Can Robert Adams Survive Moral Twin Earth?

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Journal of religious ethics Vol. 44; no. 2; pp. 334 - 351
Main Author Taylor, Luke
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Malden Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.06.2016
Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
Subjects
causal regulation
critical stance
Ethics
good
Moral Twin Earth
Morality
naturalistic
Semantics
transcendent
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Summary: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.
Bibliography:istex:AA272F1D43AF4D640456FAE6785C0BC9B4B7A489
ArticleID:JORE12144
ark:/67375/WNG-DL5SPHZ3-R
ISSN:0384-9694
1467-9795
DOI:10.1111/jore.12144