Normative Naturalism on Its Own Terms

Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 28 (3):505-530 (2021)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Normative naturalism is primarily a metaphysical doctrine: there are normative facts and properties, and these fall into the class of natural facts and properties. Many objections to naturalism rely on additional assumptions about language or thought, but often without adequate consideration of just how normative properties would have to figure in our thought and talk if naturalism were true. In the first part of the paper, I explain why naturalists needn’t think that normative properties can be represented or ascribed in wholly non-normative terms. If so, certain prominent objections to normative naturalism fail. In the second part, I consider the objection that normative properties are “just too different” from (other) natural properties to themselves be natural properties. I argue that naturalists have no distinctive trouble making sense of thought and talk involving forms of “genuine” or “authoritative” normativity which can drive a non-question-begging form of the objection.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The Normative Property Dualism Argument.Jesse Hambly - forthcoming - The Philosophical Quarterly.
Non-naturalism and Normative Necessities.Stephanie Leary - 2017 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 12.
Irreducibly Normative Properties.Chris Heathwood - 2015 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 10:216–244.
Non-Naturalism and Reference.Jussi Suikkanen - 2017 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 11 (2):1-24.

Analytics

Added to PP
2021-04-30

Downloads
776 (#31,672)

6 months
144 (#31,761)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Pekka Väyrynen
University of Leeds

Citations of this work

Nomic moral naturalness.Alexios Stamatiadis-Bréhier - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-22.
Nomic moral naturalness.Alexios Stamatiadis-Bréhier - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (9):3306-3327.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Principia ethica.George Edward Moore - 1903 - Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications. Edited by Thomas Baldwin.
On What Matters: Two-Volume Set.Derek Parfit - 2001 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Moral realism: a defence.Russ Shafer-Landau - 2003 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism.David Enoch - 2011 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.

View all 49 references / Add more references