Today, we get on to part 3 of the entry on moral realism, found on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy site and I very much hope that they can do better this time out than they have in the past.
The problem, for those who have been reading along, is that the entire “argument” for moral realism has been pointing out all of its detractors and then whining about it because it doesn’t make advocates happy.
Screw your happiness! Produce evidence that you’re right! So here we go again. I don’t know that it can get any worse.
“According to some, that ‘something important’ is that moral claims are essentially bound up with motivation in a way that nonmoral claims are not (Ayer 1936, Stevenson 1937, Gibbard 1990, Blackburn 1993). Exactly what the connection to motivation is supposed to be is itself controversial, but one common proposal (motivation internalism) is that a person counts as sincerely making a moral claim only if she is motivated appropriately.” Sorry, you haven’t even defined what “moral claims” are and how you differentiate them from non-moral claims. It really comes off like “this kind of thing makes me feel a certain way.” So what? Your feelings don’t matter. If your entire philosophy is bound up in your emotional state, you’re being an idiot. Define your terms, produce evidence that your claims are reasonable and rational and stop whining! I’m starting to think it’s never going to improve.
“To think of something that it is good, for instance, goes with being, other things equal, in favor of it in ways that would provide some motivation (not necessarily decisive) to promote, produce, preserve or in other ways support it. If someone utterly lacks such motivations and yet claims nonetheless that she thinks the thing in question is good, there is reason, people note, to suspect either that she is being disingenuous or that she does not understand what she is saying. This marks a real contrast with nonmoral claims since the fact that a person makes some such claim sincerely seems never to entail anything in particular about her motivations. Whether she is attracted by, repelled by, or simply indifferent to some color is irrelevant to whether her claim that things have that color are sincere and well understood by her.” This whole thing is just a mess. I’m sure Hitler thought the holocaust was “good”, based on his own way of looking at the world. In fact, he did actively promote, produce, preserve and support the holocaust. He spoke out many times in favor of the “final solution”. Does that make it good? Most people would say no. I’ll tell you what it does make it. Totally subjective. We’re right back to moral anti-realism being the only thing that you can actually defend. If you want to claim that there is a moral reality that exists entirely beyond the human mind, you have to be able to back it up and these people aren’t even making a good faith effort. This whole thing is just emotional bunk, being spewed for the emotional comfort of the philosophers involved. Anyone who thinks this is a good thing is an idiot.
It goes back to making excuses for why moral anti-realists don’t take any of this seriously and I’ll just skip over that. I’m looking for positive evidence in favor of moral realism, not a lot of bald rationalizations. Yet that’s really all that they can seemingly do. I’m going through paragraph after paragraph, seeing nothing but “we don’t like it!” as their only explanation for why people reject their empty claims. This brings us right around to religion again because this is exactly what they do. They let their emotions run away with them, to the point that they pretend everyone is out to get them because fewer and fewer people are willing to fall for their ridiculous claims these days. It’s a purely emotional reaction to honest disagreement because it’s really starting to look as if moral realists don’t have any good answers either. They just really wish it was true. That’s not how critical thinking works!
“None of this is to defend, as realists must, the idea that some of the claims are actually true. But it does suggest that moral realists can acknowledge a necessary connection between moral claims and action without abandoning the cognitivism that is central to their position.” Yet that’s not what they really have to defend. They need to defend a mind-independent morality that demonstrably exists beyond the brains of humanity. I can’t even understand how they would propose to do that. What mechanisms could they even suggest that would show that there is this mind-independent moral reality? This is nothing but claims accepted on fee-fees and faith. It’s exactly what the religious do. Aren’t you people supposed to be better than the religiously deluded? Please, give it a try!
“Some error theorists do argue that combining cognitivism with motivational internalism results in an untenable position (Mackie 1977). According to them, the moral facts that would make motivating beliefs true would themselves have to be, in some way, intrinsically motivating states of the world. And, they add, there is no reason to think there are such states. Yet if the motivational internalism one embraces for moral claims has a parallel for pain claims, then this argument must be wrong (assuming it is true of some experiences that they are painful). Either motivational internalism does not require intrinsically motivating states of the world in order for the relevant claims to be true or else we have independent reason (provided by our awareness of pain) to think there are such states. While there may well be reason to think there are no moral facts, this argument does not provide it.” I actually thought they might get to some evidence, since the last section admitted that moral realists actually have to defend their views, but no, sadly not. It’s right back to claiming that the moral anti-realists are wrong without a) demonstrating that they actually are, there isn’t an argument to be presented here at all, just empty statements that are little more than “nuh-uh!” and b) a complete failure to justify their position in the first place because their position is based entirely on their emotions.
This is a really good reason why a lot of people are rejecting philosophy as a pointless waste of time. Far too many people are holding positions, not for rational, evidence-based reasons, but because it makes them happy. We have to go back to the very purpose of philosophy, to teach us how to think critically and rationally and recognize fallacies and failures in the intellectual process. So far, there has been nothing whatsoever in this article that has been remotely rational or intelligent. It’s been little children screaming “we’re right!” without ever making a good-faith effort to prove it.
Maybe this is just a really terrible argument, an exception for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy site. Maybe there are philosophers who can present evidence to show that moral realism is even a coherent idea beyond “it makes me feel good”. If anyone would like to suggest something of reasonable length that comes anywhere close to making a positive argument for moral realism, I’d love to see it, because I am absolutely not impressed with this crap and you shouldn’t be either.
Why are you confused by the term “moral claims”? It just means a moral proposition. Anti-Realists and Realists agree on what moral claims look like. The anti-realist doesn’t think “murder is morally wrong” isn’t a moral phrase. They just think it doesn’t “mean” the same thing as the realist.
Then you seem to think an analysis of emotion and motivation is in one way just “appealing to emotion.” This is nonsense. Whether moral claims are intrinsically motivating is an interesting part of meta-ethics, and it has nothing to do with saying “moral realism is true because I feel it.”
You really need to try harder to understand these views. It is like you’re trying to shove a square criticism into a circular position.
And the Hitler example fails to capture what is actually being talked about here. The psychology of moral realism is about explaining what people think about moral realism. It isn’t trying to dissuade moral anti-realists. Again, you’re just misunderstanding the core argument.
Of course it’s a moral claim. That doesn’t make it actually so. It seems to be why moral realists pretend “some moral claims are true” without actually demonstrating that’s factually correct. How have you come to the conclusion that any moral claims are factually correct if you can’t demonstrate any that are? Are we supposed to believe that the odds favor moral claims being correct eventually, if you toss enough of them out there? What actual methodology can be applied to demonstrate correctness and not just emotional appeal? Remember, moral realism states that morals are mind-independent. That means it doesn’t matter how you react to a moral claim or whether or not you agree with it, to be real, it has to be correct, entirely independent of any mind.
Go ahead and show that’s true for us. Moral realism doesn’t have anything to do with what people think. That’s kind of the point of the argument.
You wrote: “Sorry, you haven’t even defined what “moral claims””
I responded “how is this confusing to you” and you wrote “well prove moral claims are true.” Can you see how this would make it seem as though you cannot follow the train of thought that you started?
Again, the memory of a goldfish! I’ve talked about moral facts, an analysis of evolutionary traits and psychology, and natural facts. I’ve given you a methodology, and a reading to go with it!
The problem is, moral realists state “some moral claims are true.” Great, demonstrate which ones and how they are objectively true. Even a stopped watch is right twice a day. Show how moral realism provides a demonstrable path to objective truth. Every single moral realist I’ve brought this up with has made excuses and just vanished. Funny how that works.