving the best of Aristotelian naturalism.
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Notes
I am grateful to John Hacker-Wright, Scott Woodcock, Jacob Fehr and two anonymous reviewers at this journal for their insightful feedback on drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to Stefan Linquist and Andrew Freundlich for conversations that helped flesh out my views. Finally, I am grateful to the attendees of my presentations of this paper at The University of Guelph and the 14th annual ISME conference.
Interestingly, Kant (1978, 250) acknowledges the possibility of rational moral aliens.
Carson (2014, 38) suggests that MacIntyre provides those with only fragmented and incoherent knowledge of traditions “minimal rational resources.” Given that, for MacIntyre, it is impossible to be rational in any sense without already being part of traditions, it is almost surely the case that those with such resources are already bound by traditional moral norms. I thus discuss this charge only in order to demonstrate what other Aristotelian naturalists can learn from MacIntyre’s theory.
I will note in passing that if the Great Red Dragon is to be rational on MacIntyre’s scheme, he must participate in tradition-constituted enquiry and thus be bound by the virtues of rational independence in addition to the virtues of acknowledged dependence. Whether he participates in such enquiry is something that can be empirically verified, just like membership in the class of intelligent mammals, as neither of these involves species membership.
Following Bergman and Beehner (2015) I define social complexity—which I take to be a measure of how social an animal is—as that which increases with the number of differentiated relationships of individuals. I also take transitive inference ability to be a suitable indicator of intelligence. Studies have demonstrated a positive correlation between transitive inference ability and social complexity (e.g., Maclean et al. 2008).
As Lewens (2020, 483–84) points out, “species” in the sense typically discussed by Aristotelian naturalists shares little in common with empirical accounts. MacIntyre (1999, 22) however appeals to scientific research when characterizing the flourishing of dolphins. This suggests that the MacIntyrian brand of Aristotelian naturalism is friendly to empirical details. Importantly, the empirical account I have outlined avoids the charge of underdetermination Lewens (2020, 486–91) presses against the Aristotelian naturalism of Foot and Thompson.
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This research was completed while funded under the Philosophy PhD program at the University of Guelph.
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McCracken, G. Is Aristotelian Naturalism Safe From the Moral Outsider?. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 24, 1123–1137 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-021-10250-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-021-10250-z