Discussions of morality seem to me to often end up turning around two different intuitions, which I might label morality-as-preference and morality-as-given. The former crowd tends to equate morality with what people want; the latter to regard morality as something you can't change by changing people.
As for me, I have my own notions, which I am working up to presenting. But above all, I try to avoid avoiding difficult questions. Here are what I see as (some of) the difficult questions for the two intuitions:
For morality-as-preference:
Why do people seem to mean different things by "I want the pie" and "It is right that I should get the pie"? Why are the two propositions argued in different ways?
When and why do people change their terminal values? Do the concepts of "moral error" and "moral progress" have referents? Why would anyone want to change what they want?
Why and how does anyone ever "do something they know they shouldn't", or "want something they know is wrong"?Does the notion of morality-as-preference really add up to moral normality?
For morality-as-given:
Would it be possible for everyone in the world to be wrong about morality, and wrong about how to update their beliefs about morality, and wrong about how to choose between metamoralities, etcetera? So that there would be a morality, but it would be entirely outside our frame of reference? What distinguishes this state of affairs, from finding a random stone tablet showing the words "You should commit suicide"?
How does a world in which a moral proposition is true, differ from a world in which that moral proposition is false? If the answer is "no", how does anyone perceive moral givens?
There's at least one other intuition about the nature of morality to distinguish from the as-preference and as-given ideas. It's the view that there are only moral emotions - guilt, anger and so on - plus the situations that cause those emotions in different people. That's it. Morality on this view might profitably be compared with something like humour. Certain things cause amusement in certain people, and it's an objective fact that they do. At the same time, if two people fail to find the same thing funny, there wouldn't normally be any question of one of them failing to perceive some public feature of the world. And like the moral emotions, amusement is sui generis - it isn't reducible to preference, though it may often coincide with it. The idea of being either a realist or a reductionist about humour seems, I think, absurd. Why shouldn't the same go for morality?
Followup to: The Bedrock of Fairness
Discussions of morality seem to me to often end up turning around two different intuitions, which I might label morality-as-preference and morality-as-given. The former crowd tends to equate morality with what people want; the latter to regard morality as something you can't change by changing people.
As for me, I have my own notions, which I am working up to presenting. But above all, I try to avoid avoiding difficult questions. Here are what I see as (some of) the difficult questions for the two intuitions:
Part of The Metaethics Sequence
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