Navigating Moral Realism with Agent-Binding
From Naked Preferences to Empirical Truths
This post addresses the philosophical tension between moral realism and the skepticism famously articulated by David Hume. Hume argued persuasively that moral claims—statements about what "ought" to be—cannot logically follow from purely descriptive claims about reality—statements about what "is." My stance aligns closely with Hume’s skepticism, particularly regarding the idea that preferences alone (what I term "naked preferences") cannot hold objective, universal factual status.
To resolve this philosophical challenge, I propose a concept called agent-binding. Agent-binding transforms vague or general moral claims, such as "lying is wrong," which inherently lack objective truth in isolation, into explicitly defined, empirically verifiable statements—for example, "Agent X believes lying is wrong." By explicitly connecting moral preferences and judgments to specific agents, we establish clear empirical conditions under which such claims can be genuinely evaluated as true or false.
I further position the agent-binding approach in dialogue with significant philosophical traditions critical of objective morality:
J.L. Mackie's Error Theory vigorously argues against objective morality, asserting moral claims are systematically false because they presuppose inherently motivating and metaphysically "queer" properties—attributes unlike any known empirical facts or natural properties.
Richard Joyce's Moral Fictionalism views moral claims not as objective truths but as beneficial social fictions. According to Joyce, morality functions pragmatically as a useful myth that facilitates cooperative social behavior despite lacking literal truth.
Agent-binding carves out a nuanced middle ground between these positions. It acknowledges Mackie's fundamental skepticism about universal moral truths but maintains that moral statements can attain empirical validity within explicitly agent-bound contexts. Unlike Joyce’s pragmatic fictionalism, agent-binding offers a concrete, empirical framework for evaluating truth claims, moving beyond mere utility toward genuine conditional objectivity.
Agent-binding provides a structured approach to morality that neither assumes universal moral realism nor fully succumbs to skepticism or fiction. By emphasizing context-dependent truth evaluation, it offers a coherent philosophical resolution to challenges posed by Hume, Mackie, and Joyce.
References
Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. (1739).
Mackie, J.L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Penguin, 1977.
Joyce, Richard. The Myth of Morality. Cambridge University Press, 2001.