Moral non-naturalism is the view that moral properties (goodness, rightness, wrongness) are not reducible to or identical with natural properties. Rightness might be a simple, unanalyzable property that we grasp through moral intuition. This preserves the distinctiveness of ethics but raises questions about how we access moral facts and what grounds them.
Reflect on the intuition that 'good' seems to mean something different from and less analyzable than natural properties like 'causes happiness.' Consider whether, if morality is just about consequences, we lose something important about its authority.
You already know from moral cognitivism that moral statements are genuine truth-apt claims — "Cruelty is wrong" is not just an expression of disgust but a statement that can be true or false. Moral non-naturalism now takes that insight and asks: what kind of property is wrongness? Its answer is that moral properties like goodness, rightness, and wrongness are sui generis — a kind unto themselves, not reducible to any natural property describable in scientific or empirical terms.
The canonical argument for non-naturalism is G.E. Moore's open question argument. Moore observed that for any natural property N — say, "produces maximum happiness" — you can coherently ask "But is what produces maximum happiness actually good?" If goodness just meant "produces maximum happiness," this question would be as empty as asking "Is a bachelor unmarried?" The fact that the question remains genuinely open for every natural candidate suggests that goodness cannot be identical to any natural property. It must be something else entirely — a non-natural property that we recognize not through empirical observation but through moral intuition.
This is what distinguishes non-naturalism from naturalism: non-naturalists hold that moral knowledge is not continuous with scientific knowledge. Just as we might grasp mathematical truths through rational insight rather than sensory experience, we grasp moral truths through a special faculty of moral perception. Philosophers like W.D. Ross argued that we intuit certain prima facie duties — to keep promises, avoid harm, be fair — directly and with considerable confidence, even if these duties can conflict and require judgment to adjudicate.
The view raises genuine challenges. How exactly does this intuitive faculty work, and why do moral intuitions vary across cultures and individuals? Non-naturalists typically respond that variation in intuitions does not show that moral facts are merely subjective, any more than disagreement in mathematics shows there are no mathematical facts — people can be wrong, distorted by bias, or reasoning from incomplete information. A second challenge is metaphysical queerness: what kind of thing is a non-natural moral property, and how do we causally interact with it? Non-naturalists bite this bullet, arguing that moral reality genuinely includes features that resist scientific reduction. Understanding this debate equips you for the broader question of moral realism — whether objective moral facts exist at all, and if so, what they are made of.
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