Vilma Venesmaa

It is commonly assumed that if normative terms are analyzable in descriptive terms, as claimed by analytic reductionists, this provides an easy explanation why normative supervenience would be a conceptual truth. This chapter argues that our knowledge of normative supervenience has two important features this explanation fails to account for: first, the idea that normative properties supervene on descriptive properties seems obvious to us and, secondly, we don’t come to accept this thesis distributively by finding it plausible in each of its particular instances but rather by seeing a pattern that all normative properties must conform to. An alternative is suggested, an expressivist account of normative supervenience that allows us to explain both of these features. The chapter closes by arguing that they require explanation even on the assumption that normative supervenience is not a conceptual truth. This makes the explanation problem concerning our knowledge of normative supervenience more general than previously thought.

A common worry regarding normative supervenience theses is that they are easily trivialized unless we somehow restrict the set of descriptive base properties on which the normative properties supervene. The idea is that if all descriptive properties are included in the base, any two individuals that share all their base properties must be the same individual in the same world, from which it follows that they have the same normative properties. We argue that this trivial explanation for unrestricted normative supervenience fails. Moreover, we argue that even if it succeeded, this wouldn’t undermine the explanation challenges associated with normative supervenience.