@2018stichQuest outlines two inconclusive attempts to characterize morality and moral judgments:
- The philosophers’ project involves using conceptual analysis of “morality” to either provide an account of how we actually use the term “morality”—the “descriptive-elucidatory” project—or else revise or propose a set of rules for discussing morality—the normative project.
- The psychologists’ project involves looking for prototypical examples of moral judgments, then deriving essential features of morality from shared properties of these examples.
While progress can be made in the theory of specific moral judgments (e.g., the semantics of, function of, evolutionary history of, psychological mechanisms underlying) so long as parties agree upon which judgments are of interest, Stich concludes that there may be no essential way to carve moral judgments from non-moral ones:
However, if it turns out, and I’m betting it will, that there are actually a number of different natural kinds included in that vaguely specified class, then future philosophers and psychologists may simply drop the term “moral judgment” and focus instead on judgments of these separate natural kinds. If that’s the way things unfold, both philosophers and psychologists may be destined for a future without “morality.” (20)
Related notes:
- Morality is fundamentally an evolved solution to problems of cooperation, after Curry et al. (2019)
- Morality functions to guide people with competing interests towards agreements of mutual benefit
References
- @2018stichQuest, “The quest for the boundaries of morality”