ruby sparks
Contributor
Now you can tell me that illness is different from morality, etc., and you still fail to see that the analogy is apt because the same argument that you are using against morality, if it worked, it would work against illness/health as well.
No. In the case of illness there are facts (and properties) that are independent of attitudes. In the case of morality, that is an unresolved issue. So whatever way you are using illness as a comparison, it could be inapt and the same arguments in favour or against could not necessarily be used validly for both. Gustatory taste or beauty would be better because they seem to be on a par with morality in that they are things which are 'merely' sensed or mentally held to be the case (with caveats for the things that have been suggested as bases for morality).
I am not even sure what you mean when you say 'the argument I am using against morality' in the first place.
If that were true, not only illness realism fails, but everything. Science and everything else relies on common sense human intuitions, like the intuition that we can generally (i.e., in nearly all cases) trust our senses, our memories, generally our faculties, and of course our epistemic intuition that allows us to make epistemic probabilistic assessments, and so on. There is no way around it. When people reject some common sense intuition on the basis of new evidence, they are actually rejecting it on the basis of new evidence and a stronger commonsense intuition (of course, in many cases, they just reject common sense moral intuitions because they are confused by RIP).
What we are investigating here is not clearly something about the outside world (eg illness). It is about psychological/internal/brain beliefs. In that domain especially, what we think things are is an unreliable guide to what is objectively the case and has been shown to be, over and over. Here is a suggested 'Top 20' of some of the inherent flaws involved in both human intuitions and reasoning:
1. Illusions of agency and free will (including attributing these to entities which don't have them).
2. Illusions of self.
3. False beliefs and superstitious thinking generally (eg conspiracy theories, gambler's fallacy, curses, luck, etc)
4. Teleology (the pervasive idea that things happen for a purpose).
5. Pattern-finding (when there is no pattern).
6. Anthropomorphism (the projecting of human attributes incorrectly).
7. Causality (we over-read this).
8. Various illusions of perception (vision, hearing etc).
9. Time (our brains muck about with this).
10. Over-estimating the role of consciousness (underestimating the role of what are the bulk of our mental processes, the non-conscious ones).
11. Over-confidence bias.
12. Self-serving bias.
13. Herd mentality.
14. Loss aversion.
15. Framing bias.
16. Narrative fallacy.
17. Anchoring bias.
18. Confirmation bias.
19. Hindsight bias.
20. Correlation bias.
And in at least some cases, no amount of reasoning can dislodge the false beliefs. Others are merely 'sticky' (tend to persist).
I might even suggest that if we are wrong about 1 and 2 above, then we are likely fundamentally wrong about morality from the very start.
There are also false beliefs about the way the physical world operates which for most humans are intuitively wrong. Most people not trained in Newtonian physics will think that a ball dropped by a man walking along will fall vertically down. And as for quantum physics, most people, even some trained physicists, have significant trouble getting their heads intuitively around the idea that things can be everywhere at once and that the appearance that they are in one particular location is merely probabilistic.
It is one thing to say that our unreliable brain allows us to navigate the world successfully most of the time, in an ad hoc way, and another thing to say that it gets things factually right, and this is especially true of 'mental' (internal) things such as beliefs. These have often been shown to be incorrect. The takeaway lesson is 'be sceptical about the true nature of your mental beliefs' (even if they have not yet been demonstrated to be wrong).
I did not even include religion, or 'spirituality' in general (the sense that there is some 'higher or other reality' or a supernatural realm or that there are souls, or for that matter auras or healing crystals) though I easily could have beefed up my list with things like that. They are very common false beliefs and quite 'sticky'.
Just on the topic of religion specifically though. I don't agree that just because it's an ideology it necessarily disqualifies moral judgements, especially if we realise that the moral rules of religion do not actually come from the god believed to be the source of them. In an important way, the moral content of religion consists of the morality of the writers and as such is a factual record of what they held to be moral and immoral. Men merely invented god to serve as an arbiter (a 'wise ruler') for the beliefs they already had about morality, whatever those were at the time of writing.
As such the false belief that there is a god deciding moral issues is only a skew in a limited way. And in any case, people, either individually or within the vast multitude of different religious subsets, generally pick and choose which bits to accept or reject and always have done.
1. There is a fact of the matter as to whether a moral assessment (e.g., whether Ted Bundy was a bad person) is true (this should be understood with some tolerance for vagueness, e.g., there is a fact of the matter as to whether an animal is a lion - but there might be some vagueness, as mentioned earlier).
2. There are moral properties, e.g., some humans sometimes behave immorally, some humans sometimes behave in a morally praiseworthy manner.
I am not sure what you mean by 'properties' but in any case, the more interesting first question here is whether all moral judgements are moral facts. I understand that some moral realists only claim that there are some. Are you one of them?
And I think you should move away from 'easy' examples, such as killing for fun, or at the other extreme, shoe-wearing customs. Get your hands dirty with the trickier ones in between. Although if you are only claiming that some moral judgements (eg killing for fun) are moral facts, then you don't need to.
Now, how would the fact that we ascertain morality by means of a human intuition make a dent on realism so defined? What does the fact that we use a human intuition - just as in the illness case, or the redness case, etc. - have any relevance at all?
There is more to illness than our intuitions about it. For that reason I have no idea why you carry on using the comparison with illness.
Regarding colour, I can't get past the claim that if we are not talking about colour in the everyday sense then we are not talking about colour, which is obviously questionable.
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