A Simple Escape from Moral Twin Earth
Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 7 (2):109-118 (2018)
Abstract
This paper offers a simple response to the Moral Twin Earth (MTE) objection to Naturalist Moral Realism (NMR). NMR typically relies on an externalist metasemantics such as a causal theory of reference. The MTE objection is that such a theory predicts that terms like ‘good’ and ‘right’ have a different reference in certain twin communities where it’s intuitively clear that the twins are talking about the same thing when using ‘good’. I argue that Boyd’s causal regulation theory, the original target of the MTE objection, was never vulnerable to this objection. The theory contains an epistemic constraint on reference which implies that either the property that causally regulates uses of ‘good’ isn’t different for the twin communities or, in scenarios where the reference is different, the communities diverge in ways where it’s not intuitively clear that ‘good’ has the same reference for them.Author's Profile
DOI
10.1002/tht3.375
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Citations of this work
Normative Commitments in Metanormative Theory.Pekka Väyrynen - 2019 - In Jussi Suikkanen & Antti Kauppinen (eds.), Methodology and Moral Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 193-213.
Metasemantics and boydian synthetic moral naturalism.Xinkan Zhao - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):11161-11178.
Quasi-Naturalism and the Problem of Alternative Normative Concepts.Camil Golub - 2022 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 19 (5):474-500.
A dose of reality for moral twin earth.Jeffrey Wisdom - 2021 - Philosophical Psychology 34 (6):784-804.
A dose of reality for moral twin earth.Jeffrey Wisdom - 2021 - Philosophical Psychology 34 (6):784-804.
References found in this work
The meaning of 'meaning'.Hillary Putnam - 1975 - Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7:131-193.
“How to Be a Moral Realist.Richard Boyd - 1988 - In G. Sayre-McCord (ed.), Essays on Moral Realism. Cornell University Press. pp. 181-228.
Disagreement and the Semantics of Normative and Evaluative Terms.David Plunkett & Timothy Sundell - 2013 - Philosophers' Imprint 13 (23):1-37.