Abstract
I address a family of objections I label the So What? objection to robust non-naturalist realism (or, just non-naturalism). This objection concludes that non-naturalism fails to identify the moral properties in virtue of failing to explain why non-natural properties would have all the features we expect moral properties to have and can be extended to provide the conclusion that the non-naturalist is therefore immoral. I argue that So What? is question-begging because it disallows non-naturalists their central theoretical claim: there are ethical properties iff they are fundamental properties (and, in virtue of that, non-natural). I then diagnose the error anti-non-naturalists make explicitly: those who object to non-naturalism along the lines of So What? either fail to understand precisely what the theory claims or fail to understand non-naturalist motivations for going in for that theory.
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Notes
I will not worry about the relation between properties and facts (etc.).
My preferred characterization of naturalism is a sort of chauvinistic disciplinary characterization according to which the hard sciences like physics, chemistry, biology, and geology signal the sorts of entities that will count as natural (whereas the more human sciences do not) such that something is natural if and only if it is like the entities in those sciences or fully capturable in terms of the naturalistically respectable sciences. Cf. Witmer (2018, 2012). Disagreement over this will not affect the points I make in the paper.
For a helpful guide to various distinctions related to existence and judgement externalism v. internalism, see van Roojen (2015, 55–59, 201–209).
All emphasis in original unless otherwise noted.
It might be worth noting that I will use (im)moral and (un)ethical interchangeably.
This is probably an analytic truth if anything is. The difficulty, in some cases, will be identifying the irrelevant considerations.
For those who are suspicious of this principle: the criticisms that follow do not rely on this principle being correct. If you think something in the neighborhood of the inference this principle licenses below is desirable, but do not like the principle itself, feel free to formulate your own version of it and plug it in. My criticisms will stand regardless. Thanks to Matthew Jernberg and Paul Martin for discussion.
That is, all normative and evaluative properties are reducible to goodness.
Aside from this problem, there is the further problem–at least for Bedke (2020), Dasgupta (2017), and Hayward (2019)–that this argument seems to overgeneralize to all other metaethical positions on offer. Erdur’s (2016) argument is meant to show that all forms of antirealism as well as all forms of realism face the So What? objection and all are committed to immoral views. I think Erdur is right that, if the normative rendering of So What? applies to realism, then it also applies to antirealism; further, I think the very same point can be made against the explanatory rendering of So What?. I think the lesson to draw from this is different from the one Erdur draws, however, since I think we should not abandon metaethical theorizing as a result of the general applicability of the argument; instead, I think we should drop the argument since the generality of the argument should clue us into the idea that something has gone badly wrong in the argument itself.
Dasgupta (2017: 307) seems to think that it is.
See supra n. 6.
Writing in a different context, FitzPatrick (2022, 35–36) says something that is perhaps similar to what I am saying here:
[T]he only reason metaphysical “nonnaturalism” has entered the picture is that we have posited irreducibly normative properties and facts in order to capture the idea [that reality itself favors certain ways of valuing and acting such that a certain set of ethical standards are objectively correct]… We are not trotting out some new, or obscure property like “exnat,” divorced from our ethical concepts, to do mysterious work… All we are doing is making a familiar normative claim about a set of ethical standards—that it is the appropriate one for ethical evaluation and for guiding human deliberation and action—and then maintaining that this claim states an irreducibly normative truth about the world, that is, a truth that cannot be explicated in nonnormative terms because it is about something inherently normative.
This is more-or-less the central theme of FitzPatrick (2008).
For a defense of a pragmatic understanding of begging the question according to which begging the question occurs when a statement is made that relies on the point at issue in the dialectical context, see Copp (2019, 234–236).
One could do this purely negatively as in FitzPatrick (2022). Some relevant considerations would then be the Frege-Geach Problem against expressivism (cf. Schroeder, 2008; Unwin, 1999, 2001), Euthyphro against divine command and response-dependence (See Quinn 2006; Wielenberg 2016) and the references there, as well as my discussion below), and pathetic ethics-style objections against sensibility theory (cf. Kirchin 2012, chap. 6; FitzPatrick 2008, 169–171; LeBar 2013; Sosa 2006). Of course, this would all happen against a backdrop of assuming realistic appearances are important to maintain.
