Is anything WRONG?

Now where does value come from? Human value is objective. But we know some people don't see it like that. That is why we say it's wrong to harm someone.

But why is it wrong?

How is a naturalist to treat statements like these? The problem is that the properties expressed in them are just not scientifically testable, physical properties nor are they at home in a naturalist view of how we know things, how things came to be, and what is real. Intrinsically normative, non-natural properties are not known by the methods of science. I cannot find out that mercy is a virtue by some laboratory experiment. Nor are they the kinds of properties that could come to be present by strict physical laws. It is obvious that no property that science studies is normative. So what is a naturalist to do? There are three main courses of action available. First, a naturalist can try to paraphrase sentences like "Mercy is a virtue" as mere expressions of emotion ("Hooray Mercy!") or as mere commands ("Prefer mercy!").

But these paraphrases don't work because "Mercy is a virtue" is true, but mere expressions of emotion or pure imperatives are neither true nor false, and they leave unanswered why it is we should express emotions in this way or obey this command.

Second, a naturalist can paraphrase "Mercy is a virtue" in a reductionist way where the normative property "virtue" is replaced by a scientific, natural property, such as, "I like mercy" or "Merciful acts tend to promote survival." The first sentence is a statement of psychology, the second of evolution. Unfortunately, these paraphrases don't work either. Why? They leave out the normative component of "Mercy is a virtue." From the fact that someone likes mercy it does not follow that mercy is something we ought to value. Nor does it follow that mercy is intrinsically valuable from the fact (if it is a fact) that merciful acts promote survival unless, of course, we are already assuming that survival is an intrinsically good, normative state of affairs. But such an assumption would merely relocate normative value for the naturalist, it would not naturalize it.




It is a cherished belief of most people that human beings simply as such have equal value and rights and that they have significantly greater value than animals. However, this claim is difficult if not impossible to justify given a naturalist worldview. For many naturalists, the best, perhaps only, way to justify the belief that all humans have equal and unique value simply as such is in light of the metaphysical grounding of the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the image of God. Such a view depicts humans as substances (a particular thing like a dog that is a simple, indivisible unity of parts and attributes at a time, that remains the same through change, and that has a nature (being a human, being a carbon atom, being a dog) that provides an answer to the question “What kind of thing is this particular object?”) with a human nature, and for at least two reasons, naturalists claim that this framework must be abandoned.

For one thing, the progress of science has regularly shifted entities (e.g., heat) from the category of substance (heat was once viewed as the substance caloric that flowed into or out of objects) to the category of quality (heat is an attribute of warmth, not a thing like caloric), or quantity (heat is not the attribute of being warm, it is the mathematical quantity of mean kinetic energy). Since natures are the essences of substances, if there really are no substances (and, instead, there are just collections or aggregates of atoms and molecules), then we should reject the existence of natures. Thus, there most likely is no such thing as a human nature, and talk of such should be understood solely within the categories of biology, chemistry, and physics and with a view of humans as mere ordered aggregates of parts.