Follow up to: Responses to My Questions for Moral Realists

Um… I said I’d publish this on Thursday, but I never said which time zone, so the correct answer is… um… Pacific Time. But here it is. Enjoy.

Awhile ago, I wrote four essays rejecting moral realism — “Will The Real Moral Realism Please Stand Up?”, “Finlay and Joyce on Moral Discourse”, “Why Moral Realism is False and How We Can Still Have Moral Discourse Without It”, and “You Can’t Unify Rationality and Morality”.

Ultimately, I came up with three different concepts that moral realism involves: There’s success theory, the part that I accept, which states that moral statements like “murder is wrong” do successfully refer to something real (in this case, a particular moral standard). There’s unitary theory, which I reject, that states there is only one “true” moral standard rather than hundreds of possible ones. And then there’s absolutism theory, which I reject, that states that the one true morality is rationally binding.

It was unitary theory and absolutism theory that I thought were part of moral realism, but didn’t understand. This lead me to pose the following questions for moral realists:

…Why is there only one particular morality? What is the one true theory of morality? What makes this theory the one true one rather than others? How do we know there is only one particular theory? What’s inadequate about all the other candidates?

…Where does morality come from? What is grounding morality? Are moral facts contingent; could morality have been different? Is it possible to make it different in the future?

…Why should we care about (your) morality? How does morality get it’s ability to be rationally binding? If the very definition of “rationality” includes being moral (as is sometimes the case), is that mere wordplay? Why should we accept this definition of rationality and not a different one?

Here are my reactions to the responses that have been provided.

Read More →

Follow up to: Questions for Moral Realists

Awhile ago, I asked some questions for moral realists. I’m grateful for the responses that various people provided and I look forward to commenting on them very soon. Right now, I just want to make sure I have them all in the same place. So here’s a list of where people have responded to my questions. Let me know if I missed anything!

Philosopher David Pearce responded for a bit on the Felicifia thread.

I received a fair amount of comments on The LessWrong thread.

Rob Moore wrote “The Origin of Ethics”.

Brandon of Siris wrote “On Some Questions About Moral Realism”.

With apologies for the delays, I’ll be posting a single, cohesive response on Thursday. Thanks to all those who responded and let me know if I missed anything!

Follow up to: The Euthyphro Dilemma and Why Moral Realism is False and How We Can Still Have Moral Discourse Without It

After writing “The Euthyphro Dilemma” and “Why The Moral Argument Fails”, I was interested in a potential argument against the existence of God (an argument that claims to demonstrate God’s nonexistence):

P1: If God exists, moral realism is true (there is only one morality, it is true, and it is irrational to not follow it).
P2: Moral realism is false.
C3: Therefore, God does not exist.

I’ve defended P2 throughout my series on normativity, with the most recent summary in “Why Moral Realism is False and How We Can Still Have Moral Discourse Without It”.

Of course, for P2, it’s important to separate arguments against moral realism in the actual world from moral realism as a concept. After all, perhaps moral realism is false, but could have been true had something else been the case, say… a God existed. However, I in “We Ought Not Have an Ought Simpliciter” and explicitly in “The Euthyphro Dilemma” have been arguing against moral realism as a concept and with God, which makes P2 relevant.

P1 I’m less sure of… I’m not even sure I buy it myself and “The Euthyphro Dilemma” seems to argue against P1, not for P1. But I think P1 is popular among theists (at least Abrahamic ones), which thus makes the actual nature of morality pretty jarring. As I said, “the real nature of morality doesn’t comport well with what we would expect on Christianity or many other religions, further straining the case for theism.”

But if you’re inclined to accept P1 and then buy my argument for P2, C3 follows logically. Any thoughts? Ways to make this argument stronger or weaker? Defeat it all together?

Follow up to: Why The Moral Argument Fails

In “Why The Moral Argument Fails”, I outlined the Moral Argument for God’s existence, as follows…

P1: If God does not exist, objective moral duties do not exist.
P2: Objective moral duties do exist.
C3: Therefore, God exists.

…and demonstrated it fails because P2 was false. Objective moral duties do not exist in the sense of having a single, absolute set of moral commands. Now, I want to look at P1. As I said earlier, showing that P1 is false is merely lapping the theist who already lost the moral argument at the failure of P2, but should be pretty instructive in considering theistic morality and how normativity works out in general.

Read More →

I’ve been running a three-part Weekly Link Roundup series looking at the cosmological argument and the design argument, with a forthcoming one looking at the fine-tuning argument. However, there’s another argument for the existence of God that gets brought up a lot — the moral argument.

The moral argument tends to flow like this:

P1: If God does not exist, objective moral duties do not exist.
P2: Objective moral duties do exist.
C3: Therefore, God exists.

Here, I think I have original (and moderately concise) commentary to make, so I thought it would be worth writing my own essay about it.

Read More →