Naturalism

At first glance, ethical naturalism may be understood as a broad set of attempts to explain or justify the moral phenomenon from a scientific or empirical worldview. From a methodological perspective, this may involve drawing on scientific or empirical theories and methods to understand ethics in its various dimensions. From a metaphysical perspective, it consists in understanding moral facts or properties as reducible to, or fundamentally constituted by, natural facts or properties.

There are, however, different ways of understanding what counts as a natural fact or property. Such facts or properties may be characterized as having causal powers, occupying space-time, being posited by our best scientific theories, or being empirically observable, among other possibilities.

Historically, one of the most significant challenges to the naturalist tradition in ethics has been its apparent difficulty in accounting for the normativity of morality—that is, its binding or action-guiding force. The world of natural facts and properties seems, at least at first sight, to contain no prescriptions regarding how things ought to be or how people ought to act, which is precisely the central concern of ethics.

We welcome submissions that explore these and other related issues contributing to a better understanding of the different dimensions of ethics.

Submission deadline: November 30, 2026.