Moral realism and anti-realism

David Baggett at First Thoughts has a fine post on moral realism and anti-realism (with my commentary):

Watering down the categories

I have found a recent trend among a number of naturalistic ethicists and thinkers to be both interesting and mildly exasperating, but most of all telling. Both one like John Shook, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York—and someone with whom I recently dialogued at the University at Buffalo—and Frans de Waal, author most recently of The Bonobo and the Atheist (to adduce but a few examples) seem to be gravitating toward functional categories of morality. Talk of belief and practice replaces talk of truth; references to moral rules exceed those of moral obligations; and prosocial instincts supplant moral authority. What is interesting about this trend is that the resulting picture is entirely consistent with the view of complete moral skeptics, even amoralists.

Moral realism and anti-realism are views that are at the core of the theist-atheist debate. If moral law is real-- if it is an objective thing that we discover-- then atheism is plainly untenable. Atheism inherently requires that our sense of moral law corresponds to nothing real outside of our minds. Atheism presupposes that moral law is something we create, but do not discover.

The Darwinist view is that moral law is something we create as an evolved adaptation-- a sense that something is right or wrong is necessary to our survival. Of course, such a view is anti-realist. It asserts that survival or non-survival is real, and that we adapt by applying moral categories to our survival tactics.

The flexibility of Darwinian "theory" is as always noteworthy. Fierce competition, and the tenderest cooperation, are both explained. Or not explained.

Take Joel Marks, for example, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of New Haven. A former Kantian ethicist, he has decided that the category of morality lacks an objective referent. He’s written a few books about it, one that came out just this month, but an op-ed in the New York Times encapsulated his view in succinct fashion. In brief, although he has retained his aversive feelings toward, say, animal suffering, he has grown altogether skeptical that his feelings point to moral reality. He still fights for a world more to his liking, but he has come to think that morality has precious little to do with it, because there is no such thing. Marks is an amoralist—a very nice fellow, from all accounts, but someone who has given morality up. Resonating with Marks are such naturalists as Sharon Street and Richard Joyce, who have insisted that an evolutionary development of our moral sense, on a naturalistic picture, gives us little reason to think that our moral beliefs and convictions correspond with moral truth. Rather they evolved to produce behaviors that conduced to reproductive advantage.

But evolved morality is no morality, but merely an adaptive strategy. Adaptive "morality" lacks an objective referent.

But then de Waal and Shook come along and insist, largely without argument, that, to the contrary, the success of evolutionary moral psychology to account for our feelings of empathy, altruism, and prosociality is not only consistent with morality, but sufficient to account for it. To project the appearance their argument works, though, they need to engage in some subtle sleight of hand, replacing categories of moral authority with moral instincts, categorical obligations with malleable rules, objective truths with shared beliefs. But in the debate about moral foundations, classical theism can account for the full range of moral truths in need of explanation, without watering them down or subtly replacing them with functional analyses—from intrinsic goodness to categorical oughtness to genuine moral agency. To the extent that our naturalist friends like de Waal and Shook appear to be retaining the thick language of morality to capture ideas thin enough that complete moral skeptics could endorse them, there appears something deeply confused at best or disingenuous at worst about their approach, fortifying my growing conviction that soon enough the real moral debate will feature classical theists on one side and moral anti-realists on the other.

If morality is an adaptive strategy, then morality is not real. It is a delusion. I think that Baggett is right. This debate will come down to classical theists (Christians mainly) vrs. atheists. Moral realists vrs. anti-realists.

I think that the prime motivating ideology of modern atheism is moral anti-realism anyway, so at least the debate will move in an honest direction.

New atheism has always been about morality, not science. Scientism is a tactic, not a motive, for atheist evangelism.