Introduction to Naturalism

The next major move in ethics has been based on naturalism, which roughly is the view that there is only the natural; there is nothing supernatural. Usually this means all that exists is physical or dependent upon the physical. There are no essential natures or universal properties, like Plato thought. Already, we have seen many shifts in this direction, with materialist, nominalist, and empiricist moves. Plus, the Scientific Revolution gave rise to the view that the universe is a causally closed machine. When Darwin’s Origin was published, there was no longer a need to appeal to God as Creator. Naturalism became the dominant worldview in the west.

Naturalistic Ethics

To be consistent, ethics needed to be adapted to a naturalistic framework. Historically, this has taken many forms. In this and the following essays on naturalistic ethics, I will focus on one or more such proposals. In this essay, I will look at naturalistic moral views that are noncognitivist. This will include A. J. Ayer’s emotivism and Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism.

Noncognitivism

Moral noncognitivism includes the views that 1) intrinsically moral properties don’t exist, and 2) moral judgments are neither true nor false. While there is some debate about what moral judgments are, noncognitivism denies a place for beliefs. Since knowledge involves justified true beliefs, there is no moral knowledge on this view.

Ayer (d. 1989) was one of the logical positivists. Fitting with naturalism, meanings had to be something physical and empirically knowable. For them, a sentence is meaningful if and only if it is empirically verifiable. Ayer denied that moral sentences are meaningful; they do not have cognitive content and cannot be true or false. Sentences like “murder is wrong” is code language that just expresses emotions; e.g., “ugh, murder!” Similarly, “justice is good” translates to “hooray, justice!” His is a kind of emotivism. (Similarly, another noncognitivist option is prescriptivism: moral sentences just express commands; e.g., “don’t murder!” They too are not true or false.)

Simon Blackburn (b. 1944) is a noncognitivist who endorses quasi-realism. He too denies the reality of intrinsically moral properties since we live in a naturalistic, “disenchanted” world. He focuses on our ways of talking morally. His project attempts to give moral discourse the right to engage in talk as though morals exist (realism), and moral claims are true or false. Based on the surface grammar of a moral sentence, we can treat them as such. But, like Ayer, there really are no morals, and moral claims are not true or false. In both Ayer’s and Blackburn’s cases, the focus is on the way we talk morally and the denial of intrinsically moral properties.  

Assessment

What should we make of these noncognitivist views? First, by reducing away any cognitive content from moral sentences, they end up being merely descriptive. But, morality deeply seems to be about what is normative, or prescriptive. If people protest against a miscarriage of justice (e.g., an unarmed African-American man who was walking down a street, but was murdered by white men), they are not merely emoting. Instead, they deeply believe there was an injustice done, which is why they are upset.

Second, moral judgments are not identical with feelings or commands, for the former can occur without the latter. We do not need to have any feelings when we state, “Murder is wrong.” And, we can have feelings without moral judgments.

Third, there is no room for any moral education or training on these views, since there is no cognitive content to learn and therefore no real moral disagreement. But, this result undermines any training in moral virtue, such as in why we should address examples of injustices in society. It also does not do justice to the fact that many of us do disagree morally. This is plain to see when we look at the many social and moral issues we deliberate and debate.

These noncognitivist views undermine our four core morals, but there are more naturalistic options yet to be considered.

For Further Reading

A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic

Simon Blackburn, Essays in Quasi-Realism

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 5