Dispositionalism and Moral Nonnaturalism

Excerpt

Arguments akin to the following are commonly raised against realist moral nonnaturalism: The justification for the second premise is often given in the form of an argument from elimination. For instance, Mackie’s claim is that none of our normal epistemic sources could possibly reveal such properties and truths – neither direct sense perception nor inference to the best explanation nor conceptual analysis nor any combination thereof.¹ Moreover the notion that we have a special faculty of intuition, whose sole job is to reveal this transcendent realm to us, is seen as odd and ad hoc. Such epistemological concerns may be exacerbated by the fact that humans are the product of natural evolution, as Street, Joyce, and others have argued.² Why think that a natural evolutionary process would (or even could) give us a faculty for accessing transcendent, prescriptive moral properties and truths? Moreover we can provide perfectly good causal explanations for the evolutionary origins of our moral beliefs and relevant emotions, all without any reference to actual transcendent moral truths. As for the first premise, while it would be possible to affirm both realist moral nonnaturalism and also moral skepticism (such that realism would be upheld along with the denial that anyone possesses moral knowledge), such a conjunction is virtually unknown in the literature, so it is reasonable simply to grant this conditional, at least for the sake of argument. …