Ethical Naturalism
Current Debates

Twelve new essays that demonstrate the challenges ethical naturalism poses to eliminativism and the most sophisticated versions of non-naturalism.

Susana Nuccetelli (Edited by), Gary Seay (Edited by)

9781107677777, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 19 September 2013

272 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.4 kg

'Nuccetelli and Seay's volume contributes to advancing the debates surrounding ethical naturalism in constructive and valuable ways.' Mauro Rossi, Dialectica

Ethical naturalism is narrowly construed as the doctrine that there are moral properties and facts, at least some of which are natural properties and facts. Perhaps owing to its having faced, early on, intuitively forceful objections by eliminativists and non-naturalists, ethical naturalism has only recently become a central player in the debates about the status of moral properties and facts which have occupied philosophers over the last century. It has now become a driving force in those debates, one with sufficient resources to challenge not only eliminativism, especially in its various non-cognitivist forms, but also the most sophisticated versions of non-naturalism. This volume brings together twelve new essays which make it clear that, in light of recent developments in analytic philosophy and the social sciences, there are novel grounds for reassessing the doctrines at stake in these debates.

Introduction
1. Naturalism in moral philosophy Gilbert Harman
2. Normativity and reasons: five arguments from Parfit against normative naturalism David Copp
3. Naturalism: feel the width Roger Crisp
4. On ethical naturalism and the philosophy of language Frank Jackson
5. Metaethical pluralism: how both moral naturalism and moral skepticism may be permissible positions Richard Joyce
6. Moral naturalism and categorical reasons Terence Cuneo
7. Does analytical moral naturalism rest on a mistake? Susana Nuccetelli and Gary Seay
8. Supervenience and the nature of normativity Michael Ridge
9. Can normativity be naturalized? Robert Audi
10. Ethical non-naturalism and experimental philosophy Robert Shaver
11. Externalism, motivation, and moral knowledge Sergio Tenenbaum
12. Naturalism, absolutism, relativism Michael Smith.

Subject Areas: Ethics & moral philosophy [HPQ], Philosophy [HP]