ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the worry that moral normativity cannot be grounded in natural facts. EMR, an empirical hypothesis about natural moral values, holds that these values are normatively significant. The key claim of the chapter is that the move from natural moral values to claims about what is morally right or wrong is abductive rather than deductive: natural moral values are hypothesized by EMR to account for the general phenomenon of moral normativity. Human moral norms are the result of psychosocial processes of wide reflective equilibrium, and while EMR claims that such processes track natural moral values, it does not claim that direct deductions can be made from premises regarding natural moral values to conclusions regarding what we ought or ought not do. The chapter also considers whether EMR makes moral reasons authoritative, and whether the natural moral values tracked by human processes of wide reflective equilibrium could be different from natural moral values that might be the result of alternative evolutionary developments on other planets capable of supporting biological life.
