Supervenience Arguments and Normative Non‐naturalism

Abstract

Descriptive properties, for Jackson, are just properties which can be expressed with descriptive language—that is, with language that includes no normative vocabulary such as ‘right’, ‘good’, ‘reason’, etc.1 Descriptivism thus implies that every normative property can be expressed using descriptive vocabulary only. (We will return in §2 to the question of why, according to Jackson et al., Descriptivism is supposed to be true.) Most parties to the debate—both those friendly to Jackson’s argument and those concerned to resist it—are willing to grant at the outset that if Descriptivism is true, then the traditional non-naturalist views about the normative found in Moore (1903) and elsewhere are false. Non-naturalism is true, in other words, only if Descriptivism is false.2 Let us label this thesis Implication: ∗Thanks to Campbell Brown, James Dreier, Allan Gibbard, Ishani Maitra, David Manley, Sarah Moss, David Plunkett, Peter Railton, Mark Schroeder, Bart Struemer, and Brian Weatherson for helpful discussion of the various issues covered in this paper. 1Jackson (1998, 113, 117). Gibbard (2003, 99) draws the same distinction using the term ‘natural’, stipulating that supernatural, mathematical and psychological properties count as “natural” in the relevant sense. Brown (2011) doesn’t explicitly accept the same definition of ‘descriptive property’, presumably on the grounds that his version of the argument is supposed to avoid the “linguistic detour” present in Jackson’s. He doesn’t, however, offer an alternative characterization of the notion. I will not try to settle this question for Brown; but it should be clear that the points I make against Jackson’s argument should apply mutatis mutandis to Brown’s version if he were to accept the same characterization of what descriptive properties are. 2In addition to Brown (2011) and Streumer (2008), Shafer-Landau (2003, 94 ff.), Fitzpatrick (2008, 199), Shafer-Landau (2003), Suikkanen (2010), and Schmitt & Schroeder (2011, 146-7) all raise questions about a different premise in Jackson’s argument. For more discussion, see §§56 below.