E Johnson's List: Philosophy

• • Naturalistic accounts of ethics allows morality to be non-mysterious and an identifiable part of the world or of conventionality, avoiding the possibility of ultimately mysterious sources in non-naturalistic or supernatural accounts Though even empirical statements accompanying naturalism may not avoid some basic assumptions attached, leaving space for non-naturalism.
• If Hume is right, every valid argument for an evaluative conclusion either includes or presupposes some evaluative premise. And, as a result, there is no value neutral argument for an evaluative conclusion.
• G. E. Moore argued (at the beginning of the twentieth century) that no naturalist account of morality could do justice to what we are actually thinking and claiming when we make moral  judgments.
• According to these views, moral properties were to be identified with some natural property or other (e.g. with what is pleasant, or what satisfies someone's desire, or what conforms to social rules that are in force).
• But then we must grant that to think something is pleasant is not identical to thinking it good.
• Moore's point is that the question is not settled — not closed — on conceptual grounds
• Much of the attention was given, by those who have come to be called intuitionists, to defending the idea that moral knowledge, while not based on our senses and on the empirical data we might collect, was nonetheless on as secure a footing as, say, our knowledge of mathematics or of the fundamental concepts (of, say, causation and necessity) that play crucial roles in science
• Among morality's dist

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