Abstract

The normativity objection challenges normative naturalism by arguing that we have a distinctive cognitive experience when making normative judgements, finding ourselves in touch with some action-guiding authority issuing demands from outside, and that this cannot be explained naturalistically. An increasing number of naturalists have defended their position by adopting the coloring strategy, which aims to explain away the need for positing a special property and contends that the normative feel results from the intricate work of our mind which colors the world. In this paper, I critically review the extant strategies and consider what the most plausible form of the strategy would look like. I further argue that even the strategy in its most plausible form faces serious problems, that it lacks positive motivation, that it is self-defeating, and that it may well be unnecessary in the first place. As a result, the coloring strategy as a response to the normativity objection should be rejected, though it may have merits in intramural debates among naturalists.