Is Moral Realism True? (Dr. Eric Sampson vs. Dr. Jonas Olson)
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- Опубліковано 12 чер 2022
- Are there objective moral values and duties? Moral realists say yes, and anti-realists say no. Dr. Eric Sampson (professor of philosophy at Rhodes College), defends moral realism. Dr. Jonas Olson (professor of philosophy at Stockholm University) defends anti-realism (specifically error theory).
To read more on Dr. Sampson's defense of Moorean arguments for moral realism, check out the paper linked below.
www.erictsampson.com/uploads/1...
To read more on Dr. Olson's defense of Error Theory, check out his book linked below.
www.amazon.com/Moral-Error-Th...
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That's incredible! Jonas Olson himself in the encounter. Unbelievable that you arranged such powerful collision. Many thanks.
Thanks, Jordan. I think it was helpful that you stepped in in the latter half of the conversation to bring everything together. From a pedagogical point of view, I think that’s a good move with this kind of discussion.
"It seems true that a hand is moving in my field of vision."
"It seems true that it's wrong to burn people alive for the light it provides (x)."
There is seemingly something importantly distinguishing between these two claims. For the former, it's an appearance to one's senses that an inescapable experience is occuring with certain experienced features. For the latter, what is experienced as "wrongness"?
We could explain the latter as simply "I don't like x." You don't experience abstracted things, just appearances. You can experience repulsion but not the stance-independent fact that something is categorically "wrong." And we make use of language to distinguish these things. It seems the realist is taking a step with the "moral" claim that is not substantiated and is not analogous to the other examples.
Exactly. I really don't understand why moral realists aren't just laughed out of the room.
@@stewartpatton2179 Well, we do laugh at them, but then they just stand there proclaiming that they are right because they _feel_ like they are.
@@stewartpatton2179moral realism is the far better position
Nice and cordial discussion of important issues in meta ethics! Good summary by Jordan. At around 1:13:00.
I don't see how Sampson gets to "it's just not the thing to do" as an explanation for something being "plausibly wrong." I get that he experiences a repulsion to the action, but it appears he has merely assigned the label "wrong" to the feeling of replusion and mapped that term with objectivist baggage.
1:08:26 Eric doesn't find the prospect of murdering people far away just to hear a fun snap noise horrifying? We are very different..
It’s great to see this conversation. I’m glad to see a strong proponent of realism and antirealism on this channel. Olson’s done great work on error theory and I appreciate his cautious approach. While I’m convinced of moral antirealism, it makes for more interesting discussion if there’s a variety of people who fall along various points in their level of confidence (even if I’d prefer everyone be an antirealist).
I had some criticisms of both Sampson and Olson.
(1) Sampson and Olson both assume ordinary people are moral realists. There’s no good evidence this is true, and quite a bit of evidence that it isn’t.
(2) Sampson doesn’t provide much in the way of substantive arguments for realism in his opening remarks. It’s not clear he offers much in the way of an argument at all. Note that Sampson presents a very robust form of realism that includes e.g, epistemic access to moral facts, yet does not present any arguments for this, either. It all comes down to little more than realism seeming true…to Sampson. Well, antirealism seems true to me. Is there any good reason for people to think realism is true if it doesn’t seem true to them?
(3) Sampson employs a common strategy moral realists use: a kind of epistemic piggybacking strategy. The idea is to say “we agree that A, B, and C is true, so why not D?” This move is a subtle burden-shifting maneuver. Rather than presenting a positive case for moral realism, the move is to suggest that one’s reasons for accepting moral realism are on par with one’s reasons for accepting other claims. Now, if one wants to object to realism, someone using this move can try to make you defend some other claim, such as the existence of time or the external world.
(4) Around 3:10 Sampson talks about why people care about realism. “If moral realism is true that would mean that you have moral obligations to help others and not to do bad things to them. So there are demands that are placed on your life that are independent of what you care about or what your goals are, so you can’t just get out of them by changing what you care about or what your goals are.”
This is one of the most puzzling elements of realism, and one not adequately discussed. What on earth does Sampson mean, you can’t get out of them? Suppose moral realism is true. Suppose, also, that you know what the moral facts are. For instance, one of the facts is that you shouldn’t steal.
