Paul Bloomfield

The property of physical health is presented as a model for moral goodness, and a primer on being healthy follows. Healthiness is understood in terms of proper biological function. Conventionalism and relativism, two bugbears of moral realism, are discussed in relation to healthiness and found not to arouse suspicion about the reality of physical health. By analogy, these can be accommodated by moral realism. A discussion of the supervenience and reduction of goodness and health follows, and the chapter ends with a discussion of S. Blackburn's challenge to moral realism based on supervenience.

There are two conceptions of “morality” currently at play in the philosophical literature and employing them differentially affects how the relationship of morality to self-interest is conceived. The first conception may be thought of as the social conception of “morality”. It begins with the question of how one ought to behave toward others. Morality is seen as having a final authority over our lives and the interests of others play a necessary role in the decision procedures we ought to use. Where the interests of others are not at issue, morality does not come into play: there is no morality for an agent stranded alone on a desert island. The other conception of morality dates back to the ancient Greeks, and takes as its starting point the question, “How ought I to live?”. It might fairly be called the “Socratic” conception of morality. Answering this question will inevitably require one to consider how one will behave toward other people, but extends beyond that, to every significant aspect of a person's life, however private.

An extended transcendental argument for moral realism is given cast in terms of an “argument from error”. This is distinguished from an argument from moral phenomenology because the errors under consideration are those that go undetected despite our confidence of their existence. First person error is focused upon in particular as is the human condition in general. The argument establishes a presumption in favor of moral realism, not a conclusive proof. A theory of moral goodness is needed, and a sketch of the ontological, epistemological, semantic, and psychological questions any such theory must answer is given.

While emotions can play positive, contributory roles in our cognition and our lives, they frequently have the opposite effect. Michael Brady’s otherwise excellent introduction to the topic of emotion is unbalanced because he does not attend to harms emotions cause. The basic problem is that emotions have a normative aspect: they can be justified or unjustified and Brady does not attend to this. An example of this is Brady’s discussion of curiosity as the emotional motivation for knowledge. More importantly, while emotions can and sometimes do reveal to us what we value, it is far less frequent that emotions reveal objective value.

Perhaps the most familiar understanding of “naturalism” derives from Quine, understanding it as a continuity of empirical theories of the world as described through the scientific method. So, it might be surprising that one of the most important naturalistic moral realists, Philippa Foot, rejects standard evolutionary biology in her justly lauded _Natural Goodness_. One of her main reasons for this is the true claim that humans can flourish (eudaimonia) without reproducing, which she claims cannot be squared with evolutionary theory and biology more generally. The present argument concludes that Foot was wrong to reject evolutionary theory as the empirical foundation of naturalized eudaimonist moral realism. This is based on contemporary discussion of _biological function_ and _evolutionary fitness_, from which a definition of “eudaimonia” is constructed. This gives eudaimonist moral realism an empirically respectable foundation.

One of the few points of unquestioned agreement in virtue theory is that the virtues are supposed to be excellences. The best way to understand the project of "virtue ethics" is to understand this claim as the idea that the virtues always yield correct moral action and, therefore, that we cannot be “too virtuous”. In other words, the virtues cannot be had in excess or “to a fault”. If we take this seriously, however, it yields the surprising conclusion that many traits which have been traditionally thought of as “virtues” fail to make the grade. The most prominent solution to the problem, reminiscent of Aristotle's view, is found to generate more problems than it solves. Ratio, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 49-60, March 2022.

The idea of epistemic temperance is introduced and explicated through a discussion of Plato's understanding of it. A variety of psychological and epistemic phenomena are presented which arise due to epistemic intemperance, or the inappropriate influence of conations on cognition. Two cases familiar to philosophers, self-deception and racial prejudice, are discussed as the result of epistemic intemperance though they are not typically seen as having a common cause. Finally, epistemic temperance is distinguished from epistemic justice, as these have been conflated.

