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Explaining Practical Normativity

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Abstract

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 that a naturalistic realist about practical normativity will ultimately be able to explain the distinctive normativity of practical norms. I then show that radical pluralism or particularism about the structure of normative ethics would complicate the naturalistic strategy that I defend. This suggests a perhaps surprising way in which the resolution of the debate between ethical naturalists and non-naturalists may rest in part on the answers to substantive normative questions.

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Notes

  1. The ‘generic’ label is from Copp (2005). I previously called this sort of normativity ‘formal’ in my (2011). I now think Copp’s term is more apt.

  2. Compare the literature on ‘rule-following’ that developed around Kripke (1984).

  3. Although see Wedgwood (2007) and Gibbard (2012) for recent accounts heavily influenced by the Kripkean idea that meaning is normative.

  4. Compare Foot (1997).

  5. For an account of the concept practical ought that develops this point, see my forthcoming.

  6. For important skepticism about the explanandum, see Tiffany (2007).

  7. A realist could aim to offer an account that combined a purely psychological account of normativity with a recognizeably realist account of reference. Certain forms of hybrid expressivism could be understood in this way, as could certain broadly Fregean approaches to the semantics of the normative which located the distinctive normativity of the practical ought in the Sinn rather than the Bedeutung (cf. Wedgwood 2004). I do not pursue these alternatives here.

  8. For a more careful discussion of the distinction, see my (2015b).

  9. Among many others, see Shafer-Landau (2003), FitzPatrick (2008), and Enoch (2011).

  10. There is an active controversy about whether metaphysical explanations can be regimented in terms of a single grounding relation, or whether there is an irreducible plurality of metaphysical grounding relations (for contrasting views, see for example Rosen 2010; Wilson 2014). The dialectic of this paper would survive either resolution of this dispute.

  11. For sympathetic discussion, see Dancy (2006, §§4–8). Compare also Shafer-Landau (2003, 58), and Enoch (2011), who pithily dubs this the ‘just too different’ intuition. It is worth emphasizing that the relationship between both Scanlon and Parfit and non-naturalism is complicated by their meta-ontological views (e.g. Scanlon 2014; Parfit 2011, §31). For critical discussion see Enoch and McPherson (forthcoming).

  12. Note that the non-naturalist’s most (in-)famous argument against naturalism—G.E. Moore’s open question argument—may best be developed as a way of pressing the same explanatory complaint (see Moore 1903). Compare Darwall et al. (1997b, 4), which links the best version of the open question argument to ‘action-guidingness’, or D’Arms and Jacobson (2000, 726–727), which links this argument to the distinctive ‘critical function’ of normative concepts. Moore’s own argument is difficult to interpret this way, because of its seemingly purely semantic focus. The purely semantic version of the argument seems more promising as a defense of expressivism than non-naturalism; see for example Horgan and Timmons (1992).

  13. The most notable contemporary instance being Parfit’s conviction (displayed throughout Part Six of his 2011), that his naturalist interlocutors are simply not really talking about normative concepts at all.

  14. For supervenience, see e.g. my (2012a). For epistemic access, see much of the literature following Street (2006), and especially Bedke (2009).

  15. The argument of this section is in some ways reminiscent of the charge by Korsgaard 1996, 28–47 that the realist merely asserts the normativity that he ought to explain. However, there are several important differences here, of which I will mention only that Korsgaard appears to assume that any purely metaphysical thesis will be relevantly unexplanatory. By contrast, I am granting that in principle a primitive metaphysical posit could be explanatory.

  16. Another example that illustrates this structure is Rosen’s (2010) defense of grounding: Rosen addresses the ‘grasp’ criterion by showing that we have intuitive facility with grounding, and that we can give a rigorous statement of the distinctive formal structure of grounding relations. He addresses the explanatory power criterion by arguing that grounding relations can play a role in both posing and answering an extraordinary range of philosophical questions.

  17. Discussing morality, Audi puts the point pithily: “…certain of the natural properties of a thing determine what moral properties it has, (if any)” (1997, 97; emphasis mine). As Shafer Landau (2003, 78) puts the point, the non-moral world ‘controls’ the moral world.

  18. See my (2015a) for more careful discussion of these issues.

  19. For this challenge to non-naturalism, see e.g. Jackson (1998, 122–123).

  20. The term ‘mysterianism’ is most commonly used in the philosophy of mind, to label the view that the relationship between experiential states and underlying physical causes necessarily eludes our epistemic grasp (for discussion see Stoljar 2006, 91–94). Here the idea is that normativity is similarly something that we must simply accept as a brute and inexplicable feature of reality.

  21. Compare Gibbard’s comment that if we encountered a ‘halo of goodness’, “We’d need to learn more about halos” before knowing how to respond to it (2002, 180). If my argument here is correct, the awkward conclusion for the non-naturalist is that there is nothing more to learn about said ‘halo’. Gibbard seems to find this possibility unintelligible in an account of normativity.

  22. I take this point to be one important motive for much utilitarian and more broadly consequentialist ethics.

  23. Another example of the comparative assessment of normative explanation can be extracted from Scanlon’s (1982) discussion of what he takes to be the real but comparatively inadequate force of the explanation of moral obligation offered by ‘philosophical utilitarianism’.

  24. See (my 2015b, 141–142) for more on this point.

  25. On the other hand, if the best possible realist vindication is too underwhelming, this suggests that we should seek a non-metaphysical explanation of the distinctive normativity of the concept practical ought.

  26. Compare especially Jackson (2000).

  27. For discussion and defense of Ross against this charge, see McNaughton (2002).

  28. For other ways that theorizing in metaethics and normative ethics are connected, see my (2012b).

  29. Dancy (2006) and Enoch (2011) are especially clear examples of this thinking.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Derek Baker, David Jones, Noah Lemos, David Plunkett, Michael Smith, several anonymous referees, and audiences at the Minnesota Philosophical Society, Australasian Association of Philosophy, and Virginia Philosophical Association for illuminating comments on previous versions of this paper. This paper cites much less richly than it should, in order to meet a word limit. I apologize to the authors of important relevant work that goes unmentioned.

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McPherson, T. Explaining Practical Normativity. Topoi 37, 621–630 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9442-8

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