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Languages : en
Pages : 121
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According to the philosophical position known as moral realism, morality is a robustly objective domain of fact about which many of us have justified beliefs. This dissertation consists of three papers, each of which presents an independent line of argument against this position. In the first paper, I examine Sharon Street's "Darwinian Dilemma," which claims that realists can give no adequate account of the relation between the (supposed) objective moral truths and the evolutionary pressures that have influenced our moral judgments. I develop a general strategy for constructing a realist response that avoids both horns of Street's dilemma. Then, I argue that while such a response escapes the specific critique presented by Street, it fails to adequately rescue moral realism from the epistemological challenges raised by the (putative) fact of widespread evolutionary influence. In the second paper, I consider whether widespread, intractable moral disagreement raises an additional epistemological challenge for moral realists. First, I isolate exactly what sort of disagreement would pose the most serious threat to justified beliefs about objective moral truths, and develop an account of such fundamental disagreements. Next, I examine several popular anti-realist arguments from disagreement, and argue that they fail to undermine the realist position. Finally, I develop a novel argument for the claim that moral disagreement of a particular sort would undermine our ability to attain justified beliefs about objective moral facts. In the final paper, I once again explore the implications of widespread ethical disagreement, but this time through the lens of moral semantics. Realists hold that moral terms such as "good" and "right" refer to objective moral properties, and that different parties to serious moral disputes refer to the same properties as one another when they use these words. I argue that we have excellent reason to doubt that co-reference obtains in cases of fundamental disagreement. The semantic challenge, if successful, undermines the realist's contention that there is a distinct moral reality that we are all attempting to accurately describe when we engage in moral thought and discourse.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 121
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Book Description
According to the philosophical position known as moral realism, morality is a robustly objective domain of fact about which many of us have justified beliefs. This dissertation consists of three papers, each of which presents an independent line of argument against this position. In the first paper, I examine Sharon Street's "Darwinian Dilemma," which claims that realists can give no adequate account of the relation between the (supposed) objective moral truths and the evolutionary pressures that have influenced our moral judgments. I develop a general strategy for constructing a realist response that avoids both horns of Street's dilemma. Then, I argue that while such a response escapes the specific critique presented by Street, it fails to adequately rescue moral realism from the epistemological challenges raised by the (putative) fact of widespread evolutionary influence. In the second paper, I consider whether widespread, intractable moral disagreement raises an additional epistemological challenge for moral realists. First, I isolate exactly what sort of disagreement would pose the most serious threat to justified beliefs about objective moral truths, and develop an account of such fundamental disagreements. Next, I examine several popular anti-realist arguments from disagreement, and argue that they fail to undermine the realist position. Finally, I develop a novel argument for the claim that moral disagreement of a particular sort would undermine our ability to attain justified beliefs about objective moral facts. In the final paper, I once again explore the implications of widespread ethical disagreement, but this time through the lens of moral semantics. Realists hold that moral terms such as "good" and "right" refer to objective moral properties, and that different parties to serious moral disputes refer to the same properties as one another when they use these words. I argue that we have excellent reason to doubt that co-reference obtains in cases of fundamental disagreement. The semantic challenge, if successful, undermines the realist's contention that there is a distinct moral reality that we are all attempting to accurately describe when we engage in moral thought and discourse.
Author: Dalton Manuel Herrera
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 148
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Author: David Enoch
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019161856X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
In Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism David Enoch develops, argues for, and defends a strongly realist and objectivist view of ethics and normativity more broadly. This view—according to which there are perfectly objective, universal, moral and other normative truths that are not in any way reducible to other, natural truths—is familiar, but this book is the first in-detail development of the positive motivations for the view into reasonably precise arguments. And when the book turns defensive—defending Robust Realism against traditional objections—it mobilizes the original positive arguments for the view to help with fending off the objections. The main underlying motivation for Robust Realism developed in the book is that no other metaethical view can vindicate our taking morality seriously. The positive arguments developed here—the argument from the deliberative indispensability of normative truths, and the argument from the moral implications of metaethical objectivity (or its absence)—are thus arguments for Robust Realism that are sensitive to the underlying, pre-theoretical motivations for the view.
Author: Colin Marshall
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198809689
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Colin Marshall offers a ground-up defense of objective morality, drawing inspiration from a wide range of philosophers, including John Locke, Arthur Schopenhauer, Iris Murdoch, Nel Noddings, and David Lewis. Marshall's core claim is compassion is our capacity to perceive other creatures' pains, pleasures, and desires. Non-compassionate people are therefore perceptually lacking, regardless of how much factual knowledge they might have. Marshall argues that people who do have this form of compassion thereby fit a familiar paradigm of moral goodness. His argument involves the identification of an epistemic good which Marshall dubs "being in touch". To be in touch with some property of a thing requires experiencing it in a way that reveals that property - that is, experiencing it as it is in itself. Only compassion, Marshall argues, lets us be in touch with others' motivational mental properties. This conclusion about compassion has two important metaethical consequences. First, it generates an answer to the question "Why be moral?", which has been a central philosophical concern since Plato. Second, it provides the keystone for a novel form of moral realism. This form of moral realism has a distinctive set of virtues: it is anti-relativist, naturalist, and able to identify a necessary connection between moral representation and motivation. The view also implies that there is an epistemic asymmetry between virtuous and vicious agents, according to which only morally good people can fully face reality.
