ABSTRACT
Can we do without normative facts? Morality is the paradigm example of a normative area of thought and talk, and a prominent theme in twentieth and twenty-first century metaethics has been the attempt to account for our everyday moral practices without relying on the notion of a moral fact. Philosophers have been suspicious of moral facts for a number of reasons, but one influential line of argument goes as follows. Let a natural fact be a fact that is part of the subject matter of the natural or social sciences (cf. Moore 1903, 92). If moral facts are held to be non-natural, suspicions arise about their nature (they seem to be very different from the familiar facts of science or commonsense), and about how we come to have knowledge of them (the familiar sorts of knowledge-gathering activities deployed by science or commonsense seem to provide knowledge only of natural facts). Non-natural moral facts are thus suspicious on metaphysical and epistemological grounds. So could moral facts be natural facts? If so, the metaphysical and epistemological worries are perhaps more tractable, but we now face difficulties in the area of moral semantics: for one thing, moral judgments don’t seem like judgments about natural states of affairs since the former seem to be intrinsically motivational in a way not shared by the latter, and Moore’s open-question argument suggests that moral judgments have a normative force not possessed by naturalistic judgments.
