Good post. The point about laypeople's ability/willingness to accept the entailments/implications of their other commitments being an empirical question seems VASTLY under-appreciated in these debates.
Dec 5, 2023·edited Dec 5, 2023Liked by Lance S. Bush
I wrote a methodological criticism of the idea that theism can logically detail moral realism (without appealing to empirical data), because it has concerns via inference as well, though this criticism is ubiquitous since it a modern form of the Euthyphro problem.
Briefly, we have the following concern: if you accept moral antirealism WITHOUT theism, then you probably should as well WITH theism. The reason for this is actually quite obvious: any theistic definition of "good," "ought," or any other term will not have a meaningful capacity to morally motivate us. In this sense, when we (intuitively) treat "X is good => I ought to do X," or something similar, we divorce ourselves from traditional moral discourse, because there is nothing meaningful about saying "X is commanded by God => I should do X" without appealing to some external moral realism in the first place. At best we reject norms entirely and believe in some divorced "good" and "bad."
I'm sympathetic to that objection, and tend to rely on Humean concerns about the relation between moral facts and motivation. I might primarily object to the notion of anything distinctively metaethical about "traditional moral discourse."
Good post. The point about laypeople's ability/willingness to accept the entailments/implications of their other commitments being an empirical question seems VASTLY under-appreciated in these debates.
I wrote a methodological criticism of the idea that theism can logically detail moral realism (without appealing to empirical data), because it has concerns via inference as well, though this criticism is ubiquitous since it a modern form of the Euthyphro problem.
Briefly, we have the following concern: if you accept moral antirealism WITHOUT theism, then you probably should as well WITH theism. The reason for this is actually quite obvious: any theistic definition of "good," "ought," or any other term will not have a meaningful capacity to morally motivate us. In this sense, when we (intuitively) treat "X is good => I ought to do X," or something similar, we divorce ourselves from traditional moral discourse, because there is nothing meaningful about saying "X is commanded by God => I should do X" without appealing to some external moral realism in the first place. At best we reject norms entirely and believe in some divorced "good" and "bad."
- Nathaniel
I'm sympathetic to that objection, and tend to rely on Humean concerns about the relation between moral facts and motivation. I might primarily object to the notion of anything distinctively metaethical about "traditional moral discourse."
Moral realism is just the claim that there are moral truths, not thst they are automatically motivating
I tend to go with the definition that there are stance independent moral facts. They don't have to be automatically motivating.