Topics Ethics

Question Hello. Reading a bit of Wikipedia, a bit of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and a bit of your site, I got this impression about moral theories: (1) Traditional moral realists claim that there are (universally binding) moral facts. (2) Traditinal moral anti-realists claim that there are no (universally binding) moral facts. (3) So called "moral externalists" claim that (perhaps universal) moral facts are not binding (that is, they are morally binding, but people may ignore morality without being irrational, and so people may ignore such "bindingness"). Did I get it right? What I mean is that sceptics about morality always assume that morality should in some way be "absolutely binding". But some philosophers are half way between realism and scepticism because they accept morality and just deny its necessary bindingness. My question is whether these philosophers are really between realism and anti-realism.

Accepted:
August 2, 2012

Comments

I think you have got some aspects of one central metaethical debate right. Some realists believe that (a) there are objective moral requirements and that (b) they are dictates of reason. There are those who deny this form of realism, because they deny (a) or (b) or both. But once we distinguish these two claims within some forms of realism, we can see the conceptual possibility of accepting (a) without (b) or (b) without (a). Anti-rationalists can accept (a) without (b), and various subjectivist views can accept (b) without (a). You ask about the anti-rationalist. The anti-rationalist says that objective moral requirements might apply to us even if it isn’t always or necessarily irrational to be immoral. According to the anti-rationalist, morality is one thing, rationality another. This requires us to distinguish two kinds of skeptical threats -- skepticism about the existence of objective moral requirements and skepticism about the rational authority of moral requirements. You seem to doubt whether anti-rationalism is a stable position. If objective moral requirements had to be rationally binding, then we could not separate (a) and (b) or the two kinds of skepticism. Skepticism about the rational authority would imply skepticism about objective moral requirements. So the issue really turns, I think, on whether (a) and (b) are independent, as the anti-rationalist alleges.