The above sentences, if taken (as you do) as claims about human moral psychology rather than normative ethics, are compatible with full-on moral realism. I.e. everyone’s moral attitudes are pushed around by status concerns, luckily we ended up in a community that ties status to looking for long-run implications of your beliefs and making sure they’re coherent, and so without having fundamentally different motivations to any other human being we were better able to be motivated by actual moral facts.
I know the OP is trying to say loudly and repeatedly that this isn’t the case because ‘everyone else thought that as well, don’t you know?’ with lots of vivid examples, but if that’s the only argument it seems like modesty epistemology—i.e. “most people who said the thing you said were wrong, and also said that they weren’t like all those other people who were wrong in the past for all these specific reasons, so you should believe you’re wrong too”.
I think a lot of this thread confuses moral psychology with normative ethics—most utilitarians know and understand that they aren’t solely motivated by moral concerns, and are also motivated by lots of other things. They know they don’t morally endorse those motivations in themselves, but don’t do anything about it, and don’t thereby change their moral views.
If Peter Singer goes and buys a coffee, it’s no argument at all to say “aha, by revealed preferences, you must not really think utilitarianism is true, or you’d have given the money away!” That doesn’t show that when he does donate money, he’s unmotivated by moral concerns.
Probably even this ‘pure’ motivation to act morally in cases where empathy isn’t much of an issue is itself made up of e.g. a desire not to be seen believing self-contradictory things, cognitive dissonance, basic empathy and so on. But so what? If the emotional incentives work to motivate people to form more coherent moral views, it’s the reliability of the process of forming the views that matter, not the motivation. I’m sure you could tell a similar story about the motivations that drive mathematicians to check their proofs are valid.
The above sentences, if taken (as you do) as claims about human moral psychology rather than normative ethics, are compatible with full-on moral realism. I.e. everyone’s moral attitudes are pushed around by status concerns, luckily we ended up in a community that ties status to looking for long-run implications of your beliefs and making sure they’re coherent, and so without having fundamentally different motivations to any other human being we were better able to be motivated by actual moral facts.
I know the OP is trying to say loudly and repeatedly that this isn’t the case because ‘everyone else thought that as well, don’t you know?’ with lots of vivid examples, but if that’s the only argument it seems like modesty epistemology—i.e. “most people who said the thing you said were wrong, and also said that they weren’t like all those other people who were wrong in the past for all these specific reasons, so you should believe you’re wrong too”.
I think a lot of this thread confuses moral psychology with normative ethics—most utilitarians know and understand that they aren’t solely motivated by moral concerns, and are also motivated by lots of other things. They know they don’t morally endorse those motivations in themselves, but don’t do anything about it, and don’t thereby change their moral views.
If Peter Singer goes and buys a coffee, it’s no argument at all to say “aha, by revealed preferences, you must not really think utilitarianism is true, or you’d have given the money away!” That doesn’t show that when he does donate money, he’s unmotivated by moral concerns.
Probably even this ‘pure’ motivation to act morally in cases where empathy isn’t much of an issue is itself made up of e.g. a desire not to be seen believing self-contradictory things, cognitive dissonance, basic empathy and so on. But so what? If the emotional incentives work to motivate people to form more coherent moral views, it’s the reliability of the process of forming the views that matter, not the motivation. I’m sure you could tell a similar story about the motivations that drive mathematicians to check their proofs are valid.