scholarly journals Blackburn’s Supervenience Argument Against Moral Realism: Revisited

Metaphysica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-165
Author(s):  
Harold W. Noonan
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Natural Properties ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Descriptive Names

AbstractBlackburn argues against naturalistic moral realism. He argues that there is no conceptual entailment from satisfying a naturalistic predicate to satisfying a moral predicate. But the moral is conceptually supervenient on the natural. However, this conjunction of conceptual supervenience with lack of conceptual entailment is something the non-realist can explain, but the realist cannot. I argue first that Blackburn’s best formulation of his challenge is his first one. Subsequently he reformulates it as a demand for a ‘ban on mixed worlds’. Critics have directed their arguments against this formulation but they are ineffective against Blackburn’s first formulation. My second thesis is, even so formulated the realist can meet the challenge. The bare conceptual supervenience of the moral on the natural can be given a realist explanation by understanding names of moral properties as descriptive names of natural properties.

scholarly journals The Explanationist Argument For Moral Realism

2011 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Sinclair
Keyword(s):  
Strong Evidence ◽  
Moral Realism ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Natural Properties ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Explanations ◽  
Moral Properties

In this paper I argue that the explanationist argument in favour of moral realism fails. According to this argument, the ability of putative moral properties to feature in good explanations provides strong evidence for, or entails, the metaphysical claims of moral realism. Some have rejected this argument by denying that moral explanations are ever good explanations. My criticism is different. I will argue that even if we accept that moral explanations are (sometimes) good explanations the metaphysical claims of realism do not follow.According to moral realists, moral properties such as justice and goodness take their own unique place in nature's ontological roll-call. Although realists disagree about the nature of these moral properties — for example, whether they are reducible or otherwise constituted by non-moral or natural properties — they all agree that such properties are genuine constituents of the world that are sometimes instantiated by objects, events or states of affairs.

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.

Reality and Morality

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Billy Dunaway
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Moral Disagreement ◽  
Moral Language ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Realist View

This book develops and defends a framework for moral realism. It defends the idea that moral properties are metaphysically elite, or privileged parts of reality. It argues that realists can hold that this makes them highly eligible as the referents for our moral terms, an application of a thesis sometimes called reference magnetism. And it elaborates on these theses by introducing some natural claims about how we can know about morality, by having beliefs that are free from a kind of risk of error. This package of theses in metaphysics, meta-semantics, and epistemology is motivated with a view to an explanation of possible moral disagreements. Many writers have emphasized the scope of moral disagreement, and have given compelling examples of possible users of moral language who appear to be genuinely disagreeing, rather than talking past one another, with their use of moral language. What has gone unnoticed is that there are limits to these possible disagreements, and not all possible users of moral language are naturally interpreted as capable of genuine disagreement. The realist view developed in this book can explain both the extent of, and the limits to, moral disagreement, and thereby has explanatory power that counts significantly in its favor.

Ontological Entanglement in the Normative Web

Dialogue ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 483-501
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN WINOKUR
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Moral Properties

Terence Cuneo has recently argued that we have to be committed to the existence of epistemic facts insofar as they are indispensable to theorizing. Furthermore, he argues that the epistemic properties of these facts are inextricably ‘ontologically entangled’ with certain moral properties, such that there exist ‘moral-epistemic’ facts. Cuneo, therefore, concludes that moral realism is true. I argue that Cuneo’s appeal to the existence of moral-epistemic facts is problematic, even granting his argument for the existence of indispensable epistemic facts. I conclude, therefore, that Cuneo’s argument fails to justify moral realism.

scholarly journals Considering Dispositional Moral Realism

Perspectives ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-22
Author(s):  
Prabhpal Singh
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Secondary Qualities ◽  
Dispositional Account ◽  
Affective Attitudes ◽  
Simon Blackburn ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
David Enoch

AbstractMy aim in this paper is to consider a series of arguments against Dispositional Moral Realism and argue that these objections are unsuccessful. I will consider arguments that try to either establish a dis-analogy between moral properties and secondary qualities or try to show that a dispositional account of moral properties fails to account for what a defensible species of moral realism must account for. I also consider criticisms from Simon Blackburn (1993), who argues that there could not be a corresponding perceptual faculty for moral properties, and David Enoch (2011), who argues that Dispositional Moral Realism does not most plausibly explain the difference between moral disagreements and disagreements of mere preference. Finally, I examine a novel criticism concerning the relationship between the diverse variety of moral properties and the range of our normative affective attitudes, arguing that the view has no problem accounting for this diversity.