Now let’s suppose you steal, anyway. Setting aside the consequences of getting caught, being punished, and so on, all of which could occur even if moral realism were false, let’s just consider the consequences of violating the stance-independent moral rule for its own sake. Okay. What are those consequences?
As far as I can tell: none whatsoever. You can just steal and, even if there were some moral fact saying you ought not to, well, so what? Nothing happens if you steal. So when Sampson says you can’t just get out of these moral rules, what does that amount to? For all practical purposes, you can: you can simply ignore the rules and there are no consequences at all. Literally nothing in the universe changes. As far as I’m concerned, that means that, yes you can get out of the moral rules. Indeed, it’s unclear what there was to get out of in the first place.
(5) Olson concedes too much to Sampson. Why does Olson think Sampson’s Moorean move has force? Why does he think moral realism is “prima facie” plausible? What even is it that’s supposed to be plausible?
(6) I don’t think Olson should so willingly grant that stance-independent requirements are coherent (I prefer the term “intelligible”). I don’t think Sampson, or any other realist, could explain what stance-independent moral facts are. This is why many realists claim that the concepts they’re appealing to are primitive that cannot be further explained. In other words, it’s not like realists (or at least non-naturalist realists) are out there offering explanations of what they mean. They aren’t. Rather, they’re out there offering explanations for why they can’t explain what they mean.
Half of all Anglophone philosophers are realists, and the average American is always more realist than the average philosopher
@@whatsinaname691 (1) It's more than half. The latest PhilPapers found 62% of the academic philosophers surveyed endorsed moral realism, while only about 25% endorsed antirealism.
This is better evidence that there is something wrong with the methods of academic philosophy than it is evidence that realism is true. If there are good reasons why I should take this to be any more than very weak evidence for moral realism, I'd love to discuss this with you.
Many people cite the PhilPapers survey as evidence. Yet I don't think we should take it as much evidence. What we'd need is good evidence that a philosophical position is likely to be true if a current majority of philosopher favor it. This would in turn require evidence that philosophers are experts at getting philosophical positions correct. I'm not sure that they are, and there's plenty of research challenging various aspects of philosophical expertise.
Regarding (2):
//the average American is always more realist than the average philosopher//
Almost all empirical evidence suggests otherwise. I've posted about this in response to Huemer making the claim that “It appears that the overwhelming majority of people throughout history were moral realists." This is little more than a widespread myth among academic philosophers. As I said in in response to Huemer's remark:
"So far, our best empirical studies have found that, at least among predominantly WEIRD populations (with some exceptions), that most participants are *not* moral realists.
Across multiple paradigms, Pölzler and Wright (2020) found that a majority of respondents consistently favored some form of antirealism, typically individual subjectivism or cultural relativism.
Taylor Davis (2021) found that when you presented participants with a more comprehensive set of options than earlier studies on metaethics, that the most common response participants favored was noncognitivism, and this held across all five of moral foundations.
Beebe (2015) observed that early versions of measures used to assess folk metaethics didn’t include a noncognitivist option. When it was included, it was a very common response (and the most common response for 3 of 7 moral issues).
Beebe and Sackris (2016) found that metaethical standards appear to change over the course of one’s lifespan, and likewise replicated the high rates of endorsement for antirealist views.
Beebe et al. (2015) found that high levels of metaethical variability (with many participants favoring antirealist responses) replicated in multiple nations, including China, Poland, and Ecuador.
Sarkissian et al. (2011) found that when you explicitly drew attention towards the cultural differences between two people who disagreed about a moral issue, that people shifted towards expressing a more relativist stance, and that this effect was replicated in a population in Singapore.
Even studies that report majority-realist responses still find a significant minority who express antirealist standards. For instance, Zijlstra found that 22.5% of participants reported that moral disagreements feel like “matters of taste” (p. 8 ).
The vast majority of studies consistently show significant interpersonal and intrapersonal variability in folk metaethics. There are maybe a few dozen studies now. There are at best very few (and possibly no) studies that suggest that almost all ordinary people endorse moral realism, in any culture, at any point in their lives, in any population.
