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Why Moral Status Matters for Metaethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2019

CAROLINE T. ARRUDA
CAROLINE T. ARRUDA*
Affiliation:
DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY, THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASOctarruda@utep.edu
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Abstract

I show that an overlooked feature of our moral life—moral status—provides a route to vindicating naturalist moral realism in much the same way that the Humean theory of motivation and judgment internalism are used to undermine it. Moral status presents two explanatory burdens for metaethical views. First, a given view must provide an ecumenical explanation of moral status, which does not depend on the truth of its metaethical claims (say, that there are mind-independent facts about moral status). Second, its explanation must be consistent with persistent normative ethical disagreement about what constitutes moral status. I conclude that naturalist moral realism succeeds, while quasi-realism fails because it cannot meet the latter requirement. This argument has three results: we have a new route for metaethical vindication more generally and for naturalist moral realism in particular; quasi-realism's plausibility is undermined by an inability to explain disagreement, but not for the familiar reasons.

Keywords

moral statusmoral realismquasi-realism
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 4 , Issue 4 , Winter 2018 , pp. 471 - 490
Copyright
Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2019 

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Footnotes

The writing of this paper was funded in part by the Provost's Career Development Grant at the University of Texas at El Paso. I presented an earlier version at the Normative Disagreement Workshop at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, the University of Oslo. I thank the workshop participants, especially Carla Bagnoli, Gunnar Björnsson, John Eriksson, Christel Fricke, Teresa Marques, Knut Olav Skarsaune, and Caj Strandberg, as well as two anonymous referees for this journal, for their helpful comments.

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