Troubles on moral twin earth: Moral queerness revived

Supervenience, Dependence, Disjunction

“…Of two formulations separated by "or" here, only the first has anything to do with a fallacy of composition, while only the second  with its contentious deployment of the notion of truth  bears on the issue; at any rate that issue concerns the content of the supervenience principles rather than facts about adherence, individual or collective, to them. (A sentiment similar to that expressed by Klagge here can also be found in note 17 of [Horgan and Timmons, 1992].) Klagge continues, rather surprisingly in view of his [1984] (see the end of Remark 8.4 above): "Possible-worlds formulations, do not preserve the relativization of this condition to perspectives considered distributively.…”

“…As Hare [1952, p. 82] put it, "Talking about the supernatural is no prophylactic against 'naturalism'." And it should also be noted that the response in question is offered particularly in reaction to Blackburn [1971Blackburn [ , 1985, in the first of which the combination of even  especially, indeed  weak supervenience with a failure of the subjacent properties 92 to entail the supervenient properties is held to be bad news for an advocate of realism about the latter, essentially because such a position allows no explanation for the absence of the 'mixed worlds' discussed earlier; an argument like that Blackburn presents (though credited by him to Casimir Lewy)  supervenience as a problem for moral realism  is extracted by Horgan and Timmons from the writings of J. L. Mackie and developed by them in [Horgan and Timmons, 1992]. (As well as these references, see [Lewis, 1985, p. 165 [Stalnaker, 2003, p. 92] "According to Moore, natural properties entail evaluative properties," seems inappropriate, given the way Moore himself had introduced the terminology of entailment into philosophy in the first place  as standing for the converse of deducibility  which rather unfits it for use here, given Stalnaker's continuation of this remark: "but the necessary connection between natural and evaluative is synthetic and 92 R. M. Hare, who placed great emphasis on supervenience in ethics  even if he sometimes went astray in theorising about it (see note 70)  regarded the correct term converse to supervenient as being subjacent  the term used in Remark 8.6 above  rather than the crude though often encountered "subvenient".…”

Non-Naturalism and Reference

“…For a modern version, see Sider (2011: 34-35). The standard objection to causal theories of reference in metaethics is the Moral Twin-Earth objection (Horgan and Timmons 1991, 1992aand 1992b. For responses, see Copp (2000); Dowell (2016) …”

Moore on Twin Earth

“…Boyd's proposal has come under withering attack from Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons (1991, 1992a, 1992b, 2000. In a series of articles, they have argued that for any N that the naturalist realist cares to adduce, a revised open question argument would succeed in showing that 'good' does not refer to N. Horgan and Timmons note that our semantic intuitions cannot be ignored by proponents of naturalistic semantics, because the thought experiments which convince us of the truth of sample synthetic identity claims depend for their persuasiveness on these intuitions-not alone, as would have to be the case were the identity a priori, but in conjunction with the natural facts upon which the claim rests.…”