[...]
Even if the antirealist intuitions were less common, Huemer is framing the situation as though antirealism was, at best, represented a very tiny portion of views among historical populations. I’m aware of no evidence that this is the case.
Finally, it may be that most people throughout history had no particular stance towards moral realism at all. We are not entitled to presume that people hold one or another of competing philosophical views on the basis of nothing more than our own intuitions. Sure, we might point out, people had moral codes and moral standards all through history. That doesn’t mean they were realists. Sure, people believed in a God or gods. That doesn’t mean they were moral realists.
Maybe every one of these studies is mistaken. If so, then on what basis is Huemer entitled to make sweeping generalizations about the entirety of human psychology, in the complete absence of any substantive body of empirical literature to support such a claim?
References
Beebe, J. R. (2015). The empirical study of folk metaethics. Etyka, 50, 11-28.
Beebe J.R., Qiaoan R., Wysocki T. et al. (2015), “Moral Objectivism in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 15 (3-4): 386-401.
Beebe, J. R., & Sackris, D. (2016). Moral objectivism across the lifespan. Philosophical Psychology, 29(6), 912-929.
Davis, T. (2021). Beyond objectivism: new methods for studying metaethical intuitions. Philosophical Psychology, 34(1), 125-153.
Machery, E. (2018). Morality: A historical invention. In K. Gray & J. Graham (Eds.), The atlas of moral psychology. New York: The Guilford Press: 259-265.
Pölzler, T., & Wright, J. C. (2020). Anti-realist pluralism: A new approach to folk metaethics. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11(1), 53-82.
Zijlstra, L. (2021). Are people implicitly moral objectivists?. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1-19
@@lanceindependent There’s a pretty big gap between particularism and anti realism
@@whatsinaname691 What do you mean? I'm talking about antirealism, not particularism.
@@lanceindependent Moral subjectivism can still fall into Moral particularism (a form of objective morality). When they made the survey, did they all agree that it’s wrong to burn children alive? Yes.
I think we use language like should in cases where most people wouldn't think there was a right answer anyways. Like what restaurant should we go to, what should the price be etc. So it's not clear to me why there would be some need to abolish this language about morality if anti-realism is true.
Yeah it's that continued appeal back to the intuitive normative claims that I don't understand from moral realists. To me it's like saying if the ultima facie justification for anti-realism is complicated shouldn’t we just reject the all things considered view in favor of just the prima facie view without all things considered? Why would we ever think that to be a good method? Imagine a person doing the same because of the prima facie intuition that the earth seems flat in one's experience. It would be so bad to reject all the evidence for it not being flat because it is just so intuitive that the earth is flat.
Well, it’s true that it’s ridiculous for a flat earther to affirm the earth is flat, but it’s not because they have an intuition. The intuition itself does provide prima facie justification, but like Eric said there are some things we might have to throw out. For the flat earther, there’s ample counter evidence against their intuition, so they ought to throw that kind of justification out.
Though In the moral domain, the only and or best evidence we have is intuition.
Technically no one can deny "moral" realism since that refer to the mores which merely describe whatever it happens that people are doing. The issue is actually whether "ethical" realism is true since that refer to ethos which is prescriptive of what people ought to be doing.
Your statement is false because you don't know what the word even means. Morals are NOT descriptions of what people do, they are prescriptions for what people ought to do.
@@Oners82 My statement is false because you merely assert that it's false? What, on your worldview, does it matter if my statement is false? Also, forget the name-game, it matters not, the point is the distinction between description and prescription.
Most people in philosophy don't use the distinction between "morality" and "ethics" like you do.
@@cdrksn
Of course they do, it is the OP that got the distinction incorrect!
@@Oners82 The OP is who I was responding to.
Sampson replied to me and basically said sometimes intuitions are all we have. That may be true but I still find that it adds absolutely no weight to his argument. Our intuitions are wrong all the time, so I think it requires more substantive arguments to try to establish moral realism.
