Non-natural Properties Research Articles

Robust Moral Realism and the Supervenience Argument

The paper examines the supervenience argument advanced by the robust moral realists in defense of moral realism. How defensible is the supervenience argument? The paper argues that answer to this question is not as straight forward as the proponents of the robust realism assumed. It argues that defending supervenience argument without paying proper attention to details about the main tenets of moral realism in relation to “is and ought” gap that exists between natural and non-natural properties is largely responsible for why moral realists assume that up till now, there is no demonstrative argument to show that their supervenience argument had been persuasively refuted. This paper does not intend to fill the traditional gap in favor of moral realism. Instead, it intends to challenge such assumption. The paper concludes that the supervenience argument is not as defensible as the proponents of the theory have claimed.

Metaethics and the Nature of Properties

Abstract This paper explores the connection between two philosophical debates concerning the nature of properties. The first, metaethical debate is about whether normative properties are ordinary natural properties or some unique kind of non-natural properties. The second, metaphysical debate is about whether properties are sets of objects, transcendent or immanent universals, or sets of tropes. I argue that nominalism, transcendent realism and immanent realism are not neutral frameworks for the metaethical debate but instead lead to either metaethical naturalism or non-naturalism. We can therefore investigate the metaethical question on its own terms only within the framework of trope theory.

How to Think about the Debate over the Reality of Beliefs

The aim of this paper is to propose a new conceptualization of the distinction between realism and anti-realism about beliefs that is based on the division between natural and non-natural properties, as defined by Lewis. It will be argued that although the traditional form of anti-realism about beliefs, namely eliminative materialism, has failed (as it led to unacceptable consequences), there is a possibility to reformulate the division in question. The background assumption of the proposal is the framework of deflationism about truth and existence: it will be assumed that beliefs can be said to exist and their attributions can said to be true. The aim is to show that even when we buy into such assumptions we can meaningfully distinguish between the realist and anti-realist approach to belief. According to the proposal, the paradigmatic anti-realist view on beliefs should be seen as a conjunction of three claims: that belief attributions do not track objective similarities, that beliefs are not causally active, and that there is no viable way of naturalizing content. It will be shown that seeing the debate in the proposed way has important advantages as it allows the issue of belief realism to be made non-trivial and tractable, and it introduces theoretical unity into contemporary metaphysics of beliefs.

Thanks, We’re good: why moral realism is not morally objectionable

This paper responds to a recently popular objection to non-naturalist, robust moral realism. The objection is that moral realism is morally objectionable, because realists are committed to taking evidence about the distribution (or non-existence) of non-natural properties to be relevant to their first-order moral commitments. I argue that such objections fail. The moral realist is indeed committed to conditionals such as “If there are no non-natural properties, then no action is wrong.” But the realist is not committed to using this conditional in a modus-ponens inference upon coming to believe its antecedent. Placing the discussion in a wider epistemological discussion—here, that of “junk-knowledge”, and of how background knowledge determines the relevance of purported evidence—shows that this objection does not exert a price from the realist.

Moore’s Open Question Phenomenon Explained—Naturalistically

ABSTRACT G.E. Moore’s open question arguments (OQAs) have been targeted by unsympathetic philosophers for close to a century. Perhaps the most serious criticism directed towards Moore’s OQAs is that they beg the question against targeted theories. After presenting an OQA extracted from §13 of Principia Ethica, I lodge this question-begging objection before articulating Moore’s autobiographical efforts to mitigate its force. I then suggest that Moore’s OQAs are incomplete, awaiting the final stage of construction, an explanation of the ‘open question’ phenomenon—the inclination of many philosophers to endorse the central premises of Moore’s OQAs. After a brief investigation of noncognitivist attempts to explain the phenomenon, I propose a semantic explanation, a cognitivist explanation that commits its proponents neither to mysterious nonnatural properties nor to perilous positions regarding the paradox of analysis. I conclude by arguing that Moore’s completed OQAs are successful, but his deployment of them in efforts to refute metaethical naturalism, even analytic or semantic versions, is not.

WHY CARE ABOUT NON-NATURAL REASONS?

Abstract Are non-natural properties worth caring about? I consider two (related) objections to metaethical non-naturalism. According to the intelligibility objection, it would be positively unintelligible to care about non-natural properties that float free from the causal fabric of the cosmos. According to the ethical idlers objection, there is no compelling motivation to posit non-natural normative properties because the natural properties suffice to provide us with reasons. In both cases, I argue, the objection stems from misunderstanding the role that non-natural properties play in the non-naturalist’s understanding of normativity. The role of non-natural properties is not to be responded to, but to “mark” which natural properties it is correct for us to respond to in certain ways.

