Introduction
In the paper “Why Naturalism?’, David Copp attempts to explain what ethical naturalism is and believes that to understand naturalism one must accept that moral properties such as moral rightness, goodness, justice and virtuousness are natural. His thesis tries to explain the meaning of natural properties. The paper focuses on ethical naturalism and as such differentiates between “ethical naturalism’ and “unrestricted naturalism” on the grounds that ethical naturalism is only concerned with moral properties and ignores other properties of naturalism.
Discussion
Copp starts with the basic assumption that moral properties must be empirical in order to be natural. His strategy is to analyze the existing literary approaches and examine to see if they are empirical. He first sets out to prove that G.E Moore is a non-naturalist by showing that Moore finds moral knowledge to be non-empirical which is against his basic assumption.
He next considers the four basic approaches of natural properties, viz. reductionist proposals, ostensive definitions, metaphysical definitions and epistemic definitions. He finds problems with the reductionist proposal because it proposes to reduce the natural properties to some base properties to which the moral properties must be related. His argument is that the proposal is unable to tell us what makes these base natural properties natural. His objection to the ostensive definition approach is that it reduces the “natural world to be the world studied by sciences”, and hence leaves no room for doubt and no need for the ostensive part of the proposal.
He similarly finds problems with the various Metaphysical definitions. He has problems with natural properties being called factual properties because it would mean that a simple statement that someone is good would have to be a fact. He has problems with the natural world being of the causal order because people often view supernatural as the causal order which is against the very nature of naturalism. His problem with the David Armstrong’s idea of “spatiotemporal manifold” is that properties are not in space-time. And finally his problem with the suggestion that natural world is material or physical is that ethical naturalism need not be materialistic or physical.
Thus having debunked all the above theories, Copp next debunks science as being able to provide an explanation for naturalism since all empirical knowledge is not necessarily scientific. According to him naturalism is not scientism as natural theories must be empirical and not scientific.
He thus concludes that a property can be natural if and only if any proposition regarding it can only be known empirically. And thus, since moral properties are natural properties they must be empirical.
His next explains that according to him “moral naturalism is best understood in terms of the strongly a priori”. Strongly a priori is a proposition which can be reasonably believed without empirical evidence and which is empirically indefeasible. On the other hand weakly a priori is a propositions which can be reasonably believed without empirical evidence. Many of our basic moral beliefs, such as friendship is good, are weakly a priori since we believe them to be true without needing any empirical evidence. But these would also be acceptable to a naturalist since these can be undermined by empirical evidence. Thus we can have moral knowledge without empirical evidence. So the only way to distinguish ethical naturalism from non-naturalism is on the basis of the distinction between empirical and a priori.
Another problem addressed by Copp is that two people might disagree on what is morally right and what is wrong. He is of the opinion that if people disagreed with us regarding certain moral generalities it does not qualify as empirical evidence against those moral generalities. Copp finally concludes that his thesis lays the groundwork for the development of ethical naturalism. His proposal is simple that moral properties are natural because they can be empirically proved. In answer to the argument that “synthetic proposition about the instantiation of a moral property is strongly a priori”, he believes that the argument “undermines the plausibility of a priorism in ethics and supports the plausibility of naturalism.”
Conclusion
As we can see from the exegesis above, Copp’s argument, though extremely forceful, is incomplete. He is unable to completely answer the criticism regarding his theory of ethical naturalism from what he calls “epistemic defeaters”. He agrees to a certain extent that if someone disagrees with us about the morality of an issue that it undermines the instantiation of its moral property. Yet he insists that just because someone disagrees with us it does not constitute to empirical evidence. He is unable to completely explain why this is so and in fact admits that his argument is incomplete.
In my opinion, as Copp himself says in his conclusion, what the thesis does is just lay the groundwork for further work on the concept of ethical naturalism. It still leaves a lot to be desired. His assumption that naturalism must be empirical may also be flawed. If this assumption is true, than he is unable to completely prove the point he had set out to prove.
The substance of his argument is that ethical naturalism must be empirical. This is a point he has stressed over and over again throughout the thesis. However, when it came to contesting the argument from “epistemic defeaters”, he simply states that any empirical evidence against any synthetic moral claim is not strongly a priori, unless the putative evidence does not undermine the credibility of the propositions. This argument is incomplete and requires further examination.
Works Cited
Copp, David. “Why Naturalism?” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice” Vol. 6, Issue 2 (2003): 179-200. Web.