Another point is that my intuitions tell me that realism is obviously false. The idea that moral judgments/truths could come from anywhere other than an agent's subjective consciousness seems utterly absurd to me. Sure, I think torturing people for fun is wrong, but that is my subjective preference because I do not like to see other people suffer fo no reason. As a member of a social species, I have traits such as compasion, empathy and altruism so my ideal world is one in which as many people as possible flourish. Torturing people for fun is in conflict with that.
However the idea that my subjective preference is somehow grounded in some objective truth that lies outside of any agent's consciousness seems extremely implausible to me. Therefore when it comes to intuitions, all we have achieved is stalemate.
I absolutely agree. Philosophers will frequently appeal to "intuitions." But intuitions don't emerge out of the ether. Intuitions are the output of particular psychological mechanisms. I have lots of "intuitions": It seems like there are trees, I don't like certain kinds of music, and so on. I'm not sure those qualify as "intuitions," but they're the output of pretty reliable systems: vision, my ability to make preference judgments based on my memory of past experiences, and so on. What psychological mechanisms are metaethical judgments the output of?
...I have no idea. And I doubt anyone else does, either. Philosophers will just say something is an "intuition" as though the mind is a blackbox, and if it's reliable in situation X, it must be reliable in situation Y. But that's not how brains work. We have a bunch of different subsystems. Some of them might be accurate. Some might not be accurate.
Imagine you have two apps on your phone: a calculator app, and a Bible quote app.
You look at the output of the calculator app: it's highly reliable. Can you conclude that therefore the Bible quote app is also accurate when it delivers quotes about Noah's Ark and talking snakes? No. The output of the Bible quote app is due to a completely different app than the calculator app. Just because the calculator app is reliable, doesn't mean the Bible quote app is.
Just the same, just because some of our psychological mechanisms are reliable and tend to give us true beliefs, doesn't mean all the rest of our psychological mechanisms are reliable.
If the moral realist doesn’t know which psychological processes are causing their realist intuitions, how can they possibly know whether those realist intuitions are trustworthy or not?
(2) //Another point is that my intuitions tell me that realism is obviously false. //
I have very similar intuitions. I’d go further and say that realism doesn’t simply seem false to me, it’s worse than false: it’s literally nonsense. It’s like someone insisting there are facts about how “tasty” food is that have nothing to do with people’s food preferences. It just seems like someone taking some perfectly ordinary and acceptable concept (things taste good/bad *to* people, but things can’t just be stance-independently “tasty”), negating some essential feature of it, and then saying that’s how things really are. Like “a square with no sides.” I have no idea what realists are even talking about, and after dozens if not hundreds of conversations, I’ve begun to suspect moral realism is the result of some kind of deep conceptual confusion.
//However the idea that my subjective preference is somehow grounded in some objective truth that lies outside of any agent's consciousness seems extremely implausible to me.//
Right, so I’m inclined to agree, but again, I’d go further: *what would it even mean* for there to be an “objective truth” about what you “should” do? I’m not sure the notion of stance-independent normative truths is even intelligible.
Suppose the objective truths were not aligned with your goals and interests. Suppose, for instance, that the objective moral truths were things like “spend all day screaming at tables” or “turn all matter in the universe into donuts.” If you found out this is what you “should do” would you do it?
I wouldn’t. I’d go “so much for the objective moral facts.” I only do what I want to do. In fact, I don’t even think I’m capable of doing things I don’t want to do. And I have no interest whatsoever in doing whatever happens to be mind-independently good. In other words, I only want to act based on my subjective values, and I am only capable of doing so. Moral facts, even if they existed, would have no force whatsoever unless we happened to want to to comply with them.
@@lanceindependent
I agree with you in parts, but disagree in many others.
You are right that perception and preferences are not intuitions, so those are not apt analogies. We have intuitions about things such as psychology, causality, ontology, epistemology etc., and while some of our intuitions may be right, others we know to be wrong.
"If the moral realist doesn’t know which psychological processes are causing their realist intuitions"
We actually do have a relatively good idea, but it is irrelevant so not worth pursuing.
"how can they possibly know whether those realist intuitions are trustworthy or not?"
