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WHAT MAKES MORAL VALUES QUEER? 683
morality is about. Morality loses its point if it is not fixed by actions, states of affairs, or
attitudes. If morality did not require moral properties to be fixed by non-moral properties,
then it would allow for moral properties to be free floating, detached from the non-moral
world. Furthermore, it would not be conceptually guaranteed that morality gives as reliable
a verdict about what we ought to do. Therefore, Jackson calls this part of supervenience “the
most salient and least controversial part of folk moral theory” (Jackson 1998: 118) and
Michael Smith writes, “Everyone agrees that the moral features of things supervene on their
natural features [...]. For recognition of the way in which the moral supervenes on the
natural is a constraint on the proper use of moral concepts“ (Smith 1994: 21).
Why are the two necessity operators critical in the context of this paper? The metaphysical
necessity claim purports to describe part of the behavior of moral properties, i.e. how they
relate to descriptive properties. It is this part of moral supervenience that stands in need of
explanation. As I showed in the first paragraph, Mackie argues that if these necessities
remain unexplained, they would be queer. Second, conceptual necessity is about what sort
of relation morality incontrovertibly requires. Mackie’s error theory, for example, embraces
the conceptual constraint arguing that it is an integral part of morality for moral properties
to be supervenient (he argues that moral value “would have to be” supervenient). But, he
denies that unexplained metaphysical necessities exist, as the existence of such a relation
would be queer and implausible. To sum up, unexplained metaphysical necessity is the
target of the queerness argument and the conceptual necessity secures its importance.
To remind ourselves, from the formula for strong moral supervenience the embedded
metaphysical necessities – □ M∀y(Gy→Fy) – stand in need for explanation. Suppose there is
something (say, X) that explains these necessities. Then, an explanation for those necessities
could be expressed as follows:
EXP
X explains that it is metaphysically necessary that everything that is G is also F.
But EXP could mean either of two things. In one sense, X might explain why being G
necessitates the instantiation of a particular property F and not that of another property such
as E (where F and E are not identical). In another sense, X might explain why something’s
being G necessitates anything at all and not just nothing. In this latter case, X would explain
why a certain relation obtains, namely that of necessitation.
5. Explaining Supervenience: Two Accounts
Any metaethical account is conceptually committed to moral supervenience and normative
realists in particular to supervenience being a relation between distinct types of properties.
However, the charge goes that if these necessities remain unexplained, they are queer, e.g.
they are utterly different from anything else in the universe and a commitment to these
entities is therefore implausible.
Turning this uneasiness into a serious queerness argument against normative realism
requires finding a plausible account of ‘explanation’ that explains all remaining cases of
supervenience but which leaves moral supervenience in particular as an unexplained queer
residue. The rest of the paper will be concerned with pointing to two difficulties in meeting
this challenge: First, if one were to choose a demanding account of explanation, one might
manage to leave the moral case unexplained. But such an account might also leave other types
of facts or properties such as mental properties unexplained. Hence, if we do not want to give
up our commitment to these other properties, moral supervenience could, though
unexplained, escape queerness. On the other hand, if one chooses an account of ‘explanation’