ABSTRACT
Naturalism has been characterised in many ways and, in one form or another, is widely held. Scientific naturalism, in and outside the field of philosophy of science, is especially well respected. Philosophers have distinguished reductive and nonreductive versions of naturalism – in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science and ethical theory. A challenge to scientific naturalism, even in nonreductive versions, is to accommodate normative explanations, particularly those purporting to explain nonnormative phenomena such as human actions and other empirical phenomena, by appeal to apparently moral facts. Are such explanations possible without reducing normative properties or moral facts to natural ones? What would such reduction require? This chapter seeks to clarify both these issues and some of the concepts essential for understanding naturalism in any form. A main aim of the article is to show how normative perception and moral explanations are each compatible both with a worldview that might be considered a liberal naturalism and also with a moderate version of scientific naturalism.
