Position on moral realism 

I'll take moral realism to describe all those positions which developed, whether in Christian, Islamic, Confucian or even Buddhist worldings, which feel the world would fall apart if people were not moral, that morality is somehow bound up in the substance of the world, and that one has direct access to this realm as a human (other animals not so much). Often there is a keystone element like god or karma which has to exist because otherwise no one would be human, particularly in naive moral realism. And where we would all be animals and not moral at all.

It's a common sense view in large measure. And one of lived practice rather than inquiry or comparison.

Morality and it’s derivative “moral philosophy” within which 'moral realism' is a curlicue, are outcomes of our evolutionary past and more recent historical unfoldings. This means that common sense views of anything that are uninformed by our big history are lacking an important frame, and if they also lack an understanding of even recent historical processes they may have no insight into their impermanence and contingent idosyncracies. Common sense may be completely ad hoc and politically drenched.

Common sense may throw everything or nothing into the… —gap, depending on time and circumstance.

The curlicue of moral realism is a derivative position that takes common sense experience of morality as not being an outcome of any process. Perhaps common sense says nothing about this negatively or positively, but in recent millennia either God puts 'it all' into order, or, if evolution appears instead of god or karma as a gap filler, then morality is real because evolutionary processes must moved toward that moral peak in a fitness landscape, as if moral imperatives provide a niche of survival (I suspect this is Sam Harris' position, but it would be too boring for him to put it here in this type of talk so we might never know). It some need to align all the gap with some consistency and then the order either emerges (complexifying into existence) or arises (immanently)

Neither this God'wat'dunnit nor a Sam Harris caricature of evolution selecting morality per se is close to my position.

I argue that evolution only selects, at the very most, for the urge to organise our place in what then becomes the world, and how we do that in practice… —how we create menus, meals or cusines, or socks, dress-ups or fashions… —are secondary, and arguments of good taste or style are tertiary outcomes, even if the substance of craft and skill combine all levels, meta & mean, into one bloodsoup dish at easter while wearing a hooded cassock in velvet and ermine at the crack of dawn.

I do not offer this worlding as a solution but as a gap that should be allowed to remain as long as is it is required.

The common sense of moral realism often puts these outcomes (morality/religion/art/polity) and their derivatives as prior. As cause. As causal. This is an error.

These thoughts were spurred by the occasion of the the following paper. It debunks Moral Realism from an evolutionary perspective, but from within the thickets of those outcomes called moral philosophy. Philosophy is a highly derivative form but is at least aware of times past, if only as a source to maintain disputation (the dialectic Valhalla).

Evolutionary Debunking of (Arguments for) Moral Realism by Arnon Levy & Itamar Weinshtock Saadon, (forthcoming) Synthese.

Abstract : Moral realism is often taken to have common sense and initial appearances on its side. Indeed, by some lights, common sense and initial appearances underlie all the central positive arguments for moral realism. We offer a kind of debunking argument, taking aim at realism’s common sense standing. Our argument differs from familiar debunking moves both in its empirical assumptions and in how it targets the realist position. We argue that if natural selection explains the objective phenomenology of moral deliberation and judgement, then this undermines arguments from that phenomenology. This results in a simpler, and in some ways more direct, challenge to realism. It is also less vulnerable to the main objections that have been leveled against such arguments. If accepted, our conclusion should make a real difference to the dialectic in this area. It means that neither realism nor its denial is the default, to-be-refuted, position.

From the last lines of the abstract:

“It means that neither realism nor its denial is the default, to-be-refuted, position. It also means that even simple versions of metaethical subjectivism might pose a real threat to the realist.”

What a great gap.

From the middle:

“ if natural selection explains the objective phenomenology of moral deliberation and judgement, then arguments from that phenomenology are found wanting.”

To repeat, common sense unaware of its evolutionary “history” is no such thing, common sense is then just an epicycle of fashion, like ‘a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.' George Orwell 1984.

First version in April 2023 on substack.