Because it reads like an undergraduate essay that regurgitates the ideas from the lectures and the required reading, without any sense that the writer himself is actually thinking about the ideas and trying to decide the truth of anything (which undergraduates in philosophy aren't supposed to be doing anyway — see Pirsig's concept of "philosophology"). All that such an essay accomplishes is to show that the student (or AI assistant) has learned the names of the important people and has at least some idea of what they said.
It does not reach much of a conclusion and does not make much of an argument for it. The conclusion seems (because it comes at the end) to be that "We should treat morality as a compelling fiction". The fictionalism section is suffused with the idea of moral progress, yet the concept is not queried. Whence the "should", whence the compulsion, and whence the claim of progress? The writer questions all the concepts of morality previously discussed and finds them wanting, but this time the questions go unasked and unanswered.
You could reorder the sections, making any of them the conclusion. All it takes is to not argue against whichever one you put last. Maybe the lecturer is in the fictionalist camp.
Not the one who downvoted it (although I am also tempted to), but here is my objection: The text is written in a needlessly complicated way, which may be a required ritual when publishing in academic sources, but not necessary when communicating on a blog, and it only makes it more difficult for the readers. It's like writing in Latin.
For example:
J.L. Mackie's "argument from queerness" identifies the core problem.
Yeah, I guess I am supposed to know what that means. Trying to find some answers online, I think it means the following: "Moral properties are strange, different from other properties of physical objects in this universe. Therefore we must have a special way of evaluating them. Further research is needed."
This is academic writing, where the clarity of text is low priority, and making proper references to high-status sources is high priority. If instead you tried to explain the while situation to a smart teenager, you would probably say something like "When you look at physical objects, you see nothing inherently good or bad. Even looking at humans from the perspective of 'they are huge systems of atoms' does not provide a foundation for what 'good' and 'bad' might mean. Intuitively, we care about things like love or suffering, but there is no obvious reason why a robot or a space alien (possibly incapable of any of these feelings) should care about that. If we want to keep using these words -- and yes, they seem useful in many important situations -- we need a definition, and will probably have no simple relation to the physical properties of things."
The obvious question is: why is it better to write for smart teenagers? Shouldn't we optimize for higher-status people instead?
My answer is that this is related to the problem of "distillation". The world is already difficult. If we make things more difficult by not communicating as clearly as we could, the tower of knowledge will collapse under its own weight. (Well, at some point it will collapse anyway, but sooner if we keep adding extra weight.)
It's like badly written code. It may still compile and execute correctly, but at some moment you should refactor it.
Almost everything here is written in a needlessly complicated way. for instance, you dont have to write "utility function" when you mean "preferences".
J.L. Mackie’s “argument from queerness”
Is moral philosophy 101.
Then I am clearly not the intended audience.
And the question his, how is the voting system supposed to work in such case.
There are situations that may appear the same to most voters (sometimes possibly to all).
For each of those, only the expert audience can make an opinion other than "over my head".
There is a risk that when everyone clicks "over my head", all three kinds of posts will pass. Especially if they get an upvote or two, because people are more likely to upvote than downvote in general.
The voting system can't fix the people doing the voting. From behaviour , what they want is at least one of the (usual content, usual style)..the same old same old. What they don't want is to be challenged or stretched.
My answer is that this is related to the problem of “distillation”. The world is already difficult. If we make things more difficult by not communicating as clearly as we could
That's a great idea, and you, collectively, should try it. Just look at how badly you are communicating the central claim of AI threat.
The naturalist, realist project of morality is one that aims to define what is right and wrong by appealing to a set of objective moral truths, whether that be through the maximization of pleasure or through the categorical imperative. However, this essay will argue these theories fall short insofar as they fail to establish the existence of objective mind-independent moral properties. Nevertheless, completely embracing an error theory of morality likely leads to complete moral abolitionism which, for the pragmatist, is not an appealing reality. Therefore, this essay explores alternatives, such as Smith’s constitutivism and Joyce’s fictionalism, to fill the nihilistic void left by the anti-realist. While it is better to dispense of the metaphysically objective good and evil, the counterfactual must be one that embraces a fictional view of morality.
Moral realism faces insurmountable challenges in establishing objective moral facts independent of human attitudes and institutions. J.L. Mackie's "argument from queerness" identifies the core problem. Moral properties would be metaphysically peculiar entities unlike anything else in our ontology. They would need inherent motivational force, somehow bridging Hume's is-ought gap.
Consider utilitarian attempts to ground morality in pleasure maximization. Hedonistic states are real psychological phenomena, but the claim that we ought to maximize them requires an unjustified normative leap. Utilitarians must posit that pleasure possesses intrinsic "to-be-pursuedness" independent of our attitudes. Yet such properties appear nowhere else in scientific understanding. Neurochemical processes underlying pleasure represent evolved behavioral reinforcement mechanisms, not objective moral significance.
