The Moore's Open Question Argument By Peter Railton

As a response to the Moore’s Open Question Argument (OQA), Peter Railton attempts to show under non-analytic naturalism, it is possible for normative properties to be reducible to natural properties without running into Moore’s OQA. However, this move met an objection by Derek Parfit, known as the Triviality Objection. In this essay, I will attempt to show that Parfit’s Triviality Objection does not succeed in proving that Non-Analytical Naturalism is incoherent by disagreeing with the view that once reduction is made, identity claims cease to be normative altogether. This paper will firstly briefly introduce the argument by Railton, followed by Parfit’s Triviality Objection as a response to show the incoherence of Railton’s argument for Non-Analytical
However, in the 19th Century, Moore’s OQA was published and had many convinced that Analytical Naturalism does not hold by showing that normative and natural properties do not have the same meaning through the compositionality test. Thus, normative properties cannot be captured by natural properties. In a compositionality test, normative and natural properties are proven to have the same meaning only if the question is closed. Using the example in Moore’s Principia Ethica, consider the two statements – “Going to the movies is pleasant, but is it pleasant?” and “Going to the movies is pleasant, but is it good?” Latter statement is open and thus, pleasant and good does not have the same meaning since the question is no longer asking the same thing (pp.
The suggested solution was to introduce a second-order property - just like how has the second-order property of , Non-Analytical Naturalists could follow the same model to show that identity claims are informative in relating the two property through a different property. But to ensure that the reduction is still normative, the second-order property needs to be a normative one since the normative claim is already reduced to descriptive terms. However, in introducing a new normative claim, this would entail the further reduction of the second-order normative property, since Non-Analytical Naturalists claim that all normative claims are reducible to natural terms. But the reduction of the second-order normative property to a completely naturalistic one would then require a new normative property in the reduction to keep the identity claim normative and this process goes on and on. The reduction would never end. Alternatively, Non-Analytic Naturalists could bite the bullet and reduced normative claims to a completely naturalistic one without introducing second-order normative property. But from this move it seems like they gave up on their position. Thus, the method of introducing second-order normative property suggested by Parfit does not work.