You have done what few have done; convinced me of my ignorance... I could guess at moral realism, but I cannot imagine internalism... Are these real terms or computer generated?

Yep;... All talk about talk...You can play with it, but when I need it for serious business all the pieces better be there...

You don't think that the question of whether or not having a moral belief entails being motivated to act on that belief is a legitimate and even important philosophical question?

You don't think that the question of whether or not having a moral belief entails having a reason to act on that belief is a legitimate and even important philosophial question?

If you don't think those things are legitimate and even important philosophical questions then I wonder what kind of understanding of the subject you have and also what kind of representative of this board you are.

Intead of dismissing the whole matter like you've done, I'd personally like people to either make a contribution to the thread by taking a position on the matter and stating their views, since internalism and externalism are jointly exhaustive of the possibilities, or else stay off the thread entirely.

I don't think moral beliefs play any part in what people do when morals are demanded...

The question is and always has been: Who are you??? Ethics as a word does not point to belief, but to custom, and for my point: Character...

People have always talked about morals so they can teach them as the subject of reason...There is nothing reasonable about them,

and people use reason to avoid morality rather than to be moral...

Your thread may go back to Socrates, but Socrates was wrong...In any moral situation, where moral action is demanded, the only question needng answer is what is the content of ones character

JP2U;118469 wrote:

If something suitably like the belief-desire model of action is correct and motiational internalism is also correct then having moral beliefs most certainly does play a part in what people do "when morals are demanded". So you're either questioning the BD model of action or else you're questioning motivational internalism and I don't know which.

Morals and ethics, the same thing, are themselves abstraction upon which you, or some one is building another model...What are you building on to begin with???? Can you Define morals and moral behavior so you can model them??? I am on firm ground asking what people do who are moral, and how have morals always been expressed socially... I understand you want to rationalize the process so you can manipulate as sytem... Give it up...

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You're talking about virtue theory and that's another, albeit related, issue. If you're a virtue theorist, as you're claiming to be here, it seems more likely than not that you're an internalist if for no other reason than that most have been. Regardless, virtue theory and a more conventional approach to ethics aren't incompatible: they're just different ways of approaching the same subject matter which is moral action. Virtue theory views moral action in terms of dispositions to act or related (classes of) potential acions whereas conventional approaches view it in terms of the actions or classes of action directly.

I am not talking about virtue theory...If I say virtue I am talking of a quality only having a theoretical existence... But out of curiosity; what is the relationship between morals and virtue in your book that each needs its own theory???

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So you think that every moral person and every moral activity is irrational or extrarational: rationality is irrelevant to the matter.

I am not saying some rational can be found for morality or virtue for that matter... Each are a part of culture and culture is knowledge, and society, as the living success of culture tries to hand off its knowledge to individuals when it asks them to behave in ways proven to be moral and virtuous out of its greater knowledge..But this request is often in vain because if the whole society has lost its morals and virtue, then no individual given a choice will behave any other way than they wish...The Ethics of a person always reflect back on ones community, and that is the meaning of the word, of custom, or character...No community means no morality, and community does not mean universal community either... What the Jews do to the Arabs, even when it seems inhuman, is, given the sense of the community, Justified, and moral...

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But since morality is just about how people choose and pursue their basic values and since the choosing and the pursuing can apparently, at least in some cases, involve more or less rational decision-making, I fail to see how you could possibly justify your claim. Choosing to jump off a cliff is arguably intrinsically less rational than choosing not to. And choosing to run away from the cliff if you want to jump off of it (or choosing to jump off of it if you want to run away from it) is definitely less rational than its opposite.

Not true...Morality is not a choice any more than personality is...When a moral question comes up, it is never in relation to other events, and the answer is not what Jesus would do, or joe blow down the street...Reason does not enter into, or comparison as reason usually is, but only: What do I do being me... People know if they have the hero in them, and some people always know weree the exit is, according to who they are... A thief may steal a nickle or a million bucks, but only because of what he is, and not the prize...If philosophy has any part to play in ethics for the individual it is this: The examined life...If you have any doubt, then look long into the mirror of introspection asking: Who AM I...

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But if you want to debate this further then you're welcome to do so by pm or in another thread please, not here since it's off topic.



They're doing (bad) moral reasoning when they do that.



Tell me again where it was that Plato/Socrates said that answering that (sort of) question satisfactorily would be insufficient to determining the answers to the other questions?

Internalism doesn't seem very intuitive, though I'm not sure how exactly it's defined. There are many people who profess sincere beliefs but don't follow them.

We have moral beliefs which can conflict with moral instincts,

and moral beliefs which can conflict with our desires.

So one can have a moral belief, and be motivated to do otherwise.

Or are you just saying that having a moral belief comes with some amount of motivation attached?

I'm not sure what the significance of saying that would be

I like your argument for moral realism though.

And it would seem that moral instincts are internalist by definition.

This is a good point you raise but internalism is traditionally meant to require not that someone merely profess a sincere belief but that they actually have the sincere belief ... that's what was intended when I said "sincere". I did talk about "profess" for reasons that I won't explain right now but I included "sincere" to prevent this approach.

I'm not sure how this is relevant, although it might be. However I would include whatever propositions or cognitive inclinations our instincts might dispose us to under the heading of "belief".

When you talk about this moral belief vs. moral instinct thing I think you must have in mind thought experiments in moral psychology such as the issue of throwing a fat man onto a train track (instinctively morally repugnant) to save several children from being run over by the train (a plausible moral belief). My point is that the instinct that one should not throw the fat man on the train track is already tantamount to a moral belief. Whether that instinct/belief is right or not is another thing.

So you're saying here and in the last sentence that you are an internalist but that you're a weak internalist.

Yes, that's what internalism is. That's all it takes to be a weak internalist. Some people deny that moral beliefs require ANY corresponding motivations/desires of ANY strength at all. Those are externalists.

When you think seriously about what the externalist is saying ... that we can sincerely and reflectively endorse the wrongness of murder (or child rape, or cannibalism, or whatever) but not thereby have even the slightest inclination or motivation to avoid it ... then that seems to be a pretty significant position to me.

I see, the externalist position is that there must be some feature in the outside world to provide the motivation?

I would think neuroscience could disprove this?

Perhaps externalism is true for sociopaths.

I would think internalism would be strongly linked with realism.

If we all share a set of moral instincts that motivate, then that would be a level of realism.

How?

...
It's precisely the diversity of our moral opinions/instincts (rather than those we share) that's used as one argument against realism.

My own position is that the true amoralist is systematically incapable of understanding any moral facts at all ... and I don't think there are such people. The sociopath on the other hand is merely handicapped in their capacity to understand such facts. You could use a metaphor of color blindness except that appreciating colors requires a specific perceptual faculty whereas appreciating moral facts does not ... there is no single cognitive or perceptual faculty that completely incapacitates one from appreciating moral facts, although there are cognitive modules (subsystems or our brain) that makes it much easier to appreciate them, just as there are distinctively mathematical modules or language modules in the brain.

Yes, but you'd be wrong, the opposite is true. My OP is all about why this is so. I have my own view on the matter but it requires that most professional philosophers doing (meta)ethics are ... well ... 'tards.

Some of you might find this to be a very dense post so if you have any questions please feel free to ask them. I'm starting a new thread because the few other threads on moral realism don't seem to touch on my particular interest which is as follows:

I'm interested in hearing any thoughts about how one might go about reconciling moral realism with internalism. Personally I see no problem with doing this and thus wonder why it is that internalism is the near-exclusive domain of nonrealists of various stripes. I think that it's a misuse of moral-belief language to strip it of motivational-expressive content but that cognitivism and realism are nevertheless both true because we can, in fact, be right or wrong in our moral beliefs and that there are facts of the matter which are at least often not wholly dependent on our opinions: that is to say, not wholly dependent on our merely reporting such-and-such a belief. This seems unproblematic to me. Am I just missing something?

