Wade A. Tisthammer

Whether morality exists entirely as part of the natural world depends at least in part on what we mean by “morality.” Using analysis and formal logic it can be shown that, if one adopts a certain colloquial moral semantics whereby “is” and “ought” are different relations with respect to the type of ought that morality uses, it leads to deontic morality not being part of the natural world (at least not entirely so), thereby leading to a folk moral semantics argument against moral naturalism (or for moral non-naturalism). A similar argument can be used for arguing that, if one adopts the view that moral facts are natural facts, they should also adopt the view that moral facts are descriptive facts, i.e., that moral naturalism implies moral descriptivism.

Paradoxes inspired by José Benardete have been used in arguments for temporal finitism and causal finitism. Joseph C. Schmid has argued that there is a symmetry between those arguments and a corresponding argument against an endless future with respect to Koons’ patchwork principle using intrinsically identical copies of situations involving God revealing a future. I argue that this symmetry argument has limitations a theist can exploit to avoid the problem. A precognitive grandfather paradox about using simple foreknowledge to reveal the future that is redolent of the grandfather paradox against time travel illustrates why one might prefer a type of subjunctive foreknowledge over simple foreknowledge with respect to revealing the future, and a test for intrinsicality reveals that the future-revealing quality need not be intrinsic to a situation containing a subjunctively foreknowing God revealing the future.