Abstract

In "moral arguments" ("mind", 1958), Philippa foot displayed what she claimed to be a deduction of an evaluative conclusion from a non-Evaluative premise. In "freedom and reason", R m hare attacks foot-Style deductions on two grounds: he first offers a "reductio", Comparing them to a racist deduction; he then offers an explanation of where all of these arguments go awry. I argue in my paper's first part that hare's explanation rests upon a defective criterion of entailment. In passing I show how this counts against certain noncognitivist arguments that purport to show that moral judgments cannot be factual. In the second part I show that foot-Style deductions--And the racist deduction as well--Are either unsound or else superfluous to the naturalist's enterprise. From this I draw certain morals as to what conditions a successful naturalism must satisfy