I don’t know why we have to keep having these conversations but apparently we do. A post popped up over on Reddit in which the OP wanted to know the views of atheist moral realists and I pointed out that they’d have a really hard time coming up with any of those because the overwhelming majority were moral anti-realists.
That’s when all of the doo-doo hit the fan.
Now maybe this is a case of being ignorant of the relevant terminology. Moral realism is the proposition that ethical statements express propositions that refer to objective features of the world. In other words, people who believe in objective morality, like most theists do. Atheists, almost without exception since I can’t think of a single example that disagrees, they are moral anti-realists. They think morals are subjective. They are things that humans made up.
Unfortunately, this is where people started to throw their hats into the ring, showing that they don’t actually understand the terminology that they’re attempting to use. They were declaring morality to be “human well-being” and that was absolutely universal! Yeah, except it’s not. Because even Matt Dillahunty, and I hate to keep using him as an example, but he acknowledges that choosing well-being as your goal is entirely subjective, but then, according to him, whatever you do thereafter, you can measure against that goal and objectively determine what is moral and what is not.
Except you can’t. That’s really a topic for a different post and I’ve already talked about it plenty. You are going to get plenty of disagreement over what actions cause harm and what actions cause health and as soon as you’ve got a debate going on, objectivity goes right out the window.
Real objective things, like the speed of light or the acceleration of gravity in a vacuum, those things can be demonstrated to be so, entirely beyond the opinions of the humans engaged in evaluating them. You either agree with the facts or you are wrong. There’s no real room for subjectivity.
Yet when it comes to morality, tons of people have tons of very different takes and they can’t all be right, can they? I suppose they could all be wrong, but the only real reality is that the whole process is entirely subjective.
Objectivity, by definition, is “not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts”. It’s either true or it’s not. Your opinions don’t mean a damn thing.
I think that’s the point at which these people simply don’t understand the conversation that they’re trying to have. Immediately, all of them were offering their opinions of what was moral and what was not, proving conclusively at that point that their position was entirely subjective but they couldn’t get that through their head. It just went around and around in a circle, them making claims, me providing definitions that proved their claims untenable, until I just gave up. I’d already proven my point. It was a complete waste of time to go on because we weren’t getting anywhere.
That’s really how a lot of discussions go though, I’ve noticed. It’s pure emotion, zero intellect and nobody on the other side wants to listen to reason. One of them asked me to describe what I thought was “good” or “bad”. Well if I have to describe my opinions, it’s not objective, is it? They’re just proving my point. It gets to the point where it’s people tugging on a rope that’s tied around a mountain. There’s no point to the activity because they’re incapable of thinking about it critically.
This is becoming more and more common these days, as people double down on their emotional wishful thinking and refuse to listen to reason. It’s not just the religious doing it, although they certainly do, it’s tons of people. Why? Because in the modern world, at least this is my take on it, there’s been too much emphasis given to raw individuality. Everyone wants to feel special, what they think must be so because they managed to think it. Coming to rational conclusions based on the evidence, that’s purely secondary against their emotional reactions and their overactive egos. Whether anything is true, it doesn’t matter so long as they are happy where they end up.
That’s just not how reality functions. A position is either intellectually defensible or it is not. Sitting there, demanding that you’re right because you really want to be right, that doesn’t actually make you right. It’s the basic argument that we have with the religious every single day. I really don’t want to start having that argument with the non-religious too. I’d hoped that they were better than that.
Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be the case, at least for the rank and file.
”
mark smith
4 hours ago
I feel sorry for you Samuel. But I understand why people decide to lean on their own understanding. I’m a nobody, who knows nothing, who cannot see everything, who will never be able to experience everything in this world and at the same time everyone is like me. I’ll put my faith in Jesus instead of the world. Instead of mankind’s understanding .”
Reply:
” Samuel Schick
Samuel Schick
4 hours ago
@mark smith , No need to feel sorry for me. I am free now from the threats of hell and the promise of heaven.
I am free to use my critical thinking skills which religions frown upon their followers doing.
I’m free from having to perform mental gymnastics in order to defend religion.
I am free from the double standards and hypocrisy that religion demands of it’s followers. An example being using criteria to judge other religions, holy texts and deities false while making excuses why that very same criteria does not apply to my religion.
I’m free from having to say the Bible is the truth while ignoring all the times the Bible contradicts itself. One example being the different versions of the discovery of the empty tomb. Not all versions can be true.
