Mark Hopwood

speaker

1,269 appearances 31 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2009 last heard Sep 2014

Mark Hopwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Elucidations · Episode 41: David Enoch discusses metaethics · 9 Nov 2012 podcast

I mean, let's say that I'm the kind of person who is not a moral realist of your kind. voice-verified

So maybe I'm the kind of person who says, look, this talk of objective moral facts is crazy. voice-verified

I mean, you know, sure, like... voice-verified

we have our views about what's right and wrong, but those are culturally relative or something. voice-verified

Different cultures have them. voice-verified

There's no objective truth about this. voice-verified

I think that's a pretty widely held view. voice-verified

And it seems like what you're saying is, sure, someone can say that in theory, but in practice, they're actually committed to the existence of objective, normative facts every time they deliberate about something. voice-verified

Like it's a bad thing to be committed? voice-verified

So in a way, this takes us right back to our original question about meta-ethics. voice-verified

So to hold a different meta-ethical view than your opponents is not to accuse them of being bad people or bad deliberators or anything of the sort. voice-verified

But it is to say something like, you and I share this practice of deliberating, and I'm going to show you that we're presupposing something in doing that practice. voice-verified

And that's the structure of voice-verified

So you've mentioned a couple of scientific findings, findings about genes or quarks, and someone might say, well, there's one big difference between all of that stuff and the moral case, and that's that in the case of genes and quarks, all right, not everyone agrees about that stuff, but there's a bunch of people who've been working really hard for a long time, and they've come to a consensus about this stuff, and that's a hard-won consensus where... voice-verified

Everyone who's been working on it agrees on the central things. voice-verified

And someone might say, it is just not like that in the moral case. voice-verified

And that's a reason to wonder whether there really are these facts. voice-verified

We don't seem to agree at all across different cultures, even within cultures. voice-verified

If there are such a thing as moral experts, they don't seem to agree either. voice-verified

So doesn't it seem like the fact of just wide disagreement about the most fundamental and the most basic moral questions should make us think maybe there aren't really objective facts of the matter. voice-verified

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