ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on various explanations of supervenience in ethics. A philosophical explanation is often a derivation of the phenomenon in need of explanation from other assumptions. The phenomenon of supervenience in ethics will likewise be explained thus: by recourse to arguments whose conclusions are the supervenience of the ethical predicates on non-ethical ones. The chapter discusses the explanation of supervenience can be applied to global supervenience as well. It explains universalizability, examines R. M. Hare’s arguments for the universalizability of ethical terms, and study the extent to which supervenience is a constituent of the requirement of universalizability. The chapter presents a critique of two additional arguments for the supervenience of ethical predicates on non-ethical ones. The first is J. Dancy’s argument from resultance to supervenience, and the second is S. Blackburn’s argument from projectivism to supervenience. Blackburn has presented a projectivist position in ethics, claiming that such a position explains the supervenience of ethical predicates better than competing ones.
