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Showing posts with label Moral Supervenience. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Moral Supervenience. Show all posts

Saturday, December 19, 2015

Three Types of Moral Supervenience

By John Danaher
Philosophical Disquisitions
Originally published November 7, 2014

Here are two excerpts:

As you know, metaethics is about the ontology and epistemology of morality. Take a moral claim like “torturing innocent children for fun is wrong”. A metaethicist wants to know what, if anything, entitles us to make such a claim. On the ontological side, they want to know what is it that makes the torturing of innocent children wrong (what grounds or explains the ascription of that moral property to that event?). On the epistemological side, they wonder how it is that we come to know that the torturing of innocent children is wrong (how to we acquire moral knowledge?). Both questions are interesting — and vital to ask if you wish to develop a sensible worldview — but in discussing moral supervenience we are focused primarily on the ontological one.

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The supervenience of the moral on the non-moral is generally thought to give rise to a philosophical puzzle. JL Mackie famously argued that the if the moral truly did supervene on the non-moral, then this was metaphysically “queer”. We were owed some plausible account of why this happens. He didn’t think we had such an account, which is one reason why he was an moral error theorist. Others are less pessimistic. They think there are ways in which to account for moral supervenience.

The blog post is here.