Moral Perception and the Contents of Experience

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 294-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Preston J. Werner
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Moral Perception ◽  
Philosophy Of Perception ◽  
Normal Individuals ◽  
Moral Properties

I defend the thesis that at least some moral properties can be part of the contents of experience. I argue for this claim using acontrast argument, a type of argument commonly found in the literature on the philosophy of perception. I first appeal to psychological research on what I call emotionally empathetic dysfunctional individuals (eedis) to establish a phenomenal contrast betweeneedis and normal individuals in some moral situations. I then argue that the best explanation for this contrast, assuming non-skeptical moral realism, is thatbadnessis represented in the normal individual’s experience but not in theeedi’s experience. I consider and reject four alternative explanations of the contrast.

Conclusion

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Audi
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Moral Perception ◽  
Moral Property ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Natural Properties ◽  
Necessary Truth ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Perceptual Capacity

This concluding chapter explains how the theory of moral perception takes full account of the causal element in perception but does not require naturalizing moral properties. However, the theory does require that moral properties have a base in the natural world. They are anchored in the natural world in a way that makes possible moral knowledge and the ethical objectivity that goes with it. The bridge from their naturalistic base to moral judgment often has the intelligibility of the self-evident, and under some conditions it has the reliability of necessary truth. Seeing that an act or a person has a moral property may itself be a manifestation of an intuitive perceptual capacity that has considerable discriminative subtlety regarding descriptive natural properties.

scholarly journals Moral supervenience

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 592-615 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anandi Hattiangadi
Keyword(s):  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Conceivability Argument ◽  
Natural Properties ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Moral Supervenience ◽  
The One ◽  
Special Case

AbstractIt is widely held, even among nonnaturalists, that the moral supervenes on the natural. This is to say that for any two metaphysically possible worlds w and w′, and for any entities x in w and y in w′, any isomorphism between x and y that preserves the natural properties preserves the moral properties. In this paper, I put forward a conceivability argument against moral supervenience, assuming non-naturalism. First, I argue that though utilitarianism may be true, and the trolley driver is permitted to kill the one to save the five, there is a conceivable scenario that is just like our world in all natural respects, yet at which deontology is true, and the trolly driver is not permitted to kill the one to save the five. I then argue that in the special case of morality, it is possible to infer from the conceivability of such a scenario to its possibility. It follows that supervenience is false.

Editor’s Introduction: The View from Erewhon

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kinch Hoekstra
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Language Play ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Properties

Kinch Hoekstra’s introduction to Philip Pettit’s The Birth of Ethics adumbrates the themes of the work with reference to earlier attempts to provide naturalistic accounts of or challenges to morality. For Pettit, moral properties are really in the world, and yet are the product of patterns of human interaction and conventions to promote interests; his theory is thus both a kind of moral realism and a kind of moral conventionalism. Self-interest and language play central roles in Pettit’s hypothetical account of the genealogy of ethics, and a sketch is accordingly provided of the disagreement between Pettit and Michael Tomasello, which focuses on those roles.

Meta-Ethics

2020 ◽  
pp. 264-278
Author(s):  
Terence Irwin
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Concepts ◽  
Natural Properties ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Objective Property ◽  
The Way ◽  
Moral Facts

Moore’s arguments begin a debate that revives sentimentalist and rationalist arguments. According to Moore, ‘good’ is indefinable, because there is no definition of it that mentions only ‘natural’ properties. Non-naturalist objectivists argue that we know about objective moral properties, but not in the way we know about other properties. Non-cognitivists argue that goodness is not an objective property at all; when we say that something is good, we are not stating a fact about it, but expressing an emotion, or issuing some prescription. Even if objectivism is correct about the meaning of moral judgments, we may still deny that any moral judgments are true, on the ground that we have no reason to believe that there are any moral facts of the sort that objectivists claim to describe. Further discussion of these arguments against objectivism requires closer attention to the difference between moral concepts and moral properties.

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