scholarly journals Ethical Emergentism and Moral Causation

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 331-362
Author(s):  
Ryan Stringer
Keyword(s):  
Causal Efficacy ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Ethical Naturalism ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
In Virtue Of

Abstract This paper focuses on a recently articulated, emergentist conception of ethical naturalism and its commitment to causal efficacy, or the idea that moral properties have causal powers, along with its supporting commitment to moral causation. After I reconstruct the theory, I explain how it offers some interesting theoretical benefits to moral realists in virtue of its commitment to causal efficacy. Then, after locating some examples of moral causation in support of this commitment, I present and respond to five objections to such causation, which all threaten to undermine this support. Lastly, I consider a very serious problem that the theory faces in virtue of positing emergent moral properties as responsible for moral causation – namely, the problem of downward moral causation. I describe this problem in detail and argue that, as it stands, it does not spell doom for the theory.

Plato’s Forms as powers

2021 ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Anna Marmodoro
Keyword(s):  
Physical World ◽  
Causal Efficacy ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Difficult Question ◽  
Difference Makers

This chapter introduces Plato’s fundamental entities, the Forms. It focuses on his view that the Forms are causal powers, and his innovative stance that the Forms are transcendent entities; it argues that Plato’s Forms are transcendent powers. This raises the (difficult) question of what kind of causal efficacy transcendent entities can have on things in the physical world. By showing that Plato’s Forms are causal powers having constitutional causal efficacy, as difference-makers, like Anaxagoras’s Opposites, the chapter begins to build the case for what I call Plato’s Anaxagoreanism. If the Forms operate like Anaxagoras’s Opposites, by constitutional causal efficacy, except that they are transcendent, how can features of objects in the physical world be constitutionally derived from features of transcendent entities, the Forms? The chapter argues that Plato thinks of the causal efficacy of the Forms on the model of the normativity of mathematics and geometry over the sensible world.

What is affirmative action?

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
In Virtue Of

This chapter (1) offers a definition of affirmative action; (2) presents a typology of affirmative action policies; (3) and distinguishes between different kinds of justifications for affirmative action. These are all three useful points. Often when people seemingly disagree about the justifiability of affirmative action, they define it differently; have different kinds in mind even though they define affirmative action in the same way; or have different kinds of justifications of affirmative action in mind, even though they define it in the same way and have the same kinds in mind. Moreover, if we do not know what affirmative action is, we are not in a position to say which non-moral properties it has. If so, we cannot tell whether it is morally justified per se, since presumably if affirmative action per se is (un)justified, it is (un)justified in virtue of non-moral properties that it has by way of definition. The chapter concludes with a thumbnail sketch of the rest of the book.

scholarly journals Moral Explanations, Thick and Thin

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan Cline
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Thick Concepts ◽  
Moral Explanations ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Cornell Realism ◽  
In Virtue Of

Cornell realists maintain that irreducible moral properties have earned a place in our ontology in virtue of the indispensable role they play in a variety of explanations. These explanations can be divided into two groups: those that employ thin ethical concepts and those that employ thick ethical concepts. Recent work on thick concepts suggests that they are not inherently evaluative in their meaning. If correct, this creates problems for the moral explanations of Cornell realists, since the most persuasive moral explanations are those that employ thick concepts. If thick concepts are not inherently evaluative, then the most plausible explanations on offer cannot support Cornell realism. Moral explanations employing thin concepts, however, are too flimsy to support the view. Unless proponents can develop a compelling story about thick concepts or thin explanations, Cornell realism is in trouble.

Anaxagoras’s metaphysical foundations

2021 ◽  
pp. 12-34
Author(s):  
Anna Marmodoro
Keyword(s):  
Causal Efficacy ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
The World

This chapter introduces Anaxagoras’s metaphysics and the relations of fundamentality and composition that hold between entities in his ontology: the Opposites (properties), stuffs, objects, the so-called seeds (i.e., reified structures), and nous with its vortex. The chapter argues that the crux of Anaxagoras’s metaphysics, which will also influence Plato the most, is the stance that parts of properties are parts of objects. Objects are qualified by properties by having parts of properties (in preponderance) within their constitution. Thus, constitutional overlap is the ‘mechanism’ by which Anaxagoras accounts for the qualification of objects. The chapter provides an account of Anaxagoras’s Opposites as causal powers and explains the type of causal efficacy the Opposites have in the world: constitutional causal efficacy.

