It’s commonly held that particular moral facts are explained by ‘natural’ or ‘descriptive’ facts, though there’s disagreement over how such explanations work. We defend the view that general moral principles also play a role in explaining particular moral facts. More specifically, we argue that this view best makes sense of some intuitive data points, including the supervenience of the moral upon the natural. We consider two alternative accounts of the nature and structure of moral principles—’the nomic view’ and ‘moral platonism’—before (...) considering in what sense such principles obtain of necessity. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that normative properties supervene on natural properties. Non-naturalists face a distinctive challenge to explain this relation. Stephanie Leary argues that non-naturalists can meet this explanatory demand by positing the existence of hybrid normative properties. I argue that this proposal does not meet the supervenience challenge.

Expressivism is supposed to have an advantage over moral realism, in that it can explain why it is a conceptual truth that the moral supervenes on the natural, even though the natural does not entail the moral. I develop an analogy between expressivism and a version of theistic moral realism, and argue that this version of theistic moral realism shares any advantage that expressivism might have. It may be that the alleged advantage that expressivism has over moral realism is overstated. (...) Nevertheless, possible analogies between expressivism and theistic moral realism have received very little attention in the past, and are worth considering for their own sake. (shrink)