Kantian deontology attempts to derive moral obligations from rational agency itself. The categorical imperative generates universal moral laws through pure practical reason, independent of contingent desires. However, this faces the normative authority problem. Even granting logical inconsistencies in universalized maxims, why should consistency constitute moral obligation rather than mere instrumental rationality? Kantians claim rational agents are necessarily committed to consistency, but this fails to explain why logical commitment carries moral rather than merely practical significance.
Contemporary realists offer sophisticated responses to these challenges. Non-naturalist minimalists like Parfit argue that moral truths are sui generis but not causally queer - reasons are simply part of what it means to be rational. However, even if this avoids metaphysical queerness, it leaves the evolutionary debunking argument intact. Our moral faculties evolved for fitness enhancement, not truth-tracking, undermining belief entitlement regardless of whether moral facts exist.
Naturalistic reductionists like Railton claim that moral facts are natural facts about objective well-being. This avoids queerness by reducing morality to empirically accessible phenomena. But reduction deflates precisely the normativity that makes moral discourse valuable. If moral facts simply describe natural regularities about flourishing, they lose the action-guiding force that trumps personal preferences - the very feature that justifies retaining moral language.
Quasi-realist expressivists like Blackburn offer a middle path. They preserve the grammar of moral realism without metaphysical commitments, treating moral claims as sophisticated expressions of attitudes that can be true or false within our practices. This resembles fictionalism but lacks criteria for discarding harmful moral fictions. The expressivist cannot explain why some moral practices deserve preservation while others merit abandonment.
The epistemological challenges reinforce these metaphysical difficulties. If objective moral facts exist, how do we access them? Moral properties cannot be observed through sensory experience. Moral intuitions appear unreliable and culturally variable. Widespread disagreement about fundamental moral questions suggests that objective moral facts, if they exist, remain epistemically inaccessible.
The causal irrelevance of moral properties undermines their explanatory power. We explain actions by invoking beliefs, desires, and social pressures - not objective moral facts. Even when moral considerations seem causally relevant, closer examination reveals that agents' beliefs about morality, rather than moral facts themselves, do the causal work. This causal impotence renders moral properties explanatorily superfluous.
Despite compelling objections to moral realism, completely dispensing with moral discourse presents significant pragmatic difficulties. Moral language serves crucial social functions that purely descriptive or instrumental frameworks cannot replace. The concepts of good and evil provide shared vocabulary for coordination, motivation, and social criticism that appears indispensable for complex social life.
Moral judgments carry distinctive action-guiding force that purely descriptive statements lack. When we judge an action as morally wrong, we express more than mere disapproval. We invoke standards that claim authority over behavior regardless of the agent's contingent desires. This normative force proves essential for moral education, social reform, and personal commitment to difficult moral projects.
Consider the civil rights movement's reliance on moral language. The movement's power derived significantly from framing racial discrimination in moral terms - as fundamentally wrong rather than merely undesirable or inefficient. Purely descriptive critiques focusing on economic costs or social instability lacked the motivational force necessary to sustain long-term political struggle. Moral language provided both internal motivation for activists and external pressure on institutions by appealing to shared moral commitments.
Moral discourse enables sophisticated practical reasoning unavailable in purely instrumental frameworks. Moral considerations can override self-interested calculations, allowing agents to act against immediate desires for principled reasons. This capacity for moral commitment solves collective action problems and enables long-term social cooperation. Without moral constraints, social life would collapse into Hobbesian competition, making complex institutions and relationships impossible.
Moral concepts provide tools for evaluating and reforming existing practices by appealing to standards that transcend current social arrangements. Revolutionary moral criticism - challenging slavery, gender inequality, or economic exploitation - requires normative vocabulary that claims authority over established customs. Purely conventional or instrumental critiques lack resources to fundamentally challenge existing power structures.
Furthermore, moral language facilitates moral development and character formation. The concepts of virtue and vice provide frameworks for self-evaluation and improvement that extend beyond narrow self-interest. Moral education cultivates capacities for empathy, integrity, and justice that contribute to human flourishing in ways that purely instrumental education cannot achieve. The narrative structure of moral development - striving to become a good person - provides meaning and direction for human life.
However, these practical benefits do not require commitment to moral realism. We can preserve the instrumental value of moral language while abandoning metaphysical claims about objective moral facts. What matters is effectiveness in promoting coordination, motivation, and social improvement rather than truth.
Michael Smith's constitutivist approach offers one strategy for preserving moral discourse while avoiding problematic metaphysical commitments. Constitutivism grounds moral obligations in the constitutive norms of rational agency rather than mind-independent moral facts. Moral requirements derive from what it means to be a rational agent, making them inescapable for any creature capable of deliberation and action.
