Moral Supervenience and Moral Thinking

The paper aims at meeting Blackburn’s challenge (1971, 1984, 1985) to explain the non-reductive supervenience of moral predicates on natural ones. It offers a critical examination of Hare’s model of moral thinking (1981) which can be used as a candidate for such an explanation. It is argued that, as it stands, Hare’s model fails to meet Blackburn’s challenge. Yet some revisions of the model are suggested, and it is claimed that the improved version does supply the required explanation. The model suggested in the paper carries a meta-ethical implication concerning the superiority of the anti-realist understanding of moral discourse.