NORMATIVITY AND THE NATURALISTIC FALLACY1
Connie S. Rosati
University of Arizona
(penultimate draft, forthcoming in The Naturalistic Fallacy, ed. Neil Sinclair.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
In Principia Ethica, G. E. Moore famously deployed his “open question”
argument to convict all naturalistic and metaphysical analyses of good of committing
the “naturalistic fallacy.” 2 Critics, like William Frankena, argued that the
naturalistic fallacy was no fallacy at all.3 Others argued that Moore’s open question
argument rested on mistaken ideas about philosophical analysis.4 In the “Preface to
the Second Edition,” which appears to have been drafted around 1920 or 1921,
Moore acknowledged the many confusions in his book, including confusions about
the naturalistic fallacy. 5 Despite these confusions, Moore was arguably right to
reject the forms of naturalism that he scrutinized, and so he seems to have detected
some deficiency. As it has come to be expressed in contemporary terms, Moore
exposed the failure of then extant versions of naturalism—and perhaps any version
of naturalism—to capture the “normativity” of ethics.6
Just what the normativity of ethics consists in remains a matter of dispute. I
shall return to this difficulty later. Let us assume though, for purposes of
1
An early version of this paper was presented at the Australian National University in July of 2017.
Many thanks to participants for helpful questions and comments. Thanks also to Janice Dowell,
Julia Driver, Jesse Hambly, David Sobel, Nick Southwood, and Daniel Wodak for helpful discussion
of the issues explored herein. Work on this article was supported by a visiting fellowship at the
Australian National University during the summer of 2017. I am grateful to the philosophy
department and to ANU for their support.
2
Moore (1903/1993a). All in-text references that provide only a page number are to the revised
edition of Principia Ethica. Unfortunately, Moore didn’t distinguish clearly between offering a
conceptual analysis and a real definition; some of what he writes suggests that he thinks the concept
GOOD is unanalyzable, and some or what he writes suggests that good can’t be given a real definition.
For example, Moore says that he is not interested in dictionary definitions of ‘good’ but rather one
that will tell us the real nature of the object denoted by the word.
3
Frankena (1939).
4
See, e.g., Langford (1942) and Lewy (1964). See also Frankena (1939: 472-473). For Moore’s own
attempt to explain his understanding of analysis, see Moore (1942).
5
Regarding the year Moore wrote the Preface, see Lewy (1964: 251).
6
See, e.g., Frankena (1968), Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton (1992), and Darwall (2003a) and
(2003b). For related discussion, see Rosati (1995a), (1995b), (2000), (2003), (2006a),and (2016).
David Brink (2001: 155, n. 4) suggests that interpretations that see “one strand in the OQA [open
question argument] as reflecting Moore’s concern with the normativity of ethics” rest on internalist
assumptions.
2
exploration, that talk about normativity concerns a real feature (or features) of
ethics and of “the normative” more generally. Moore’s challenge may have revealed
a seeming tension between naturalism and normativity, but given the problems
with his argument against naturalism, and given the uncertainties about just what
normativity is, we might nevertheless wonder whether some form of naturalism
could still be viable. Is there a way to resolve that apparent tension? What options
might be available to those who remain sympathetic to naturalism?
In this essay, I explore these questions. I begin by setting out Moore’s
presentation of the naturalistic fallacy (NF) in his “Preface,” which acknowledges
and tries to correct for certain difficulties with his presentation of it in Principia.7 In
light of Moore’s corrections, I go on to describe briefly the range of naturalistic
responses available to those who have broadly naturalist leanings in metaethics. My
interest ultimately lies with those forms of naturalism that aim to be realist or
objectivist in a sense that goes beyond whatever sort of objectivity might be claimed
by expressivists who embrace a quasi-realist program.8 Only a successful defense of
views like these would vindicate the sort of naturalism that seems to have been
Moore’s target. I set out desiderata on a viable form of naturalism and assess how
two contemporary forms of naturalism fare by them. Despite difficulties with the
particular views I examine, I suggest that defenders of naturalism would do well to
develop theories that further explicate and meet these desiderata.9
The Naturalistic Fallacy
Moore offers quite a number of important corrections in his preface. He
begins by acknowledging that the word ‘good’ is ambiguous and, in fact, is used to
stand for a number of predicates, “so there is no predicate whatever which can
truly be said to be the meaning of the word” (3). So which of the predicates that
‘good’ stands for, or what sense of the word, does he have in mind? It is, he says,
“the sense of the word which is of far the greatest importance for Ethics, because it
has to the conceptions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ an extremely important relation which
7
The preface was intended to be published with the second edition of Principia Ethica but never was;
and it appears to be incomplete. Although it likely doesn’t reflect Moore’s ultimate views about the
matters he discusses, I believe it offers at least some insight into how his thinking evolved.
8
See, e.g., Blackburn (1987); Gibbard (1990); Dreier (2004) and (2015).
9
In earlier work, I raised open question challenges to certain forms of contemporary naturalism and
offered a diagnosis of the force of Moore’s open question argument. See Rosati (1995a), (1995b),
and (2003). This essay goes beyond these articles in offering a somewhat different (and no doubt
controversial) way of categorizing metaethical theories and in suggesting how one might develop a
more plausible form of naturalism, though I take no position herein on the naturalist’s prospects for
success.
3
no other sense of the word has” (4). Moore refers to this predicate, the sense of the
word in play when we talk about intrinsic value, as “G.”
Moore also expresses uncertainty about his earlier claim that G is
unanalyzable. He thinks, however, that the question of whether it is unanalyzable is
not as important as he had suggested in the book (5). This is mainly because the
claim that G is not identical with such properties as being desired, being pleasant, or
serving some purpose does not, as he had implied in Principia, rest on whether it is
unanalyzable (6). So although he thinks it is probably true, he no longer wants to
insist the G is “‘indefinable’ in the sense of being ‘unanalyzable’” (6). He adds to
this that even if G were unanalyzable, it wouldn’t follow, as he had suggested in
Principia, that G cannot be expressed by other words (9). (Readers might recall that
he himself, in Principia, had said that “[w]henever [someone] thinks of ‘intrinsic
value,’ or ‘intrinsic worth,’ or says that a thing ‘ought to exist,’ he has before his
mind the unique object—the unique property of things—that I mean by ‘good’”
(68).) He had not, he now writes in the preface, made clear the distinction between
offering an analysis and expressing a notion in other words (9).
Moore goes on to distinguish two propositions that he thinks are easily
confused with the proposition that G is unanalyzable, and which he still appears to
accept:
(1) that G is not completely analysable in terms of natural or
metaphysical properties; and that if, therefore, it is analysable at
all, it certainly involves in its analysis some unanalysable notion,
which is not identical with any natural or metaphysical property
and
(2) that ethical propositions do involve some unanalysable notion,
which is not identical with any natural or metaphysical property
(14).
He allows, however, that this unanalyzable notion might not be G.
Moore tell us that he still considers true and important the proposition that
“G is different from any natural or metaphysical property,” but he thinks it is
insufficiently precise (15). He offers three considerations to explain why he
proposes to “substitute for the proposition that G is not identical with any natural
or metaphysical property, a proposition which will differ from it….” (16). The most
important of these reasons, for present purposes, are the second two. Moore
reports, as the second, that “I do not feel so certain as I could wish that it is true. It
is, I think, far more certain that G is not identical with any natural or metaphysical
property of a certain limited class, than that it is not identical with any whatever” (15).
