Moral and Other Realisms: Some Initial Difficulties

Abstract

Some very similar problems and disputes arise in ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of perception. One of the most basic of these parallel controversies concerns the connection between certain features we attribute to objects and certain mental responses that somehow or other provide a basis for these attributions.¹ Three examples of such feature-response pairs drawn from ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of perception respectively are (a) moral goodness and moral approval, (b) funniness and amusement, and (c) something’s being red and its looking red. What makes these and many other examples controversial is the fact that one kind of philosopher (the realist) finds it plausible to claim first that whether an object possesses one or another of these features is independent of and prior to the question whether it provokes the correlative response and second that the response itself is a genuinely cognitive state of mind in some way directed to the feature as part of its object.² While another kind of philosopher (the mentalist) finds it plausible to deny both these claims and to assert instead that the response has conceptual priority over the feature and that what the realist takes in the response as cognitive of the feature is really some noncognitive attitude, disposition, sensation, or act of will. In other words, the realist regards the response as a response to the feature while the mentalist sees the feature as some sort of construction out of the response. In considering the dispute it will be convenient to have a way of generalizing over all feature-response pairs that tend to generate this kind of controversy; thus I shall take the liberty of speaking of C-pairs (‘C’ for ‘Controversial’) and, in the context of discussing such pairs, C-features and C-responses.