Neo-Humean Moral Contingentism

The neo-Humean account of moral principles (NHM) is a theory about the metaphysical status of moral principles. According to NHM, moral principles (in the genetic, non-propositional sense) are entities that supervene upon, and are nothing over and above, the distribution of properties located at the Humean mosaic (the set of fundamental, non-modal, physical properties). In this paper, I do two things. First, I make the case for NHM: NHM explains pure moral principles in a straightforward way while also explaining moral supervenience in a dialectically advantageous way. Secondly, I defend the contingentist aspect of NHM: the properties that figure in the Humean mosaic are governed by a principle of recombination. And the fact that moral properties figure in that mosaic contingently suggests that moral principles are also contingent (i.e. they differ depending on a given world’s distribution of base-properties). This makes NHM susceptible to a normative authority problem, an epistemological problem, a moral luck problem, and a modal miracle problem. I show that NHM can meet these challenges, thus making it superior to other moral contingentist proposals on the market.