He offers as his third reason that it does not capture something he considers of
4
great importance, namely that “G depends only on the intrinsic nature of things
which possess it” (16). The only properties he is aware of that do not depend only
on the intrinsic nature of what possesses them, he says, are natural and
metaphysical properties, and so G differs from at least this subset of natural and
metaphysical properties.10
Before offering his substitute proposition and more precisely delimiting the
class of natural properties that are not identical with G, Moore considers his use of
the phrase “the naturalistic fallacy.” In Principia, Moore had explained this fallacy in
a number of conflicting ways.
1. It may be true that all things which are good are also something
else, just as it is true that all things which are yellow produce a
certain kind of vibration in the light. And it is a fact, that Ethics
aims at discovering what are those other properties belonging to
all things which are good. But far too many philosophers have
thought that when they named those other properties they were
actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply
not “other,” but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness.
This view I propose to call the “naturalistic fallacy” and of it I
shall now endeavour to dispose (62).
2. If I were to imagine that when I said “I am pleased,” I meant
that I was exactly the same thing as “pleased,” I should not
indeed call that a naturalistic fallacy, although it would be the
same fallacy as I have called naturalistic with reference to Ethics.
The reason of this is obvious enough. When a man confuses two
natural objects with one another, defining the one by the other,
if for instance, he confuses himself, who is one natural object,
with “pleased” or with “pleasure” which are others, then there is
no reason to call the fallacy naturalistic. But if he confuses
“good,” which is not in the same sense a natural object, with any
natural object whatever, then there is a reason for calling that a
naturalistic fallacy; its being made with regard to “good” marks
it as something quite specific, and this specific mistake deserves
a name because it is so common (65).
3. Even if [good] were a natural object, that would not alter the
10
I shall hereafter drop the reference to metaphysical properties and focus on the naturalistic fallacy
as it concerns naturalistic views in ethics.
5
nature of the fallacy nor diminish its importance one whit (65).
4. I have thus appropriated the name Naturalism for a particular
method of approaching Ethics…. This method consists in
substituting for ‘good’ some one property of a natural object or
of a collection of natural objects…(91-92).
5. the naturalistic fallacy [is] the fallacy which consists in
identifying the simple notion which we mean by ‘good’ with
some other notion (109).
6. the naturalistic fallacy consists in the contention that good
means nothing but some simple or complex notion, that can be
defined in terms of natural qualities (125).
7. the point that good is indefinable and that to deny this involves
a fallacy, is a point capable of strict proof (128).
(1) and (2) suggest that philosophers have confused good with some other property
that also belongs to things that instantiate good, or more precisely, they have
confused the ‘is’ of predication with the ‘is’ of identity. (3) suggests that they
confuse good, which is not a natural object, with a natural object. But (4) tells us
they would still be committing the fallacy even if good were a natural object, so
here, the problem would seem to be just confusing one object or property with
another. In (5), the problem is substituting for the property good some property of
natural objects. (6) and (7) both seem to concern defining ‘good’ in terms of
natural properties. (8) seems to treat the fallacy as trying to define ‘good’ at all.
And Moore says yet other things about the fallacy he calls naturalistic. In
light of these various claims, Frankena was led to rename the naturalistic fallacy,
the “definist fallacy.” As Frankena explains it, the
definist fallacy is the process of confusing or identifying two
properties, of defining one property by another, or of substituting
one property for another. Furthermore, the fallacy is always simply
that two properties are being treated as one, and it is irrelevant, if it
be the case, that one of them is natural or nonethical and the other
non-natural or ethical.11
11
Frankena (1939: 59).
6
NF is thus, strictly speaking, no fallacy at all. And if we understand NF as Frankena
characterized it, then it remains open to naturalists to insist that their views involve
no such confusion, or at least, that Moore’s problematic open question argument
does not show that they do.
In the preface, Moore acknowledges some of the confusions in his earlier
discussion of NF. In particular, he confesses to having confused three different
assertions: (1) that a person is “identifying with G some predicate other than G”;
(2) that a person is identifying G with a predicate that is analyzable; and (3) that a
person is “identifying G with some natural or metaphysical predicate” (17). He
remarks that if he is going to use the label ‘naturalistic fallacy,’ he should use it “as
a synonym for the identification of G with some predicate of the class I am now
going to define, and which, as I said, I now wish to substitute for the class ‘natural
and metaphysical predicates’” (19). Moore also concedes that he seems to have
misused the term ‘fallacy,’ while clarifying what it means for someone to be
committing the naturalistic fallacy (21).
I should, if I still wished to use the term ‘naturalistic fallacy,’
propose to define ‘So and so is committing the naturalistic fallacy’
as meaning ‘he is either confusing G with a predicate of the kind to
be defined or holding it to be identical with such a predicate or
making an inference based upon such a confusion,’ and I should
also expressly point out that in so using the term ‘fallacy’ I was using
it in an extended, and perhaps improper, sense (21).
Before offering his substitute proposition, Moore allows that it is “not as
precise as he would wish” and that he does not “feel that it is not entirely free from
doubt” (21). The substitute proposition consists, he says of two separate
propositions:
(1) G is a property which depends only on the intrinsic nature of the things
which possess it.
and
(2) Though G thus depends only on the intrinsic properties of things which
possess it, and is, in that sense, an intrinsic kind of value, it is yet not
itself an intrinsic property (22).12
12
For discussion of how propositions 1 and 2 are connected to Moore’s claims in Principia, see
Darwall (2003b: 474); and see Darwall (2003b: 475) for an alternative argument in support of
Moore’s idea that good is not itself an intrinsic property.
7
Propositions (1) and (2) suggest that two features delimit the class of properties with
which it is a mistake to confuse or identify G. The properties in this class are ones
that either (1) do not depend only on the intrinsic nature of the things that possess
them or (2) are themselves intrinsic properties of the things that possess them. As
Moore also expresses it, “G is neither a contingent property nor yet an intrinsic
one,” whereas most natural predicates are “either contingent or intrinsic” (22-23).13
G is thus, he thinks, a “very peculiar” predicate or property, one that shares the
features of being neither contingent nor intrinsic, so far as he can see, only with
“other predicates of value” (23).
But what is an “intrinsic property”? Moore describes intrinsic properties as
ones that “tell you something about the intrinsic nature of things which possess
them” (23), and he offers a test for whether a property is intrinsic: “no property will
be ‘intrinsic,’ unless it is immediately obvious, with regard to that property that, if
one thing, A, possessed it, and another thing B did not possess it, A and B could
not be exactly alike” (23). 14 Being red and being square are examples of intrinsic
properties; in contrast, being seen by me is not an intrinsic property (25).15
With Moore’s characterization of intrinsic properties in hand, we might
express Moore’s two propositions as follows.
(1) G is a property which depends only on the intrinsic nature of the things
which possess it, and therefore only on the intrinsic properties of the
things which possess it.
and
(2) G is not itself an intrinsic property, that is, a property with regard to
which it is immediately obvious that, if one thing, A, possessed it, and
another thing B did not possess it, then A and B could not be exactly
alike.
