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WHAT MAKES MORAL VALUES QUEER? 685
an coherently imagine a detailed world in which such zombies exist, but that, nevertheless,
they are not possible. 16
If these philosophers were right, then moral facts and mental states would seem very much on
par with regard to the ‘lack of entailment’ and it would seem difficult to render moral
supervenience queer for this ‘lack of entailment’.
In contemporary philosophy of mind, it is a moot point as to whether zombies are conceivable
and possible, conceivable or possible, or neither. And as long as the debate isn’t decided, the
normative realist can, it seems, adopt a wait-and-see attitude about the issue. Shafer-Landau
takes this cue and defends his version of non-reductive moral realism exactly in this way:
The problem, then, should be that competent speakers of a language can conceive of a
world in which the base properties that actually underlie particular moral ones fail to
do so. But there is no mystery here, since people can conceive of many things that are
not metaphysically possible. If certain base properties metaphysically necessitate the
presence of specified moral properties, then the conceptual possibility that they fail to
do so reveals only a limitation on our appreciation of the relevant metaphysical
relations. There is no deep explanatory puzzle resisting resolution here. (Shafer-
Landau 2004: 86)
On the one hand, I think that Shafer Landau is right: as long as it is a moot issue as to
whether “people can conceive of many things that are not metaphysically possible” this ‘lack
of entailment’ argument seems somehow ill-suited to bringing out the queerness of moral
supervenience. On the other hand, Shafer-Landau’s assessment of the situation is almost too
optimistic. It is far from clear whether people can conceive “many things” that aren’t
metaphysically possible. After all, there seems to be something about the subjective
experience of mental states that makes them especially problematic. Whether the analogy
between the moral and the mental can withstand critical examination would require a
thorough analysis of the zombie thought experiment debate. This is outside the scope of this
paper.
5.2 Explanation in Terms of the Base – A Minimal Requirement on Explanation
In The Impossibility of Superdupervenience, Michael Lynch and Joshua Glasgow put forward
an interesting argument defending the idea that supervenience among properties can never
be explained in a satisfying way. They ask us to imagine a supervenience relation, such as the
supervenience of moral properties/facts (call them B-facts) on non-moral properties/facts
(call them A-facts), and then they ask us to imagine that this supervenience can be explained
by some further fact; call this explainer fact an ‘S-fact’. Now they point to the following
dilemma:
Either (i) these S-facts themselves supervene on the A-facts or (ii) they do not. We shall
argue that the nonreductive materialist cannot claim that S-facts supervene on the A-
facts on pain of a regress. This leaves (ii). If S-facts don’t supervene on A-facts then
either (iia) the S-facts are members of the set of A-facts; or (iib) the S-facts are sui
generis. We shall claim that neither (iia) nor (iib) is a plausible option for the
nonreductive materialist. If so, then the S-facts cannot be explained in a
materialistically respectable way. Superdupervenience is impossible. (Lynch and
Glasgow 2002: 208f)
Before discussing this passage, I would like to point out that (ii) and (iia) do not go together
well because, if S-facts were a member of A facts, then they would be trivially supervenient on
16
See Kirk 1974 & Chalmers 1996, 93–171.