Is There a Causal Closure Argument?

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I'm a little worried about causal closure arguments or causal exclusion arguments because I think they're going to, in the end, exclude too much if we think that everything can ultimately be explained. Then that leaves little room for beliefs and desires, for instance, to do in explaining. Unless you think that a belief is nothing other than an arrangement to fermions and bosons. That's a view that some people have held in the philosophy of mind, but not many people hold. It's just saying there might be some worrying implications of that causal exclusion argument. On the one hand, you jettison moral features from the metaphysics, but you might have to jettison a lot

Despite occasional and important disagreements, most people are in rough agreement about what it means to be moral, to do the right thing. There’s much less agreement about why we should be moral, or even what kind of answer to that question could be convincing. Philosopher Russ Shafer-Landau is one of the leading proponents of moral realism — the view that objective moral truths exist independently of human choices. That’s not my own view, but ethics and meta-ethics are areas in which I think it’s wise to keep an open mind and listen to smart people who disagree. This conversation offers food for thought for people on either side of this debate.

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Russ Shafer-Landau received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Arizona. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Among his numerous books are Moral Realism: A Defense and Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? He is the editor of Oxford Studies in Metaethics, and is the founder and organizer of the annual Madison Metaethics Workshop.

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