- HOW TO BE A MORAL REALIST
Richard N. Boyd 1982
Chapter 9 in
Essays on Moral Realism (Cornell Paperbacks) 1st Edition
by Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Editor),
The author [Boyd] therein claimed those who deny moral facts has a cognitive deficit in moral sense just like perceptual deficit in perception.
I agree with the above point because, moral facts [moral propensities] are inherent in ALL human beings, whilst active in some minority.
Those with an active moral impulse [mirror neurons, etc.] will naturally recognize there are moral facts intuitively and for some, thereupon seek evidences and reasons to justify their existence.
Meanwhile, the majority recognize there are moral facts by virtue of God given moral facts.
The moral facts deniers [e.g. Sculptor, Peter Holmes, Flasher..] are the minority who has a cognitive deficit in moral sense and impulse.
in [..] = mine
Agree/Disagree??[The Moral Deniers argues:]..the person for whom moral judgments are motivationally indifferent would not only be psychologically atypical but would have some sort of cognitive deficit with respect to moral reasoning as well.
- Mere facts (especially mere natural facts) cannot have this sort of logical connection to rational choice or reasons for action.
Therefore, so the objection goes, there cannot be moral facts;
Moral Realism (or at least naturalistic Moral Realism) is impossible.
I think that there is a deep insight in the view that people for whom questions of Moral goodness are irrelevant to how they would choose to act - suffer a cognitive deficit.
If we adopt a naturalistic conception of moral knowledge we can diagnose in such people a [Moral] deficit in the capacity to make moral judgments somewhat akin to a perceptual deficit.
What I have in mind is the application of a causal theory of moral knowledge to the examination of a feature of moral reasoning which has been well understood in the empiricist tradition since Hume, that is, the role of sympathy [empathy] in moral understanding.
It is also very probably right, as Hume insists, that the operation of sympathy [empathy] is motivationally important: ...
The psychological mechanisms by which all this takes place may be more complicated than Hume imagined, but the fact remains that one and the same psychological mechanism—sympathy [empathy]—plays both a cognitive and a motivational [moral] role in normal human beings.
The full resources of naturalistic epistemology permit the moral realist to acknowledge and explain this important insight of moral anti-realists [moral facts deniers].
- We are now in a position to see why the morally unconcerned person, the person for whom moral facts are motivationally irrelevant, probably suffers a cognitive deficit with respect to moral reasoning.
Such a person would have to be deficient in sympathy [empathy], because the motivational role of sympathy [empathy] is precisely to make moral facts motivationally relevant.
In consequence, she or he would be deficient with respect to a cognitive capacity (sympathy [empathy]) which is ordinarily important for the correct assessment of moral facts.
The motivational deficiency would, as a matter of contingent fact about human psychology, be a cognitive deficiency as well.
eta: View from ChatGpt
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