Accueil
http://www.iep.utm.edu/moralrea/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism-moral/
"There is a broad sense of “moral naturalism” whereby a moral naturalist is someone who believes an adequate philosophical account of morality can be given in terms entirely consistent with a naturalistic position in philosophical inquiry more generally. As science has developed over the last several centuries, it has seemed to many that the kinds of facts that scientists investigate through empirical methods are the only kinds of facts that there are. Religion and superstition have fallen by the wayside; the only things that we ought to believe in are the kinds of things that science can tell us about. This increasingly common attitude combines a metaphysical doctrine—that the only things that exist are natural things—with an epistemological doctrine—that we know about the world strictly by the use of experimentation and other empirical methods. Moral naturalism refers to any version of moral realism that is consistent with this general philosophical naturalism. Moral realism is the view that there are objective, mind-independent moral facts. For the moral naturalist, then, there are objective moral facts, these facts are facts concerning natural things, and we know about them using empirical methods.
Naturalism in this sense is opposed by those who reject a parsimonious naturalistic metaphysics and stand willing to allow a domain of nonnatural or supernatural facts to play an essential role in our understanding of morality. Naturalism is also opposed by “anti-realists”, including error theorists, constructivists, relativists, and expressivists. According to error theorists, there are no moral facts of any kind. And according to constructivists, relativists, and expressivists, there are moral facts, but these facts are subjective, rather than objective. Anti-realists hold that, if there are any moral facts, these facts are merely products of our contingent attitudes."
"Claims that use normative terminology like ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’, etc. are normative claims. Claims that avoid this use of evaluative terminology, and instead use terminology common to the natural sciences, are natural claims. If moral claims and natural claims are synonymous, as the Analytic Naturalist holds, then moral and natural claims must refer to the same facts."
"As a form of realism, it offers to make robust sense of moral objectivity and moral knowledge, allowing for moral utterances to be truth-apt in straightforward ways and for some of them to be true. And as a form of naturalism it is widely seen as preferable to rival forms of moral realism. Moral properties and facts, realistically construed, can often seem unpalatably “queer”, as Mackie famously expressed it (Mackie 1977, chapter 1, section 9): a realist can seem committed to the existence of metaphysically far out entities or properties and embarrassed by the lack of any plausible epistemic story of how we can obtain knowledge of them. The naturalist offers to save realism but eliminate the mystery.
Moral realism and general philosophical naturalism are both attractive views in their own right. Moral realism seems necessary to do justice to do our sense of right and wrong being more than a matter of opinion, and philosophical naturalism has proven to be the most successful project, ever, for advancing human knowledge and understanding. And while anti-realists and non-naturalists dispute realism and naturalism, respectively, moral naturalism is a plausible conjunction of two plausible views."
"1.2.1 Support by Contrast.
In recent years, moral non-naturalism has been the subject of much more discussion than moral naturalism, as moral non-naturalists have discovered new ways of articulating and defending their view. But along with an increase in the popularity of moral non-naturalism, there has been a corresponding increase in the popularity of arguments against non-naturalism. These arguments, indirectly, provide support for moral naturalism. If there are arguments that have force against the moral non-naturalist, but not the naturalist, then these arguments give us reason to be naturalists about morality. While many objections can and have been offered against non-naturalism, we’ll look at the two most prominent here.
The first argument against normative non-naturalism concerns normative supervenience. The normative supervenes on the natural; in all metaphysically possible worlds in which the natural facts are the same as they are in the actual world, the moral facts are the same as well. This claim has been called the “least controversial thesis in metaethics” (Rosen forthcoming); it is very widely accepted. But it is also a striking fact that stands in need of some explanation. For naturalists, such an explanation is easy to provide: the moral facts just are natural facts, so when we consider worlds that are naturally the same as the actual world, we will ipso facto be considering worlds that are morally the same as the actual world. But for the non-naturalist, no such explanation seems available. In fact, it seems to be in principle impossible for a non-naturalist to explain how the moral supervenes on the natural. And if the non-naturalist can offer no explanation of this phenomenon that demands explanation, this is a heavy mark against non-naturalism (McPherson 2012).
It is highly controversial whether this argument succeeds (for discussion, see McPherson (2012), Enoch (2011, Ch. 6), Wielenberg (2014, Ch. 1), Leary 2017, Väyrynen 2017, Rosen forthcoming,). But if it does succeed, then it provides a good reason to think that moral properties, if they exist, must be natural properties.
