Explaining my metaethical position

Just a brief summary of my current metaethical position.

Other thoughts:

1) The tactic we used to define what is morally true is inspired by the counterarguments of relativists and anti-realists to the self-refutation attack. Relativists and anti-realists will
come up with many clever ways to argue that relativism is not self-refuting or if it is it does not matter. When one claims that they don't live like an anti-realists they can simply shrug it off.
If we offer to define what is true starting from principles that we seem to share and abide by, then it becomes harder for the anti-realist to defend his position. Perhaps a similar tactic could be used
in the epistemic domain to defend epistemic normativity.


2) We did not stress the fact that the mechanisms with which we create heuristics are ingrained in our cognition but some of our moral biases are obviously socially constructed, for the sake of our enterprise this isn't very problematic: Some heuristics we use are socially constructed others aren't. But perhaps another way to reach first principles in the moral domain could be trying to understand if the intuitions we have are socially constructed or not.

3) Perhaps we should define the moral domain as how we think we should behave towards others (not sure).

4) Some citations are missing, future me will insert them.

Link to document:

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[dionysianapollomarx]

I do hope I’m part of your intelligent audience. Not quite sure since I’ve not read enough philosophy basics to be comfy about that. Tuning into this. Will be applying for philosophy masters this summer or after. This will be great food for thought. Love your content.

[medbot]

I don’t watch literally any philosophy videos yet I somehow got recommended this video and I’m so excited bro. It is almost a one for one of the paper that I wrote to describe my personal philosophy. Insane.

[SMD]

Ah nice to see this. I’ve just downloaded some philosophy books onto my kubo.
I now hope I can become a member of your intelligent audience… lol

[micahsadoy]

As a moral non-naturalist, I think the primary difficult with naturalist positions - such as yours - lies in spelling out in what sense *moral facts* are *natural facts.*
As a liberal naturalist, there is a perhaps trivial sense in which all facts are facts that somehow hold in virtue of nature. Metaphysically, everything in some sense depends upon nature. But just because entities with respect to some domain of inquiry are dependent (metaphysically) on nature or natural facts in order for such-and-such entities/relations to hold, it is not clear to me that facts IN the domain must then be natural facts.
The existence of the game of chess is in some very broad sense a part of "nature." There is some causal story that explains why the game exists. But the game of chess is a cultural artifact. Money is a similar kind of a social construction. The statement "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" need not and usually is not understood as an empirical statement. The government declares it as so, enacts various policies, and so brings the social phenomenon into existence.
[Morality is probably not totally arbitrary in the way that the rules of some game may be declared on some arbitrary basis. I tend to think of morals as the (most general and abstract) necessary a priori rules of *rational social cooperation.* Certain rules are simply constitutive of what it means to be engaged in rational cooperation with others.]
There is almost certainly some naturalistic account of why we HAVE these capacities for rational cooperation; science might be able to give us an answer of WHERE morality comes from (insert story involving apes and game theory, etc. etc.), but it might also be the case that the methods of science are not sufficient to answer questions about how we ought to live (together). If ethics must always be philosophical, and if philosophy is not reducible to science, there is a good chance the methods of ethics exceed the methods of science.
The argument here is that moral facts are not natural facts because the epistemology of moral facts is radically different from the epistemology of the proto-typical natural facts discovered in the empirical sciences.

[taythemuffin]

Not related but do you have a response to the repugnant conclusion? and if so could you possibly do a video on it.

[sophon]

I am not your intelligent audience member. My aim is to make Mac n cheese and maybe learn something listening to this

[arturogonzalez]

Hello, I haven’t seen the video but I’m a philosophy major (although specialized in political philosophy). So, maybe I’m part of your intelligent audience?

[morgengabe]

You say you base naturalism in physical facts. Why not mathematical? Seems easier to speak less speculatively about mathematical objects.

[firstaidsack]

Do you believe in moral obligation? If so, where does it come from?