I fall closer to the morality-as-preference camp, although I’d add two major caveats.
One is that some of these preferences are deeply programmed into the human brain (i.e. “Punish the cheater” can be found in other primates too), as instincts which give us a qualitatively different emotional response than the instincts for direct satisfaction of our desires. The fact that these instincts feel different from (say) hunger or sexual desire goes a long way towards answering your first question for me. A moral impulse feels more like a perception of an external reality than a statement of a personal preference, so we treat it differently in argument.
The second caveat is that because these feel like perceptions, humans of all times and places have put much effort into trying to reconcile these moral impulses into a coherent perception of an objective moral order, denying some impulses where they conflict and manufacturing moral feeling in cases where we “should” feel it for consistency’s sake. The brain is plastic enough that we can in fact do this to a surprising extent. Now, some reconciliations clearly work better than others from an interior standpoint (i.e. they cause less anguish and cognitive dissonance in the moral agent). This partially answers the second question about moral progress— the act of moving from one attempted framework to one that feels more coherent with one’s stronger moral impulses and with one’s reasoning.
And for the last question, the moral impulses are strong instincts, but sometimes others are stronger; and then we feel the conflict as “doing what we shouldn’t”.
That’s where I stand for now. I’m interested to see your interpretation.
I fall closer to the morality-as-preference camp, although I’d add two major caveats.
One is that some of these preferences are deeply programmed into the human brain (i.e. “Punish the cheater” can be found in other primates too), as instincts which give us a qualitatively different emotional response than the instincts for direct satisfaction of our desires. The fact that these instincts feel different from (say) hunger or sexual desire goes a long way towards answering your first question for me. A moral impulse feels more like a perception of an external reality than a statement of a personal preference, so we treat it differently in argument.
The second caveat is that because these feel like perceptions, humans of all times and places have put much effort into trying to reconcile these moral impulses into a coherent perception of an objective moral order, denying some impulses where they conflict and manufacturing moral feeling in cases where we “should” feel it for consistency’s sake. The brain is plastic enough that we can in fact do this to a surprising extent. Now, some reconciliations clearly work better than others from an interior standpoint (i.e. they cause less anguish and cognitive dissonance in the moral agent). This partially answers the second question about moral progress— the act of moving from one attempted framework to one that feels more coherent with one’s stronger moral impulses and with one’s reasoning.
And for the last question, the moral impulses are strong instincts, but sometimes others are stronger; and then we feel the conflict as “doing what we shouldn’t”.
That’s where I stand for now. I’m interested to see your interpretation.