Arquitectura del proyecto

Parfit thinks that the normativity argument decisively rules out naturalism but, acknowledging that many people will be unconvinced, he also offers other arguments. The one he believes to be most significant is the triviality argument, which he devotes the most discussion to and names a chapter after.197 _{This argument has generated much discussion, but most of the replies have} misunderstood the point that Parfit is trying to make. However, once we understand the point that Parfit is trying to make we can see that one of the premises of the triviality argument just begs the question against the naturalist. Parfit claims that he does not beg the question because he has offered decisive auxiliary arguments for the premises of his argument. It is these auxiliary arguments and not the triviality argument, which is of the most philosophical interest. I identify the main auxiliary arguments and show that they do not work. I also, along the way, dampen the hopes of Parfit and Peter Railton, that naturalists and non-naturalists might come to agree with one another.

§1 – The Triviality Argument

The triviality argument is designed to show that normative claims, understood along naturalist lines, could not be both substantive and positive. In order to be substantive a normative claim must be significant, in the sense that we could disagree with it or it could tell us something we do not already know. To be positive a normative claim must state or imply that when some act has a natural property, like maximises happiness, it also has some other, different normative property. Throughout, Parfit uses the example of the utilitarian claim

(A) When some act would maximise happiness, this act is what we ought to do.

On the kind of non-naturalist account that Parfit favours (A) tells us that acts which have the natural property maximises happiness, also have the non-natural, non-ontological, irreducibly normative property being what we ought to do. It is easy for philosophers who hold this account to explain why (A) is substantive and positive. (A) is substantive since we might not have already known that acts which maximise happiness also have the different normative property of being what we ought to do. Additionally, someone could sensibly disagree with (A); they might believe instead that only actions with some other natural property are the actions we ought to do or they might believe that there is no such property as being what we ought to do. Non-naturalists can straightforwardly explain why (A) is positive too since being what we ought to do is, on their account, a different normative property from the natural property maximises happiness.

Naturalists meanwhile cannot explain why claims like (A) are both substantive and positive. Naturalist utilitarians are committed to something like the following claim:

(C) When some act would maximise happiness, this property of this act is the same as the property of being what we ought to do.

But (C) is incompatible with the fact that (A) is substantive and positive, so naturalist

utilitarianism must be false, or so Parfit argues. Accepting (C) does not require accepting there is any analytic link between the meaning of the expressions ‘maximises happiness’ and ‘is what we ought to do’, or between the content of the concepts <maximises happiness> and <is what we ought to do>. (C) only requires that normative terms and concepts pick out the same property as some natural terms and concepts. As such, Parfit’s argument applies equally to both analytic and synthetic forms of utilitarian naturalism.

Parfit presents his argument in the following form:

(1) (A) is a substantive normative claim, which might state a positive substantive normative fact.

(2) If, impossibly, (C) were true, (A) could not state such a fact. (A) could not be used to imply that when some act would maximise happiness, this act would have the different property of being what we ought to do, since (C) claims that there is no such different property. Understood along Naturalist lines (A) would

be only another way of stating the trivial fact that, when some act would maximise happiness, this act would maximise happiness.

Therefore,

This form of naturalism is not true.198

Mark Schroeder points out that in this form Parfit’s argument is invalid.199 _{(1) is true as long as} (A) states or implies that when an act would maximise happiness it would have some different normative property. So, (1) could be true if (A) implies that acts which maximise happiness have the normative property good or the normative property what we have most reason to do. But, (2), if true, only rules out that (A) implies that when some act maximises happiness it could not have the normative property of being what we ought to. This premise is silent about whether (A) might imply that happiness-maximising acts has normative properties other than the property being what we ought to do. As a result, (1) and (2) could be true and the conclusion false. To fix this Parfit could simply tweak the second premise so that it said something like this:

(2’) If, impossibly, (C) were true, (A) could not state such a fact. (A) could not be used to imply that when some act would maximise happiness, this act would have a different normative property since (C) claims that there is no such different property.

With that tweak in place, Parfit’s argument is valid, but it only tells against one particular form of naturalist utilitarianism if it is sound. Parfit thinks, however, that his argument generalises. For any claim of the form, ‘If an act is M then it is N’, where ‘M’ is a natural predicate and ‘N’ is a normative predicate, that claim can only be positive and substantive if it says of an act that has a natural property that is also has a different normative property. However, according to the naturalist, some claim of the form, ‘If an act is M then it is N’, merely states the normatively trivial fact that actions with a particular natural property have that selfsame property. If

198 _{Parfit (2011b), pp.343-44. I alter premise (2) slightly so that Parfit’s argument applies to analytic naturalists as well}

as synthetic naturalists.

normative claims of the form, ‘If an act is M then it is N’, are positive and substantive then for any ‘M’ and ‘N’ those terms cannot denote the same property. Therefore, no naturalist account could work. It does not matter whether or not on the naturalist account in question ‘M’ and ‘N’ have the same meaning, just that they are co-referring. Because his argument has this feature, Parfit thinks that it is not vulnerable to the same objections that the open question argument faces.

