A Problem For Moral Naturalism

It has trouble making normative ethical disputes substantive

Suppose deontologists and utilitarians are arguing about which of them is right. This dispute seems substantive — it seems like they’re disagreeing and there’s an answer. But moral naturalism has a lot of trouble explaining this fact. Here, I’m only describing some types of naturalism — this wouldn’t apply to Sinhababu’s view, for example.

If morality is just reducible to some complex physical fact, it’s very unclear what physical fact they could be disagreeing about in that case. Even in cases of views like Sinhababu’s, it’s not clear that both sides would agree that they’re arguing about what Sinhababu thinks they’re arguing about (deontologists don’t think they’re arguing about whether hope is an accurate feeling in the sense of correspondence — pretty much no one other than Sinhababu thinks that’s what’s being disputed).

Take the case of a view like Railton’s. Railton starts by reducing good for one to what one’s idealized self would want for them. For example, pleasure is good for you if your idealized, reflective self would want pleasure. But this seems to not be a genuine reduction — it’s just a candidate view. Unless we make your idealized self aware of all of the genuine facts that confer reasons — which Railton tries to argue don’t exist above and beyond the facts that you’d ideally care about — then no one, not even hedonists, think everyone would always care about pleasure. Thus, this is not what hedonists and objective list theorists are arguing about. Railton just endorses a candidate view of self-interest — but that’s not a genuine reduction any more than declaring that ‘pleasure is the good’ is a genuine reduction. It’s just a view of what the good is, but it’s not a reductive definition.

Then, Railton reduces social rationality — what’s rational from the point of view of people in general — to what one would approve of if they waited everyone’s interests who was affected equally. They acted as they would if they were behind the veil of ignorance, for example — being fully impartial, and representing everyone’s interests. But this is just assuming some type of utilitarian — someone who is not a utilitarian wouldn’t think that we should maximize how well people’s lives go generally.

It seems perfectly coherent to say “there are non-welfarist values” — even though I think it’s false — but on Railton’s view, the person saying that is just misusing moral terms. But if this is true, debates about whether nature is intrinsically valuable aren’t substantive. This seems clearly false — of course they’re substantive.

This problem generalizes. There just isn’t any natural fact that’s being disputed — that Kantians think takes the form of Kantianism, utilitarians think takes the form of utilitarianism, and so on.

Now, the naturalist might say that what is being disputed is the moral norms that would be widely endorsed by a perfectly rational society. But given that they’re trying to reduce moral norms, their reduction can’t include moral norms in it! No one denies that perfectly rational beings who had access to all the a priori knowledge would know what is right — but the whole question is what it means to be right!

And if moral norms reduce to natural facts then it’s not clear why we can care about them. If deontology is correct — but that reduces to some statement about what is, not genuinely normative, then why should I care? Only non-naturalism preserves robust normativity!

Objections? Do you think there is some naturalistic account that provides a robust account of normativity and explains genuine disagreement?