Henrik Rydéhn

According to the Divide & Conquer (DC) strategy (Fogal and Risberg 2020) for explaining moral supervenience, the modal covariation between moral and natural properties can be partly explained by appeal to pure moral principles. Bhogal (2022) has recently argued that DC fails. A pure moral principle like Act Utilitarianism (AU) cannot explain moral supervenience because AU is not a difference-maker for moral supervenience. There is nothing special about AU which explains why moral properties supervene on natural properties; other moral principles would also explain moral supervenience. On the other hand, if the proponent of DC appeals to some general feature of pure moral principles (like the fact that they have a “bridge-law” structure) then there is a question of what explains that feature. In this paper I do two things. First, I explore a possible extension of the DC-strategy against Bhogal's objection: I consider whether pure moral principles have the right features to explain moral supervenience by showing how these features follow from plausible assumptions about the underlying metaphysics of moral principles. Secondly, I show how this extended version of the DC-strategy can be used as a novel argument for moral contingentism.