The second argument against moral non-naturalism concerns moral epistemology. According to evolutionary debunking arguments, our moral beliefs are products of evolution, and this evolutionary etiology of our moral beliefs serves to undermine them. Exactly why evolution debunks our moral beliefs is a matter of substantial controversy, and the debunking argument has been interpreted in a number of different ways (Vavova 2015). Sharon Street, whose statement of the evolutionary debunking argument has been highly influential, holds that debunking arguments make a problem for all versions of moral realism—her paper is entitled “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value.” But according to another popular line of argument, these debunking arguments are only problems for moral non-naturalism. The fundamental worry is that our moral beliefs are the product of evolutionary facts rather than moral facts. If this is so, this would serve to debunk our moral beliefs, either because it is a necessary condition on justified belief that you take your beliefs to be explained by the facts in question (Joyce 2006, Ch. 6; Bedke 2009; Lutz forthcoming) or else because the non-naturalist is left with no way to explain the reliability of our moral beliefs (Enoch 2009, Schechter 2017).
But if moral naturalism is true, the realist needn’t grant the skeptic’s premise that our moral beliefs are the product of evolutionary facts rather than moral facts. If moral facts are natural, then we needn’t see moral facts as being contrary to natural, evolutionary facts. The moral facts might be among these evolutionary facts that explain our moral beliefs. If, for instance, to be good just is to be conducive to social cooperation, then an evolutionary account that says that we judge things to be good only when they are conducive to social cooperation would not debunk any of our beliefs about goodness. This account would, instead, provide a deep vindication of those beliefs (Copp 2008).
It is open to naturalists to say that the moral facts are wholly or partly responsible for us having the moral beliefs that we have. This allows them to address any number of different epistemic objections that the moral non-naturalist seems ill-equipped to answer. If these objections do succeed against only the non-naturalist, that’s a good reason to think that moral properties, if they exist, must be natural properties."
2.1 The Open Question Argument
By far the most famous and influential argument against moral naturalism is G.E. Moore’s Open Question Argument (Moore 1903, 5–21). Moore’s thought is as follows. Suppose “N” to abbreviate a term expressing the concept of some natural property N, maximally conducing to human welfare perhaps, and suppose a naturalist proposes to define goodness as N-ness. We swiftly show this to be false by supposing someone to ask of something acknowledged to be N, whether it was good. This, Moore urges, is an open question. The point is, essentially, that it is not a stupid question in the sort of way, “I acknowledge that Jimmy is an unmarried man but is he, I wonder, a bachelor?” is a stupid question: if you need to ask it, you don’t understand it. Given what the words concerned mean, the question of whether a given unmarried man is a bachelor is, in Moore’s terminology, closed—there is no way for a conceptually competent individual to be in doubt about the answer to this question. So goodness and N-ness, unlike bachelorhood and unmarried-man-hood, are not one and the same.
Of course the concepts may be coextensive. For all the Open Question Argument shows, it may be the case, for instance, that a thing is good if and only if it conduces to welfare: utilitarianism of that kind might be a synthetic moral truth. But what the Open Question Argument is supposed to rule out is that “good” and "N” pick out, in virtue of semantic equivalence, not two distinct and coextensive properties, but rather one and the same property. As Moore emphasizes, we should distinguish the question, “What is goodness?” from the question “What things are good?” (1903, 5) The Open Question Argument is supposed to rule out certain answers to the first question, i.e., naturalistic answers such as “conduciveness to happiness.” But it is not meant to rule out our answering the second question by offering, e.g., “those things which conduce to happiness.”
A lot of fire has been directed at this little argument in the century since Moore published it. A central worry is that he failed to consider a crucial possibility. Consider the biconditional:
x is good iff x is N.
Moore, as we saw, notes that this may express a claim about what goodness is or a claim about what things are good. The former claim he understands as a claim that “good” and “N” are equivalent in meaning and so denote the very same property. He failed, however, to notice the possibility that they might denote the very same property even though they are not equivalent in meaning. The assumption at work here David Brink calls “the Semantic Test for Properties”, according to which two terms pick out the same property only if they mean the same (Brink 1989, chapter 6 and Brink 2001). Brink thinks we can be confident that this assumption is false (and all the more so if we understand sameness of meaning as something epistemically transparent to competent speakers so that epistemic inequivalence implies semantic inequivalence). One counterexample is by now proverbial:
x is water iff x is H2O.
It seems obvious that “water” doesn’t mean the same as “H2O” (and all the more so if we take speakers as authoritative as to what their words mean). For it was a discovery when 18th century chemists figured this fact out. But being water and being H2O are not just a case of a pair of coextensive properties, such as being a cordate and being a renate. Being water and being H2O are one and the same identical property, the property identity in question being a posteriori, not a priori and certainly not analytic. So the Open Question Argument cannot refute Metaphysical Naturalism. At most, the Open Question Argument gives us a reason to be synthetic, rather than analytic, naturalists.
