Results for 'Metaethical Naturalism'

956 found
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  1.  39
    Is metaethical naturalism sufficient? A Confucian response to problems of meaning.James Dominic Rooney - forthcoming - Asian Philosophy.
    Ethical naturalism is sometimes accused of problematic metaphysics or epistemology. Some argue that naturalists rely on concepts of ‘nature’ indefensible in the light of modern evolutionary biology. There is also an epistemological worry that has been raised recently that strong normative evaluation, such as meaning in human life, is empirically inaccessible or even in conflict with what we know in scientific contexts. While the critics have targeted Aristotelian and Neo-Aristotelian views, I will appeal to an argument from the Neo- (...)
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  2. Naturalism in Metaethics.Jussi Suikkanen - 2015 - In Kelly James Clark (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 351-368.
    This chapter offers an introduction to naturalist views in contemporary metaethics. Such views attempt to find a place for normative properties (such as goodness and rightness) in the concrete physical world as it is understood by both science and common sense. The chapter begins by introducing simple naturalist conceptual analyses of normative terms. It then explains how these analyses were rejected in the beginning of the 20th Century due to G.E. Moore’s influential Open Question Argument. After this, the chapter considers (...)
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  3. Methodological Naturalism in Metaethics.Daniel Nolan - 2018 - In Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. New York: Routledge. pp. 659-673.
    Methodological naturalism arises as a topic in metaethics in two ways. One is the issue of whether we should be methodological naturalists when doing our moral theorising, and another is whether we should take a naturalistic approach to metaethics itself. Interestingly, these can come apart, and some naturalist programs in metaethics justify a non-scientific approach to our moral theorising. This paper discusses the range of approaches that fall under the general umbrella of methodological naturalism, and how naturalists view (...)
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  4. Metaethics and the Nature of Properties.Jussi Suikkanen - 2024 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 98 (1):113-131.
    This paper explores the connection between two philosophical debates concerning the nature of properties. The first metaethical debate is about whether normative properties are ordinary natural properties or some unique kind of non-natural properties. The second metaphysical debate is about whether properties are sets of objects, transcendent or immanent universals, or sets of tropes. I argue that nominalism, transcendent realism, and immanent realism are not neutral frameworks for the metaethical debate but instead lead to either metaethical (...) or non-naturalism. We can therefore investigate the metaethical question on its own terms only within the framework of trope theory. (shrink)
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  5.  7
    Naturalism in Metaethics.Jussi Suikkanen - 2015 - In Kelly James Clark (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 351–368.
    This chapter offers an introduction to naturalist views in contemporary metaethics. Such views attempt to find a place for normative properties (such as goodness and rightness) in the concrete physical world as it is understood by both science and common sense. The chapter begins by introducing simple naturalist conceptual analyses of normative terms. It then explains how these analyses were rejected in the beginning of the 20th century due to G.E. Moore's influential open question argument.
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  6. Scorekeeping in Debates between Non-Naturalism and Its Opponents: On Parfit's Last Statement in Metaethics.Dong-Ryul Choo - 2020 - 철학적 분석 (Philosophical Analysis) 44:1-29.
    [English abstract] In his last metaethical statement, Parfit revisits his earlier arguments for non-metaphysical normative non-naturalism , and points to the possibility of convergence between his view and Railton's non-analytical normative naturalism. I examine the basis of this convergence claim and find it unpersuasive, mainly because if their views converge on the same position, Parfit's non-natural norms exist only as predicates. In order to avoid this consequence, he needs to present a reason for believing in the existence (...)
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  7.  32
    Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism as a Metaethical Route to Virtue-Ethical Longtermism.Richard Friedrich Runge - 2024 - Moral Philosophy and Politics.
    This article proposes a metaethical route from neo-Aristotelian naturalism, as developed in particular by Philippa Foot, to virtue-ethical longtermism. It argues that the metaethical assumptions of neo-Aristotelian naturalism inherently imply that a valid description of the life-form of a species must satisfy a formal requirement of internal sustainability. The elements of a valid life-form description then serve as a normative standard. Given that humans have the ability to influence the fate of future generations and know about (...)
