Saturday, July 7, 2018

The Boydian Philosophy Approach To Morality

By Gregory Turner


Morality has always been a pretty hot topic for debate, especially when the concept of good and bad being innate or created by society is being argued about. For one group, morality is something artificial and just made by man while the other group believes morality is already existent but just discovered by humans. One philosophy that supports the latter is known as the Boydian philosophy.

Richard Boyd explains this concept through his belief that scientific realism itself is true. The principle of morality in the Boydian point of view is that moral realism and scientific realism are actually very similar. Because of their similarity, they can be compared with each other with one being able to prove that the other is true.

The basic premise of Boyd is very simple. He states that scientific realism is most likely true. If scientific realism is most likely true, then moral realism is also most likely true since they are in a very similar context.

To further illustrate, take a look at the atom, which is the basic building block of everything in the world. The atom, when theorized of its existence, could not be seen by the naked eye nor could it be felt using the other 4 senses as well even though scientists believed they exist. Years down the road, scientists created a special microscope for seeing atoms and were able to see them.

While Boyd does not really aim to trump anti moral realists, his claim is that there is definitely evidence of the existence of moral realism. He questions what moral realism evidence would look or feel like if morality could somehow be discovered and observed through the naked eye. His claim is to be open minded moral realists that should see how moral realism could prove to be a positive argument.

Now, according to the theory and experiment based approach of the scientific method, a scientific concept is first created with a hypothesis then a theory. The next step is to create experiments and try to gather as much evidence there is to try and prove the theory correct. If the theory has been proven to be correct, then it will evidently become a truth.

This is why Boyd always questions what evidence of morality would look like because there is not any visible evidence. It is also a question of how would people experiment to get the evidence of moral realism in society. After all, it was established earlier that morality is there and just needs to be proven through the same scientific process. The process of proving it though, is another story.

Basically, this is what Boyd is trying to point out when he argues about morality. As there is no evidence discounting it, it is really open for debate as to whether it exists or not. However, Boyd toys with the idea that if scientific realism is real, then moral realism must be real too.




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