Abstract
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 that moral properties are in some way reducible to the lower-level natural properties on which they supervene, while the “non-naturalists” maintain that moral properties are sui generis and robustly irreducible. In this paper I present a novel version of realist ethical naturalism—a view that I call Emergentist Ethical Naturalism—that reveals this common way of understanding the distinction between naturalism and non-naturalism to be flawed by combining a commitment to ethical naturalism with a commitment to the sui generis and robustly irreducible nature of moral properties that typically defines non-naturalism. Then, after presenting the theory and addressing a few worries that one might have about it, I show how it offers some novel, emergence-based responses to the various supervenience challenges that plague moral realism and thereby gives the ethical naturalist a robustly non-reductive option for dealing with these challenges.
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Notes
By moral “properties” I mean property-tokens, or particular, concrete property-instantiations or property-instances, as opposed to property-types or abstract universals. And I intend the description of moral properties as being “real and objective” to convey the intuitive sense in which moral realism asserts the existence of moral properties that are on an ontological par with the genuine, non-moral properties that things possess independently of what any real or hypothetical agent might happen to think about those things. So for example, if we assume that each instance of torturing the innocent for fun is morally wrong, then a moral realist would say that each act-token here literally possesses the property of moral wrongness, where this is to be understood in the same way as we would understand each act-token’s possessing the property of causing the innocent severe pain: this causal property is a genuine property of each act-token, and each one has it independently of what any real or hypothetical agent might think about it.
For what I take to be a novel, methodological interpretation of the difference between “naturalist” and “non-naturalist” realism, see Cuneo (2007).
Labeling the kind of ontological non-reductionism that defines “non-naturalism” as “robust” ontological non-reductionism is intended to distinguish the strong kind of ontological non-reductionism that certain “non-naturalists” want from other views that call themselves “non-naturalist” yet don’t quite deliver a sufficiently strong kind of ontological non-reductionism. I’m thinking here of Shafer-Landau’s (2003) “non-naturalism,” which posits, along with constitution-naturalism, that moral properties are constituted by the properties on which they supervene.
I am indebted to Kerry McKenzie for pointing out the need to address this issue.
I want to stress that I’m offering this example only for the purpose of illustrating what emergent properties are.
This inexplicability of emergent properties is closely related to their theoretical unpredictability in that these two features appear to stand or fall together, with the former apparently explaining the latter. If it could not be explained why a property, P, arises from certain basal properties, B, then it seems that P-instantiations could not be predicted from the knowledge of the B-level alone (for what could be the grounds of the prediction?). Conversely, if P-instantiations could not be predicted from knowledge of the B-level alone, then it seems that it could not be explained why P arises from B, as P-instantiations could surely be predicted from the B-level alone if it were theoretically possible to explain why P arises from B.
This theoretical non-deducibility of emergent properties is closely related to their theoretical unpredictability and inexplicability in the sense that, at the very least, these latter features seem to entail the former. For if a property, P, were theoretically deducible from its basal properties, B, then P would certainly be theoretically predictable from B, which implies that P’s theoretical unpredictability entails P’s theoretical non-deducibility. And, since a deduction of P from B would presumably explain why P arises from B, the in-principle inexplicability of why P arises from B would rule out any explanation of why P arises from B, and therefore any deduction of P from B.
This is, admittedly, a rather strong conception of emergent properties that might not sit well with other people. Some, for example, may want to count certain properties as emergent ones even though they don’t count as emergent on the understanding of such properties provided here. And others may want to relax epistemic conditions 6 and 7 by relativizing the unpredictable and inexplicable nature of emergent properties to our current knowledge or theories about the B-level in order to allow properties to count as emergent in some sense while simultaneously allowing for the possibility of some day being able to theoretically explain and predict these properties from the B-level alone (or without the help of Nagelian bridge laws that synthetically connect emergent properties to B-level ones). Yet those who would count certain properties as emergent ones even though these properties don’t count as emergent on the strong conception of emergent properties provided here are merely operating with weaker conceptions of emergence to begin with rather than pointing to any problem with my strong conception of it. And those who want to relax epistemic conditions 6 and 7 in the above manner want to do something that I resist here for the following reasons. One is that such relaxing of these conditions may require us to jettison ontological conditions 3 and 4 from our conception of emergent properties, which is certainly the case if, as suggested earlier, these particular ontological conditions imply the epistemic ones in their non-relaxed form. Another is that the motivation offered here for relaxing conditions 6 and 7 in the above manner arguably runs counter to the theoretical pessimism inherent in true emergentism. One is of course free to define emergent properties in a way that allows for the possibility of some day being able to theoretically explain and predict them from the B-level alone, but such a definition seems to water down emergence so much that it effectively rejects emergence in its true form (as one would do, for instance, by defining God as love instead of as a supernatural person that is, among other things, all-loving).
