Moral naturalism

Moral naturalism is the view that moral properties are natural properties or are reducible to them. It holds that moral claims can be understood within a naturalistic account of the world.

Moral realism: The view that moral claims can be true or false and that some are true. Moral naturalism is one realist account of what makes moral claims true.
Moral non-naturalism: The view that moral properties are real but not identical to natural properties or reducible to them. It rejects the naturalist account of what moral properties are.
Peter Railton: An American philosopher known for naturalistic realism about moral value and scientific explanation. His sophisticated consequentialist account connects moral facts to ideally informed interests.
Open-question argument: An argument that any proposed definition of goodness in natural terms leaves a meaningful open question. Moore used it to challenge claims that goodness is identical to a natural property.
Moral epistemology: The study of how moral knowledge is possible and how moral beliefs are justified. Naturalists must explain how inquiry into natural facts can yield moral knowledge.
Moral property: A property such as goodness, wrongness, or justice attributed to actions, people, or states of affairs. Naturalists explain moral properties by identifying them with, or reducing them to, natural properties.
Moral anti-realism: A family of views denying that moral claims describe objective moral facts. It challenges the realist commitment commonly shared by moral naturalists.
Richard Boyd: An American philosopher who developed a homeostatic property-cluster account of natural kinds and defended moral naturalism. His account explains moral properties as complex natural kinds rather than simple reductions.
Moral supervenience: The principle that moral differences require differences in the underlying nonmoral facts. Naturalists use supervenience to state a dependence relation without settling reduction.
Moral motivation: The study of how moral judgments relate to intentions and actions. Naturalist accounts must accommodate the practical force of moral judgments.

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