I'm a socratic intellecutalist, don't believe in true akrasia, don't believe in true amoralists, don't view the customary externalist or antirealist arguments involving them as being very persuasive at all, and think that these phenomena can be explained very simply within a realist-internalist framework.

I think that we can induce from our observations of how people actually use moral-belief language that it has a motivation-expressing component and that to strip it of that is not to speak the language at all. The fact that it has this component in no way requires that there not be associated moral facts which are at least partially independent of the expressed motivations themselves. The situation in which our opinions matter but there are other binding facts not dependent on our opinions would be akin to a game which has both a coordination and a noncoordination component.

The other binding facts (the noncoordination components) would include, for just one prime example, whether or not the course of action being held up as moral is appropriately universalizable or is, on the other hand, self-defeating (or, more weakly, self-stultifying). A moral claim can be correct only if the action it recommends isn't defeated in appropriately general practice and, correspondingly, if acting on the purpose which one sincerely expressing it has doesn't lead to ones purpose being defeated. This is nothing more than a demand that moral motivations be subject to a performative consistency constraint or be "minimally fit" to use an evolutionary term.

It is because they're subject to such a constraint that we can expect moral motivations to at least often be rational ones, and this is also at least partly why so many make the connection between rationality and morality so tight. This constraint can also help explain why societies in general are concerned with morality and why diverse societies so often agree on so many points of morality. This consistency constraint can even help explain why moral language has its motivational component: because apathy isn't appropriately generalizable and gets defeated as such.

While the talk about a generalizability/consistency constraint sounds superficially very Kantian one doesn't need to make universalizability and morality equivalent as he does. One only needs to make the connection one way and appropriately strong (imho necessary). One also doesn't need to adopt the rest of Kant's views. And one doesn't need, following Kant, to define morality as this equivalence from the get-go then simply pound one's fist and say it's so largely without argument, because one can actully look around and see that this is how moral language is actually used and can look at the explanatory power of maintaining that there is this connection between fitness and morality (ex. the success of evolutionary approaches to anthropology).

I'm a realist because it seems extraordinarily obvious to me ... I mean just really, overwhelmingly clear ... that what goes into determining whether or not an action is appropriately generalizable or fit involves, at least in many cases, a whole lot more than just our opinions.

So, to repeat my initial question after all of that: Am I just missing something obvious when I fail to see why internalism is a predominantly expressivist/subjectivist/antirealist/anticognitivist position? Isn't it a position that realists should be reclaiming for their own? Are there any out there who are doing this? Am I just missing them? Is there some good reason that I've somehow overlooked that they're just not there? Is there something I'm failing to understand? Have I mischaracterized my own view so that I should call it something else? If so, show me where. Also, I know that there are at least a couple contemporary proponents of intellectualism in some form or another (neo-Neoplatonists) but I've forgotten who they are, so can anyone point me to them?

One last comment as it comes to me: One might object to what I've written above that there could be someone who says "I care about being fit but I don't care about being moral.". This would be simultaneously an amoralist and Moorean open-question argument. But my point is that I just don't see why I should ever take such a person's statement at face value. I think I have volumes of good evidence (observational linguistics, religious practice, and general anthropology for starters, then moving on to functional magnetic resonance imaging and much more) precisely to the fact that I should NOT take such a claim at face value. I think that the plausibility of their even saying such a thing depends largely on contextual differences and shades of meaning between "fit" and "moral" and that the mere existence of such differences, while perhaps enough to sow confusion in some, is hardly enough to make for a good argument that there's not a strong or even necessary link between the two.

One of the schools of ethical thought I most admire is Cornell Realism but, unfortunately, they're externalists. I don't see why one should have to be an externalist.

