Ruminations on normative realism

One of the things that I came to appreciate over this project is that the real debate over moral realism is happening at a deeper level than I thought it was. I thought that debates about realism were primarily debates about ontology, but they're not. They're debates about frameworks and concepts primarily, and questions of ontology or metaphysics follow.

Everybody agrees that norms and values are an important part of human life and experience. The only question is what role do they play. Are they expressions of our deepest held plans and expectations? Or should we see them as law-making, ruling over ourselves and others?

The realist says that the best way to understand the role that norms play is most similar to the role that facts of any sort play. When someone accepts a norm, when they're doing is recognizing a feature of reality. The challenges to normative realism are challenges that this is not the right model for understanding moral realism. This challenge is fairly limited, when you think about it. A philosophical account that fails to explain the importance of morality in practice is worse off for it. The question is a fairly limited one: what is the proper model through which to understand our relationship with normativity.

This eases some of the pressure off both realism and anti-realism. On the one hand, anti-realism has nothing to do with being immoral, or saying that nothing matters (except in the technical sense, in which nothing objectively matters, or something like this). On the other hand, it eases some of the pressure off of realism, since realism should not be seen as the view that there are moral objects floating around in space that we access with our MoralVision that was given to us by God at Sinai. Or, at least, this is a point of contention. The anti-realist contends that the realist is committed to having an unexplainable MoralVision (just as bad as laser vision or the ability to fly). But the moral realist can defend his view by showing that the fact-model of understanding normativity doesn't need to be committed to all these things. It's primarily a question of how to model, justify and conceptualize human experience, and ontology and metaphysics only come in as a side-effect. But the goal is the former, not the latter.

So, can the moral realist meet this challenge? Well, can the epistemic realist meet this challenge? In order to really answer this one needs a theory of reasons and an epistemology of normative knowledge. But I think the point is that this is redundant; knowledge is normative. So you can't provide an argument against epitsemic realism, and it's worth giving an account of how that debate goes. I think that ultimately the only way to understand a challenge against normative realism generally is an urging to give up normativity. We lose our concepts, our ability to talk conceptually, when we give up normativity. So you need to keep norms, or you can't take anything seriously.

The question is not "What's out there?", at least not primarily. The question is how should we understand our lives, and I think that this requires norms.

In other words, maybe progress in this debate can be made by reflecting on how a discussion between a normative skeptic and a realist would go, and this can be aided by considering epistemic norms, because this is where things start to get crazy. Having reflected in this way, moral norms don't seem so bad. And this can be shown in the epistemic picture. Maybe. I'm losing the train of thought here. Lunch time, though.