Realism, Naturalism, and Moral Semantics

2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
David O. Brink
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Moral Realism ◽  
Direct Reference ◽  
Ethical Naturalism ◽  
Moral Beliefs ◽  
First Approximation ◽  
Open Question Argument ◽  
The World ◽  
Open Question

The prospects for moral realism and ethical naturalism have been important parts of recent debates within metaethics. As a first approximation,moral realismis the claim that there are facts or truths about moral matters that are objective in the sense that they obtain independently of the moral beliefs or attitudes of appraisers.Ethical naturalismis the claim that moral properties of people, actions, and institutions are natural, rather than occult or supernatural, features of the world. Though these metaethical debates remain unsettled, several people, myself included, have tried to defend the plausibility of both moral realism and ethical naturalism. I, among others, have appealed to recent work in the philosophy of language—in particular, to so-called theories of “direct reference” —to defend ethical naturalism against a variety of semantic worries, including G. E. Moore's “open question argument.” In response to these arguments, critics have expressed doubts about the compatibility of moral realism and direct reference. In this essay, I explain these doubts, and then sketch the beginnings of an answer—but understanding both the doubts and my answer requires some intellectual background.

Direct Reference and the Open Question Argument

dialectica ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 383-402
Author(s):  
Niklas Möller
Keyword(s):  
Direct Reference ◽  
Open Question Argument ◽  
Open Question

Open question argument

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tristram McPherson
Keyword(s):  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Ethical Naturalism ◽  
Natural Properties ◽  
The Core ◽  
Open Questions ◽  
Open Question Argument ◽  
Naturalistic Account ◽  
Open Question

The open question argument is the heart of G.E. Moore’s case against ethical naturalism. Ethical naturalism is the view that goodness, rightness, etc. are natural properties; roughly, the sorts of properties that can be investigated by the natural sciences. Moore claims that, for any candidate naturalistic account of an ethical term according to which ‘good’ had the same meaning as some naturalistic term A, we might without confusion ask: ‘I see that this act is A, but is it good?’ Moore claimed that the existence of such open questions shows that ethical naturalism is mistaken. In the century since its introduction, the open question argument has faced a battery of objections. Despite these challenges, some contemporary philosophers claim that the core of Moore’s argument can be salvaged. The most influential defences link Moore’s argument to the difficulty that naturalistic ethical realists face in explaining the practical role of ethical concepts in deliberation.

scholarly journals Three Millian Ways to Resolve Open Questions

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Andrew Cullison
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Original Formulation ◽  
Open Questions ◽  
Open Question Argument ◽  
Proper Name ◽  
Open Question

Millianism is a thesis in philosophy of language that the meaning of a proper name is simply its referent. Millianism faces certain puzzles called Frege's Puzzles. Some Millians defend the view by appealing to a metaphysics of belief that involves Ways of Believing. In the first part of this paper, I argue that ethical naturalists can adopt this Millian strategy to resist Moore’s Open Question argument. While this strategy of responding to the Open Question Argument has already appeared in the literature, I show that the Millian strategy can be easily extended to other versions of the Open Question Argument that are alleged to be stronger than the original formulation. The allegedly stronger versions of the Open Question Argument are not straightforwardly Frege's Puzzles, but they still have analogue versions that have been presented against Millianism. What the Ways Millian can say against those analogue versions can easily be applied to these other versions of the Open Question Argument.

The Truth that Pain is Bad

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Moral Fact ◽  
Partial Analysis ◽  
Open Question Argument ◽  
Open Question ◽  
Potential Objection

This chapter articulates several core claims of Compassionate Moral Realism, and argues that the view thereby satisfies the semantic and metaphysical criteria for moral realism. The chapter focuses on the claim that pain is objectively bad, arguing that it is literally true and corresponds to a stance-independent moral fact. After clarifying the meaning of that claim, a partial analysis for “objectively bad” is defended, according to which something is objectively bad if any subject in touch with it would be averse to it. After showing how this partial analysis connects to other philosophers’ analyses of value-related notions and follows from several defensible full analyses, a potential objection based on Moore’s Open Question Argument is considered and answered. It is then shown that “pain is objectively bad” is therefore literally true on this analysis, and that the corresponding fact is stance-independent in the relevant ways.

Assimilative Moral Realism and Supervenience

Dialogue ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken Yasenchuk
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Ethical Naturalism ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Important Respect ◽  
Natural Properties ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Macrophysical Properties ◽  
David Brink ◽  
The Way

David Brink has recently argued for the “parity” of ethics and the sciences. While the parity claim alone might be metaphysically neutral, Brink favours a form of ethical naturalism on which moral properties “are” natural properties, just as non-moral macrophysical properties “are” the microphysical states that compose them. Brink supports this claim by showing that both types of properties share certain important features: specifically, that both may be (and typically are) constituted, supervening and synthetically necessitated. I shall argue that notwithstanding these common features, there remain significant modal differences in the way the two types of properties are assigned to the world. These differences represent an important respect in which moral properties are not on par with their scientific counterparts.

