Concept
Ethical non-naturalism
Overview
Ethical non-naturalism (or moral non-naturalism) is the meta-ethical view which claims that:
Ethical sentences express propositions.
Some such propositions are true.
Those propositions are made true by objective features of the world, independent of human opinion.
These moral features of the world are not reducible to any set of non-moral features.
This makes ethical non-naturalism a non-definist form of moral realism, which is in turn a form of cognitivism. Ethical non-naturalism stands in opposition to ethical naturalism, which claims that moral terms and properties are reducible to non-moral terms and properties, as well as to all forms of moral anti-realism, including ethical subjectivism (which denies that moral propositions refer to objective facts), error theory (which denies that any moral propositions are true), and non-cognitivism (which denies that moral sentences express propositions at all).
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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But all philosophy is either cognition on the basis of pure reason, or the cognition of reason on the basis of empirical principles. The former is termed pure, the latter empirical philosophy. The philosophy of pure reason is either propædeutic, that is, an inquiry into the powers of reason in regard to pure à priori cognition, and is termed critical philosophy; or it is, secondly, the system of pure reason—a…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Ethical non-naturalism is.
And in so doing, it enforces the moral meaning of natural science. When all is said and done in criticism of present social deficiencies, one may well wonder whether the root difficulty does not lie in the separation of natural and moral science. When physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, contribute to the detection of concrete human woes and to the development of plans for remedying them and relieving the human…
John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy
States what Ethical non-naturalism is.
(2) And the same consideration is sufficient to dismiss the hypothesis that ‘good’ has no meaning whatsoever. It is very natural to make the mistake of supposing that what is universally true is of such a nature that its negation would be self-contradictory: the importance which has been assigned to analytic propositions in…
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica
States what Ethical non-naturalism is.
Philosophers who discussed Ethical non-naturalism
Related ideas
- Moral nihilism
- G. E. Moore
- Intuition
- Pleasure
- Conscience
- Metaethics
- Non-cognitivism
- Anti-realism
- Naturalistic fallacy
- Perception
- Cognitivism (ethics)
- Value theory
- Ethical subjectivism
- Action theory (philosophy)
- Reductionism
- God
- Property (philosophy)
- Supernatural
- Definition
- Proposition
- Ethical intuitionism
- Ethical naturalism
- Moral realism
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Analytic philosophy.