But it is not clear that the Open Question Argument proves even this much. Another criticism, forcefully urged by Michael Smith, is that the Open Question Argument seems to prove too much, being just a particular instance of the piece of reasoning embodied in the Paradox of Analysis. The practice of conceptual analysis, this reasoning goes, aspires to provide real philosophical illumination; however, if all analytic truths must share the obviousness of the proverbial unmarried male status of bachelors, then no purported piece of conceptual analysis could fail to be either false or trivial, a conclusion highly embarrassing to much modern philosophy (Smith 1994, 37–39). But once we allow that analytic truths may be unobvious, the appearance of openness in the question whether an N thing is a good thing ceases to look very significant.
A further criticism of the Open Question Argument comes from William Frankena (1939). Frankena worries that the Open Question Argument begs the question at issue. “Is such-and-such, which is N, good?” is an open question precisely when a definition of N-ness in terms of goodness is not an analytic truth—and that is precisely what Moore is trying to establish. Moore seems to owe us more support than has been given for the claim that all questions concerning natural-moral identities are open.
One might claim that the failure of other attempted analyses of ‘good’ gives us a kind of inductive reason to think that no analysis of goodness can be successful. This inductive argument, if successful, might answer Frankena’s objection. But it is not clear how strong such an inductive argument is. As Finlay (2014, Ch. 1) argues, if it is true that goodness can be analyzed, the very truth of that hypothesis predicts that every analysis except the correct one will be false. Thus, it also predicts that every question of the form ‘X is N, but is X good ?’ will feel open, except for the one question that includes the correct analysis of goodness in place of N. So we should not take the existence of open questions of the form ‘X is N, but is X good ?’ as data against the hypothesis that ‘good’ can be analyzed, since that data is actually predicted by the hypothesis. The only way to know that an analysis fails is to test it, and it’s always possible that the correct analysis remains untested."
"2.2 The Normativity and Triviality Objections.
Although Moore’s original version of the Open Question Argument today has few defenders, there have been a number of recent attempts to refashion it into a more compelling form. One popular version of the Open Question Argument, called the Normativity Objection (Scanlon 2014; Parfit 2011), sidesteps questions about the cognitive significance of moral and descriptive terminology and appeals to considerations regarding the natures of natural and normative facts. Moral facts tell us what is good in the world and what we have reasons or obligations to do. Natural facts—the kinds of facts that scientists study—are facts about the innate physical structure of the universe and the causal principles that govern the interaction of matter. Those are obviously just two different kinds of facts. Moral facts, because they are facts about goodness, reasons, obligations, and the like, are normative facts. But natural facts are not normative. In trying to give a naturalistic account of morality, naturalists forgot the most important thing: that moral facts aren’t purely facts about the way the world is; they are facts about what matters.
There are, generally, two ways in which a naturalist might respond to this objection. First, a naturalist could say that moral facts aren’t essentially normative; it may be the case that we typically have reasons to act morally, but reason-giving force is not part of the essence of moral facts. That suggestion might have the feeling of an absurdity—of course moral facts are the kinds of things that provide reasons; if an action is morally required, that’s a good reason to do it! But according to some “reforming definitions” of morality (Brandt 1979; Railton 1986), while we may intuitively think that moral facts give reasons, that is a kind of defect in our conception of morality. It would be more accurate and fruitful to define moral facts in terms that are not necessarily reason-providing. Thinking about moral facts in this way is different than how we typically think about moral facts—that is why this kind of account constitutes a reforming definition of morality—but we are talking about morality all the same (Railton 1986).
The biggest problem for reforming definitions is that they suggest that normativity is somehow dispensable to morality. But as Joyce (2000, Ch. 1) argues, normativity is a non-negotiable commitment of our moral discourse. If the only kinds of facts that exist are natural, and natural facts are not a source of reasons for everyone, then, argues Joyce, this amounts to a proof that moral facts don’t exist. Reformers may respond by calling into question Joyce’s notion of “non-negotiable” commitments. For Joyce, it is obvious that facts that do not provide reasons for everyone are, ipso facto, not moral facts. But it is controversial whether any of our concepts have commitments that are non-negotiable in this way (cf. Prinzing 2017).
