The Burden Of Proof In Philosophy And

The Burden of Proof in Philosophy and

Related Entries 1. Characterizing Moral Anti-realism Traditionally, to hold a realist position with respect to X is to hold that X exists objectively. On this view, moral anti-realism is the denial of the thesis that moral properties—or facts, objects, relations, events, etc. This could involve either 1 the denial that moral properties exist at all, or 2 the acceptance that they do exist but this existence is in the relevant sense non-objective. There are broadly two ways of endorsing 1 : moral noncognitivism and moral error theory.

Proponents of 2 may be variously thought of as moral non-objectivists, or idealists, or constructivists. So understood, moral anti-realism is the disjunction of three theses: moral noncognivitism moral error theory moral non-objectivism Using such labels is not a precise science, nor an uncontroversial matter; here they are employed just to situate ourselves roughly. In this spirit of preliminary imprecision, these views can be initially characterized as follows: Moral noncognitivism holds that our moral judgments are not in the business of aiming at truth. So, for example, A. For a more familiar analogy, compare what an atheist usually claims about religious judgments.

Non-objectivism as it will be called here allows that moral facts exist but holds that they are non-objective.

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But the status of these facts seems different. We could all be under the impression that it is not carbon, and all be wrong. If we all thought that it was worth more or lessthen it would be worth more or less. So understood, subjectivism is a kind of non-objectivist theory, but there are many other kinds of non-objectivist theory, too.

Cars, for example, are designed and constructed by creatures with minds, and yet in another sense cars are clearly concrete entities whose ongoing existence does not depend on our mental activity.

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Those who feel pessimistic that the notion of mind-dependence can be straightened out might prefer to characterize moral realism in a way that makes no reference to objectivity. There is also the concern that the objectivity clause threatens to render moral anti-realism trivially true, since there is little room for doubting that the moral status of actions usually if not always depends in some manner on mental phenomena, The Burden of Proof in Philosophy and as the intentions with which the action was performed or the episodes of pleasure and pain that ensue from it. See Sayre-McCord ; also his the entry on moral realism. Whether such pessimism is warranted is not something to be decided hastily.

Perhaps the judicious course is to make a terminological distinction between minimal moral realism—which is the denial of noncognitivism and error theory—and robust moral realism—which in addition asserts the objectivity of moral facts. See Rosen for this distinction. If moral anti-realism is understood in this manner, then there are several things with which it is important not to confuse it. First, moral anti-realism is not a form of moral skepticism. If click at this page take moral skepticism to be the claim that there is no such thing as moral knowledge, and we take The Burden of Proof in Philosophy and to be justified true belief, then there are three ways of being a moral skeptic: one can deny that moral judgments are beliefs, one can deny that moral judgments are ever true, or one can deny that moral judgments are ever justified.

The noncognitivist makes the first of these denials, and the error theorist makes the second, thus noncognitivists and error theorists count as both moral anti-realists and moral skeptics. So moral non-objectivism is a form of moral anti-realism that need not be a form of moral skepticism. Conversely, one might maintain that moral judgments are sometimes objectively true—thus being a moral realist—while also maintaining that moral judgments always lack justification—thus being a moral skeptic. See entry for moral skepticism. Speaking more generally, moral anti-realism, as it has been defined here, contains no epistemological clause: it is silent on the question of whether we are justified in making moral judgments. This is worth noting since moral realists often want to support a view of morality that would guarantee our justified access to a realm of objective moral facts.

But any such epistemic guarantee will need to be argued for separately; it is not implied by realism itself.]

The Burden of Proof in Philosophy and.