Rambling about Metaethics

This post will be less apologetic focused than most (though there is a sort of indirect argument for theism that will make an appearance).  It’s also over an area that I have very little confidence to discuss. But in an attempt to get my bearing on the field I’d like to get some of my thoughts down on paper.  It will be mostly a sketch.  If anyone feels that I’ve made an error, please correct me.

Whatever metaethical theory we adopt, it should be consistent with the Ultimacy Intuition:

Ultimacy Intuition:  Whatever is not God is created by and depends upon God.

Moore’s O-QA tries to demonstrate the fundamentality of the good, showing that it cannot be reduced to any other more fundamental property.  It probably fails due to Kripke-style arguments.

Reduction: Every moral theory will eventually reach a final stage of explanation that may seem brute and abrupt.  

Natural Law theory holds that our nature determines what is good for us.  Knowledge is good for humans because we have the natural capacity for knowledge and so on.  

Question: Does the good precede the right? 
On NL, the good precedes the right.  Kant would reject this due to some opaque argument about the autonomy of reason.  I still haven’t been able to grasp how that argument is supposed to work.  
Many philosophers seem to think that a rejection of the right preceding the good leads to consequentialism.  NL claims otherwise, holding instead that the right moral rules are generated by the basic goods of human nature in a non-consequentialist way (the incommensurable thesis?).

Why hold to NL?

1. It explains Mersenne problems in ethics.  (Our natures are essential features of us.  Essential features seem to require less of an explanation than features that are non-essential.  Or God decides our features and this just gives us a single brute fact rather than a multitude of them.)
2. Closeness Principle: It locates moral norms in an appropriately close way to us.  They’re not far off and external, like a command.
3. Kind Relative: It would provide differing moral norms for intelligent sharks, which seems right.
4. Objective: Yet it’s still objective and controlling for each individual, contra relativism. 
5. Epistemic Claim: It provides an easy path of knowing moral noms:  Statistical evidence.
6. Supervenience-Intuition?--Normative truths supervene on the non-normative.
7. Plausible normative implications (contra Utilitarianism?).

Question:  Is this consistent with an EoL?  See Pruss.

NL Requires Theism (Pruss thinks so)

1. Evolutionary history seems to violate the closeness principle.  Need alternative story.  
2. Why are there not conflicting norms within individuals?  We need an explanation.  Because God providentially ordered it that way.
3. Why do natures not include really nasty features?  Because our forms are ways to participate in God, and there’s no way to participate in God in an evil way.

The basic argument for theism being given here is indirect.  It goes something like:

1. We should adopt the best metaethical account available.
2. The best metaethical account is Natural Law.
3. Natural law requires theism.
4. We should adopt theism.  

But why would God choose the natures we have? Wouldn’t that introduce Mersenne problems?  (a) Free choice or (b) incommensurable reasons that do not have arbitrary parameters.

Aside from Pruss, it otherwise seems like NL is a relatively secular theory.  If so, this may imply that the theory violates the Ultimacy Intuition.  The goods of being a human seem to make no reference to God.  Are the goods of humans independently sovereign and would they be good even if God failed to exist?

One way to approach this problem is to say that the goods of humans are just a specification of God’s goodness.  When we say that it’s good to possess knowledge as a human, we’re saying that it’s good to participate in God’s goodness qua human rationality.  That would enable the theory to uphold the Ultimacy Intuition.  This is the approach of both Pruss and Mark Murphy.  Mark Murphy calls this Moral Concurrentism, drawing from the theological position of the same name.  To better understand this we probably need to make sure we also understand concurrentism.  

But the suggestion makes reference to a vague concept, participation.  What does it mean?  Given that its use in NL is a Thomistic suggestion, it does not mean what Plato meant by it.  

As far as I can tell from my study of Aquinas, this is the best account I can give of the concept: 

Participated existence = an effect having a share of the cause plus it having the cause as an exemplar (created properties might turn out to all be deep down relational properties, Leftow for this).  Anything that possesses some trait p (existence, or whatever) but does not possess p to the fullest universal extent is participating in that trait.  Participation is just a weak term of negation.  It means ~simple.  Simple here means essence=existence.  Any essence that is not simple instead has participated existence.

Switching gears;

Parfit is not a naturalist. But he is a reductionist.  He thinks that the concept “good” just means “reason to prefer.” Buck-passing account.  Reasons for Parfit are objective and external to the human mind, can take a truth value, but they do not have an ontology.  Reasons to believe are a species of moral reasons more broadly, and if we accept the former then that gives an argument for the existence of the latter. Why does he believe that these reasons are the reasons?  Why not other reasons?  Are they necessary?  Parfit’s approach reminds me of WLC’s response to the Platonic challenge to theism.  

It seems that the theistic tradition has a strong impulse to say that God is the Good.  Does Parfit’s approach enable us to say this?  Saying that God is good just means that there’s reasons to prefer God. Saying that God is the Good means what?  And could Parfit give us an account of participation?