Ten years ago, I proved the truth of moral realism. It was in the article, “An Ontological Proof of Moral Realism” (Social Philosophy & Policy 30 (2013): 259-79). Following is a summary. Background: One version of the “ontological argument” for God’s existence claims that, given that it is
Nov 18, 2023·edited Nov 18, 2023Liked by Michael Huemer
Holy crap, this argument is pure genius. Why haven’t I seen this before? I just shared it with an antirealist friend and he admitted he was completely stumped. It just works. Nice job.
I think the definition of moral realism you gave is somewhat unsatisfying. When I think about moral realism, the thesis that comes to mind is something like:
Strong moral realism: there are necessary moral facts about what is good and bad, just like there are mathematical facts.
SMR seems better than your definition of MR because SMR is just a fact about reality, while MR is agent-focused, since it is a claim about reasons some moral agent (the reader? every possible moral agent?) has. SMR is also better than MR because it has stronger implications: if your epistemic credence in SMR is 1, your epistemic credence in "torturing babies is bad" should be 1, while any non-negligible credence in "torturing babies is bad" is compatible with MR.
Then, MR can be rephrased as "SMR has a non-negligible epistemic credence", by an argument similar to yours.
What is special about the baby torture case that allows us to know this about it, but not be able to generalize?
“The premises of the anti-torture argument (1-4 in sec. 2) do not depend on self-interest, desire, or the attitudes of observers towards baby-torture. “
The premises don’t mention self-interest, desire, or the attitudes of observers, but would the argument work among aliens that had different psychology?
Why did human psychology evolve to give us these intuitions, if not for reproductive fitness, which might be seen as a form of prudence, or something like it?
I have always understood Moral Realism to be the claim that there are objective moral facts, not that there are objective moral reasons. Is there no difference between moral facts and moral reasons? Please help me, I might be confused.
Cool. So the claim, generally construed, is that for any action A, if it's is possible that there is a reason, r, to do A then there is another reason, s, to do A since, as you suggest, one generally (always?) has a reason to do what one might have a reason to do. But doesn't it beg the question to say that s here is a moral reason? If we have independent grounds for thinking that all reasons are prudential, (i.e. if a relevant form of naturalism is true, say), then your argument merely shows that we can derive the existence of a prudential reason from the possibility of a prudential reason. Nothing in the argument settles that the reason you end up with is moral. What am I missing?
Holy crap, this argument is pure genius. Why haven’t I seen this before? I just shared it with an antirealist friend and he admitted he was completely stumped. It just works. Nice job.
I think the definition of moral realism you gave is somewhat unsatisfying. When I think about moral realism, the thesis that comes to mind is something like:
Strong moral realism: there are necessary moral facts about what is good and bad, just like there are mathematical facts.
SMR seems better than your definition of MR because SMR is just a fact about reality, while MR is agent-focused, since it is a claim about reasons some moral agent (the reader? every possible moral agent?) has. SMR is also better than MR because it has stronger implications: if your epistemic credence in SMR is 1, your epistemic credence in "torturing babies is bad" should be 1, while any non-negligible credence in "torturing babies is bad" is compatible with MR.
Then, MR can be rephrased as "SMR has a non-negligible epistemic credence", by an argument similar to yours.
What is special about the baby torture case that allows us to know this about it, but not be able to generalize?
“The premises of the anti-torture argument (1-4 in sec. 2) do not depend on self-interest, desire, or the attitudes of observers towards baby-torture. “
The premises don’t mention self-interest, desire, or the attitudes of observers, but would the argument work among aliens that had different psychology?
Why did human psychology evolve to give us these intuitions, if not for reproductive fitness, which might be seen as a form of prudence, or something like it?
I have always understood Moral Realism to be the claim that there are objective moral facts, not that there are objective moral reasons. Is there no difference between moral facts and moral reasons? Please help me, I might be confused.
Cool. So the claim, generally construed, is that for any action A, if it's is possible that there is a reason, r, to do A then there is another reason, s, to do A since, as you suggest, one generally (always?) has a reason to do what one might have a reason to do. But doesn't it beg the question to say that s here is a moral reason? If we have independent grounds for thinking that all reasons are prudential, (i.e. if a relevant form of naturalism is true, say), then your argument merely shows that we can derive the existence of a prudential reason from the possibility of a prudential reason. Nothing in the argument settles that the reason you end up with is moral. What am I missing?