A Stalemate in Naturalizing Ethics: Insights from Theories of Punishment

This essay critically examines whether ethical naturalization – understood as the grounding of moral inquiry in empirical sciences – can resolve enduring normative disputes. Focusing specifically on the conflict between retributivist and consequentialist justifications of punishment, we investigate whether naturalistic approaches (drawing on evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics), in addition to explaining the origins and persistence of moral intuitions and practices, can also justify their normative authority. Scientific naturalists seek to reduce or replace normative ethics with descriptive accounts, often deploying evolutionary debunking arguments to challenge moral realism. Liberal naturalists, by contrast, integrate empirical insights without eliminating irreducible normativity. Through analysis of punishment theories, this article argues that, while naturalization sheds light on the evolutionary roots of retributive intuitions (e.g. adaptive cooperation mechanisms) and highlights neuroscientific challenges to free will, thus reinforcing consequentialist explanations, it nevertheless fails to adjudicate which theory is morally superior, since empirical explanations do not bridge the is-ought gap (Hume’s problem). The resulting stalemate highlights naturalization’s explanatory adequacy but normative insufficiency. The essay concludes by advocating a pluralistic integration in line with liberal naturalism, where science informs, but does not replace, philosophical reflection on ethical justification.