As of August 2011, if you’ve read this then you probably know more about how human values actually work than almost every professional metaethicist on Earth. The general lesson here is that you can often out-pace most philosophers simply by reading what today’s leading scientists have to say about a given topic instead of reading what philosophers say about it.
Do philosophers actually talk about human motivation in the descriptive behavioral summary sense? (Or are you talking about experimental philosophers? But you do mention metaethicists...) In particular, while it might be the case that metaethicists could benefit from knowing this stuff, are metaethicists among the philosophers who one shouldn’t learn from on this topic, do they write about it (in the descriptive, as opposed to the prescriptive/normative sense)?
I guess if you count experimental philosophers like Joshua Greene & Fiery Cushman as metaethicists, then there are a few metaethicists who know some of this stuff. But I was thinking of more traditional armchair metaethicists.
Metaethicists do a wide variety of work. A few have written things worth reading, like Richard Joyce and Stephen Finlay.
Metaethicists discuss a broad range of issues, many of them invoking descriptive claims about human motivation. For example, many of them argue (largely via introspection) that motivational internalism is true in humans. But the recent psychology/neuroscience of human motivation makes this position unlikely to be true, as I’ll argue in a future post.
Do philosophers actually talk about human motivation in the descriptive behavioral summary sense? (Or are you talking about experimental philosophers? But you do mention metaethicists...) In particular, while it might be the case that metaethicists could benefit from knowing this stuff, are metaethicists among the philosophers who one shouldn’t learn from on this topic, do they write about it (in the descriptive, as opposed to the prescriptive/normative sense)?
I guess if you count experimental philosophers like Joshua Greene & Fiery Cushman as metaethicists, then there are a few metaethicists who know some of this stuff. But I was thinking of more traditional armchair metaethicists.
Metaethicists do a wide variety of work. A few have written things worth reading, like Richard Joyce and Stephen Finlay.
Metaethicists discuss a broad range of issues, many of them invoking descriptive claims about human motivation. For example, many of them argue (largely via introspection) that motivational internalism is true in humans. But the recent psychology/neuroscience of human motivation makes this position unlikely to be true, as I’ll argue in a future post.
This comment to Jack’s recent post discusses motivational internalism and some of that neuroscience.