Abstract
Normative naturalism holds that normative properties are identical with, or reducible to, natural properties. Various challenges to naturalism focus on whether it can make good on the idea that normative concepts can be used in systematically different ways and yet have the same reference in all contexts of use. In response to such challenges, some naturalists have proposed that questions about the reference of normative terms should be understood, at least in part, as normative questions that can be settled through normative inquiry. In this paper I have two goals. First, I argue that these naturalist proposals do not yet allow for radical disagreement on normative matters, or at least do not explain how such disagreement is possible. Secondly, I argue that, in order to account for radical disagreement, naturalists should not only treat normative reference as a normative issue but also adopt a non-representationalist account of normative concepts, on which such concepts are individuated through their practical role. I illustrate this point by showing how a view that combines naturalism and expressivism about normative discourse can vindicate the elasticity of normative concepts, their referential stability, and the objectivity of normative truths.
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Notes
This is, of course, based on Horgan and Timmons (1991).
In a similar vein, Streumer (2017: 49ff) argues that standard versions of naturalism entail a false guarantee of truth for judgments made under certain descriptively specified conditions.
To clarify, this is not the claim that the same normative concepts can refer to very different natural properties for different people or communities. Indeed, this is what my next desideratum denies.
I am relying here on a loose but intuitive notion of objectivity, and will not try to give a more precise characterization of the relevant notion of dependence in this paper. Let me just say that objectivity thus defined is meant to rule out cases in which, say, what is morally right or wrong depends on moral attitudes or beliefs about what is right or wrong, while allowing that normative properties can depend in more benign ways on our mental states and social practices: for instance, that what is right or wrong can depend on facts about our hedonic states, and even on facts about relevant social institutions and conventions, as long as those institutions and conventions do not directly concern the given normative properties.
This view is inspired by Gibbard’s (2003) argument that expressivists should be metaphysical naturalists, but unlike Gibbard I rely on a hybrid expressivist framework (more on this, in Sect. 5). Bex-Priestley (forthcoming) defends a similar combination of hybrid expressivism and naturalism, which he also calls quasi-naturalism, and briefly mentions the potential metasemantic benefits of this view, particularly with respect to solving the Moral Twin Earth problem. The present paper argues that quasi-naturalism can indeed make good on this promise.
Copp (2000) also suggests that, in cases where the same concept refers to different properties, there can still be disagreement in attitude involving that concept. Moreover, similar appeals to the idea in disagreement in attitude have been made by certain normative relativists and contextualists who try to account in this way for intuitive data about disagreement between people with different normative standards (e.g., Wong, 2006, MacFarlane, 2014, Finlay, 2014). Arguing against these proposals goes beyond the scope of the present paper, but let me just say again that I am looking for an account that vindicates Referential Stability and Objectivity in cases like Moral Twin Earth and Honor Code.
See also Boyd (1993) for further discussion on reference as an epistemic notion.
Cfr. the evolutionary accounts of moral properties proposed by Sterelny and Fraser (2016) and Curry (2016). Boyd (1988, 2003) also suggests that moral properties might be realized by slightly different natural properties for different communities, depending on their history and specific social needs, but he does not endorse sameness of reference in cases of radical divergence in moral beliefs and practices.
Again, I am relying here on an intuitive but imprecise notion of objectivity, which allows that the extension of normative properties can depend on relevant social practices (e.g., it can be an objective normative truth that I should follow local traffic laws, even if that means driving on different sides of the road in different countries) but does not allow for “right” to refer to the property of preserving honor and eliminating impurity in the Honor Code scenario.
Merli (2002: 216) and Laskowski (2018: 722) suggest similar responses to Horgan and Timmons’ (1991) Moral Twin Earth argument and to Streumer’s (2017) related challenge to normative naturalism, respectively. See also Dowell’s (2016) argument that competent speakers’ semantic intuitions about disagreement have little probative force against externalist metasemantic theories.
“In deciding what the referent is of a natural kind term, we are seeking to identify, from among the candidate categories, the one which best fits the explanatory role associated with natural kind terms: explaining the inductive, explanatory and practical achievements of the associated discourse. In a perfectly good sense of the term, we are making normative judgments here … [But] the only normative judgments involved in the evaluation of semantic claims about natural kind terms are epistemic judgments about the cogency of competing explanations for achievements within particular domains of practice, and … the only normative judgments which are implied by such semantic claims are hypothetical judgments about how to bring about such achievements.” (Boyd, 2003, pp. 535–536).
Boyd does allow for the use of judgments about epistemic and hypothetical normativity in metasemantic inquiry (see the previous footnote). For instance: “if you want to achieve goal X, use Y to refer to Z”. However, this does not address the problem I raise here about how we can correctly identify the practical achievements of moral discourse in the first place. Boyd also concedes that, in practice, we will typically rely on our own moral judgments in assessing the aims of moral practice and therefore in settling facts about moral reference. But he insists that semantic inquiry into moral reference can in principle be “completely morally unengaged” (2003: 545), and this claim is the target of my worry here.
See also Väyrynen (2018b: 207–208) for more discussion on the use of substantive normative assumptions in causal theories of reference for normative terms.
Streumer (2017: 57) raises a similar regress worry about naturalistic views that rely on normative notions in specifying reference conditions for normative terms.
Thanks to N. G. Laskowski for suggesting this way of pressing the circularity worry.
