There’s at least one other intuition about the nature of morality to distinguish from the as-preference and as-given ideas. It’s the view that there are only moral emotions—guilt, anger and so on—plus the situations that cause those emotions in different people. That’s it. Morality on this view might profitably be compared with something like humour. Certain things cause amusement in certain people, and it’s an objective fact that they do. At the same time, if two people fail to find the same thing funny, there wouldn’t normally be any question of one of them failing to perceive some public feature of the world. And like the moral emotions, amusement is sui generis—it isn’t reducible to preference, though it may often coincide with it. The idea of being either a realist or a reductionist about humour seems, I think, absurd. Why shouldn’t the same go for morality?
There’s at least one other intuition about the nature of morality to distinguish from the as-preference and as-given ideas. It’s the view that there are only moral emotions—guilt, anger and so on—plus the situations that cause those emotions in different people. That’s it. Morality on this view might profitably be compared with something like humour. Certain things cause amusement in certain people, and it’s an objective fact that they do. At the same time, if two people fail to find the same thing funny, there wouldn’t normally be any question of one of them failing to perceive some public feature of the world. And like the moral emotions, amusement is sui generis—it isn’t reducible to preference, though it may often coincide with it. The idea of being either a realist or a reductionist about humour seems, I think, absurd. Why shouldn’t the same go for morality?