Representing ethical reality: a guide for worldly non-naturalists

Abstract

Ethical 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.

Keywords:

• Ethical realism
• non-naturalism
• metaethics
• representation
• evaluation
• normativity

Notes

1. This contrasts with ‘quietist’ or non-metaphysical cognitive non-naturalist views according to which non-natural ethics facts and properties stand outside of the world, on the model of logical or mathematical abstractions having no metaphysical grounding in or implications for what the world contains. Derek Parfit, for example, denies that normative properties and facts are part of (or are grounded in) reality or the fabric of the world, as they exist only in a ‘non-ontological sense’ (Parfit 2011). Cf. also T.M. Scanlon (2014) who, while not denying the ontological import of normative claims, restricts any such import to a domain-specific ontology such that the ontological commitments of normative claims have no more to do with what the world contains, in the usual sense, than do the commitments of mathematical or logical claims. In contrast, I defend a worldly, metaphysically committed non-naturalist view in FitzPatrick (2008) and something substantively similar to this but conceived as a form of expansive naturalism in FitzPatrick (2016).

2. For critical discussion of Moore’s arguments see Brink (2001) and Sturgeon (2003). I explore some of the insights that are nonetheless to be found in Moore’s discussion, and how they might be developed into more successful challenges to familiar forms of naturalism, in FitzPatrick (forthcoming).

3. The last three paragraphs and parts of what follows in this section draw from FitzPatrick (forthcoming).

4. This last part is meant to be neutral as between value-based accounts of reasons and buck-passing accounts of goodness in terms of reasons, though I favor the former. The crucial point here is that goodness in the ethical sphere is reason-involving in this way (cf. Parfit 2011).

5. Similarly, contra Gibbard (2006), the hedonist should not claim that the property of being pleasant is just identical to the property of being what one ought to do. These are distinct properties even if it is true that all and only pleasant things are things that ought to be done. See Dancy (2004, 2006) and FitzPatrick (2011, 16–27) for critique of this and related conflations of resultant normative properties with resultance base properties, by both Gibbard and Jackson.

6. We can, of course, refer to such properties without using evaluative or normative concepts, as by referring to goodness using the description ‘Moore’s favorite property’. The point is that we cannot provide any adequate characterization or account of the property except through employing such concepts.

7. There are of course natural facts about the various effects of living according to one set of standards or another, or about natural inclinations we may or may not have toward one set or another, either as we are or with certain (naturalistically specifiable) idealizations of our psychologies. But there are reasons to doubt that any such plainly natural facts can succeed in capturing the robust normative facts in question, or so non-naturalists believe.

8. For present purposes I will just grant this assumption. In FitzPatrick (2016), however, I question whether naturalism should necessarily be understood to exclude irreducibly evaluative or normative properties and facts from the natural world. Perhaps there can be a more expansive form of ethical naturalism that accommodates irreducibly evaluative or normative properties and facts within an enriched naturalist ontology. If such a view is viable, everything the non-naturalist really wants can be captured within a naturalist picture after all and there would be no further reason to posit non-natural properties. I shall set this possibility aside here, however, and continue linking metaphysically irreducible value and normativity with non-naturalism.

9. ‘Exnat’ is Gibbard’s (2003, 16) made-up term for a dummy non-natural property about which we are told nothing except that it is non-natural, which unsurprisingly then seems entirely superfluous when thinking about ethical evaluation: how could it possibly help, ethically speaking, to be told that an act has this obscure property on top of the familiar sorts of natural with which we are concerned in ethical evaluation? Gibbard (2006, 328–330) gives a caricature of non-naturalism very similar to Jackson’s in imagining a non-naturalist hedonist claiming (implausibly) that the fact that eating chocolate is pleasant (and otherwise harmless) is not enough to justify it without adding some strange non-natural property (like exnat) to the mix.

10. Perhaps part of Jackson’s point in the earlier quote is that such natural facts as that an action will kill many and save none can plausibly be taken directly to ground a reason to avoid the action, without an appeal to wrongness as an intermediary that really directly grounds the reason and is held by some to be non-natural. But that would still miss the point. Even if we allow that the natural facts directly ground the reason to avoid the action as well as the wrongness of the action (though on any plausible view the wrong-makingness and reason-groundingness of the facts in question here will still be intimately related), the non-naturalist’s claim is just that this normative metafact – the fact that these natural facts do ground such a reason – cannot be cashed out in a purely naturalistic way. We are not positing some superfluous additional property. Thanks to Evan Tiffany for helpful discussion here.

11. I explain why I consider this ‘settling’ for less than we might have wanted in FitzPatrick (2008, 189, fn. 2; 2011, 26–27; and 2014, 575–578). That said, it would go too far to claim that having categorical reason-giving force is a conceptually ‘non-negotiable’ feature of morality, as Richard Joyce (2001) holds as part of an argument for error theory. While I agree that it is an important feature to try to preserve in our theorizing – which is precisely what leads some of us to embrace non-naturalism – and that it would be a significant loss to settle for something less, it is just not plausible to suppose that the many theorists who have embraced ethical realism without robust categoricity (holding instead neo-Humean, instrumentalist views of practical reasons, for example) have simply changed the subject and are failing literally to address morality at all – like someone who goes on talking of phlogiston after conceding that she is not speaking about any substance released during combustion (where we would say that she is not then really talking about phlogiston at all). Their accounts of morality may be somewhat deflationary (which is precisely why I resist them), but they are not simply about another topic. Thanks to Matt Bedke for helpful discussion on this topic.

12. See the contribution to this volume from Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons, ‘Gripped by Authority’ (forthcoming). I explain why I think it is important to try to hold out for a realist account of objectivity and categoricity, as against non-realist expressivist views, in FitzPatrick (2011). But again, if it were the only alternative to moral nihilism it might well be a preferable option for a metaphysically disillusioned non-naturalist.

13. I am grateful to Matt Bedke, Stefan Sciaraffa, Evan Tiffany, and participants in the Representation and Evaluation conference in Vancouver, 2017, for very helpful comments.