The critical focus of this paper is on a claim made explicitly by Gilbert Harman and accepted implicitly by numerous others, the claim that naturalism supports concurrent defense of scientific objectivism and moral relativism. I challenge the assumptions of Harman's ‘argument from naturalism' used to support this combination of positions, utilizing. Hilary Putnam’s ‘companions in guilt’ argument in order to counter it. The paper concludes that while domain-specific anti-realism is often warranted, Harman’s own views about the objectivity of facts and (...) the subjectivity of values are better seen as stemming from scientistic ideals of knowledge than from dictates of naturalism. Scientists qua scientists make value judgments, and setting aside scientistic assumptions and unrealizable conceptions of scientific objectivity should lead us to more symmetrical metaphilosophical conception of epistemic and ethical normativity than that which underlies Harman's account. (shrink)

In Recent years noncognitivist ethical theories have been supported by an argument which has come to be widely accepted among moral philosophers.1 According to this argument, an ethical term like ‘good’ has both a commending function and a describing function, but between these functions there is the important difference that the commending function alone is invariant while the describing function varies greatly. For many and different things may be called good—hammers, sunsets, paintings, missionaries, cannibals—but despite these differences in the descriptive (...) criteria for applying the word to objects, ‘good’ retains a common meaning in all these uses, for in each case the word is being used to commend. The conclusion drawn, then, is that because of its being the sole invariant or common feature of every use of ‘good’, the commendatory function rather than the varying descriptive function must be the primary meaning of ‘good’. I shall refer to this as the commendatory invariance argument. (shrink)