The reliability of an intuition is gauged by how well it tracks reality, not by what psychological mechanism gives rise to it.
To use your app analogy, the bible app could say things that are true just by pure chance even if the app is unreliable.
The psychological mechanisms are irrelevant, what matters is can we justify the resulting intuition.
"I’ve begun to suspect moral realism is the result of some kind of deep conceptual confusion."
I find this to be highly implausible. The very fact that a majority of philosophers, many of whom are extremely intelligent, are realists should make us consider that maybe there is substance to their position.
They have after all studied it in far more depth than you or I, so I do not have the intellectual hubris to dismiss their position as confused.
If all of their arguments were as weak as Sampson's then sure, but many are far more sophisticated than that.
"what would it even mean for there to be an “objective truth” about what you “should” do?"
You demonstrate in your very next paragraph that you know very well what it means, so your alleged suspicion that it isn't intelligible is clearly not genuine.
"Suppose, for instance, that the objective moral truths were things like “spend all day screaming at tables”"
On a pedantic note, that proposition by it's very nature cannot be a moral truth. It is a command, not a moral statement.
And would I do it? No, because it has no moral content so cannot be a moral truth.
Morality governs how conscious, morally capable agents ought to interact. A table is not an agent so an interaction between an agent and a table has no moral content (unless the table is property of an agent or something like that).
"or “turn all matter in the universe into donuts.”"
This again cannot be a moral truth, not only for the reasons given above but also because it is physically impossible. "Ought" implies "can", so no moral truth can ever demand an agent do the physically impossible.
"I don’t even think I’m capable of doing things I don’t want to do."
We all do things we don't really want to do. Whether it be giving money to charity when we would rather spend it on a new shirt, or going to see grandma when we would rather see our mates in the pub, we all do things we don't really want to because we "know" it is the right thing to do.
"Moral facts, even if they existed, would have no force whatsoever unless we happened to want to to comply with them."
Moral facts would have no force on people who only care about their own desires and have no interest in behaving morally, even if they knew what the moral facts were? Well yeah, that's kinda stating the blatantly obvious!
However to people who value morality over their own desires, moral facts clearly WOULD have force. And sure, you can say you need to have that value first, but acting morally is by definition what you OUGHT TO DO. If you choose not to live in accordance with moral facts then you are by definition just an immoral person.
And please don't take any offense to that, I'm not attacking you personally, just responding to the logic of your arguments!
@@Oners82 //And please don't take any offense to that, I'm not attacking you personally, just responding to the logic of your arguments! //
You said I wasn’t being genuine. That is a very serious personal attack. But you say you are not attacking me personally, and ask me not to take offense.
@@lanceindependent
You claimed that realism is unintelligible but then went on to criticise it as a perfectly coherent position that you simply disagree with. Your claim that it is unintelligible is therefore clearly false, but maybe the reason you made the false claim is that you simply didn't think through your argument enough.
Don't get triggered by the word "genuine", I simply misspoke and was clearly referring to the falsehood of your claim, not your character.
So, are you going to respond to anything I argued, or is this a "feign offense and run away" tactic?
I agree with almost everything you said. However if social creatures were to evolve on another planet, wouldn't you expect them to have empathy with others and to value co-operation? Without such qualities it would be very difficult to maintain social cohesion. If you added intelligence and the ability to self reflect and reason like humans, I think its likely they would display morals similar to ours. This is why I think moral realism is more likely true than false.
This is almost certainly due to my ignorance but aren't a lot of these questions resolved by maintaining the social context of morality?
At a basic level, it "seems" wrong to "burn someone for the reading light it provides" because as conscious and social creatures we know that we do not want to be burned for reading light from which we can infer that the hypothetical victim doesn't either. And that despite our present desire to read, burning others for light doesn't actually get us what we want most in life.
Again, I could be way off here, but it seems to be that morality is akin to the dynamics of other disciplines but in a social context. We have an ideal (well-being or sustainable wanted experience etc) and the way to achieve said ideal is through disciplined choice that restrains or denies some of our present wants and temptations in order to cultivate the intended goal over time.
