ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I tie together various elements of Sellars’s ethical theory (and his philosophical project more broadly) to demonstrate how Sellars’s ethical theory comports with his stringent naturalism. The key move for Sellars, of course, is his understanding of normative claims as nondescriptive. This obviates the need to “place” ontologically problematic normative facts into a scientific worldview, it avoids “queerness” worries as to how such facts can be intrinsically motivating, and it avoids is-ought gap concerns about how natural facts could generate normativity. By drawing on social practice theorists like Joseph Rouse, I will demonstrate that while Sellars’s theory is nondescriptive, it paints a picture of our moral practice as ineliminably tied to the natural world through essentially world-involving practices. We are thus left with a picture of our moral practice as robustly objective, involving binding normativity, yet fully consistent with Sellars’s strict nominalism and his scientia mensura.