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  8. Resurrecting the Hume's Dictum argument against metaethical non-naturalism.Noah Gordon - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-23.
    I argue for the viability of one neglected way of developing supervenience-based objections to metaethical non-naturalism. This way goes through a principle known as ‘Hume’s Dictum’, according to which there are no necessary connections between distinct existences. I challenge several objections to the Hume’s Dictum-based argument. In the course of doing so, I formulate and motivate modest and precise versions of Hume’s Dictum, illustrate how arguments employing these principles might proceed, and argue that the Hume’s Dictum argument enjoys (...)
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  9. Non-Naturalism and Reference.Jussi Suikkanen - 2017 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 11 (2):1-24.
    Metaethical realists disagree about the nature of normative properties. Naturalists think that they are ordinary natural properties: causally efficacious, a posteriori knowable, and usable in the best explanations of natural and social sciences. Non-naturalist realists, in contrast, argue that they are sui generis: causally inert, a priori knowable and not a part of the subject matter of sciences. It has been assumed so far that naturalists can explain causally how the normative predicates manage to refer to normative properties, whereas (...)
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  10. Naturalisation without naturalism: a prospect for metaethics.Sergio Cremaschi - manuscript
    First, I discuss naturalism's meaning in philosophy and then the sense in which it has been introduced in ethics: that of American Naturalism, that of Dewey’s pragmatism, the sense of a negation of Moore’s negation of naturalism, the neo-Aristotelian, and the external realist. I will argue a fundamental heterogeneity of these meanings. I will add that the reasons for the apparent unity of a naturalist front in recent philosophical debates lie more in the sociology of knowledge. I (...)
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  11. Metaethics and the Nature of Properties.Neil Sinclair - 2024 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 98 (1):133-152.
    This paper explores connections between theories of morality and theories of properties. It argues that (1) moral realism is in tension with predicate, class and mereological nominalism; (2) moral non-naturalism is incompatible with standard versions of resemblance nominalism, immanent realism and trope theory; and (3) the standard semantic arguments for property realism do not support moral realism. I also raise doubts about trope-theoretic explanations of moral supervenience and argue against one version of the principle that we should accept theories (...)
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  12. Metaethical Experientialism.Andrew Y. Lee - forthcoming - In Geoffrey Lee & Adam Pautz (eds.), The Importance of Being Conscious. Oxford University Press.
    I develop and defend "metaethical experientialism," the thesis that phenomenal facts explain certain kinds of value facts. I argue, for example, that anyone who knows what it’s like to feel extreme pain is in a position to know that that kind of experience is bad. I argue that metaethical experientialism yields genuine counterexamples to the principle that no ethical conclusion can be derived from purely descriptive premises. I also discuss the prospects for a pluralistic metaethics, whereby different (...) theories hold for different classes of ethical facts. (shrink)
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  13. Mind-Body Meets Metaethics: A Moral Concept Strategy.Helen Yetter-Chappell & Richard Yetter Chappell - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 165 (3):865-878.
    The aim of this paper is to assess the relationship between anti-physicalist arguments in the philosophy of mind and anti-naturalist arguments in metaethics, and to show how the literature on the mind-body problem can inform metaethics. Among the questions we will consider are: (1) whether a moral parallel of the knowledge argument can be constructed to create trouble for naturalists, (2) the relationship between such a "Moral Knowledge Argument" and the familiar Open Question Argument, and (3) how naturalists can respond (...)
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  14. Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism and the Evolutionary Objection: Rethinking the Relevance of Empirical Science.Parisa Moosavi - 2018 - In John Hacker-Wright (ed.), Philippa Foot on Goodness and Virtue. Springer Verlag. pp. 277-307.
