Philosophy 361		Ethics		Darwall		Fall 1997

META-ETHICS I:  NATURALISM

I  Recall the distinction made in the first lecture between metaethics and normative 
ethics.  Roughly:  Normative ethics concerns questions like:  What is good?  What is 
right?  What is the test of right and wrong?  Metaethics concerns philosophical issues 
about ethics. What is goodness or value? 

II  We can put one basic metaphysical issues in the form of a dilemma.

	A.  From the inside, ethical convictions purport to be objective. Compare, for 
example, the belief that it is wrong to cause gratuitous harm to innocents, with a 
preference for a flavor of ice cream.  These seem different.  When people disagree 
about the latter, they can see this as disagreement in taste, but not in the former case.  
If someone were to judge that there is nothing wrong in harming innocents, we are 
likely to think this judgment is mistaken.  
	Note that this doesn't mean that we think ourselves infallible.  To the 
contrary.  The issue of fallibility doesn't even arise in matters of brute difference of 
taste.  It is because our ethical judgments purport to be true that we can take seriously 
the possibility that we are mistaken.  
	B.  On the other hand, it can be hard to see what could make ethical beliefs 
true or false, what their truth or falsity could consist in.  Harman raises this problem 
in the following way.

	Harman's Problem.  In science, we confirm theories by seeing whether their 
predictions correspond to experience.  If we observe what the theory predicts, we take 
this as evidence for the theory.  
	This might already seem a contrast with ethics.  What functions as 
observations in ethics?  Why not intuitive ethical convictions?
	We might think that this differs from science because intuitive ethical 
judgments are already "infected" with theory.  But neither is it the case in science that 
observations are "theory neutral."
	The real probem, Harman says, is that there is a further difference.  In science 
we take not just what we observe, but also our observing it, to be explained by the 
theory, and this gives us reason to take our observation as evidence for the truth of 
the theory.  Harman's challenge:  nothing like this is true in ethics.
  
	Examples

III  Fundamental Dilemma of Metaethics:  Either ethical convictions can be true 
(as they seem from the inside) or they cannot be.  If they can, what can make them 
true?  In what does their truth consist?  If they cannot be, then why do we think, feel, 
and talk as though they can?


IV 	NATURALISM.  One response to these issues is naturalism.  The ethical 
naturalist holds that ethical propositions can indeed be true, and that is because ethical 
properties are themselves really natural properties.   What properties are natural 
properties?  Most uncontroversially, any that we can discover by empirical 
investigation.
	There are basically two kinds of naturalist position:  reductive naturalism and 
nonreductive naturalism.  
	Reductive naturalism holds that ethical properties are identical to properties 
that can be identified with the vocabulary of the empirical sciences or empircal "folk 
theory".  For example, the position that value is the property of being desired. Would 
be a form of reductive naturalism.
	Nonreductive naturalism holds that ethical properties are natural, even though 
they can't be "reduced" to those identifiable through other such vocabularies.  It may 
be that ethical properties can only be referred to be ethical terms, but nonetheless be 
true that ethical properties are natural properties.
Question:  Is Mill a naturalist?  If so, what sort is he?

	Faced with Harman's contrast above, one tack open to the naturalist is to hold 
that value and morality are real aspects of the world that really do explain things.  
Thus, the naturalist might say, our ethical convictions may indeed be explained
by the (natural) ethical facts.  The challenge is to make this position plausible.

V  A problem for naturalism advanced by G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903):.  
Take any natural property you please--e.g., being desired or being pleasant.  It would 
seem that there could still be a dispute between two individuals who agree that a thing 
has that property, but disagree about whether it is good.  What is this dispute about?  
If it is really about whether the thing is good, then goodness apparently cannot be the 
same as the natural property we initially took, since there is no dispute about whether 
the thing has that property.  So, the arugment concludes, ethical naturalism is false.  
Goodness is not any aspect of nature.  [n.b. if this argument works, it presumably 
also works against the idea that goodness is a supernatural property.]

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Text Analysis Project Assignment for 10/1:  Harman, NM, pp. 41-46.
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