Scientific Naturalism and Normative Explanation

Robert N. Audi (University of Notre Dame)

Abstract: Naturalism has been characterized in many ways and, in one form or another, is widely held. Scientific naturalism, in and outside the field of philosophy of science, is especially well respected.  Philosophers have distinguished reductive and non-reductive versions of naturalism—in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, and ethical theory. A challenge to scientific naturalism, even in non-reductive versions, is to accommodate normative explanations, particularly those purporting to explain non-normative phenomena such as human actions and other empirical phenomena, by appeal to apparently moral facts. Are such explanations possible without reducing normative properties to natural ones? What would such reduction require?  This paper seeks to clarify both these questions and some of the concepts essential for understanding naturalism in any form. A main aim of the paper is to show how both normative perception and moral explanations are compatible with a worldview plausibly considered a version of scientific naturalism.