… recent evidence from neuroscience and neighbouring disciplines indicates that moral judgement is often an intuitive, emotional matter. Although many moral judgements are difficult, much moral judgement is accomplished in an intuitive, effortless way. An interesting feature of many intuitive, effortless cognitive processes is that they are accompanied by a perceptual phenomenology. For example, humans can effortlessly determine whether a given face is male or female without any knowledge of how such judgements are made. When you look at someone, you have no experience of working out whether that person is male or female. You just see that person’s maleness or femaleness. By contrast, you do not look at a star in the sky and see that it is receding. One can imagine creatures that automatically process spectroscopic redshifts, but as humans we do not. All of this makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. We have evolved mechanisms for making quick, emotion-based social judgements, for ‘seeing’ rightness and wrongness, because our intensely social lives favour such capacities, but there was little selective pressure on our ancestors to know about the movements of distant stars.
There’s no argument for relativism here yet. Agreed? Instead the suggestion is that the existence of a particular ‘perceptual phenomenology’ - regardless of how it came about, evolution or otherwise - indicates the existence of a particular
reality (i.e., maleness/femaleness). (The point about the stars seems entirely naive.)
… We have here the beginnings of a debunking explanation of moral realism: we believe in moral realism because moral experience has a perceptual phenomenology, and moral experience has a perceptual phenomenology because natural selection has outfitted us with mechanisms for making intuitive, emotion-based moral judgements, much as it has outfitted us with mechanisms for making intuitive, emotion-based judgements about who among us are the most suitable mates. Therefore, we can understand our inclination towards moral realism not as an insight into the nature of moral truth, but as a by-product of the efficient cognitive processes we use to make moral decisions. According to this view, moral realism is akin to naive realism about sexiness, like making the understandable mistake of thinking that Tom Cruise is objectively sexier than his baboon counterparts. - wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/Greene-NRN-Is-Ought-03.pdf
This section ignores what I just pointed out and thus commits a rather gross
non sequitur.
It’s worth reading the whole paper (four pages). Many people do instinctively believe in absolutes, but the key word is instinctively – we are looking at our own navels and being fooled in our introspection.
Sure, but this is not true of everybody, in particular it is not true of moral philosophers. So your comments about the hoi polloi are irrelevant, a red herring.
To use the author’s metaphors, we acknowledge that beauty is in the mind of the beholder and therefore a sunset is not absolutely beautiful, beauty is relative. Yet we may instinctively think Tom Cruise or Nicole Kidman is absolutely sexy compared to a baboon or a frog, even to the extent that a male frog would find a fairytale princess more attractive than a female frog. On reflection we realize this is entirely naive, that sexiness is in the eye of the beholder, that sexiness is also relative.
Oh, do we recognize all that? I don’t. Do you have any reason for believing what you’ve written other than your far-fetched appeals to popular ‘recognition’? Do you know of any moral philosophers who would swallow what you’ve written here? Do you know
anyone who would swallow what you’ve written here? It sounds like deplorable nonsense to me. (No one I know is ‘instinctively’ inclined to think that a frog would find Nicole Kidman or Tom Cruise sexy - lol!)
In both cases we evolved to make rapid decisions emotively and intuitively. All that is being said is that morality is similar in kind, and just as we can’t determine beauty or sexiness entirely rationally, the way we process morality and come to decisions also involves instinctive intuition.
But again, that’s not what we do in the context of moral philosophy,* which is the relevant context for this discussion. So this is again a red herring.
*Well, maybe
you do - but I wish you’d stop!
)
Then of course beyond that the content of morality itself involves subjectivity. If you decide to take your wife and kids on holiday, knowing you could instead donate the cost to starving kids on the other side of the world, you are making a value judgment, weighing the well-being of yourself and your family with the well-being of others you’ll never meet. Your personal values are partly decided by our evolved state, our culture and your own life experience, none of which were determined rationally.
I have no idea how this is supposed to be relevant.
The evidence from different fields is that this is who we are, and by understanding this about ourselves we can understand the history of morality and make better decisions. It’s reasonable to conclude it will shortly be taught in Psychology 101 and Ethics 101, if it isn’t already.
Er, right… what evidence, from what different fields, shows that? I think you’ve jumped a few steps in your argument there. You’re just begging the question at this point.
. Yet neither God nor anyone is allowed to see any comedy in this. Why not shimmy on over to Ask An Apologist and ask whether it might just be taking absolutism to bizarre new levels.
*