The second way to respond to the Normativity Objection is to say that moral facts are both natural and normative, in virtue of the fact that normativity itself is a natural phenomenon. This suggestion might also have a feel of absurdity to it. How could normativity be natural? The most popular strategy for substantiating natural normativity is a two-step strategy. First, show that all normative concepts can be analyzed in terms of one, fundamental normative concept.
Second, show that that fundamental normative concept picks out a natural property. There are a number of ways that such an account could proceed: This two-step strategy is popular and promising, but it is certainly not uncontroversial. Those moved by the Open Question Argument and the Normativity Objection are skeptical that the second step of the naturalizing strategy could ever be completed. Non-naturalists doubt that it could ever be shown that the fundamental normative concept picks out some natural property because normative properties and natural properties just seem to obviously be different kinds of properties.
David Enoch is more pithy, saying simply that natural properties and normative properties are just too different for any natural account of a fundamental normative property to be satisfying. But because all normative claims conceptually reduce to claims about reasons , argues Schroeder, there will be no such general truth, provided that we have a coherent account of the foundational notion of a reason.
If all normative claims are conceptually reducible to claims about reasons , then a coherent account of reasons can explain all normative claims, without error. These fundamental normative facts about reasons are themselves explained by the natural facts to which reasons reduce. But because this reduction of reasons will take the form of a synthetic reduction, there end up being no conceptual connections between the normative and the natural. It may well be the case that the lack of conceptual connections between the natural and normative is better explained by non-naturalism Enoch If moral naturalism is true, says Parfit, then it will be possible to make moral claims and natural claims and have those two claims be about the same fact.
Parfit worries that if the two claims are about the same fact, then those two claims must contain all the same information. And a statement of equivalence between any two claims that contain the same information must be trivial. But moral claims that describe the relationships between moral facts and natural facts are not trivial at all—they are highly substantive.
Moral Naturalism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
And, indeed, this is what we find. Naturalists have typically responded to the Triviality Objection by saying that moral-natural identities contain additional information in virtue of the fact that they tell us something about the nature of the moral facts in question. The last objection to moral naturalism that we will consider is the Motivation Objection. This objection is a favorite of metaethical expressivists, and they deploy it with equal fervor against all moral realists, both naturalists and non-naturalists alike. But it is still worthy of discussion as a major objection to naturalist moral realism, because naturalism is the realist view that seems to have the most problem answering the objection.
If I sincerely judge that I ought to give money to charity, then it seems that I must be at least somewhat motivated to give when the opportunity arises. Someone who lacks any inclination to give to charity does not really judge that they ought to give to charity. Judgement internalism is a plausible view, and, if it is true, that spells trouble for moral naturalists.
Plausibly, if a moral judgement is just a belief to the effect that some natural fact obtains, I might at least conceivably hold that belief and simply not give a damn. In which case, if naturalism is true, internalism must be false. But many philosophers—particularly expressivists—hold that judgement internalism is true. So much the worse for naturalists. The amoralist is precisely the sort of person the internalist says is not possible: Both offer up descriptions of people of just this kind urging that they are eminently credible and all too intelligible. Internalists deny that it is possible for anyone to be a genuine amoralist.
While someone might appear to be making moral judgements they do not care about, such a person is in fact not making genuine moral judgements at all, according to the internalist. Rather they are making what R. Hare called inverted commas moral judgements , —, — The internalist claims that in the mouth of the amoralist, a moral utterance fails to mean quite what it does when it is used by you or me.
What is missing is some action-guiding motivation-entailing dimension of meaning that naturalism seems ill-suited to capture. However, a more subtle alternative view Copp ; cf. This move might promise to account for much of the intuitive appeal of internalism while remaining fundamentally naturalistic. That would leave in place worries about the intelligibility of a possible disconnection between thought about what is right, etc. These, however, might recede as the naturalist puts flesh on his account of moral properties.
Certainly, you and I might conceivably disagree about that while nonetheless coinciding in all our motivations. At which point the issue is going to turn on whether that sort of disagreement is really properly to be considered moral disagreement at all. One important school of thought here is represented by philosophers whose work is inspired by that of Aristotle.
This view has its roots in the writings of G.
A contemporary and well-integrated treatment of gender and race.
Geach, and the early Philippa Foot, among others. As this list makes clear, this is very much the official metaethical theory among many important contemporary virtue ethicists. According to neo- Aristotelian virtue ethics, the primary moral concept is that of virtue. Virtue is a property of people; virtuous people are good people.
