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Moral Functionalism and Moral Nonnaturalism

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Notes

  1. Richard Boyd, “How to Be a Moral Realist,” in G. Sayre-McCord (ed.), Essays in Moral Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 181–228; David Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Frank Jackson and Phillip Pettit, “Moral Functionalism and Moral Motivation,” Philosophical Quarterly 178 (1995): 20–40; Peter Railton, “Moral Realism,” Philosophical Review 95 (1986): 163–207; Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994).

  2. A functionalist approach to morality is even more plausible than a functionalist account of the mind. Some mental states, such as pain, essentially involve intrinsic qualities and hence cannot be fully characterized in terms of functional roles. There might be creatures who are functionally different from us but still feel pain or creatures who are functionally identical with us but feel no pain. In contrast, a moral property, say rightness, doesn’t seem to possess intrinsic features such that rightness couldn’t be characterized by appeal to its relations with other properties.

  3. For notable exceptions, see Ralph Wedgwood, The Nature of Normativity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  4. Even if atomistic moral functionalism is false, it is not conceptually false, on my broad notion of functional properties. For a similar usage, see Sydney Shoemaker, “Some Varieties of Functionalism,” in S. Shoemaker (ed.), Identity, Cause, and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 261–286.

  5. Jackson and Pettit, op. cit., p. 22.

  6. Richard Boyd, “Finite Beings, Finite Goods: The Semantics, Metaphysics and Ethics of Naturalist Consequentialism (Part II),” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (2003): 24–47, p. 28.

  7. Michael Smith, “Moral Realism,” in H. LaFollette and I. Persson (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory, 2nd Edition (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 15–42.

  8. David Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  9. Holistic functionalism per se doesn’t entail moral-natural reducibility as atomistic functionalism does. But it doesn’t follow that holistic functionalism entails moral-natural irreducibility. If moral properties are understood as first-order functional properties, and if there are single realizers that play the functional roles, then moral properties would be reducible to natural properties, regardless of whether a holistic version of moral functionalism is adopted.

  10. David Lewis, “How to Define Theoretical Terms?” Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970): 427–446; David Lewis, “Psychophysical and Theoretical Identification,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 50 (1972): 249–258.

  11. Frank Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Peter Railton, “Noncognitivism about Rationality: Benefits, Costs, and an Alternative,” Philosophical Issues 4 (1993): 36–51.

  12. For a similar definition of mental states, see Jaegwon Kim, Philosophy of Mind (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996). This definition is neutral between the debate between first-order functionalism and second-order functionalism, which I will discuss in Section 4.

  13. Crispin Wright, Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

  14. See John McDowell, “Value and Secondary Qualities,” in S. Darwall, A. Gibbard, and P. Railton (eds.), Moral Discourse and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 201–214.

  15. To say that a proposition that P is a priori, in my terminology, is to say that the primary way of knowing that P is not based on empirical evidence. We can have mathematical knowledge by empirical means (e.g. via the testimony of mathematicians). But that is only a secondary way of knowing about mathematical truths; such knowledge ultimately relies on mathematicians’ mathematical knowledge, which is acquired in a priori ways.

  16. See Jackson, op. cit.

  17. Jackson and Pettit, op. cit., p. 23.

  18. Boyd, “How to Be a Moral Realist,” op. cit.; Peter Railton, “Naturalism and Prescriptivity,” Social Philosophy and Policy 7 (1989): 151–174.

  19. Boyd, “Finite Beings, Finite Goods,” op. cit., p. 26.

  20. Ned Block, “Troubles with Functionalism,” in N. Block (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 268–305.

  21. Robert Audi, Moral Perception (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Derek Parfit, On What Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); T. M. Scanlon, Being Realistic about Reasons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  22. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903).

  23. There is another way to respond to this objection. We can distinguish between pro tanto wrongness and overall wrongness. Even if our knowledge that torturing a sentient being for fun is overall wrong is contingent on empirical facts, the knowledge that it is pro tanto wrong seems not.

  24. Scanlon, op. cit.

  25. I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to address this issue.

  26. Stephen Biggs and Jessica Wilson, “The A Priority of Abduction,” Philosophical Studies 174 (2017): 735–758; Ernest Sosa, “Reliability and the A Priori,” in T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 369–384.

  27. Terrence Horgan and Mark Timmons, “New Wave Moral Realism Meets Moral Twin Earth,” Journal of Philosophical Research 16 (1991): 447–465, and “Copping Out on Moral Twin Earth,” Synthese 124 (2000): 139–152. For similar thought experiments, see R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952).

  28. Horgan and Timmons, “Copping Out on Moral Twin Earth,” op. cit.

  29. David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), and “The Two-Dimensional Argument against Materialism,” in D. Chalmers (ed.), The Character of Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 141–205.

  30. It is an ideal epistemic possibility that P if P could be the case for all an ideal thinker can know a priori. See Chalmers, “The Two-Dimensional Argument against Materialism,” op. cit.

  31. Some philosophers criticize empirical versions of psychological functionalism on similar grounds. See Block, op. cit.; Shoemaker, op. cit.