Beyond Concepts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Garrett Millikan
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Language Function ◽  
Natural Signs ◽  
Transmission Of Information ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Information ◽  
Natural Ontology

This book weaves together themes from natural ontology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and information, areas of inquiry that have not recently been treated together. The sprawling topic is Kant’s how is knowledge possible? but viewed from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. The assumption is that we are evolved creatures that use cognition as a guide in dealing with the natural world, and that the natural world is roughly as natural science has tried to describe it. Very unlike Kant, then, we must begin with ontology, with a rough understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, only later developing theories about the nature of cognition within that world and how it manages to reflect the rest of nature. And in trying to get from ontology to cognition we must traverse another non-Kantian domain: questions about the transmission of information both through natural signs and through purposeful signs including, especially, language. Novelties are the introduction of unitrackers and unicepts whose job is to recognize the same again as manifested through the jargon of experience, a direct reference theory for common nouns and other extensional terms, a naturalist sketch of uniceptual—roughly conceptual— development, a theory of natural information and of language function that shows how properly functioning language carries natural information, a novel description of the semantics/pragmatics distinction, a discussion of perception as translation from natural informational signs, new descriptions of indexicals and demonstratives and of intensional contexts and a new analysis of the reference of incomplete descriptions.

Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 15

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Moral Realism ◽  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Moral Explanation ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Selection Of

This series is devoted to original philosophical work in the foundations of ethics. It provides an annual selection of much of the best new scholarship being done in the field. Its broad purview includes work being done at the intersection of ethical theory and metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. The chapters included in the series provide a basis for understanding recent developments in the field. Chapters in this volume explore topics including the nature of reasons, the tenability of moral realism, moral explanation and grounding, and a variety of epistemological challenges.

Moral Injury and Biblical Studies: An Early Sampling of Research and Emerging Trends

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-144
Author(s):  
Brad E. Kelle
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Moral Injury ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Moral Beliefs ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Emerging Trends ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
The World ◽  
Biblical Texts

Moral injury emerged within clinical psychology and related fields to refer to a non-physical wound (psychological and emotional pain and its effects) that results from the violation (by oneself or others) of a person’s deepest moral beliefs (about oneself, others, or the world). Originally conceived in the context of warfare, the notion has now expanded to include the morally damaging impact of various non-war-related experiences and circumstances. Since its inception, moral injury has been an intersectional and cross-disciplinary term and significant work has appeared in psychology, philosophy, medicine, spiritual/pastoral care, chaplaincy, and theology. Since 2015, biblical scholarship has engaged moral injury along two primary trajectories: 1) creative re-readings of biblical stories and characters informed by insights from moral injury; and 2) explorations of the postwar rituals and symbolic practices found in biblical texts and how they might connect to the felt needs of morally injured persons. These trajectories suggest that the engagement between the Bible and moral injury generates a two-way conversation in which moral injury can serve as a heuristic that brings new meanings out of biblical texts, and the critical study of biblical texts can contribute to the attempts to understand, identify, and heal moral injury.

The randomized communication complexity of revenue maximization

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-83
Author(s):  
Aviad Rubinstein ◽  
Junyao Zhao
Keyword(s):  
Lower Bounds ◽  
Communication Complexity ◽  
Social Choice Rule ◽  
Valuation Function ◽  
Optimal Auctions ◽  
Incentive Compatible ◽  
First Approximation ◽  
Exponential Separation ◽  
Open Question

We study the communication complexity of incentive compatible auction-protocols between a monopolist seller and a single buyer with a combinatorial valuation function over n items [Rubinstein and Zhao 2021]. Motivated by the fact that revenue-optimal auctions are randomized [Thanassoulis 2004; Manelli and Vincent 2010; Briest et al. 2010; Pavlov 2011; Hart and Reny 2015] (as well as by an open problem of Babaioff, Gonczarowski, and Nisan [Babaioff et al. 2017]), we focus on the randomized communication complexity of this problem (in contrast to most prior work on deterministic communication). We design simple, incentive compatible, and revenue-optimal auction-protocols whose expected communication complexity is much (in fact infinitely) more efficient than their deterministic counterparts. We also give nearly matching lower bounds on the expected communication complexity of approximately-revenue-optimal auctions. These results follow from a simple characterization of incentive compatible auction-protocols that allows us to prove lower bounds against randomized auction-protocols. In particular, our lower bounds give the first approximation-resistant, exponential separation between communication complexity of incentivizing vs implementing a Bayesian incentive compatible social choice rule, settling an open question of Fadel and Segal [Fadel and Segal 2009].

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