The second way to respond to the Normativity Objection is to say that moral facts are both natural and normative, in virtue of the fact that normativity itself is a natural phenomenon. This suggestion might also have a feel of absurdity to it. How could normativity be natural? The most popular strategy for substantiating natural normativity is a two-step strategy. First, show that all normative concepts can be analyzed in terms of one, fundamental normative concept. Second, show that that fundamental normative concept picks out a natural property. There are a number of ways that such an account could proceed: here are two recent, influential examples:
Mark Schroeder (2005, 2007) accepts the popular “buck-passing” or “reasons first” account of normativity (Scanlon 1998), which says that all normative concepts can be analyzed in terms of the concept of a reason. Schroeder also accepts the Humean Theory of Reasons (as a substantive, synthetic truth), which says that, roughly, S has a reason to Φ just in case Φ-ing will satisfy one of S’s desires. If the Humean Theory is correct, then being a reason is a natural property. And, if all other moral facts are to be analyzed in terms of reasons, then all moral facts are natural facts.
Phillipa Foot (2001) rejects the “buck-passing” account and accepts a traditional “value first” account of normativity, which says that goodness is the fundamental normative concept. She also accepts a neo-Aristotelian account of goodness, which says that, roughly, something is good for a person just in case it contributes to that person’s flourishing (where flourishing is itself supposed to be a complex natural property including healthiness, happiness, etc.) If neo-Aristotelianism is correct, goodness is a natural property. And if all moral facts are to be analyzed in terms of goodness, then all moral facts are natural facts.
This two-step strategy is popular and promising, but it is certainly not uncontroversial. Those moved by the Open Question Argument and the Normativity Objection are skeptical that the second step of the naturalizing strategy could ever be completed. Non-naturalists doubt that it could ever be shown that the fundamental normative concept picks out some natural property because normative properties and natural properties just seem to obviously be different kinds of properties. Wittgenstein claimed to “see clearly, as it were in a flash of light, not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance” (Wittgenstein 1965). David Enoch (2011) is more pithy, saying simply that natural properties and normative properties are just too different for any natural account of a fundamental normative property to be satisfying.
But while many have felt the force of this “just too different” intuition, it’s unclear what that charge amounts to. In what sense are the natural and the normative “just too different?” Schroeder thinks that the “too different” intuition has force only if there is “a perfectly general single truth about which any reductive view would be forced into error” (Schroeder 2005, 14). The existence of such a truth would be the proof that the natural and normative are just too different; without such a truth, the non-naturalist hasn’t offered much by way of an argument against naturalism. But because all normative claims conceptually reduce to claims about reasons, argues Schroeder, there will be no such general truth, provided that we have a coherent account of the foundational notion of a reason. If all normative claims are conceptually reducible to claims about reasons, then a coherent account of reasons can explain all normative claims, without error. These fundamental normative facts about reasons are themselves explained by the natural facts to which reasons reduce. But because this reduction of reasons will take the form of a synthetic reduction, there end up being no conceptual connections between the normative and the natural. This general lack of conceptual connections between the normative and the natural is what explains the presence of the “just too different” intuition, and it is fully compatible with moral naturalism as a synthetic metaphysical truth.
Schroeder’s response may succeed in providing a naturalist-friendly explanation of the “just too different” intuition, but it seems strange to say that the existence of numerous analytic relations between different normative concepts, combined with a lack of analytic relations between normative and natural concepts, should in any way work to support the thesis that the normative is natural. It may well be the case that the lack of conceptual connections between the natural and normative is better explained by non-naturalism (Enoch 2011).
Derek Parfit’s Triviality Objection (Parfit 2011) is another contemporary extension of the Open Question Argument. If moral naturalism is true, says Parfit, then it will be possible to make moral claims and natural claims and have those two claims be about the same fact. Parfit worries that if the two claims are about the same fact, then those two claims must contain all the same information. And a statement of equivalence between any two claims that contain the same information must be trivial. But moral claims that describe the relationships between moral facts and natural facts are not trivial at all—they are highly substantive.
Although Parfit’s focus on the nature of normative facts helps to illuminate exactly what is supposed to be deficient about the naturalist’s account, it is not clear that this Triviality Objection is any more forceful than the Open Question Argument. Parfit’s central motivating thoughts are that (a) natural-moral identity claims are substantive rather than trivial, and therefore (b) moral claims contain different information than natural claims do, which makes it plausible that (c) moral claims concern a different kind of fact. These are exactly the central thoughts behind Moore’s Open Question Argument, and so we can expect naturalists to respond to this objection in largely the same way that they respond to the Open Question Argument. And, indeed, this is what we find. Naturalists have typically responded to the Triviality Objection by saying that moral-natural identities contain additional information in virtue of the fact that they tell us something about the nature of the moral facts in question. Thus, moral-natural identities are informative in the same way that other natural identity claims (like water = H2O) are (Copp 2017)."
