Brian Leiter
speaker
530 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2009
last heard Sep 2010
Brian Leiter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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But now we get to a very tricky question on the insulations from reasons and evidence side.
And I think we need to forget John Lennon 'cause I I don't think he had a reflective enough
view about these matters for us to know where he stood on this.
Whether or not you think moral views are insulated from reasons and evidence is going to turn on what you think is the right metaphysics, epistemology, and semantics of morality.
Okay?
And this is a hard question.
But let's take a couple of possible views.
If you're a certain kind of naturalistic moral realist, take Peter Railton, Richard Boyd, Cornell realism as it used to be called, then you actually think moral beliefs do in fact answer to reasons and evidence, and moral epistemology is just continuous with scientific epistemology.
So if that's your view, there's no issue here.
Morality isn't like religion because it's not in fact insulated from reasons and evidence.
Now what if you're a non-cognitivist, right?
What if you're a non-cognitivist, anti-realist of some kind?
You think that there are no, as a metaphysical matter, no objective moral truths or facts, and moral judgments are mere expressions of attitudes or feelings of some suitably complex kind.
Okay.
The crucial thing to notice here is that if you're a non-cognitivist, right, then your moral judgments don't in fact
Express beliefs.
And since they don't express beliefs, the question of whether the beliefs are insulated from reasons and evidence just doesn't even arise because there are no beliefs here.
Whereas one could, I suppose, propose a fully non-cognitivist interpretation of religion.
But I'm inclined to think that significant parts of religious discourse should in fact be interpreted as expressing beliefs.
And not simply attitudes.
Showing 101–120 of 530 · page 6 of 27
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