Sequence 5 parts 2009
The Will-Be/Ought Gap
Predictions can be checked against what happens. What checks a moral claim? An argument from 2009 about moral progress and moral realism.
_from_the_series_The_Disasters_of_War_(Los_Desastres_de_la_Guerra)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg){kind=link}
Is Moral Progress Due to Moral Imagination or Condemnation?
Throughout the nineties, and to some extent in the last decade, there has been a certain brand of political thinker who just can’t imagine the motivation for cruelty. So alien is the concept that these folks (Richard Rorty and Judith Butler, for instance) have developed a deflationary theory of moral philosophy that simply advises us…
The Will-Be/Ought Gap: Marking Ideas to Market and Moral Realism
(What follows are some reflections on two related problems. One is Robin Hanson’s discussion of prediction markets to counteract status quo bias , and the other is my friend Leigh Johnson’s meditation on strong moral relativism . Because of length, I have cut my extended reflections on Dr. J’s “strong relativism” for a post tomorrow.)…
Verifying Moral Realism (The Will-be/Ought Gap, continued)
Yesterday , I called myself a moral realist, which is to say that I believe that some claims about values are agent-neutral. Going back to testability, I suspect that one place that markets will not yield much benefit is in evaluations of normativity. Despite the fact that I am a moral realist and believe that…
Bridging The Will-Be/Ought Gap
So I’ve been writing the last few days on a number of only tenuously related themes: cruelty and torture , probability and prediction markets , testability, middle-range theories, and moral realism . Today I’m going to try to draw these themes together and point to a couple avenues for further discussion. Obviously, it’s important to…
Beyond ‘Real’ and ‘Relative’: What are moral propositions about?
Dr. J responds on moral realism. It appears that our dispute focuses on the role that ‘the world’ plays in verifying our moral propositions. Dr. J is right to note that I’ve made an important and potentially dispositive claim in asserting that agent-neutrality requires that one’s account be “either verified by the world or not.” However, I…