Reason, 'Real' Patterns, and Moral Judgment

Johann A. Klaassen
University of Idaho

I count myself among that group of philosophers who, at the end of the twentieth century, look to consolidate some of what we have learned in the past hundred years - and so to "naturalize" philosophy. As a moral philosopher, I have argued (elsewhere) that moral properties are constituted by, but not reducible to, natural properties. I do not hold that "ethical concepts are definitionally eliminable in favor of naturalistic terms", but rather that "ethical properties, or the ascription of ethical terms, must be governed by naturalistic criteria" (Kim 1993, 234); our justifications for claiming the existence of moral properties, or for using moral predicates, must rest on a naturalistic foundation - a kind of "supervenience" of the moral upon the natural. Since all claims of supervenience are empty without a substantiating explanation of how the higher-order facts are dependent upon the lower-order, in this essay I offer an explanation which ties moral values to patterns of natural fact, by way of the "real patterns" of the recent work of Daniel Dennett.