The Moral Constructive Distinction

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Research on the moral conventional distinction and other attempts to see how people from different cultures and sub-communities think about the distinction between moral and non-moral concerns often reveals that. People will attribute some of those traits to things you and I might consider to be conventions but not to what we would consider to be moral violations. In other words it looks like there's evidence to support this claim that the way that you draw the moral versus non-moral distinction isn't culturally universal. It could even go so far as to suggest that there may be cultures and societies that don't have a moral bucket like at all.

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What is metaethics? Is moral objectivism the same thing as moral realism? When philosophers examine sentences like "Murder is wrong", are they generally more interested in (1) the role that the language is playing in a social interaction (e.g., that it's an imperative or that it expresses an emotion) or (2) the concepts themselves and their relations? Could it be the case that all moral statements are false? What do we know about how people actually use moral language in everyday life? Or do people even have any idea what they're doing when they use moral language? We're familiar with the idea that cultures vary in how they emphasize and value moral concepts; but are there cultures that have radically different moral concepts than our own (i.e., cultures that might not even have the concepts of modesty or honor in the first place, or that might have moral concepts that have never occurred to us)? Are there cultures that have have no moral concepts at all? What does it really mean to say that someone "should" do something? What is the use of intuition in philosophy? Where is philosophy going wrong today?

Lance S. Bush is a PhD student in social psychology at Cornell University. Most of his research focuses on moral psychology, metaethics, and methodological issues in experimental philosophy. He is also interested in psychological factors relevant to effective altruism and existential risk, particularly cognitive biases, reputational concerns, and other psychological phenomena that inhibit altruism and concern for the distant future. Email him at lancesbush@gmail.com or learn more about him at LanceSBush.com.

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