Debbie Roberts

According to many, that the normative supervenes on the non-normative is a truism of normative discourse. This chapter argues that those committed to more specific moral, aesthetic, and epistemic supervenience theses should also hold (NS*): As a matter of conceptual necessity, whenever something has a normative property, it has a base property or collection of base properties that metaphysically necessitates the normative one. The main aim in this chapter is to show that none of the available arguments establish (NS*), or indeed the relevant epistemic, aesthetic, and moral supervenience theses. (NS*) is not a conceptual truth. This has considerable dialectical importance. One interesting upshot is that it affords non-reductivists and non-naturalists a novel way of resisting certain prominent supervenience-based objections to their views, including objections that formulate supervenience as a purely metaphysical thesis.

Platonism in philosophy of mathematics and non-naturalist realism in metanormative theory seem to share key features. This chapter argues that the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument made by Platonists in philosophy of maths can be fruitfully pursued by non-reductive realists in metaethics. Thick evaluative concepts, and their role in scientific theories, play a key role in the normative version of the indispensability argument. The chapter makes the case that this strategy can deliver much of what the robust realist non-naturalist wishes to hold, including the sui generis nature of normative properties. However, the resulting view, like that of Platonists who pursue the analogous strategy, is naturalist rather than non-naturalist.

Joseph Raz devotes one section of “The Truth in Particularism” to explaining the irrelevance of supervenience to the debate between generalists and particularists. Really, however, his claim is that supervenience is irrelevant to metaethics in general. If there is a true supervenience thesis, he argues, it is not one that we now have access to; moreover, it is not one that we are ever likely to have access to. Raz’s discussion of supervenience has been largely neglected. The chief aim of this chapter is to bring it to light, for it is an argument that merits serious consideration. The secondary aim is to defend it. First, it reconstructs the argument before responding to objections. These objections concern the explanatory role of the general supervenience thesis, the inconceivability of its falsity, the claim that supervenience is a deep feature of our evaluative discourse, and the claim that supervenience of the evaluative on the nonevaluative must hold because the evaluative is grounded in the nonevaluative. The key move in Raz’s argument against supervenience concerns observations that he makes about ordinary evaluative practice. As they stand, these observations are suggestive but brief; however, these observations, supplemented by considerations about thick evaluation, give Raz the resources to respond to all of the above objections.

According to many, that the normative supervenes on the non-normative is a truism of normative discourse. This chapter argues that those committed to more specific moral, aesthetic, and epistemic supervenience theses should also hold : As a matter of conceptual necessity, whenever something has a normative property, it has a base property or collection of base properties that metaphysically necessitates the normative one. The main aim in this chapter is to show that none of the available arguments establish, or indeed the relevant epistemic, aesthetic, and moral supervenience theses. is not a conceptual truth. This has considerable dialectical importance. One interesting upshot is that it affords non-reductivists and non-naturalists a novel way of resisting certain prominent supervenience-based objections to their views, including objections that formulate supervenience as a purely metaphysical thesis.

In ethics, aesthetics and increasingly in epistemology, a distinction is drawn between thick and thin evaluative concepts. A common characterisation of the distinction is that thin concepts have only evaluative content, whereas thick concepts combine evaluative and descriptive content. Because of this combination, it is again commonly thought that thick concepts have various distinctive powers including the power to undermine the distinction between fact and value. This paper discusses the accuracy of this view of the thick concepts debate, as well as assessing the prospects for a thick concepts argument against the fact value distinction, while introducing the three main philosophical positions on the nature of thick concepts

This chapter defends explanatory indispensability arguments for the existence of irreducibly evaluative properties from the so-called ‘supervenience objection’. A structurally similar argument and objection are found in the philosophy of mathematics. It is argued that a response to the supervenience objection is available that is structurally similar to a recent response made in the philosophy of mathematics case. The core claim is that reductive realists in metaethics, like nominalists in philosophy of mathematics, have to take what has been called the ‘hard road’. And in metaethics, like in philosophy of mathematics, there are good reasons to think that this road is not navigable.

Thick concepts are commonly characterised as holding together thin evaluative and non-evaluative elements. Some hold the thin evaluative element is no part of the content of the concept. Others hold that it is. Among the latter there are those who think the descriptive and evaluative elements can be ‘disentangled’ and those that think they cannot. This paper puts forward an alternative to all of the above starting from the thought that it's mistaken to think of thick concepts as composed of elements at all. This is the view that thick concepts are evaluative as a matter of content but not by having thin evaluative content. Along the way, the paper explores what it is for a concept to be evaluative.

The claim that the normative depends on the non-normative is just as entrenched in metanormative theory as the claim that the normative supervenes on the non-normative. It is widely held to be a genuine truism, a conceptual truth that operates as a constraint on competence with normative concepts. Call it the dependence constraint. I argue that this status is unwarranted. While it is true that the normative is dependent, it is not a genuine truism, or a conceptual truth, that it depends on the nonnormative. I argue for the following inadequacy claim: that when we cull all the normative terms from our language, and so the concepts that they stand for, what we will be left with will not necessarily be sufficient to adequately describe, conceptualize or represent what it is that we are supposed to be making normative judgements in virtue of. This has implications for both ascriptive and metaphysical understandings of the dependence constraint, and the potential to radically reshape the dialectic in metanormative theory.

This article aims to clarify the view that thick concepts are irreducibly thick. I do this by putting the disentangling argument in its place and then setting out what nonreductivists about the thick are committed to. To distinguish the view from possible reductive accounts, defenders of irreducible thickness are, I argue, committed to the claim that evaluative concepts and properties are nonevaluatively shapeless. This in turn requires a commitment to (radical) holism and particularism. Nonreductivists are also committed to the claim that a thick concept is in itself evaluative, and not evaluative because of any link to thin evaluation.