I owe this example to Kerry McKenzie.
To be clear, Ethical Emergentism does not take a position on what the correct first-order moral theory says these basal properties are (although an interesting question is whether it might be more compatible with certain moral theories). Ethical Emergentism just says that, once first-order moral theory fixes the basal properties, moral properties emerge from them.
Positing this particular relation is due to reflection on what an emergence relation between moral properties and their basal properties would have to look like. If it were true that moral properties emerge from whatever properties the correct first-order moral theory identifies as their supervenience bases, then moral properties would, on the one hand, have to emerge synchronically because their instantiation does not lag behind that of their basal properties. On the other hand, moral properties would have to emerge with metaphysical necessity because their basal properties necessarily give rise to them, where the necessity here is metaphysical (i.e., if certain properties ground moral ones, then they not only must do so, but they must do so in every metaphysically possible world in which they appear). Now this faces the immediate objection that emergent properties can only be nomologically necessitated by their basal properties (McLaughlin 1997; Noordhof 2010). However, this objection begs the question. Why think that emergent properties can only be nomologically necessitated by their basal properties? Is there a good reason to believe this?
Sometimes this is referred to as “the autonomy of ethics.”
This characterization is bound to receive complaints, but it is intuitively appealing insofar as it seems to capture what it fundamentally means to be a metaphysical naturalist. Also, according to Fales (2007), Alvin Plantinga has characterized metaphysical naturalism along similar lines as the view denying gods or anything very much like a god.
I’d like to thank an anonymous reviewer for directing me to address these worries.
And here is how this supposed to work. As I argued in the previous section, emergent properties would fit comfortably into the world as minimal metaphysical naturalism envisions it by emerging naturally (i.e., without supernatural or spiritual aid) from the lower-level natural properties of things. Consequently, robustly irreducible, realistically construed moral properties would fit comfortably into the world as minimal metaphysical naturalism envisions it—and thereby earn a claim to being natural properties—by being emergent properties. It isn’t, then, the emergence of moral properties from lower-level natural properties per se that can give them a claim to being natural. These moral properties instead earn this claim by fitting comfortably into the world as minimal metaphysical naturalism envisions it, and having such properties emerge is a way, I am suggesting, of getting them to so fit.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this troublesome example.
Ridge claims that the non-naturalist, understood as a robust ontological non-reductionist about moral properties, still cannot plausibly explain supervenience. But as this section aims to show, the non-naturalist can explain supervenience with Ethical Emergentism (and legitimately claim to be a naturalist while doing so).
An ethical naturalist’s third option here is to posit an identity relation (which also holds synchronically and with metaphysical necessity): there is a metaphysical entailment relation holding between moral properties and their basal properties because the former are identical to the latter. However, this option appears to founder on the fact of asymmetrical ethical dependence. First of all, it sounds odd to think of moral properties as dependent on their basal properties if they are actually identical (isn’t it odd to think that something is dependent on itself?). Second, even if an identity-naturalist could make sense of this dependence of moral properties, an identity relation between them and their basal properties delivers symmetrical dependence between these properties rather than asymmetrical dependence.
And perhaps even a third: Ridge (2012) claims that the supervenience challenge is to explain how there could be “non-natural” moral properties given the truth of analytic supervenience. But the answer to this is easy for the emergentist ethical naturalist: “non-natural” moral properties are just sui generis and irreducible moral properties, and there can be such properties because they can emerge synchronically and with metaphysical necessity from the lower-level natural properties that the correct first-order moral theory specifies as the supervenience bases of moral properties.
The response I offer here to the above worry may seem to generate another one—namely, that EEN implausibly rules out the theoretical possibility of ever achieving a deeper understanding of why moral properties arise from certain lower-level natural properties. But this worry begs the question against EEN in asserting that this is an implausible feature of the view. What’s so implausible about EEN’s theoretical pessimism? Why not regard it as a theoretical virtue rather than a cost? Also, even if this were a genuine cost of the theory, there may be plenty of other benefits of the theory that, at the end of the day, still render EEN acceptable. As Enoch might put it, EEN might be implausible in its theoretical pessimism and yet earn enough “plausibility points” through its theoretical virtues to sufficiently counterbalance the implausibility.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Nancy Cartwright, the participants of the March 4, 2016 meeting of the Moral and Political Philosophy Seminar at UC San Diego, and especially an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I would also like to thank David Brink, Cory Davia, Matthew Fulkerson, and Kerry McKenzie for feedback on an earlier document out of which the present paper grew.
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Stringer, R. Realist ethical naturalism for ethical non-naturalists. Philos Stud 175, 339–362 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0870-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0870-0