Moral Realism Starter:

• Moral realism or ___________ is the ___________ view that ethical sentences express __________  and can therefore be true or false. So we can have moral ____________.

meta-ethical knowledge

cognitivism  propositions

Moral Realism Starter: so far…

Moral realism or cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false. So we can have moral knowledge.

Metaethics

God-independent

transcendent truths

Metaethics: Moral Realism

• Moral truths = God-independent transcendent truths. Maths analogy. Platonism. Moral elitism. Acrasia.

• Moral truths = natural facts. The open question argument and the naturalistic fallacy.

• Moral truths = relational properties which provide reasons for action. Analogy with secondary properties.

• Issues: How is knowledge of moral truth possible? How is agreement over moral truth possible? To what extent can such truths motivate/justify action?

General strengths• allows moral utterances to be ‘truth-apt’ (checkable for

truth or falsity) • …and for some of them to be true.• …so the domain of moral values can be known.• …so gives an account of how these values arise.

Discussion Task: establish, criticise

• The analogy between morality and mathematics.

• Moral Platonism.

• Moral elitism.

• Acrasia or Akrasia

Maths and Morality

• we know some transcendent truths – those of mathematics.– public/shared, objective/independent of human perception, enduring

• we know these truths through mathematical intuition/ rational insight – pure thought, in other words

– faculty can be trained/developed

moral values are transcendent/outside space and time. we know these truths through moral intuition/moral insight

– a.k.a. ‘conscience’

– faculty can be trained/developed

• BUT (analogy fails) – Public/shared? Objective/independent of human perception?

Enduring?

Moral Platonism/Platonic Realism

• Discussed in Plato’s ‘Parmenides’: ‘– ‘You see a number of great objects, and when you look at them there

seems to you to be one and the same idea (or nature) in them all; hence you conceive of greatness as one.’

• Forms are objects of pure thought that are transcendent.• There are Forms or Universals that relate to moral values

– Forms of Justice, Courage, Kindness, Goodness– These forms have meaning insofar as they partake of the ‘Form of the

Good’• And empirical moral truths are correct only insofar as they partake

of the ‘Forms’.– Our values are valuable because what they have in common is ‘Value’

itself.• But Mackie: “queer”

– forms are metaphysically far out entities or properties without a plausible epistemic story of how we can obtain knowledge of them.

– their existence raises more problems than it solves…

Elitism

Moral Elitism

• = special temperament/training needed for access to moral truths

• Many moral philosophers are moral elitists:– Plato’s ‘Philosopher-King’ (knows Forms)– Nietzsche’s ‘Ubermensch’ (has WTP)– Moore’s conception of self-evidence/ Ross’s ‘moral intuitions’…

• Is moral ‘elitism’ obviously wrong? – If there can be moral knowledge, then it is plausible that some people

have it while other people lack it. – We celebrate e.g. experts in physics. Why not experts in morals?

• Perhaps historical religious figures are examples, or the Philosopher-King

• But! e.g. Kant – moral agency = all being able to discover moral truths.

Acrasia or Akrasia I

• ‘Weakness of the will’ = How can one know the good and yet do the bad?

• To be virtuous, Socrates argues in the Protagoras, is simply to (really) know the truth about what is good and what is not.

• However, weakness of will does seem to occur. • So, as no one knowingly does what (they believe) is

wrong, weakness of will = ignorance of the right thing to do:

– Hence Socrates argues that if a person says doing x is right but does y, they don’t really (deep down) believe that the right thing to do is x.

– For example, they actually believe that the pleasure of doing y, rather than x, outweighs what is good about x.

Other accounts of acrasia

• Aristotle argued that virtue is knowledge held in the right way– so that it has the right effect on motivation. – So someone who is weak-willed has moral knowledge, but they do not fully grasp

the significance of their knowledge.

• Donald Davidson (in How is weakness of the will possible?) argues that weakness of will involves a failure of the person to judge that x is (really) best.

• Non-cognitivists such as Hume can argue that judgment, or reason, simply does not have the final say on our decisions – our emotions do. So we be motivated to do things that we do not believe in any sense are best.

• Modern faculty psychology is at ease with the idea of the self as having multiple agents – the self is ‘an ecology of souls.

Homework for Thursday

• Read ahead in handout about:– Moral truths = natural properties– Moral truths = relational properties which

provide reasons for action. The analogy with secondary properties.