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RichardChappell comments on Pluralistic Moral Reductionism - Less Wrong
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I'm inclined not to write about moral non-naturalism because I'm writing this stuff for Less Wrong, where most people are physicalists.
What does it mean to you to say that something is a 'fundamental normative concept'? As in... non-reducible to 'is' statements (in the Humean sense)?
I was thinking of "fundamental" concepts as those that are most basic, and not reducible to (or built up out of) other, more basic, concepts. I do think that normative concepts are conceptually isolated, i.e. not reducible to non-normative concepts, and that's really the more relevant feature so far as the OQA is concerned. But by 'fundamental normative concept' I meant a normative concept that is not reducible to any other concepts at all. They are the most basic, or bedrock, of our normative concepts.
Given the extremely poor access human beings have to the structure of their own concepts, it's dubious that the methods of analytic philosophy can trace those structures. Moreover, concepts typically "cluster together similar things for purposes of inference" ( Yudkowsky ) and thus we can re-structure them in light of new discoveries. Concepts that are connected now might be improved by disconnecting them, or vice versa. It is not at all clear that normative concepts are not included in this (Neurath-style) boat.