Humean Moral Realism Without Irony
摘要
This paper attempts to derive a recognizably realist account of moral concepts from a Humean picture of human rationality and psychology. Building on work by Philip Pettit and Thomas Nagel, I defend a general psychological model of human beings which assumes that they are divided between a number of different evaluative standpoints, which we are naturally motivated to integrate in some way. Because there are infinitely many ways to integrate one’s attitudes, this leaves the typical human being with a serious practical problem: what is the best, most satisfying way of doing so? On the meta-ethics I am proposing, this is the practical question which ethics seek to answer. Exploiting foundational results in social choice theory, I argue that any human being faced with this problem will recognize certain highly specific technical and empirical constraints on their psychological integration. Any proposed integration which fails to meet these conditions will be less satisfying than a solution that meets them all. The intersubjective nature of these constraints guarantees that some ways of integrating your attitudes are just better than others, in a sense that every human being must recognize if they are moved by the problem of morality at all.