So what does it take for someone to be a good person? And, Aristotle argued, all living things have a proper function, which is determined by their nature. Just as hammers and nails have different functions which spring from the nature of those things, living things have functions that are also determined by their natures. Worker bees are supposed to collect honey—worker bees that do this well are good bees.
Moral Naturalism
Venus flytraps are supposed to capture flies—those that do this well are good flytraps. And humans are good if they pursue their function, as dictated by their nature. A big problem here, it is widely supposed, is the biology. And the prospects for grounding ethics in modern post-Darwinian biology seem hopeless: Indeed, as noted, evolutionary biology may debunk rather than support our moral beliefs. Nussbaum has sought to respond to claims of this sort that have been ably canvassed in the work of Bernard Williams Nussbaum This, Nussbaum charges, is a mistake: But to understand ethical facts as grounded in facts about human nature, where the facts about human nature are understood in a way that is already pervasively and substantively moralized, no longer looks much like a form of naturalism, and appears quite consistent with a variety of competing metaethical views such as constructivism, expressivism, or non-naturalism.
We will focus on Hursthouse, whose account is the clearer and more detailed of the two. Ethical naturalism, according to Hursthouse, views evaluation as an activity continuous with a kind of ethology that is focused on the evaluation of living things as specimens of their kind. In the case of plants, to say that an individual is a good member of whatever its species may be is to evaluate how well its parts and operations contribute in ways characteristic of that species to the two ends of survival and reproduction.
With at least some animals a third end becomes salient—freedom from pain and pleasure and enjoyment of sorts characteristic to the species in question. And with social animals a fourth dimension comes into play: Defectiveness in this context is a straightforwardly factual matter. Given the normal characteristics of their species, male cheetahs who help their heavily pregnant mates to hunt for food are to be classed as defective, as are male polar bears who nurture their young Hursthouse , — A good human being is a human being endowed with characteristics that conduce in characteristically human ways to the four ends of survival, reproduction, characteristic enjoyment and freedom from pain, and the good functioning of the group.
And, at the level of character, those characteristics are just the virtues. But humans are special, as a highly salient characteristic feature of human beings is rationality. This makes the evaluation of human conduct very different from that of cheetahs or polar bears. Being rational, we can elect to assign some feature of our characteristic behavior no normative weight at all, or even negative weight. There nonetheless remains a distinctive and characteristically human way of carrying on: Nor do we need to be any sort of naturalists to believe it. Why not the making of fire, having sexual intercourse without regard to season, despoiling the environment and upsetting the balance of nature, or killing things for fun Williams , 73?
Perhaps we can bring this too under the heading of the characteristically human, but those humans who may not share these values might fairly retort, So what? The hallmark feature that is distinctive of naturalism, Hursthouse would respond, is the regulatory role of the four ends Hursthouse , — But these too seem to be decidedly up for grabs, as when she acknowledges that nothing in particular need follow from her view about the ethical status of e. We turn now to the views of Judith Jarvis Thomson.
This has the effect of neutralizing the Open Question Argument. And, for something to be a good toaster, it must be something that toasts things well. The goodness of a good toaster is not mysterious in any way. It is entirely a matter of the toaster being composed and organized in such a way as to efficiently and effectively perform its characteristic function.
And if you have no objection to the idea that some toasters are good and others are bad, then you should have no objection to the idea that other things can be good or bad as well. Goodness need not always be understood in terms of a particular substantive. So that is a way that a smudge can be good Thomson , 21— Thomson also argues that we can relativize our notion of goodness to a class of things. One can be a good piano player for a six-year old without being a good piano-player, full stop.
And this class-relativization can occur whether we are talking about good instances of kinds or good-modified things. Thus, we can have a good typewriter for a typewriter built in , or an individual who is good at crossword puzzles for an athlete. Thomson, following the two-step strategy outlined in Section 2. With an account of virtue in hand, we can now begin to define moral terms. Thomson is a virtue theorist: Accordingly, acts are only the kinds of things that can be good-modified. Just as there is no such thing as a good smudge, but only smudges that are good in some respect e.
Moral goodness is itself explained in terms of moral virtue and vice concepts. There is no such thing as being morally good, full stop, but only morally good-in-a-way; by being brave, generous, just, prudent, etc. Thomson , —; , —; , 59— As the examples of the good toaster and the good knife illustrate, for Thomson the morally good is just one sub-class of good things and it is not a particularly large sub-class; the non-morally good is vastly larger than the morally good.
In addition to the morally good, there are four other sub-classes of goodness: In general, Thomson suggests, a virtue is a trait such that, whatever else is true of those among whom we live, it is better if they have it Thomson , For example, generosity is a moral virtue because generous people will act in ways that are beneficial for others. All five kinds of goodness are natural properties. Thomson acknowledges that enjoyment is a little tricky: Koolaid , so a role must be given to expertise, which can be hard to characterize Thomson , — The beneficial can also be complicated.
