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MugaSofer comments on Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant - Less Wrong
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No, it doesn't. If your ethics conflicted with Morality, how on earth would you tell?
That would depend on exactly what kind of Moral Realism you espouse. If you're Kantian, you think reason will tell you whether your actions are "really" wrong or right. If you're a Divine Command Theist, you think God can tell you whether your actions are "really" wrong or right. If you're a Contractarian, you think the Social Contract can tell you whether your actions are "really" wrong or right...
And so on, and so forth.
As I've said, I think Moral Realism of this kind is silly, but if it happens to be true then what you think you "ought" to do and what you actually "ought" to do could be two different things.
Oh. Right. Yes. I'm an idiot.
Hmm.
Well, if they think they can prove it, any moral realists are welcome to post their reasoning here, and if they turn out to be right I can't see any objection to posting on the implications. That said, I suspect that many (all?) forms of moral realism come not from mistakes of fact but confusion, and have a good chance of being dissolved by the sequences.
Isn't EY a moral realist?
Let's define our terms. Moral realism is a conjunction of three claims:
This should be distinguished from moral non-naturalism (which asserts that the moral facts are somehow transcendent or abstract or nonphysical), moral universalism (which asserts that a single set of moral truths holds for everyone), and moral primitivism (which asserts that moral concepts are primitive, metaphysically basic, and/or conceptually irreducible).
I don't see how those three exclude Moral Non-Naturalism. Certainly, the majority of divisions I've seen have put MN-N as a form of Moral Realism...
I think Robb's intention was to say that moral non-naturalism, universalism, and primitivism are all species of the moral-realist genus, but that one can be a moral realist without being any of those three (as EY is, I believe).
Could be. Re-reading the comment hasn't helped me clear up my confusion, so maybe RobBB can clarify this for us.
My intent was just to highlight that realism, non-naturalism, universalism, and primitivism are different ideas. I wasn't weighing in on their relationship, beyond their non-identity. Universalism and primitivism, for instance, I'd usually consider compatible with an error theory of morality (and thus with anti-realism): Moral statements are semantically irreducible or structurally applicable to everyone, but fail to meet their truth-conditions. Similarly, I could imagine people committed to anti-realism precisely because moral facts would have to be non-natural. We may not want to call the latter view 'moral non-naturalism,' though.
Well put, thank you.
Down to definitions. He no longer believes that there is some "higher good" beyond mere human ethics.
Okay, but that's orthogonal to the question of moral realism.
(That's what I meant by moral realism.)
And more importantly: why the ** (excuse the language) would you care.
If what I truly desire upon reflection is objectively "evil", I want to believe that what I truly desire upon reflection is objectively "evil". And tautologically, I will still truly desire it.
Some folks have used the idea of "moral observations" to address this. Basically, if you see your neighbor's child light a dog on fire, and you say "I saw your child doing something wrong", you're making a coherent statement about your observation of reality. Our moral observations can be distorted / hallucinated just like other observations, but then that is only as much of a barrier to understanding moral reality as it is to understanding physical reality.
Oh, obviously. I was saying that it would be hard to observe morality except in the usual way; it has since been pointed out that most forms of moral realism come with such a method; praying, for example.