The most coherent formulation that I’ve seen is from Terence Cuneo’s The Normative Web. The basic idea is that moral norms have the same ontological status as epistemic norms.
Unpacking this a little, when we’re talking about epistemic norms we’re making a claim about what someone ought to believe. For example:
You ought to believe the Theory of General Relativity is true.
You ought not to believe that there is a dragon in your garage if there is no evidence.
When we say ought in the sentences above we don’t mean it in some empty sense. It’s not a matter of opinion whether you ought to form beliefs according to good epistemic practices. The statements have some normative bite to them. You really ought to form beliefs according to good epistemic practices.
Similarly, you could cast moral norms in a similar vein. For example:
You ought to behave in a way which promotes wellbeing
You ought not to behave in a way which causes gratuitous suffering.
The moral statements above have the same structure as the epistemic statements. When I say you really ought not to believe epistemically unjustified thing X this is the same as saying you really ought not to behave in morally unjustified way Y.
There are some objections to the above:
You could argue that epistemic norms reliably track truth whereas moral norms reliably track something else like wellbeing which you need an additional evaluative function to tell you is “good.”
The point is that you also technically need this for epistemic norms. Some really obtuse person could always come along and ask you to justify why truth-seeking is “good” and you’d have to rely on some external evaluation that seeking truth is good because XYZ.
The standard formulation of epistemic and moral norms is “non-naturalist” in the sense that these norms cannot be deduced from natural facts. This is a bit irksome if we have a naturalist worldview and want to avoid positing any “spooky” entities.
Ultimately I’m pretty skeptical that we need these non-natural facts to ground normative facts. If what we mean by really ought in the above are that there are non-natural normative facts that sit over-and-above the natural facts then maybe the normative statements above don’t really have any “bite” to them. As noted in some of the other comments, the word really is doing a lot of heavy lifting in all of this.
The most coherent formulation that I’ve seen is from Terence Cuneo’s The Normative Web. The basic idea is that moral norms have the same ontological status as epistemic norms.
Unpacking this a little, when we’re talking about epistemic norms we’re making a claim about what someone ought to believe. For example:
You ought to believe the Theory of General Relativity is true.
You ought not to believe that there is a dragon in your garage if there is no evidence.
When we say ought in the sentences above we don’t mean it in some empty sense. It’s not a matter of opinion whether you ought to form beliefs according to good epistemic practices. The statements have some normative bite to them. You really ought to form beliefs according to good epistemic practices.
Similarly, you could cast moral norms in a similar vein. For example:
You ought to behave in a way which promotes wellbeing
You ought not to behave in a way which causes gratuitous suffering.
The moral statements above have the same structure as the epistemic statements. When I say you really ought not to believe epistemically unjustified thing X this is the same as saying you really ought not to behave in morally unjustified way Y.
There are some objections to the above:
You could argue that epistemic norms reliably track truth whereas moral norms reliably track something else like wellbeing which you need an additional evaluative function to tell you is “good.”
The point is that you also technically need this for epistemic norms. Some really obtuse person could always come along and ask you to justify why truth-seeking is “good” and you’d have to rely on some external evaluation that seeking truth is good because XYZ.
The standard formulation of epistemic and moral norms is “non-naturalist” in the sense that these norms cannot be deduced from natural facts. This is a bit irksome if we have a naturalist worldview and want to avoid positing any “spooky” entities.
Ultimately I’m pretty skeptical that we need these non-natural facts to ground normative facts. If what we mean by really ought in the above are that there are non-natural normative facts that sit over-and-above the natural facts then maybe the normative statements above don’t really have any “bite” to them. As noted in some of the other comments, the word really is doing a lot of heavy lifting in all of this.