Smith argues that rational agency necessarily involves commitment to formal constraints including consistency, coherence, and responsiveness to reasons. These constraints generate substantive moral obligations when applied to practical problems facing rational agents in social contexts. The prohibition against murder emerges from recognizing that killing undermines conditions necessary for rational agency itself. Rational agents cannot coherently will a world where rational agency is systematically undermined.
This strategy avoids the queerness problem by grounding moral obligations in natural facts about rational agency rather than sui generis moral properties. Rationality represents a natural capacity that can be studied empirically without invoking mysterious metaphysical entities. The normativity of moral claims derives from the internal perspective of rational agents rather than external moral facts.
Constitutivism also addresses the motivational problem facing moral realism. Since moral obligations derive from constitutive norms of rational agency, rational agents are necessarily motivated to comply with them insofar as they remain committed to rational agency itself. The connection between moral judgment and motivation becomes internal rather than external, solving the puzzle of how objective moral facts could motivate action.
Even granting these advantages, constitutivism faces significant challenges in establishing the necessity of its derivations. Critics argue that formal constraints of rationality underdetermine substantive moral conclusions, leaving considerable space for rational disagreement about moral questions. The move from formal consistency to specific moral obligations requires contentious premises about human nature, social cooperation, and conditions for rational agency that rational agents might reasonably reject.
The scope problem presents additional difficulties. If moral obligations derive from rational agency, what do we owe non-rational beings like animals, infants, or severely cognitively disabled humans? The constitutivist framework struggles to extend moral consideration beyond rational agency boundaries, potentially excluding vulnerable populations that intuitively deserve moral protection.
Moreover, constitutivism may prove too ambitious in grounding thick moral concepts in thin rational requirements. While formal constraints of rationality may generate minimal requirements for social cooperation, they seem insufficient to support robust conclusions about distributive justice, personal virtue, or the good life. The gap between rational agency and substantive morality remains substantial.
Richard Joyce's moral fictionalism provides a more promising approach to preserving moral discourse while acknowledging the failure of moral realism. Fictionalism recommends treating moral claims as useful fictions rather than literal truths, analogous to engaging with fictional narratives while recognizing their non-factual status. We can continue using moral language for its practical benefits while avoiding problematic metaphysical commitments.
The fictionalist strategy draws inspiration from mathematical fictionalism, which treats mathematical objects as useful fictions rather than abstract entities. Just as we engage in mathematical reasoning without believing in the literal existence of numbers, we can engage in moral reasoning without believing in objective moral facts. The utility of moral discourse lies in its practical consequences rather than its truth value.
Joyce distinguishes between assertoric and non-assertoric uses of moral language. In assertoric contexts, moral claims purport to state objective facts and are systematically false due to the non-existence of moral properties. However, in non-assertoric contexts - what Joyce calls "moral fiction" - moral claims function as useful tools for coordination and motivation without making problematic truth claims. The key is learning to use moral language in the fictional mode while avoiding the assertoric fallacy.
Moral fictionalism preserves the practical benefits of moral discourse while avoiding the epistemological and metaphysical problems of moral realism. We can continue engaging in moral reasoning, criticism, and education by treating them as sophisticated fictional practices rather than attempts to track moral truth. The motivational efficacy of moral language remains intact because fictional engagement can be psychologically compelling even when we recognize its non-factual status.
The fictionalist approach also explains the persistence of moral disagreement without undermining the possibility of moral discourse. Just as literary critics can disagree about interpretation of fictional works while sharing commitment to literary criticism, moral agents can disagree about moral questions while sharing commitment to moral fiction. The lack of objective facts to adjudicate moral disputes becomes unproblematic once we abandon the goal of moral truth.
Furthermore, fictionalism allows for moral progress and criticism by treating them as developments within ongoing fictional practices rather than discoveries of moral truth. Moral reformers can propose new moral narratives that better serve human purposes without claiming to have discovered previously unknown moral facts. Social criticism becomes a creative rather than cognitive enterprise, focused on constructing better moral fictions rather than uncovering moral reality.
Moral realism’s promise of objective, mind-independent “oughts” collapses under the weight of metaphysical queerness, epistemic inaccessibility, and evolutionary debunking. Yet jettisoning morality altogether would undermine the indispensable social progress encoded in talk of good and evil. Therefore, we should treat morality as a compelling fiction that structures shared expectations and motivates principled action, while remaining lucid about its non-literal status. Constitutivism reminds us that rational agency entails minimal normative constraints, but fictionalism shows how to keep the richer, action-guiding vocabulary without metaphysical baggage. By consciously inhabiting moral fiction, we can reform narratives that oppress and reinforce those that enable flourishing.