    Neo-Aristotelian metaethical naturalism is a modern attempt at naturalizing ethics using ideas from Aristotle’s teleological metaphysics. Proponents of this view argue that moral virtue in human beings is an instance of natural goodness, a kind of goodness supposedly also found in the realm of non-human living things. Many critics question whether neo-Aristotelian naturalism is tenable in light of modern evolutionary biology. Two influential lines of objection have appealed to an evolutionary understanding of human nature and natural teleology (...)
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  15. The Saucer of mud, The Kudzu vine and the uxorious cheetah: Against neo-Aristotelian naturalism in metaethics.James Lenman - 2005 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 1 (2):37-50.
    Let me say something, to begin with, about wanting weird stuff. Stuff like saucers of mud. The example, famously, is from Anscombe’s Intention (Anscombe Anscombe 957)) where she is, in effect, defending a version of the old scholastic maxim, Omne appetitum appetitur sub specie boni. If your Latin is rusty like mine, what that says is just that every appetite – for better congruence with modern discussions, let’s say every desire – desires under the aspect of the good, or in (...)
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  16. Sellars’ metaethical quasi-realism.Griffin Klemick - 2020 - Synthese 197 (5):2215-2243.
    In this article, I expound and defend an interpretation of Sellars as a metaethical quasi-realist. Sellars analyzes moral discourse in non-cognitivist terms: in particular, he analyzes “ought”-statements as expressions of collective intentions deriving from a collective commitment to provide for the general welfare. But he also endorses a functional-role theory of meaning, on which a statement’s meaning is grounded in its being governed by semantical rules concerning language entry, intra-linguistic, and language departure transitions, and a theory of truth as (...)
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  17. Non-Analytical Naturalism and the Nature of Normative Thought: A Reply to Parfit.Nicholas Laskowski - 2015 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 9 (1):1-5.
    Metaethical non-analytical naturalism consists in the metaphysical thesis that normative properties are identical with or reducible to natural properties and the epistemological thesis that we cannot come to a complete understanding of the nature of normative properties via conceptual analysis alone. In On What Matters, Derek Parfit (2011) argues that non-analytical naturalism is either false or incoherent. In § 1, I show that his argument for this claim is unsuccessful, by showing that it rests on a tacit (...)
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  18. Comparative Metaethics: Neglected Perspectives on the Foundations of Morality.Colin Marshall (ed.) - 2019 - London: Routledge.
    This collection of new essays focuses on metaethical views from outside the mainstream European tradition. The guiding motivation is that important discussions about the ultimate nature of morality can be found far beyond ancient Greece and modern Europe. The volume’s aim is to show how rich the possibilities are for comparative metaethics, and how much these comparisons can add to contemporary discussions of the foundations of morality. Representing five continents, the thinkers discussed range from ancient Egyptian, ancient Chinese, and (...)
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  19. Wholesale moral error for naturalists.Alexios Stamatiadis-Bréhier - 2023 - Journal of Value Inquiry:1-13.
    In this paper, I show how realist moral naturalists can provide an intra-theoretic explanation of the epistemic possibility of wholesale moral error. This is a requirement on metaethical theories that has been recently defended by Akhlaghi (2021). After clarifying Akhlaghi’s argument and responding to Evers’s (2021) recent rebuttal, I argue that even under the assumption that moral facts are grounded in an appropriate subset of natural facts (N-facts), there is still a non-zero probability of wholesale moral error. This is (...)
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  20. Hume’s Dictum and Metaethics.Victor Moberger - 2020 - Philosophical Quarterly 70 (279):328-349.
    This paper explores the metaethical ramifications of a coarse-grained criterion of property identity, sometimes referred to as Hume's dictum. According to Hume's dictum, properties are identical if and only if they are necessarily co-extensive. Assuming the supervenience of the normative on the natural, this criterion threatens the non-naturalist view that there are instantiable normative properties which are distinct from natural properties. In response, non-naturalists typically point to various counterintuitive implications of Hume's dictum. The paper clarifies this strategy and defends (...)
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  21. Brentano's Metaethics.Jonas Olson - 2017 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 187-195.
