Just wondering, in modern metaethical debate would Aristotelianism count as a non-reductionist naturalistic form of realism that accepts internalism? Or is it a reductionist form of naturalism?
-Jon
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Jon Irenicus: Just wondering, in modern metaethical debate would Aristotelianism count as a non-reductionist naturalistic form of realism that accepts internalism? Or is it a reductionist form of naturalism? -Jon
Non-reductionist with internalism, I think. How do you mean reductionism and non-reductionism exactly? Moral properties are natural properties but they are supervenient.
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Non-reductionist in the sense that it is multiply realized by natural properties or supervenient on them. I was struggling to see where Aristotelianism fits in, because metaethics textbooks tend not to mention it past the point of a general description of naturalism. Reductionist naturalism entails reducing moral to non-moral properties.
It seems like a pretty muddled subject to me. I'm not sure why academic philosophers have such a hard time understanding Aristotelian philosophy. I guess it is all the crap that has built up in philosophy over the millennia, particularly the past few hundred years, all the false dichotomies, pointless distinctions, and weird ways of thinking. They get it so ingrained in graduate school that they can't think straight anymore.
Moral properties are natural properties, but they supervene on other natural properties, yes. Moral properties are not reducible to them in the sense of being explainable in purely non-moral terms.
I agree. A lot of metaethics stems from bad metaphysics/epistemology (emotivism/quasi-realism being clear examples.) It's as if philosophy has just become a game divorced from real world pursuits, a kind of fetishism. I can't think of a course with more 'isms' than metaethics, although I like its abstract nature, when it does not involve waffling about the spawn of bad epistemology, or an exclusive focus on linguistic analysis. Some of it like Cornell Realism (non-reductive naturalism) and the internalism-externalism debate are interesting. The real difficulty isn't so much in situating Aristotle as it is in situating Kant, not surprisingly, because there are many ways of viewing his project, some of which can't be neatly filed under any one view. A real mess.