On The Explanatory Role Of Moral Property

The debate between moral realists and moral anti-realists is deep-seated.Moral realists face a lot of refutation,such as Evolutionary Debunking Arguments,Irrelevant Influence Arguments,The Reliability Challenge and so on.These refutations argue for the position that there is no reason to think that there are moral facts from all kinds of angles.They think that our moral judgments come from something other than moral fact.Such views,if true,will no doubt challenge moral realism.And these challenges,if succeed,will make it doubtful for our faith in moral knowledge.Apart from these challenges,Harman raised another challenge for moral realism in his book The Nature of Morality in 1977,which mentioned that morality cannot play a role in explaining our observation in a way that science does.He then concluded that though scientific theory can be confirmed by explaining scientific observation,moral theory cannot be confirmed by the occurrence of moral observation.This is what then be called the“Explanatory Challenge”for moral realism by researchers.This challenge influences a lot and arouses extensive discussions later.Under careful analysis,Harman’s explanatory requirement turns out to contain a causal requirement.Focused on such point,the replies to Harman are mainly in two ways,one is to refute that causal relationship is necessary for the establishment of explanatory relationship,the other is to approve it.What is more,the latter kind of replies can be divided into two kinds,one is to argue that morality accords with the causal requirement,the other is to argue that though morality does not accord with the causal requirement,we can still use moral explanations.This thesis only focuses on the first respond of the second way.I will analyze the debate between Harman and Sturgeon deeply and indicate that Harman’s argument makes unreasonable concession to avoid holding double standards.As for Sturgeon,he lacks positive argument for the clear explication on the causal role moral properties play in the occurrence of non-moral facts.He just relies on the analogy between science and morality and the refutation of double standards,which is not enough to prove himself in the face of Harman’s second challenge.After analyzing Harman and Sturgeon’s arguments,I find that the biggest problem of their argument comes from their dependent on the counterfactual theory of causality.I will point out that for the problems researchers raised for this theory,it is not a good theory to describe causality,which means that not only Harman,but also Sturgeon,is not sound in the basis of the argument.Therefore,I think that to defend themselves,both Harman and Sturgeon need to reply to the problem raised in their debate first,and then reply to the problems with the counterfactual theory.It is a really heavy task for them.Due to space limitation,I cannot give an accurate answer to the question here:whether moral properties can explain the occurrence of non-moral facts or not?...