Part 4 brings us to the section in the article on moral realism on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy labeled “Epistemology”. Hopefully this is better than what we’ve seen so far but I’m not going to be holding my breath.

So let’s jump right into it, shall we?

Before I get going though, I want to point out that there’s been a rollicking debate going on over on my YouTube channel about moral realism and it’s just not going well for the realists. They are following the same line of emotional confirmation that we see in this article, simply insisting that they’re right and presenting arguments that make no sense, except from their own ideological side. I made a point there that’s just as applicable here. These arguments are identical to the ones presented by religious apologists, that only seem reasonable if you approach them from the standpoint of already believing they’re true. They don’t stand up to critical scrutiny any other way.

Anyhow, let’s get back to epistemology.

“Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that there are moral facts. Suppose even that the moral facts are properly thought of as at least compatible with science. One thing Moore’s Open Question Argument still seems to show is that no appeal to natural facts discovered by scientific method would establish that the moral facts are one way rather than another. That something is pleasant, or useful, or satisfies someone’s preference, is perfectly compatible with thinking that it is neither good nor right nor worth doing.” First off, no, we’re not going to presuppose that you’re right, just because you want to be right. For the sake of argument, we can let it slide for the moment, but we’re not going to just shrug our shoulders and play make believe. However, this is absolutely wrong. If we suppose that the moral facts are compatible with science, then they would have to be demonstrable and defensible objectively. You’d have to be able to prove that they existed in some coherent way. Therefore, you’d be able to show that they were either mind-independent as the moral realists want to think, or mind-dependent, as reality seems to show. Again, we get back to the problem that they are exercising their emotions in all of this. It doesn’t matter if you think something is pleasant or useful or satisfying, that doesn’t make a thing true. If moral facts exist beyond the human mind, then how we react to them doesn’t matter. They are what they are. If it was an objective moral fact that “murder is good”, then murder would be good, no matter how it made you feel.

This is very much like divine command theory if you think about it. Is a thing good because God says it is, or does God say it is because it’s good? In moral realism, is a moral precept “good” because that’s what it is, entirely separate from our interpretations, or is it only “good” because we’ve decided that it is? In the latter instance, moral realism goes entirely out the window because good and evil become nothing more than our subjective whims.

“The mere fact that moral facts might be compatible with natural facts does nothing to support the idea that we could learn about the moral facts.” Yet you haven’t shown how to differentiate between the two. It is a demonstrable natural fact that morality  comes from the human mind. All you have to do is look at the moral landscape worldwide. Different places with different people and different cultures have wildly different moral views. There are some commonalities, to be certain, where human needs and desires are held in common, but otherwise, it’s a madhouse. Welcome to reality.

“But from where, then, can we get the moral premises needed? Of course no answer is to be found in a claim that certain norms are in force or that a powerful being commanded something since, in both cases, nothing about what ought to be done follows from these claims without assuming some further moral claim (e.g. that one ought to obey the norms in force or that one owes allegiance to the powerful being).” Because there isn’t an ought. I pointed this out on the YouTube channel, but this is part of Hume’s Is/Ought problem. You can’t get from a demonstrable fact (what is) to what should be done with it (the ought) in any defensible way. All of it gets filtered through the human mind and it depends on which human mind gets hold of it for any particular answer to come forth. Nothing else, at least so far as I’ve seen, is at all defensible.

“If at least some fundamental moral principles were self-evident, or analytic truths, or at least reasonably thought to enjoy widespread consensus or to be such that eventually all would converge on those principles, there might be some plausible candidates. ” Ah yes, the religious “if”. We  see that all the time. They don’t see it as “if” though, they see it as “because” and I suspect the same is going on here. Just because something could exist, that doesn’t mean that it does exist. You have to back that up with evidence. Also, consensus means absolutely nothing. That’s just an appeal to popularity. I’ve made this point before that most people, long ago, thought the Earth was flat. Some idiots still think so today. That doesn’t mean the Earth was ever flat. Those people were just wrong. That’s why science isn’t what scientists say, it’s what the evidence shows. Over on YouTube, we’ve already seen the moral realists trying to appeal to popularity. That doesn’t mean a thing.

