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Title: Tristram McPherson
Ethical non-naturalism and the metaphysics of supervenience
Ethical non-naturalism and the metaphysics of supervenience
Abstract for University of Sydney
Tristram McPherson
University of Minnesota Duluth
[email protected]
It is widely accepted that the ethical supervenes on the natural, where
this is roughly the claim that it is impossible for two circumstances to be
identical in all natural respects, but different in their ethical respects.
This has traditionally been argued to pose a problem for ethical
non-naturalism, which claims that ethical properties are fundamentally
different in kind from natural properties. This core non-naturalist claim
makes the supervenience of the ethical appear to be a puzzlingly brute
metaphysically necessary connection between distinct classes of properties.
Existing accounts of this problem have recently been challenged in three
important ways. This paper develops and defends an entirely metaphysical
characterization of the supervenience problem in light of these challenges.
The first challenge (recently pressed by Nicholas Sturgeon) argues that
supervenience theses are theoretically parochial, and hence cannot play the
dialectical role required by the traditional argument. In response, I offer
a formulation of supervenience that I claim deserves to count as
dialectical common ground. Roughly, I propose that no metaphysically
possible world that is identical to a second world in all base respects can
be different from the second world in its ethical respects, where any
property counts as a base property, unless it is a sui generis ethical
property. I argue that this thesis should be accepted by both naturalistic
and non-naturalistic realists. I then rebut attempts by Phillip
Stratton-lake and Brad Hooker and by William Fitzpatrick to undercut the
supervenience problem by adding additional structure to the core
non-naturalist view. I argue that these proposals turn out either to simply
provide a way of characterizing the supervenience burden, or relocate it. I
claim that these cases offer general reasons to think that no such
structural augmentation can undercut the burden. Non-naturalists such as
Shafer-Landau and Ralph Wedgwood have recently argued for analogies between
their views and non-reductive physicalism in the philosophy of mind. In the
last part of the paper, I examine the attempt to use non-reductive
physicalism as a model of an unmysterious explanation of necessary
connection between distinct properties. I argue that the non-reductive
naturalist explains the necessary connection by way of a functionalist
account of mental properties that makes them relevantly continuous with
physical properties. I then show that, because non-naturalists
characteristically resist such continuity between ethical and natural
properties, they cannot easily adopt the non-reductivist’s strategy.
Together, these arguments provide strong reasons for thinking that the
non-naturalist cannot escape the improved version of the supervenience
problem.
When: Wed Aug 4 3:30pm – 5:39pm Eastern Time - Melbourne, Sydney
Calendar: Seminars
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* [email protected] - creator
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