Moral supervenience and distinctness: comments on Dreier

Jamie Dreier has argued that the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral requires explanation, and that attempts by the non-naturalist to provide it, or to sidestep the issue, have so far failed. These comments on Dreier first examine the notion of distinctness at work in the idea that non-natural properties are distinct from natural ones, pointing out that distinctness cannot be understood in modal terms if supervenience is to be respected. It then suggests that Dreier’s implicit commitment to the existence of infinite Boolean combinations of properties plays a significant role in the challenge to non-naturalism, and that the non-naturalist has some principled reasons for rejecting it. It also suggests that the real problem for non-naturalists isn’t explaining supervenience, but is rather the well-known problem of explaining our capacity to know anything about non-natural properties. That is, if the latter epistemological problem can be solved, the former metaphysical one might well disappear, at least as a distinctive problem for non-naturalist realists about morality.

A dilemma for non-naturalists: irrationality or immorality?

Either 1. the non-naturalist is in a state of mind that would treat as relevant information about the existence and patterns of non-natural properties and facts as they make up their mind about normative matters, or 2. the non-naturalist is in a state of mind that would treat as irrelevant information about the existence and patterns of non-natural properties and facts as they make up their mind about normative matters. The first state of mind is morally objectionable, for one should not change one’s normative beliefs to pander to the patterns of some non-natural realm. The second state of mind is irrational, for if you think you are aiming to represent non-natural properties correctly, you should (rationally) be interested to know which actions share a non-natural property and which do not, and you should (rationally) be prepared to change your mind accordingly.

Representing ethical reality: a guide for worldly non-naturalists

AbstractEthical realists hold (i) that our ethical concepts, thoughts, and claims are in the business of representing ethical reality, by representing evaluative or normative properties and facts as aspects of reality, and (ii) that such representations are at least sometimes accurate. Non-naturalist realists add the further claim that ethical properties and facts are ultimately non-natural, though they are nonetheless worldly. My aim is threefold: to elucidate the sort of representation involved in ethical evaluation on realist views; to clarify what exactly is represented and how non-naturalism comes into the picture for non-naturalists; and to defend worldly non-naturalism against some objections. The first question addressed is how we should model evaluation on any realist view, which should in turn guide the identification of which properties and facts are credibly regarded as ‘evaluative’ ones. Then the question is: what role might non-natural properties and facts play, and how are they related to what is represented in ethical evaluation? Once that is clear, we will be in a position to answer certain objections to non-naturalist realism from Jackson, Gibbard, Bedke, and Dreier. I argue that the objections all mischaracterize the role played by non-natural properties and facts on plausible versions of non-naturalist realism.

Intuitionism and Nihilism

Intuitionism and nihilism, according to nihilists, have key features in common: the same semantics and the same phenomenology. Intuitionism is the object of nihilism’s attack. The central charge nihilism lodges against intuitionism is that its nonnatural moral properties are queer. Here I’ll examine what ‘queer’ might mean in relation to the doctrines nihilism uses to support this charge. My investigation reveals that nihilism’s queerness charge lacks substance and resembles a tautology served with a frown. There’s really nothing to it. After I show that, I’ll offer an explanation for why nihilism has gotten intuitionism wrong. It makes a central mistaken methodological assumption and doesn’t target any identifiable intuitionism in the last hundred or so years.

Non-Naturalism and Reference

Metaethical realists disagree about the nature of normative properties. Naturalists think that they are ordinary natural properties: causally efficacious, a posteriori knowable, and usable in the best explanations of natural and social sciences. Non-naturalist realists, in contrast, argue that they are sui generis: causally inert, a priori knowable and not a part of the subject matter of sciences. It has been assumed so far that naturalists can explain causally how the normative predicates manage to refer to normative properties, whereas non-naturalists are unable to provide equally satisfactory metasemantic explanations. This article first describes how the previous non-naturalist accounts of reference fail to tell us how the normative predicates could have come to refer to the non-natural properties rather than to the natural ones. I will then use the so-called qua-problem to show how the causal theories of reference of naturalists also fail to fix the reference of normative predicates to unique natural properties. Finally, I will suggest that, just as naturalists need to rely on the non-causal mechanism of reference magnetism to solve the previous problem, non-naturalists, too, can rely on the very same idea to respond to the pressing metasemantic challenges that they face concerning reference.