It is easy enough to account for with such things as carpets. What is good for a carpet is what conduces to its being in the condition that people who want carpets typically want their carpets to be in Thomson , In the case of plants and lower animals, what is good for them is what conduces to health, and health is whatever conduces to their being in a condition to do what they were designed by nature to do Thomson , 56— What is good for a person is the trickiest case.
Nor is it a matter of conducing to what one most wants example: I might most want to smoke 60 cigarettes a day [Thomson , 54]. So she thinks the truth is some form of compromise between the want story and the health story Thomson , 55— And moral goodness is a matter of having character traits that promote these other kinds of goodness particularly by being beneficial. This is a beautifully elegant and straightforward account that makes a valiant attempt to represent moral claims, and indeed evaluative and normative claims more generally, as straightforward matters of natural fact.
The main critical concerns that might be raised are liable to echo points already aired. It is likely true that the property of being a good toaster is nothing more than the naturally-respectable property of being useful for toasting. If moral naturalism is, generally, the view that moral facts are the kinds of facts that can be investigated empirically, in a broadly scientific way, then no view captures the spirit of naturalism better than Cornell realism.
Cornell realism was developed by in the s by Boyd , Brink , Sturgeon , and Railton ; the view gets its name from the fact that Boyd, Brink, and Sturgeon were working or studying at Cornell University at the time. It is a comprehensive metaethical system, with interrelated linguistic, metaphysical, and epistemological commitments, that is driven by a commitment to mirroring scientific methodology in ethics as closely as possible.
It might seem odd to suggest that we can come to know things about morality by using scientific methodology. Empirical methods are all, ultimately, grounded in an epistemology of observation. But, as Gilbert Harman , Ch. The problem with this thought is that not all natural properties are directly observable. Some kinds of natural properties are highly complex, and knowable only through the functional role they occupy. Consider, for instance, the property of being healthy. These directly observable properties are only indications of healthiness.
Healthiness has a robust causal profile. There are many things that can cause or impede health by their presence or absence: And there are many things that will result from health in typical circumstances: Our awareness of the causal profile of healthiness thus gives us a way of figuring out which things have or do not have the complex property of healthiness. The Cornell realists hold that goodness is exactly like healthiness in all of these ways Boyd Like healthiness, goodness is a complex natural property that is not directly observable, but nonetheless has a robust causal profile.
Many different things contribute to or detract from goodness—things like pleasure or pain, honesty or untruthfulness—and there are many things that will result from goodness in typical circumstances—things like human flourishing, or political peace. Because goodness is a natural property with a complex causal profile, the property of goodness can enter into explanatory relations. Thus, contra Harman, it is possible for goodness to explain our observations Sturgeon We can, accordingly, observe whether something is good by looking for indications of goodness.
This is exactly the same way that we observe whether something is healthy. The great asset of Cornell realism is that it directly adopts widely accepted views about the nature of natural properties and scientific knowledge in order to answer the foundational questions of moral metaphysics and moral epistemology. What are moral properties? Highly complex natural properties, individuated by their causal profiles—Boyd calls these homeostatic cluster properties. Are there, generally, properties like this? Yes; healthiness is one; moral properties are properties like that.
How do we know about moral properties? By looking for directly observable properties that are characteristically functionally upstream or downstream from the moral property that we are interested in provided that we have justified background beliefs about the functional roles of moral properties. Do we, generally, have knowledge like this? Yes; this is how we have scientific knowledge; moral knowledge is knowledge like that.
In this way, the theoretical resources of scientific realism also turn out to support moral realism Boyd But this kind of objection threatens to prove too much. Our theories and background beliefs are justified together by their overall coherence. So if there are no substantial metaphysical or epistemological issues raised by the claims that healthiness exists and that we can know about healthiness , then there should be no substantial metaphysical or epistemological issues raised by the claims that goodness exists and that we can know about goodness.
It is not essential to Cornell realism that goodness be identified with any particular complex natural property—different Cornell realists have different first-order normative commitments. The most influential of these accounts is due to Railton Railton, like Thomson, holds that moral goodness is defined in terms of what is non-morally good for agents. Whereas Thomson, as a neo-Aristotelian, defines what is good for a human in terms of human biology, Railton defines non-moral goodness in terms of the desires of a fully-informed counterpart see also Brandt , Smith To illustrate, Railton asks us to imagine a traveler, Lonnie, who feels terrible because he is badly dehydrated.
