I want to learn more about moral realism and moral anti-realism. So I'll be reading this "sequence" of posts on the subject, as a reading list. [Update: this link is more user-friendly.]
Here is a list of my questions on the topic, some of which I hope the reading list will answer, and some which I do not think it will, but which I may answer myself as I read:
Why are moral anti-realists moral in practice?
Does moral anti-realism come as a pragmatic choice? (We might choose it so that everything moral depends on human consensus, rather than all humans having to agree on the same external moral standard. Also moral anti-realists would perhaps not feel as often that their way was right, and thus they would find it easier to get along with other people.)
Or is moral anti-realism something which comes from a full pursuit of what is true? (Trying as hard as you can to be epistemically rational, you will find yourself not believing in moral realism).
Do people believe things because they are true, or for pragmatic reasons?
If our pragmatism is ill-founded, what can cause us to change? (A moral realism? Can we approach morality with enough of a sense of responsibility to the truth to even believe in moral realism, though it confronts our current sense of practical well-being?)
Can moral anti-realism prevent extinction risk from voluntary anti-natalism? Or from AI manipulating human biology so that we no longer have the drive to survive and resist AI? (Or, perhaps more realistically, from the drift of cultures of AI or AI plus the humans who have some influence on them, causing us to lose interest in survival?) Future people coming to positions, that they hold ostensibly voluntarily, that undo everything we find meaningful morally. (X-Risk makes a case for dealing with X-risk, like it's our mature responsibility to do so. But why should we be obliged to care about it any more than we already do? It's entirely possible that people in the future won't. So are we morally obliged to care? If so, then why can't that moral obligation apply to our descendants? But then we would want some kind of time-invariant morality, probably a moral realism.)
Do we "want" realism for our own purposes (moral realism a construct for our own pragmatic ends) or is realism something forced on us that we have to adapt to? We take physical reality as a hard given and don't complain too much, so presumably we could adapt to a morality that was as "rude" as it is. But perhaps we fear a real morality because it threatens our well-being as we currently understand it. It's as though humanity forms a consensus of what we like, and that's our reality, the one we construct. And moral realism is either part of that human-constructed reality (and thus is safe, but not fully independent of us after all) or it's outside that consensus and is independent, as real as physics, and it might go against our consensus. I think, as a matter of fact, the fact that there even is a debate over moral realism vs. anti-realism may indicate that we have some kind of choice, that we are not forced.
If we aren't forced to believe in moral realism, is there some other way to relate to reality which does cause us to adhere to it? Strictly speaking, none of us are forced to believe in external reality or other minds. But we investigate what is there before us, and we want to know what there is to know about what we see, in case it is real. This exploratory, perhaps "amatory" or "altruistic", approach to knowledge could apply with moral realism. From a theistic analogy, we can do what's right because it is right because of God, and God forces us to do it; or we can do right because it is right because of God, and that's enough for us, since we love God. We can believe a truth because it is true and we are forced to acknowledge it for reasons of survival or expedience (pragmatism), or we can believe it because it is true, because we love truth. I can think of a theistic moral realism and know of at least one atheistic moral realism (Rawlette's). Do we 1) "love moral realisms to be true" (even atheistic ones), or do we 2) construct them to be true, or are we 3) forced to find them true? Another analogy for "love something to be true" is to go out to meet that truth, put yourself out there, explore to find it, work to believe it once you see that it's there. Can truths believed this way still be epistemically rational? They aren't identical to constructed truths, but are they still too similar to them, if constructed truths fall short of those needed for realism?
Might we be psychological anti-realists despite our belief in moral realism? Might we be rational anti-realists because we are psychological anti-realists? For any number of reasons, a person's brain can become disposed to not believe in things, or to not even trust the category of belief in certain things (find things to "not even be true").
This list should be enough to start with.
I somewhat wonder if I should look for more readings on this important topic, besides the sequence mentioned above. Maybe I'll feel up to it when I am done with that.
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Update: having begun to read the sequence, I find some links to add to the reading list:
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) on John Mackie's Argument from Queerness
Wikipedia on G. E. Moore's Open Question Argument
Peter Singer The Triviality of the Debate Over 'Is-Ought' and the Definition of 'Moral'
Alonzo Fyfe and Luke Muehlhauser Morality in the Real World podcast (transcripts here). (Not sure what's in this but it might have something to do with realism vs. anti-realism -- at worst be an example of a moral realism). Episodes I listened to:
"01 Introduction"
"02 God is Not the Ground for Morality"
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