3.1.8: Cognitivist and Realist Theory Two (Non-Naturalism)

Moore’s critique of Naturalism sets the scene for his own metaethical view. According to Moore, moral properties do exist but they are fundamentally simple non-natural properties. The best way to understand what non-natural means is as follows. If Goodness is non-natural then it is not the kind of property that is discoverable through the kind of empirical means that help us to identify natural properties, such as in the sciences. How we might come to know non-natural properties depend on the particular theory under consideration. However, typically non-naturalists think that we intuit the presence of these simple non-natural properties via a moral sense. So although intuitions are about how we discover moral properties rather than what moral properties are like, typically non-naturalists are also intuitionists.

Richard Price (1723–1791) suggested that truths are intuited when they are acquired “without making any use of any process of reasoning”. More contemporarily, W. D. Ross (1877–1971) suggested that we intuit self-evident moral truths “without any need of proof, or of evidence beyond itself”. An example should make this method of intuiting non-natural moral properties much clearer.

Becky is watching a BBC news report on a woman who has been helped to hear for the first time in her life via the use of new medical technology. Having been so helped, the news report points out that this person has made a documentary which involves her passing on this technology to poor children who are living with deafness in Bangladesh. While watching the report and the associated interview, Becky intuits the fact that the doctors have acted in a morally good way in researching and implementing the cure for this woman’s deafness and that she too is acting morally well in helping others to hear. The moral goodness is self-evident in the situation and does not require Becky to use her faculties of reason to identify it; the property of goodness is picked up via her moral sense.

W. D. Ross specifically suggests that there are various self-evident prima facie duties that we can intuit (prima facie meaning, in this sense, apparent on first glance); duties that should guide our behaviour but that sometimes can be overridden by other competing duties. Ross outlines duties such as not harming others, not lying, and keeping promises. Ross suggests that no formal empirical or logical defence of these duties is appropriate because they are self-evident. We cannot argue to the claim we should not lie, only from it in terms of how to act in specific situations.

If you are an intuitionist and a realist this might offer a route to surviving both the Open Question Argument and the Naturalistic Fallacy. Intuitionists claim that moral properties are fundamentally simple and non-natural, open to apprehension via our moral sense. When we utter moral sentences we seek to describe the presence of such properties accurately and, sometimes, we will correctly and appropriately refer to the presence of these non-natural properties in the world. When we so appropriately refer, we make true moral statements.