William A. Rottschaefer

In this article I elaborate a scientifically based moral realism that I call affordance moral realism, and I offer a promissory note that affordance moral realism is the best current explanation of morality. Affordance moral realism maintains that morality is constituted by the interaction of moral agents and moral affordances. The latter are the natural and social environments in which moral agents’ activities take place and contain the objects of moral agents’ activities whose actualizations are the manifestation of substantive moral goods. In making this argument, I take a scientific naturalistic approach that includes both the natural and social sciences, aiming to make my account both methodologically and substantively naturalistic. On the subject side of my affordance view, I offer a scientific account of moral agency, one based on an extension of social cognitive theories of agency to the realm of morality. And I argue that affordance moral realism explains the nature of moral agency, its acquisition, maintenance, and successful performance. To explain its origin and maintenance, I make use of a general theory of selection that embraces biological, social, cultural, and intentional selection. On the object side, I offer a theory of moral affordances and their actualizations, employing the findings and theories of moral developmental psychology and moral psychology to understand their actualizations through the successful operations of moral agents. I conclude that a scientifically based naturalistic affordance moral realism promises to provide the best current account of morality. It is not only affordable; it’s a bargain.

Although scientific naturalistic philosophers have been concerned with the role of scientific psychology in illuminating problems in moral psychology, they have paid less attention to the contributions that it might make to issues of moral ontology. In this paper, I illustrate how findings in moral developmental psychology illuminate and advance the discussion of a long-standing issue in moral ontology, that of moral realism. To do this, I examine Gilbert Harman and Nicholas Sturgeon's discussion of that issue. I contend that their explorations leave the issue unresolved. To break the stalemate, I appeal to empirical psychological findings about moral internalization-the process by which children acquire the capacity to act in terms of moral norms. I contend that these findings illuminate the issue, suggest a way to advance it, and tend to support a moral realist position.

In this very informative volume, Peter Olen addresses questions that are of interest both to philosophers generally and to students of Sellars's thought in particular. Do philosophers have a job that is distinct from the scientists'? Yes. What is the nature of normativity and how is it discerned? Roughly, normativity is connected with the extra-conceptual content that normative language adds to factual content. Do Wilfrid Sellars's career-long efforts to account for the nature of both philosophy and normativity present itself as a unified, consistent one? No, so the interpreters of Sellars who find in his works a unified position are incorrect. The pure pragmatics developed by the early Sellars gives way to a...

In his recent Gifford Lectures, Holmes Rolston argues that the informational character of biological phenomena is better explained by a theistic God of the process variety than by appealing to naturalistic biological explanations. In this paper, I assess Rolston’s argument by examining current biological and philosophical interpretations of the role of the theoretical concept of information in the description and explanation of biological phenomena. I find that none of these understandings of the concept allow Rolston’s conclusion. Natural selection explanations are in principle sufficient for accounting for the informational character of biological phenomena.

This important book brings findings and theories in biology and psychology to bear on the fundamental question in ethics of what it means to behave morally. It explains how we acquire and put to work our capacities to act morally and how these capacities are reliable means to achieving true moral beliefs, proper moral motivations, and successful moral actions. By presenting a complete model of moral agency based on contemporary evolutionary theory, developmental biology and psychology, and social cognitive theory, the book offers a unique perspective. It will be read with profit by a broad swathe of philosophers, as well as psychologists and biologists.

In Science, Truth and Democracy, Philip Kitcher has argued that science ought to meet both the epistemic goals of significant truth and the nonepistemic goals of serving the interests of a democratic society. He opposes this science as servant model to both the theology of science as source of salvific truth and the theology of science as anti-Christ. In a recent critical comment, Paul A. Roth argues that Kitcher remains entangled in the theology of salvific truth, not realizing that its goal is either vacuous or unattainable. Instead of theologies, Roth proposes demythologization. In the end, science attains neither truth nor value, for these goals are incomprehensible and unattainable. Consequently, science’s goals are entirely pedestrian and without special interest. Adopting Kitcher’s own scientific naturalistic epistemology, the author argues for a naturalized theology of science, using a science as mediator model, in which both nature and scientist have a role in the acquisition of significant truth.

This paper sketches an alternative answer to James Jones's recent attempt to explore the implications of cognitive social learning theories of personality for issues in epistemology, philosophy of science, and religious studies. Since the 1960s, two cognitive revolutions have taken place in scientific psychology: the first made cognition central to theories of perception, memory, problem solving, and so on; the second made cognition central to theories of learning and behavior, among others. Cognitive social learning theories find their place in the latter revolution. Because of an ongoing naturalistic revolution in philosophy, these cognitive revolutions in psychology are having a profound effect on both descriptive and normative issues in epistemology and philosophy of science. From the naturalistic perspective, philosophy cannot adequately pursue its goals without the contributions of the empirical sciences, including psychology. The author concludes that the cognitive revolutions in psychology and the naturalistic revolution in philosophy have similar descriptive and normative import for the study of religion.

