The difficulty that I see with this issue, speaking as a theist, is that I believe that moral facts exist in the mind of God. So, do those do those facts have a reality? Yes, I think so. Are they binding on all persons universally? Yes, I think so. But are those facts stance independent? No, not in a Platonic sense. So, how would you categorize my view? I don't see how it would fit neatly into either camp.
I don't think we should try to fit theistic views into either camp. The camps are inventions. We can just toss out the camps and talk about what's the case without insisting on putting things into boxes.
Ironically enough, I might have been more of a moral realist as an atheist than I am now as a Christian. It wouldn't be my hill to die on though as a lot of other factors played part and might have proved more instrumental than the conversion.
I did become more precious with my faith though. I realized that acting all high and mighty undermined the other whatever their path, and opened the way for them to justifiably undermine my faith and my path in return.
And so each man for himself. Moral realism is a form of naivety I had my fill of during my teenage years and young adulthood.
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.
The difficulty that I see with this issue, speaking as a theist, is that I believe that moral facts exist in the mind of God. So, do those do those facts have a reality? Yes, I think so. Are they binding on all persons universally? Yes, I think so. But are those facts stance independent? No, not in a Platonic sense. So, how would you categorize my view? I don't see how it would fit neatly into either camp.
I don't think we should try to fit theistic views into either camp. The camps are inventions. We can just toss out the camps and talk about what's the case without insisting on putting things into boxes.
Good! I appreciate that.
Beautifully said.
Ironically enough, I might have been more of a moral realist as an atheist than I am now as a Christian. It wouldn't be my hill to die on though as a lot of other factors played part and might have proved more instrumental than the conversion.
I did become more precious with my faith though. I realized that acting all high and mighty undermined the other whatever their path, and opened the way for them to justifiably undermine my faith and my path in return.
And so each man for himself. Moral realism is a form of naivety I had my fill of during my teenage years and young adulthood.
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."
I tend to go with the definition that there are stance independent moral facts. They don't have to be automatically motivating.
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.