This includes, for instance, van Roojen’s (2006) proposal, which imposes a knowledge condition on normative reference. For similar reasons, I believe cases of radical disagreement cannot be properly accommodated by Williams’ (2018, 2020) substantive radical interpretation view, on which the correct interpretation of the content of an agent’s thoughts or claims is the one that does the best job of making her substantively rational, where substantive rationality is a measure of how well the agent is responding to normative reasons in her beliefs, attitudes, and actions. At first glance, this view also seems to predict that people in Honor Code-type scenarios do not refer to the property of wrongness in their use of “wrong,” insofar as their moral judgments are not formed in response to actual instances of wrongness, and therefore are not reason-responsive in this sense. Williams rejects this apparent implication of his view and tries to accommodate such cases by focusing on other ways in which the relevant agents are being rational, e.g., in the links they exhibit between moral judgments and certain motivational dispositions, like being disposed to blame people for actions one believes to be wrong. But on his view the fact that agents in Honor Code-type scenarios are vastly mistaken in their moral judgments and attitudes still seems to count as evidence against attributing the same reference to their concepts as to ours, even if this evidence might be outweighed by other considerations. I disagree: the fact that the relevant agents exhibit certain motivational tendencies in their use of moral concepts is all that matters in establishing that they use the same concepts as us―and with the same reference, if this is what first-order moral theory tells us about these cases―no matter how unreliable those agents might otherwise be in their normative judgments and attitudes.
Horgan and Timmons focus on Copp’s (2000) proposal and its reliance of the notion of human flourishing, but I take it that their objection is more general and would extend to Brink’s view as well.
Take the claim that the referential intention associated with the use of “right” is to pick out those actions that are D, where ‘D’ is a stand-in for whatever descriptive feature might seem plausible in this context, such as maximizing utility or promoting social cohesion. We can easily come up with a counterexample to this claim: some actual or possible community that uses “right” (and the associated concept of rightness) without the intention of picking out actions that are D. If ‘D’ stands for maximizing utility, for instance, both Moral Twin Earth and Honor Code will do for this purpose.
Expressivism is the most salient non-representationalist account of normative discourse, but it need not be the only option for naturalists: for instance, inferentialism about normative concepts might also do the job. But my goal here is only to defend the quasi-naturalist response to the metasemantic challenge.
Ridge (2014: 42, 132) also suggests that his version of hybrid expressivism is compatible with naturalism about normative properties. See also Copp (2001, 2018), Schroeder (2014), and Laskowski (2019, 2020) for other attempts to combine naturalism with expressivism or non-cognitivism, but with significantly different goals and commitments than quasi-naturalism as defined in this paper.
There is a long-running debate about whether and how we can distinguish between quasi-realist expressivism and genuine realism about normativity (see Golub 2017, 2021 for my own contributions to this debate), but am setting aside this issue in the present paper. Here I am only claiming that expressivism can make good on the objectivity of normative truths, facts, and properties, whether or not this amounts to vindicating a form of normative realism.
More precisely, in a hybrid-expressivist framework, “Child abuse is objectively wrong” will express an attitude of disapproving of actions that have a certain natural property, even when considering scenarios in which we or others did not disapprove of such actions, and the belief that child abuse has that natural property.
To be clear, the quasi-naturalist account of Conceptual Elasticity, Referential Stability, and Objectivity that I have sketched here does not depend on a hybrid expressivist framework. Pure expressivists such as Gibbard (2003) will also tie the identity of normative concepts to their normative roles and will interpret claims about normative reference and objectivity as first-order normative claims amenable to an expressivist account. I believe hybrid expressivism is needed for a successful quasi-naturalist response to the metasemantic challenge, but only because it plays a key role in accounting for the metaphysical claims of normative naturalism in the first place, as I pointed out above.
Eklund (2017, pp. 56–57) raises a similar worry for views according to which concepts with the same normative role thereby have the same reference, which he calls “the embarrassment of riches problem”.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this worry.
It might be useful to note that normative theorizing need not always lead to objectivist conclusions or verdicts of sameness of reference in cases where different communities vastly diverge in their uses of normative concepts: there might be good reasons to adopt some form of relativism with respect to some such cases, like a view according to which the reference of “wrong” has shifted across human history due to radical changes in the circumstances and needs of human beings. Whether such a relativism of distance is ultimately plausible is again a matter to be settled through normative theory. The quasi-naturalist response to the metasemantic challenge only involves the claim that objectivism about reference can be the right stance with respect to cases like Moral Twin Earth and Honor Code.
See Schroeter and Schroeter (2013) for an in-depth discussion of the epistemic access condition on reference and a related argument to the effect that an account of normative reference should align with a general, use-dependent conception of reference applicable to all areas of discourse.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments and discussion on previous versions of this paper, many thanks to Farbod Akhlaghi, James Brown, Claire Kirwin, Manuel García-Carpintero, Will Gamester, Nick Laskowski, Teresa Marques, Sven Rosenkranz, Alex Sandgren, Thomas Schmidt, Pekka Väyrynen, Robbie Williams, Jack Woods, audiences at the University of Leeds, the University of Barcelona, the 2021 Cyprus Metaethics Workshop, and the 2022 “Truth in Evaluation” Conference of the Italian Society for Analytic Philosophy, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal.
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Research for this paper was funded through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 837036.
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Golub, C. Normative Reference as a Normative Question. Erkenn (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-023-00744-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-023-00744-w