Ethics, Deliberation, and Motivation

Let’s consider the situation in which a person has asked, about some situation, “what should I do?” Obviously this comes up all of the time, so you’d think that we would have a pretty good idea what is happening when someone is deliberating in this way.

Filling in some particulars, let’s say that the person is trying to decide whether or not to eat meat, given the ethical considerations of doing so. So the person might consider some things:

Do any or all animals deserve moral standing?
If so, what about eating them violates this moral standing?
If not, ought I refrain from eating meat for another ethical reason, such as world food supply issues?
If so, do all have equal moral standing, or by what criteria do we judge the value of an animal’s life?

And on and on…

Now, I am not posting this in order to start an animal welfare discussion. What I want to discuss is what, exactly, is going on here if we are not assuming some form of moral realism? Because it seems to me that such moral deliberation makes no sense if we aren’t assuming a moral realist standpoint. Yet nobody who I ever discuss ethics with ever wants to commit to a realist position.

Before going further, let’s define moral realism:

This is a paraphrase of the definition in the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy

moral realism: a metaethical view committed to the objectivity of ethics, and consisting of three components: 1) A metaphysical component which consists of the claim that there are moral facts and moral properties whose existence and nature are independent of people’s beliefs and attitudes about what is right and wrong. 2) A semantic component that consists of the claim that moral judgments should be construed as assertions about the moral properties of the objects of moral assessment, that moral predicates purport to refer to properties of such objects, that moral judgments can be true or false, and that beliefs can match the propositions that moral judgments express. 3) An epistemological component consisting of the claim that some moral beliefs are true, that there are methods for justifying moral beliefs, and that moral knowledge is possible.

Now that we’ve got the technical definition, lets sum it up this way:

moral realism: the view that there are moral facts, that when we talk about these moral facts we are talking about them in a straightforward and common sense way, and that we can justify and have better and worse beliefs concerning these facts.


At this point, perhaps, this posting will become like one of those choose your own adventure books:

1) If you accept some form of moral realism, please explain your moral realist position.
2) If you do not, please continue below.

Getting back to the original example—the person deliberating about whether or not to eat meat, and if we don NOT accept some form of moral realism:

What are we doing when we deliberate in this way???

I think I’ll stop here for now, realizing that I haven’t written all that I wanted so far, but so that there isn’t too much to discuss. Are we on the same page so far? I want to continue asking what the deliberative questions are attempting to get answers to if moral realism is not a correct position, and whether any other ethical view, such as relativism or subjectivism, could possibly provide justified and/or rational motivation.