Am I a reductive or non-reductive naturalist?
I tried to get The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding from the university library today after work, but the library still has limited hours until 7th March. It won't be open after business hours until Tuesday, by which time I will be busy rehearsing for my play, so I won't really be able to get to the library until 8th March anyway.
I was only curious about the term anyway. But if attitudinalism is meant to be similar to non-cognitivism, then I am sure I will not accept that as an approach to ethics, because as I understand it, ethical non-cognitivism means that moral statements have no truth-value, which I cannot believe. They do have a truth-value; it is simply what determines that truth-value that can be problematic.
Excuse me, WTF is non-reductive naturalism??
Some lecture notes from the University of Michigan are helping me with this:
In other words, that sounds like G.E. Moore, from when I did my ethics course, but I wouldn't swear by it. Apparently, the properties that are natural properties are, "Most uncontroversially, any that we can discover by empirical investigation".
That is definitely a reinforcement for my "empirical theory of ethics"--except how does one empirically investigate moral properties?
This is the part that I have been waiting for!
The example being offered is of J.S. Mill's famous quote that the only evidence that something is desirable is that people actually do desire it. One could argue that Mill is reducing ethical goodness to the property of being desired. Similarly, the external reviewer was trying to make out that I was reducing ethics to sociological functionalism--which, although that wasn't true, would have made me a reductive naturalist if it were true.
I sincerely doubt that ethics can be reduced to anything other than ethics, whether that be sociological functionalism or desiredness or anything. My comments in Section 5.2 of the thesis speak to this point, and the external reviewer has to ignore them in order to make his claim. Of course, he also has to ignore the last three chapters, but the review is obviously disingenuous anyway.
This therefore makes me a non-reductive naturalist, which G.E. Moore is as well. I make this point at this part of the thesis, and I got the point directly from my associate supervisor at the time. The essence of the claim is that, if ethical properties are natural, then even though they cannot reduce to other kinds of natural properties, they will still supervene over them, which seems fair enough.
I was only curious about the term anyway. But if attitudinalism is meant to be similar to non-cognitivism, then I am sure I will not accept that as an approach to ethics, because as I understand it, ethical non-cognitivism means that moral statements have no truth-value, which I cannot believe. They do have a truth-value; it is simply what determines that truth-value that can be problematic.
The difficulty of classifying any view as non-naturalistic is, at bottom, the cost of allowing non-reductive versions of naturalism.
Excuse me, WTF is non-reductive naturalism??
Some lecture notes from the University of Michigan are helping me with this:
The ethical naturalist holds that ethical propositions can indeed be true, and that is because ethical properties are themselves really natural properties.
In other words, that sounds like G.E. Moore, from when I did my ethics course, but I wouldn't swear by it. Apparently, the properties that are natural properties are, "Most uncontroversially, any that we can discover by empirical investigation".
That is definitely a reinforcement for my "empirical theory of ethics"--except how does one empirically investigate moral properties?
There are basically two kinds of naturalist position: reductive naturalism and nonreductive naturalism.
This is the part that I have been waiting for!
Reductive naturalism holds that ethical properties are identical to properties that can be identified with the vocabulary of the empirical sciences or empircal "folk theory".
The example being offered is of J.S. Mill's famous quote that the only evidence that something is desirable is that people actually do desire it. One could argue that Mill is reducing ethical goodness to the property of being desired. Similarly, the external reviewer was trying to make out that I was reducing ethics to sociological functionalism--which, although that wasn't true, would have made me a reductive naturalist if it were true.
I sincerely doubt that ethics can be reduced to anything other than ethics, whether that be sociological functionalism or desiredness or anything. My comments in Section 5.2 of the thesis speak to this point, and the external reviewer has to ignore them in order to make his claim. Of course, he also has to ignore the last three chapters, but the review is obviously disingenuous anyway.
This therefore makes me a non-reductive naturalist, which G.E. Moore is as well. I make this point at this part of the thesis, and I got the point directly from my associate supervisor at the time. The essence of the claim is that, if ethical properties are natural, then even though they cannot reduce to other kinds of natural properties, they will still supervene over them, which seems fair enough.
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