tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post2384405958615816270..comments2023-10-29T10:32:36.914-04:00Comments on Philosophy, et cetera: Normative vs Metaethical (constitutive) Wrong-makingRichard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-43429965991710581782015-12-23T15:58:11.366-05:002015-12-23T15:58:11.366-05:00Ah, yes, I wasn't thinking of expressivism! D...Ah, yes, I wasn't thinking of expressivism! Don't really have any argument against that view; just find it unsatisfying, personally.Richard Y Chappellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-19702691394674750142015-12-23T14:39:37.977-05:002015-12-23T14:39:37.977-05:00Thanks Richard, this is helpful, I'm having a ...Thanks Richard, this is helpful, I'm having a look at those other posts, and associated comments. Two quick points:<br /><br />One way of hearing the Erdur argument is as showing that we shouldn't be *looking* for a *metaphysical* distinction between normatively significant properties and normatively insignificant ones, precisely because metaphysics doesn't help with normative explanation (and the real question is why we should care about one property more than the other, which is a normative question). And insofar as all we can say (if we accept brutalism) is, "The wrongness of the act consists in the act's possessing the property of being wrong", it isn't clear to me why anything metaphysical is going on here - the trivial thesis here tells us nothing about the *nature* of the property of being wrong.<br /><br />On metaethical naturalism and a posteriori identity, I think I agree with everything you say at least in the first post *as a critique of Boyd-style Cornell realism*. That is, I agree that something like the Moral Twin Earth objection is decisive against that view. But Cornell realism really has two components: a metaphysical commitment to moral properties being natural properties, and a meta-semantic commitment to moral terms/concepts being like natural kind terms/concepts. As I see it, the Moral Twin Earth objection only targets the meta-semantic component. But expressivists like Gibbard (and me) can accept the metaphysical thesis without accepting that meta-semantics. As an expressivist I locate the intrinsic prescriptivity of wrongness in the concept, so I hold with the naturalist that there is no metaphysical distinction between wrongness and natural properties. (I think this goes back to the different ways Mackie and Hare understood objective prescriptivity.)Daniel Elsteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14921339425026901790noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-29041778701169599362015-12-23T13:51:45.399-05:002015-12-23T13:51:45.399-05:00Hi Daniel, I think the conceptual distinction suff...Hi Daniel, I think the conceptual distinction suffices to defang these arguments, because it shows that the non-naturalist (or realist more broadly) isn't <i>committed</i> to treating normative properties as more important than "pain and suffering and loss", as Erdur puts it. Indeed, a non-naturalist <i>can't</i> collapse the distinction, so any argument that <i>starts</i> from that premise is question-begging in the most blatant possible way, and so can't function as an <i>argument</i> against non-naturalism.<br /><br />(I do say more about Jackson's version of the "Ethical Idler" worry in my paper, which I think is an importantly different argument from the sort of <i>moral</i> objection discussed in this post. In response to a more distinctively <i>theoretical</i> worry about what the point of these further properties would be, I discuss the meta-ethical -- as opposed to normative -- role that they play. Insofar as we want to know what <i>metaphysically</i> distinguishes a normatively significant property like <i>painfulness</i> from a normatively inert property like <i>liquidity</i>, I don't think it helps much to say that painfulness is self-identical. Liquidity is self-identical too, after all. So is happiness, for that matter. There's no metaphysical difference between naturalism and nihilism; the difference between the two views is merely semantic.)<br /><br />For more on the broader issue of why a posteriori identities are no help to metaethical naturalists, see my old post '<a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2006/04/against-synthetic-ethical-naturalism.html" rel="nofollow">Against Synthetic Ethical Naturalism</a>' (funnily, I seem to have been sympathetic to <i>analytical</i> naturalism at the time of writing!) -- or, more recently, '<a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2015/02/information-and-parfits-fact-stating.html" rel="nofollow">Information and Parfit's Fact-Stating Argument</a>'.Richard Y Chappellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-36807156842402825782015-12-23T12:50:43.627-05:002015-12-23T12:50:43.627-05:00Hi Richard, this is a nice post and I agree with a...Hi Richard, this is a nice post and I agree with a lot of it. I wonder though whether the distinction you rely on between what it is for an action to be wrong and what it takes for an action to be wrong is accepted by your opponents. Maybe they think that there is no more to what it is for an action to be wrong than that it has what it takes. Insofar as we can codify wrongness in naturalistic terms (with our normative theory of wrong-making features) we have thereby characterised some natural property - and, the naturalist says, that is the property of being wrong.<br /><br />Now I take it that in the paper you have a response to this line, which is Parfit's idea that we need to accommodate normative facts of the form, "this natural fact - the possession of the aforementioned natural property - is a normatively important one". But the naturalist has a good reply to this argument: a posteriori identity claims can be informative. It is a fact, and informative, that Hesperus = Phosphorus, but this just requires a conceptual distinction rather than a metaphysical one. So there's nothing obviously weird about communicating that the natural property picked out by the correct normative theory is normatively significant just by saying that it is identical to the property of being wrong; and of course that doesn't require the positing of any non-natural properties. So the "Ethical Idlers" argument does seem convincing to me overall, absent some compelling reason to distinguish the "what it is" from the "what it takes" in this case.Daniel Elsteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14921339425026901790noreply@blogger.com