Ethical Naturalism

Current Debates

Susana Nuccetelli, Gary Seay

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780521192422
• eBook ISBN: 9781139199995
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• ETHICAL NATURALISM
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 Naturalism in moral philosophy
• CHAPTER 2 Normativity and reasons: five arguments from Parfit against normative naturalism
• CHAPTER 3 Naturalism: feel the width
• CHAPTER 4 On ethical naturalism and the philosophy of language
• CHAPTER 5 Metaethical pluralism: how both moral naturalism and moral skepticism may be permissible positions
• CHAPTER 6 Moral naturalism and categorical reasons
• CHAPTER 7 Does analytical moral naturalism rest on a mistake?
• CHAPTER 8 Supervenience and the nature of normativity
• CHAPTER 9 Can normativity be naturalized?
• CHAPTER 10 Ethical non-naturalism and experimental philosophy
• CHAPTER 11 Externalism, motivation, and moral knowledge
• CHAPTER 12 Naturalism, absolutism, relativism
• Bibliography
• Index