    This chapter explains Franz Brentano's metaethical theory and how it purports to deal with such difficulties. Brentano explains correctness in emotions by analogy with correctness in judgements. For a judgement to be correct is for it to concord with a judgement made by someone who judges with self-evidence (Evidenz). Self-evident judgements are guaranteed to be correct, and they are based either on "inner perception" or on presentations of objects that are rejected apodictically. Brentano's metaethical theory concerns first and (...)
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  22. Realist Ethical Naturalism for Ethical Non-Naturalists.Ryan Stringer - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (2):339-362.
    It is common in metaethics today to draw a distinction between “naturalist” and “non-naturalist” versions of moral realism, where the former view maintains that moral properties are natural properties, while the latter view maintains that they are non-natural properties instead. The nature of the disagreement here can be understood in different ways, but the most common way is to understand it as a metaphysical disagreement. In particular, the disagreement here is about the reducibility of moral properties, where the “naturalists” maintain (...)
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  23. Early Forms of Metaethical Constructivism in John Dewey's Pragmatism.Pierre-Luc Dostie Proulx - 2016 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 4 (9).
    This paper demonstrates the innovative character of the approach to metaethics underlying John Dewey’s pragmatism. Dewey's theory of evaluation is contrasted with one of the most dominant contemporary metaethical theses: constructivism. I show that the insistence placed by metaethical constructivists on the actor’s practical point of view, on the rejection of the subjective preferences model, and on a specific form of ethical antirealism and naturalism echoes some of the most crucial claims made by Dewey. This argumentation leads (...)
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  24. Ethics and naturalism.Adam Greif - 2023 - Prolegomena: Casopis Za Filozofiju/Journal of Philosophy 22 (2):237-256.
    The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between naturalism and morality and to assess their compatibility. Naturalism is defined as respect for science, for its methods and results. From this respect for science, one can infer two distinct philosophical naturalisms: the methodological and the metaphysical. The relationship between these forms of naturalism and morality depends on the correct conception of morality. This paper differentiates between objectively realistic conception and all other conceptions and argues that (...)
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  25. Whose Metaethical Minimalism?Noell Birondo - 2018 - Southwest Philosophy Review 34 (2):37-43.
    T. M. Scanlon’s ‘Reasons Fundamentalism’ rejects any naturalistic reduction of normative truths and it also rejects the type of non-naturalism that invokes a ‘special metaphysical reality.’ Here I argue that this still does not commit Scanlon—as some have thought—to an extreme ‘metaethical minimalism’ according to which there are no ‘truth makers’ at all for normative truths. I emphasize that the issue here is not just about understanding Scanlon, since the actual position defended by Scanlon might, more significantly, point (...)
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  26. Non-Naturalist Moral Realism and the Limits of Rational Reflection.Max Khan Hayward - 2018 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (4):724-737.
    This essay develops the epistemic challenge to non-naturalist moral realism. While evolutionary considerations do not support the strongest claims made by ‘debunkers’, they do provide the basis for an inductive argument that our moral dispositions and starting beliefs are at best partially reliable. So, we need some method for separating truth from falsity. Many non-naturalists think that rational reflection can play this role. But rational reflection cannot be expected to bring us to truth even from reasonably accurate starting points. Reflection (...)
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  27. Spinoza’s metaethical synthesis of nature and affect.Brandon Smith - 2022 - Ithaque 30:89-112.
    In this essay, I evaluate four central metaethical readings of Spinoza’s moral philosophy in the literature: unqualified anti-realism, qualified anti-realism, qualified realism, and unqualified realism. More specifically, I discuss the metaethical readings of Charles Jarrett (unqualified anti-realism), Matthew Kisner (qualified anti-realism), Jon Miller (qualified realism), and Andrew Youpa (unqualified realism), each of which captures core aspects of this debate. My conclusions are that (1) Spinoza is neither an unqualified anti-realist nor an unqualified realist and (2) Spinoza’s ethical framework (...)
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  28. A Dilemma for Theistic Non-Naturalism.StJohn Lambert - 2023 - Religions 14 (9):1–9.