I’m free from churches guilt tripping me into giving them money that I needed to support my family.
I’m free from religions use of greed in order to get money from it’s followers. ” Give to the Lord and he will repay you a hundred fold”, ” Just pray and ask God and he will give it to you.” Bible does say ” Ask and ye shall receive.”
I’m free from blaming Satan for all the bad the happens and God getting a free pass even though as the Bible says NOTHING happens unless God allows it to happen. “
But the religious don’t want to be free. Seriously, I’ve heard them ask if they aren’t God’s slave, whose slave will they be?
These people are true idiots.
Majority of atheist philosophers are moral realist.and almost all philosophers who specialize in the field of meta-ethics are moral realist. This post is a classical example of dunning Kruger
I have never once, in my life, met a single moral realist that was an atheist. Not once, not ever. Moral realists require objective morality and there’s absolutely no way to come to a rational position on that.
The majority of philosophers are moral realists. The majority of philosophers are atheists. I believe that most, based on survey data and experience, most philosophers are both moral realists and atheist.
Even if they weren’t, the majority of arguments for moral realism do not require God. Cuneo’s book “The Normative Web” is a recent example of a book, written by a theist defending moral realism, that deliberately avoids theism.
There are many arguments that come from atheists defending moral realism. This happens for both moral naturalism and moral non-naturalism. Cornell Realism is a popular moral realism. Some proponents include Boyd, Brink, Sturgeon, and Railton. These are all atheists and naturalists.
Russ Shafer-Landau wrote “Moral Realism: A Defence”. This is a massive influential book. He defends a moral non-naturalism. He is also an atheist.
When we track through the history of modern meta-ethics, we find that many, many people are atheists and moral realists. They’ve written papers and books defending their positions. To say you haven’t met any shows an ignorance on your part and is not evidence against their existence.
I think this extends to folk psychology as well: we see many atheists who seem to think moral realism is true. Moral language often implies an uncritical realism, and moral realism seems radically intuitive to a lot of people. In some modern writing, it has been argued that moral anti-realism actually has the burden of proof. Again, it seems impossible that you haven’t met a moral realist who is an atheist before given just how common this position is!
You say there is no way to get to this position. But you don’t actually address any of the many popular arguments. You don’t seem to know about them.
You close the post by talking about “emotional wishful thinking” – how can you say this when all that seems to propping up your argument is ignorance coupled with a hope that you’re right?
There are a lot of people who believe things for entirely emotional reasons. That doesn’t mean that it’s demonstrably true. They like the idea because it provides emotional comfort. They like it because it provides stability. What they can’t do is step back from the emotion and provide any evidence to back up their claims.
So I’ll use an example that I’ve used a lot, simply because it’s so clear. Matt Dillahunty is on record as proclaiming, in effect, that slavery is now, has always been and will always be wrong. He can’t describe how he objectively knows this to be true, he just feels it. He has a strong emotional attachment to the idea. When he talks with theists about slavery in the Bible, he will state that the Bible is wrong because, “obviously” slavery is immoral.
Well, says who? Because we can’t prove anything objectively about morality, period. Morality is nothing more than the ideas that we come up with in our heads. It is enforced by nothing more than societal consensus and as we all know, societal consensus can, and does, demonstrably change. There was a point in time where most people thought being gay was bad. Today, that’s largely not true, at least for most people. Morality changed. There is no objective basis for any universal, unchanging, “real” morality, period. It’s just whatever people collectively think now and what they collectively think now, that might not be what they think tomorrow. I just gave one demonstrable example where that’s happened in recent history but there are many, many more.
That’s where moral realism is just an emotional construct. People want it to be true without being able to demonstrate that it actually is. To go back to the previous example, Matt really wants to think that slavery is wrong, at all times and in all places, forever and ever. I’m sure he can build all kinds of rationalizations and constructs for why he thinks that’s true, yet rationalizations and constructs are not the same thing as reality. Of course, I’m not saying that I think slavery is a good thing, I was raised in the same sort of social structure as Matt was, as most people are in western cultures today and it’s had the same kind of impact on my moral thinking as it has on most other people’s. That doesn’t mean that I get to project my moral constructs onto everyone else and declare myself arbitrarily right and everyone who disagrees arbitrarily wrong, just because it makes me feel better to think so.
