Moral Realism, Social Construction, and Realism, Social Construction, and Communal Ontology

South African Journal of Philosophy 19 (2):119-131 (2000)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

The paper examines two forms of naturalistic moral realism, “Micro-structure realism” and “Reason realism”. The latter, as we defend it, locates the objectivity of moral facts in socially constructed reality, but the former, as exemplified by David Brink\'s model of naturalistic moral realism, secures the objectivity of moral facts in their micro- structure and a nomic supervenience relationship. We find MSR\'s parity argument for this account of moral facts implausible; it yields a relation ship between moral facts and their natural- scientific constitution that has a queer, slapped- together quality. We argue that the relationship needs to be spelled out by a process of social construction, involving collective intentionality and constitutive rules. We explain how our constructivist model of RR differs from a form of it defended by Michael Smith, which analyzes moral facts by reference not to construction but rather to a hypothetical situation of full rationality. We agree with Smith, as against Bernard Williams, that a rational agent may have reasons for acting that go beyond the agent\'s “subjective motivational set,” but we locate such reasons by reference to the agent\'s member ship in an actual community, and we explore the prospects for moral objectivity given this constraint on moral reasons.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Moral realism, social construction, and communal ontology.Wesley Cooper & Augustine Frimpong-Mansoh - 2005 - South African Journal of Philosophy 19 (2):120-131.
The Place of Construction in Sociological Realism.Luca Martignani - 2016 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 46 (4):517-536.
Social Construction.Ásta Sveinsdóttir - 2015 - Philosophy Compass 10 (12):884-892.
A critical analysis of structural realism.Wei Wang - 2008 - Frontiers of Philosophy in China 3 (2):294-306.
Ontology, Reality and Construction in Niklas Luhmann’s Theory.K. C. Matuszek - 2015 - Constructivist Foundations 10 (2):203-210.
The Social Construction of American Realism.Amy Kaplan - 1992 - University of Chicago Press.

Analytics

Added to PP
2013-12-01

Downloads
31 (#445,254)

6 months
2 (#668,348)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Augustine Frimpong-Mansoh
Northern Kentucky University

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references