I owe Joe Jones a thank you for a question that prompted putting the response in these terms.
But the error is also present in Erdur (2016, 597).
To the degree that this response goes further than the responses from Blanchard (2019), Enoch (2020), and Horn (2020), it is stronger. So, while each of their responses are, so far as I can tell, satisfactory if the arguments are not illicit in the way I claim, my response will be better because it will not allow the objection to gain a foothold to begin with.
Given what I say in supra note 16, one might wonder whether my response would not also generalize such that any time So What? is leveled against a metaethical view, it begs the question. The short answer is that I am not sure. I am not sure for two reasons. The first is that, on the non-naturalist view of things, there is no conceptual gap between the theoretical entities and the ethical properties we started out with–the ethical properties just are the theoretical posits of the non-naturalist. This is not true of any other metaethical view. The second reason is that, if this argument were directed at other theories, it is not clear premise (3) must appear as it does against the non-naturalist. Indeed, with other theories, there is a gap between the theoretical posits and the ethical properties we started with; Boyd’s (1988) homeostatic property clusters, for instance, would not be a perfect match to the property of goodness that we take ourselves to be familiar with from experience. If there is this gap, however, it appears as though other views might be able to be directly charged with missing the relevant features of goodness in their attempted explanation. So, premise (3) could instead look like: “Homeostatic property cluster, H, should not be promoted in the way goodness should.” This seems to me to be what is going on in Enoch (2011, 80–82, 104–109) and FitzPatrick (2014) when they make the just too different argument against naturalism. Still, none of this is transparently correct to me, so I leave it here for those who wish to defend their view against Erdur’s general argument.
The Euthyphro dilemma is popularly understood by asking: Is x good because God says, or does God say that x is good because it is good? I will discuss the objection at length below.
Dasgupta confirmed this in an email.
An anonymous reviewer pointed out to me that Hayward is actually making a reference to Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov. Despite this not being a direct reference to Euthyphro, I do still think it evinces that Hayward sees a parallel between the non-naturalism and divine command theory and the types of objections they are vulnerable to. Insofar as Hayward thinks divine command theory itself is vulnerable to So What?, I think what I say about the difference between Euthyphro and So What? could call that contention into question. Further, insofar as I am right about the difference between the two objections, I think this also explains the mistake Hayward (and Ivan) make.
For context, van Roojen (2015, 277, n. 4 in reference to p. 259), while perhaps giving slightly different delivery to So What?, does seem to clearly make the point Dasgupta (2017) later makes: “Another way to see the worry is just to ask yourself whether you could ask the “So What?” question upon being told that one action among a number of alternatives had a simple unanalyzable nonnatural property.”.
Monotheistic contexts require a slightly different challenge than the original Euthyphro of course, and I have made that change without much explanation. But see Quinn (2006, 74–75) for discussion.
Of course, there are responses. See especially Quinn (2006). Cf. Harrison (2015) who argues that Euthyphro does not generate a problem at all. I think he is confused about the argumentative thrust of the arbitrariness worry that comes from the second horn. It might very well be true that our (extremely) clear and distinct intuitions as of the horrendousness of some acts (say, Hitler’s actions) entails that there is something in reality that our intuitions are picking up on, but that does not automatically vindicate divine command theory. This is because the potential arbitrariness and so possible goodness of Hitler’s actions in some other possible world on divine command theory is a problem for the theory insofar as it appears incompatible with the intuition that Hitler’s actions are necessarily bad–bad in every possible world. For a similar criticism, as well as a fuller critical assessment of Harrison’s arguments, see Wielenberg (2016).
Notice you need to be convinced of both. I am convinced of the former, but not the latter.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to David Enoch, Shmuel Gomes, and Simon Kirchin for comments on previous versions of this paper. Thanks also to Matthew Jernberg and Paul Martin for discussion at an informal writing group meeting. Finally, thanks to my two anonymous reviewers for pressing me to clarify a few points and shorten the paper.
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Cannon, N.D. Why bother with so what?. Philos Stud 181, 349–367 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-02089-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-02089-0