One thing we might ask initially is whether G itself satisfies Moore’s
requirements. It appears not to satisfy (2). G might depend only on the intrinsic
nature of things that are G. But G might nevertheless be an intrinsic property, for
it does seem immediately obvious that if A is G and B is not G, then A and B could
13
This comes from a paragraph that Moore deleted but which the editor of the revised edition of
Principia, Thomas Baldwin, reinserted. See Moore (1903/1993: 22, n. 1).
14
Moore (1903/1993: 26) notes a way in which his use of the label “intrinsic property” might be
misleading.
15
See Moore (1903/1993: 93), comparing good to the natural properties of objects. I suspect that
Moore was here thinking of natural properties as intrinsic properties, in contrast to good.
8
not be exactly alike. All naturalistic analyses would likewise satisfy Moore’s
condition on being an intrinsic property, even if they satisfy (1), so they, too, might
be intrinsic properties. Given that G just is N, it will likewise seem immediately
obvious that if A is G and B is not G, then A and B could not be exactly alike.
Moore’s test for intrinsic properties doesn’t explicitly require that we consider a
naturalistic property said to be identical with G under its naturalistic description,
though perhaps that is how he should be understood, given how he poses open
question challenges to forms of naturalism in Principia. But notice that if this is
required, then it might not be immediately obvious that if A has N and B does not
have N, then A and B cannot be exactly alike; it would seem to depend on the N in
question. So some naturalistic views might have an advantage over Moore’s view in
that they at least conform to (2).
Consider an example. It is not immediately obvious that if A has the
property of being seen by me and B does not, then A and B cannot be exactly alike. A
and B might either be exactly alike or not. Moore certainly would not regard being
seen by me as an intrinsic property. Thus, either G and all N count as intrinsic
properties under (2), or Moore’s G does count as an intrinsic property, whereas at
least some N do not, in which case only those N clearly comport with Moore’s
insistence that G is not itself an intrinsic property.
Of course, Moore says not only that G is not itself an intrinsic property but
that it depends only on the intrinsic features of things that possess it. But some
naturalistic analyses might have the result that G satisfies both (1) and (2). Consider
the property of being desired. It is not immediately obvious that if A is desired and B
is not desired, then A and B cannot be exactly alike. Consider two qualitatively
identical chocolate bars. A person, P, might desire to eat one or the other of them
(but not both), only in virtue of their intrinsic properties. But having selected A, it
would seem to be true of A that P desires to eat it but not true of B that P desires to
eat it. Yet it would not be immediately obvious that A and B therefore cannot be
exactly alike. Although A differs from B in that A has the property of being selected
by P and B does not, that property is not itself an intrinsic property of A. One
might, of course, doubt that P desires to eat A or B only in virtue of their intrinsic
properties; being disposed to produce a pleasurable taste, one might argue, is not an
intrinsic property. 16 But if A has the dispositional property of producing a
pleasurable taste and B does not, it seems immediately obvious that A and B cannot
16
One might also argue that the example trades on an equivocation between something’s being
intrinsically good and instrumentally good. For surely P desires to eat A as a means to getting the
pleasurable taste of eating it. But I take it that someone who accepts a desire analysis would reject
this idea, lest her theory collapse into hedonism, which is not to say that it doesn’t in fact pose a
serious difficulty for desire analyses.
9
be exactly alike; and so the dispositional property seems to satisfy Moore’s necessary
condition on being an intrinsic property. Moore offers us only a necessary
condition on being an intrinsic property, and it seems clearly inadequate to his
purposes.
Moore’s characterization of intrinsic properties is strangely epistemic, not
unlike the open question argument he deployed against naturalism. But even
leaving that difficulty to one side, Moore’s substitute proposition seems, if
anything, less clear than his earlier claim of nonidentity between G and any N. As
we have seen, it leaves us without a clear demarcation of the class of natural
properties with which Moore thinks G is not identical. And it does not clearly
identify the kind of property he takes G to be. It does not, for example, clearly
distinguish intrinsic properties from merely supervenient properties. In Principia,
Moore seemed to be going for supervenience. He remarks, for example, that “two
things which have a different value must also differ in other respects” (87). So
Moore’s view about the relationship between G and natural properties, both in
Principia and in the preface, would seem to be that there can be no G-difference
without an N-difference. But Moore also seems to want to say something stronger
than that G supervenes on natural properties, because without more, what he says
is consistent with a reduction of G to N. Although reduction involves more than
supervenience, if G reduces to N, then it is true of anything that is G that there
could be no G-difference without an N-difference.
Moore arguably means, in the preface, to express the proposition that G
supervenes on N but is not reducible to at least any natural property of a certain
class. If this is indeed the way to understand Moore, then it seems that he could
dispense with proposition (1). Whether G depends only on the intrinsic properties
of A or on those as well as on some extrinsic or relational properties of A, so long
as G is not identical with any of the properties of A that fall into the relevant class,
then Moore would seem to have captured what he thinks is crucial to G.17
Of course, it would still remain to establish that G is not identical with any
of these properties. Although the open question argument may expose weaknesses
of particular naturalistic theories, it does not provide a wholesale refutation of
naturalism, given how it might plausibly work, insofar as it works at all.18 And, as is
17
Notice, too, that it would enable us to make better sense of “cumulative value” of the sort Moore’s
doctrine of organic unities involves; the greater value attributed to a whole might be due not only to
its intrinsic properties, but also to the relations among items in the whole.
18
See Railton (1990: 158), and Rosati (2003) and (2016).
10
now well understood, the open question argument overlooks both the possibility of
synthetic identities and of unobvious analyticities.19
The deeper difficulty, however, is that Moore does not provide a convincing
explanation of why G is not identical with any natural property. In Principia, he
seemed to attribute it to the simplicity and unanalyzability of good. But in the
preface, he no longer insists that G is simple and unanalyzable. He admits that G
might be analyzable in terms of some other normative notion which is itself
unanalyzable. But this simply shifts the mystery to that other normative notion.
Moore also, as we have seen, confesses to being less certain that G is not identical
to any N whatsoever, though he still thinks it is likely true. We need an account of
the special character of G that would explain why G supervenes on naturalistic
features but is not reducible to at least any N of a certain class.
I believe, along with others, that what Moore’s open question argument
really exposed is the normativity of G. As Frankena recognized, Moore’s insistence
on the simplicity of G in Principia may have prevented him from seeing this.20 The
problem for naturalism is that naturalistic properties seem to lack the normativity
of G or of any other normative property. This diagnosis allows us to at least begin
to explain why G is not identical with any N of a certain class, as well as to better
explain what that class might be. G is not identical with any N of the class of
natural properties that do not have the normativity of G. We could thus
understand the “naturalistic fallacy” as the mistake of confusing a normative
property G with some property that lacks the normativity of G. This understanding
allows for both the possibility that G is not identical with any N whatsoever and
that G is identical with some N.
How Naturalists Might Proceed
If we accept the foregoing understanding of the naturalistic fallacy and what
the open question argument reveals, naturalists would need to provide a
naturalistic account of normative properties and facts that has their normativity. As
noted at the outset, however, we have no clear, uncontroversial account of what
normativity is. Nevertheless, we might seek guidance from some prominent views
about normativity.
Normativity
19
See, e.g., Boyd (1988), Sturgeon (1984), and Brink (1989) on synthetic identities. And see Jackson
(1998) and Smith (1994) on unobvious analyticities; see also Finlay (2014). For a form of “reforming
naturalism” that advances reforming definitions of ethical terms, see Brandt (1979).
20
See Frankena (1968: 98-99).
