Audrey Powers

Can the moral be causally efficacious? When my friend does something morally wrong, is it the moral wrongness of her action that causes me to think, "My friend did something morally wrong"? It is generally assumed that how one should answer these questions depends on one’s metaethical commitments. Moral naturalism is taken to let us account for moral causation, while moral non-naturalism is taken not to. I argue that this assumption is false. According to widely accepted difference-making accounts of causation, the moral may be causally efficacious on standard non-naturalist views.

This is a paper about model-building and overfitting in normative ethics. Overfitting is recognized as a methodological error in modeling in the philosophy of science and scientific practice, but this concern has not been brought to bear on the practice of normative ethics. I first argue that moral inquiry shares similarities with scientific inquiry in that both may productively rely on model-building, and, as such, overfitting worries should apply to both fields. I then offer a diagnosis of the problems of overfitting in moral inquiry and explain how our current practice seems worryingly susceptible to such problems. I conclude by giving suggestions for how we might avoid overfitting when doing normative ethics.