Tomorrow, the world might change. I can’t imagine the kind of circumstances that might be required for such a change to happen, but it demonstrably has in the past, hence it absolutely can again. So next week or next year or in a thousand years, if humans decide, for some reason incomprehensible to the modern me, that slavery is just fine, then what? The people in that distant future are probably going to do the same thing that a lot of people do today. “Those people back in the 21st century, can you believe how immoral they were, not having slaves?” I’m sure that’s the same kind of thing that slave-owners in the past did when trying to justify their own views.
Ultimately, it all comes down to feelings and trying to validate those feelings as something greater than what’s inside your head. I’m not saying that’s a good or a bad thing, I’m just pointing out that’s what’s really going on. Just because you really want your beliefs to be larger than yourself, that doesn’t mean that they are. I can come up with a thousand reasons why I think slavery is a bad thing, why I think rape is a bad thing, why I think racism is a bad thing, but people who lived in a time and in a context where those things were the norm, I’m sure they could come up with a thousand reasons why they were convinced they were perfectly fine.
The whole point of all of this is to recognize the emotional underpinning of moral thinking. It’s not going to cause any of it to go away but it’s going to stop people from declaring “I’m absolutely right about everything that I believe because I really, really want to be right!” It’s only from that perspective that we can honestly have a conversation about the real world ramifications of our actions, absent the emotional wishful thinking that so many people insist on pretending gives them the right to declare immediate victory without doing any of the work.
Hope that helps.
A lot of you response is arguing against a strawman.
I talked about philosophers and popular opinion. You then gave an account of what Matt Dillahunty believes. I don’t think Mr Dillahunty is a philosopher, nor do I think his views are typical. I do not trust him to give a philosophically rigourous account. This is part of why I never talked about him, and talked only about published philosophers.
And this is important: you say that he cannot justify his claims. I don’t know if that is true, but what I do know is that I gave you many examples of people who have written books justifying their views. Can you give a criticism of any of them?
I can ask this really specifically: where does Boyd make a mistake in his account of Cornell Realism? Specifically, where he does mistake his argument as an emotional appeal? What about Cuneo? What about RSL?
A really good structure for any argument is to give the account you’re arguing against yourself. Explain their view, and try to do it really accurately. Then you point to the thing you don’t think works, and you explain why it doesn’t work. You get some of this right when you talk about Matt, but now try doing it with someone who knows their topic.
You also don’t seem to know what moral realists claim. You talk about “objective and unchanging” morality. This isn’t what all moral realists think. They think that moral propositions can be true, and that some are actually true. Plenty of truthes are contextual. If you want to see more on this you can check out the difference between Moral Particularism and Moral Generalism.
So again, you’ve offered a weak line of argumentation that seems to be based off common misunderstandings. My recommendation is for you to read some actual philosophy on the topic.
If you want to make a video out of it, I would be happy to come and talk about secular moral realism. I would be especially enthusiastic if it were framed as a debate!
It’s not a strawman because I pointed out someone that actually held said position. No, he’s not a philosopher. I never said that he was. He was simply an example of someone who uses that view, nothing more. Yet the problem that I see so often with people pointing to philosophers is, how is that any different than someone saying “my pastor said X”? At least with science, the scientists have something to point to in order to back up their claims. What do philosophers have? Why should I believe them? What kind of credible evidence can they point to beyond noodling their navels, especially when it comes to the fundamental nature of reality? How is that any different than what religion does?
And you say that philosophers have written books “justifying” their positions. Justifying in what way? It all comes down to people saying things, not demonstrating things objectively. Philosophy is the wrong tool for the job. You can get a thousand philosophers in a room and they can’t tell you a damn thing about the characteristics of a new species of wombat philsophically. Likewise, they can’t tell you anything about the fundamental state of reality by noodling their navels. You might be impressed by the words that they write but the words that they write aren’t backed up by anything. Scientists aren’t special because they have degrees, they matter only if they act in accordance to objective reality. How do philosophers do that, when working in these kinds of subjects where accountability to the real world is required?
It’s the same problem that we see in religion. They try to (mis)use philosophy because they can’t get science to go along with their beliefs. The only discipline that could conceivably show that a god is real is science, yet science doesn’t find that to be true so they grasp at straws to get to their emotionally-comforting conclusion regardless of whether or not it’s applicable.
And forgive me, I’m in the middle of working on a piece about simulation theory which has a lot of the same problems, so if there’s some crossover here, I apologize.