11
In his critique of Moore’s views about value, Frankena argued that
“[i]ntrinsic goodness can have a normative character as such only if it essentially or
analytically involves a reference to an agent on whom something is actually or
hypothetically enjoined, that is, only if it is not a simple intrinsic quality.”21 This
meant, according to Frankena, that good must be a complex notion that includes
within it the idea of normativity or “ought.” As he expressed it, “To my mind, what
makes ethical judgments seem irreducible to natural or metaphysical judgments is
their apparently normative character; that is, the fact that they seem to be saying of
some agent that he ought to do something.”22 So good must be understood in terms
of what ought to be valued.
Stephen Darwall has seconded Frankena’s idea. 23 He contends that
although Moore correctly identified an “irreducible core,” he incorrectly identified
it with intrinsic value.24 According to Darwall, “The central ethical notion is that of
normativity or normative reason, which we require to understand both the notion of
good and that of right action.”25 Thus, in order for intrinsic value to be a normative
notion,
it will have to be interpreted in terms of a normative connection to
some valuing attitude or agent state…Whenever we say that
something is intrinsically valuable solely because of, or in virtue of,
its intrinsic nature, we should understand the relevant ‘because’ and
‘in virtue of’ normatively, that is, as asserting that its intrinsic nature
provides reasons for so valuing it.26
Darwall has tried to account for the force of Moore’s open question argument by
appealing to the distinction between theoretical and practical realms, and between
agent-neutral reasons and the agent-relative reasons that Moore himself failed to
recognize. According to Darwall, there is a kind of freedom distinctive of practical
reason. “The very acknowledgement of the kind of freedom that makes the open
question possible itself depends on recognition of agent-relative claims we can make
on one another as free and rational beings.”27 The force of the open question
argument is explicable in terms of the freedom agents have and the existence of
21
Frankena (1939: 98-99).
Ibid., 102 (emphasis added).
23
Darwall (2003a).
24
Ibid., 8.
25
Ibid. (emphasis added).
26
Ibid., 9 (emphasis added).
27
Darwall (2003b: 472). See also Rosati (2003), on the connection between autonomy and
normativity.
22
12
agent-relative reasons. As reflective agents, we can step back and ask whether we
have reason to promote any intrinsically valuable state, and so whether we have
reason to act on the agent-neutral reasons such states provide. In seeing ourselves as
free, we recognize the existence of sources of reasons besides intrinsic value. As a
consequence, “we can assert without contradiction or conceptual confusion…that
there are other agent-relative reasons” for not acting to promote valuable states.28
According to Darwall, the open question argument shows that “practical reasons
can be grounded only within free practical reflection.”29
In understanding normativity in terms of reasons, Darwall seems to take
sides in what has recently emerged as a three-way debate about which normative
notion is the fundamental one in terms of which all normativity is to be explained.
Value fundamentalists, like Moore, maintain that all normativity can be explained
in terms of value, and all normative notions can be analyzed in terms of value.
Reasons fundamentalists maintain that all normativity can be explained in terms of
reasons, and all normative notions can be analyzed in terms of reasons.30 And
fittingness fundamentalists maintain that “fittingness” is the fundamental notion in
terms of which all normative notions can be analyzed.31
The difficulty for all three views, as David Copp has argued with respect to
reasons fundamentalism, is that the central notion each employs is itself normative,
and so the normativity of these notions (and therefore normativity itself) remains
unexplained.32 One way to address this would be to offer a naturalistic reduction of
one of these key notions. In any case, naturalists would presumably aim to do
better, by arriving at an account of normativity that does not leave it mysterious.33
Copp himself advances a “standard-based” account, which promises to offer
a naturalistic and unified account of the normativity of normative claims. He
distinguishes between type-one and type-two normative propositions. Type-one
normative propositions, such as propositions about law, language, and etiquette,
“entail nontrivially that a relevant standard has an appropriate currency” in a
relevant group.34 Type-two normative propositions—those of morality, epistemology,
and aesthetics—entail that a “relevant standard is appropriately justified.” 35 A
standard “specifies a criterion against which one can in principle judge or appraise
28
Darwall (2003b: 485).
Ibid., 488.
30
See, in addition to Darwall, Scanlon (2000) and Parfit (2011).
31
See McHugh and Way (2016) and Howard (forthcoming). Early proponents include Franz
Brentano and A. C. Ewing.
32
Copp (2007: 256).
33
Compare Shafer-Landau (2003) and Enoch (2013).
34
Copp (1995: 10, 22).
35
Ibid.
29
13
our actions, states of our psychology, states of our character, social institutions, and
so forth.”36 It specifies conditions that are to be met, and items in the category to
which those conditions apply can either satisfy or fail to satisfy those conditions.
What is it for a standard to be “appropriately justified”? A standard is justified
when it meets those “criteria of justification” identified by some higher-order
standard.37 So on Copp’s view, normativity would seem to be a matter of satisfying
one or another sort of correctness conditions, and in the case of the normativity of
ethics, correctness conditions supported by higher-order, presumably epistemic,
standards.
In offering an account of the normativity of normative claims, rather than of
normative facts or properties, Copp’s approach would seem to move him closer to
expressivism. On the view favored by expressivists, normativity is a feature of
normative judgments, rather than of normative properties or facts, and it consists
(roughly) in the expressive and recommending force of those judgments. 38 But
while Copp connects normativity to the characteristic action- and choice-guiding
functions of normative judgments, the standard-based account does not reduce the
normativity of normative claims to their expressive and guiding functions.39
The N-Conditions
In light of what we have learned from exploring Moore’s naturalistic fallacy
and certain criticisms of it, and in light of competing views about normativity, I
want to consider how we might begin to characterize the conditions that a
successful form of naturalism would have to satisfy. Let us assume going forward
that the naturalist’s focus need not be on G in particular; rather, it could be on any
normative property, such as being good for someone, being morally right, being a reason
and so on. In place of G, we can use N* to designate the target normative property,
except where G happens to be the N* in question.
What seems most important to Moore’s understanding of G, at least based
on the preface, is that G is not itself an intrinsic property; it is not a part of the
intrinsic nature of what has it. And the most plausible way to understand the
naturalistic fallacy and what the open question revealed is that the forms of
naturalism Moore targeted failed to capture the normativity of G. What a naturalist
would have to be looking for, then, is some N that has the normativity of the target
N*, while not itself being a part of the intrinsic nature of what has N*. These
36
Ibid., p. 19.
Ibid., p. 24.
38
Stevenson (1937); Hare (1963); Gibbard (1990).
39
More recently, Copp (2007) has described “three grades” of normativity in an effort to understand
the strength of moral normativity.
37
14
considerations suggest that naturalists should be looking for a naturalistic property
that is relational and that has the normativity of N*.
We can treat the various views about normativity discussed above as
identifying at least indicators of normativity, against which we might test whether a
naturalistic analysis has captured the normativity of N*. These indicators include
that N provides plausible correctness conditions, that N has a connection to the
valuing attitudes or states of agents (or at least reflective agents), that facts about the
instantiation of N provide not only agent-neutral reasons, but also agent-relative
reasons, that judgments about N can serve the choice- and action-guiding functions
of judgments about N*. A naturalistic analysis would need to have these indicators,
without invoking any unreduced normative notions, with the result that
normativity itself is effectively naturalized. Of course, different normative notions
are associated with different features, platitudes, or truisms, so a plausible
naturalistic account of a particular N* would need to capture these as well.
