tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post114363468283234311..comments2023-10-29T10:32:36.914-04:00Comments on Philosophy, et cetera: Against Synthetic Ethical NaturalismRichard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-1145174376130652512006-04-16T03:59:00.000-04:002006-04-16T03:59:00.000-04:00Well, sometimes you should do minor harms to preve...Well, sometimes you should do minor harms to prevent much greater ones, of course. There are few straightforward ethical imperatives that apply in all situations. But we can easily obtain necessary truths through conditionalization. (Here's where my argument comes in, which you haven't addressed at all! You merely <I>assert</I> "Nothing apriori or analytic about it." Where's your argument?)<BR/><BR/>That is, we can get a raft of claims of the form (C) "If in circumstance X, then action A is the right thing to do." So long as enough descriptive information is built into X (it might completely specify all natural facts about the world, including potential consequences of different actions, etc.) then the whole conditional (C) is a necessary truth. (This follows from the fact of moral supervenience, and our Realist supposition that there's some act A which is the right thing to do in circumstance X.) That is, C is true in all possible worlds, considered counterfactually. But if an ethical claim is true of a world considered as counterfactual, it is also true of that world considered as actual. So (C) is true of all possible worlds considered as actual. So it is a priori. QED.<BR/><BR/>One can dispute the realist premise, of course. But that's a whole 'nother debate. For now my point is simply that if we are moral realists at all, then we should be analytical naturalists about it.<BR/><BR/>As for the crucial connection between naturalism and analyticity, see the paper by Dave Chalmers and Frank Jackson on <A HREF="http://consc.net/papers/analysis.html" REL="nofollow">Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation</A>. (They argue there for "an a priori entailment from microphysical truths to ordinary macroscopic truths". I might blog more on this later.)Richard Y Chappellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-1145137249926641432006-04-15T17:40:00.000-04:002006-04-15T17:40:00.000-04:00I don't know of an apriori or analytic naturalist ...I don't know of an apriori or analytic naturalist ethical proposition, perhaps because "naturalism" and "analytic" rarely, if ever, cross meaningful paths. <BR/><BR/>Probably the strongest, uncontroversial ethical claim one can make is "Do No Harm." Nothing apriori or analytic about it.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com