As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of my working papers examines two epistemological challenges to normative realism and argues that a certain kind of naturalism can successfully address these challenges while avoiding the problems faced by other versions of realism. While that previous blog post focused on quasi-naturalism, these epistemological advantages can be attributed more generally to a family of views that I call soft naturalism. The main ingredients of soft naturalism are:
naturalist realism about normativity, i.e. the view that normative properties are identical with, or fully constituted by, natural properties; and
the rejection of a deep Darwinian vindication of normative thought. That is, soft naturalism denies that our basic normative attitudes were selected because they tracked normative facts.
Quasi-naturalism endorses (1) and (2), but other naturalist views might also be compatible with these two ideas.
For this reason, I have shifted the focus of the paper from quasi-naturalism to soft naturalism. But at the end of the paper I raise the question of what kind of views might fall under the soft naturalist label, and suggest that quasi-naturalism is a salient option. Here is the ending section in full:
I have argued that soft naturalism can successfully answer the evolutionary debunking argument and the reliability challenge to normative realism while avoiding problems faced by other realist responses to these epistemological challenges. The reader might wonder, however, what exactly falls under the soft naturalist label, given how I have defined the view: as the conjunction of metaphysical naturalism and the rejection of a deep Darwinian vindication for normative beliefs.
The core tenets of soft naturalism might seem to be compatible with a wide range of naturalist views, including Cornell-style non-analytic naturalism or analytic naturalism of the sort developed by Jackson (1998). However, if we examine more closely what kind of metasemantic picture might support soft naturalism, I believe the most natural answer to this question leads us away from these standard varieties of naturalism and into a different direction.
First, I need to make explicit an ingredient of soft naturalism that has not played a role in the discussion so far but is now important. I take soft naturalism to hold not only that our normative beliefs are by-and-large true, and that our counterparts in some other evolutionary scenarios have vastly mistaken normative attitudes and beliefs, but also that our evolutionary counterparts use the same normative concepts as us. This additional claim about concepts falls naturally out of soft naturalism as previously described: if our counterparts did not use the same concepts, then arguably we could not disagree with their normative beliefs or think that their beliefs are vastly mistaken. This claim is also in tension with the metasemantic commitments of both Cornell realism and analytic naturalism.
Cornell realism typically includes a causal theory of reference according to which the extensions of normative terms consist in certain natural properties that causally regulate the use of those terms in the right way. This theory leads to a dilemma when we consider the many evolutionary pathways on which normative concepts could have been used: (1) either the natural properties that causally regulate the use of normative concepts across all these evolutionary scenarios are the same as the natural properties regulating our own use of normative concepts, but the only way to make good on this idea seems to be hard naturalism and its reductive evolutionary account of normative properties; or (2) the normative concepts used on distant evolutionary pathways are not the same as ours, given that their use is not causally regulated by the natural properties that constitute the extensions of our normative concepts, but by different properties. However, this second option goes against the soft naturalist idea that evolution could have led human beings to use the same normative concepts as us but in very different ways.
Analytic naturalism, which aims to provide purely naturalistic definitions for normative concepts by relying on platitudes of folk normative theory, faces a similar set of options: (1) either these folk platitudes are so general and abstract that they cannot determine the extension of normative terms, which defeats the purpose of the theory; (2) or they are substantive enough that they do fix the reference of normative terms in a manner that delivers intuitively plausible normative verdicts, but which also entails that our evolutionary counterparts do not use the same normative concepts as us, given that they do not accept the same reference-fixing folk platitudes; (3) or the alleged folk platitudes align with the tenets of reductive evolutionary ethics, which allows for the same normative concepts to be used across all evolutionary pathways, but this again amounts in effect to hard naturalism.
What is, then, the right theory of normative meaning for soft naturalists, if neither causal theories of reference nor Jackson-style analytic descriptivism will do?
One option might be a conceptual role semantics (cfr. Wedgwood 2007), on which normative concepts are individuated through certain rules that govern their use in deliberation and action—for instance, the rule that someone who judges that, all things considered, they ought to φ is thereby rationally committed to intending to φ—while the extension of normative concepts is constituted by certain natural properties that make the relevant intentions, actions, etc. correct or choiceworthy. Such a metasemantic picture would allow soft naturalists to claim that our evolutionary counterparts in distant scenarios use the same normative concepts as us, in virtue of using concepts governed by the same basic rules, but they use those concepts incorrectly, insofar as they apply those concepts to natural properties that do not make intentions, actions etc. choiceworthy.
A different option would be to adopt an expressivist account of normative discourse, on which normative concepts are individuated by the desire-like mental states that they encode. If combined with a deflationary account of truth, fact, and other related notions, expressivism is arguably compatible with realist commitments to normative truth, objectivity and knowledge (Blackburn 1993, 1998; Gibbard 2003) and with a naturalist conception of normative properties (the same Gibbard 2003). If successful, this combination of expressivism and naturalist realism would also vindicate the core tenets of soft naturalism, particularly the idea that the same normative concepts are used across evolutionary scenarios but some of these uses are radically mistaken.
There might be other metasemantic frameworks compatible with soft naturalism, but I will not explore this issue further here. However the metasemantic details are filled out, all versions of soft naturalism will require an account on which normative concepts are individuated, in some way or another, by their practical role in deliberation and action, while questions about their reference are treated as internal to normative discourse and resolved through normative inquiry.
Soft naturalists can thus claim that evolution could have led human beings to use normative concepts in very different ways and yet these concepts have the same reference across evolutionary scenarios. This reference consists in certain natural properties that are causally connected in the right way with our own attitudes and beliefs but not with the attitudes and beliefs of some of our evolutionary counterparts, a fact that helps address epistemological challenges to our normative beliefs, as I have argued in this paper. But figuring out what these properties are is not a task for evolutionary biologists or social scientists. It is the job of normative theorists.