Ryan Stringer

This paper introduces emergent moral non-naturalism, which holds that moral properties depend on descriptive properties and normative bridge principles for their instantiation, where these principles specify instantiation conditions of moral properties in terms of descriptive properties. Continuous with the non-naturalist tradition in metaethics, this view takes moral properties to be non-causal properties; in accordance with the emergentist tradition in metaphysics, it takes them to confer powers on their bearers. Reconciling these two claims of non-causality and power conferral, emergent moral non-naturalism construes moral properties in terms of their non-causal powers.

Consequentialism is often criticized for failing to accommodate impersonal constraints and personal options. A common consequentialist response is to acknowledge the anticonsequentialist intuitions but to argue either that the consequentialist can, after all, accommodate the allegedly recalcitrant intuitions or that, where accommodation is impossible, the recalcitrant intuition can be dismissed for want of an adequate philosophical rationale. Whereas these consequentialist responses have some plausibility, associational duties represent a somewhat different challenge to consequentialism, inasmuch as they embody neither impersonal constraints nor personal options, but rather personal constraints. Our intuitions about associational duties resist capture within the intellectual net of consequentialism, and such duties do admit of a philosophical rationale at least as plausible as anything the consequentialist has to offer

This book is a systematic and constructive treatment of a number of traditional issues at the foundation of ethics, the possibility and nature of moral knowledge, the relationship between the moral point of view and a scientific or naturalistic world view, the nature of moral value and obligation, and the role of morality in a person's rational life plan. In striking contrast to many traditional authors and to other recent writers in the field, David Brink offers an integrated defense of the objectivity of ethics.