RAILTON’S REDUCTIVE MORAL REALISM A thesis submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts By Garrett Rauckhorst May 2013 Thesis written by Garrett Rauckhorst B.A., Hiram College, 2007 M.A., Kent State University, 2013 Approved by Michael Byron_______________________________, Advisor David Odell-Scott____________________________, Chair, Department of Philosophy Raymond Craig______________________________, Assoc. Dean, College of Arts and Sciences ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................................ v CHAPTER 0.INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................... 1 0.1 Metaethics ................................................................................................................... 1 0.2 The Outline .................................................................................................................. 2 0.3 Purpose ....................................................................................................................... 3 1. RAILTON’S REDUCTIVE MORAL REALISM ............................................................................ 5 1.1 The Fact/Value Distinction ........................................................................................... 5 1.1.1 The Argument from Rational Determinability ............................................................ 6 1.1.2 The Argument from Internalism ................................................................................ 7 1.1.3 The Argument from Ontological Queerness .............................................................. 9 1.2 Railton’s Positive Account of Non-moral Value ............................................................ 11 1.3 Explanatory Uses of Non-moral Value ......................................................................... 14 1.4 Intuitive Appeal ............................................................................................................ 15 1.5 Normative Realism ...................................................................................................... 16 1.6 Moral Value ................................................................................................................. 17 1.7 Explanatory Uses of Moral Value ................................................................................. 19 1.8 Moral Realism and the Argument from Relativity ......................................................... 23 1.9 Moral Value, Rationality, and Normativity .................................................................... 24 1.10 Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 25 2. DEREK PARFIT ........................................................................................................................ 27 2.1 Parfit’s Metaphysical and Epistemological Justification ................................................ 28 2.1.1 Metaphysical Justification ......................................................................................... 28 2.1.2 Epistemological Justification ..................................................................................... 31 2.2 The Smoker and Agony ............................................................................................... 40 2.3 The Argument from the Source of Reasons ................................................................. 45 2.4 Hard Naturalism ........................................................................................................... 48 2.5 Naturalism and the Normativity Objection .................................................................... 55 2.6 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 60 3. CONNIE ROSATI ...................................................................................................................... 61 3.1 Ideal Advisor and Normativity ...................................................................................... 62 3.2 Ideal Advisor and Full Information................................................................................ 64 3.3 Rosati’s Objection to Ideal Advisors and Normativity ................................................... 66 3.4 Rosati’s Conceptual Impossibility Objection to Ideal Advisor and Full Information ....... 71 3.5 Does Railton Meet the Internalist Requirement ............................................................ 74 iii 3.6 Railton and the Justificatory Requirement .................................................................... 77 3.6.1 Ideal Advisor’s Personality ........................................................................................ 78 3.6.2 Railton and the Fully Informed Person ...................................................................... 84 3.7 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 90 4. WHAT HAVE I DONE? ............................................................................................................. 91 4.1 Parfit ............................................................................................................................ 92 4.2 Rosati .......................................................................................................................... 94 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................... 97 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Michael Byron. He was hip to my many attempts at straw men, non-sequiturs, and equivocations. He was incredibly patient in tolerating my questionable mastery of English grammar. His metaethical insights were crucial in my attempt to write a cogent thesis. Any mistakes that I managed to slip by him are the fault of solely myself. Thank you. I would like to thank my readers: Dr. Frank Ryan, Dr. Kim Garchar, and Dr. Tammy Clewell. Thanks for reading my thesis thoroughly in the short period between its completion and my defense. Thanks for all of the amazing and insightful questions that were raised at the defense. I would like to thank Elaine Blum for helping me format the final version of this paper. Without her help this paper would never have been formatted correctly. Lastly, I would like to thank all of my friends and family for tolerating my neglect during my work on this thesis. Thank you especially my fiancée, Sarah Rhoades. v 0 INTRODUCTION 0.1 Metaethics The field of metaethics explores peculiar questions about moral philosophy. When I make a moral claim such as, “Murder is wrong,” what exactly am I claiming? This claim is a first-order ethical claim, which attempts to provide us with action guidance by telling us something about murder. Metaethics instead asks questions about first order ethical claims. What is the “wrongness” about which I speak? Am I claiming that murder is against the law, or that I do not like it, or that it is disdained by my culture, or am advising you against it? Conversely, I might be claiming that there are certain moral properties that exist in the world, and the murder has the property of being wrong. If this were the case, then what kind of strange thing would such a property be? There are many different views to these and many other questions in metaethics. Most of them go by fancy sounding names. Cognitivists believe that moral judgments such as, “Murder is wrong,” express facts about the world and are thus either true or false. Cognitivists disagree about whether these statements are ever true. Non-Cognitivists believe that moral judgments are an expression of a preference or an emotion or some other non-truth-apt state. Along similar lines Moral Realists believe that moral properties exist in the mind-independent world and that humans are somehow capable of interacting with them. Anti-realists disagree, believing instead that there are no mind-independent moral properties. There is some disagreement about which features constitute the metaethical divide between naturalism and non-naturalism. Naturalists, as I understand them, believe that 1 2 moral properties are exclusively natural properties. Non-Naturalists, as I understand them, believe that moral properties are not exclusively natural properties. Naturalists disagree about whether moral properties are fully reducible to natural properties or are utterly unique natural properties. Reductionists believe that they are fully reducible to other more mundane, but possibly complex properties of our natural world. Non-reductionists believe that moral properties are sui generis. Thus metaethics is the study of several different and difficult components or moral philosophy. Metaethics examines, inter alia, the semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology of regular first-order ethics. Semantics is the study of meaning. Metaethics examines what we mean or attempt to mean when making ethical claims. Metaphysics is the study of what there is and what these things are like. Metaethics examines whether moral properties exist, and if so what they consist in. Epistemology is the study of knowledge. Metaethics examines how we are able to know about moral properties, if they exist. 0.2 The Outline In this work I will be