Ethical Naturalism by Nuccetelli Susana; Seay Gary; & Gary Seay

Author:Nuccetelli, Susana; Seay, Gary; & Gary Seay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

An OQA* could now be deployed to raise a priori doubts about Utilitarian. For evaluating the alleged content-equivalence triggers the standard Moorean question, construed as: Is “maximizes utility” content-equivalent to “right?” To answer this requires that one first make an a priori comparative judgment of content for both predicates, which starts out with self-ascriptive comparative judgments of content of the form: are my tokens of “M” content-equivalent to my tokes of “N?” The intuitions elicited in response to the Moorean question are initially first person, since they require that one compare one’s conceptions of the content of the predicates involved. They are therefore epistemically privileged intuitions, for under normal circumstances and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, their epistemic warrant requires neither investigation of the environment nor inference from evidence – provided of course that one understands the moral and non-moral predicates involved, and has no reason to doubt that one is a competent user of them (or to think that one’s intuitions about their contents are atypical and therefore irrelevant to the folk conception of them).

Similar Moorean questions could be deployed to generate parallel doubts about other putative content-equivalences. Adequate answers to such questions would, at least initially, require access only to the concepts in one’s own mind, together with a priori generalizations of the resulting intuitions about sameness and difference in their content. There is now dialectical space to claim that the doubts about putative content-equivalences that such questions generate are warranted a priori: as argued above, they rely on intuitions that, under normal circumstances and in the absence of contrary evidence, require no empirical investigation (though they are defeasible by empirical evidence).4 In addition, those intuitions seem generally true, provided there are no reasons to think that one is not competent with the concepts involved. Arguments along similar lines could be run to generate a priori doubts about other putative naturalistic equivalences of “right,” “good,” “ought,” and the like. Since Moorean questions are likely to elicit a priori doubts for each proposed naturalistic equivalence of moral predicates, the burden is now on the analytical naturalists to produce reasons strong enough to overcome such doubts.

Construed in this way, the OQA is beyond the reach of the responses to it offered by Jackson and Smith, given that the argument does not depend on the relevant question’s being open when it is significant or not trivial (or, alternatively, closed when it is insignificant or trivial). A priori warranted claims need not be trivial: what characterizes them instead is that they can be settled without empirical investigation. The OQA* is therefore immune to Jackson and Smith’s line of reply to Moorean arguments that starts out by observing something that Moore seems to have missed: namely, that a conceptual analysis could be correct but neither obvious nor trivial. In the case of the conceptual equivalences between moral and purely descriptive predicates countenanced by analytical naturalists, the Moorean question might appear open while being in fact closed. Does this challenge our

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