L'éthique et sa place dans la nature
One of the burning questions among metaethical realists is whether moral facts and properties are natural or non-natural. In this thesis, I argue that we should treat a family of arguments for non-naturalism with considerable scepticism: the Open Question Argument, the Normative Intuition, and the argument from the Is-Ought Gap. Moore’s famous Open Question Argument only supports moral non-naturalism if it begs the question against the modest (non-reductionist) naturalist. As for the Normative Intuition, it either commits the fallacy of inferring on the basis of a thing’s specific difference that it does not belong to the genus it putatively belongs to, or it underestimates the breadth of natural properties that possess the features which non-naturalists allege are distinctive of moral and normative properties. The argument from the Is-Ought Gap, for its part, underestimates the ubiquity of the logical and conceptual gap that allegedly marks a deep metaphysical discontinuity between the normative and natural domains.
G.E. Moore David Enoch Just-too-different intuition Derek Parfit J.L. Mackie Motivation morale Thomas Scanlon Is-ought gap Moral naturalism Moral non-naturalism Moral properties Metaphysics of reasons Open question argument Normative intuition Moral motivation