Maybe it wasn’t a sincere moral judgment, they were just echoing what they’ve been told, like a blind person saying stop signs are red.
But a blind person can still sincerely say that “stop signs are red”. Their justification for saying so may be different from a sighted person’s, but the statement is still sincere (the blind person really believes it).
Is it part of the internalist claim that it is just impossible to acquire moral knowledge by such third-party means? For instance, simply observing what other people say about “right” and “wrong” and building an inductive concept about what actions the words describe, but without any emotional preference for “right” over “wrong”?
I can’t speak for internalism, but it certainly seems to me that what I’m doing when I say that it’s wrong for me to eat pork by the standards of Judaism is different from what i would be doing, were I an observant Jew, if I said it was wrong for me to eat pork.
But still, how does this break the analogy with “red” for a blind person? For instance, a blind person could sincerely believe all of the following:
“Stop signs are red”
“My evidence for believing that stop signs are red is that sighted people have told me so”
“Red things aren’t red just because people say they are. Rather they have some inherent property to do with the way light reflects off them which causes people to describe them as red”
“Some religious sects call certain signs red which everyone else calls orange, but these sects are wrong; the signs are in fact orange. Members of the sects have been brought up that way, and are sincere in their beliefs, but they are still wrong”
“If I were a member of such a sect, I’d probably also believe that the orange signs are red”
In short it seems possible to have a complete and sincere set of beliefs in “red” as an objective world property, without ever seeing red yourself or ever having any emotional response to it. I don’t immediately see why the same can’t be true for moral beliefs.
It’s certainly true that there are two different things being done by psychopaths and nonpsychopaths in the original example, but it might be that both of those things count as genuine moral beliefs, just as the two different things involving a stop sign can count as genuine beliefs about color.
OTOH, it might be that only one of them counts as a genuine moral belief, just as only one of the things involving a stop sign counts as a genuine perception of color.
But a blind person can still sincerely say that “stop signs are red”. Their justification for saying so may be different from a sighted person’s, but the statement is still sincere (the blind person really believes it).
Is it part of the internalist claim that it is just impossible to acquire moral knowledge by such third-party means? For instance, simply observing what other people say about “right” and “wrong” and building an inductive concept about what actions the words describe, but without any emotional preference for “right” over “wrong”?
I can’t speak for internalism, but it certainly seems to me that what I’m doing when I say that it’s wrong for me to eat pork by the standards of Judaism is different from what i would be doing, were I an observant Jew, if I said it was wrong for me to eat pork.
But still, how does this break the analogy with “red” for a blind person? For instance, a blind person could sincerely believe all of the following:
“Stop signs are red”
“My evidence for believing that stop signs are red is that sighted people have told me so”
“Red things aren’t red just because people say they are. Rather they have some inherent property to do with the way light reflects off them which causes people to describe them as red”
“Some religious sects call certain signs red which everyone else calls orange, but these sects are wrong; the signs are in fact orange. Members of the sects have been brought up that way, and are sincere in their beliefs, but they are still wrong”
“If I were a member of such a sect, I’d probably also believe that the orange signs are red”
In short it seems possible to have a complete and sincere set of beliefs in “red” as an objective world property, without ever seeing red yourself or ever having any emotional response to it. I don’t immediately see why the same can’t be true for moral beliefs.
Fair enough.
It’s certainly true that there are two different things being done by psychopaths and nonpsychopaths in the original example, but it might be that both of those things count as genuine moral beliefs, just as the two different things involving a stop sign can count as genuine beliefs about color.
OTOH, it might be that only one of them counts as a genuine moral belief, just as only one of the things involving a stop sign counts as a genuine perception of color.