Can the empirical sciences contribute to the moral realism/anti-realism debate?

Synthese 195 (11):4907-4930 (2018)
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Abstract

An increasing number of moral realists and anti-realists have recently attempted to support their views by appeal to science. Arguments of this kind are typically criticized on the object-level. In addition, however, one occasionally also comes across a more sweeping metatheoretical skepticism. Scientific contributions to the question of the existence of objective moral truths, it is claimed, are impossible in principle; most prominently, because such arguments impermissibly derive normative from descriptive propositions, such arguments beg the question against non-naturalist moral realism, science cannot inform conceptual accounts of moral judgements, and the conceptual is logically prior to the empirical. My main aim in this paper is to clarify and critically assess these four objections. Moreover, based on this assessment, I will formulate four general requirements that science-based arguments in favor of moral realism and anti-realism should meet. It will turn out that these arguments are limited in several ways, and that some existing arguments have been unsound. Yet it is still possible in principle for the empirical sciences to contribute to the moral realism/anti-realism debate.

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Thomas Pölzler
University of Graz

Citations of this work

An empirical argument against moral non-cognitivism.Thomas Pölzler & Jennifer Cole Wright - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (6):1141-1169.
An Empirical Argument against Moral Non-Cognitivism.Thomas Pölzler & Jen Wright - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.

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References found in this work

The moral problem.Michael R. Smith - 1994 - Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell.
Moral realism: a defence.Russ Shafer-Landau - 2003 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Language, truth and logic.Alfred Jules Ayer - 1936 - London,: V. Gollancz.

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