We might now delineate the conditions or desiderata that a naturalistic
analysis would need to satisfy very roughly as follows, while allowing that this set of
conditions might be incomplete. A successful naturalistic analysis must identify N*
with an N
1. that is relational
2. that has a connection to the valuing attitudes or states of
reflective agents
3. that is such that facts about its instantiation provide agents with
pro tanto agent-neutral or pro tanto agent-relative reasons or
both, depending on the N* in question
4. that allows judgments about what has N to serve the action- and
choice-guiding functions of judgments about what has N*,
5. that provides correctness conditions, while invoking no
unreduced normative notions, and
6. that captures whatever additional features, platitudes, or truisms
might be peculiar to N*.40
Call these the “N-conditions.” In attempting to meet these conditions, the
naturalist seeks a theory that goes beyond supervenience, that explains the
connection between naturalistic and normative properties and facts, rather than
40
I do not include in this list that N can do explanatory work. Railton does argue that his theory
allows facts about value and morality to enter into explanations. See Railton (1986b). But others
have argued that naturalists need not (and perhaps shouldn’t) saddle themselves with such a
requirement. See Sinclair (2006).
15
merely identifying, as Moore’s own view does, a pattern of (unexplained)
dependency relations between naturalistic and normative properties or facts.41
Forms of Naturalism
What sort of naturalism might satisfy these conditions? Let the term
‘naturalism’ refer to any metaethical theory that seeks to fit ethics within a
naturalistic world view. And let the label ‘ethical naturalism’ refer to theories, like
synthetic naturalism, according to which ethical properties are natural properties
and ethical facts are natural facts. For want of a better definition, treat “natural”
properties and facts as those that could be investigated or discovered by the natural
sciences, where the natural sciences include psychology and sociology.
Expressivism and the error theory have a place on the naturalistic map, but
a successful defense of these views (unlike a successful defense of synthetic
naturalism) would not vindicate the sort of naturalism that Moore targeted. A
successful defense of a constructivist theory, however, might. Let the term
‘constructivism’ refer to what has come to be called global or unrestricted
constructivism.42 The contrast is with restricted constructivism of the sort defended
by John Rawls. 43 Whereas unrestricted constructivist theories are metaethical
theories that aim to construct all normative truths, restricted constructivist theories
attempt to construct normative truths about some particular domain, such as
political morality. Constructivism has been characterized in various ways, often as
the view that normative truths are constructed via a hypothetical or corrected
procedure. Sharon Street describes constructivism as holding that: (1) “the only
standards of correctness that exist are those set from within the practical point of
view itself” (2008: 220); as a consequence, (2) normative truth consists in “what is
entailed from within the practical point of view” (2010: 367).44
A constitutivist theory might also vindicate naturalism, at least when
combined with constructivism. Constitutivism, like constructivism, has been
characterized in various ways.45 On one depiction, constitutivism holds that reasons
(or normativity) can be explained in terms of what is constitutive of agency. 46
41
Kim (1993: 167). For general discussion of supervenience, see McLaughlin and Bennett (2011). I
have framed what the naturalist needs to offer in terms of an identificatory reduction, but the
naturalist might offer her account in terms of grounding. For some helpful discussion of grounding,
see, e.g., Rosen (2018). But see Wilson (2014).
42
See Barry (2018) and Street (2010).
43
See Rawls (1980).
44
For (1), see Street (2008: 220); for (2), see Street (2010: 367). See also Street (2012).
45
See Rosati (2016).
46
See Bukoski (2016).
16
Melissa Barry has suggested that constructivism is importantly connected to
constitutivism. Constructivism differs from other proceduralist views in that it
derives the procedure of construction from standards constitutive of agency. The
constructivist defense of a particular procedure of construction thus “rests
ultimately on a constitutive argument.” 47 Although constitutivism is sometimes
construed as the view that we can derive normative standards or reasons from what
is constitutive of agency, I here follow Barry’s suggestion. For present purposes,
then, we needn’t consider constitutivism separately from constructivism.
Certain forms of ethical naturalism and constructivism share structural
features that distinguish them from the forms of naturalism that Moore’s open
question argument clearly did dispose of. Consider, for example, the view that being
good is being pleasurable or being desired. Or consider the view that being good (or
ethically better) is being more evolved.48 I take it to be obvious that such views do not
capture the normativity of G.
The forms of ethical naturalism and constructivism I have in mind may
ultimately fail to capture the normativity of N* (in fact, I think extant theories do
fail), but they are a clear improvement over earlier forms of naturalism. 49 The
reason why is that their structure enables them to at least begin to satisfy the Nconditions.50 Call the class of naturalistic theories—forms of ethical naturalism and
constructivism—that share this kind of structure agency-based theories.51 Among the
theories that I would include in the category of agency-based theories are Peter
Railton’s ethical naturalism, Michael Smith’s rationalism, Christine Korsgaard’s
Kantian constructivism, Sharon Street’s relativistic constructivism, and Julia
Driver’s recent Humean constructivism. 52 David Enoch has suggested that
constructivism, understood as proceduralist, may be indistinguishable from the
synthetic naturalism of Peter Railton, and so does not constitute a distinctive
metaethical theory. 53 But one might just as well say that forms of synthetic
47
See Barry (2018). For defenses of constitutivism, see, e.g., Korsgaard (1996) and (2002), Velleman
(2000) and (2009), Ferrero (2009), and Katsafanas (2011). For critical discussion of constitutivism,
see, e.g., Enoch (2006) and (2011), Tiffany (2013), and Bukoski (2016).
48
Moore (1903/1993: 100-109).
49
For discussion of how extant versions of naturalism fail to be normative, see Rosati (1995a),
(1995b), and (2003).
50
For additional discussion of the distinction between different kinds of naturalism, see Kolnai
(1980) and Rosati (2003).
51
For an argument that tries to connect agency and nonnaturalism, see Regan (2003).
52
See Railton (1986a) and 1986b); Smith (1994) and (2013); Korsgaard (1996) and (2009); Street
(2008), (2010) and (2012); and Driver (2017). Street refers to her view as “Humean” constructivism,
but Driver’s account strikes me as more in keeping with Hume’s ethical thought. Street
acknowledges that her view involves a “certain relativism” (2008: 224).
53
Enoch (2009), and see Street’s response (2010: 365, 372-374).
17
naturalism are ultimately indistinguishable from constructivism, and so do not
constitute a distinctive metaethical theory. In my view, the important normative
divide lies elsewhere, between forms of naturalism that appeal to natural properties
that are not agency-involving and those that appeal to natural properties that are
agency-involving. The latter forms of naturalism, like constructivist theories,
attempt to incorporate the standpoint of a reflective agent. Of course,
constructivists generally do not present their theories as offering naturalistic
property analyses, but in my view, constructivist theories can, and arguably should,
be recast in this way and dispense with the metaphor of construction.
Agency-Based Naturalism
In the remainder of this essay, I consider the structure of agency-based
theories and how it equips them to begin to meet the N-conditions. I focus on
Street’s constructivism about reasons and Railton’s naturalistic account of intrinsic
value, because these views well display the strengths of agency-based theories, and
their deficiencies indicate the main ways in which such theories might do better.
