An Attempt at the Naturalistic Interpretation of Norms and Evaluations

Abstract

The paper considers the naturalism/anti-naturalism controversy in metaethics and argues for the former position, but not in its radical version. The processes of issuing norms and making valuations are taken as primitive with respect to their verbal articulation by norms and value-statements, as traditionally understood. This leads to a non-linguistic approach to norms (analyzed as performative actions) and evaluations as facts considered as processes existing in the spatio-temporal world. Performatives, evaluation processes, normative utterances (performative and deontic), and bonitive sentences provide sufficient tools for grounding naturalism in metaethics. No undertaken logical analysis shows that deontic and bonitive logic are analogical. The paper also considers generalized arguments of Hume and Moore, which, as it appears, are not dangerous for naturalism.