In this view, the question of normativity and obligation is a judgment that my own nature makes on my actions. It's objective in that its stance independent in the moment but ultimately I "Should" be moral because being moral gets me what I want most, or what I want ideally. When someone tells me what what I've done is "wrong," that carries weight because if they are correct the proper interpretation of their judgment is that my actions will not achieve my ends. Essentially, that I'm being nearsighted.
Thoughts?
Correct me if I'm wrong. You are objectively grounding morality in human nature, which has a social component, correct?
@@collin501 essentially, yea. I'd say the "grounding" is a combination of conscious experince itself and our nature (social dynamics etc)
What do you think?
@@landonpontius2478 I think that morality is very much tied to our social relationships and conscious experience because intention is a conscious experience and is very important for morality. But what's interesting to me, is that reason can reinterpret experience to give a different sense of right or wrong and that is true of social dynamics as well.
So what I want to add is that our nature is aimed toward reason and truth that is beyond us. The fact that reasons can change our morality is interesting in itself. Of course, our reason might sometimes be just the evolving thoughts of society. But if we could get people together from different times and places and different moral beliefs, they should still be able to explain their rationale to each other and understand the reasons. They may persuade each other of certain moral truths, but maybe not come to a full consensus. But if they were given doctrines and principles to better judge right and wrong, then in some sense reason would correct the societal dynamics they had inherited. I think people change their minds frequently on moral issues because of reasons. I think if you answer what exactly reason is and how it's grounded, then you've answered the question of how morality is grounded.
That's my current thinking on it.
@@collin501 yea I like that emphasis on reason, I'll have to think on that a bit.
There are plenty of moral theories that lean heavily on reason, especiallys Kant's categorical imperitive, and a common appeal to what a "perfectly rational" agent would choose. The implication being that reason is what gives us the ability to go against our impulses and to instead choose higher values over momentary pleasure or convenience. Which is what we think separates us from other animals.
A really compelling idea that I've stumbled into recently is that morality is the path to the most desirable life.
There seems to be a common message that immorality is more enjoyable but that it just happens to be wrong and that morality ruins all the fun and leads us down a path of discomfort. But I think that's wrong. Morality is a discipline. And like any discipline it does require self-denial, restraint and perhaps discomfort in the moment but it's for the promise of a more enjoyable state later. It's an investment in the future self.
But also like other disciplines, it's difficult to cultivate that lifestyle. But I like this framing because it says that when you do something "wrong" that's the same as being "wrong" about it ultimately fulfilling your desires. We are making a mistake in our pursuit of what we want. That the way to get what you want, in a way that's sustainable and won't end in regret and or misery, is to exercise discipline and take the moral path.
Anyway, i'm rambling now but I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
@@landonpontius2478 I think that's good, happiness or some good end being at least a part of morality, maybe what it's grounded in, but at least a motivation. Definitely part of the moral reasoning process. Also, in my estimation, praise and blame seem to be natural parts of morality and they even seem greater than the natural consequences of the actions themselves. That is, doing something out of a good heart is more praiseworthy even if it had the same effect as doing it with some kind of empty motivation. That might be a feature of virtue ethics more than deontology. But I think all systems, whether virtue, deontology, consequentialism, or whatever else, can have reasons that create a sense of morality, so all moral reasoning contributes to morality. I think for me I may rank them in a certain order, but I want to say they all have moral value as long as they have good reason.
Also when it comes to morality, I think that faith can play a role, but there is also reason involved. For example, there are certain places in the Bible that give a rule with the statement, "I am the Lord." That is, the reason to follow is that the law or command comes from a higher authority than yourself, and faith accentuates this reason because of the greatness of the authority. Other places in the Bible there are appeals to the effects of certain things, maybe because they're fair, or maybe because you would want the same done(or not done) to yourself. There are many other reasons as well given in the Bible, some pragmatic, some based on authority, some based on fairness, some based on rewards, punishments, praise, and blame.
So my approach is to assume that morality is based on all different types of reasoning. How you apply reasons in a given situation is important. People use bad reasons to justify certain things every day. So the simple approach is simply to ask questions, what are your reasons for your moral choices and attitudes.
