Enoch on S-M

1.A.8 Sayre-McCord
In the last section of his (1988a) Sayre McCord presents – in just four pages – what is by far the most detailed and careful attempt at the second strategy I know of. Despite its lack of crucial details, this section clearly anticipates my line of argument for Robust Realism.
Sayre-McCord starts by noticing that the explanatory project – indeed, the explanatory requirement itself – is normative through and through, for it requires, at the very least, that we evaluate explanations, and choose the best one. He notes that there is little to recommend a view that is realist about some normative facts but not about moral ones, and so he concludes that our engagement in the explanatory project already commits us to evaluative, and so to moral, facts. There is just no way of engaging in explanation without relying on normative facts.
Sayre-McCord goes even further than that. He argues that the respectability of normative (and in particular moral) facts and properties does not depend on their indispensability to the explanatory project:
The legitimacy of moral theory does not require any special link between explanatory and moral justification. (280)

Instead, what guarantees the respectability of moral and other normative facts are their justificatory, not their explanatory, role:
Just as we take the explanatory role of certain hypotheses as grounds for believing the hypotheses, we must, I suggest, take the justificatory role of certain evaluative principles as grounds for believing the principles. (278)

This is, I take it, an explicit rejection of the first strategy of Harman’s Challenge, a rejection of the explanatory requirement, and the beginning of an argument for normative realism from a different kind of indispensability. Though Sayre-McCord does not use the term “indispensability argument”, he does often say that evaluative facts are indispensable (e.g., 279). And he suggests that we talk in this context, instead of an inference to the best explanation, of an inference to the best justification (ibid.).
Now, Sayre-McCord does not give some crucial details here (details which I try to give in this chapter and in the rest of this essay): What exactly does indispensability amount to? Why does indispensability to the explanatory and the justificatory projects justify ontological commitment? Why is there a justification-related need to invoke irreducibly evaluative facts and not just, say, psychological ones about one’s brute desires or preferences? Furthermore, in some important respects the line he seems to suggest is different from mine: For one thing, I cannot see how anything like inference to the best justification can be made to work . More generally, it seems to me the justificatory work normative facts do matters to us because of the deliberative indispensability of justification. What is intrinsically indispensable, in other words, is the deliberative project, not the justificatory one. The latter only matters because the former does. This is why I think the argument for Robust Realism is better put in terms of deliberative rather than justificatory indispensability.
Despite the lack of details and these differences, and despite Sayre-McCord’s commitment to Metaphysical Naturalism, it is clear, I think, that his suggestions anticipate – in broad outline, at least – my indispensability argument for Robust Realism.