Naturalistic ontology and epistemology of moral facts

Abstract

The paper presents an original version of the moral naturalism  — a theory that combines moral realism and naturalistic empiricism. In the first section, I give initial definitions of the basic concepts for our study (such as moral realism, epistemological and metaphysical naturalism, supervenience) and clarify their meaning. In the second section, I present the main motivation for this study and those grounds on which we should try to defend both moral realism and naturalism. In the third section, we take a series of steps aimed at the explication of the logical form of moral facts. The advantage of the proposed logical form is that it allows us to argue that knowledge of such facts can be a result of knowledge of the physical properties of objects. This implies that moral realism and epistemological naturalism are compatible. In the fourth section, I demonstrate another feature of the proposed logical form: it is similar to the logical form of some other, much less controversial modal facts (such as, for example, facts about physical possibilities). This similarity allows us to propose some kind of analogy of Armstrong’s combinatorial theory of possibility for moral facts. Doing so I show how moral facts can supervene on the totality of all physical facts. In the fifth section, I analyze the most serious problem for moral naturalism: Hume’s guillotine. In the sixth final section, I present the main argument of this paper and make some remarks.

Keywords:

ethics, metaethics, ontology, moral realism, moral argumentation, naturalism, supervenience, Hume’s guillotine