Actually, I don’t know if you and Boghossian really disagree here. I think Boghossian is trying to argue that your normative preferences arise from your opinions about what the moral facts are. So I think he’d say:
IEPB: “People ought to do X” is your preference because you are assuming “People ought to do X” is a moral fact. It’s a different issue whether your assumption is true or false, or justified or unjustified, but the assumption is being made nevertheless.
For example, when you exhort IEPB to not make mediocre philosophy arguments, and say that that’s your preference, it’s because you are assuming that the claim, “philosophy professors ought not to make mediocre philosophy arguments”, is in fact, true.
IEPB: “People ought to do X” is your preference because you are assuming “People ought to do X” is a moral fact. It’s a different issue whether your assumption is true or false, or justified or unjustified, but the assumption is being made nevertheless.
If my mental model of moral philosophers is correct, this contravenes how moral philosophers usually define/use the phrase “moral fact”. Moral facts are supposed to (somehow) inhere in the outside world in a mind-independent way, so the origin of my “People ought to do X” assumption does matter. Because my ultimate justification of such an assumption would be my own preferences (whether or not alloyed with empirical claims about the outside world), I couldn’t legitimately call “People ought to do X” a moral fact, as “moral fact” is typically understood.
Consequently I think this line of rebuttal would only be open to Boghossian if he had an idiosyncratic definition of “moral fact”. But it is possible that our disagreement reduces to a disagreement over how to define “moral facts”.
For example, when you exhort IEPB to not make mediocre philosophy arguments, and say that that’s your preference, it’s because you are assuming that the claim, “philosophy professors ought not to make mediocre philosophy arguments”, is in fact, true.
Introspecting, this feels like a reversal of causality. My own internal perception is that the preference motivates the claim rather than vice versa. (Not that introspection is necessarily reliable evidence here!)
I agree that any disagreement might come down to what we mean by moral claims.
I don’t know Boghossian’s own particular commitments, but baseline moral realism is a fairly weak claim without any metaphysics of where these facts come from. I quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia:
Moral realism is not a particular substantive moral view nor does it carry a distinctive metaphysical commitment over and above the commitment that comes with thinking moral claims can be true or false and some are true.
A simple interpretation that I can think of: when you say that you prefer that people do X, typically, you also prefer that other people prefer that people do X. This, you could take as sufficient to say “People ought to do X”. (This has the flavor the Kantian categorical imperative. Essentially, I’m proposing a sufficient condition for something to be a moral claim, namely, that it be desired to be universalized. But I don’t want to claim that this a necessary condition.)
At any rate, whether the above definition stands or falls, you can see that it doesn’t have any metaphysical commitment to some free-floating, human-independent (to be be distinguished from mind-independent) facts embedded in the fabric of the universe. Hopefully, there are other ways of parsing moral claims in such ways so that the metaphysics isn’t too demanding.
I might’ve been influenced too much by people speaking to me (in face-to-face conversation) as if moral realism entails objectivity of moral facts, and maybe also influenced too much by the definitions I’ve seen online. Wikipedia’s “Moral realism” article starts outright with
Moral realism (also ethical realism or moral Platonism) is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world (that is, features independent of subjective opinion), some of which may be true to the extent that they report those features accurately. This makes moral realism a non-nihilist form of ethical cognitivism with an ontological orientation, standing in opposition to all forms of moral anti-realism and moral skepticism, including ethical subjectivism (which denies that moral propositions refer to objective facts),
and the IEP’s article on MR has an entire section, “Moral objectivity”, the beginning of which seems to drive at moral facts and MR relying on a basis beyond (human) mind states. The intro concludes,
Neither subjectivists nor relativists are obliged to deny that there is literal moral knowledge. Of course, according to them, moral truths imply truths about human psychology. Moral realists must maintain that moral truths —and hence moral knowledge—do not depend on facts about our desires and emotions for their truth.
At the same time, the SEP does seem to offer a less narrow definition of MR which allows for moral facts to have a non-objective basis.
I wonder whether I’ve anchored too much on old-fashioned, “classic” MR which does require moral facts to have objective status (whether that’s a mind-independent or human-independent status), while more recent moral realist philosophies are content to relax this constraint. Maybe I’m a moral realist to 21st century philosophers and a moral irrealist to 20th century philosophers!
“Moral facts” (i.e. _facts_ about _morality_) are overall neither objective nor subjective; they’re intersubjective, in that they are shared at least throughout a given community and moral code, and to some extent they’re even shared among most human communities. (Somewhat paradoxically, when talking about the most widely-shared values—precisely those values that are closest to being ‘objective’, if only in an everyday sense! - we don’t even use the term “morals” or “morality” but instead prefer to talk about “ethics”, which in a stricter sense is rather the subject of how different facets of morality might interrelate and balance each other, what it even means to argue about morality, and the practical implications of these things for everyday life.)
