McCauley Honorary | Charles Nussbaum "Why Normative Ethics Is Natural and Metaethics Is and Is Not"

Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

Charles Nussbaum | Philosophy, University of Texas, Austin
"Why Normative Ethics Is Natural and Metaethics Is and Is Not"

Morality prescribes privileged standards for action and character. Ethics is the philosophy of morality. Normative ethics codifies the prescriptive principles of morality that justify considered judgments of cases. Metaethics is the second-order study of ethics. It investigates the truth conditions of moral judgments and principles, the ontological commitments of moral principles, and the justification of these principles, as well as related metaphysical issues such as moral property supervenience, reductionism, and eliminativism, among other matters. Normative ethics, I argue, is maturationally natural, practiced natural, and reflectively natural. Metaethical positions, by contrast, range from the strongly natural to the strongly non-natural. Hence, metaethics is both natural and non-natural.