-Lutz, Matthew and Lenman, James, "Moral Naturalism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/naturalism-moral/>.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism-moral/
"There is a broad sense of “moral naturalism” whereby a moral naturalist is someone who believes an adequate philosophical account of morality can be given in terms entirely consistent with a naturalistic position in philosophical inquiry more generally. As science has developed over the last several centuries, it has seemed to many that the kinds of facts that scientists investigate through empirical methods are the only kinds of facts that there are. Religion and superstition have fallen by the wayside; the only things that we ought to believe in are the kinds of things that science can tell us about. This increasingly common attitude combines a metaphysical doctrine—that the only things that exist are natural things—with an epistemological doctrine—that we know about the world strictly by the use of experimentation and other empirical methods. Moral naturalism refers to any version of moral realism that is consistent with this general philosophical naturalism. Moral realism is the view that there are objective, mind-independent moral facts. For the moral naturalist, then, there are objective moral facts, these facts are facts concerning natural things, and we know about them using empirical methods.
Naturalism in this sense is opposed by those who reject a parsimonious naturalistic metaphysics and stand willing to allow a domain of nonnatural or supernatural facts to play an essential role in our understanding of morality. Naturalism is also opposed by “anti-realists”, including error theorists, constructivists, relativists, and expressivists. According to error theorists, there are no moral facts of any kind. And according to constructivists, relativists, and expressivists, there are moral facts, but these facts are subjective, rather than objective. Anti-realists hold that, if there are any moral facts, these facts are merely products of our contingent attitudes."
"Claims that use normative terminology like ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’, etc. are normative claims. Claims that avoid this use of evaluative terminology, and instead use terminology common to the natural sciences, are natural claims. If moral claims and natural claims are synonymous, as the Analytic Naturalist holds, then moral and natural claims must refer to the same facts."
"As a form of realism, it offers to make robust sense of moral objectivity and moral knowledge, allowing for moral utterances to be truth-apt in straightforward ways and for some of them to be true. And as a form of naturalism it is widely seen as preferable to rival forms of moral realism. Moral properties and facts, realistically construed, can often seem unpalatably “queer”, as Mackie famously expressed it (Mackie 1977, chapter 1, section 9): a realist can seem committed to the existence of metaphysically far out entities or properties and embarrassed by the lack of any plausible epistemic story of how we can obtain knowledge of them. The naturalist offers to save realism but eliminate the mystery.
Moral realism and general philosophical naturalism are both attractive views in their own right. Moral realism seems necessary to do justice to do our sense of right and wrong being more than a matter of opinion, and philosophical naturalism has proven to be the most successful project, ever, for advancing human knowledge and understanding. And while anti-realists and non-naturalists dispute realism and naturalism, respectively, moral naturalism is a plausible conjunction of two plausible views."
"1.2.1 Support by Contrast.
In recent years, moral non-naturalism has been the subject of much more discussion than moral naturalism, as moral non-naturalists have discovered new ways of articulating and defending their view. But along with an increase in the popularity of moral non-naturalism, there has been a corresponding increase in the popularity of arguments against non-naturalism. These arguments, indirectly, provide support for moral naturalism. If there are arguments that have force against the moral non-naturalist, but not the naturalist, then these arguments give us reason to be naturalists about morality. While many objections can and have been offered against non-naturalism, we’ll look at the two most prominent here.
The first argument against normative non-naturalism concerns normative supervenience. The normative supervenes on the natural; in all metaphysically possible worlds in which the natural facts are the same as they are in the actual world, the moral facts are the same as well. This claim has been called the “least controversial thesis in metaethics” (Rosen forthcoming); it is very widely accepted. But it is also a striking fact that stands in need of some explanation. For naturalists, such an explanation is easy to provide: the moral facts just are natural facts, so when we consider worlds that are naturally the same as the actual world, we will ipso facto be considering worlds that are morally the same as the actual world. But for the non-naturalist, no such explanation seems available. In fact, it seems to be in principle impossible for a non-naturalist to explain how the moral supervenes on the natural. And if the non-naturalist can offer no explanation of this phenomenon that demands explanation, this is a heavy mark against non-naturalism (McPherson 2012).
It is highly controversial whether this argument succeeds (for discussion, see McPherson (2012), Enoch (2011, Ch. 6), Wielenberg (2014, Ch. 1), Leary 2017, Väyrynen 2017, Rosen forthcoming,). But if it does succeed, then it provides a good reason to think that moral properties, if they exist, must be natural properties.
