Naturalism Next

               I recently wrote a response to an article on Matthew Adelstein's blog responding to moral realism. He has defended his piece on his blog , and here I make some comments on his defense. Intuitions                Matthew’s first complaint is that I did not address his arguments defending phenomenal conservatism. That’s true, but as I said in my original post, I never intended to. Rather, my intent was to caution the relative weight we should place on intuitions. In my view, intuitions are a weak defeasible starting point, and nothing more. Matthew made a few points in response to the research I cited in defense of this more modest aim. I think they are all misleading or untrue. While visual seemings are far from infallible as this shows, this does nothing to undermine the fact that things tend to be how they appear. The research I cited in my first post is often taken to imply that o...

In this article, I respond to a post on Matthew Adelstein’s blog arguing for moral realism. I am not myself a convinced moral anti-realist, but I’m fairly sympathetic to it, and I do not think that the arguments in Matthew’s post ought to be rhetorically persuasive to an anti-realist or someone who is agnostic on metaethics. Intuitions and Phenomenal Conservatism  Much of Matthew’s case rests on an appeal to intuition. A word of caution is in order about intuition. While I agree that intuition is a defeasible starting point for reasoning, I think we should be far more skeptical of it than many in the ‘pop philosophy’ spaces I occupy are. This is because our scientific picture of the world has consistently shown that many of our intuitive notions are false. Folk beliefs are notoriously unreliable.  Let’s take one example from a domain I spent a lot of time doing research in during my undergraduate education: our perception is intuitively rich and filled with detail. We seem t...