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WHAT MAKES MORAL VALUES QUEER? 679
normative properties. While normative properties tell us what we have reason to do, nonnormative
properties do not. As such, moral properties and non-moral properties really are,
as Michael Ridge notes, “distinct existences” (Ridge 2008). Therefore, it might prima facie
seem puzzling and in need of explanation that there should be necessary connections (as
supervenience tells us) among them.
A third point to learn from Mackie is that in rendering unexplained supervenience queer,
one adduces a reason for why it is implausible; it is not the lack of explanation per se that is
implausible but, rather, that this lack of explanation is queer, i.e. it is unprecedented.
Mackie notes that realists 8 only have a problem explaining supervenience if they are
committed to moral properties being intrinsically normative; that is, whenever the realist
has a problem with queer moral properties, she might have a corresponding problem with
queer moral supervenience. Though they are two sides of the same coin, metaphysical
arguments from moral queerness have traditionally focused on moral properties themselves
and not on supervenience 9 . In the next chapter, I will give an argument for why it is
advantageous to formulate queerness based on supervenience and not, as it is traditionally
conceived, based on moral properties.
3. Motivating Queer Supervenience: A Methodological Argument
in Favour of the Focus on Moral Supervenience
In this section I will present a methodological argument for why it is advantageous to base
the argument form moral queerness on supervenience of moral properties, rather than on
moral properties themselves.
The important aspect of queerness is that the object under scrutiny is “utterly different from
anything else in the universe”. I want to argue for a methodological constraint on this
difference: being different ought not to be trivially true. Here is an example of something’s
being trivially different from anything else: gold is different from anything else in the
universe, because it is the only metal with the atomic number of 79. The reason why this is
trivial is that, upon knowing what kind of thing gold is, we already know that it is the only
metal with that atomic number. Being a metal with the atomic number 79 just is being
gold 10 . This constraint can be formulated as follows:
(i)
X’s being utterly different from anything else ought not to be formulated such that
the difference is trivial.
As I have said, gold’s having the atomic number 79 makes it trivially different from anything
else; this is because it is sufficient to make it gold. This sufficiency condition for being
trivially different from anything else can be stated as follows:
(i)C
X will be trivially different from everything else if the feature Y that accounts for
the difference is a sufficient X-maker.
For moral properties that would mean:
8
Expressivists don’t believe that there are moral properties at all. Foremostly realists have noted that
expressivists equally have a problem explaining supervenience. I don’t wish to take a stance on this issue
here.
9
See for instance Michael Smith, Beyond the Error Theory p. 2; Bart Streumer 2011, 3.
10
The formulation “what kind of thing X is” cannot be replaced by “understanding the term gold”.
Before it was discovered that gold has a certain atomic structure, many did understand the word “gold”
properly. But, it is also true that they did not know what kind of thing it is.