Whether “moral facts” are human-independent is an interesting question in itself. I think one could definitely argue that a number of basic moral facts that most human communities share (such as the value of ‘protection’ and ‘thriving’) are in fact also shared by many social animals. If true, this would clearly imply a human-independent status for these moral facts. Perhaps more importantly, it would also point to the need to attribute some sort of moral relevance and personhood at least to the most ‘highly-developed’ social animals, such as the great apes (hominids) and perhaps even dolphins and whales.
Actually, I don’t know if you and Boghossian really disagree here. I think Boghossian is trying to argue that your normative preferences arise from your opinions about what the moral facts are. So I think he’d say:
IEPB: “People ought to do X” is your preference because you are assuming “People ought to do X” is a moral fact. It’s a different issue whether your assumption is true or false, or justified or unjustified, but the assumption is being made nevertheless.
For example, when you exhort IEPB to not make mediocre philosophy arguments, and say that that’s your preference, it’s because you are assuming that the claim, “philosophy professors ought not to make mediocre philosophy arguments”, is in fact, true.
If my mental model of moral philosophers is correct, this contravenes how moral philosophers usually define/use the phrase “moral fact”. Moral facts are supposed to (somehow) inhere in the outside world in a mind-independent way, so the origin of my “People ought to do X” assumption does matter. Because my ultimate justification of such an assumption would be my own preferences (whether or not alloyed with empirical claims about the outside world), I couldn’t legitimately call “People ought to do X” a moral fact, as “moral fact” is typically understood.
Consequently I think this line of rebuttal would only be open to Boghossian if he had an idiosyncratic definition of “moral fact”. But it is possible that our disagreement reduces to a disagreement over how to define “moral facts”.
Introspecting, this feels like a reversal of causality. My own internal perception is that the preference motivates the claim rather than vice versa. (Not that introspection is necessarily reliable evidence here!)
I agree that any disagreement might come down to what we mean by moral claims.
I don’t know Boghossian’s own particular commitments, but baseline moral realism is a fairly weak claim without any metaphysics of where these facts come from. I quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia:
A simple interpretation that I can think of: when you say that you prefer that people do X, typically, you also prefer that other people prefer that people do X. This, you could take as sufficient to say “People ought to do X”. (This has the flavor the Kantian categorical imperative. Essentially, I’m proposing a sufficient condition for something to be a moral claim, namely, that it be desired to be universalized. But I don’t want to claim that this a necessary condition.)
At any rate, whether the above definition stands or falls, you can see that it doesn’t have any metaphysical commitment to some free-floating, human-independent (to be be distinguished from mind-independent) facts embedded in the fabric of the universe. Hopefully, there are other ways of parsing moral claims in such ways so that the metaphysics isn’t too demanding.
I might’ve been influenced too much by people speaking to me (in face-to-face conversation) as if moral realism entails objectivity of moral facts, and maybe also influenced too much by the definitions I’ve seen online. Wikipedia’s “Moral realism” article starts outright with
and the IEP’s article on MR has an entire section, “Moral objectivity”, the beginning of which seems to drive at moral facts and MR relying on a basis beyond (human) mind states. The intro concludes,
At the same time, the SEP does seem to offer a less narrow definition of MR which allows for moral facts to have a non-objective basis.
I wonder whether I’ve anchored too much on old-fashioned, “classic” MR which does require moral facts to have objective status (whether that’s a mind-independent or human-independent status), while more recent moral realist philosophies are content to relax this constraint. Maybe I’m a moral realist to 21st century philosophers and a moral irrealist to 20th century philosophers!
“Moral facts” (i.e. _facts_ about _morality_) are overall neither objective nor subjective; they’re intersubjective, in that they are shared at least throughout a given community and moral code, and to some extent they’re even shared among most human communities. (Somewhat paradoxically, when talking about the most widely-shared values—precisely those values that are closest to being ‘objective’, if only in an everyday sense! - we don’t even use the term “morals” or “morality” but instead prefer to talk about “ethics”, which in a stricter sense is rather the subject of how different facets of morality might interrelate and balance each other, what it even means to argue about morality, and the practical implications of these things for everyday life.)
Whether “moral facts” are human-independent is an interesting question in itself. I think one could definitely argue that a number of basic moral facts that most human communities share (such as the value of ‘protection’ and ‘thriving’) are in fact also shared by many social animals. If true, this would clearly imply a human-independent status for these moral facts. Perhaps more importantly, it would also point to the need to attribute some sort of moral relevance and personhood at least to the most ‘highly-developed’ social animals, such as the great apes (hominids) and perhaps even dolphins and whales.