Naturalism, Normativity, and the Open Question Argument

Abstract

The phenomenal influence of G. E. Moore's argument on twentieth century metaethics may now seem undeserved.2 On one important interpretation, for instance, Moore's argument for the unanalyzability of 'good' relies upon an account of analysis that would have the result that no terms are definable.3 If the argument shows anything, then, it shows too much, and thus it reveals nothing of special interest about 'good.' The noncognitivists who followed Moore, however, accepted the argument as a refutation of analytic naturalism, though they offered their own diagnosis of the argument's force. The meaning of 'good' is not fundamentally descriptive, they contended, and any account that construes it as such will leave open the question whether to approve of or to recommend whatever has the naturalistic property identified with goodness. Questions about good remain open because 'good' is used to express a pro-attitude or a recommendation, and it is logically open to us to approve of or to recommend anything.4 The open question argument shows us, the noncognitivists concluded, that evaluative concepts cannot be fundamentally descriptive and still perform their unique expressive and recommending functions.5 In recent years, certain have disputed the noncognitivists' conclusion and have attempted to construct naturalistic accounts of nonmoral goodness that are invulnerable to the open question argument.6 These new naturalists recognize that earlier forms of definitional naturalism failed effectively to capture the expressive and recommending functions of evaluative terms. At the same time, they deny that these functions can be preserved only by treating 'good' as purely or primarily prescriptive. Instead, they argue, we can construct a descriptive meaning for 'good' that secures its recommending and expressive functions simply in virtue of the proposed descriptive content.7