Now, if you want to have an extended discussion on moral realism, that’s fine, but again, it’s just a bunch of people saying a thing that cannot be independently validated in any way. As with religion, I don’t care what anyone believes, I care what they can demonstrate to be so. The problem that I’ve seen with moral realists is that they have nothing to demonstrably base their views on. If it’s your opinion, fine. You’re welcome to your own opinions. You’re just not welcome to your own facts. I have yet to see anyone point to anything demonstrable upon which they could hang their hat. If you’d like to be the first to do so, by all means feel free. I’m just not interested in your unjustified opinions. Let’s see what you’ve got.
I asked you really specific questions. I asked:
Where does Boyd make a mistake in his account of Cornell Realism? Specifically, where he does mistake his argument as an emotional appeal? What about Cuneo? What about RSL?
It is possible, and likely, that you haven’t read any of these. That isn’t an issue by itself: meta-ethics is niche and dense. But you have made sweeping claims about all attempts in meta-ethics, so you’d hope that you’d be able to answer these questions. They’re directly related to your central thesis!
I haven’t said anything like “X said Y.” I’ve said “X defends account Y in book Z. Why do you think Y is an appeal to emotion?”
The difference here is important.
We see a similar sin at the close. You’ve said “it cannot be validated” but that is simply not true. One account I brought up was Hursthouse’s. Hursthouse uses empirical data and a natural understanding of the world to back up her account. I specifically asked why this would be an appeal to emotion, and now I have another question: what about her account cannot be validated?
To close: I haven’t given a positive position. I’ve asked you to justify your opinions. I’ve asked for your specific position on famous views in meta-ethics, and I’ve asked you to defend your position.
I am not trying to prove moral realism. I am trying to get you to offer a sincere account that addresses common positions.
Again, I’d love to do this in a longer format. Is there a place where you can defend anti-realism, and I can offer a criticism? These comments are limiting and the structure is difficult. If you prefer video/voice, I’m happy to do that. I have experience teaching this topic, as well as giving presentations on meta-ethics.
And I said, I’m not debating books, I’m debating people. If you think those are good arguments, then make your case and we can have a conversation. Because here’s something that I see all the time from the religious, and note that I’m not accusing you of doing this, but a lot of them will try to send the atheist off to do busy work, but they don’t actually understand the arguments that they’re trying to present by proxy. So, if you want to debate, demonstrate that you have an understanding of the point you’re trying to make.
In the other comment, I gave you a link to a famous recent argument in favour of moral realism.
Here, all I’m asking you to do is prove the general claim you made by talking about specifics. It’s true that I’ve talked about specific claims and specific people but that’s what researching a topic is, I’m afraid!
I have a Masters in Philosophy, and I’m currently at the tail end of a PhD. I’ve taught meta-ethics before, as I’ve said in the other comment. I’ve also done some work on meta-ethics independent of the teaching. I can understand that you think I might be bluffing but I’m not trying to send you off to do busy work. I’m asking you to do focused research in order to support your claim.
Hursthouse’s “On Virtue” is a good start if you’re interested in ’empirical’ work around meta-ethics. It’s a famous book, and in the last section of the book she talks specifically about moral naturalism (the chapter is called NATURALISM).
And if you don’t think I know what I’m talking about, what harm is there in debating me? Surely, you’ll just dominate and your position will look all the stronger.
I’m not saying you don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m saying that I’m not going to debate a book. If you want to make a point, by all means, do so. If you want to say “go read this book” then there’s not really a discussion going on, is there?
But I linked an argument in standard form.
What do you think the salient difference between linking an argument and posting it in a message box that doesn’t allow for much formatting is?
If you just want it in my own words, I can link you to work I’ve done before?
I also think it is important to note that these have character limits. Asking someone to defend their position that all of X is Y by telling them that this instance of X doesn’t look like Y and they should read X doesn’t seem problematic. It’s only 20 pages a chapter, and Hursthouse is extremely readable.
It’s about justification and research. These, I’m sure we agree, are virtues!
Again, if you wanted to debate this in longer form content I’d be happy to.
The issue, and I’m not saying that you’re doing it but I run into this insanely often, is that a lot of people are really just trying to argue by proxy. “Let’s you and them fight” while they just sit there and watch. I’m not interested in that. Anyone who wants to make their own points, that’s fine. I’ve just had enough of people, mostly religious people, who don’t actually understand the content that they’re trying to present and every single time you debunk it, they just come up with another link for you to chase after since they don’t really have anything of substance to say on their own.
