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Cornell realism is a view in meta-ethics, associated with the work of Richard Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon, and David Brink, who earned his Ph.D. at Cornell University. There is no recognized and official statement of Cornell realism, but several theses are associated with the view. [1]
Moral realism is the view that there are mind-independent, and therefore objective, moral facts that moral judgments are in the business of describing. This combines a cognitivist view that moral judgments are belief-like mental states in the business of describing the way the world is, a view that moral facts exist, and a view that the nature of moral facts is objective; independent of our cognizing them or our stance towards them.
This contrasts with expressivist theories of moral judgment (e.g., Stevenson, Hare, Blackburn, Gibbard), error-theoretic/fictionalist denials of the existence of moral facts (e.g., Mackie, Richard Joyce, and Kalderon), and constructivist or relativist theories of the nature of moral facts (e.g., Firth, Rawls, Korsgaard, Harman).
Cornell realism accepts motivational externalism, which is the view that moral judgments need not have any motivational force at all. A common way of explaining the thesis invokes the claim that amoralists are possible – that there could be someone who makes moral judgments without feeling the slightest corresponding motivation. This gives Cornell realists a simple response to Humean arguments against cognitivism: if moral judgments do not have motivational force in the first place, there is no reason to think they are non-cognitive states. Some, like Brink, add to this motivational externalism an externalism about normative reasons, which denies that there is any necessary connection or relation between what one has reason to do and what one is motivated to do (or would be motivated to do, if one were fully rational and knew all of the facts).
Cornell realism accepts the view that moral facts are natural facts. They fall within the province of the natural and social sciences. But while they are not supernatural (as in divine command theory) and they are not non-natural (as in Moore's Principia Ethica or Mackie's picture of a realist world), they cannot be reduced to non-moral natural facts. That is, while moral facts are natural facts and supervene on non-moral natural facts, they cannot be identified with non-moral natural facts. [2]
There is no reductive connection between moral terms and concepts and natural terms and concepts. This gives Cornell realists a simple response to the charge that you cannot have naturalism without naturalistic fallacy: namely, that metaphysical reduction doesn't imply semantic reduction. This usually goes with a Kripke-Putnam semantic story: moral terms and concepts pick out certain natural properties in virtue of those properties standing in an appropriate causal (social-historical) relation to our tokenings of the terms and concepts.
The argument from morality is an argument for the existence of God. Arguments from morality tend to be based on moral normativity or moral order. Arguments from moral normativity observe some aspect of morality and argue that God is the best or only explanation for this, concluding that God must exist. Arguments from moral order are based on the asserted need for moral order to exist in the universe. They claim that, for this moral order to exist, God must exist to support it. The argument from morality is noteworthy in that one cannot evaluate the soundness of the argument without attending to almost every important philosophical issue in meta-ethics.
In analytic philosophy, anti-realism is the position that the truth of a statement rests on its demonstrability through internal logic mechanisms, such as the context principle or intuitionistic logic, in direct opposition to the realist notion that the truth of a statement rests on its correspondence to an external, independent reality. In anti-realism, this external reality is hypothetical and is not assumed.
Ethical naturalism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:
Ethical non-naturalism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:
Internalism and externalism are two opposite ways of integration of explaining various subjects in several areas of philosophy. These include human motivation, knowledge, justification, meaning, and truth. The distinction arises in many areas of debate with similar but distinct meanings. Internal–external distinction is a distinction used in philosophy to divide an ontology into two parts: an internal part concerning observation related to philosophy, and an external part concerning question related to philosophy.
In metaphilosophy and ethics, metaethics is the study of the nature, scope, ground, and meaning of moral judgment, ethical belief, or values. It is one of the three branches of ethics generally studied by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics.
Moral relativism or ethical relativism is used to describe several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different peoples and cultures. An advocate of such ideas is often referred to as a relativist.
