Abstract

In his later years, Peirce proposed the idea of ethics as a normative science. Is such a thing possible? John Dewey asks “whether scientific propositions about the direction of human conduct, about any situation into which the idea of should enters, are possible; and, if so, of what sort they are and the grounds upon which they rest”. If the meaning of ‘science’ here is taken in its contemporary sense—the way in which physics or biology might be understood—then normative science implies ethical naturalism, the position that normativity is explainable as a natural property, and capable of empirical study. Russ Shafer-Landau defines it precisely in these terms, where moral properties..