Cornell Realism, Explanation, and Natural Properties

Abstract

The claim that ordinary ethical discourse is typically true and that ethical facts are typically knowable (ethical conservativism) seems in tension with the claim that ordinary ethical discourse is about features of reality friendly to a scientific worldview (ethical naturalism). Cornell Realism attempts to dispel this tension by claiming that ordinary ethical discourse is, in fact, discourse about the same kinds of things that scientific discourse is about: natural properties. We offer two novel arguments in reply. First, we identify a key assumption that we find unlikely to be true. Second, we identify two features of typical natural properties that ethical properties lack. We conclude that Cornell Realism falls short of dispelling the tension between ethical conservativism and ethical naturalism.Many of us desire a meta-ethical position that allows us to take ordinary ethical discourse seriously. It seems to those of us, that is, that much of what we say about right and wrong or good and bad, for example, is true. Even more, it seems to those of us that we typically know many of these truths. What many of us desire, in other words, is a meta-ethical position that sees our ordinary ethical discourse as tracking important features of an accessible reality, as opposed to seeing it as some kind of mistake, mystery, or fiction (however useful). As we will put it, this is a desire for conservativism about ethical discourse, or ethical conservativism for short.Many of us, just as much, desire a meta-ethical position that respects the success of scientific inquiry. It seems to those of us, that is, that certain scientific explanations are the most impressive and secure examples of knowledge of the world around us, and that we are thereby required to conform our methods of inquiry and the ontological commitments of our theories to its methods and commitments. Put a bit differently, it seems that the correct scientific account of the world has a special kind of privilege: the methods it deploys, and the entities that it requires-which we will hereafter refer to as natural -are the ones that we have most reason to employ and believe exist. What those of us desire, then, is a meta-ethical position that does not commit us to non-scientific (non-natural) methods and entities. As we will put * We are grateful to an anonymous referee for helpful comments and discussion.

Controversies on Cornell Realism

“…First, natural properties involved in scientific explanations are testable, which gives rise to different experiments that can test hypotheses regarding their extension. However, this is not the case for moral theory (Oliveira & Perrine 2017: 1032. Oliveira and Perrine's criticism obviously ignores Cornell realist arguments that moral hypotheses can also be tested against the world, and further, the results of these tests can move us to revise or to abandon our initial moral views (Sturgeon 1988: 232;2006: 241).…”

“…While moral properties "are constituted by" or "are multiply realized by" or "supervene upon" non-moral natural properties, they cannot be reduced to non-moral natural properties (Miller 2003: 139). And moral properties are semantically irreducible; this means that an ethical statement cannot be paraphrased into a non-ethical statement (Oliveira & Perrine 2017: 1025. This seems to combine the feature of both naturalism and non-naturalism.…”

“…According to Luis R. G. Oliveira andTimothy Perrine (2017: 1029), there are two important disanalogies between scientific explanations and moral explanations. First, all scientific explanations are embedded in the practices of a professional scientific community which "is characterized by a collaborative attempt to examine and refine explanations… through the minds and labs and pens of different scientists, with the results being replicated and the conclusions reaffirmed, and until it has survived competing legitimate and valuable explanations."…”

“…Second, scientific practices and theories aim at producing scientific explanations that are theoretically excellent, that is, accurate, generally consistent, held to a high standard of rigor, unifying diverse phenomenon, etc. However, moral discourse and ethicists' practice seldom aim at producing moral explanations that are theoretically excellent (Oliveira & Perrine 2017: 1029.…”

Realism, Naturalism, and Hazlett’s Challenge Concerning Epistemic Value

“…An alternative conception of natural properties is that they are those properties, whatever they are, that will eventually belong to a complete, scientific description of the world. I'm also skeptical that the property of epistemic value is a natural property in this sense, for reasons I've articulated inOliveira and Perrine (2017). In short, my primary goal in this paper is to defend nonnaturalism, where 'naturalism' is understood in Armstrong's sense of spatiotemporal properties.16 I will ignore his third constraint-the Universal Constraint-for two reasons.…”