Abstract

According to the Divide & Conquer (DC) strategy (Fogal & Risberg 2020) moral supervenience can be partly explained by appeal to pure moral principles. Bhogal (2022) has recently argued that DC fails. A pure moral principle like Act Utilitarianism (AU) cannot explain moral supervenience because AU is not a difference-maker for moral supervenience. That is, there is nothing special about AU which explains why moral properties supervene on natural properties. On the other hand, if the proponent of DC appeals to some general feature of pure moral principles (like the fact that they have a ‘bridge-law’ structure) then there is a question of what explains that feature. In this paper I do two things. First, I propose an extended DC-strategy against Bhogal’s challenge: specifically, it could be argued that the underlying metaphysics of moral principles are as such that they provide a plausible explanation of moral supervenience. To illustrate this, I consider what I take to be the most prominent accounts about the metaphysics of moral principles and I show that, prima facie, they all converge on the view that moral principles are as such that they explain moral supervenience. Secondly, I argue that the extended DC-strategy faces an interesting dilemma: it either explains the metaphysical necessity of moral principles by adopting parochial (and potentially problematic) metaphysical assumptions, or DC leads towards moral contingentism. Finally, I note that the resulting form of moral contingentism is moderate and potentially philosophically desirable. So, in this sense, one could take DC to motivate moral contingentism.