Moral realism: moral facts and knowledge

1. Moral realism:moral facts and knowledge The very idea

2. Key resources: • Meta-ethics in a small nutshell (short) • Meta-ethics in a much larger nutshell (longer) • Lacewing – Moral cognitivism • Lacewing – Moral truth

3. What do you think? • Every woman has the right to terminate her pregnancy. • Abortion is murder. • Education is a universal right. • The Taliban policy of preventing girls from attending school was morally permissible. • It is wrong to mutilate the genitals of children. • Female circumcision is right for those cultures (e.g. among many groups in the Horn of Africa) where it is a long established tradition.

4. In addressing these questions it feels like something hangs on the answer. • Disagreements seem genuine – there’s a right answer, even if it’s hard to get to. • Moral disputes do not seem like arguments over the taste of Marmite.

5. Meta-ethics • Aim to understand the nature of moral judgements – not the elucidation of a theory of what is good, right or virtuous (normative ethics). • What does this involve? • What are the key issues and questions?

6. Key issues: • Meaning: is the semantic function of moral discourse to state facts? • Metaphysics: do moral facts or properties exist? What are they? Are they reducible to some other type of property or sui generis? • Epistemology: can we possess moral knowledge? What can justify our moral beliefs? • Objectivity: can moral judgements really be correct or incorrect? In what sense, if any, is there a moral truth ‘out there’? • Moral psychology: what is the connection between forming a moral judgement and acting? Does making a moral judgement necessarily motivate a person to act?

7. A map of the positions Do moral judgements express beliefs? YES COGNITIVISM NO – they express beliefs, but they are all false NO NON-COGNITIVISM Sometimes true? YES – they report the facts Error theory SUBJECTIVISM Hume Emotivism Naturalism v. non-naturalism Reductionism v. non-reductionist approach

8. Moral realism: key claims A robust, full-blown realism has these commitments. • Meaning: moral discourse aims to report the moral facts. • Metaphysics: there exist moral facts (or properties) and they are distinct class of facts (N.B differences among realists on type of facts and reduction) • Epistemology: We possess moral knowledge, which is to have knowledge of (some of) the moral facts. • Objectivity: moral facts are objective or independent of any particular beliefs or thoughts we might have about them. Although N.B the notion of objective will need to be carefully specified. • Moral psychology: internalism v. externalism – more on this later

9. Realism… So…. • Moral judgements as objective. • There exist moral facts or properties • We can possess moral knowledge. Motivations…

10. Motivations - truth • Realism accounts for the actual nature of our moral discourse – our judgements look and function like any other declarative sentence. • The existence of moral facts explains why our moral judgements are expressed in a truth-functional way. For example… • The judgement that ‘hunting badgers is morally wrong’ has the grammatical form of a sentence that is capable of being true or false. • It explains why some of our judgements are true .

11. Motivations - justification • Realism explains why I am justified or not in expressing a particular moral belief or forming a moral judgement. • My belief that wanton cruelty is wrong is explained by the fact that it is wrong – the belief is supported by the way things are and (as with any other belief) it has the job of reporting of how things are. • …and why we can have moral knowledge – to know that p is right/wrong is to have a justified belief about the fact that p.

12. Justification – disagreement and progress • Moral realism explains why moral disagreements are real. • Just as we may dispute what the right answer is in science, so too with moral questions. • If morality is objective in this way, then it makes sense of the idea of progress as well as the possibility of error. • Parallel with scientific progress - things can improve morally as we come to acquire moral knowledge.