Wait, if moral realism is true, doesn't it mean some philosopher one day will just pull a Moses and descend from the ivory tower bearing morality itself, that is, the correct moral positions to hold on every issue, and everyone will have to accept it, the way we are forced to accept the conclusions of science? And if that can't happen, then how can moral realism be true?
If we are going to try to make intuitionism work, we need to deal with the problem that sometimes our intuitions conflict (even within a single person). I guess it's fashionable to mention concepts like "reflective equilibrium" and then move on with life, but not many people appear to be really working on how to think about these things.
By the looks, Terry Hogan raises some interesting concerns about Bayesian epistemology:
It seems obvious that people have intuitions about what is right and what is wrong. It also seems obvious that people can have intuitions that are wrong, and come to conclusions that are incorrect without being emotionally passionate about it. I'm not really sure why anyone would attempt to argue that just because it is possible to be wrong, that therefore there is no such thing as being right. The other arguments against moral realism also seem rather silly. However, concluding from all of this that we can intuit moral truths, and then be sure that we got it right ourselves is not convincing. In the great span of human time on this planet, it was only a blink of an eye go that it was intuitively obvious that killing your enemies' children was a perfectly moral thing to do unless you wanted to take them as slaves. It was also intuitively obvious that the sun moved, and the earth did not. Advances in knowledge allow us to be certain that our ancestors were wrong about the latter, but there have been no advances to prove they were wrong about the former. Obviously, I prefer to live in a world where nobody is killing my children or taking them as slaves, but that is not a philosophical argument on my part.
Wait, if moral realism is true, doesn't it mean some philosopher one day will just pull a Moses and descend from the ivory tower bearing morality itself, that is, the correct moral positions to hold on every issue, and everyone will have to accept it, the way we are forced to accept the conclusions of science? And if that can't happen, then how can moral realism be true?
If we are going to try to make intuitionism work, we need to deal with the problem that sometimes our intuitions conflict (even within a single person). I guess it's fashionable to mention concepts like "reflective equilibrium" and then move on with life, but not many people appear to be really working on how to think about these things.
By the looks, Terry Hogan raises some interesting concerns about Bayesian epistemology:
https://thorgan.faculty.arizona.edu/sites/thorgan.faculty.arizona.edu/files/Troubles%20for%20Bayesian%20%20Formal%20Epistemology.pdf
It seems obvious that people have intuitions about what is right and what is wrong. It also seems obvious that people can have intuitions that are wrong, and come to conclusions that are incorrect without being emotionally passionate about it. I'm not really sure why anyone would attempt to argue that just because it is possible to be wrong, that therefore there is no such thing as being right. The other arguments against moral realism also seem rather silly. However, concluding from all of this that we can intuit moral truths, and then be sure that we got it right ourselves is not convincing. In the great span of human time on this planet, it was only a blink of an eye go that it was intuitively obvious that killing your enemies' children was a perfectly moral thing to do unless you wanted to take them as slaves. It was also intuitively obvious that the sun moved, and the earth did not. Advances in knowledge allow us to be certain that our ancestors were wrong about the latter, but there have been no advances to prove they were wrong about the former. Obviously, I prefer to live in a world where nobody is killing my children or taking them as slaves, but that is not a philosophical argument on my part.