Yes to Realism! No to Non-naturalism!

Abstract

ccording to contemporary moral realism a moral property, like goodness or badness, is either a natural (descriptive) property or a non-natural (nondescriptive) property of actions or situations. Contemporary moral naturalists like Richard Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon, and David Brink are a group of philosophers who are often referred to as Cornell realists because of their connection with Cornell University.1 Frank Jackson is another contemporary moral naturalist who is one of the leaders of The Canberra Planners2 at the Australian National University with which he is connected. Jackson defends “the most extreme form of naturalism.”3 Jackson’s view is considered extreme by those who disagree with him because he believes that moral properties are reducible or identical to natural properties. This view of Jackson is opposed by contemporary non-naturalists like Jonathan Dancy, Derek Parfit, and Russ Shafer-Landau for reasons which in my view are not successful. Despite Jackson’s reductionism about the ethical, the Cornell realists, nevertheless, agree with him that moral properties are natural properties. Supervenience is a logical platitude that is shared and used commonly by moral naturalists and moral non-naturalists to explain the nature of moral properties. Supervenience is the logical truism (i) that moral properties are dependent for their realization and emergence on natural properties: “an act’s non-moral properties do determine without remainder an act’s being right”4, and (ii) that actions and situations which are exactly alike in their non-moral or descriptive properties cannot differ in their moral properties: “two actions that share all their non-moral properties to the same degree must share all their moral properties to the same degree, and that no object can change its moral properties without changing its non-moral properties.”5 The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the metaphysical plausibility of the non-naturalist view of moral properties. I will mainly concentrate my evaluation on the views of Shafer-Landau (henceforth just S-L) whose defence