Realism and Naturalism in Ethics

This collection of Nicholas Sturgeon's most important and influential essays on ethics and its history presents an impressive cumulative argument for naturalist moral realism, and a defence of it against the most prominent competing views in metaethics. These essays defend a unified view of the metaphysics, epistemology, semantics, and psychology of ethics. Naturalistic moral realism treats moral judgments as capable of being true or false, and takes their truth conditions to be independent of the appraiser's moral beliefs and attitudes. Moral facts and properties are part of the natural order, not requiring divine or supernatural support. Reductive analytical definitions of moral terms are rejected, and a non-reductive form of synthetic naturalism. is accepted. If moral properties are natural, they ought to explain both the actions of individuals and larger social movements. Hence moral explanations are sometimes good psychological and historical explanations. Non-reductive naturalism supports the autonomy of ethics in relation to the natural and social sciences. This form of ethical naturalism contrasts not only with analytical naturalism but also with those forms of non-naturalism that treat moral facts and properties as sui generis. The defense of naturalistic realism includes full and careful discussions of different forms of irrealism - expressivism, nihilism, and relativism. The essays are interrelated, introducing readers to different positions that are explored in more detail in other essays. Six essays discuss historical figures: Butler, Hume (three essays), Mill, and Moore. The realist and naturalist outlook of the other essays informs and unifies the discussion of historical figures in ways that highlight novel and distinctive interpretive and comparative perspective in the history of ethics. Students of Hume will benefit especially from the three essays that contrast Hume's actual views with the 'Humean' views that are often attributed to him.