Peter Railton: Moral Realism & Naturalism

Biography

Peter Albert Railton was born in 1950 in the United States. He studied at the University of Michigan, where he earned his doctorate in philosophy in 1980. His dissertation, supervised in the climate of a department undergoing a renaissance in analytic philosophy, already contained the seeds of his major contribution: a defense of moral realism grounded in a naturalistic, reductionist account of moral value. Railton joined the faculty of the University of Michigan, where he spent his entire career, becoming the John Stephenson Perrin Professor of Philosophy and an influential figure in the department's graduate program. Over the decades he has also held visiting appointments at leading institutions and served as editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs, one of the most important journals in moral and political philosophy. Railton's work spans metaethics, normative ethics, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of law, but he is known above all for the series of papers in the 1980s — most famously "Moral Realism" (1986) and "Facts and Values" (1986) — that helped revive moral naturalism after half a century of non-cognitivist dominance. He continues to work on the nature of normativity and value.

Historical Background

Railton's philosophy must be understood against the state of metaethics in the mid-twentieth century. Since the emotivism of A.J. Ayer and the prescriptivism of R.M. Hare, the dominant view in analytic philosophy had been non-cognitivism: moral judgments express attitudes or prescriptions rather than facts, and there is no moral knowledge in the factual sense. Meanwhile, the naturalist tradition — from the utilitarians through to mid-century naturalists — had been largely silenced by G.E. Moore's open-question argument and the charge of the naturalistic fallacy. The 1970s and 1980s saw a "realist revival" — associated with the so-called Cornell realists (Richard Boyd, David Brink, and Nicholas Sturgeon, as well as Railton) — which challenged the anti-realist consensus on two fronts. Against the non-cognitivists, the revival argued that moral language is genuinely truth-apt and that moral properties can be part of the natural world. Against Moore, it argued that the open-question argument fails, because identities between moral and natural properties can be discovered a posteriori, as scientific identities are. Railton's distinctive contribution was to show how this could work in detail: by offering a reductionist account of moral value grounded in the welfare of individuals.

Core Ideas

Railton's central project is a defense of moral realism — the view that moral judgments can be true or false in virtue of objective moral facts — combined with moral naturalism — the view that moral properties are natural properties. His key move is the reductionist strategy. Railton proposes that we can identify moral properties with natural properties in the way that science identifies water with H2O. The moral property of being good for a person, he argues, can be understood as the property of what a fully informed and rational version of that person would want for their actual self — an "ideal advisor" or "ideal observer" account. "Intrinsically good for X" is analyzed in terms of what X's hypothetical, fully informed, fully rational self would want. Goodness, in the general sense, is then cashed out in terms of facts about individual welfare. This analysis answers the open-question argument: the question "this is what your rational self would want, but is it good?" is open only because we have not yet discovered the identity — just as "this is H2O, but is it water?" was open before chemistry discovered the identity. Railton also argues that moral facts are explanatory: the fact that an act is wrong can explain why people avoid it and why they criticize it, which gives moral properties a genuine place in the natural world. His account preserves moral objectivity without positing "queer" non-natural entities.

Major Works

Railton's most important works are his papers of the 1980s. "Moral Realism" (1986), published in Philosophical Review, is the classic statement of his naturalistic realism: it sets out the reductionist strategy, defends the ideal observer account of intrinsic value, and answers the standard objections from queerness, disagreement, and supervenience. "Facts and Values" (1986), published in Philosophical Topics, extends the strategy to show how normative claims about welfare and rationality can be continuous with factual claims. "Moral Realism: Prospects and Problems" (1989) and "Naturalism and Prescriptivity" (1993) refine and defend the view against its critics, including the challenge of explaining the normative "ought." Railton has also written influentially on the philosophy of science — "Marxism, Truth, and Science" (1986) — and on normative questions about well-being and impartiality. A collection of his essays, Facts, Values, and Norms: Essays toward a Morality of Consequence (2003), gathers the core of his ethical work.

Philosophical Influence

Railton's influence is difficult to overstate. His defense of moral naturalism is one of the cornerstones of the late-twentieth-century realist revival, and it set the agenda for subsequent naturalist work: anyone who wants to defend moral realism as a naturalistic position must engage with his reductionist strategy and his answer to the open-question argument. His work revitalized the connection between ethics and the philosophy of science, and his reductionist methodology influenced the treatment of normativity across philosophy — in practical rationality, in the theory of well-being, and in the debate over whether "ought" claims can be grounded in facts. With Derek Parfit's defense of non-naturalist realism and Peter Singer's practical ethics, Railton's work defined the realist options available to contemporary metaethicists. He is also a major figure in the philosophy of well-being: his ideal advisor account is one of the standard theories of welfare in contemporary philosophy.

Related Concepts

Railton's philosophy belongs to the tradition of moral realism and moral naturalism, the view that moral properties are natural properties. His reductionist strategy is the contemporary answer to Moore's naturalistic fallacy and the is-ought problem. The realism vs anti-realism debate is the frame for his work, and his account of welfare connects ethics to the practical ethics of Peter Singer and the philosophy of well-being.