Analytical Descriptivism Meets Moral Twin Earth分析描写符合道德的孪生地球.docVIP

Analytical Moral Functionalism Meets Moral Twin Earth Terry Horgan, University of Arizona Mark Timmons, University of Memphis In Chapters 4 and 5 of his 1998 book From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis, Frank Jackson propounds and defends a form of moral realism that he calls both ‘moral functionalism’ and ‘analytical descriptivism’. Here we argue that this metaethical position, which we will henceforth call ‘analytical moral functionalism’, is untenable. We do so by applying a generic thought-experimental deconstructive recipe that we have used before against other views that posit moral properties and identify them with certain natural properties, a recipe that we believe is applicable to virtually any metaphysically naturalist version of moral realism. The recipe deploys a scenario we call Moral Twin Earth. 1. Jackson’s Analytical Moral Functionalism We begin by briefly summarizing Jackson’s theory. He proposes to construe moral terms like ‘goodness’ and ‘rightness’ in much the same way that the mentalistic terms of folk psychology are construed by the first-order version of the position in philosophy of mind called analytical functionalism. According to first-order analytical functionalism about the mental—as articulated, for instance, by D. M. Armstrong (1968, 1970) and David Lewis (1966, 1972, 1980)—mental-state terms are functionally definable via the principles of common-sense psychology, and these terms refer not to second-order functional properties but rather to certain neurophysical properties that fill the roles specified by the functional definitions. Jackson’s approach involves four central ideas. First, he posits what he calls ‘folk morality’, something whose (partly implicit) mastery he takes to be required for competence in the use of moral concepts: In the case of the mind, we have a network of interconnected and interdefinable concepts that get their identity through their place in the network…. The network itself is the t