ABSTRACT

Nearly 30 years ago, Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons published a now- popular article that combines Hilary Putnam’s Twin Earth scenario with G.E. Moore’s open question argument in an effort to show that moral naturalism – the view that moral facts are at bottom ordinary, natural facts of some sort – is probably false. Responses to Horgan and Timmons’s “revised open question argument” have been legion, but surprisingly, no one has attempted to test the core assumption upon which the argument is based; namely, that competent language users univocally treat natural kind-terms as rigid designators. Here, I present evidence that the intuitions of competent English speakers are not as univocal as Horgan and Timmons need them to be to ground their argument against moral naturalism. I also briefly sketch a way that the moral naturalist can respond even if competent language speakers do treat natural-kind terms in the way that Horgan and Timmons suggest.

摘要

近 30 年前，特里·霍根 (Terry Horgan) 和马克·蒂蒙斯 (Mark Timmons) 发表了一篇时下流行的文章，将希拉里·普特南 (Hilary Putnam) 的双地球情景与通用电气·摩尔 (GE Moore) 的开放式问题论证相结合，试图表明道德自然主义——即道德事实是最底层的普通自然事实某种意义上——可能是假的。对 Horgan 和 Timmons 的“修正开放式问题论证”的回应很多，但令人惊讶的是，没有人试图测试论证所依据的核心假设。也就是说，有能力的语言用户明确地将自然种类术语视为严格的指示符。在这里，我提供了证据，证明说英语的人的直觉并不像霍根和蒂蒙斯需要的那样明确，以作为他们反对道德自然主义的论点。