On Graham Oddie’s Experience Conjecture

In his 2005 book Value, Reality, and Desire, philosopher Graham Oddie defends a robust version of moral realism according to which 1) evaluative judgements have propositional content, 2) the presuppositions of some of our evaluative judgements are fulfilled, 3) the truth or falsity of evaluative judgements is mind-independent, 4) evaluative judgements are not reducible to any other kind of judgement, and 5) values are causally efficacious features. As such, Oddie’s robust version of moral realism stands in stark opposition to expressivism, the error-theory, idealism, naturalism, and evaluative epiphenomenalism. Now, Oddie rarely presents a positive argument in favour of this robust version of moral realism. Instead he hopes to offer up solutions to some of its most pressing problems, thereby showing it to be a plausible value-theoretic alternative. Among the more difficult problems discussed in Oddie’s book is the problem of value-data. In short, the problem of value-data is the familiar epistemological issue of explaining how we can possibly acquire evaluative knowledge if values are indeed something over and beyond the realm of empirical reality. In this blog post, I want to provide the reader with a summary of Oddie’s solution to this problem and formulate some modest criticism towards it.

Is Moral Supervenience a Local or a Global Phenomenon?

The purpose of this blog post is to inspire a discussion concerning the relationship between moral values and natural properties. In particular, I want to discuss whether moral supervenience should be understood as a local phenomenon (i.e. as a relationship between sets of properties within the confines of one or more possible worlds) or as a global phenomenon (i.e. as a relationship between sets of properties associated with entire possible worlds). I shall start out by going through the various intuitions that are commonly taken to be expressed by the most plausible of all local supervenience theses: the strong supervenience thesis. Then, at the end of this blog post, I shall bring our attention to a global supervenience thesis and explain how it has been thought to better capture the context-dependent nature of moral values. Finally, the case will be made that we have no strong reasons to prefer the global supervenience thesis over the strong supervenience thesis.

On The Open-Question Argument and Moral Supervenience

In the beginning of the 20th century, G. E. Moore kick-started the modern meta-ethical debate by discussing the merits of analytic naturalism: the view that moral values are identical to natural properties as a matter of conceptual necessity.[1] His most central argument in this discussion was the so called open-question argument. The purpose of the open-question argument was not only to show that analytic naturalism is false, but that it also commits a certain sort of fallacy that he referred to as ‘the naturalistic fallacy’. In this blog post, my aim will be to present Caj Strandberg’s amended version of Moore’s open-question argument and clarify what implications it might have for our understanding of the relationship between moral values and natural properties.

Moral Supervenience, Possible Gods, and Linguistic Competence with Regard to Moral Concepts

I want to argue that there are possible worlds that are almost identical to ours, save for the fact that the actions performed in those worlds are associated with entirely different moral values – or perhaps none at all. This will be done with the help of what I call the conceivability argument.[1] In short, the conceivability argument can be understood as saying that, because there are conceivable worlds where moral values are at least partially supervenient on the will of a god, there are also genuine possible worlds where moral values are so supervenient. And since two gods in two different possible worlds could differ in terms of the actions they approve of, it is also possible for two things in two different possible worlds to be identical in terms of their natural properties and yet differ in terms of their moral values.[2] Furthermore, because a god could probably change his will so as to force different moral values on the same sets of natural properties at different times, it should also be possible for two things in the same world to be identical in terms of their natural properties and yet differ in terms of their moral values. If sound then, the conceivability argument shows that the second part of the following thesis does not hold: