How to be a Moral Realist

[Veritas Aequitas]

Note: 'How to be a Moral Realist' is not referring to the moral realism and facts re Platonic Forms and from a God.

This OP is about how moral facts can be justified from a Framework and System of Morality with empirical evidences and philosophical reasoning just like Science albeit of different efficiency.

The main point of the author:

• What I want to do in this essay is to explore the ways in which
  -recent developments in realist philosophy of science,
  -together with related “naturalistic” developments in epistemology and philosophy of language,
  can be employed in the articulation and defense of Moral Realism.

I have merely provided the Introduction from the article from:

• HOW TO BE A MORAL REALIST
  RICHARD N. BOYD
  Essays on Moral Realism (Cornell Paperbacks) 1st Edition
  by Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Editor),

to show the existence of such a thesis.

For the details, one will have to read the whole essay.

Scientific Realism is the doctrine

• • that scientific theories should be understood as putative descriptions of real phenomena,
  • that ordinary scientific methods constitute a reliable procedure for obtaining and improving (approximate) knowledge of the real phenomena which scientific theories describe, and
  • that the reality described by scientific theories is largely independent of our theorizing.
  Scientific theories describe reality and reality is “prior to thought” (see Boyd 1982).

By “Moral Realism” I intend the analogous doctrine [with Science] about moral judgments, Moral statements, and moral theories.

According to Moral Realism:

• 1 Moral statements are the sorts of statements which are (or which express propositions which are) true or false (or approximately true, largely false, etc.);
  2 The truth or falsity (approximate truth…) of Moral statements is largely independent of our moral opinions, theories, etc.;
  3 Ordinary canons of moral reasoning—together with ordinary canons of scientific and everyday factual reasoning—constitute, under many circumstances at least, a reliable method for obtaining and improving (approximate) moral knowledge.

It follows from Moral Realism that such moral terms as “good”, “fair”, “just”, “obligatory” usually correspond to real properties or relations
and that our ordinary standards for moral reasoning and moral disputation
—together with reliable standards for scientific and everyday reasoning
—constitute a fairly reliable way of finding out which events, persons, policies, social arrangements, etc. have these properties and enter into these relations.

It is not a consequence of Moral Realism that our ordinary procedures are “best possible” for this purpose— just as it is not a consequence of Scientific Realism that our existing scientific methods are best possible.

In the scientific case, improvements in knowledge can be expected to produce improvements in method (Boyd 1980, 1982, 1983, 1985a, 1985b, 1985c), and there is no reason to exclude this possibility [improvements] in the moral case.

Scientific Realism contrasts with instrumentalism and its variants and with views like that of Kuhn (1970) according to which the reality which scientists study is largely constituted by the theories they adopt.
Moral Realism contrasts with non-cognitivist metaethical theories like emotivism and with [non-cogntivists’] views according to which moral principles are largely a reflection of social constructs or conventions.

What I want to do in this essay is to explore the ways in which
-recent developments in realist philosophy of science,
-together with related “naturalistic” developments in epistemology and philosophy of language,
can be employed in the articulation and defense of Moral Realism.

What I hope to demonstrate in the present essay is that
Moral Realism can be shown to be a more attractive and plausible philosophical position if recent developments in realist philosophy of science are brought to bear in its defense.

I intend the general defense of Moral Realism offered here as a proposal regarding the metaphysical, epistemological, and semantic framework within which arguments for Moral Realism are best formulated and best understood.

[Veritas Aequitas]

The Contents of the Essay:

• How to be a Moral Realist
  
  1 INTRODUCTION 308
  • 1.1 Moral Realism
    1.2 Scientific knowledge and moral skepticism
  2 SOME CHALLENGES TO MORAL REALISM
  • 2.1 Moral intuitions and empirical observations
    2.2 The role of “reflective equilibrium” in moral reasoning
    2.3 Moral progress and cultural variability
    2.4 Hard cases
    2.5 Naturalism and naturalistic definitions
    2.6 Morality, motivation, and rationality
    2.7 The semantics of moral terms
    2.8 Verificationism and Anti-Realism in ethics
  3 REALIST PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
  • 3.1 The primacy of reality
    3.2 Objective knowledge from theory-dependent methods
    3.3 Naturalism and radical contingency in epistemology
    3.4 Scientific intuitions and trained judgment
    3.5 Non-Humean conceptions of causation and reduction
    3.6 Natural definitions
    3.7 Reference and epistemic access
    3.8 Homeostatic property-cluster definitions
  4 HOW TO BE A MORAL REALIST
  • 4.1 Moral semantics, intuitions, reflective equilibrium, and hard cases 325
    4.2 Constraints on a realist conception of moral knowledge
    4.3 Homeostatic consequentialism
    4.4 Observations, intuitions, and reflective equilibrium
    4.5 Moral semantics 335
    4.6 Hard cases and divergent views 338
    4.7 Morality, motivation, and rationality 342
    4.8 CONCLUSION
  5 ADDENDUM
  • 5.1 History
    5.2 Homeostatic property clusters again
    5.3 Hard cases, cultural variability, and an apparent circularity of argumentation
    5.4 The evidence for Moral Realism

[Sculptor]

ROTFLMFHOTIRDTS

[Veritas Aequitas]

ROTFLMFHOTIRDTS

As usual, no rational counter arguments.
You are really a pariah and bastard relative to what is Philosophy proper.

What is presented-in-quote above is from a proper philosophical paper.

[Sculptor]

ROTFLMFHOTIRDTS

As usual, no rational counter arguments.

You've been shown them all before on this very forum. You did not understand them.

[Veritas Aequitas]

ROTFLMFHOTIRDTS

As usual, no rational counter arguments.

You've been shown them all before on this very forum. You did not understand them.

Your usual counter is that 'nervous laugh' 'lol' blah, blah, blah, because you fear the truth.

[Veritas Aequitas]

It is a tragic shame that you cannot apply this insight to your posts on "objective morality", since you seem to be using the "geometric method" to impose your own will upon the moral landscape yet can have not objective justification for doing so.

Don't be too hasty.

I am not with scientific realism like Boyd.

the scientific realist holds that science aims to produce true descriptions of things in the world (or approximately true descriptions, or ones whose central terms successfully refer, and so on).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/

Since you are into scientific realism, you should consider Boyd argument that moral realism is plausible in the same sense with scientific realism.
Read the OP or if you can get it, read Boyd's article how moral realism is possible like scientific realism.

HOW TO BE A MORAL REALIST
RICHARD N. BOYD
Essays on Moral Realism (Cornell Paperbacks) 1st Edition
by Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Editor),

The main point of the author:
[Boyd]"What I want to do in this essay is to explore the ways in which
-recent developments in realist philosophy of science,
-together with related “naturalistic” developments in epistemology and philosophy of language,
can be employed in the articulation and defense of Moral Realism."

My approach to Moral Objective is from the antirealist perspective just like scientific antirealism producing objective scientific facts via a human-based scientific FSRC.

[Sculptor]

As usual, no rational counter arguments.

You've been shown them all before on this very forum. You did not understand them.

Your usual counter is that 'nervous laugh' 'lol' blah, blah, blah, because you fear the truth.

And still you avoid the issues.

[Sculptor]

It is a tragic shame that you cannot apply this insight to your posts on "objective morality", since you seem to be using the "geometric method" to impose your own will upon the moral landscape yet can have not objective justification for doing so.

Don't be too hasty.

I am not with scientific realism like Boyd.

the scientific realist holds that science aims to produce true descriptions of things in the world (or approximately true descriptions, or ones whose central terms successfully refer, and so on).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/

Since you are into scientific realism, you should consider Boyd argument that moral realism is plausible in the same sense with scientific realism.
Read the OP or if you can get it, read Boyd's article how moral realism is possible like scientific realism.

HOW TO BE A MORAL REALIST
RICHARD N. BOYD
Essays on Moral Realism (Cornell Paperbacks) 1st Edition
by Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Editor),

The main point of the author:
[Boyd]"What I want to do in this essay is to explore the ways in which
-recent developments in realist philosophy of science,
-together with related “naturalistic” developments in epistemology and philosophy of language,
can be employed in the articulation and defense of Moral Realism."

My approach to Moral Objective is from the antirealist perspective just like scientific antirealism producing objective scientific facts via a human-based scientific FSRC.

The levels of your self-delusions are breathtaking.
You keep digging yourself deeper and deeper, not seemingly capable of joining up the dots.

[FlashDangerpants]

The levels of your self-delusions are breathtaking.
You keep digging yourself deeper and deeper, not seemingly capable of joining up the dots.

To be fair, the paper he is referencing is not only very very disimilar to anyting VA argues, but it is also far too clever and technical for VA to even understand it. It is in fact the one which he horribly misread when he launched those stupid threads where he calls you and I "cognitively impaired" because VA doesn't understand the philosophical questions about moral motivation or the causal role of beliefs.

You don't have to buy the book, the paper is published here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... al_Realist

It has several weaknesses in my view. To begin with, any argument that uses scientific knowledge as the analogue to justify a similar approach to moral knowledge will obviously inherit the usual set of issues inherent to that dubious move. This extra step of almost declaring scientific judgments and moral judgements to be perceptual strikes me as a specific weakness tbh....

From the perspective of the naturalistic epistemology of science, there need be no puzzle. It is, of course, a question of the very greatest psychological interest just how intuitive judgments in science work and how they are related to explicit theory, on the one hand, and to experimental practice, on the other. But it seems overwhelmingly likely that scientific intuitions should be thought of as trained judgments which resemble perceptual judgments in not involving (or at least no tbeing fully accounted for by) explicit inferences, but which resemble explicit inferences in science in depending for their reliability upon the relevant approximate truth of the explicit theories which help to determine them. This dependence upon the approximate truth of the relevant background theories will obtain even in those cases (which may be typical) in which the tacit judgments reflect a deeper understanding than that currently captured in explicit theory. It is an important and exciting fact that some scientific knowledge can be represented tacitly before it can be represented explicitly, but this fact poses no difficulty for a naturalistic treatment of scientific knowledge. Tacit or intuitive judgments in science are reliable because they are grounded in a theoretical tradition (itself partly tacit) which is, as a matter of contingent empirical fact, relevantly approximately true.

But I would want Willy B's view on the matter of the 'relevantly approximately true' part of that rather than that of an inbred pissant like VA. ersonally I am inclined to accept tha take on scientific realism, but I have no dog in that race.

[Sculptor]

The levels of your self-delusions are breathtaking.
You keep digging yourself deeper and deeper, not seemingly capable of joining up the dots.

To be fair, the paper he is referencing is not only very very disimilar to anyting VA argues, but it is also far too clever and technical for VA to even understand it. It is in fact the one which he horribly misread when he launched those stupid threads where he calls you and I "cognitively impaired" because VA doesn't understand the philosophical questions about moral motivation or the causal role of beliefs.

You don't have to buy the book, the paper is published here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... al_Realist

It has several weaknesses in my view. To begin with, any argument that uses scientific knowledge as the analogue to justify a similar approach to moral knowledge will obviously inherit the usual set of issues inherent to that dubious move. This extra step of almost declaring scientific judgments and moral judgements to be perceptual strikes me as a specific weakness tbh....

From the perspective of the naturalistic epistemology of science, there need be no puzzle. It is, of course, a question of the very greatest psychological interest just how intuitive judgments in science work and how they are related to explicit theory, on the one hand, and to experimental practice, on the other. But it seems overwhelmingly likely that scientific intuitions should be thought of as trained judgments which resemble perceptual judgments in not involving (or at least no tbeing fully accounted for by) explicit inferences, but which resemble explicit inferences in science in depending for their reliability upon the relevant approximate truth of the explicit theories which help to determine them. This dependence upon the approximate truth of the relevant background theories will obtain even in those cases (which may be typical) in which the tacit judgments reflect a deeper understanding than that currently captured in explicit theory. It is an important and exciting fact that some scientific knowledge can be represented tacitly before it can be represented explicitly, but this fact poses no difficulty for a naturalistic treatment of scientific knowledge. Tacit or intuitive judgments in science are reliable because they are grounded in a theoretical tradition (itself partly tacit) which is, as a matter of contingent empirical fact, relevantly approximately true.

But I would want Willy B's view on the matter of the 'relevantly approximately true' part of that rather than that of an inbred pissant like VA. ersonally I am inclined to accept tha take on scientific realism, but I have no dog in that race.

My apprehension of morality has always been from the perspective of history, anthropology and cultural studies. My own education has included history and archaeology, but I also had an early grounding in science.
For me it just beggars belief that morality and claims of scientific objectivity can appear on the same page let alone the same sentence.
I was just reading about the Parthians recently who thought nothing about leaders having lots of sons whom then expected to kill to avoid challenges to their leadership. This was normative for 100s of years, a morality which we witness fictionally with Klingons.
In Rome at the same time advancement was only to be achieved through buying your way to the top and puching for the next stage on the cursus honorum by using family influence. For VA these cultural norms can only be considered abherent. Common acts of infanticide, slavery , all taking and normative and moral actions are similarly treated by his imaginary schema.

And yet when you ask him to defend one single rule he falters. Even when you gain agreement the basis of the agreeable moral rule cannot be based on a scientific principle but a socially conditioned and culturally relative norm.

All the rest is just verbal masturbation.

[Veritas Aequitas]

My apprehension of morality has always been from the perspective of history, anthropology and cultural studies. My own education has included history and archaeology, but I also had an early grounding in science.
For me it just beggars belief that morality and claims of scientific objectivity can appear on the same page let alone the same sentence.

And yet when you ask him to defend one single rule he falters. Even when you gain agreement the basis of the agreeable moral rule cannot be based on a scientific principle but a socially conditioned and culturally relative norm.

From your study of history, anthropology and cultural studies, have you come across any groups of human or individual[s] who readily would act or accept that babies can be tortured and killed for pleasure?
As far as I know, there is none.

There could be some individuals who may commit the above heinous act, but psychologically they have a damaged brain.
No normal human being would readily would act or accept that babies can be tortured and killed for pleasure.

Since there are no evidence of any groups of normal human beings or normal individuals who would readily act or accept that "babies can be tortured and killed for pleasure," it is a pattern that can be studied scientifically on an inductive basis to reach a scientific conclusion on it.
An abductive hypothesis which is likely to be tenable can be constructed evidently.

This is what Boyd [from a scientific realism perspective] is proposing.
In principle there MUST be a scientific fact on why no individual or group would readily act or accept that "babies can be tortured and killed for pleasure."

It is just that science do not yet has the resources and tools to discover the reason and basis [scientific fact] on the existent of such a inherent inhibitor [oughtnot_ness] that deter any normal person in torturing and killing babies for pleasure.
At the rate science, AI and technology is advancing exponentially, eventually science will be able to determine and test the scientific fact of the neural algorithm that inhibit any normal person from torturing and killing babies for pleasure.

All scientific facts are objective. You cannot deny this.
Since the scientific fact of the inherent inhibitor [oughtnot_ness] that deter any normal person in torturing and killing babies for pleasure is also related to morality, morality can leverage on this scientific fact as being objective, i.e. moral realism.

Boyd thesis approach from the scientific realism ideology,
I approach the same point [moral realism] from scientific antirealism [FSERC] perspective.

There is a link to Boyd's article, read it.

[Will Bouwman]

Tacit or intuitive judgments in science are reliable because they are grounded in a theoretical tradition (itself partly tacit) which is, as a matter of contingent empirical fact, relevantly approximately true.

