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Debating Moral Realism (apparently) on Embrace the Void (Patreon)

Published:
2024-03-04 05:18:23
Imported:
2026-06
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Some of you might 'enjoy' this recent discussion I (Chris) had with Aaron on his philosophy podcast Embrace the Void. This was partly a response to our Yuval Harari episode and Aaron's desire to explain why we had got things wrong in our analysis. In any case I enjoyed myself, even if we did have to talk about philosophy... a bit.

Files

Debating Moral Realism with Chris Kavanagh - Embrace The Void

My guest this week is Chris Kavanagh, cohost of Decoding the Gurus and a cognitive anthropologist working at the psychology department at Rikkyo university in Japan. I have him on to discuss a recent episode of theirs about metaethics and debate the case for moral realism.

Comments

Joshua McMonagle-Ihasz

Are you really a moral monster Chris? Sounds like you are ready to go vegan/vegetarian

Empty_Cognizance

Ah, I saw that notification come up… three?… days ago and was going to ask whether it was worth listening to, in your opinion… thank you for making me type this replacement message instead 🤓

Nina Davies

Am I being dim, or isn't belief in a cosmological moral law very similar to a belief in God? No wonder Aaron hates the Stoics. My favourite Douglas Adams quote - and one I very much live by, as it turns out, is: Sir,' I said to the universe, 'I exist.' 'That,' said the universe, 'creates no sense of obligation in me whatsoever.' I also now understand why 'moral relativism' is seen as a winning card for philosophers. I really did loose the will to listen with the assertion that democracy was somehow floating out there in the moral universe. A paradigm too far for me. I am definitely a moral flat earther.

Roland Weber

Yeah, I did enjoy that already last week 😃 I'm supporting ETV as well, after listening to your previous occurrences there. Also, Helen Lewis and C Thi Nguyen. 😃

Paul Bowman

Aaron's a lovely guy, but his faith in moral realism is baffling to me. I was hoping to finally hear a worked out argument that might help me understand, but it didn't happen. Towards the end of the interview he was resorting to mere assertion "Causing unnecessary suffering just IS objectively wrong". Like many otherwise intelligent thinkers, Aaron appears trapped within his liberal modernist ideology - one of the self-contradictory aspects of which is the "ideology of non-ideology", i.e. that your normative positions are not ideological choices but objective truths. It's the persistent refusal of the fact/value distinction. That said, even if I don't accept liberal universalism is a law of the universe, like the speed of light, that doesn't mean that it doesn't have a pragmatic valence, related to real problems of current human development. Having reached a level of technological and social development where warfare can now threaten species-level extinction, then there is a real stake in finding universal agreement on shared values, norms and principles (legal or otherwise) that might avert global nuclear war or similar. So applying reason to arguing about normative ethics at societal and international level has a pragmatic reality - its not the kind of nihilistic relativism of extreme kinds of cultural relativism, for e.g. But I agree with Chris that our framework for making those rationales is relative to our synchronous existence as pro-social primates, and our diachronic situation of technological and cultural development.

James Pulver

I really was happy to hear Chris give me a better foundation for thinking that both there is no objective morality and that there are objectively better and worse ones for Humans, at least if you think the point of morality is how things seem from the evolving point of view of humans. Though I also tend to think things like wronging or hurting another falls under morality whereas modes of dress or which animal you eat do not(I allow vegetarian vs not is a moral question perhaps, but pork vs beef seems the same valence to me). Preference in dress or sorts of cooking seem completely relative to me. And culturally subjective. I still can't understand why it seems like to Chris(and Kevin from previous pod) that effectively random events equal will of any sense, or that something like the 2 face from batman flip of a coin and doing what it says would make that specific choice free either. Or, absent substrate chauvinism, a computer(well, technically the complex operating system) has free will by how they seemed to define it.

Zack

I’m interested in what form of moral realism he embraces. I don’t see how one escapes moral realism (which I’m taking to mean moral statements can have truth value, even if they are contingent, and therefore moral facts exist even if they are contingent on the types of beings that exist). But any strict moral realism that is not pluralist and does not allow for changing moral truths seems doomed to fail. I’ll update after the episode!

Linda Sears

Lots of fun! I fall more on your side of this discussion, Chris. I do love how philosophical explorations venture into imaginary territories, such as what would the jellyfish 🪼 beings find to be moral?

Harold Chalmers

I really enjoyed this. I didn't know Chris was into this kind of thing and he should actually maybe consider talking about philosophy a little more? The weird sci-fi territory combined with the serious consideration of how different non-human ethics could get is fascinating. Kudos to Aaron, too. Really great stuff.