Lonnie does not know that he is dehydrated, and so is not taking appropriate steps to make himself feel better. But we can imagine a fully-informed version of Lonnie—Railton names him Lonnie-Plus—who knows about his dehydration and knows that drinking clear liquids will make him feel better. Lonnie-Plus, who like Lonnie desires to feel better but who unlike Lonnie knows the best means to that end, would choose to drink clear fluids. The fact that Lonnie-Plus would choose to drink clear fluids means that drinking clear fluids is good for Lonnie.
Thus, what would satisfy an omniscient agent might well be something that we would in no way recognize as beneficial.
- Theo: Respuestas desde la habitación infantil (Spanish Edition).
- The Visionary : Windows of Heaven – Mirrors of Hell?
- ethics | Origins, History, Theories, & Applications | theranchhands.com.
- David McNaughton, Moral Vision: An Introduction to Ethics - PhilPapers.
- Alice and the Magic Box.
This suggests that moral facts would not provide the same reasons for everyone. There may, in practice, be substantial overlap between the metaphysical commitments of neo-Aristotelianism and Cornell realism. Cornell realists say that the good is a certain higher-order natural property. Neo-Aristotelians say that goodness has something to do with human flourishing, which is itself a kind of higher-order natural property. Both Cornell realists Boyd and neo-Aristotelians Thomson have found the analogy with healthiness illuminating when explaining the nature of moral properties see also Bloomfield So Cornell realists and neo-Aristotelians do tend to be similar in the way that they conceive of normative properties.
But they differ with respect to what they say about language.
But because Cornell realists regard moral terms as terms for a certain kind of complex natural property, they accept a causal reference theory for moral terms, because a causal reference theory is the standard theory of reference for natural kind terms. Adopting the causal reference theory is a sensible thing for the Cornell realists to do, for two reasons. First, it continues their foundational commitment to treating moral properties as a kind of causally-individuated natural property.
And second, it helps them evade the Open Question Argument Brink By accepting a causal theory of reference, the Cornell realists thereby reject a description theory of reference; for a Cornell realist, moral terms cannot be defined in any verbal way. They simply refer to the complex higher-order natural property that causally regulates their use. This makes Cornell realism a form of synthetic naturalism.
As we saw in 1.
To understand the Moral Twin Earth Objection, we need to first understand how causal regulation semantics are supposed to work. The following thought experiment, from Putnam , has been highly influential: We would say that this is a planet where there is no water. There is, instead, another substance—XYZ—that plays the same functional role. What could account for that? People use moral terminology to praise and blame and to guide action, but they take very different kinds of actions to be worthy of praise or blame and they guide their actions in very different ways. But we do not have the same judgement about how people use moral language on Moral Twin Earth!
We conclude that there is a substantive moral disagreement between the denizens of Moral Twin Earth and the people in our world, and that such disagreement is possible only because we and the Twin Earthers mean the same thing by our moral terms. So much the worse for Cornell realism.
See Dowell for a recent, influential criticism of this argument. To put the point another way: Assume that causal reference theory is true for moral terms, and assume that different properties causally regulate the use of moral terms in different societies. If both of these assumptions are true, it follows that moral terms refer to different things in different societies. And it does seem, empirically, to be the case that different properties causally regulate the use of moral terms in different societies. Kinship is a source of obligation in every human society. Duties to close relatives take priority over duties to more distant relatives, but in most societies even distant relatives are still treated better than strangers.
If kinship is the most basic and universal tie between human beings, the bond of reciprocity is not far behind. It would be difficult to find a society that did not recognize, at least under some circumstances, an obligation to return favours.
Mythical accounts
In many cultures this is taken to extraordinary lengths, and there are elaborate rituals of gift giving. Often the repayment must be superior to the original gift, and this escalation can reach extremes that eventually threaten the economic security of the donor. Many Melanesian societies also place great importance on giving and receiving very substantial amounts of valuable items. Many features of human morality could have grown out of simple reciprocal practices such as the mutual removal of parasites from awkward places.
The person must choose his partner carefully. If he helps everyone indiscriminately, he will find himself delousing others without getting his own lice removed. To avoid this, he must learn to distinguish between those who return favours and those who do not. In making this distinction, he would be separating reciprocators from nonreciprocators and, in the process, developing crude notions of fairness and of cheating.
He will naturally strengthen his ties to those who reciprocate , and bonds of friendship and loyalty, with a consequent sense of obligation to assist, will result. This is not all. The reciprocators are likely to react in a hostile and angry way to those who do not reciprocate. Thus, a system of punishment and a notion of just desert constitute the other side of reciprocal altruism. Although kinship and reciprocity loom large in human morality, they do not cover the entire field. Typically, there are obligations to other members of the village, tribe, or nation, even when they are strangers.
