I’m worried that the ideas presented in my ethics classes are misguided and “conceptually corrupt”
No need to worry about it—have no doubt that they’re conceptually corrupt.
From your comments, I think you would appreciate Stirner:
Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole
world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that
beckons to you. You have a fixed idea!
Do not think that I am jesting or speaking figuratively when I regard those persons who cling to the Higher,
and (because the vast majority belongs under this head) almost the whole world of men, as veritable fools, fools
in a madhouse. What is it, then, that is called a “fixed idea”? An idea that has subjected the man to itself. When
you recognize, with regard to such a fixed idea, that it is a folly, you shut its slave up in an asylum. And is the
truth of the faith, say, which we are not to doubt; the majesty of (e. g.) the people, which we are not to strike at
(he who does is guilty of – lese-majesty); virtue, against which the censor is not to let a word pass, that morality
may be kept pure; – are these not “fixed ideas”? Is not all the stupid chatter of (e. g.) most of our newspapers the
babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, Christianity, etc., and only seem to go about free
because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?
You write:
I’m a moral non-realist and for that reason I find (and when in college- found) normative moral theories to be really silly. Just as a class on theology seems pretty silly to someone who doesn’t believe in God so does normative moral theory to someone who doesn’t think there is anything real to describe in normative theory. But I think such courses can still be productive if you translate all the material in natural/sociological terms.
Isn’t it strange that the people who believe in fantasy commands from existence are the ones called moral “realists”?
But I think there is something real to describe in normative theory—one can describe how the moral algorithms in our heads work, and the distribution of different algorithms through the population. Haidt has made progress in turning morality from an exercise in battling insanities to a study of how our moral sense works, in the same way one might study how our sense of taste or smell works. Then given any particular set of moral algorithms, one can derive normative claims from that set.
No need to worry about it—have no doubt that they’re conceptually corrupt.
From your comments, I think you would appreciate Stirner:
You write:
Isn’t it strange that the people who believe in fantasy commands from existence are the ones called moral “realists”?
But I think there is something real to describe in normative theory—one can describe how the moral algorithms in our heads work, and the distribution of different algorithms through the population. Haidt has made progress in turning morality from an exercise in battling insanities to a study of how our moral sense works, in the same way one might study how our sense of taste or smell works. Then given any particular set of moral algorithms, one can derive normative claims from that set.
There is lots of exciting descriptive work to do. But that isn’t normative theory, it’s descriptive moral psychology.
You can still have normative theory in the axiomatic sense—if (these moral algorithms), then these results.