Affording Affordance Moral Realism
- PDF / 676,671 Bytes
- 19 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 117 Downloads / 192 Views
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Affording Affordance Moral Realism William A. Rottschaefer1 Received: 14 April 2020 / Accepted: 5 August 2020 © Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research 2020
Abstract In this article I elaborate a scientifically based moral realism that I call affordance moral realism, and I offer a promissory note that affordance moral realism is the best current explanation of morality. Affordance moral realism maintains that morality is constituted by the interaction of moral agents and moral affordances. The latter are the natural and social environments in which moral agents’ activities take place and contain the objects of moral agents’ activities whose actualizations are the manifestation of substantive moral goods. In making this argument, I take a scientific naturalistic approach that includes both the natural and social sciences, aiming to make my account both methodologically and substantively naturalistic. On the subject side of my affordance view, I offer a scientific account of moral agency, one based on an extension of social cognitive theories of agency to the realm of morality. And I argue that affordance moral realism explains the nature of moral agency, its acquisition, maintenance, and successful performance. To explain its origin and maintenance, I make use of a general theory of selection that embraces biological, social, cultural, and intentional selection. On the object side, I offer a theory of moral affordances and their actualizations, employing the findings and theories of moral developmental psychology and moral psychology to understand their actualizations through the successful operations of moral agents. I conclude that a scientifically based naturalistic affordance moral realism promises to provide the best current account of morality. It is not only affordable; it’s a bargain. Keywords Affordances · Bio-cultural selection · Metaethics · Moral agency · Moral psychology · Moral realism
Introduction Moral realisms come in many varieties, but roughly they divide up into supernaturalist, nonnaturalist, and naturalist. While the first two take moral values to be distinct from and independent of any features of the worlds of common sense and the sciences, naturalistic moral realisms find moral values to be features of and dependent upon phenomena encountered in our everyday world and studied by the sciences. Some moral realisms not only embrace a naturalistic ontology, but also a scientifically based epistemology and methodology. In this article, I elaborate one such scientifically based moral realism, what I call affordance moral realism. I do so within the context of what I contend is the central job of the metaethical enterprise, a description and explanation of moral agency. Since their introduction * William A. Rottschaefer [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR, USA
by J. J. Gibson in the 1950s, theories of affordances, those things the environment offers an agent for good or ill, have played an increasingly i
Data Loading...
