As someone who spent a year at a Tennessean high school surrounded by Baptists, I understand your experience. I just ended up with a different conclusion: no one is interested in the metaphysical questions because they have to be settled if you want to continue living your “normal” life. What looks like interest in the metaphysical questions is a mere self-preservation mechanism for the normative ethical claims and not to be taken at face value.
To me, it seems faulty to assume any believer “reasons” about the existence of god, their brains just successfully trick them into thinking that. That’s why I felt it was weak as a metaphor for anti-realism vs realism. So from an outside view your metaphor makes sense if you take believers to be “reasoning” about anything but felt to me like it was more distracting from the thing you meant to point at, than actually pointing at it. The thing being:
I think it’s going to be less useful to discuss “what are moral claims usually about.” What we should instead do is instead what Chalmers describes (see the quote in footnote 4). Discussing what moral claims are usually about is not the same as making up one’s mind about normative ethics. I think it’s very useful to discuss normative ethics, and I’d even say that discussing whether anti-realism or realism is true might be slightly less important than making up one’s mind about normative ethics. Sure, it informs to some extent how to reason about morality, but as has been pointed out, you can make some progress about moral questions also from a lens of agnosticism about realism vs. anti-realism.
Thanks, this makes sense.
As someone who spent a year at a Tennessean high school surrounded by Baptists, I understand your experience. I just ended up with a different conclusion: no one is interested in the metaphysical questions because they have to be settled if you want to continue living your “normal” life. What looks like interest in the metaphysical questions is a mere self-preservation mechanism for the normative ethical claims and not to be taken at face value.
To me, it seems faulty to assume any believer “reasons” about the existence of god, their brains just successfully trick them into thinking that. That’s why I felt it was weak as a metaphor for anti-realism vs realism. So from an outside view your metaphor makes sense if you take believers to be “reasoning” about anything but felt to me like it was more distracting from the thing you meant to point at, than actually pointing at it. The thing being: