Philo

Volume 12, Issue 1, Spring/Summer 2009

Sanford Levy
Pages 46-60

Metaethical Naturalism and Thick Moral Arguments

There has long been interest in deriving evaluative conclusions from nonevaluative premises. I revisit two classic attempts at this derivation by Philippa Foot and John Searle. They try the derivation using “thick arguments.” I argue that all thick arguments fail. Their failure is not due to a special feature of morality or of moral language, as many critics have charged. Rather it is because the thick evaluative terms are theoretical terms.