There may also be a loyalty to the group as a whole that is distinct from loyalty to individual members of the group. It may be at this point that human culture intervenes. Each society has a clear interest in promoting devotion to the group and can be expected to develop cultural influences that exalt those who make sacrifices for the sake of the group and revile those who put their own interests too far ahead.
More tangible rewards and punishments may supplement the persuasive effect of social opinion. This is the start of a process of cultural development of moral codes. Research in psychology and the neurosciences has thrown light on the role of specific parts of the brain in moral judgment and behaviour, suggesting that emotions are strongly involved in moral judgments, particularly those that are formed rapidly and intuitively.
These emotions could be the result of social and cultural influences, or they could have a biological basis in the evolutionary history of the human species; such a basis would continue to exert some influence even if social and cultural forces pulled in different directions. Some of this research, however, also indicates that people sometimes use reasoning processes to reach moral judgments that contradict their usual intuitive responses. Many people believe that there are no moral universals—i. It has already been shown that this is not the case.
Of course, there are immense differences in the way in which the broad principles so far discussed are applied. The duty of children to their parents meant one thing in traditional Chinese society and means something quite different in contemporary Western societies. Yet, concern for kin and reciprocity are considered good in virtually all human societies.
Also, all societies have, for obvious reasons, some constraints on killing and wounding other members of the group. Beyond this common ground, the variations in moral attitudes soon become more striking than the similarities. They refused to do it at any price. The Indians cried out that he should not mention so horrid an act. Herodotus drew the obvious moral: Variations in morals were not systematically studied until the 19th century, when Western knowledge of the more remote parts of the globe began to increase. In The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas —08 , the Finnish anthropologist Edward Westermarck — compared differences between societies in matters such as the wrongness of killing including killing in warfare, euthanasia , suicide , infanticide , abortion , human sacrifice , and duelling ; the duty to support children, the aged, or the poor; forms of permissible sexual relationship; the status of women; the right to property and what constitutes theft; the holding of slaves; the duty to tell the truth; dietary restrictions; concern for nonhuman animals; duties to the dead; and duties to the gods.
Westermarck had no difficulty in demonstrating tremendous diversity in what different societies considered good conduct in all these areas.
More recent, though less comprehensive , studies have confirmed that human societies can and do flourish while holding radically different views about all such matters—though of course various groups within a society may do less well under some sets of beliefs than others. As noted above, ethics itself is not primarily concerned with the description of the moral systems of different societies. That task, which remains on the level of description, is one for anthropology or sociology. In contrast, ethics deals with the justification of moral principles or with the impossibility of such a justification.
Nevertheless, ethics must take note of the variations in moral systems, because it has often been claimed that this variety shows that morality is simply a matter of what is customary and that it thus is always relative to particular societies. According to this view, no moral principle can be valid except in the societies in which it is held. One way of replying to this position would be to stress the fact that there are some features common to virtually all human moralities.
It might be thought that these common features must be the universally valid and objective core of morality. This argument would, however, involve a fallacy. If the explanation for the common features is simply that they are advantageous in terms of evolutionary theory, that does not make them right. Evolution is a blind force incapable of conferring a moral imprimatur on human behaviour. It may be a fact that concern for kin is in accord with evolutionary theory, but to say that concern for kin is therefore right would be to attempt to deduce values from facts see below The climax of moral sense theory: In any case, the fact that something is universally approved does not make it right.
If all human societies enslaved any tribe they could conquer, and some freethinking moralists nevertheless insisted that slavery is wrong, they could not be said to be talking nonsense merely because they had few supporters.
Ethics: a general introduction
Similarly, then, universal support for principles of kinship and reciprocity cannot prove that these principles are in some way objectively justified. This example illustrates the way in which ethics differs from the descriptive sciences. From the standpoint of ethics, whether human moral codes closely parallel one another or are extraordinarily diverse , the question of how an individual should act remains open. People who are uncertain about what they should do will not be helped by being told what their society thinks they should do in the circumstances in which they find themselves.
Even if they are told that virtually all other human societies agree and that this agreement stems from evolved human nature , they may still reasonably choose to act otherwise. If they are told that there is great variation between human societies regarding what people should do in such circumstances, they may wonder whether there can be any objective answer, but their dilemma still would not be resolved. In fact, this diversity does not rule out the possibility of an objective answer: This too is something that will be taken up later in this article, for the possibility of an objective morality is one of the constant themes of ethics.
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