The second argument against moral non-naturalism concerns moral epistemology. According to evolutionary debunking arguments, our moral beliefs are products of evolution, and this evolutionary etiology of our moral beliefs serves to undermine them. Exactly why evolution debunks our moral beliefs is a matter of substantial controversy, and the debunking argument has been interpreted in a number of different ways (Vavova 2015). Sharon Street, whose statement of the evolutionary debunking argument has been highly influential, holds that debunking arguments make a problem for all versions of moral realism—her paper is entitled “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value.” But according to another popular line of argument, these debunking arguments are only problems for moral non-naturalism. The fundamental worry is that our moral beliefs are the product of evolutionary facts rather than moral facts. If this is so, this would serve to debunk our moral beliefs, either because it is a necessary condition on justified belief that you take your beliefs to be explained by the facts in question (Joyce 2006, Ch. 6; Bedke 2009; Lutz forthcoming) or else because the non-naturalist is left with no way to explain the reliability of our moral beliefs (Enoch 2009, Schechter 2017).
But if moral naturalism is true, the realist needn’t grant the skeptic’s premise that our moral beliefs are the product of evolutionary facts rather than moral facts. If moral facts are natural, then we needn’t see moral facts as being contrary to natural, evolutionary facts. The moral facts might be among these evolutionary facts that explain our moral beliefs. If, for instance, to be good just is to be conducive to social cooperation, then an evolutionary account that says that we judge things to be good only when they are conducive to social cooperation would not debunk any of our beliefs about goodness. This account would, instead, provide a deep vindication of those beliefs (Copp 2008).
It is open to naturalists to say that the moral facts are wholly or partly responsible for us having the moral beliefs that we have. This allows them to address any number of different epistemic objections that the moral non-naturalist seems ill-equipped to answer. If these objections do succeed against only the non-naturalist, that’s a good reason to think that moral properties, if they exist, must be natural properties."
2.1 The Open Question Argument
By far the most famous and influential argument against moral naturalism is G.E. Moore’s Open Question Argument (Moore 1903, 5–21). Moore’s thought is as follows. Suppose “N” to abbreviate a term expressing the concept of some natural property N, maximally conducing to human welfare perhaps, and suppose a naturalist proposes to define goodness as N-ness. We swiftly show this to be false by supposing someone to ask of something acknowledged to be N, whether it was good. This, Moore urges, is an open question. The point is, essentially, that it is not a stupid question in the sort of way, “I acknowledge that Jimmy is an unmarried man but is he, I wonder, a bachelor?” is a stupid question: if you need to ask it, you don’t understand it. Given what the words concerned mean, the question of whether a given unmarried man is a bachelor is, in Moore’s terminology, closed—there is no way for a conceptually competent individual to be in doubt about the answer to this question. So goodness and N-ness, unlike bachelorhood and unmarried-man-hood, are not one and the same.
Of course the concepts may be coextensive. For all the Open Question Argument shows, it may be the case, for instance, that a thing is good if and only if it conduces to welfare: utilitarianism of that kind might be a synthetic moral truth. But what the Open Question Argument is supposed to rule out is that “good” and "N” pick out, in virtue of semantic equivalence, not two distinct and coextensive properties, but rather one and the same property. As Moore emphasizes, we should distinguish the question, “What is goodness?” from the question “What things are good?” (1903, 5) The Open Question Argument is supposed to rule out certain answers to the first question, i.e., naturalistic answers such as “conduciveness to happiness.” But it is not meant to rule out our answering the second question by offering, e.g., “those things which conduce to happiness.”
A lot of fire has been directed at this little argument in the century since Moore published it. A central worry is that he failed to consider a crucial possibility. Consider the biconditional:
x is good iff x is N.
Moore, as we saw, notes that this may express a claim about what goodness is or a claim about what things are good. The former claim he understands as a claim that “good” and “N” are equivalent in meaning and so denote the very same property. He failed, however, to notice the possibility that they might denote the very same property even though they are not equivalent in meaning. The assumption at work here David Brink calls “the Semantic Test for Properties”, according to which two terms pick out the same property only if they mean the same (Brink 1989, chapter 6 and Brink 2001). Brink thinks we can be confident that this assumption is false (and all the more so if we understand sameness of meaning as something epistemically transparent to competent speakers so that epistemic inequivalence implies semantic inequivalence). One counterexample is by now proverbial:
x is water iff x is H2O.
It seems obvious that “water” doesn’t mean the same as “H2O” (and all the more so if we take speakers as authoritative as to what their words mean). For it was a discovery when 18th century chemists figured this fact out. But being water and being H2O are not just a case of a pair of coextensive properties, such as being a cordate and being a renate. Being water and being H2O are one and the same identical property, the property identity in question being a posteriori, not a priori and certainly not analytic. So the Open Question Argument cannot refute Metaphysical Naturalism. At most, the Open Question Argument gives us a reason to be synthetic, rather than analytic, naturalists.
