Posts from — March 2011

The difficulty of arguing for an objective morality is not necessarily an argument against the validity of such a pursuit, since moral anti-realism, in its different forms, is also difficult to argue for. Furthermore, there is a sense in which we feel quite strongly, more so than we do for our taste in music, say, that morality is objective, and that one can be wrong about it. This feeling is almost as strong as the conviction that the chair exists, despite there being no inarguable philosophical argument in its favour.

But it must be confessed that the nature of moral objectivity, if it is not just an illusion, is very different from the fact of Newton’s laws or of 2 and 2 equalling 4. I would instead argue for what I call an evolutionary moral pragmatism, which aims to render the metaethical question of objectivity and subjectivity irrelevant, and strives rather to find the objectively best morality under certain conditions and based on certain premisses which are taken to be reasonable and easily agreed upon, in the same way that the objectively best medical operation is one which most effectively cures the given ailment, regardless of one’s eccentric taste for a different kind of success.  There is nothing in medicine that can impel a doctor to undertake an operation correctly other than the possibility of losing his job, an outcome which medicine itself cannot render undesirable. [Read more →]