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Moore claimed that what he took to be the fundamental moral concept, goodness, is a non-natural concept. From this, together with his premise that there is a property — goodness — he inferred that the concept goodness signifies a non-natural property. This chapter distinguishes properties from concepts, and accepts that there is a difference between basic moral concepts and naturalistic concepts. However, it argues that moral concepts signify natural properties: some natural property is the property of being good. The main thesis is a so-called thesis of natural constitution: some broadly natural property constitutes being what one ought to do. The main argument for this claim begins with a traditional non-cognitivist (expressivist) theme that to understand what the word ‘ought’ means we need to say what it is to think or claim that someone ought to do something. Ought-statements are understood in terms of the activity of planning, and it is proposed that we can best grasp the content or meaning of such statements by understanding what it is to disagree in plan. The upshot of this argument is that any planner is committed to the thesis of natural constitution. The rest of the chapter paper is concerned with exploring and defending the philosophical assumptions (e.g. about the nature of properties) presupposed in this argument. The overall metaethical view of the chapter represents a blend of non-naturalism about moral concepts with naturalism about moral properties.

The metatheory of the book is tested in application to itself. What sorts of plans must one have to believe the metatheory, and do we have such plans? The structure of the metatheory is like that of Brandom. Moore claimed that normative thoughts aren’t naturalistic. The metatheory says what kinds of planning constitute believing Moore, and the metatheory itself. An objection from weakness of will: one can believe one must do something but not do it. The expressivist point is that such a state of mind suffers conceptual incoherence. Nonnaturalism too can recognize this. With conceptually incoherent states of mind, a different concept of mental content from that in the book is needed, grounded in simulation. Simulational meaning allows interpreting a person as conceptually confused, whereas normative meaning figures in what one could believe coherently.

In this Brandom-like metatheory, meaning is characterized in terms of ought, and ought is characterized in two ways: expressivistically by a substantive meaning theory, and conceptually by the tie of normative belief to action, which then figures in expressivism’s claims for its substantive theory. Put in their strongest forms, nonnaturalism and expressivism coincide in their theses, but their explanations contrast. Bare proclamations of a non-natural realm are epistemically implausible. Expressivism starts with us in the natural world, and explains what nonnaturalism appeals to. Because disagreement in aim is possible, thought of meaning act like representation. With true normative views and enough perspicacity and understanding of nature, we could see how a vast history of natural selection might lead to physical systems interpretable as planning and guiding discourse using a concept of meaning that isn’t naturalistic.

In this chapter I try to show what an ontology for normative nonnaturalism could look like. Firstly, I inquire into the modal nature of the supervenience relation within a normative nonnaturalist framework. I surmise that the necessity preceding a strong normative supervenience relation is neither analytical nor nomological, but metaphysical. Borrowing from E. J. Lowe’s essentialist theory of necessity I argue that among the metaphysical determinations of an object’s essence there is also the property of possessing a certain telic structure. Secondly, I analyze the normative constitution relation, whose function is to identify what grounds supervenience. This analysis highlights the fact that end-directedness is a component of constitution along with descriptive properties. Thirdly, I show that supervenience follows from constitution and that the supervenience relation between descriptive and normative properties is obtained by means of the constitution analysis of the telic structure of the object displaying such properties.

This chapter focuses on the metaethical and epistemological framework within which Ross develops his moral theory. It is argued that the most important distinctive feature of Ross’s nonnaturalist metaethics is his emphasis on the distinction between essence theories and grounds theories, which is the product of his introduction of the concept of prima facie duty; that Ross does a better job of arguing for nonnaturalism than Moore does in Principia Ethica; and that Ross also does well in recognizing and taking on two new alternative positions in metaethics: noncognitivism (against which he raises a version of the Frege-Geach problem decades before Geach) and error theory. It is then argued that his moral epistemology is less satisfactory. He inherits from Prichard a distinctive form of knowledge-first epistemology that (unlike Sidgwick’s fallibilist intuitionism) leads to dogmatism. And his claims about the special epistemic status of principles of prima facie duty are problematic.