But it is not clear that the Open Question Argument proves even this much. Another criticism, forcefully urged by Michael Smith, is that the Open Question Argument seems to prove too much, being just a particular instance of the piece of reasoning embodied in the Paradox of Analysis. The practice of conceptual analysis, this reasoning goes, aspires to provide real philosophical illumination; however, if all analytic truths must share the obviousness of the proverbial unmarried male status of bachelors, then no purported piece of conceptual analysis could fail to be either false or trivial, a conclusion highly embarrassing to much modern philosophy (Smith 1994, 37–39). But once we allow that analytic truths may be unobvious, the appearance of openness in the question whether an N thing is a good thing ceases to look very significant.
A further criticism of the Open Question Argument comes from William Frankena (1939). Frankena worries that the Open Question Argument begs the question at issue. “Is such-and-such, which is N, good?” is an open question precisely when a definition of N-ness in terms of goodness is not an analytic truth—and that is precisely what Moore is trying to establish. Moore seems to owe us more support than has been given for the claim that all questions concerning natural-moral identities are open.
One might claim that the failure of other attempted analyses of ‘good’ gives us a kind of inductive reason to think that no analysis of goodness can be successful. This inductive argument, if successful, might answer Frankena’s objection. But it is not clear how strong such an inductive argument is. As Finlay (2014, Ch. 1) argues, if it is true that goodness can be analyzed, the very truth of that hypothesis predicts that every analysis except the correct one will be false. Thus, it also predicts that every question of the form ‘X is N, but is X good ?’ will feel open, except for the one question that includes the correct analysis of goodness in place of N. So we should not take the existence of open questions of the form ‘X is N, but is X good ?’ as data against the hypothesis that ‘good’ can be analyzed, since that data is actually predicted by the hypothesis. The only way to know that an analysis fails is to test it, and it’s always possible that the correct analysis remains untested."
"2.2 The Normativity and Triviality Objections.
Although Moore’s original version of the Open Question Argument today has few defenders, there have been a number of recent attempts to refashion it into a more compelling form. One popular version of the Open Question Argument, called the Normativity Objection (Scanlon 2014; Parfit 2011), sidesteps questions about the cognitive significance of moral and descriptive terminology and appeals to considerations regarding the natures of natural and normative facts. Moral facts tell us what is good in the world and what we have reasons or obligations to do. Natural facts—the kinds of facts that scientists study—are facts about the innate physical structure of the universe and the causal principles that govern the interaction of matter. Those are obviously just two different kinds of facts. Moral facts, because they are facts about goodness, reasons, obligations, and the like, are normative facts. But natural facts are not normative. In trying to give a naturalistic account of morality, naturalists forgot the most important thing: that moral facts aren’t purely facts about the way the world is; they are facts about what matters.
There are, generally, two ways in which a naturalist might respond to this objection. First, a naturalist could say that moral facts aren’t essentially normative; it may be the case that we typically have reasons to act morally, but reason-giving force is not part of the essence of moral facts. That suggestion might have the feeling of an absurdity—of course moral facts are the kinds of things that provide reasons; if an action is morally required, that’s a good reason to do it! But according to some “reforming definitions” of morality (Brandt 1979; Railton 1986), while we may intuitively think that moral facts give reasons, that is a kind of defect in our conception of morality. It would be more accurate and fruitful to define moral facts in terms that are not necessarily reason-providing. Thinking about moral facts in this way is different than how we typically think about moral facts—that is why this kind of account constitutes a reforming definition of morality—but we are talking about morality all the same (Railton 1986).
The biggest problem for reforming definitions is that they suggest that normativity is somehow dispensable to morality. But as Joyce (2000, Ch. 1) argues, normativity is a non-negotiable commitment of our moral discourse. If the only kinds of facts that exist are natural, and natural facts are not a source of reasons for everyone, then, argues Joyce, this amounts to a proof that moral facts don’t exist. Reformers may respond by calling into question Joyce’s notion of “non-negotiable” commitments. For Joyce, it is obvious that facts that do not provide reasons for everyone are, ipso facto, not moral facts. But it is controversial whether any of our concepts have commitments that are non-negotiable in this way (cf. Prinzing 2017).
