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We are concluding our treatment of Peter Railton’s “Moral Realism” (1984), and given that you likely haven’t listened to the seven preceding parts, or (like us) you’ve forgotten things from them, this discussion can serve as a standalone summary of not only Railton’s view, but of our efforts to actually figure out what a plausible naturalistic, empirical account of ethics could amount to.
The first part of the paper is concerned with setting up the idea that individuals have objective interests, and that we can know something about these by imagining what we as individuals would choose if we had all the relevant information about ourselves and our situation. Because you with knowledge of physiology and the poisonous quality of various drinks would not choose to drink what is in fact poisonous, this shows that it is in your objective interest right now to not drink that poison, even if you don’t know that it’s poison and you really really desire it.
He then shifts to comparably saying that for societies, there is likewise such a thing as health, such that, for example, slavery is unhealthy and unstable: A society whose leaders knew all the relevant details about long-term stability would not choose a body politic with such an unhealthy characteristic.
So the question is, can he bring these two accounts together such that the wise, all-knowing version of you as an individual would choose not only what is in your individual objective self-interest, but you would also choose what would make you a good citizen of a healthy community. For the result to be full-on ethics, this would have to generalize not only to identification of your interest with that of your social group, but with all of humanity, and really all of creation (to allow for environmental responsibilities, for example). While Railton does not argue very much explicitly for this leap (he merely points out the intuitive plausibility that a mature person would so identify), we talk through how Hume, Kant, and Korsgaard handled this question, and whether their insights can complete Railton’s account.
Read along with us, starting on PDF p. 42.
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