§2 - Response 1 – Railton and Dowell & Sobel

Parfit’s triviality argument has generated a lot of discussion but most responses to it have missed the mark. Parfit imposes on the naturalist two requirements: that they show that normative claims like (A) are substantive and that they show that they are positive. Most naturalist

responses have focused on the first of these requirements, but, as we shall see, this is a mistake because Parfit is willing to grant that the naturalist can explain why normative claims are substantive, just not how they could be both substantive and positive.

(A) is substantive as long as it is potentially informative and could be disagreed with. The second premise of Parfit’s arguments states that if naturalism were true then normative claims would just state the normatively trivial fact that actions with a natural property have that selfsame property. Most philosophers who have responded to Parfit have thought that he is here claiming that if normative claims like (A) merely stated the fact that actions with a natural property have that property then they could not inform us of something we did not already know, nor could they be sensibly disagreed with. 200 _{On this interpretation, Parfit’s argument is more or less just a}

variation of Moore’s open question argument, which I already covered in Chapters 1 and 2. It is natural to think that Parfit is here trying to argue along the same lines as Moore. Moore argued that if naturalism were true then a normative claim like ‘Pleasure is good’ would be equivalent in

meaning to a trivial claim like ‘Pleasure is pleasure’; that looks similar to the point that Parfit is trying to get at when he says that naturalists cannot explain why normative claims are non-trivial. If we understand Parfit’s argument this way then the challenge for the naturalist is to explain the difference in cognitive significance between accepting normative claims and accepting trivial natural claims like ‘Pleasure is pleasure’.

To meet this challenge the naturalist can just take one of the many extent responses to Moore’s argument and apply it, mutatis mutandis, to Parfit’s argument. Different naturalists try to do this in different ways. One example comes in Peter Railton’s paper Two Sides of the Metaethical Mountain.201 Railton takes Parfit to be challenging the naturalist to say what information a claim like

(C) when some act would maximise happiness, this property of this act is the same as the property of being what we ought to do.

provides over and above a trivial claim like

(E) being an act that would maximise happiness is the same as being an act that would maximise happiness Railton’s response is to argue that (C), unlike (E), informs us that the property maximises happiness fulfils the job description associated with the normative concept <being what we ought to do>. He makes his case by using the analogy to the concepts <heat> and <molecular kinetic energy>, which are co-referring but associated with different information. The job description associated with the concept <heat> is something like that which melts solids, evaporates liquids, etc. If we are told that when something has the property of having a certain molecular kinetic energy then it

necessarily has a certain heat, we are informed that things with a natural property also have the property of fulfilling a certain job description associated with the concept <heat>. This is information that could not be provided simply by telling saying to someone, “Something with a certain molecular kinetic energy has a certain molecular kinetic energy”, since the concept <molecular kinetic energy> is not associated with the same job description as the concept

<heat>. The same goes for (C) and (E). If we learned that maximising happiness was the same as being what we ought to do we would have learned that maximising happiness is the property that fits the job description of <being what we ought to do>. Railton is circumspect when it comes to detailing what the job descriptions associated with normative concepts are, but he does suggest that normative concepts are associated with other normative concepts and that they are related to intention and action in ways that paradigmatically natural concepts are not.

Whether or not Railton shows that normative claims, understood along naturalist lines, can be substantive, it does not fully address the argument that Parfit intends to make. Parfit accepts that claims like (E) could give us substantive information as Railton claims, but he argues that this information could not also be positive. To be positive, in Parfit’s sense, a normative claim must tell us that when some act has a natural property it has another different normative property. The claim (C) does not imply that when some act has a particular natural property, it therefore has a different normative property. The only information it gives us is negative; it tells us that when some act has a natural property, it does not have some other different property of being right, since naturalists do not believe there is any property of rightness distinct from that natural property.202

The same pattern arises in Janice Dowell and David Sobel’s debate with Parfit. Dowell and Sobel understand Parfit’s argument along the same lines that Railton does. They write:

“Parfit’s Triviality Objection purports to show that [naturalists] are unable to do so much as state informative identities between the normative and the natural”.203

They model their response to this challenge on Robert Stalnaker’s approach to explaining why identity claims involving co-referring proper names can be informative. It is not necessary to go far into the details, but the idea is that claims like (C) update the ‘conversational common

202 _{Parfit (2016, pp.94-6)}

ground’ – roughly, the set of presuppositions and background beliefs underlying a conversation - in ways that (E) does not.204 _{Particularly, (C) rules out that we are speaking a language in which} the expression ‘maximises utility’ denotes a property other than the property that is denoted by the expression ‘what we ought to do’.

In his response, Parfit does not take issue with Dowell and Sobel’s contention that claims like (C), understood along naturalist lines, could be informative. His point of contention is that this information could not be positive. As a result, he quickly dismisses Dowell and Sobel’s argument as being based on a misunderstanding of his argument.205 _{Merely showing that normative claims} are substantive is not an adequate response to Parfit’s challenge since it only fulfils one of the two requirements that Parfit imposes.