    Non-naturalism is the view that there are sui generis, non-natural moral properties. This paper poses a dilemma for theists who accept this view. Either God explains why non-moral properties make sui generis, non-natural moral properties obtain, or God does not explain this. If the former, then God is unacceptably involved in the explanation of his own moral goodness. If the latter, then God’s sovereignty, stature, and importance are undermined, and an unacceptable queerness is introduced into the world. This paper (...)
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  29. Getting a Moral Thing Into a Thought: Metasemantics for Non-Naturalists.Preston J. Werner - 2010 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 140-169.
    Non-naturalism is the view that normative properties are response-independent, irreducible to natural properties, and causally inefficacious. An underexplored question for non-naturalism concerns the metasemantics of normative terms. Ideally, the non-naturalist could remain ecumenical, but it appears they cannot. Call this challenge the metasemantic challenge. This chapter suggests that non-naturalists endorse an epistemic account of reference determination of the sort recently defended by Imogen Dickie, with some modifications. An important implication of this account is that, if correct, a fully (...)
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  30. Nietzsche contra Stoicism: Naturalism and Value, Suffering and Amor Fati.James A. Mollison - 2019 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (1):93-115.
    Nietzsche criticizes Stoicism for overstating the significance of its ethical ideal of rational self-sufficiency and for undervaluing pain and passion when pursuing an unconditional acceptance of fate. Apparent affinities between Stoicism and Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially his celebration of self-mastery and his pursuit of amor fati, lead some scholars to conclude that Nietzsche cannot advance these criticisms without contradicting himself. In this article, I narrow the target and scope of Nietzsche’s complaints against Stoicism before showing how they follow from his other (...)
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  31. Conceptual Analysis in Metaethics.N. G. Laskowski & Stephen Finlay - 2018 - In Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. New York: Routledge. pp. 536-551.
    A critical survey of various positions on the nature, use, possession, and analysis of normative concepts. We frame our treatment around G.E. Moore’s Open Question Argument, and the ways metaethicists have responded by departing from a Classical Theory of concepts. In addition to the Classical Theory, we discuss synthetic naturalism, noncognitivism (expressivist and inferentialist), prototype theory, network theory, and empirical linguistic approaches. Although written for a general philosophical audience, we attempt to provide a new perspective and highlight some underappreciated (...)
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  32. A Companion to Naturalism.Juliano Santos do Carmo (ed.) - 2015 - NEPFIL.
    Offering a engaging and accessible portrait of the current state of the field, A Companion to Naturaslim shows students how to think about the relation between Philosophy and Science, and why is both essencial and fascinating to do so. All the authors in this collection reconsider the core questions in Philosophical Naturalism in light of the challenges raised in Contemporary Philosophy. They explore how philosophical questions are connected to vigorous current debates - including complex questions about metaphysics, semantics, religion, (...)
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  33. (1 other version)Non-Naturalism: The Jackson Challenge.Jussi Suikkanen - 2010 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 87-110.
    Frank Jackson has famously argued that there is no logical space for the view which understands moral properties as non-natural properties of their own unique kind. His argument is based on two steps: firstly, given supervenience and truth-aptness of moral claims, it is always possible to find a natural property which is necessarily co-instantiated with a given moral property, and secondly that there are no distinct necessarily co-instantiated properties. I argue that this second step of the argument must rely on (...)
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  34. The Projectability Challenge to Moral Naturalism.John Bengson, Terence Cuneo & Andrew Reisner - 2020 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 17 (5):471-498.
    The Projectability Challenge states that a metaethical view must explain how ordinary agents can, on the basis of moral experience and reflection, accurately and justifiably apply moral concepts to novel situations. In this paper, we argue for two primary claims. First, paradigm nonnaturalism can satisfactorily answer the projectability challenge. Second, it is unclear whether there is a version of moral naturalism that can satisfactorily answer the challenge. The conclusion we draw is that there is an important respect in (...)
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  35. The Supervenience Challenge to Non-Naturalism.Pekka Väyrynen - 2018 - In Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. New York: Routledge. pp. 170-84.
