Ethics Naturalized : Naturalism as Explanatory Structure in Metaethics

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this essay is to investigate what implications a naturalized account of metaethics could have for our understanding of ethics and to advance a type of ethical naturalism that is non-reductionist. During the course of the study several different approaches to metaethics are investigated and critically evaluated, before a positive account of ethical naturalism is delivered. It is argued that ethics is a natural phenomenon that is best understood as an aspect of human ecology and that moral properties arise from our species natural history and supervene on our evolved human nature. It is also argued that this account of ethics is well supported in both phenomenology and moral language