The Mackiean Supervenience Challenge

Non-naturalists about normativity hold that there are instantiable normative properties which are metaphysically discontinuous with natural properties. One of the central challenges to non-naturalism is how to reconcile this discontinuity with the supervenience of the normative on the natural. Drawing on J. L. Mackie’s seminal but highly compressed discussion in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), this paper argues that the supervenience challenge as usually conceived is merely a symptom of a more fundamental challenge in the vicinity