Table Of ContentP R A C T I C A L P H I L O S O P H Y
Herausgegeben von / Edited by
Heinrich Ganthaler • Neil Roughley
Peter Schaber • Herlinde Pauer-Studer
Band 5 / Volume 5
Peter Schaber (Ed.)
Normativity and Naturalism
ont os
verlag
.
Frankfurt Lancaster
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P P
RACTICAL HILOSOPHY
Edited by
Heinrich Ganthaler • Neil Roughley
Herlinde Pauer-Studer • Peter Schaber
The aim of the series is to publish high-quality work that deals
with questions in practical philosophy from a broadly analytic
perspective. These include questions in meta-ethics, normative
ethics and "applied" ethics, as well as in political philosophy,
philosophy of law and the philosophy of action. Through the
publication of work in both German and English the series aims
to facilitate discussion between English- and German-speaking
practical philosophers.
In september 2003 several philosophers met at the ethics centre of the
University of Zurich to discuss the nature of normativity. This collection
contains the papers presented at the conference "Naturalism and
Normativity". Representing a wide range of metaethical views, the authors
develop different accounts of normativity and its relation to the natural
world.
I would like to thank the Arnold Corti-Stamm-Stiftung for its financial
support.
Zurich, July 2004 Peter Schaber
Contents
DAVID COPP
Moral Naturalism and Three Grades of Normativity 7
NEIL ROUGHLEY
Naturalism and Expressivism
On the “Natural” Stuff of Moral Normativity
and Problems with its “Naturalisation” 47
NORBERT ANWANDER
Normative Facts: Metaphysical not Conceptual 87
PETER SCHABER
Good and Right as Non-Natural Properties 105
THOMAS SCHMIDT
Moral Values and the Fabric of the World.
A Reconsideration of Mackie’s Arguments
against Moral Realism 121
THEO VAN WILLIGENBURG
Conceptual Analysis, Normativity and the Empirical 135
ULVI DOGUOGLU
Naturalism and Rule-Following Practices:
Finding Fault with Kripke’s Notion of Objectivity 151
List of Contributors 175
Name Index 176
Subject Index 178
David Copp
Moral Naturalism and Three Grades of Normativity
Is moral naturalism ruled out by the fact that morality is normative? I want
to consider this question in a systematic way, explaining the central thesis
of moral naturalism as I understand it, and then clarifying the idea of nor-
mativity. The chief point that I want to make is that the issue raised by this
question is much more complex than it might seem to be, mainly because of
complexity in what philosophers have in mind when they speak of moral-
ity as “normative”. There are several dimensions to the complexity, but the
dimension I will stress is that philosophers disagree about what we might
call the “stringency” of moral normativity. I will distinguish three “grades
of normativity”. I will investigate, for each of these grades, the plausibil-
ity of the idea that morality has that grade of normativity, and the viability
of naturalistic accounts of it. My conclusion will be tentative, but it will be
optimistic for moral naturalism.
Moral naturalism holds that in thinking of things as morally right or wrong,
good or bad, we ascribe moral properties to these things – properties such
as moral rightness and wrongness, goodness and evil. It holds that there are
such properties, and it adds that these properties are ordinary garden-variety
natural properties – properties that have the same basic metaphysical and
epistemological status as the properties a tree can have of being deciduous,
and the property a piece of paper can have of being an Australian twenty
dollar bill. I will have more to say about this in what follows. The question
is whether moral naturalism can accommodate the normativity of morality.
This is basically the question whether it can account for the fact that morality
is, in a characteristic way, action-guiding and choice-guiding. Moral thought
and discourse concern how we are to act, what we are to choose, and how we
are to live; they involve us in evaluating, prescribing, and recommending. I
use the term “normative” to speak of this phenomenon.1
1 I want to avoid the term “prescriptive” because it has been given a technical meaning
by Hare (1952).
8 David Copp
Unfortunately, the precise nature of the phenomenon, and how we might
account for it, are both unclear and contested. Anti-naturalists tend to view
naturalist proposals as inadequate, mainly, I think, because they view them
as too weak to account for the importance of morality, especially its im-
portance to rational decision-making and action. I therefore attempt in this
paper to distinguish different proposals about what the normativity of moral-
ity might consist in. These are the three “grades of normativity” that I men-
tioned, but one might think that the grades can be subdivided, or one might
think there are additional grades. There is also room to disagree about how
best to understand each of the grades that I propose. Most important, there
is no agreement that morality has all three grades of normativity. Hence, to
show that moral naturalism cannot accommodate the fact that morality is
normative, one would have to specify which grade of normativity is at issue,
to argue that morality does have that grade of normativity, and then to argue
that moral naturalism cannot account for this.
I begin the paper with an attempt to motivate the view that moral
naturalism cannot account for normativity. We obviously cannot make genu-
ine progress, however, unless we have a clear grasp of what is meant both
by “moral naturalism” and by “normativity”, so this is where I then turn. In
the second section of the paper, I provide a brief explication of moral natu-
ralism. In the third section, I provide an initial, pre-theoretical explication
of the three grades of normativity, which I call generic, motivational, and
authoritative normativity. In the rest of the paper, I discuss the two central
questions about each of the grades: Does morality have that grade of norma-
tivity? And can naturalism account for it? I think that morality does possess
generic normativity, which is the weakest grade of normativity. But I argue
that it is not plausible that morality has either motivational or authoritative
normativity. If I am correct, then even if for some reason there cannot be
naturalistic accounts of motivational or authoritative normativity, this would
not argue against naturalism. I claim, nevertheless, that it is possible to pro-
vide naturalistic accounts of all three grades of normativity. In short, my
conclusion will be optimistic for moral naturalism. At the very least, I aim
to show the difficulties standing in the way of an argument from normativity
against naturalism.