Moral realism is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world, some of which may be true to the extent that they report those features accurately. This makes moral realism a non-nihilist form of ethical cognitivism with an ontological orientation, standing in opposition to all forms of moral anti-realism and moral skepticism, including ethical subjectivism, error theory, and non-cognitivism. Moral realism's two main subdivisions are ethical naturalism and ethical non-naturalism.
Moral skepticism is a class of meta-ethical theories all members of which entail that no one has any moral knowledge. Many moral skeptics also make the stronger, modal claim that moral knowledge is impossible. Moral skepticism is particularly opposed to moral realism: the view that there are knowable and objective moral truths.
Scientific realism is the view that the universe described by science is real regardless of how it may be interpreted. A believer of scientific realism takes the universe as described by science to be true, because of their assertion that science can be used to find the truth about both the physical and metaphysical in the Universe.
Cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false, which noncognitivists deny. Cognitivism is so broad a thesis that it encompasses moral realism, ethical subjectivism, and error theory.
Ethical subjectivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:
Moral nihilism is the meta-ethical view that nothing is morally right or morally wrong and that morality does not exist.
In meta-ethics, expressivism is a theory about the meaning of moral language. According to expressivism, sentences that employ moral terms – for example, "It is wrong to torture an innocent human being" – are not descriptive or fact-stating; moral terms such as "wrong", "good", or "just" do not refer to real, in-the-world properties. The primary function of moral sentences, according to expressivism, is not to assert any matter of fact but rather to express an evaluative attitude toward an object of evaluation. Because the function of moral language is non-descriptive, moral sentences do not have any truth conditions. Hence, expressivists either do not allow that moral sentences to have truth value, or rely on a notion of truth that does not appeal to any descriptive truth conditions being met for moral sentences.
Quasi-realism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:
Metaepistemology is the branch of epistemology and metaphilosophy that studies the underlying assumptions made in debates in epistemology, including those concerning the existence and authority of epistemic facts and reasons, the nature and aim of epistemology, and the methodology of epistemology.
Richard Newell Boyd was an American philosopher, who spent most of his career teaching philosophy at Cornell University where he was Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters. He specialized in epistemology, the philosophy of science, language, and mind.
Quietism in philosophy sees the role of philosophy as broadly therapeutic or remedial. Quietist philosophers believe that philosophy has no positive thesis to contribute; rather, it defuses confusions in the linguistic and conceptual frameworks of other subjects, including non-quietist philosophy. For quietists, advancing knowledge or settling debates is not the job of philosophy, rather philosophy should liberate the mind by diagnosing confusing concepts.
David O. Brink is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. He works in the areas of moral, political, and legal philosophy.
Humeanism refers to the philosophy of David Hume and to the tradition of thought inspired by him. Hume was an influential eighteenth century Scottish philosopher well known for his empirical approach, which he applied to various fields in philosophy. In the philosophy of science, he is notable for developing the regularity theory of causation, which in its strongest form states that causation is nothing but constant conjunction of certain types of events without any underlying forces responsible for this regularity of conjunction. This is closely connected to his metaphysical thesis that there are no necessary connections between distinct entities. The Humean theory of action defines actions as bodily behavior caused by mental states and processes without the need to refer to an agent responsible for this. The slogan of Hume's theory of practical reason is that "reason is...the slave of the passions". It restricts the sphere of practical reason to instrumental rationality concerning which means to employ to achieve a given end. But it denies reason a direct role regarding which ends to follow. Central to Hume's position in metaethics is the is-ought distinction. It states that is-statements, which concern facts about the natural world, do not imply ought-statements, which are moral or evaluative claims about what should be done or what has value. In philosophy of mind, Hume is well known for his development of the bundle theory of the self. It states that the self is to be understood as a bundle of mental states and not as a substance acting as the bearer of these states, as is the traditional conception. Many of these positions were initially motivated by Hume's empirical outlook. It emphasizes the need to ground one's theories in experience and faults opposing theories for failing to do so. But many philosophers within the Humean tradition have gone beyond these methodological restrictions and have drawn various metaphysical conclusions from Hume's ideas.