Mauser and Moral Philosophy, Part I

Bernard Mauser was, as of May 2011, a candidate for a Ph.D. in philosophy from Marquette University.

I've read bits and pieces of his dissertation online. It has the forbidding title, "The Ontological Foundations for Natural Law Theory and Contemporary Ethical Naturalism."

Natural-law theory, to put matters starkly, is the whole body of theory that holds that there is such a fact as "human nature," and that human nature is normative. Understanding our own nature tells us how we ought to live.

Natural-law theory may be theistic. That is, one may couple the "laws of nature" with "Nature's God" as Thomas Jefferson did. But natural-law theory need not be theistic, and Mauser cites Larry Arnhart as an example of a philosopher who invokes the laws of nature while keeping nature's God out of the account.

At any rate, natural-law theory is certainly realist and cognitivist. It necessarily contends that good and bad are objective (real) facts about the world, and that some moral claims (the accurate ones) are instances of knowledge about that world. These are both very controversial assertions in 21st century philosophy.

Mauser's dissertation is aimed chiefly at defending natural law as a project, not defending this-or-that particular form of it, and it does this by answering certain influential objections.

One of these objections dates to the work of David Hume, and is often known as "Hume's guillotine," because its aim is to chop off the conclusions of natural-law arguments from their premises.

The argument, as Mauser paraphrases it, is this: "[T]here cannot be more in the conclusion than is in the premises of a deductive argument. The common moral syllogism has only facts in the premises, and within them there is nothing of value. However, this syllogism often concludes with a value-judgment about how one ought to act. in other words, although the two premises concern only what is the case, the syllogism concludes by stating what ought to be done."

The introduction of the "ought" gives such an argument an implicit "neck," so to speak. That neck is the target of the guillotine.

More on Hume's argument, and Mauser's reply to it, tomorrow.