Abstract
Non-reductionist moral realist views are supposed to have trouble explaining the truth of the moral supervenience thesis. In this paper I argue that the non-reductionist has nothing to worry about on this front. The positive case for the global moral supervenience thesis is flawed. I identify three considerations commonly cited in support of the thesis: the grounding concern, the horrendous deeds concern, and the normative authority concern. I argue that each one is based on mistakes, dubious assumptions and/or a question begging assumption of meta-ethical reductionism. I go on to argue that given reliable epistemic access to moral reality (something most moral realists will want to grant), the differential considered moral judgements of competent moral judges at different times and in different places is prima facie evidence that the moral landscape, like the physical landscape, is not uniform across time and space. This is incompatible with the local (non-trivial) moral supervenience thesis, according to which the subvening base excludes spatio-temporal location, thus fixing moral properties across time and space. I then argue that if the local (non-trivial) moral supervenience thesis is false there is no reason to think the global moral supervenience thesis is true. I conclude that short of a prior commitment to reductionism there is no good reason to think the global moral supervenience thesis is true.
I would like to thank the participants at the GRIN workshop on Supervenience and Normativity held at the University of Montreal in March 2014, with a special thanks to Carla Bognoli, Daniel Laurier, Brian McLaughlin and Antonino Rotolo. I would also like to thank Bartosz Brożek and Antonino Rotolo for inviting me to write this piece, and Julia K. Tanner who read and commented on an earlier draft.
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Notes
- 1.
See also my 2013 article, although the case I make there is different from the one I will be making here (Harrison 2013).
- 2.
See Kane (2003) for a more detailed description if a case of this kind.
- 3.
I am speaking of moral valences as having causal powers. Some may object on the ground that there cannot be causation by supervenient properties. I see no good reason to hold such a view and some others agree (see for Shafer-Landau 2012, esp. pp. 27–29). But anyway, note that the moral valences are producing the overall action’s moral property of rightness or wrongness (or permissibility) and so we do not have causation across different metaphysical kinds (not that I consider there to be any problem even if we did, but I know that some do).
- 4.
I am assuming the coherence of indeterminsitic causation, of course. Realist accounts of causation take the causal relation to be basic and maintain that one event causes another just in case the relation of causation obtains between them. On this kind of view there is nothing unintelligible in the idea of indeterministic causation. Causation just is the obtaining of a causal relation, and it can be indeterministic whether A will cause B, for it can be indeterministic whether this causal relation will obtain. If it does, then its obtaining just is A’s causing of B. One might reject realist accounts in favour of Reductionist accounts of causation that seek to analyse causation in terms of constant conjunction or counterfactual dependence, or the modalities of necessity and sufficiency. But these accounts have some serious problems and strike many, myself included, as fundamentally misguided insofar as it seems more natural to understand counterfactual dependence in terms of the existence of causal relations rather than the other way around (on this see Bigelow and Pargetter 1990).
- 5.
I should add that though the moral supervenience thesis is compatible with moral particularism, it does seem to me to be against the spirit of moral particularism to defend it. For the moral particularist makes it his/her business to challenge the idea that the moral valence of a natural feature – or bundle of natural features – is invariant. But a moral particularist who affirms the moral supervenience thesis has to claim that the moral valence of a natural feature is invariant across naturalistically identical situations. That is a form of invariantism too.
- 6.
The term ‘internalism’ should be understood here to refer to existence internalism and not judgement internalism.
- 7.
It might be objected that there are some motivations found necessarily in all agents. Moral norms just are those norms of practical reason that we all, qua agents, have reason to do/refrain from doing (see Rosati 2003). It is contentious whether there are motivations that all agents necessarily have (see Joyce 2006, pp. 196–199). But even in the event that there are motivations that we must all, qua agents, possess, and that these give rise to norms of practical reason that accord with our pre-theoretical moral judgements (again, questionable) it remains doubtful this will provide what is needed. There is no space to elaborate, but in common with other moral realists I find constitutivist views of normativity unpersuasive (see Enoch 2006).
- 8.
This point is, I think, more significant than it at first appears. As already noted, it is standardly seen as a virtue of reductionist views that they can explain the moral supervenience thesis (whereas non-reductionists cannot). However, the supervenience thesis in question cannot be one that includes under the umbrella of natural properties an act’s time and place. For as just noted, that version of the moral supervenience is trivially true and nobody has any difficulty explaining it. So, the version of the moral supervenience thesis that the reductionist can supposedly explain is the rather narrower, but substantial one that does not include temporal or spatial properties. Yet what justifies the exclusion of such properties? Reductionism in and of itself does not explain. Perhaps the reductionist could appeal to the fact our best normative moral theories do not allow time or place to make a difference. But our best normative moral theories are those that achieve the best fit with our considered moral intuitions. The evidence – I am going to suggest – is that these have altered over time. To discount the moral intuitions of competent moral judges from a previous time is to insist that time and place are morally irrelevant, rather than to show them to be.
- 9.
A commitment to moral truths does not entail the epistemological commitment, but without it moral realism is unattractive. As Enoch puts it:
If the best way out {in response to one version of the argument from disagreement] for the realist is to concede that moral beliefs – hers included, of course – do not reflect the moral facts, then she may perhaps have her realism, but only at the price of the most radical of skepticisms. A radically inaccessible realm of moral facts is, I think, a very small comfort for the realist. (2009, p. 22)
- 10.
I borrow the term ‘faultless’ from Capps, Lynch and Massey (2009, p. 414). They too offer a faultless explanation, though one that is very different from mine.
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Harrison, G.K. (2017). The Dubious Moral Supervenience Thesis. In: Brożek, B., Rotolo, A., Stelmach, J. (eds) Supervenience and Normativity. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 120. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61046-7_5
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