An Argument Against Reduction in Morality and Epistemology

Many naturalistically-minded philosophers want to accomplish a nat-uralistic reduction of normative (e.g. moral and epistemic) claims. Mindful of avoiding the naturalistic fallacy, such philosophers claim that they are not reducing moral and epistemic concepts or definitions. Rather, they are only reducing the extension of these normative terms, while admitting that the concepts possess a normative content that cannot be naturalistically reduced. But these philosophers run into a serious problem. I will argue that normative claims possess two dimensions of normativity. I will further argue that certain of the reductionist’s commitments require that these two dimensions of normativity be given a naturalistic reduction, while the other of the reductionist’s commitments make such a reduction impossible. Thus, the reductionist’s commitments both require and forbid a reductionist account of morality and epistemology. Thus, as we will see, reduc-tionism is torn between two incompatible requirements, and must fail. I. The Reductionist Strategy It is a commonplace that our most successful project of inquiry is that of science. There is an ongoing debate among philosophers as to how closely fields such as ethics and epistemology need to resem-ble science in order to secure legitimacy for themselves. Thus, Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton write that [W]hat is our going view of the world? Perhaps most contempo-rary philosophers would agree that our going view treats empiri-cal science as the paradigm of synthetic knowledge, and that an acceptable account of ethics must “place ” it with respect to this paradigm, either by effecting some sort of methodological (an