A basic challenge to naturalistic moral realism is that, even if moral properties existed, there would be no way to naturalistically represent or track them. Here, the basic structure for a tracking account of moral epistemology is given in empirically respectable terms, based on a eudaimonist conception of morality. The goal is to show how this form of moral realism can be seen as consistent with the details of evolutionary biology as well as being amenable to the most current understanding of representationalist or correspondence theories of truth.

The question “Why is it bad to be bad?” might seem either tautologous or poorly formed. It may seem like a tautology because it seems logical to think that badness is necessarily bad and so it must, of course, follow that it is bad to be bad. It might seem to be malformed because it may seem like anyone who asks the question, “Why is it bad to be bad?” must fail to understand the meaning of the words they are using: generally, if something is X, it cannot fail to be X. If so, then it may seem as if there must be something wrong with the question itself or with the linguistic abilities of the person asking it. The inclusion of “all things considered” is crucial. Some think that there is a problem with the idea of an all-things-considered point of view since it seems to them that the plurality of values one attempts to bring together in a single perspective may be incommensurable, so there is a problem in the idea of engaging such a perspective.

A central problem in moral theory is how it is to be defended against those who think that there is no harm in being immoral, and that immorality can be in one's self-interest, assuming the perpetrator is not caught and punished. The argument presented here defends the idea that being immoral prevents one from having self-respect. If it makes sense to think that one cannot be happy without self-respect, then the conclusion follows that one cannot be both immoral and happy. Immorality is harmful because its self-disrespecting nature keeps immoralists from being happy. This is the harm of immorality.

Error theories about morality often take as their starting point the supposed queerness of morality, and those resisting these arguments often try to argue by analogy that morality is no more queer than other unproblematic subject matters. Here, error theory (as exemplified primarily by the work of Richard Joyce) is resisted first by arguing that it assumes a common, modern, and peculiarly social conception of morality. Then error theorists point out that the social nature of morality requires one to act against one's self-interest while insisting on the categorical, inescapable, or overriding status of moral considerations: they argue that morality requires magic, then (rightly) claim that there is no such thing as magic. An alternate eudaimonist conception of morality is introduced which itself has an older provenance than the social point of view, dating to the ancient Greeks. Eudaimonism answers to the normative requirements of morality, yet does not require magic. Thus, the initial motivation for error theory is removed.

This chapter begins by noting that the 20th century beneficiary of the open question argument has been (rather ironically) the class of non-realist views, including non-cognitivism and expressivism. It contends that Moore did not properly diagnose the openness of the relevant questions about goodness; it is not simplicity versus complexity, and it is not indefinability versus definability. Rather, it is the normativity involved in moral judgments and concepts that keeps Moorean questions open and blocks definitions of ‘good’; the same sort of normativity that keeps questions open in relation to concepts like ‘plus’, ‘mass’, and ‘triangle’. The issue of normativity in semantics, epistemology, and ethics is basically the same. ‘How can features of the world establish conditions under which it makes sense for us to think that there are ways we ought to conduct ourselves (with regard to our actions, our speech, or our beliefs) and other ways which ought not to be followed?’ A clear implication of this line of argument is that those working in metaethics have often laboured under the mistaken assumption that moral terms like ‘good’ are _especially_ problematic.

The ancient Greeks almost universally accepted the thesis that virtues are skills. Skills have an underlying intellectual structure, and having a particular skill entails understanding the relevant logos. possessing a general ability to diagnose and solve problems. as well as having appropriate experience. Two implications of accepting this thesis for moral epistemology and epistemology in general are considered. Thinking of virtues as skills yields a viable virtue epistemology in which moral knowledge is a species of a general kind of knowledge that is not philosophically suspect. Also, the debate between internalists and externalists in epistemology is subversively resolved as moot by adopting this strategy: the locus of justification for a belief is in the nature of skill. Thus, the contingent fact that some skills allow Homo Sapiens an ‘internal access’. while others do not, is theoretically neutral when considering the nature of justification per se.