“These considerations highlight a crucial difficulty moral realists face even if one grants the existence of moral facts: they need some account of how we might justify our moral claims. Otherwise, whatever the moral facts are, we would have reasonable grounds for worrying that what we count as evidence for any particular claim is no evidence at all.” Doesn’t that sound like this was written by moral anti-realists to point out all of the problems of moral realism? This is at least the second time that I’ve shown that they say that they need to provide evidence, yet in the first instance, they entirely failed. Will they go ahead and finally get to something demonstrable this time? Let’s see.

“In light of this concern, it is worth noting that the challenge posed here for our moral claims actually plagues a huge range of other claims we take ourselves to be justified in making. For instance, just as no collection of nonmoral premises will alone entail a moral conclusion, no collection of nonpsychological premises will alone entail a psychological conclusion, and no collection of nonbiological premises will alone entail a biological conclusion.” Except all of that is entirely and demonstrably wrong. You can get lots of nonmoral arguments that can turn into moral conclusions. Randomly strip-mining the planet is bad because it results in a loss of available materials, that’s not much of a moral claim, it’s a pragmatic one. Yet it can lead to a moral conclusion that such activities are bad for the health, well-being and continuation of mankind. So this is just wrong and it isn’t evidence for anything.

“At one time, philosophers thought there was a quick and easy answer to these questions, an answer that immediately discredited moral claims. That answer was that in psychology and biology our justifications can and do ultimately ground out in empirical observations, whereas nothing of the kind is available for moral theory. If true, this would explain in a sharp way why psychology and biology might have a real claim on our opinions while morality and alchemy and various crackpot theories do not. The former can be tested against experience and pass the test, while the latter, while testable, can be seen to fail utterly.” Then, people started to get their feelings hurt and people stopped looking at reality dispassionately and started to live in their own emotionally comforting heads.

“Moral realists have three sorts of reply to the epistemic challenge they face. One is to argue that a proper appreciation of the ways in which all observation is theory laden leaves no real contrast between the observations that support psychology and biology and those that are appealed to supporting moral theories. As proponents of this view would have it, the process of justifying various scientific theories, which involves moving back and forth between particular specific claims and more general principles seeking a mutually supporting system, is matched step for step by when people develop and defend moral theories.” Didn’t I go over this before? This is just “properly understood” with the assumption that their side is the one that properly understands. Really? Prove it.

“Some moral realists, particularists, reject the general picture of systematic justification just described and yet argue that, when it comes to the role of observation, moral claims are nonetheless actually on a par with non-moral claims (Dancy 1993).” Well, they are, in that all of them come right out of the human mind and have no larger implications. Again, that tends to do away with moral realism, doesn’t it? If there is no difference between the two, then there is no difference between the two and unless these philosophers want to go full-religious retard, proclaiming that the human consciousness is brain-independent, it doesn’t get them anywhere.

“Another realist reply to the epistemic challenge is to argue that mathematics and logic, not science, are the right models of moral theory (Scanlon 2014). Neither mathematics nor logic, some maintain, rely on experience for their confirmation. They are, instead, supportable a priori by appeal to the nature of the concepts they involve.” Except that doesn’t get them anywhere either. Mathematics is a language that man invented, based on our observations in the natural world. It works because we made it work and because the universe seems to be reasonably consistent. That’s why we’ve had to keep inventing new forms of mathematics to explain things where our previous attempts have fallen short. Mathematics isn’t something that we just found, fully formed, floating around in the ether. We just made it up, just like morality.

“Still another reply, compatible with the first two but relying specifically on neither, shifts attention from science and from mathematics and logic, to epistemology itself. To think of any set of considerations that they justify some conclusion is to make a claim concerning the value (albeit the epistemic as opposed to moral value) of a conclusion.” Yet you can’t justify how you actually know these things, can you? This is no different than what the religious do. They claim to hold knowledge that isn’t demonstrable, for ways they cannot articulate, with imaginary evidence that they can never seem to produce, just because they’d rather be happy than factually correct.

This entire section has been a mess. It isn’t a survey of epistemology, it doesn’t define how they’ve come to the supposed knowledge that they claim to have, they are just following the religious model: stating they know things and their methodology, it’s just a secret! Reality doesn’t work that way though. You have to show your work and the moral realists are proving to be painfully bad at that. So this is four out of five sections down, not counting the introduction, and they still haven’t given us a single reason to think that they are correct. Again, why have they spent all of their time trying to discredit their critics instead of just providing their evidence?

It all seems really religious to me and that’s not something they should be proud of.