Arguably, one of the most exciting recent advances in moral philosophy is the ongoing scientific naturalization of normative ethics and metaethics, in particular moral psychology. A relatively neglected area in these improvements that is centrally important for developing a scientifically based naturalistic metaethics concerns the nature and acquisition of successful moral agency. In this paper I lay out two examples of how empirically based findings help us to understand and explain some cases of successful moral agency. These are research in moral internalization and aggression management. Using these examples, I sketch some lessons for investigating successful moral learning and moral action. My proposal reflects a common theme in scientifically based philosophy generally: the shift from the armchair methods of analyzing concepts and finding a priori foundations, the enterprise of first philosophy, to an effort to study the phenomena themselves, using empirical findings and theories to answer philosophical questions about these phenomena, an endeavor recently characterized as second philosophy

Is metaphysics possible? If so, what would it be like? And what would make it possible? David Harbert offers a positive answer to the first question and an existential phenomenological characterization of metaphysics as a reply to the second. What makes such a metaphysics possible are, according to Harbert, the personal, interpersonal, and person-related structures of being which reveal themselves in the peak moments of ordinary experience and in similar moments of aesthetic and religious experience.

Sellars’ verbal behaviorism demands that linguistic episodes be conceptual in an underivative sense and his theoretical mentalism that thoughts as postulated theoretical entities be modelled on linguistic behaviors. Marras has contended that Sellars’ own methodology requires that semantic categories be theoretical. Thus linguistic behaviors can be conceptual in only a derivative sense. Further he claims that overt linguistic behaviors cannot serve as a model for all thought because thought is primarily symbolic. I support verbal behaviorism by showing that semantic categories are in the first instance teleological explanatory categories and consequently can be observational. And I show how theoretical mentalism can be maintained even though thought is primarily symbolic

Naturalism is often considered to be antithetical to theology and genuine religion. However, in a series of recent books and articles, Willem Drees has proposed a scientifically informed naturalistic account of religion, which, he contends, is not only compatible with supernaturalistic religion and theology but provides a better account of both than either purely naturalistic or purely supernaturalistic accounts. While rejecting both epistemological and methodological naturalism, Drees maintains that ontological naturalism offers the best philosophical account of the natural world and that, in addition, it provides the opening for a supernaturalistic understanding of religion and theology, one that best fits the condition of epistemic and moral distance from the transcendent characteristic of religious wonderers and wanderers. In this paper I examine Drees's claim and argue that it is seriously flawed. I show that Drees's naturalism is, in fact, both methodologically and epistemologically naturalistic. I also show that his attempts to limit naturalism to the sphere of the natural world by means of the phenomena of limit questions and underdetermination fail. Arguing for a more optimistic, but also, I contend, more empirically accurate account of human epistemic and moral capacities, I propose a full‐fledged scientifically based naturalistic account of theology.

In this paper I examine the feminist claim that non-epistemic values ought to play a role in scientific inquiry. I examine four holist arguments that non-epistemic values ought to play a role not only in the external aspects of scientific inquiry such as problem selection and the ethics of experimentation but also in its internal aspects, those that have to do with epistemic justification. In supporting their conclusion, I argue that they establish that the traditional external/internal distinction has served as a marker for more fundamental distinctions between non-epistemic and epistemic values and between the means by which each are pursued. However, I also contend that these arguments do nothing to deny these distinctions between epistemic and non-epistemic values. Maintaining these distinctions, I argue for an epistemic holism suggesting ways in which both substantive claims about non-epistemic values and reliable processes/methods for the legitimization of non-epistemic values may also be truth-conducive, thereby serving the epistemic ends of scientific inquiry.

Abstract.The thesis that the sciences are value neutral has recently been criticized severely. However, both the critics of the value‐neutrality thesis and its upholders share the separatist position that there is a fundamental dichotomy between fact and value, differing only on the degree to which science is impregnated with values. Skinner's claim that the science of operant behavior is the science of values rejects this dichotomy and is opposed to both the value‐neutrality thesis and criticisms of it. I examine Skinner's claim that psychology is value‐laden in the radical sense of providing a foundation for a theory of values and conclude that Skinner is arguing for an ethics and theory of values which is naturalistic, teleological, and both substantively and methodologically objective.

Although scientific naturalistic philosophers have been concerned with the role of scientific psychology in illuminating problems in moral psychology, they have paid less attention to the contributions that it might make to issues of moral ontology. In this paper, I illustrate how findings in moral developmental psychology illuminate and advance the discussion of a long-standing issue in moral ontology, that of moral realism. To do this, I examine Gilbert Harman and Nicholas Sturgeon's discussion of that issue. I contend that their explorations leave the issue unresolved. To break the stalemate, I appeal to empirical psychological findings about moral internalization—the process by which children acquire the capacity to act in terms of moral norms. I contend that these findings illuminate the issue, suggest a way to advance it, and tend to support a moral realist position.

Robert Richards has presented a detailed defense of evolutionary ethics, a revised version of Darwin's views and a major modification of E. O. Wilson's. He contends that humans have evolved to seek the community welfare by acting altruistically. And since the community welfare is the highest moral good, humans ought to act altruistically. Richards asks us to take his empirical premises on faith and aims to show how they can justify an ethical conclusion. He identifies two necessary conditions for a naturalistic justification of morality (NJ): its premises (1) must be empirical and (2) concerned with morally relevant causal factors. I argue that these two conditions are insufficient. An NJ must also appeal to teleogical or teleonomic laws which identify proper effects and reliable causes of these effects. So I supplement biological faith with an NJ that I believe has a better chance of working since faith without works is dead.