  32. For a similar suggestion, see Peter Railton, “Noncognitivism about Rationality,” op. cit.

  33. David Merli, “Return to Moral Twin Earth,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 32 (2002): 207–240.

  34. It is worth noticing that the a priority of the moral theory doesn’t entail moral nonnaturalism. As I will discuss in later sections, if first-order moral functionalism were true, moral properties would be reducible to the natural realizers that play the relevant functional roles, even if the moral theory that characterizes the functional roles is a priori.

  35. Kim gives a definition of the notion of ‘second-order property’. Let B be a set of first-order properties. F is a second-order property over set B “if and only if F is the property of having some property P in B such that D(P), where D specifies a condition on members of B”. See Jaegwon Kim, Mind in a Physical World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), p. 20.

  36. D. M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968); Lewis, “Psychophysical and Theoretical Identification,” op. cit.

  37. Jerry Fodor, “Explanations in Psychology,” in M. Black (ed.), Philosophy in America (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 161–179; Hilary Putnam, “The Nature of Mental States,” in H. Putnam (ed.), Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 429–440; Kim, Mind in a Physical World, op. cit.

  38. Putnam, op. cit.

  39. David Lewis, “Mad Pain and Martian Pain,” in N. Block (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 216–222; Michael Tye, “Functionalism and Type Physicalism,” Philosophical Studies 44 (1983): 161–174.

  40. Some may reply that there really is no such mental state as pain simpliciter. Rather, there is only human pain, bat pain, Martian pain, and so on. See Lewis, “Mad Pain and Martian Pain,” op. cit. But if so, we would lose a primary motivation for functionalism, namely, “that creatures with states that play the same role in the production of other mental states and behavior possess, literally, the same mental states.” See Janet Levin, “Functionalism,” in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/functionalism/>

  41. Unlike the linguistic distinction between ‘pain’ and ‘being in pain’, moral language doesn’t suggest a distinction, for example, between wrongness and being in wrongness.

  42. Horgan and Timmons, “Copping Out on Moral Twin Earth,” op. cit., p. 140.

  43. A second-order functional property is individuated in terms of its function role characterized by a functional theory. Since the moral theory T and the twin moral theory T* are two different theories, they characterize two different sets of second-order properties.

  44. Some philosophers of mind adopt a similar strategy to argue for reductive physicalism. See Ned Block and Robert Stalnaker, “Conceptual Analysis, Dualism, and the Explanatory Gap,” Philosophical Review 108 (1999): 1–46.

  45. Jackson, op. cit.

  46. See Jerry Fodor, “Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis),” Synthese 28 (1974): 97–115; David Owens, “Disjunctive Laws?” Analysis 49 (1989): 197–202; Derk Pereboom and Hilary Kornblith, “The Metaphysics of Irreducibility,” Philosophical Studies 63 (1991): 125–145. I’d like to acknowledge that a minority group of philosophers maintain that disjunctive properties could be natural properties. See Allan Gibbard, Thinking How to Live (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 96–99.

  47. Edward Zalta, Abstract Objects: An Introduction to Axiomatic Metaphysics (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983).

  48. Shafer-Landau, op. cit., p. 91.

  49. Moral naturalism is standardly formulated as the view that moral properties are identical with (rather than merely supervenient on or realizable by) some natural properties. Moral-natural supervenience or realization could be accepted by moral nonnaturalists and is too weak for characterizing moral naturalism.

  50. See Nicholas Sturgeon, “Ethical Naturalism,” in D. Copp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 91–121.

  51. John Bengson, “Grasping the Third Realm,” in T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology, Vol. 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1–38; Terrence Cuneo, “The Evolutionary Challenge to Knowing Moral Reasons,” in D. Star (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 964–986; Aidan Lyon, “Mathematical Explanations of Empirical Facts, and Mathematical Realism,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (2012): 559–578.

  52. Jackson, op. cit.

  53. Sturgeon, op. cit.

  54. For example, some reductive physicalists argue that since there are no species-independent mental states, the putative phenomenon of multiply realizability doesn’t threaten the identity of mental states and physical states-in-species. Or, some reductive physicalists suggest that even though mental properties are multiply realized by physical properties, mental properties are necessarily coextensive with the disjunctions of physical properties and are thereby reducible to physical properties. I have discussed the two strategies in the preceding section.

  55. David Copp, “Why Naturalism?” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 6 (2003): 179–200; Jaegwon Kim, “The American Origins of Philosophical Naturalism,” Journal of Philosophical Research 28 (2003): 83–98; Hilary Kornblith, “Naturalism: Both Metaphysical and Epistemological,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19 (1994): 39–52; Railton, “Naturalism and Prescriptivity,” op. cit.; Shafer-Landau, op. cit.; Wedgwood, op. cit.

  56. If some putatively non-natural entities (such as numbers and ghosts) turn out to be empirically accessible, then I would be happy to call them natural entities.

  57. Boyd, “How to Be a Moral Realist,” op. cit.

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    Lei Zhong

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Zhong, L. Moral Functionalism and Moral Nonnaturalism. J Value Inquiry 57, 131–147 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09808-y

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