Audrey Powers - Research

Publications

"Moral Overfitting," forthcoming in Philosophical Studies.

When we're figuing out how to conduct first-order ethical inquiry, we should take relevant lessons from the natural sciences — and one such lesson we're presently neglecting has to do with avoiding overfitting.

Works in progress

"Non-Naturalist Moral Causation," provisionally forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 21. (Here's a draft.)

Consensus in metaethics has it that moral naturalists can account for moral causation while non-naturalists can't. But that's not right — non-naturalists with standard metaphysical commitments can have moral causation on widely-accepted difference-making accounts of causation.

"Laws as Partial Grounds," with Karen Bennett and Itamar Weinshtock Saadon, invited for submission to Reduction in Mind and Metaethics, eds. Alex Moran and Ralf Bader, Oxford University Press.

We develop an account of laws as partial grounds of their instances, in response to recent work in metaethics and metaphysics about when and whether laws feature in the grounds of particular facts.

Dissertation

What's the Deal With Moral Laws?

There’s not just an undifferentiated jumble of moral stuff out there – at least, most moral philosophers don’t think so. Instead, we generally think there are levels to and connections within moral reality. My promise-breaking was wrong, and so was your promise-breaking, and they were wrong in the same kind of way. That is to say, there are systematic connections between the moral and the non-moral. As such, in ethics, one of our goals is to discover what these systematic connections are. I argue that if we accept this picture of an organized moral landscape, then we are committed to the existence of moral laws, which spell out the relation between the moral and the non-moral. Such laws govern or summarize (depending on one’s background view of the metaphysical role of laws) the distribution of particular moral facts, akin to the natural laws in scientific domains.

Now, such commitments raise a number of questions. First: even if moral laws exist, in what manner should we use them in first-order moral theorizing? I argue that we need not always use moral laws: I give a picture of a model-based approach to ethics that is useful as modeling is useful in the natural sciences, and give arguments for the benefits, perils, and best practices associated with such an approach.

Second: the existence of moral laws will have metaethical implications. For one thing, we'll want to say something about how moral laws mediate interactions between the moral and the rest of the world. I argue that the existence of moral laws allows us to claim that moral facts are causally efficacious, even if non-naturalism is true (contra consensus in metaethics). For another thing, we'll want to say something about the modal status of the moral laws. Generally, we take moral laws to be metaphysically necessary. I argue, again contra consensus, that there are surprisingly good reasons to be contingentists about the moral laws. This means that it would be in a sense possible for my promise-breaking not to be wrong, under different moral laws.

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