    This paper is a survey of the supervenience challenge to non-naturalist moral realism. I formulate a version of the challenge, consider the most promising non-naturalist replies to it, and suggest that no fully effective reply has yet been given.
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  36. Deus Ex Machina: A Cautionary Tale for Naturalists.Cailin O'Connor, Nathan Fulton, Elliott Wagner & P. Kyle Stanford - 2012 - Analyse & Kritik 34 (1):51-62.
    In this paper we critically examine and seek to extend Philip Kitcher’s Ethical Project to weave together a distinctive naturalistic conception of how ethics came to occupy the place it does in our lives and how the existing ethical project should be revised and extended into the future. Although we endorse his insight that ethical progress is better conceived of as the improvement of an existing state than an incremental approach towards a fixed endpoint, we nonetheless go on to argue (...)
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  37. A Dilemma for Yong Huang’s Neo-Confucian Moral Realism.James Dominic Rooney - forthcoming - Australasian Philosophical Review.
    Yong Huang presents criticisms of Neo-Aristotelian meta-ethical naturalism and argues Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian approach is superior in defending moral realism. After presenting Huang’s criticisms of the Aristotelian metaethical naturalist picture, such as that of Rosalind Hursthouse, I argue that Huang’s own views succumb to the same criticisms. His metaethics does not avoid an allegedly problematic ‘gap,’ whether ontological or conceptual, between possessing a human nature and exemplifying moral goodness. This ontological gap exists in virtue of the fact that (...)
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  38. Moral Realism and the Existence of God: Improving Parfit’s Metaethics.Martin Jakobsen - 2020 - Leuven, Belgia: Peeters.
    Can there be an objective morality without God? Derek Parfit argues that it can and offers a theory of morality that is neither theistic nor naturalistic. This book provides a critical assessment of Parfit's metaethical theory. Jakobsen identifies some problems in Parfit’s theory – problems concerning moral normativity, the ontological status of morality, and evolutionary influence on our moral beliefs – and argues that theological resources can help solve them. By showing how Parfit’s theory may be improved by the (...)
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  39. (1 other version)Explaining Practical Normativity.Tristram McPherson - 2016 - Topoi:1-10.
    Ethical non-naturalists often charge that their naturalist competitors cannot adequately explain the distinctive normativity of moral or more broadly practical concepts. I argue that the force of the charge is mitigated, because non-naturalism is ultimately committed to a kind of mysterianism about the metaphysics of practical norms that possesses limited explanatory power. I then show that focusing on comparative judgments about the explanatory power of various metaethical theories raises additional problems for the non-naturalist, and suggest grounds for optimism (...)
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  40. How to Pull a Metaphysical Rabbit out of an End-Relational Semantic Hat.Nicholas Laskowski - 2014 - Res Philosophica 91 (4):589-607.
    Analytic reductivism in metaethics has long been out of philosophical vogue. In Confusion of Tongues: A Theory of Normativity (2014), Stephen Finlay tries to resuscitate it by developing an analytic metaethical reductive naturalistic semantics for ‘good.’ He argues that an end-relational semantics is the simplest account that can explain all of the data concerning the term, and hence the most plausible theory of it. I argue that there are several assumptions that a reductive naturalist would need to make about (...)
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  41. The Normative Stance.Marcus Arvan - 2021 - Philosophical Forum 52 (1):79-89.
    The Duhem-Quine thesis famously holds that a single hypothesis cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed in isolation, but instead only in conjunction with other background hypotheses. This article argues that this has important and underappreciated implications for metaethics. Section 1 argues that if one begins metaethics firmly wedded to a naturalistic worldview—due (e.g.) to methodological/epistemic considerations—then normativity will appear to be reducible to a set of social-psycho-semantic behaviors that I call the ‘normative stance.’ Contra Hume and Bedke (2012), I argue that (...)
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  42. On Parfit’s Ontology.Kian Mintz-Woo - 2018 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (5):707-725.
