Can Robert Adams Survive Moral Twin Earth?

Journal of Religious Ethics 44 (2):334-351 (2016)
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Abstract

Richard Boyd and Robert Adams have both developed semantic accounts of moral terms based on Hilary Putnam's causal regulation theory for natural kind terms, according to which the terms in question refer to the properties which predominantly causally regulated the terms. However, Terence Horgan and Mark Timmons have mounted an objection to Boyd's semantics—their Moral Twin Earth argument. If this argument is successful against Boyd then it might be thought that it should also be successful against Adams, given the similarity between their semantic accounts. I will argue in this essay that Adams's semantics is sufficiently different from Boyd's to enable him to survive Moral Twin Earth, but that he is vulnerable to a modified version of Moral Twin Earth that I describe.

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Luke Taylor
Nottingham University

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Supervenience, expressivism and theistic ethics.Luke Taylor - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (1):227-247.

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References found in this work

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Naming and Necessity.S. Kripke - 1972 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 45 (4):665-666.
Naming and Necessity.Saul Kripke - 2003 - In John Heil (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: A Guide and Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Meaning and reference.Hilary Putnam - 1973 - Journal of Philosophy 70 (19):699-711.
Mind, Language and Reality.Hilary Putnam - 1975/2003 - Critica 12 (36):93-96.

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