§3 – Response 2 - Railton Again

Railton’s first reply to Parfit, which we have just seen, is to challenge the idea that normative claims, understood along naturalist lines, cannot be informative. Railton also, however, offers a more irenic response.206 _{He explores whether a synthetic naturalist could accept that there are} non-natural properties if those properties are also non-ontological, as Parfit believes normative properties to be.207 _{On this response, the naturalist, in effect, concedes that Parfit’s Triviality} argument shows that claims like (C) could not be true, but then shows that the denial of claims like (C) is consistent with naturalism.

Railton takes Parfit to be saying that distinct concepts must be tied to distinct properties. He discusses the concepts <heat> and <molecular kinetic energy>. Railton takes Parfit to be saying that because those concepts are distinct they must refer to distinct properties. A claim like

204 _{Stalnaker (1981, 2014).} 205 _{Parfit (2017, pp.230-232).} 206 _{Railton (2016)}

(G) heat is the same as molecular kinetic energy

tells us that the property molecular kinetic energy has a different second-order property heat. Because the concept <heat> supplies different information to the concept <molecular kinetic energy>, the properties heat and molecular kinetic energy are different properties. Railton comments that this is an unusual way to understand talk of ‘properties’ - we do not usually think of properties as conveying information, rather, we think that only properties under descriptions convey information.208 Still, if the naturalist goes along with Parfit’s understanding of ‘properties’ they can agree with much of what he says, or so suggests Railton.

Normative concepts are distinct from natural concepts on both Railton and Parfit’s views. Since normative concepts carry different information to paradigmatically natural concepts, Railton thinks he can now agree that normative concepts pick out some kind of non-ontological, non- natural property, in Parfit’s sense of the word ‘property’. Since these properties are non-ontological this does not conflict with his commitment to methodological naturalism – the principle that, in inquiry, we should see how far we can get on the assumption that all there are, are the kinds of entities that figure in the sciences. While non-natural irreducibly normative properties do not figure in the sciences, if they are non-ontological then naturalists need have no objection to including them. And since normative concepts like <wrong> do not play fundamental

explanatory roles in the sciences it makes sense for the naturalist to say that properties like wrong are non-natural (as long as we are using ‘property’ in the sense that Railton takes Parfit to be doing).

Since on Parfit’s view (as Railton understands it) to say that two properties are distinct is to say that the concepts they are associated with carry different information, we can accept that, in Parfit’s sense of ‘property’, things have non-natural properties without reifying the former in any way that would trouble a methodological naturalist. To say that, ‘Killing has the non-natural property 208 _{Railton (2016, p.53)}

wrong’, would be to say that the concept <wrong> applies to killing and that that concept <wrong> is not equivalent in meaning to any natural concept. The synthetic naturalist could agree with all this.

When it comes to talk of irreducibly normative facts, Railton also sees reason to think that he and Parfit can agree. Parfit distinguishes between referential and informational senses of facts.209 _On the former sense the claims, ‘Heat is heat’, and, ‘Heat is molecular kinetic energy’, state the same fact, on the latter sense one claim states a trivial fact and the other states an interesting fact. Parfit thinks that when we talk of ‘normative facts’, it is the informational sense of fact that is of interest to us. Railton argues that the synthetic naturalist can agree that ‘Killing is wrong’ and ‘Killing does not maximise happiness’ (or whatever) state different facts in the informational sense of ‘fact’, since they agree that those sentences carry different information. Since the concept

<wrong> is one that does not fundamentally figure in the natural sciences, Railton is happy to say that, ‘Killing is wrong’, expresses a kind of non-natural fact, distinct from the fact expressed by the claim, ‘Killing does not maximise happiness’.

Additionally, on Parfit’s view, only natural facts have normative importance.210 _{The claim,}

(J) Your wine is poisoned

states a natural fact which gives you a reason not to drink the wine. The normative claim, (K) the fact stated by (J) gives you a reason not to drink the wine,

states a normative fact. But, that fact is not normatively important; it does not provide you with any further reason not to drink the wine over and above the fact stated by (J), according to Parfit. Since, on Parfit’s view, non-natural normative facts do not have normative importance, Railton thinks that that is a reason to think that the naturalist can grant that talk of non-natural

209 _{Parfit (2011b), ch.26, §94.} 210 _{Parfit (2011b), pp.279-80}

normative facts is legitimate. Since non-natural normative facts do not need to figure in any, “fundamental metaphysical explanation of what really matters”, these facts can figure into a broadly methodologically naturalist program.211 _{So, Railton suggests, all in all there is very little} that Parfit says about normative matters that the naturalist could not say also.

Parfit is enthusiastic about Railton’s proposal.212 _{He writes that he and Railton now agree. Parfit} thinks that if the naturalist is happy to allow that there are non-ontological non-natural

normative properties and use those to explain the normativity of normative claims then synthetic naturalism is okay.

I do not think that Parfit and Railton really agree. The reason is that Railton misunderstands Parfit’s view of properties, something which Parfit actually points out.213 _{Railton has it that on}