Xiaoou Du

It is widely accepted that moral facts supervene on non-moral facts—there can be no moral difference without some non-moral difference. This impossibility is striking enough that it seems to require some explanation, and many have argued that moral non-naturalists are incapable of providing one, to their great detriment. One of the more interesting and promising responses that non-naturalists have offered to this supervenience challenge is to appeal to the existence of moral principles to explain supervenience. This strategy has gone by a number of names; we follow Fogal and Risberg in calling it the “Divide and Conquer strategy.” This strategy is a “divide and conquer” strategy because it divides moral facts into two classes, particular moral facts and general moral principles, and gives different explanations for why these two classes of moral facts supervene on base facts. But these different explanations are related, since the divide and conquer (DC) strategy has the non-naturalist explaining the supervenience of particular moral facts by appeal to the necessity of general moral principles. In two recent papers, Selim Berker and Harjit Bhogal have both argued (in different ways) that moral principles can’t explain the supervenience of particular moral facts on base facts. We argue that these attacks on the DC strategy fail. It is perfectly acceptable and coherent to explain the supervenience of particular moral facts by appeal to moral principles.