Property Causation

2020 ◽  
pp. 245-276
Author(s):  
Paul Noordhof
Keyword(s):  
Causal Relationship ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Supervenience Base ◽  
Explanatory Virtues ◽  
Target Effect ◽  
The Right ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Explanatory Virtue ◽  
Target Effects ◽  
Base Properties

If one set of properties supervenes upon another, then the former have causal powers if: first, the supervenience base properties minimally metaphysically necessitate the supervening properties; second, part of the minimal supervenience base causes the target effect; third, instances of the supervening properties would all cause certain target effects in the right kind of circumstances, as a result of this. When these conditions are met, the causal relationship holds not only in virtue of the supervenience base properties but also the supervening ones. Two further explanatory virtues that citing property causes may display are: when a property has a distinctive causal profile (when it makes a causal contribution that no other property would) and when an instance of the property supplies the precise contribution required for a certain effect. Pragmatic appeal to the second explanatory virtue explains away our tendency to hear certain explicitly contrastive statements mistakenly as true.

Four Epistemological Challenges to Ethical Naturalism: Naturalized Epistemology and the First-Person Perspective

2000 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 30-74
Author(s):  
David Copp
Keyword(s):  
A Posteriori ◽  
Natural Property ◽  
Naturalized Epistemology ◽  
Ethical Naturalism ◽  
Moral Goodness ◽  
Natural Properties ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Psychological Property ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
Moral Properties

Ethical naturalism is the doctrine that moral properties, such as moral goodness, justice, rightness, wrongness, and the like, are among the “natural” properties that things can have. It is the doctrine that moral properties are “natural” and that morality is in this sense an aspect of “nature.” Accordingly, it is a view about the semantics and metaphysics of moral discourse. For example, a utilitarian naturalist might propose that wrongness is the property an action could have of being such as to undermine overall happiness, where happiness is taken to be a psychological property. Unfortunately, it is unclear what the naturalist means by a “natural” property. For my purposes in this paper, I shall assume that natural properties are such that our knowledge of them is fundamentally empirical, grounded in observation. More precisely, a property is “natural” just in case any synthetic proposition about its instantiation can be known only a posteriori, or with the aid of experience.

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.

What Is an Institution?

2007 ◽  
pp. 5-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Searle
Keyword(s):  
Physical Structure ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Collective Intentionality ◽  
Institutional Facts ◽  
Institutional Fact ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Creation ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Typical Point

The author claims that an institution is any collectively accepted system of rules (procedures, practices) that enable us to create institutional facts. These rules typically have the form of X counts as Y in C, where an object, person, or state of affairs X is assigned a special status, the Y status, such that the new status enables the person or object to perform functions that it could not perform solely in virtue of its physical structure, but requires as a necessary condition the assignment of the status. The creation of an institutional fact is, thus, the collective assignment of a status function. The typical point of the creation of institutional facts by assigning status functions is to create deontic powers. So typically when we assign a status function Y to some object or person X we have created a situation in which we accept that a person S who stands in the appropriate relation to X is such that (S has power (S does A)). The whole analysis then gives us a systematic set of relationships between collective intentionality, the assignment of function, the assignment of status functions, constitutive rules, institutional facts, and deontic powers.

Acerca del supuesto fundamentalismo de Wittgenstein en Sobre la certez

2007 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
Author(s):  
José M. Ariso Salgado
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
On Certainty ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Basic Beliefs

RESUMENAl analizar si Ludwig Wittgenstein mantiene una posición fundamentalista en Sobre la certeza, suele discutirse si la citada obra se adapta al modelo de fundamentalismo propuesto por Avrum Stroll. Tras exponer las líneas básicas de dicho modelo, en esta nota se mantiene que Sobre la certeza no se adapta al modelo de Stroll debido al importante papel que Wittgenstein concede al contextualismo. Además, se añade que Wittgenstein no puede ser calificado de fundamentalista porque no reconoce ninguna propiedad que, sin tener en cuenta la diversidad de casos particulares, permita justificar de forma conjunta todas nuestras creencias básicas.PALABRAS CLAVEWITTGENSTEIN, FUNDAMENTALISMO, CONTEXTUALISMO, CERTEZAABSTRACTDid Wittgenstein hold a foundationalist position in On Certainty? When this question is tackled, it is often discussed, whether On Certainty fits in the foundationalist model devised by Avrum Stroll. After expounding the main lines of this model, I hold that On Certainty does not fit in Stroll’s model, because of the important role Wittgenstein attaches to contextualism. Furthermore, I add that Wittgenstein cannot be seen as a foundationalist –or a coherentist–, because he does not admit any feature in virtue of which the whole of our basic beliefs are justified without considering circumstances at all.KEYWORDSWITTGENSTEIN, CERTAINTY, FOUNDATIONALISM, CONTEXTUALISM

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document