I actually went back and looked and I couldn’t find anywhere that you linked directly to an argument, sorry. Maybe I’m just blind, but when it comes to Boyd, which is the question that you keep asking, I could only find: “Cornell Realism is a popular moral realism. Some proponents include Boyd, Brink, Sturgeon, and Railton.”
Of course, the problem with this is that it’s all just an assertion. It’s the argument that there are mind-independent moral facts, but how can this be demonstrated? There are plenty of people who entirely disagree, including constructivist and expressionist schools. We could spend plenty of time throwing names back and forth at each other but that doesn’t actually get the discussion anywhere.
You said: “But I linked an argument in standard form.” I couldn’t find that. Could you either provide that link again or simply post the syllogism here? I’d appreciate it.
First off, the link: it’s on the other thread. It’s a link to a ‘review’ of Cuneo. It gives the standard form argument, as well as some abbreviated support. You can find it in the comment section for “Well Being Isn’t Enough.”
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-normative-web-an-argument-for-moral-realism/
You have to remember that not all moral realists believe in mind independence, but even if someone does it you seem to think that mind independence is spooky or queer. I don’t think this is the case: the vast majority of facts are mind independent, right?
Disagreement doesn’t seem sufficient to think any one position is false. The existence of God is a mind independent fact. We still feel qualified to assess that! The mere existence of theists or atheists doesn’t give us good reason to believe or disbelieve in God.
I understand that some arguments do just feel like theists reading “Read Aquinas and You’ll Be a Theist”. That isn’t what I’m doing – I’m trying to link to specific arguments that don’t seem to fall foul to the criticisms you’re forwarding. I’m asking for your takes on these arguments!
You really can’t declare that all people of any group believe the same things. It’s why labels are such an ephemeral thing and I’ve done discussions on that before. It’s why you can’t go by what label someone sticks on their forehead, you have to talk to the individual and work out what they actually think, not what they’ve decided is “close enough for government work”.
But yes, I would say that virtually all facts are mind-independent. If man had never evolved on this rock, the speed of light would still be the same, there just wouldn’t be anyone here to observe it. The force of gravity would be the same, it was there before we ever showed up and it’ll be the same long after we’re gone. Observation is not required for a fact to exist, it only serves to convince the observer that the fact is true. Life was made of cells long before man had any clue what a cell was. DNA was there long before the first scientist came up with the idea. We really aren’t important in the process. We are just verifying the facts for ourselves. We have nothing to do with the facts existing at all.
It’s why I keep saying that we’re not that hot. Humans might be really impressed with ourselves but that doesn’t really mean much. Just because we’re really impressed with our brains, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s just a 3-pound sack of meat on top of your shoulders. We’re going to go extinct one day, every species does, and nobody is going to miss us. We just don’t matter to anyone but ourselves.
Now you are right that, if a god existed, it would be mind-independent. However, at the moment at least, we have no reason at all to think that it isn’t just a product of human wishful thinking. There is no mind-independent evidence that anyone can point to for any specific deity in the real world that we all seem to share. It’s why I constantly ask the religious how they know these things? Why isn’t it just a product of their overactive imagination and wishful emotional state? Unfortunately, it seems to be an answer that they simply don’t have, yet it is an answer that they need to come up with if they hope to convince anyone who isn’t open to acting on blind faith and hopes and dreams. It’s why they don’t want to talk to the non-religious. They’ll talk about us. They’ll put words in our mouths. They won’t have a rational back-and-forth conversation because they will get quickly backed into a corner and have no intelligently defensible way to get out. It’s why all of the videos are on religiously-oriented YouTube channels. It’s why all of the articles are on religiously-oriented websites. They are just talking to the people who are already predisposed to believe these unjustified ideas uncritically because nobody who is looking at it skeptically is going to take any of it seriously.
Even going through your linked review though, it has problems from the very beginning. “We commonly talk, Cuneo explains, about these two sorts of normative facts: moral normative facts, facts to the effect that something has some such property as being wrong or right or unjust; and epistemic normative facts, facts to the effect that something has some such property as being justified or irrational or insightful or a case of knowledge.” Yet moral normative facts are not demonstrable. It doesn’t matter what people claim. It matters what they can prove. That’s the point. I’m not denying that people believe these things, I’m saying that I have yet to see anyone demonstrate them beyond the product of a human mind. That’s the whole point, I’m not interested in the ideas that people craft in their own heads. I care if they can show that said ideas are accurately representative of objective reality beyond their brain.
