MichaelA🔸 comments on What Is Moral Realism?

[MichaelA🔸]

Thanks for this post—this topic seems quite important to me, and I think this post has reduced my confusion and sharpened my thinking. I look forward to reading the later posts in the sequence.

However, not committing to any specific perspective calls into question whether there even is, in theory, a correct answer. If there are many different and roughly equally plausible interpretations of “impartial perspective” or “desire fulfillment” (or more generally: of well-being defined as “that which is good for a person”), then the question, “Which of these different accounts is correct?” may not have an answer.

I found this argument confusing. Wouldn’t it be acceptable, and probably what we’d expect, for a metaethical view to not also provide answers on normative ethics or axiology? It seems that finding out there are “speaker-independent moral facts, rules or values” would be quite important, even if we don’t yet know what those facts are. And it doesn’t seem that not yet knowing those facts should be taken as strong evidence that those facts don’t exist? Perhaps the different interpretations are equally plausible at the moment, but as we learn and debate more we will come to see some interpretations as more plausible?

Analogously, you and I could agree that there is an objectively correct and best answer to the question “What percentage of Americans are allergic to bees?”, despite not yet knowing what that answer is. And then we could look it up. Whereas if we believed there wasn’t an objectively correct and best answer, we might decide our current feelings about that question are the best thing we’d get, and we might not bother looking it up. And it doesn’t seem like we should take “we don’t yet know the percentage” as strong evidence that there is no correct percentage.

Is there a reason that analogy doesn’t hold in the case of moral realism vs anti-realism? Or am I misunderstanding the paragraph I quoted above?

(To be clear, I’m not trying to imply that the case for moral anti-realism is as weak as the case for allergy-percentage anti-realism. Moral anti-realism seems quite plausible to me. I’m just trying to understand the particular argument I quoted above.)

[Lukas_Gloor]

I found this argument confusing. Wouldn’t it be acceptable, and probably what we’d expect, for a metaethical view to not also provide answers on normative ethics or axiology?

I’m not saying metaethical views have to advance a particular normative-ethical theory. I’m just saying that if a realist metaethical view doesn’t do this, it becomes difficult to explain how proponents of this view could possibly know that there really is “a single correct theory.”

So for instance, looking at the arguments by Peter Railton, it’s not clear to me whether Railton even expects there to be a single correct moral theory. His arguments leave morality under-defined. “Moral realism” is commonly associated with the view that there’s a single correct moral theory. Railton has done little to establish this, so I think it’s questionable whether to call this view “moral realism.”

Of course, “moral realism” is just a label. It matters much more that we have clarity about what we’re discussing, instead of which label we pick. If someone wants to use the term “moral realism” for moral views that are explicitly under-defined (i.e., views according to which many moral questions don’t have an answer), that’s fine. In that sense, I would be a “realist.”

It seems that finding out there are “speaker-independent moral facts, rules or values” would be quite important, even if we don’t yet know what those facts are.

One would think so, but as I said, it depends on what we mean exactly by “speaker-independent moral facts.” On some interpretations, those facts may be forever unknowable. In that case, knowledge that those facts exist would be pointless in practice.

I write more about this in my 3rd post, so maybe the points will make more sense with the context there. But really the main point of this 1st post is that I make a proposal in favor of being cautious about the label “moral realism” because, in my view, some versions of it don’t seem to have action-guiding implications for how to go about effective altruism.

(I mean, if I had started out convinced of moral relativism, then sure, “moral realism” in Peter Railton’s sense would change my views in very action-guiding ways. But moral relativists are rare. I feel like one should draw the realism vs. anti-realism distinction in a place where it isn’t obvious that one side is completely wrong. If we draw the distinction in such a way that Peter Railton’s view qualifies as “moral realism,” then it would be rather trivial that anti-realism was wrong. This would seem uncharitable to all the anti-realist philosophers who have done important work on normative ethics.)