Street’s Relativistic Constructivism
According to Street, who rejects the common proceduralist characterization
of constructivism, “the philosophical heart of [constructivism] is the notion of the
practical point of view and what does or doesn’t follow from within it.”54 On the
constructivist view, normative truths consist in whatever follows from the practical
standpoint;55 and valuing creatures confer value on the world, rather than find it
there.56 Street gives the practical standpoint a “formal characterization,” describing
it as “the standpoint of valuing or normative judgment as such.” The practical point
of view, she writes, “is the point of view occupied by any creature who takes at least
some things in the world to be good or bad, better or worse, required or optional,
worthy or worthless, and so on….” 57 This characterization of the practical
standpoint is formal in that no substantive values are built into it, and it takes no
substantive normative claims for granted. As she also puts it, the constructivist
provides an account of the attitude of valuing that specifies “what is involved in
54
Street (2010: 364). See also Street (2012).
Street (2010: 367).
56
Street (2012: 40).
57
Street (2010: 366).
55
18
valuing anything at all.” 58 Normative standards are generated by this valuing
attitude.59
Whereas Kantian constructivisms maintain that substantive moral
conclusions are entailed from the standpoint of normative judgment as such, on
Street’s constructivism, substantive conclusions are entailed from within the
practical standpoint of an individual with her particular evaluative starting points.60
For a thing to be valuable is for its value to be entailed from within the standpoint
of a valuing creature who already values some things. 61 The only standards of
correctness are “from the point of view of someone who already accepts some
normative judgments or other….” 62 As a consequence, there are no normative
truths that exist independently of the practical point of view.
Street offers her constructivism about reasons as naturalistic, reductive, and
relativistic (or relational). She expresses her constructivism as follows:
the fact that X is a reason to Y for agent A is constituted by the fact
that the judgment that X is a reason to Y (for A) withstands scrutiny
from the standpoint of A’s other judgments about reasons.63
The view is naturalistic in that it explains what a reason is in terms of what it is for
a valuer to judge that something is a reason. It is reductive (in one sense) in that it
reduces facts about reasons to facts about what valuers takes or judge to be
reasons.64 And it is relativistic in treating normative judgments as true or false only
relative to the practical point of view of a particular valuer, with standards of
correctness set by that valuer’s other normative judgments. 65 Reasons are only
reasons for some agent: there are no absolute reasons.
Street favors what she calls a “thin” account of what is “constitutive” of
valuing, or forming the normative judgment that X is a reason to Y. 66 Rather than
offer a full account, she presents some examples. The attitude of judging something
58
Ibid., 369.
Ibid., 366.
60
Ibid., 370. See Street (2012), for further discussion of the contrasts between Kantian
Constructivism and what she calls Humean Constructivism.
61
Street (2010: 367).
62
Ibid., 366.
63
Street (2008: 223).
64
Street (2008: 241-242).
65
Ibid., 224-226.
66
According to Street, the effort to specify what is constitutive of the attitude of value or normative
judgment is not a substantive normative project; rather, it is “an exercise in descriptive philosophical
analysis.” We consult not normative intuitions about, say, whether a judgment is mistaken but,
instead, “intuitions about what is and isn’t recognizably a case of valuing” (Street 2010: 374).
59
19
to be a reason, she suggests, constitutively aims at means-end coherence. 67 You
cannot, in full awareness, take yourself to have conclusive reason to Y without
taking yourself to have a reason to take the means to Y.68 You cannot, in full
awareness and simultaneously, judge both that X is a reason to Y and that X is not
a reason to Y.69 And you cannot, in full awareness, simultaneously judge that only a
certain kind of fact, F, provides a reason to Y, and that Z, which is not an F fact,
provides a reason to Y. 70 In giving these examples, she says she is making an
“analytic or conceptual” point about what is constitutively involved in taking
oneself to have a reason or making a normative judgment, rather than a point
about rationality.71 Failure to do what is constitutively involved in taking oneself to
have a reason isn’t a normative failure; it is a failure to be making a normative
judgment or taking something to be a reason at all. A person’s failure to take
something to be a reason should not be confused with her failure to recognize a
reason that she has because, for example, she is unaware that X is a necessary means
to Y.
As for what it is for a normative judgment to withstand scrutiny, that is a
matter of whether the judgment is mistaken from the standpoint of the valuer’s
other normative judgments.72 These other normative judgments, together with the
non-normative facts, set the standards of correctness.73 For example, the judgment
that you have reason to quit smoking is true, relative to your judgment that you
have reason to promote your long-term health. Withstanding scrutiny, in the limit,
requires that a valuer’s normative judgment hold up to the standards of correctness
of all her other normative judgments, rather than some subset of them.74 When a
normative judgment withstands scrutiny from the standpoint of some of her
normative judgments but not others, the standpoint that takes priority and
determines what reasons the valuer has is “whichever standpoint is most deeply
hers, where this is a function of how strongly she holds the normative judgments in
question and how close to the center of her total web of normative judgments they
67
Street (2010: 374).
Street (2008: 227-228).
69
Ibid., 229.
70
Ibid.
71
Street does not, as far as I am aware, offer an argument for why these norms are constitutive of
making a normative judgment, rather than, as they seem to be, norms of rationality. But see (Street
2010: 374). One worry about her claim is a worry that afflicts many forms of constitutivism. If
failure to meet the constitutive norms of making a normative judgment means failure to make a
normative judgment at all, then it is unclear how we are to account for (genuine) normative
judgments that are defective.
72
Street (2008: 230).
73
Ibid.
74
Ibid., 233.
68
20
lie.”75 If there is no fact about which of her normative judgments are more central,
and the valuer accepts no normative judgment that can decide the question of
whether her current normative judgment withstands scrutiny, there will be no fact
of the matter about what she has reason to do all things considered.
Railton’s Synthetic Naturalism
The constructivist approach of “constructing” normative facts out of our
normative judgments, differs from the synthetic naturalist approach. Railton has
described himself as both a methodological naturalist and a substantive naturalist.
Whereas substantive naturalism puts forward a substantive theory of value,
Methodological naturalism holds that philosophy does not possess a
distinctive, a priori method able to yield substantive truths that in
principle are not subject to any sort of empirical test. Instead, a
methodological naturalist believes that philosophy should proceed a
posteriori, in tandem with—perhaps as a particularly abstract and
general part of—the broadly empirical inquiry carried on in the
natural and social sciences.76
Railton’s synthetic naturalism offers reforming definitions of ‘good’ and ‘morally
right/wrong’ as a part of theory construction. The definitions he offers aim to
capture the critical character of normative language, as well as the seemingly
conceptual link between normative judgment and motivation.
Railton’s theory of intrinsic value is more properly understood as a theory
of good for an individual, or perhaps good from the perspective of an individual.
Although Railton’s examples mostly concern individual welfare, he indicates in a
footnote that his account of intrinsic value is not an account of welfare.77 Whereas
Moore treated intrinsic value as value that depends only on a thing’s intrinsic
nature, Railton explains that, to call a good intrinsic in his sense, “is to say
something about why or how it matters to [a particular] being: Is it the sort of thing
that matters—or would matter, under suitable circumstances—for its own sake…or
merely as a means to other things?”78 Railton’s sort of naturalist aims to “locate a
(possibly complex) property that is claimed by an identificatory reduction to underlie
the cognitive content of discourse about a person’s good.”79 He seeks a “vindicating”
75
Ibid., 234-235.
Railton (1990: 8).
77
See note 82.