But I would want Willy B's view on the matter of the 'relevantly approximately true' part of that rather than that of an inbred pissant like VA. ersonally I am inclined to accept tha take on scientific realism, but I have no dog in that race.

Well, it's the usual stuff about what d'yer mean by theory? Take Einstein's theory of general relativity. On the one hand you have the field equations, which are more approximately true than any test they have so far been subjected to. On the other hand there is the hypothesis that matter warps spacetime; it might be true, but you can make up any number of mutually exclusive hypotheses that account for exactly the same observations. I don't know enough about ethics to be sure, but other than the utilitarians' moral calculus, I don't think when moralists bang on about theory they have anything like field equations in mind.
I've posted this several times, but it bears repeating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM-zWTU7X-k

[Sculptor]

My apprehension of morality has always been from the perspective of history, anthropology and cultural studies. My own education has included history and archaeology, but I also had an early grounding in science.
For me it just beggars belief that morality and claims of scientific objectivity can appear on the same page let alone the same sentence.

And yet when you ask him to defend one single rule he falters. Even when you gain agreement the basis of the agreeable moral rule cannot be based on a scientific principle but a socially conditioned and culturally relative norm.

From your study of history, anthropology and cultural studies, have you come across any groups of human or individual[s] who readily would act or accept that babies can be tortured and killed for pleasure?

Yes.

And is that the ONLY basis of your moral objectivism?

[Veritas Aequitas]

My apprehension of morality has always been from the perspective of history, anthropology and cultural studies. My own education has included history and archaeology, but I also had an early grounding in science.
For me it just beggars belief that morality and claims of scientific objectivity can appear on the same page let alone the same sentence.

And yet when you ask him to defend one single rule he falters. Even when you gain agreement the basis of the agreeable moral rule cannot be based on a scientific principle but a socially conditioned and culturally relative norm.

From your study of history, anthropology and cultural studies, have you come across any groups of human or individual[s] who readily would act or accept that babies can be tortured and killed for pleasure?

Yes.

And is that the ONLY basis of your moral objectivism?

Yes??? tortured and killed for pleasure?? show me the links to the evidence.
Even if there is, normal human sense will indicate that is due to a perversion.

In the case of moral objectivism or moral realism it has to be qualified to a set specific moral elements.

The "ought-not-ness to torture and kill babies for pleasure" [SF1] is one element of morality.
I claimed this very intuitive moral element is an evident pattern which is inherent in ALL humans.
This evident pattern can be abducted as very tenable scientific hypothesis.
It is very likely the scientific FSERC will confirm the above hypothesis [in the future] as a scientific fact which is objective.
When this scientific fact [SF1] in inputted into the moral FSERC, it is a moral fact which is objective.

My approach is to prove there are objective moral facts via the scientific FSERC.
The "ought-not-ness to torture and kill babies for pleasure" is one plausible moral facts, thus as qualified to ONLY this [SFI] morality, is objective.

From the above basis, I will demonstrate there are other similar moral facts with varying degrees of objectivity [nevertheless is still objective].

I don't make a blanket claim 'morality is objective' but the claim must be qualified to the set of specific moral elements that are proven to be objective.

The moral objectivist will insist on the following maxim categorically:
"no babies ought to be tortured and killed for pleasure" because such an outnot_ness is inherent in all humans.
Moral objectivists will strongly condemned any torturing and killing of babies for pleasure and take all means [with moral scope] to prevent such heinous evil acts from happening in the future.

On the other hand, if you are a moral subjectivist or relativist, by definition, you MUST tolerate the moral maxim "babies can be tortured and killed for pleasure", if there are certain groups who insist such 'heinous' acts are morally permissible.
Moral relativism or subjectivism is very vile and so you are very vile in being indirectly complicit [morally] to the above act.
You don't have a moral say in stopping people from 'torturing and killing babies for pleasure' nor promote any moral progress to prevent future acts.