The Supervenience Dilemma Explained Away

Abstract

According to an anti-realist argument, realist accounts of supervenience face the following dilemma: either they accept naturalistic reduction, an ontological claim about the nature of normative properties that is incoherent with their defining agenda, or they recognize that their agenda is based on a queer ontology, which is at risk of being unintelligible. In a recent defense of robust moral realism, David Enoch recognizes that this is a serious challenge but argues that it is not a conclusive argument against to moral realism because queerness is after all tolerable. His strategy is to minimize the costs of admitting queerness by focusing on the explanatory role of moral principles, in analogy with law. This is a promising approach to the problem of supervenience, but it is doubtful as strategy. I will show that in favor of moral realism. In fact, if all the explanatory work is done by normative principles, there is nothing for the realist account of supervenience to do. In this paper, I argue that this debate about normative supervenience rests on a misunderstanding of the role of normative principles. As an alternative, I offer a constructivist explication of the epistemic and ontological role of normative principles, which proves the notion of supervenience to be redundant. The advantage of this constructivist approach to supervenience is that it directly addresses a legitimate demand for an explanation of the function of normative discourse, which is often kept in the background. In providing a response to this demand, this constructivist argument also shows – pace Enoch and others – that an account of practical reasoning is not only pertinent but also essential to successfully address the meta-ethical issue of supervenience.