78
Railton (1986b: 10-11).
79
Railton (1990: 163). Presumably the same thing applies to other normative properties.
76
21
reduction: one that would both capture the truisms associated with our talk about
what is good for someone and preserve the normative functions of the term ‘good,’
while being at most “tolerably revisionist.”80
Railton’s account distinguishes between a person A’s subjective interests and
his objective (or objectified subjective) interests. A’s subjective interests are given by his
actual desires and preferences. In contrast, A’s objectified subjective interests are
given by what he would want himself to want or pursue, were he A+, who possesses
both “unqualified cognitive and imaginative powers” and “full factual and
nomological information about his physical and psychological constitution,
capacities, circumstances, history, and so on.”81 What determines A’s objectified
subjective interests is not what A+ would want for himself, but what A+ would
want actual A to want or seek, were he in A’s circumstances.
Railton expresses his account of relational value in a number of ways. For
example, he writes in one place that
X is intrinsically non-morally good for A just in case X is in A's objective
interest without reference to any other objective interest of A.82
Railton doesn’t explicitly express his account in terms of property reduction, but
the following seems to capture what he has in mind:
Being intrinsically non-morally good for A is being something A would want
herself to want if she were fully and vividly informed about herself and her
circumstances, possessed full imaginative powers, and suffered no cognitive
error or failure of instrumental rationality.83
In short, being intrinsically non-morally good for A in C is being what A+ would
want for A in C.84
Railton makes a number of claims in support of his account. First, he
claims that it addresses the chief concerns that we have when we wonder whether
what we desire is good for us, namely, (1) are we adequately informed about our
80
Railton (1990: 162).
Railton (1986b: 173-174).
82
Railton (1986b: 177). See also 176, note 18, and Railton (1986a: 16-17, and18). Railton tell us
that his notion “is not the same as that of an individual's welfare” (1986a: 30, note 9).
83
See Railton (1986a: 16).
84
Railton tells us that the appeal to an idealized individual’s desires has a heuristic function. The
truth-maker for claims about what is good for an individual is the reduction basis for the
counterfactuals. See Railton (1986a: 25) and (1986b: 175). But the good-maker is presumably the
property of being good for an individual, as naturalistically understood.
81
22
selves, our circumstances, and the object of our desire, and (2) are we suffering
from some failure of rationality. Because of this, it “preserves…an appropriate link
between non-moral value and motivation.”85 Second, he claims that it captures the
normative force of judgments about what is good for someone.86 Finally, he argues
that it satisfies an appropriate internalist constraint because, given the psychology
of value, we will be moved by facts about we would want ourselves to want under
ideal conditions.87 He evidently takes it to thereby satisfy what has come to be
called the “non-alienation constraint” on an individual’s non-moral good.88
Structural Features of Agency-Based Naturalism
Views like Street’s and Railton’s, I believe, have important structural
features in common that support distinguishing from among naturalistic theories
the class of agency-based theories. Here, I offer an interpretation of their positions
that attempts to highlight these features.89
First, each construes the target normative property (being a reason, being
intrinsically, nonmorally good) as relational (being a reason for A, being intrinsically,
nonmorally good for A); and each offers what seems to be a naturalistic reduction of that
relational N*. According to Street, there is no such thing as being a reason, full stop,
there is only being a reason for a particular individual; according to Railton, there is
no absolute goodness, only relational goodness or goodness for an individual. Street
doesn’t offer a property analysis, but her account seems to reduce being a reason for
A to being a judgment that a consideration is a reason for A that (a) satisfies the constitutive
standards of normative judgment, and (b) withstands scrutiny relative to A’s other normative
judgments.90 Railton seems to reduce being intrinsically non-morally good for A to being
what A would want her self to want under idealized conditions.
Second, the naturalistic reduction of each appeals to a valuing attitude or
state of an agent and incorporates aspects of the perspective of a reflective agent. Each
develops his or her account in light of what each evidently takes to be the principal
concerns agents have when they raise normative questions involving the target
normative notions; and the accounts draw on distinctively agential capacities in
identifying correctness conditions. For Street, the principal agential question seems to
concern an agent’s normative identity; it concerns how to bring her normative
85
Railton (1986b: 177-178).
See Railton (1986a: 16-17).
87
Ibid, 16-17.
88
Ibid., 9.
89
Of course, they might not sign on to this interpretation in all respects.
90
Street writes in terms of what is constitutive of the normative fact that X is a reason to Y for A. But
I’m uncertain whether she means for her account to be distinct from a reduction, and, if so, what
she thinks turns on this.
86
23
judgments into line with one another so that she has a coherent evaluative outlook
that determines what reasons she has. The agential capacities her account draws on
are those expressed in the constitutive standards for making a normative
judgment—the capacities for means-end reasoning, for maintaining consistency in
reasoning, and so on. For Railton, the principal agential questions seem to be
epistemic: Do I know enough? And am I being sufficiently rational? His
counterfactual account builds in not only full information, but idealized rational
and imaginative capacities.
Third, each seems to understand normativity naturalistically, and each
proposes an account that, by capturing normativity thus naturalistically understood,
aims to have the normativity of the target N*. On this naturalistic understanding of
normativity, normativity is (at least in part) a matter of what would address the
fundamental concerns agents have when they raise particular normative questions—
when they wonder, for example, whether they have a reason to do or pursue
something, or whether what they currently desire is good for them.91 And each tries
to develop an account of the target N* that is normative because it addresses the
relevant normative concerns of reflective agents. On Street’s account of reasons, the
normative concerns are addressed by treating an agent’s reasons as consisting in her
normative judgments that withstand the scrutiny of (and so cohere with) her other
values or normative judgments and the relevant nonnormative facts. On Railton’s
account of intrinsic value, the normative concerns are addressed by an idealization
that eliminates the possibility of factual and cognitive errors and failures of
imagination. Addressing fully an agent’s reflective concerns would seemingly
remove the possibility of meaningful open question challenges and help to show
that the proffered accounts capture the normativity of the target normative
notion.92
Fourth, each account seems to explain how the relevant kind of normative
facts, thus understood, provide agent-relative reasons. On Street’s account, an agent’s
reasons spring from the agent’s own values. Railton adopts an instrumental account
of what it is to have a reason, but in addition, he explains why facts about what A
would want herself to want under idealized conditions are bound to have an
“internal resonance” for her.93
Fifth, by both addressing the normative concerns of reflective agents and
forging a link between reasons or intrinsic value and motivation, each account aims
to preserve the action- and choice-guiding functions of the relevant normative
judgments. On Street’s view, whether something is a reason for an individual at all
91
See also Korsgaard (1996), discussing the centrality of what she calls “the normative question.”
For discussion of this with respect to Railton’s naturalism, see Rosati (1995a).
93
Railton (1986a: 17).
92
24
is determined relative to her own values, and so, presumably relative to what she
would find motivating. On Railton’s view, whether something is good for an
individual is determined by her own desires for herself, under conditions of full
information and rationality—conditions that address her own normative concerns.
Each view thereby satisfies what many would consider to be plausible internalist
constraints on reasons and intrinsic value for a person.
