Normative Objectivity Without Ontological Commitments?

Georg Gasser

doi:10.1007/s11245-016-9448-2

Abstract

Several non-naturalist philosophers look for ways to maintain the objectivity of morals without making any (robust) ontological commitments. Recently Derek Parfit proposed an account of non-ontologically existing irreducible moral properties. My first aim in this paper is to outline that such an account is doomed to fail. My second aim in this paper is to argue that irreducible moral properties can be integrated with adaptions into an ontological framework such as E.J. Lowe’s four-category ontology. If it can be shown that irreducible moral properties have a proper place in such an ontology, then there is no need to distinguish between an ontological and non-ontological mode of existence, which, in turn helps to eschew the obscurities that this distinction brings in its wake.

Highlights

Contemporary discussions of moral realism are strongly influenced by Mackie’s argument from queerness
Derek Parfit proposed an account of non-ontologically existing irreducible moral properties
If it can be shown that irreducible moral properties have a proper place in such an ontology, there is no need to distinguish between an ontological and non-ontological mode of existence, which, in turn helps to eschew the obscurities that this distinction brings in its wake

Summary

Introduction

Contemporary discussions of moral realism are strongly influenced by Mackie’s argument from queerness. The argument has two prongs: one epistemological, and one ontological. The ontological prong asks how moral properties fit into our natural world. A naturalistic moral realist will claim that there are moral properties, but propose that they are either entirely reducible to natural ones or ontologically continuous with natural ones. A naturalistic expressivist might think that talk of moral properties is nothing but an expression of one’s subjective attitude and a response to an action’s natural features. The non-naturalistic response to these worries is less straightforward: first, non-naturalistic moral realists have had a hard time spelling out the connection between natural and moral properties. Is this connection one of supervenience? Constitution? Grounding? Brute co-variation? Second, they must ward off the objection that moral properties are entities “of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe”[1] because of their apparent inherently prescriptive nature

Gasser

Parfit’s Ontology of Moral Properties

A Critical Assessment of Parfit’s Account

Outlining the Framework for a Moral Ontology

Three Possible Objections

Conclusion