Philosophy 214: Seminar in Ethics

University of California-Davis
Fall Quarter 2005

Pekka Väyrynen
Phone and email: 530.752.5653; pekkav at ucdavis dot edu
Office: 2279 Soc. Sci. and Humanities Bldg.
Office hours: M 2:30-3:30, F 11:00-12:00, and by appointment

This seminar will survey contemporary work on ethical naturalism, which I understand primarily as the view that ethical properties fall into the category of natural properties. Ethical naturalism is a form of ethical realism, the view that ethics is a domain of robustly objective fact. The topic lies at the intersection of several central issues in the past century of meta-ethics. We begin with G. E. Moore's (in)famous "open question argument" against analytical naturalism and then discuss contemporary forms of analytic naturalism and reductive and non-reductive synthetic naturalism. We'll consider different accounts of natural properties, the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral, and debates about whether there are correct "moral explanations". We'll also consider recent non-naturalist critiques of ethical naturalism, as well as arguments that a broadly naturalistic worldview better supports ethical anti-realism than naturalistic ethical realism and the question whether ethical naturalism can adequately capture normativity.

As a student in this seminar, you are expected to do the assigned reading and participate actively in class. Other requirements are:

• A term paper (ca. 15-20 pages), possibly in two drafts. Details TBA.
• Depending on enrollment, a class presentation. Details TBA.

All readings are available either online or in a folder at the Philosophy Department copy room (1243 SS&H Bldg.). You will find a link to each online text in the schedule below. Accessing most of the online readings requires institutional access via UCD server. If you use a non-UCD ISP, you need to set your browser to a proxy server (instructions here).

For most sessions, there will be more to read than we will probably get through. Each week, I will try to indicate more precisely which of the next week's readings will be the more important ones. We may also find good reasons to revise our schedule as we go on.

Pekka Väyrynen: "Moral Realism", forthcoming in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Second Edition (Macmillan, 2005).
Michael Ridge: "Moral Non-Naturalism", in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2003 edition).
Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton: "Toward Fin de Siecle Ethics: Some Trends", The Philosophical Review 101 (1992), 115-189.

G. E. Moore: Principia Ethica, revised edition (Cambridge UP, 1993), 53-73, 88-93, 1-19.

William Frankena: "The Naturalistic Fallacy", Mind 48 (1939), 464-477.
Alexander Miller: An Introduction to Contemporary Metaethics (Polity Press, 2003), 10-18.
Nicholas Sturgeon: "Ethical Naturalism", forthcoming in Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, ed. David Copp (Oxford UP, 2005).
Fred Feldman: "The Open Question Argument: What It Isn't; and What It Is", forthcoming in Philosophical Issues (2005).
Recommended: Nicholas Sturgeon: "Moore on Ethical Naturalism", Ethics 113 (2003), 528-556.

Russ Shafer-Landau: Moral Realism: A Defence (Oxford UP, 2003), 55-79.
David Copp: "Why Naturalism?", Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 6 (2003), 179-200.
David Lewis: "New Work for a Theory of Universals", reprinted in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology (Cambridge UP, 1999), 8-19.

Frank Jackson: From Metaphysics to Ethics, (Oxford UP, 1998), 117-29, 140-44, 150-53.
Brian McLaughlin and Karen Bennett: "Supervenience", in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2005 edition). Read sections 3-4 as background.
Simon Blackburn: "Supervenience Revisited", reprinted in Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford UP, 1993), 130-48.
Simon Blackburn: Spreading the Word (Cambridge UP, 1984), 180-188.
James Dreier: "The Supervenience Argument against Moral Realism", The Southern Journal of Philosophy 30 (1992), 13-38. Read sections I-III.

Peter Railton: "Facts and Values", in Facts, Values, and Norms (Cambridge UP, 2003), 43-68.
Peter Railton: "Moral Realism", The Philosophical Review (1986), 163-207.
Mark Schroeder: "Realism and Reduction: the Quest for Robustness", Philosophers' Imprint 5, No.1 (2005).

Gilbert Harman: "Ethics and Observation", The Nature of Morality (Oxford UP, 1977), 1-10.
Gilbert Harman: "Moral Explanations of Natural Facts -- Can Moral Claims Be Tested Against Moral Reality?", The Southern Journal of Philosophy 24 (1986), Supplement, 57-68.
Nicholas Sturgeon: "Harman on Moral Explanations of Natural Facts", The Southern Journal of Philosophy 24 (1986), Supplement, 69-78.
Nicholas Sturgeon: "Moral Explanations Defended", forthcoming in Contemporary Debates in Moral Philosophy, ed. James Dreier (Blackwell, 2005), 1-11.
Recommended: Nicholas Sturgeon: "Moral Explanations", reprinted in Essays on Moral Realism, ed. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Cornell UP, 1988), 229-55.

David O. Brink: Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge UP, 1989), 156-67, 172-80, 190-97.
Richard Boyd: "How to Be a Moral Realist", in Essays on Moral Realism, ed. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Cornell UP, 1988), 181-228.

Mark Timmons: Morality Without Foundations (Oxford UP, 1999), 56-70.
Terence Horgan and Mark Timmons: "Copping Out on Moral Twin Earth", Synthese 124 (2000), 139-142 only.
David Merli: "Return to Moral Twin Earth", Canadian Journal of Philosophy 32 (2002), 207-240.
Mark van Roojen: "Knowing Enough to Disagree: A New Response to the Moral Twin Earth Argument", forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Metaethics 1 (2006).

Peter Railton: "Naturalism and Prescriptivity", Social Philosophy and Policy 7 (1989), 151-74.
Connie Rosati: "Agency and the Open Question Argument", Ethics 113 (2003), 490-527.
David Copp: "Moral Naturalism and Three Grades of Normativity", in Normativity and Naturalism, ed. Peter Schaber (Ontos Verlag, 2004), 7-45.

David McNaughton and Piers Rawling: "Naturalism and Normativity", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 77 (2003), 23-45.
Jonathan Dancy: "On the Importance of Making Things Right", Ratio 17 (2004), 229-37.
Pekka Väyrynen: "Normative Appeals to the Natural" (unpublished).