Week 6: Naturalism and Nonnaturalism

Essay question

Are moral facts in any sense reducible to natural facts?

Key readings

• Cuneo, Terence, Recent Faces of Moral Nonnaturalism, Philosophy Compass, vol. 2, no. 6 (November, 2007), pp. 850-879.
• Lenman, James, Moral Naturalism, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring, 2014.
• Sturgeon, Nicholas, Ethical Naturalism, in David Copp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, ch. 3.
• Jackson, Frank, From Metaphysics to Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, ch. 5.

Further reading

• Boyd, Richard, How to Be a Moral Realist, in Geoffrey Sayre- McCord (ed.), Essays on Moral Realism, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988, pp. 181–228.
• Dancy, Jonathan, Nonnaturalism, in David Copp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, ch. 4.
• Huemer, Michael, Ethical intuitionism, New York: Palgrave, 2005, chs. 4-5.
• Horgan, Terence & Mark Timmons, New Wave Moral Realism Meets Moral Twin Earth, Journal of Philosophical Research, vol. 16 (1991), pp. 447-465.
• Streumer, Bart, Are There Irreducibly Normative Properties?, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 87, no. 4 (August, 2008), pp. 537-561.