Organon F

Volume 28, August 2021, Issue 3, Pages 505–530

ISSN 2585-7150 (online) ISSN 1335-0668 (print)

Research Article | Special issue on Value in Language

Normative Naturalism on Its Own Terms

Pekka Väyrynen

https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2021.28302

Abstract

Normative naturalism is primarily a metaphysical doctrine: there are normative facts and properties, and these fall into the class of natural facts and properties. Many objections to naturalism rely on additional assumptions about language or thought, but often without adequate consideration of just how normative properties would have to figure in our thought and talk if naturalism were true. In the first part of the paper, I explain why naturalists needn’t think that normative properties can be represented or ascribed in wholly non-normative terms. If so, certain prominent objections to normative naturalism fail. In the second part, I consider the objection that normative properties are “just too different” from (other) natural properties to themselves be natural properties. I argue that naturalists have no distinctive trouble making sense of thought and talk involving forms of “genuine” or “authoritative” normativity which can drive a non-question-begging form of the objection.

Keywords

Authoritative normativity; normative concepts; normative naturalism; one-term naturalism; practical normativity.

Author(s) and affiliation(s)

Author

Pekka Väyrynen 

Affiliation

University of Leeds

Address

The School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, United Kingdom.

E-mail

p.vayrynen@leeds.ac.uk

About this article

Received

6 November 2020

Accepted

9 April 2021

Published online

24 July 2021

Publishers

Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences

Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences

Cite as

APA

Väyrynen, P. (2021). Normative Naturalism on Its Own Terms. Organon F28(3), 505–530. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2021.28302

Chicago

Väyrynen, Pekka. 2021. "Normative Naturalism on Its Own Terms." Organon F 28 (3): 505–530. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2021.28302

Harvard

Väyrynen, P. (2021). Normative Naturalism on Its Own Terms. Organon F, 28(3), pp. 505–530. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2021.28302

Copyright information

© Pekka Väyrynen

Response page

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This article is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0).


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