David Copp

My goal in this paper is to explain what ethical naturalism is, to locate the pivotal issue between naturalists and non-naturalists, and to motivate taking naturalism seriously. I do not aim to establish the truth of naturalism nor to answer the various familiar objections to it. But I do aim to motivate naturalism sufficiently that the attempt to deal with the objections will seem worthwhile. I propose that naturalism is best understood as the view that the moral properties are natural in the sense that they are empirical. I pursue certain issues in the understanding of the empirical. The crux of the matter is whether any synthetic proposition about the instantiation of a moral property is strongly a priori in that it does not admit of empirical evidence against it. I propose an argument from epistemic defeaters that, I believe, undermines the plausibility of a priorism in ethics and supports the plausibility of naturalism.

We have the intuition that the function of morality is to make society possible. That is, the function of morality is to make possible the kind of cooperation and coordination among people that is necessary for societies to exist and to cope with their problems. This intuition is reflected in the 'society centered' moral theory I defended in my book, Morality, Normativity, and Society. The theory is a relativistic version of moral naturalism and moral realism. This paper briefly explains some of the basic ideas of my theory and attempts to answer some of the most common objections. I argue that, despite its relativism, my views allow that certain things are simply wrong to do, without any qualifications, and it allows that members of other societies, non-human animals, and even features of the environment, might have non-derivative moral status.

"Moral skepticism" is the thesis that no moral code or standard is or could be objectively justified. It constitutes as important a challenge to anti-skeptical moral theory as does skepticism about God to theistic philosophies. It expresses intuitive doubts, but it also entails the falsity of a variety of philosophical theories. It entails a denial of moral knowledge and truth, but one could reject it without holding that there is such knowledge or truth. An anti-skeptical theory could be a familiar "epistemic theory," but it could also be a "practical theory," according to which some moral code has an appropriate justification in practical reason

The contemporary debate about the relation between reasons and motivation is partly driven by the problem of explaining the “normativity” of reasons. Reasons are “prescriptive”. They direct us how to act. They are “apt” to guide our choices. Moreover, reasons are “action guiding”. Insofar as we are rational, we let them guide our choices, for we accept their instructions. These formulations are metaphorical, however, and the problem is to explain precisely what they mean. One strategy for explaining normativity, an “internalist” strategy, is to construe reasons or rationality as being necessarily connected to motivation. According to one internalist view, which is defended by Bernard Williams, appropriate motivation is entailed by reasons. This is the sense in which reasons are “apt” to guide our choices. According to another view, which is defended by Michael Smith, Christine Korsgaard, and T.M. Scanlon, motivation to act in accord with reasons is entailed by rationality. This is why we are guided by reasons insofar as we are rational. These are two familiar internalist doctrines.

The central philosophical challenge of metaethics is to account for the normativity of moral judgment without abandoning or seriously compromising moral realism. In Morality in a Natural World, David Copp defends a version of naturalistic moral realism that can accommodate the normativity of morality. Moral naturalism is often thought to face special metaphysical, epistemological, and semantic problems as well as the difficulty in accounting for normativity. In the ten essays included in this volume, Copp defends solutions to these problems. Three of the essays are new, while seven have previously been published. All of them are concerned with the viability of naturalistic and realistic accounts of the nature of morality, or, more generally, with the viability of naturalistic accounts of reasons.

The interpretation of the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill has been a matter of controversy at least since J.O. Urmson published his well known paper over twenty-five years ago. Urmson attributed to Mill a form of “rule-utilitarianism”, contrasting his reading with the “received view” on which Mill held a form of “act-utilitarianism”. Since then, the interpretive problem has typically been seen to be that of determining which of these two types of theory should be attributed to Mill, or, at least of determining whether Mill was a “rule-utilitarian”. However, as the distinction is typically made, it is possible to have a utilitarian theory which is neither an act- nor a rule-utilitarian theory. 1n particular, as I will attemptto show, Mill's theory is of neither type but is an example of a sophisticated type of utilitarianism which we might call “iterated-utilitarianism”, for reasons which will become clear in what follows.