Of course, for his syllogism, I reject it out of hand. “If moral facts do not exist, then epistemic facts do not exist.” Says who? I see no reason at all to think that is true, period and premises are only worthwhile if all parties to the discussion agree. Epistemic facts exist period. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, it still makes a sound because it still generates air disturbances that create sound waves. Whether anyone is there to hear those waves doesn’t stop those waves from existing. It’s like the religious claiming “only God could create the universe!” Well says who? That has not been demonstrated to be true. It’s an attempt to define your way to victory. I don’t care about your definitions, I care about your evidence and the religious, as we all know, have none.
Then he says that anti-realists have found that premise objectionable. Yes, for good reason! Then he tries to rationalize it all away, but none of it actually addresses the problem! This is why philosophy doesn’t actually get you anywhere. He’s trying to work through the problem but he can’t get out of his own head. He can’t set aside his own opinions and attachments and just deal with the facts at hand. Then when he goes on to discuss some of the objections, assuming this is actually representative of what Cuneo said, as it’s just a review, he says “This, Cuneo urges, is an unhappy view.” Who cares? This isn’t about happiness, this is about truth! Your feelings don’t matter! Gods don’t exist because believers really wish that they did and morality doesn’t exist objectively because Cuneo finds the alternative depressing. It’s either real or it’s not, entirely beyond the boundary of the human mind thinking about it.
If there’s something specific that you want me to address beyond that, by all means point it out, but so far, this is not impressive. It might impress people who are used to noodling their navels but it doesn’t get you anywhere once you recognize what Cuneo seems to be doing, and like I said, I can only go by the review because I’m not reading Cuneo’s own words, but based on this… I pass. You don’t get to define your world the way that you like your world. You have to accept reality as it seems, most rationally, to be, no matter how it makes you feel. Your feelings don’t matter. Neither do Cuneo’s.
You have to be super careful with your criticisms. There are mistakes here, and I think they’re based on emotion. Your feelings don’t matter. You’ve got to do the work!
The example of a tree falling in the woods isn’t an example of an epistemic facts. Epistemic facts are facts about rationality, and what we ought to believe, and whether we should treat certain claims seriously, and so on. They’re facts about how we come to know true things, the systems we use to get to truth and about the normative aspect of those systems.
Here are some examples of epistemic facts: “X knows Y”, “X shouldn’t believe Z”, and “that is a good reason to believe Y.”
The idea that Cuneo is putting forward is that we justify epistemic facts in the same way we can justify moral facts. You’ve talked about demonstrability here. I’m not sure what you think demonstrates epistemic facts, but I’m curious how you think it excludes moral facts? You seem like someone who really values rationality, for example. Rationality probably has all these good making features: we come to know true things, we have pragmatic considerations since being rational likely leads to have better lives, and so on. But these are all similar to what someone can say about valuing morality, and they can observe the effects of morality in the same way you could epistemology.
Drawing these apart, after a first glance, can be difficult. Cuneo’s a non-naturalist so he isn’t trying to talk about the natural world. He’s being agnostic and saying that “of course epistemic facts exist, and the justifications we have for that are the same as moral facts!”
There is a lot of interesting things here about how the OQA doesn’t work, and moral queerness isn’t very good and moral disagreement isn’t taken seriously. But at it’s core Cuneo is running a companions in guilt argument saying that people really think rationality is a thing, and really think epistemology is a thing. Why would we think that and not think ethics is a thing?
We do have positives reasons for being moral realists and it comes directly from this.
If you’re interested in a specifically naturalist account, then why not think something like Hursthouse is true? There are many true things we can say about animals. We have evolutionary facts about animals, and about their purpose. A good bear gets fat on salmon, a good venus flytrap catches and eats flies. A bad penguin doesn’t take appropriate care of its young. These are all really intuitive ways to think about goodness, and the good-making features of living things. People are living things shaped by their environment, genetics and so on. Why think that we cannot be assessed in the same way? This is an account that relies specifically on observable facts about humans, and observable facts about other living things. That looks pretty demonstrable to me!