    Parfit denies that the introduction of reasons into our ontology is costly for his theory. He puts forth two positions to help establish the claim: the Plural Senses View and the Argument from Empty Ontology. I argue that, first, the Plural Senses View for ‘exists’ can be expanded to allow for senses which undermine his ontological claims; second, the Argument from Empty Ontology can be debunked by Platonists. Furthermore, it is difficult to make statements about reasons true unless these statements (...)
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  43. (2 other versions)Naturalizing ethics.Owen Flanagan, Hagop Sarkissian & David Wong - 2007 - In Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology: The Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness. Bradford. pp. 1-26.
    In this essay we provide (1) an argument for why ethics should be naturalized, (2) an analysis of why it is not yet naturalized, (3) a defense of ethical naturalism against two fallacies—Hume’s and Moore’s—that ethical naturalism allegedly commits, and (4) a proposal that normative ethics is best conceived as part of human ecology committed to pluralistic relativism. We explain why naturalizing ethics both entails relativism and also constrains it, and why nihilism about value is not an especially (...)
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  44. Shapelessness in Context.Pekka Väyrynen - 2012 - Noûs 48 (3):573-593.
    Many philosophers believe that the extensions of evaluative terms and concepts aren’t unified under non-evaluative similarity relations and that this “shapelessness thesis” (ST) has significant metaethical implications regarding non-cognitivism, ethical naturalism, moral particularism, thick concepts and more. ST is typically offered as an explanation of why evaluative classifications appear to “outrun” classifications specifiable in independently intelligible non-evaluative terms. This paper argues that both ST and the outrunning point used to motivate it can be explained on the basis of (...)
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  45. The Normative Property Dualism Argument.Jesse Hambly - forthcoming - The Philosophical Quarterly.
    In this paper I develop an argument against a type of Non-Analytic Normative Naturalism. This argument, the Normative Property Dualism Argument, suggests that, if Non-Analytic Normative Naturalists posit that normative properties are identical to natural properties and that such identities are a posteriori, they will be forced to posit that these properties which are both normative and natural have higher-order normative properties of their own.
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  46. Cornell Realism, Explanation, and Natural Properties.Luis R. G. Oliveira & Timothy Perrine - 2017 - European Journal of Philosophy 25 (2):1021-1038.
    The claim that ordinary ethical discourse is typically true and that ethical facts are typically knowable seems in tension with the claim that ordinary ethical discourse is about features of reality friendly to a scientific worldview. Cornell Realism attempts to dispel this tension by claiming that ordinary ethical discourse is, in fact, discourse about the same kinds of things that scientific discourse is about: natural properties. We offer two novel arguments in reply. First, we identify a key assumption that we (...)
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  47. The Stuff That Matters.N. G. Laskowski - 2024 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies of Metaethics 19. Oxford University Press USA.
    On one way of talking about a traditional metaethical topic, realists accept that some items appear on the list of what exists in the moral or more broadly normative domain of inquiry. They then divide over whether those items are like what science and experience suggest that all other items on the list of what exists across all domains are like – naturalistic and secular. Reductive naturalists answer this further question affirmatively. Why don’t nonnaturalists? I explore the answer that (...)
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  48. Feeling good: The role of feelings in the making of moral judgement.Jeremias Koh Jian Min - unknown
    This thesis focuses on the question of whether moral feelings are necessary to the making of moral judgments. This is an important question and the answer one gives has more interesting implications than one might initially expect. I will argue that an experientialist account of moral concepts, on which moral judgments are beliefs about objective facts represented by moral feelings, provides the best naturalistic answer to the question. To make my point, I anchor my arguments in a series of comparisons (...)
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  49. Metafísica y Moral.Samuele Chilovi - 2023 - In Guillermo Lariguet, María Sol Yuan & Nicolás Alles (eds.), La metaética puesta a punto. Santa Fe: Ediciones UNL. pp. 250-271.
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  50. Moral Explanations, Thick and Thin.Brendan Cline - 2015 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 9 (2):1-20.
    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 (...)
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