2013-05-05
No surprise: a substantive comment about the survey

First, thank you for making explicit the cognitivist/realist connection, since that is what I had in mind. Some semantic cognitivists, of course, are anti-realists; but I felt it fair to pounce on the atheist/cognitivist correlation as a stand-in for atheist/realist since epistemic cognitivists are surely in the majority, as survey data also attest.

 

            Although I belong to the atheist majority, we agree about the oddity of the atheist/cognitivist correlation. I was following your comment until the part about “a lot of philosophers really have no idea what 'theism' is.” I would have expected you to say, “a lot of philosophers really have no idea what 'morality' is.” Of course these and many more balls are up in the air. We won’t really know which is more central in the (to change the metaphor) web of belief until the end of time.

 

            But for now I myself am content to embrace an anti-realism and even an abolitionism of morality to go along with my similar views about God, based again, of course, on particular conceptions of what each is. This strikes me as useful for helping to bring about a kind of world I would prefer to live in (so far as I can tell from my vantage in the present world).

 

            And even though the reality I dimly discern is indeed materialist in some sense, I am confident that genuine and strong commitments would remain possible in my desired world. Thus, regarding, to take an example near and dear to us both, a commitment to addressing the plight of nonhuman animals at human hands, an atheist/amoralist/determinist could, it seems to me, quite aptly proclaim, "I am compelled to be a vegan and to try to influence others to be vegans" at least as coherently as could a theist/moralist/libertarian.