I hope I've amused someone and hope that someone can help dispel my consternation.

Either I do not understand your question, or I think it is obvious why most moral realists would not be internalists. Moral realists are often apt to suppose that morality is an objective fact external to people, and consequently there need not correspond inside a person any motivation to do something in accordance with that external standard of right and wrong. Indeed, if there were always some internal motivation corresponding to the external fact, why would that be the case? What could possibly be the cause of this invariable correspondence between what is internal to someone with the external fact?

If the reality of a moral truth is independent of a person's opinions and feelings, why would there be a constant conjunction between morality and one's motivations? If there were such a constant conjunction, wouldn't that tend to suggest that they really were connected after all, so that moral realism would simply be false?

It sounds like you understand the post question pretty well actually. But I'd like you to produce a rigorous, step-by-step argument connecting realism to externalism though for me because I'm convinced it would go wrong somewhere. I'd produce such an argument myself, playing my own devil's advocate, but I'd much rather see how yours might go.

I'd like to point out that the "objective" and "external" requirements of realism you mention are two totally distinct requirements and that the realist only needs to adopt the first: "objective" does not need at all need to be explicated in terms of "external to people" (or vice versa). There are objective facts about people after all: about what they actually value, or can reasonably be expected to value, or what they would value under certain minimally counterfactual scenarios (such as their having knowledge of various natural facts relevant to their decision). If these internal, intrapersonal, motivational facts are partly constitutive of the objective moral facts then this would explain the correspondence you look for.

Regarding your second paragraph: Moral facts are, to a realist, much like any other facts insofar as they are largely independent of false opinion or of any transient feeling or whim. This doesn't mean however that they're independent of deepseated or fundamental desires or basic values: quite the contrary they centrally involve such desires. In fact, when we put it this way, we could say that moral facts involve such desires in exactly the same way as nonmoral facts involve pervasive and indubitable beliefs and basic sensory inputs or minimal perceptible elements. The independence of moral facts from opinion also doesn't mean that they're independent of what is actually good for or promotes the wellbeing of the organism or of appropriate parts thereof (ex. it's overall pattern or information), since they centrally involve this too. This view is perfectly consistent with moral realism as I understand it.

I'm currently rereading an old article by David Copp which gives me a bit of confirmation that I'm not just looney when I think that realism and internalism can be made to fit naturally together, and I might link to or comment on it later.

And here's a good way of categorizing metaethical views.

20th WCP: A Taxonomy of Moral Realism

I answer "Yes." to all of them.

moral realism means that:
[INDENT]

1. Moral statements are the sorts of statements which are (or which express propositions which are) true or false (or approximately true, largely false, etc.);
   
2. The truth or falsity (approximate truth...) of moral statements is largely independent of our moral opinions, theories, etc.;
   
3. Ordinary canons of moral reasoning-together with ordinary canons of scientific and everyday factual reasoning-constitute, under many circumstances at least, a reliable method for obtaining and improving (approximate) moral knowledge.
   

[/INDENT]

Moral facts are, to a realist, much like any other facts insofar as they are largely independent of false opinion or of any transient feeling or whim. This doesn't mean however that they're independent of deepseated or fundamental desires or basic values: quite the contrary they centrally involve such desires. In fact, when we put it this way, we could say that moral facts involve such desires in exactly the same way as nonmoral facts involve pervasive and indubitable beliefs and basic sensory inputs or minimal perceptible elements.

So, to repeat my initial question after all of that: Am I just missing something obvious when I fail to see why internalism is a predominantly expressivist/subjectivist/antirealist/anticognitivist position? Isn't it a position that realists should be reclaiming for their own? Are there any out there who are doing this? Am I just missing them? Is there some good reason that I've somehow overlooked that they're just not there? Is there something I'm failing to understand? Have I mischaracterized my own view so that I should call it something else?