Finally, each seemingly captures certain platitudes or truisms that figure in our
thinking with respect to the target normative notions. Street’s account would seem
to capture the apparent truism that the fact that A values something gives her protanto reason to pursue it or to act in accordance with it. Railton’s account would
seem to capture such truisms as that a person gets better at knowing what is good
for her over time, and that a person generally knows her own good better than
others do.94
Agency-Based Naturalism and Metanormative Realism
One question that might be raised about agency-based forms of naturalism
is whether they are forms of metanormative realism. I can address this question
here only briefly. Railton describes his theory as offering forms of value and moral
realism. Street views her constructivism as a form of anti-realism.95 I am uncertain
whether they disagree as to whether realism requires mind-independence; Street has
herself claimed that realism does require mind-independence.96
How to classify metaethical views is a matter of some disagreement. My own
view is that we should reject mind-independence characterizations of
metanormative realism, because they presuppose that we already know the nature
of normative properties, much as insistence on contra-causal freedom presupposes
that we already know the nature of free will.97 What we should say, I think, is that
whether a particular agency-based form of naturalism is realist ultimately depends
on factors other than whether the account on offer is mind-independent. For
example, it will depend on how well a particular theory does at capturing the
features, platitudes, or truisms surrounding the kind of normative evaluation it
seeks to understand.98
Problems for Agency-Based Naturalism
94
For discussion of these truisms, see Railton (1986b: 182) and (1990). Railton (1986b) explains
how his account allows us to predict such things as that individuals will generally know their own
good better than third parties by appeal to his posited “wants/interests mechanism.”
95
See, e.g., Street (2012: 41).
96
Street (2006: 156, note 1) and (2010).
97
For discussion, see Rosati (2018). See also Copp (2013).
98
See Railton (1986b: 189) for discussion of features of moral evaluation.
25
Although Street’s and Railton’s views share common structural features,
they differ in critical ways. One contrast is that while Street develops correctness
conditions that normative judgments must meet in order to count as reasons for an
agent, her view does not, like Railton’s view, appeal to highly idealized conditions.
Critics have argued that the idealization he employs, in particular, the appeal to full
information, is deeply problematic.99
Another contrast lies with whether normative facts are determined partly by
causal processes. Whereas on Street’s view, value is what is entailed from an agent’s
practical perspective, on Railton’s view, whether something you desire is good for
you depends on how you, with your motivational system, would react under ideal
conditions.100 Street herself, in comparing her view with Railton’s on this score,
contends that “ideal response reductions”
[make] facts about what is valuable hostage to the outcome of
irrelevant causal processes. According to constructivism, in contrast,
normative questions aren’t questions about what would emerge
from any causal process (whether real or hypothetical), but rather
questions about what is entailed from within the standpoint of a
creature who values things.”101
Railton’s view corrects for deficiencies in reasoning and information, but does not
idealize the motivational system of the individual whose good is in question, and it
is hard to see how it could without making substantive normative assumptions.102
Partly because his view does not idealize an individual’s motivational system, it is
subject to meaningful open questions and fails to capture the normativity of
goodness for a person. Unless agency-based forms of naturalism can devise a way to
remove the normative arbitrariness that seems to afflict them, they might do best to
avoid reliance on causal processes.
Although Street’s brand of constructivism avoids certain difficulties for
Railton’s view, it faces problems of its own. For present purposes, the most
important is that because her view takes the substantive input to construction to
come from the individual’s evaluative starting points, it arguably fails to capture the
normativity of reasons. It also doesn’t do as well by the standpoint of a reflective
agent, as we might desire. When an agent asks whether she has reason to Φ (say,
contribute to famine relief), she need not be wondering how Φ-ing squares with her
99
See, e.g., Velleman (1988); Sobel (1994), Rosati (1995a); and Loeb (1995).
For discussion of difficulties this creates for Railton’s view, see Rosati (1995a) and (1995b).
101
Street (2010: 374).
102
See Rosati (1995b). See also Darwall ( 2002: 31), and Coons (2013).
100
26
other evaluative judgments; so being informed that it does (or does not) square
with them hardly addresses her concerns. An individual can reasonably wonder
whether her own evaluative starting points or their entailments settle whether she
has a reason to act. In part, this is because she can wonder whether her evaluative
starting points are off, whether she has valued things she shouldn’t or failed to
value things that she ought. Street contends, plausibly, that agents typically have a
pretty complex system of evaluative judgments; 103 and presumably this might
include some higher-order evaluative judgments about how to form her own
normative judgments. But it might not. Or it might include higher-order evaluative
judgments that give her no real purchase on her normative question. Her web of
actual normative judgments, including her higher-order normative judgments,
might include ones that it shouldn’t and fail to include ones that it should. Of
course, on Street’s view, it seems that we cannot make sense of these oughts or
shoulds outside of the web of an agent’s own normative judgments. But that seems
doubtful; after all, the agent is neither ideally informed and imaginative nor an
ideal former of higher-order norms.
Street’s account purports to be of the reasons an agent really has, but the
agent, in light of her own critical reflection, need not be satisfied that, in the end,
that’s all there is to having a reason. Recall Street’s contention that Kantian
constructivisms problematically build in substantive normative judgments. Given
the difficulties with her own view, we might well wonder whether the practical
standpoint, the standpoint of normative judgment as such, requires a substantive as
opposed to a merely formal characterization after all. Constructivist views thus
seem to face their own challenge about how to build in something substantive or
non-formal, without begging important normative questions, and so without
vitiating the constructivist or naturalist project.
If naturalists are to develop a successful forms of agency-based naturalism,
they will need to focus more on unpacking the N-conditions and considering how
they might be met. In particular, they will need to do better at developing a full,
naturalistic account of normativity.104 This will, in part, involve doing better by the
queries and concerns of reflective agents.
Whither Naturalism?
Where does this leave naturalism? I have suggested that in light of Moore’s
discussion of the naturalistic fallacy and differing views about normativity, it makes
sense for naturalists to try to develop theories that meet the N-conditions. I have
103
104
See Street (2008: 236-237).
David Copp (1995) and (2007) has done the most developed work on this to date.
27
taken no position herein on their prospects for success. Still, despite the problems
with views like Street’s and Railton’s, I’m inclined to believe that for those who are
inclined toward naturalism, but who reject expressivism and the error theory,
agency-based naturalism is probably the way to go.
There remains, of course, that nagging worry about normativity. If
nonnaturalism did not face its own problems and if nonnaturalists had a persuasive
view about normativity, then it might make sense to give up on naturalism. But
nonnaturalism does face serious problems; and nonnaturalists arguably do not have
a persuasive view about normativity. Nonnaturalists might insist that normativity is
unexplainable, so they needn’t have an account of it. It isn’t clear that they are right
about this, however, and naturalism at least offers the prospect of an explanation.
In any case, nonnaturalists still owe us a plausible argument for why we should
conclude that no N has the normativity of an N*. For reasons discussed earlier, that
argument can’t be the open question argument. Nonnaturalists might insist that
Moore’s argument provides a plausible inductive case for nonnaturalism; and
inference to the best explanation for the failure of extant forms of naturalism leads
us to nonnaturalism.105 But the nonnaturalist’s explanation is not clearly better
than the explanations offered by expressivists or error theorists—or by ethical
naturalists, who might insist that we simply haven’t yet arrived at the correct form
of naturalism. If even agency-based naturalism is ultimately mistaken, we would still
want to know precisely what it is that naturalism fails to capture. As far as I can see,
the problem of explaining normativity and developing a theory that captures it is
every metaethicist’s problem.
105
Thanks to Jesse Hembly for raising this line of response.
28
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