Could you provide a reference for that? At least the SEP entry on the topic doesn’t clearly state this. I’m also unsure of what difference this makes in practice—I guess we could come up with a new word for all the people who are both moral antirealist and utilitarian-aside-for-being-moral-antirealists, but I’m not sure if the difference in their behavior and beliefs is large enough for that to be worth it.
The SEP entry for consequentialism says it “is the view that normative properties depend only on consequences”, implying a belief in normative properties, which means moral realism.
If you want to describe people’s actions, a utilitarian and a world-utility-maximizing non-realist would act similarly, but there would be differences in attitude: a utilitarian would say and feel like he is doing the morally right thing and those who disagree with him are in error, whereas the non-realist would merely feel like he is doing what he wants and that there is nothing special about wanting to maximize world utility—to him, it’s just another preference, like collecting stamps or eating ice cream.
A non-consequentialist could be a moral realist as well, such as if they were a deontologist, so it’s not a good measurement.
Also, consequentialism and moral realism aren’t always well-defined terms.
Edit: That survey’s results are strange. Twenty people answered that they’re moral realists but non-cognitivists, though moral realism is necessarily cognitivist.
Could you provide a reference for that? At least the SEP entry on the topic doesn’t clearly state this. I’m also unsure of what difference this makes in practice—I guess we could come up with a new word for all the people who are both moral antirealist and utilitarian-aside-for-being-moral-antirealists, but I’m not sure if the difference in their behavior and beliefs is large enough for that to be worth it.
Non egoistic subjectivists?
The SEP entry for consequentialism says it “is the view that normative properties depend only on consequences”, implying a belief in normative properties, which means moral realism.
If you want to describe people’s actions, a utilitarian and a world-utility-maximizing non-realist would act similarly, but there would be differences in attitude: a utilitarian would say and feel like he is doing the morally right thing and those who disagree with him are in error, whereas the non-realist would merely feel like he is doing what he wants and that there is nothing special about wanting to maximize world utility—to him, it’s just another preference, like collecting stamps or eating ice cream.
This is getting way too much into a debate over definitions so I’ll stop after this comment, but I’ll just point out that, among professional philosophers, there is no correlation between endorsing consequentialism and endorsing moral realism.
A non-consequentialist could be a moral realist as well, such as if they were a deontologist, so it’s not a good measurement.
Also, consequentialism and moral realism aren’t always well-defined terms.
Edit: That survey’s results are strange. Twenty people answered that they’re moral realists but non-cognitivists, though moral realism is necessarily cognitivist.