Non-Naturalism and the Metaphysics of Normative Properties

Normative non-naturalists seem to be committed to a supervenience relation about the normative. This means that the normative necessarily varies with the non-normative, such that the normative features of a person or a thing cannot change if the non-normative features of that person or that thing do not change either. Furthermore, according to normative non-naturalists, normative properties are metaphysically discontinuous with non-normative properties, as the former are irreducible to the latter and cannot be exhaustively understood in terms of the latter. However, it is not clear that normative non-naturalists can explain the necessary connection between the normative and the non-normative they themselves seem to maintain; this is the core of the problem of supervenience. In order to respond to the problem of supervenience, non-naturalists could either try to explain the necessary connection between the normative and the non-normative, or deny that this necessary connection between the normative and the non-normative holds. I first define normative non-naturalists theoretical commitments and give a few reasons to take this view seriously (Chapter 1), and then I explain how the problem of supervenience against non-naturalism should be understood (Chapter 2). Then, I argue that there are issues with the most convincing attempts to explain the necessary connection between the normative and the non-normative (Chapter 3) and with the most convincing attempts to deny this necessary connection (Chapter 4). My conclusion is then that non-naturalists do not have a convincing response to the problem of supervenience.