Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Topoi DOI 10.1007/s11245-017-9458-8 Essentialism and Nonnaturalist Normative Supervenience Antonella Corradini 1   © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017 is, in itself, problematic. This problem constitutes the root of the Explanatory Argument against nonnaturalism. This argument is based on Hume’s Dictum, on which the radical diference between supervenient and subvenient properties makes it diicult—if not impossible—to explain superveni- ence. Thus, it must be conceived of as a brute fact. A way of solving the problem of the inhomogeneity between the normative and the natural is to adopt a naturalist viewpoint. Let us suppose that being a naturalist—at least in a strong sense—implies maintaining that normative properties can be deined in terms of natural properties—that is, that the former are reducible to the latter. Then, there is no rea- son—based on Hume’s Dictum—for denying the possibil- ity of explaining normative supervenience. In this essay, my aim is to defend a kind of nonnaturalist normative supervenience that is grounded in the essences of things. In the second section, normative supervenience will be analysed against the background of an essentialist theory of modalities. Essentialist theories—as developed by Fine (1994a, b, 1995) in the logico-semantical domain, and Lowe (1998, 2006a, b, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012) in the metaphysical—give us tools to treat the nexus of normative supervenience as a nexus of metaphysical necessity, grounded in the essences of the items involved in the rela- tion. That nexus is also susceptible to analysis as a relation of essential grounding. 1 In the third, and central section, some paradigmatic examples of normative supervenience will be investigated. This inquiry will deploy the concept of essential grounding, as introduced in the irst section. In the fourth section, I will critically discuss a present-day 1 In recent years, the notion of grounding has become especially important for dealing with many issues relating to traditional founda- tional metaphysical problems. For a general introduction to the topics of grounding and to its formal techniques see Correia and Schnieder (2012). Abstract In this essay I defend a kind of nonnatural- ist normative supervenience, grounded in the essences of things. Essentialist theories, in fact, give us the tools to treat the nexus of normative supervenience as a nexus of metaphysical necessity, holding between the normative and the natural. In this context, essentialist grounding provides an explanation of normative supervenience that allows us to keep together both supervenience and nonnaturalism. Moreover, to achieve this signiicant result, I do not make use of hybrid properties, which are both normative and nat- ural. Rather, I endeavour to show that the notion of hybrid property is based on an erroneous notion of grounding. Keywords Normative nonnaturalism · Normative supervenience · Essentialist grounding · Metaphysical necessity 1 Introduction Normative supervenience is a fundamental metaethical claim. According to this claim, the normative properties of an entity—whatever the entity in question is: object, action, or state of afairs—are attributable to that entity only if it is characterised by certain natural properties. Many ques- tions arise about normative supervenience. Is it a necessary or contingent relation? If it is necessary and not contingent, in what sense is it necessary? Moreover, in whichever way supervenience is conceived, the fact that subvenient proper- ties are conceptually very diferent from the supervenient * Antonella Corradini antonella.corradini@unicatt.it 1 Università Cattolica di Milano, Milan, Italy