Comparing the Viewpoints of Sturgeon and Harman on Moral Explanations

Moral explanation is one of the important problems in the contemporary analytic ethics which draws the moral philosopher's attention because of its relation to ethical realism. Moral thinkers have taken two general stances in this regard: some, like Gilbert Harman, denied the explanatory power of moral properties and other, like Nicholas Sturgeon, acknowledging that moral properties and facts are not reducible to natural properties, believes in the explanatory potency of moral properties. Harman thinks that even if we, like the advocates of non reductionist moral naturalism, accept that moral properties are not reducible to natural ones we still cannot contend that moral properties have theexplanatory weight, because unlike natural properties, they are not objective facts. According to him, for having a justified belief in a particular entity, we need to find a causal or at least an explanatory criterion concerning that entity. And since moral properties have none of them they are not real and objective facts. Contrary to him, Sturgeon, mentioning a lot of examples, asserts that moral properties have a causalexplanatory role in explaining a lot of facts of the world. So, the causal explanation is true of them. Sturgeon, offering a new method for testing the explanatory criterion, proves that this criterion is true of moral properties too.