Human moral judgement seem easily explained as an evolutionary adaptation for cooperation and conflict resolution,
That’s not true: You can believe that what you do or did was unethical, which doesn’t need to have anything to do with conflict resolution.
and very poorly explained by perception of objective facts. If such facts did exist, this doesn’t give humans any reason to perceive
Beliefs are not perceptions. Perceptions are infallible, beliefs are not, so this seems like a straw man.
or be motivated by them.
Moral realism only means that moral beliefs, like all other contingent beliefs, can be true or false. It doesn’t mean that we are necessarily or fully motivated to be ethical. In fact, some people don’t have any altruistic motivation at all (people with psychopathy), but that only means they don’t care to behave ethically, and they can be perfectly aware that they are behaving unethically.
You can believe that what you do or did was unethical, which doesn’t need to have anything to do with conflict resolution.
It does relate to conflict resolution. Being motivated by ethics is useful for avoiding conflict, so it’s useful for people to be able to evaluate the ethics of their own hypothetical actions. But there are lots of considerations for people to take into account when chosing actions, so this does not mean that someone will never take actions that they concluded had the drawback of being unethical. Being able to reason about the ethics of actions you’ve already taken is additionally useful insofar as it correlates with how others are likely to see it, which can inform whether it is a good idea to hide information about your actions, be ready to try to make amends, defend yourself from retribution, etc.
Beliefs are not perceptions.
If there is some objective moral truth that common moral intuitions are heavily correlated with, there must be some mechanism by which they ended up correlated. Your reply to Karl makes it sound like you deny that anyone ever perceives anything other than perception itself, which isn’t how anyone else uses the word perceive.
It doesn’t mean that we are necessarily or fully motivated to be ethical.
Yes, but if no one was at all motivated by ethics, then ethical reasoning would not be useful for people to engage in, and no one would. The fact that ethics is a powerful force in society is central to why people bother studying it. This does not imply that everyone is motivated by ethics, or that anyone is fully motivated by ethics.
Can you expand on this? Optical and auditory illusions exist, which seem to me to be repeatably demonstrable fallible perceptions: people reliably say that line A looks longer than line B in the Müller-Lyer illusion (the one with the arrowheads), even after measuring.
An illusion is perception not accurately representing external reality. So the perception by itself cannot be an illusion, since an illusion is a relation (mismatch) between perception and reality. The Müller-Lyer illusion is a mismatch between the perception “line A looks longer than line B” (which is true) and the state of affairs “line A is longer than line B” (which is false). The physical line on the paper is not longer, but it looks longer. The reason is that sense information is already preprocessed before it arrives in the part of the brain which creates a conscious perception. We don’t perceive the raw pixels, so to speak, but something that is enhanced in various ways, which leads to various optical illusions in edge scenarios.
I think I agree: perceptions are fallible representations of reality, but infallible representations of themselves. If I think I see a cat, I may be wrong about reality (it’s actually a raccoon) but I’m not wrong about having had the perception of a cat.
That’s not true: You can believe that what you do or did was unethical, which doesn’t need to have anything to do with conflict resolution.
Beliefs are not perceptions. Perceptions are infallible, beliefs are not, so this seems like a straw man.
Moral realism only means that moral beliefs, like all other contingent beliefs, can be true or false. It doesn’t mean that we are necessarily or fully motivated to be ethical. In fact, some people don’t have any altruistic motivation at all (people with psychopathy), but that only means they don’t care to behave ethically, and they can be perfectly aware that they are behaving unethically.
It does relate to conflict resolution. Being motivated by ethics is useful for avoiding conflict, so it’s useful for people to be able to evaluate the ethics of their own hypothetical actions. But there are lots of considerations for people to take into account when chosing actions, so this does not mean that someone will never take actions that they concluded had the drawback of being unethical. Being able to reason about the ethics of actions you’ve already taken is additionally useful insofar as it correlates with how others are likely to see it, which can inform whether it is a good idea to hide information about your actions, be ready to try to make amends, defend yourself from retribution, etc.
If there is some objective moral truth that common moral intuitions are heavily correlated with, there must be some mechanism by which they ended up correlated. Your reply to Karl makes it sound like you deny that anyone ever perceives anything other than perception itself, which isn’t how anyone else uses the word perceive.
Yes, but if no one was at all motivated by ethics, then ethical reasoning would not be useful for people to engage in, and no one would. The fact that ethics is a powerful force in society is central to why people bother studying it. This does not imply that everyone is motivated by ethics, or that anyone is fully motivated by ethics.
You can believe what you did was unethical by some idiosyncratic personal standard, but that an ethical belief, not ethics.
Can you expand on this? Optical and auditory illusions exist, which seem to me to be repeatably demonstrable fallible perceptions: people reliably say that line A looks longer than line B in the Müller-Lyer illusion (the one with the arrowheads), even after measuring.
An illusion is perception not accurately representing external reality. So the perception by itself cannot be an illusion, since an illusion is a relation (mismatch) between perception and reality. The Müller-Lyer illusion is a mismatch between the perception “line A looks longer than line B” (which is true) and the state of affairs “line A is longer than line B” (which is false). The physical line on the paper is not longer, but it looks longer. The reason is that sense information is already preprocessed before it arrives in the part of the brain which creates a conscious perception. We don’t perceive the raw pixels, so to speak, but something that is enhanced in various ways, which leads to various optical illusions in edge scenarios.
I think I agree: perceptions are fallible representations of reality, but infallible representations of themselves. If I think I see a cat, I may be wrong about reality (it’s actually a raccoon) but I’m not wrong about having had the perception of a cat.