Abstract

Ethical naturalists claim that objectively authoritative moral norms must be located within a naturalistic framework. They think it is unclear what such norms could be or how we could know them; such norms seem too "queer" to fit in a natural universe. In contrast, ethical naturalists think the standards that guide scientific inquiry are normatively unmysterious. However, epistemologists have begun to worry about the dependence of theoretical reason on norms and so have tried to locate epistemic normativity in a naturalistic picture. The most popular strategy in both disciplines for naturalizing any sui generis moral or epistemic normativity is to reduce it to the more naturalistically innocuous normativity of instrumental reason. On this view, moral and epistemic standards are not normatively authoritative in themselves; they become normatively binding only through instrumental reason, if they happen to fulfill the agent's contingent desires and needs. Naturalists are confident that this story accounts for moral and epistemic normativity without "queer" remainder. ;In Part One of my dissertation, I try to determine the exact nature of the tension between naturalism and normative authority. I examine Mackie's claim that "objective prescriptivity" is the aspect of normative authority that is incompatible with naturalism. I then lay out what I take to be the central naturalist positions in both ethics and epistemology, showing, first, how they agree with Mackie about what is "odd" and, second, how they all rely on instrumental reason as the only source of normative authority. ;In Part Two I argue that upon examination it is clear that any adequate account of instrumental reason will reveal that it shares the "queer" objective prescriptivity naturalists fault moral and epistemic norms for exhibiting on a traditional characterization. If I am correct about the normative force of the instrumental norm, then naturalists face a choice: either they must give up instrumental reason or they must find a place for objective prescriptivity in a naturalistic framework. I argue that the latter is preferable