The whole field of meta-ethics is bogus and produces verbiage that isn’t helpful. The last paragraph here hits the nail on the head, an interlocutor can grant basically anything about morality, as long as there isn’t an enforcement mechanism it’s simply irrelevant.
Any non supernatural enforcement mechanism just turns compliance/non-compliance into a game theoretic problem. Even if there was a supernatural enforcement mechanism—people would just cooperate out of calculation, in which case morality and altruism get divorced and morality loses it’s emotional appeal and just reduces to individual selfishness, if you think long enough about it, which chokes the motivation to care about morality in the first place.
If I’m understanding you correctly, then I strongly disagree about what ethics and meta-ethics are for, as well as what “individual selfishness” means. The questions I care about flow from “What do I care about, and why?” and “How much do I think others should or will care about these things, and why?” Moral realism and amoral nihilism are far from the only options, and neither are ones I’m interested in accepting.
The whole field of meta-ethics is bogus and produces verbiage that isn’t helpful. The last paragraph here hits the nail on the head, an interlocutor can grant basically anything about morality, as long as there isn’t an enforcement mechanism it’s simply irrelevant. Any non supernatural enforcement mechanism just turns compliance/non-compliance into a game theoretic problem. Even if there was a supernatural enforcement mechanism—people would just cooperate out of calculation, in which case morality and altruism get divorced and morality loses it’s emotional appeal and just reduces to individual selfishness, if you think long enough about it, which chokes the motivation to care about morality in the first place.
If I’m understanding you correctly, then I strongly disagree about what ethics and meta-ethics are for, as well as what “individual selfishness” means. The questions I care about flow from “What do I care about, and why?” and “How much do I think others should or will care about these things, and why?” Moral realism and amoral nihilism are far from the only options, and neither are ones I’m interested in accepting.