You say anti-realists find issue with these. But even in the review they talk about how Cuneo deals with these issues. You keep talking about how it isn’t enough merely to believe something. Well, here you’ve taken it as enough that anti-realists merely believe they are right! Cuneo has written not only that they aren’t. but given reasons why! You owe it to yourself to engage with the material for launching into a criciticms for it.
You pretend to do this when you talk about how Cuneo calls it an “unhappy view”. This isn’t an appeal to emotion. He immediately follows up by saying it is unhappy precisely because it is self-defeating. It’s incoherent! The criticism isn’t that the view is unpalatable. It is that it is literally impossible to hold coherently.
And, just as an aside, that’s an example of an epistemic fact: it would be an epistemic fact that people ought to do research before coming to believe what they think is right. It is an epistemic fact
I think you’ve approached this really carelessly. Cuneo’s argument rests on a few key terms. You have misunderstood one of those terms. You’ve misrepresented what Cuneo has said, and you rely more on rhetoric than substance.
Then by all means, point them out. Be specific. Claiming there’s a problem without pointing out specifically what it is, that’s not a problem, that’s a claim. I very specifically used my example to show that facts do not need humans to observe them, they remain a fact regardless. Again, we come around to opinion though. You say that people “ought” to do certain things. Why? It would be one thing if they come to demonstrably favorable ends and I can think of plenty of examples of that. I can also think of plenty where people might find those ends comforting or emotionally valid, but which don’t actually mean anything beyond that. There’s a discussion that could be had on rational epistemology. I find a lot of people calling ideas justified true belief when I don’t think any of those terms actually apply. All knowledge is provisional, based on the information that we have today. Tomorrow, it might all be proven wrong. A lot of this comes down to comfort on the part of humanity, who want to believe that they’ve got it all figured out when, as we’ve seen many times in the past, we can be and often are wrong about what we think is eternal.
That’s why your examples just don’t hold water. At one point, most people “knew” that the Earth was flat. They were just wrong. Lots of people in the Middle Ages “knew” that rats caused the Black Death. They were simply mistaken. People believed in Lamarckian evolution and that didn’t turn out to be true either. People believe in gods. There’s no good reason for them to do so. The question isn’t what people ought to believe, it’s what is there evidence to support, at least provisionally, until something better comes along? No one ought to believe anything without a really good reason and that reason can’t be “it makes me happy!” That happens far too often, I’m sorry to say.
See, I’m not interested in a naturalist account, I’m interested in a well-documented and objectively demonstrable account. We can look at something like A=A. That’s fine because we’ve never seen anything but A=A and, in fact, we can’t even imagine what A <> A might look like. It holds true because every observation has shown that it holds true. That doesn’t mean that there is no conceivable set of conditions under which we might find that it is false, given a particular set of circumstances. It would represent a fundamental shift in how we look at the world but it can’t be considered beyond the realm of conceivable possibilities. I just can’t imagine how it might come to pass.
I think there are a lot of things in philosophy that have been there for so long that people don’t bother to even think about them anymore. That’s why science tests things repeatedly though. The force of gravity hasn’t changed on the planet in recorded human history but we still test it to make sure that it hasn’t. We still test the speed of light just to make sure it’s still the same. That isn’t true in philosophy though. They are just taken as gospel truth because that’s what people have thought for a very long time. That doesn’t mean they’re automatically right and because, as I said before, there is no coherent methodology for testing most philosophical thinking, there’s no way to do as science does and continually put the ideas to the test.
I think you’re the one being tremendously sloppy. You accuse me of being wrong, you can’t provide specific examples and, most importantly, you haven’t brought any evidence to the table to show that you are correct. I’ve asked a couple of times and I haven’t seen any justification for that. I’m not saying that you’re wrong but you haven’t convinced me that you’re right. I’m looking for coherent justification that these ideas are true and so far, you keep saying “this guy said a thing”. Big deal. Prove that said statements are objectively correct. I mean, isn’t that what this is all about? Even in the other discussion about moral realism, I still haven’t seen the slightest shred of evidence that morals exist beyond the human mind. When do you think I’ll be getting that?
Just curious.
It appears to me that you spend far too much time on Reddit and I’ve never known that to end well. Might I suggest a nice long walk in the sunshine or an evening out in the pub talking to real people?
It’s a cesspool, but most social media is. It’s also a place where you can get a lot of people together in one place for a conversation. I have yet to find anywhere, in person or otherwise, that the religious have had a brain about their religion. Mostly, that seems to apply to atheists as well. People, in general, are dumb, at least in my experience.