Realist ethical naturalism for ethical non-naturalists

It is common in metaethics today to draw a distinction between “naturalist” and “non-naturalist” versions of moral realism, where the former view maintains that moral properties are natural properties, while the latter view maintains that they are non-natural properties instead. The nature of the disagreement here can be understood in different ways, but the most common way is to understand it as a metaphysical disagreement. In particular, the disagreement here is about the reducibility of moral properties, where the “naturalists” maintain that moral properties are in some way reducible to the lower-level natural properties on which they supervene, while the “non-naturalists” maintain that moral properties are sui generis and robustly irreducible. In this paper I present a novel version of realist ethical naturalism—a view that I call Emergentist Ethical Naturalism—that reveals this common way of understanding the distinction between naturalism and non-naturalism to be flawed by combining a commitment to ethical naturalism with a commitment to the sui generis and robustly irreducible nature of moral properties that typically defines non-naturalism. Then, after presenting the theory and addressing a few worries that one might have about it, I show how it offers some novel, emergence-based responses to the various supervenience challenges that plague moral realism and thereby gives the ethical naturalist a robustly non-reductive option for dealing with these challenges.

D-Ribonolactone, A Versatile Synthetic Precursor of Biologically Relevant Scaffolds

D-Ribonolactone is a carbohydrate derivative of the aldonolactone family which serves as a versatile chiral pool for the total synthesis of natural products such as malayamycin, varitriol, mannostatin, shikimic acid, herbarumins, neplanocins, and many others. Also, the preparation of new C-nucleosides starting from D-ribonolactone has attracted the attention of several groups in the past decade, since this class of molecules is much less amenable to enzymatic and acid-catalyzed hydrolysis than natural and synthetic N-nucleosides. In addition, the extension of the genetic alphabet could produce new combinations of three-letter codons, potentially generating proteins containing nonbiogenic amino acids, resulting in non-natural properties. This review addresses recent methodologies (published in the past two decades) for the preparation of D-ribonolactone and its analogues, as well as their use as building blocks for the synthesis of naturally occurring compounds and biologically relevant entities in the fields of medicinal chemistry and chemical biology. Keywords: D-Ribonolactone, C-nucleosides, Heterocycle, Synthesis, Medicinal Chemistry.

Naturalness in Context

According to proponents of one influential account of metaphysical naturalness, properties fall along a spectrum from perfectly natural to highly non-natural. The perfectly natural end of the spectrum is occupied by properties that appear in the laws of nature, account for resemblance and causal powers, and ground other properties, whereas the highly non-natural properties at the spectrum’s other end are not like this at all. However, there is another phenomenon that looks very much like metaphysical naturalness but is context-dependent. I call this phenomenon context-dependent naturalness. In this paper I describe two cases in which inappropriate use is made of metaphysical naturalness and argue that in such cases, the context-dependent importance of certain properties has been confused for the context-independent importance of those properties. I argue that in order to avoid such problems we should embrace context-dependent naturalness.

Anthropology and the non-natural properties of human nature: relax and enjoy them

Anthropology and the non-natural properties of human nature: relax and enjoy them

Chomsky, London and Lewis

This article suggests that Chomsky’s notorious ‘London’ argument against semantics looks much more plausible that it is usually interpreted as being when seen in the light of something apparently remote from its concerns, viz., David Lewis’s distinction between natural and non-natural properties.

On Matrix Rigidity and Locally Self-correctable Codes

e describe a new approach for the problem of finding {\rm rigid} matrices, as posed by Valiant \cite{Val77}, by connecting it to the, seemingly unrelated, problem of proving lower bounds for linear locally self-correctable codes. This approach, if successful, could lead to a non-natural property (in the sense of Razborov and Rudich \cite{RR97}) implying super-linear lower bounds for linear functions in the model of logarithmic-depth arithmetic circuits. Our results are based on a lemma saying that, if the generating matrix of a locally decodable code is {\bf not} rigid, then it defines a locally self-correctable code with rate close to one. Thus, showing that such codes cannot exist will prove that the generating matrix of {\em any} locally decodable code (and in particular Reed Muller codes) is rigid.

NOT ENOUGH THERE THERE EVIDENCE, REASONS, AND LANGUAGE INDEPENDENCE

• The trouble caused by language dependence is not confined to formal analyses of evidential support; language dependence concerns apply to any story about how we should draw conclusions from evidence. • This is because language dependence reveals a deep problem: evidential propositions do not possess enough information to substantively favor some conclusions over others. • Introducing a distinction between natural and nonnatural properties does not alleviate this problem. • The problem is not equally a problem for everyone—it makes some views of evidential favoring much harder to maintain than others.

Yes to Realism! No to Non-naturalism!

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

Naturalism and the New Moral Intuitionism

The aim of this paper is to defend moral intuitionism, in its new formulations, against the criticism that there is something objectionably non-natural about its conception of moral properties. The force of this complaint depends crucially on what it means to be a non-natural property. I consider a number of ways of drawing the natural/non-natural distinction and argue that, once the notion of 'non-natural property' is sufficiently clarified, it fails to figure in a compelling argument against moral intuitionism.