Abstract
Non-naturalism—roughly the view that normative properties and facts are sui generis and incompatible with a purely scientific worldview—faces a difficult challenge with regard to explaining why it is that the normative features of things supervene on their natural features. More specifically: non-naturalists have trouble explaining the necessitation relations, whatever they are, that hold between the natural and the normative. My focus is on Stephanie Leary’s recent response to the challenge, which offers an attempted non-naturalism-friendly explanation for the supervenience of the normative on the natural by appealing to hybrid properties, the essences of which link them to both natural and sui generis normative properties in suitable ways. I argue that despite its ingenuity, Leary’s solution fails. This is so, I claim, because there are no hybrid properties of the sort that her suggestion appeals to. If non-naturalists are to deal with the supervenience challenge, they will have to find another way of doing so.
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Notes
In what follows, the source for all the quotations from Leary, as well as for the paraphrases of her views, is Leary forthcoming.
This problem, or something in its neighborhood, has been advanced by a number of philosophers (see, e.g., Dreier 1992; McPherson 2012). For non-naturalist responses, see, e.g., Shafer-Landau 2003, Enoch 2011, Scanlon 2014, Rosen. For criticisms of these responses, see, e.g., Dreier 2015; Leary forthcoming.
Actually, it is not entirely clear how exactly this is supposed to work. The mere fact that it is part of the essence of some property, G, that if something has the property G, it also has a certain other property, F, does not explain why G-facts ground F-facts. For example, it is plausibly part of the essence of being a bachelor, that if someone is a bachelor, then he is also unmarried. But this doesn’t explain why facts about bachelorhood would ground facts about being unmarried, as facts about bachelorhood do not ground facts about being unmarried. However, I set this issue to one side here.
Leary uses this as an example of a necessary relation between two seemingly quite different kinds of properties, which nevertheless is explainable. Krister Bykvist (in personal communication) has independently proposed this as a counter-example to my claims in this section.
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I thank Stephanie Leary, the audiences at Stockholm and Uppsala (especially my commentators Olle Risberg and Daniel Fogal, as well as Jonas Olson, Anandi Hattiangadi, Krister Bykvist, and Matti Eklund), the Helsinki metaethics reading group, and a bunch of Helsinki colleagues for helpful feedback. The funding for this work was provided by the Academy of Finland.
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Toppinen, T. Essentially Grounded Non-Naturalism and Normative Supervenience. Topoi 37, 645–653 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9456-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9456-x