So I want to ultimately ground morality in all of the reasons for any given action. The moral quality would be based on the quality of the reasons. We might not always know what is the best or right reason, or how to apply certain principles to get to the right answer. But we do at least have some ability to inquire into reasons.
The moral realist defender was actually far much better in his arguments than the error theorist's arguments
I disagree. Now what? Lol
@@cloudoftime It's never clear to me which arguments for moral realism people find convincing or why. When people comment by saying that they think the realist's arguments are better: which ones? Why are they better?
@@lanceindependent At least these kind of comments don't require much typing from us to form a response lol.
Poor discussion, and very poor arguments presentation
Sorry to hear you thought that it was a poor discussion with poor arguments. I guess you think that is the case from both people in the discussion or were you referring just to Eric?
Either they didn't read Nietzche, or they didn't understand him. It's remarkable that, in this day and age, people are still moral realists.
Suppose two people sincerely disagree over some ethical decision, as to which was the right choice. How can this disagreement be resolved? Why are these sorts of disagreements so often impossible to resolve? We can resolve scientific and mathematical and historical disagreements. We point to some sort of test or experiment or evidence.
Is killing a zygote immoral? Is gender affirming surgery immoral? How could we decide these questions in an objective way? Why haven't we? Is fascism good or bad? Is socialism good or bad? Is monarchy good or bad? Is Islam good or bad? Etc.
You realists haven't a leg to stand on. The True Morality is your luminiferous ether. The world would look identical without it. We can't possibly know about it. Why would it be aligned with the doings and experiences of the great etc grandchildren of bacteria? It's unabashedly anthropocentric. Humans care about humans and that is taken as a good reason for humans to help and protect and care for other humans. This is just a descriptive fact. And it seems perfectly sane to me. But it's not like they are misaligned with something metaphysical if they act antisocially. Nevertheless, it seems sane for that person's community to deal with such a person, maybe in a punitive way. All justice is man-made or luck, as seen from the perspective of a given man/woman.
There is no objectively correct reference frame (Galileo, Einstein). And yet, we all can agree on what is moving or not. Why? Because we all share a reference frame: Earth. And in a similar way, there is no correct morality. And yet, we can generally mostly agree on what is right or wrong, better and worse. Because we all share a reference frame: human.
Athiests like you who rebel against GOD will Become mad like neitzche. . Dr Craig debunks the lie used by athiests that we don't understand nietzche. Why should we accept your understanding of nietzche
I'm not a moral realist (and in fact I think they're all just talking gibberish), so it pains me greatly to sort of defend them a bit, but here I go: whether a moral proposition is true or not is independent of whether we know (or can know) that it is true or not.
The UA-cam debate bro way of saying that is "you are confusing ontology with epistemology."
To illustrate, someone could say "there is an odd number of electrons in the universe," and that statement has a truth value, but there's no way to know what that truth value is. The fact that we can never know whether that statement is true does not mean that the statement doesn't have a truth value.
So anyway, your approach in this comment does have some surface appeal, but it doesn't ultimately work to show that moral realism is the nonsense that it is.
We ought reflect the God. Bear His image. Be what we were designed for.
We aren't designed, we are evolved, and your god is imaginary.
I am quite surprised at how weak Sampson's arguments are.
It might seem self-evidently true that the sun orbits the earth, time runs at the same pace for all observers and there are twice as many odd and even numbers as there are just even nunmbers, but all of these beliefs would be false.
Personal, subjective intuitions are a terrible way of understanding reality and will never be able to establish objective truths.
And regarding the format, it seems rather unfair to give the realist a lengthy opening statement but not do the same for the anti-realist.
yeah his argumens are "it's true because I feel like it" and "it's true because it's obviously true". According to this logic we should claim that people can fly because one feels like he can fly after taking certain drugs. As soon as you draw the conclusion from a personal experience it becomes subjective and relative.
The problem with this argument is that it leads to global skepticism/scientific anti realism. Philosophers and scientists alike believe a lot of things for pragmatic reasons, and will make the argument that shaving morality off is arbitrary.
@@creosjediacademyguides7103 This is a strawman. A gross simplification of the argument, at best.