The second way to respond to the Normativity Objection is to say that moral facts are both natural and normative, in virtue of the fact that normativity itself is a natural phenomenon. This suggestion might also have a feel of absurdity to it. How could normativity be natural? The most popular strategy for substantiating natural normativity is a two-step strategy. First, show that all normative concepts can be analyzed in terms of one, fundamental normative concept. Second, show that that fundamental normative concept picks out a natural property. There are a number of ways that such an account could proceed: here are two recent, influential examples:
Mark Schroeder (2005, 2007) accepts the popular “buck-passing” or “reasons first” account of normativity (Scanlon 1998), which says that all normative concepts can be analyzed in terms of the concept of a reason. Schroeder also accepts the Humean Theory of Reasons (as a substantive, synthetic truth), which says that, roughly, S has a reason to Φ just in case Φ-ing will satisfy one of S’s desires. If the Humean Theory is correct, then being a reason is a natural property. And, if all other moral facts are to be analyzed in terms of reasons, then all moral facts are natural facts.
Phillipa Foot (2001) rejects the “buck-passing” account and accepts a traditional “value first” account of normativity, which says that goodness is the fundamental normative concept. She also accepts a neo-Aristotelian account of goodness, which says that, roughly, something is good for a person just in case it contributes to that person’s flourishing (where flourishing is itself supposed to be a complex natural property including healthiness, happiness, etc.) If neo-Aristotelianism is correct, goodness is a natural property. And if all moral facts are to be analyzed in terms of goodness, then all moral facts are natural facts.
This two-step strategy is popular and promising, but it is certainly not uncontroversial. Those moved by the Open Question Argument and the Normativity Objection are skeptical that the second step of the naturalizing strategy could ever be completed. Non-naturalists doubt that it could ever be shown that the fundamental normative concept picks out some natural property because normative properties and natural properties just seem to obviously be different kinds of properties. Wittgenstein claimed to “see clearly, as it were in a flash of light, not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance” (Wittgenstein 1965). David Enoch (2011) is more pithy, saying simply that natural properties and normative properties are just too different for any natural account of a fundamental normative property to be satisfying.
But while many have felt the force of this “just too different” intuition, it’s unclear what that charge amounts to. In what sense are the natural and the normative “just too different?” Schroeder thinks that the “too different” intuition has force only if there is “a perfectly general single truth about which any reductive view would be forced into error” (Schroeder 2005, 14). The existence of such a truth would be the proof that the natural and normative are just too different; without such a truth, the non-naturalist hasn’t offered much by way of an argument against naturalism. But because all normative claims conceptually reduce to claims about reasons, argues Schroeder, there will be no such general truth, provided that we have a coherent account of the foundational notion of a reason. If all normative claims are conceptually reducible to claims about reasons, then a coherent account of reasons can explain all normative claims, without error. These fundamental normative facts about reasons are themselves explained by the natural facts to which reasons reduce. But because this reduction of reasons will take the form of a synthetic reduction, there end up being no conceptual connections between the normative and the natural. This general lack of conceptual connections between the normative and the natural is what explains the presence of the “just too different” intuition, and it is fully compatible with moral naturalism as a synthetic metaphysical truth.
Schroeder’s response may succeed in providing a naturalist-friendly explanation of the “just too different” intuition, but it seems strange to say that the existence of numerous analytic relations between different normative concepts, combined with a lack of analytic relations between normative and natural concepts, should in any way work to support the thesis that the normative is natural. It may well be the case that the lack of conceptual connections between the natural and normative is better explained by non-naturalism (Enoch 2011).
Derek Parfit’s Triviality Objection (Parfit 2011) is another contemporary extension of the Open Question Argument. If moral naturalism is true, says Parfit, then it will be possible to make moral claims and natural claims and have those two claims be about the same fact. Parfit worries that if the two claims are about the same fact, then those two claims must contain all the same information. And a statement of equivalence between any two claims that contain the same information must be trivial. But moral claims that describe the relationships between moral facts and natural facts are not trivial at all—they are highly substantive.
Although Parfit’s focus on the nature of normative facts helps to illuminate exactly what is supposed to be deficient about the naturalist’s account, it is not clear that this Triviality Objection is any more forceful than the Open Question Argument. Parfit’s central motivating thoughts are that (a) natural-moral identity claims are substantive rather than trivial, and therefore (b) moral claims contain different information than natural claims do, which makes it plausible that (c) moral claims concern a different kind of fact. These are exactly the central thoughts behind Moore’s Open Question Argument, and so we can expect naturalists to respond to this objection in largely the same way that they respond to the Open Question Argument. And, indeed, this is what we find. Naturalists have typically responded to the Triviality Objection by saying that moral-natural identities contain additional information in virtue of the fact that they tell us something about the nature of the moral facts in question. Thus, moral-natural identities are informative in the same way that other natural identity claims (like water = H2O) are (Copp 2017)."
-Lutz, Matthew and Lenman, James, "Moral Naturalism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/naturalism-moral/>.