Author: Michael Bergmann
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019164854X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Challenges to Moral and Religious Belief contains fourteen original essays by philosophers, theologians, and social scientists on challenges to moral and religious belief from disagreement and evolution. Three main questions are addressed: Can one reasonably maintain one's moral and religious beliefs in the face of interpersonal disagreement with intellectual peers? Does disagreement about morality between a religious belief source, such as a sacred text, and a non-religious belief source, such as a society's moral intuitions, make it irrational to continue trusting one or both of those belief sources? Should evolutionary accounts of the origins of our moral beliefs and our religious beliefs undermine our confidence in their veracity? This volume places challenges to moral belief side-by-side with challenges to religious belief, sets evolution-based challenges alongside disagreement-based challenges, and includes philosophical perspectives together with theological and social science perspectives, with the aim of cultivating insights and lines of inquiry that are easily missed within a single discipline or when these topics are treated in isolation. The result is a collection of essays—representing both skeptical and non-skeptical positions about morality and religion—that move these discussions forward in new and illuminating directions.
Author: Folke Tersman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521853385
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 172
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Book Description
Folke Tersman explores the nature of moral thinking by examining moral disagreement.
Author: Geoffrey Sayre-McCord
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801495410
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
This collection of influential essays illustrates the range, depth, and importance of moral realism, the fundamental issues it raises, and the problems it faces.
Author: Sam Harris
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 143917122X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
Sam Harris dismantles the most common justification for religious faith--that a moral system cannot be based on science.
Author: Alexander B. Hyun
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 149
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Book Description
This dissertation is a defense of moral realism. By moral realism, I mean the conjunction of three claims: (i) Descriptive cognitivism, according to which moral judgments are descriptive beliefs that aim to represent the world accurately; (ii) The success thesis, according to which some moral judgments are true; and (iii) The objectivity thesis, according to which the true moral judgments are objectively true, in the sense that their truth does not constitutively depend on the attitudes of some actual or idealized agent. The purpose of my dissertation is to argue in favor of the success and objectivity theses. In Chapter 1, I argue in favor of externalism about normative reasons, thereby defending both the success and objectivity theses from influential objections. Roughly, externalism about normative reasons states that there are some external reasons for action, i.e., reasons to do some act that do not depend on the desires of the agent whose reasons they are. I argue for externalism by appealing to epistemic normativity. While others have appealed to epistemic normativity to defend externalism, such appeals are normally aimed at undermining arguments against externalism. In contrast, I develop a more ambitious use of epistemic normativity that aims to provide a direct argument for the truth of externalism. Specifically, I argue that there exist practical epistemic facts - facts to the effect that we epistemically ought to perform certain actions - and that these facts entail the existence of external reasons for action. I also bolster this argument for externalism by seeking to refute the formidable challenges to externalism that have recently been offered by Kate Manne and Julia Markovits. In Chapter 2, I defend a version of the increasingly influential 'companions in guilt' argument for moral facts, thereby establishing the success thesis. My favored version of this argument goes as follows: (1) If there are no moral facts, then there are no practical epistemic facts; (2) there are practical epistemic facts; (3) so, there are moral facts. The second premise, which is known as the 'Ontological Premise,' is defended at length in Chapter 1. I offer a presumptive case for the first premise, which is known as the 'Parity Premise,' by arguing that the four most formidable arguments against moral facts suggest equally-plausible arguments against practical epistemic facts. I then argue that my argument's atypical appeal to practical epistemic facts allows it to address recent objections to the companions in guilt argument that have been offered by Christopher Heathwood and Stephen Ingram. In the third and final chapter of my dissertation, I respond to the 'puzzle of pure moral deference,' a challenge to the objectivity thesis that has been most forcefully pressed by Sarah McGrath. According to this challenge, moral anti-realism can explain why moral deference seems intuitively problematic to many of us, whereas moral realism cannot explain why this is so; and we therefore have reason to accept anti-realism instead of realism. I develop three independent rebuttals to this challenge. First, I object to the four main anti-realist accounts of our discomfort with moral deference, thereby undermining the claim that moral anti-realism provides an explanation of this discomfort. Second, I develop a dilemma for the proponent of the puzzle of pure moral deference, arguing that either the anti-realist cannot provide the needed explanation, or else the realist can do so. Finally, I offer a novel, realist-friendly account of our discomfort with moral deference that builds on extant realist accounts. In brief, I argue that a lot of people's discomfort can plausibly be explained by appealing to the fact that moral deference is both unfair and bad for society.
Author: Richard Joyce
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262263254
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 285
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Book Description
Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking—staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms—if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"—might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject. Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality.
