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Ethical Naturalism Ethical Naturalism University Press Scholarship Online Oxford Scholarship Online The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory David Copp Print publication date: 2005 Print ISBN-13: 9780195147797 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: February 2006 DOI: 10.1093/0195147790.001.0001 Ethical Naturalism Nicholas L. Sturgeon (Contributor Webpage) , David Copp DOI:10.1093/0195147790.003.0004 Abstract and Keywords Ethical naturalism holds that ethical facts about such matters as good and bad, right and wrong, are part of a purely natural world — the world studied by the sciences. It is supported by the apparent reasonableness of many moral explanations. It has been thought to face an epistemological challenge because of the existence of an “is- ought gap”; it also faces metaphysical objections from philosophers who hold that ethical facts would have to be supernatural or “nonnatural,” sometimes on the grounds that ethical thought has a practical role that no thought about purely natural facts could have. Its defenders have argued resourcefully against these challenges. Keywords: ethical naturalism, moral explanations, is-ought gap, supernatural ethical facts, nonnatural ethical facts Page 1 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 16 October 2017 Ethical Naturalism The term “ethical naturalism” has been used by philosophers as a name for a number of quite different views, only a few of which are the topic of this essay. Philosophers writing about ethics standardly draw a distinction between first-order and second-order questions. First-order questions are about which actions are right or wrong, which actions, character traits, and institutions good or bad, and the like. Second-order questions are about the status of the first-order questions: what their subject matter is, whether they have objective answers, what kind of evidence is relevant in addressing them. Most of the doctrines called “naturalism,” including the ones on which I shall focus, fall in the second of these categories, though not all do. To begin with several that I shall identify only to put aside, the ancient sophists initiated a debate about whether morality exists by nature or by convention, and the term “naturalism” can of course be used for view that the correct answer is “by nature.” Although this dispute is hard to pin down, it is presumably a second-order one. A related view —a first-order doctrine, and perhaps the one introductory students most often think of when introduced to the term—is that moral goodness or rightness consists in following nature, or in acting according to nature. This rather vague thesis, too, is one with a long philosophical pedigree. As Joseph Butler noted, it could mean, a bit more precisely, either that virtuous actions are ones that conform (in some sense to be explained) to the nature of things, or that they are the ones that conform more specifically to human nature. The Stoics held both versions of this view; Butler followed Aristotle in emphasizing a view of the latter sort (Butler, 1900, Preface and Sermons 1–3). (p.92) 1. “Ethical Naturalism”: The Standard Definition For the last century of philosophical discussion, however, the term has most often been used to name a different doctrine, a second-order one, addressing a different issue. That issue is whether values and obligations, especially moral values and moral obligations, fit into a scientifically based, naturalistic view of the world. Ethical naturalism is understood as the view that they do. It holds, more specifically, (a) that such ethical properties as the goodness of persons, character traits, and other things, and such as the rightness or wrongness of actions, are natural properties of the same general sort as properties investigated by the sciences, and (b) that they are to be investigated in the same general way that we investigate those properties. It should be clear even from this preliminary statement of the doctrine that understanding it will depend heavily on understanding just what is to count as a naturalistic view of the world, or as a natural property, or as the appropriate way to investigate natural properties. Page 2 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 16 October 2017 Ethical Naturalism It turns out, in fact, that in the debate about ethical naturalism these key notions have been understood in different ways. A naturalistic worldview, however, is virtually always understood to be one that at the very least rejects belief in the supernatural, so part of the issue under debate is what place there is for moral values and obligations in a world without a God or gods and without supernatural commands or sanctions. It of course continues to be a hotly debated issue in philosophy whether any such naturalistic metaphysical picture is correct. Whether ethical naturalism is a viable position can be of interest, however, even to someone who rejects a naturalistic metaphysical view. Theists, for example, sometimes object that an atheistic picture of the world leaves no place for morality and for moral knowledge; an ethical naturalist will reply that since moral facts are purely natural facts of the sort that can exist whether or not there is a God, and that can be known by unproblematic natural means, this objection is mistaken. So a theist who wants to assess this reply will have an interest in whether ethical naturalism is correct. It is probably true, however, that debates about ethical naturalism draw even more of their interest from the fact that many educated people, including many academic philosophers, do find a naturalistic metaphysics increasingly plausible in light of the impressive advances of the natural sciences in the last several centuries. We can see why ethical naturalism, on this standard account of it, is different from the older doctrines I have mentioned. Some forms of ethical relativism hold that ethical right and wrong are fixed by nothing but social conventions; but since facts about social conventions are natural facts, these forms of relativism are usually considered naturalistic theories, in the standard sense of the term, even though they would fall on the “convention” side of the older convention-versus- (p.93) nature debate. On the other hand, whether the view that morality exists “by nature” counts as a naturalistic view in this standard sense depends on the details. Some versions of the view that right actions are those that follow the nature of things, for example, construe the nature of things theologically, and so would not count. In addition, there are theories of ethics that do address the question of whether moral goods and obligations fit into a naturalistic worldview, and do so from a naturalistic perspective, but are not versions of what I am calling ethical naturalism. J. L. Mackie has argued that real ethical facts or properties—what he calls “objective values”—could not be natural, and has rejected them on that ground (1977, ch. 1). This is a view about ethics based on a naturalistic view in philosophy, but it is not ethical naturalism as the term is standardly defined. The same might be said about ethical noncognitivism, though Page 3 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 16 October 2017 Ethical Naturalism the case is in one respect a bit trickier. Noncognitivism comes in a variety of versions; but in its original and standard formulation, it holds, with Mackie, that there are no moral facts—and a fortiori no natural moral facts—but adds that it was never the function of ethical discourse to attempt to state such facts in any case. The primary function of first-order ethical discourse, of arguments about better and worse, right and wrong, is instead said to consist in the expression of favorable and unfavorable attitudes toward things, or of prescriptions or of action-guides of some kind: in any case, not in the expression of beliefs assessable as true or false. For reasons I shall come to, some standard arguments for noncognitivism do not tie it to a naturalistic metaphysics: they present it, at least officially, as a view that should be equally plausible whether or not there is a God or a supernatural realm. I believe that it is safe to say, however, that virtually all of the philosophers who have defended this view have nevertheless been attracted to it largely because it promises plausibly to fit ethical discourse (though not, of course, ethical facts) into a naturalistic metaphysics. When it is held in this manner, then it is like Mackie's view in being held on the basis of a naturalistic worldview; but (whether it is held for that reason or any other) it is also like Mackie's view in not being a version of ethical naturalism.1 2. Moore's Influence I have defined ethical naturalism primarily as a metaphysical doctrine (about what kind of facts moral facts are), though with an unsurprising epistemological corollary (that since moral facts are natural facts, we can know about them pretty much as we know about other natural facts).
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