Can ethics be fully naturalistic while still explaining why moral reasons genuinely have authority over us?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
David Copp is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis, and his work has focused on moral and political philosophy.
Check out his new book, "Ethical Naturalism and the Problem of Normativity"!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DPGFFK2W
2. Book Summary
David Copp frames the book around what he takes to be metaethics’ central puzzle: the ‘problem of normativity’. He wants a theory-neutral grip on what needs explaining when we say that reasons, oughts, and values are ‘normative’, and he treats this as a problem not just for ethical realism in general, but especially for ‘ethical naturalism’. The worry is straightforward: if normative facts are what would make basic moral claims true, it’s hard to see how such facts could fit into a world that we learn about through experience and science—since it doesn’t look like experience (ordinary or scientific) can simply reveal that (say) torture is wrong or compassion is a virtue.
To make the dispute precise, Copp develops an ‘empirical criterion’ of the natural: roughly, a property counts as natural only if no synthetic truth about its instantiation is ‘strongly a priori’—so, for the naturalist, substantive basic ethical truths (if any) must be empirically defeasible. He then maps the space of ethical naturalisms: non-reductive views (often cast in terms of grounding/supervenience) versus reductive views, and within reductionism, ‘analytic’ versus ‘non-analytic’ versions—where he explicitly favors the non-analytic, metaphysical-analysis approach. Along the way he argues that to take the normativity problem seriously, it’s not enough to say ethical facts are natural (or grounded in natural facts); we need some reductive story of what ‘robust normativity’ itself consists in.
The second half of the book tests concrete proposals: he reviews several substantive naturalist options (including Cornell-style views, the Canberra Plan, neo-Humean and neo-Aristotelian approaches, and his ‘Pluralist-Teleology’) and then answers major objections (the ‘is/ought gap’, Parfit-style challenges, and the “just too different” intuition). A recurring verdict is that non-reductive naturalisms like Cornell Realism may be compatible with naturalism, but they don’t by themselves deliver a philosophically satisfying account of robust normativity, because they don’t provide the needed reductive explanation of what normativity is. Copp presents ‘Pluralist-Teleology’ as the most promising route: very roughly, basic ethical truths are grounded in facts about which systems of standards would best help humans solve different ‘problems of normative governance’—with morality tied in particular to the ‘problem of sociality’ and an ‘ideal moral code’ understood in those terms.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:39 - Overview of book
05:59 - The problem of normativity
12:59 - Normativity
19:17 - Formal vs. robust normativity
22:53 - Robust normavity
30:41 - Authoritativeness
35:35 - Categorizing theories
41:18 - Empirical research
50:39 - Normative conceptualism
54:05 - Analytic naturalism
1:09:32 - Plausible normative theories
1:15:10 - Parity thesis
1:18:50 - Nominalism
1:24:14 - Metaphysical naturalism
1:28:51 - Non-naturalist realism
1:33:00 - Non-primitivist non-naturalism
1:37:37 - Error theory
1:41:13 - Non-cognitivism
1:46:37 - Disunified moral semantics
1:50:12 - Natural properties
1:54:26 - Metaphysical characterization
1:56:24 - Counterexamples?
2:01:10 - Nature of normative properties
2:05:54 - What are these properties?
2:07:55 - Relation between natural properties and ethical properties
2:13:47 - Supervenience
2:21:48 - Frank Jackson’s direct argument
2:27:55 - Subjectivist neo-Humeanism
2:34:39 - Is it realist?
2:38:37 - Neo-Aristotelian naturalism
2:43:37 - Potential objections
2:49:03 - Pluralist teleology
2:53:05 - Desire-dependent again?
2:59:11 - Is-ought gap
3:04:34 - Bilgrami’s pincer argument
3:16:51 - “Just too different” objection
3:23:03 - Upshots
3:26:21 - Value of philosophy
3:29:03 - Conclusion
