And, disagreeing with Massimo on Homo ethicus

 Massimo seems to be coming more and more of a moral realist. He posted for free this 2024 piece on that.

I disagree and here's why.

I have long thought that we simply “are,” morally, for several reasons.

One is from Walter Kaufmann’s “Without Guilt and Justice.” I am not sure we can make overarching claims about ourselves en toto as a species without getting into Platonism, or without trying to claim a utilitarian view from nowhere and nowhen about the development of human ethics. In other words, on the second half of this first issue, we simply can't step outside of ourselves to make moral judgments about ourselves as a species in that way. (Although little mentioned in the book, critics have generally understood it to be a critique of John Rawls.)

On the Platonist side, these words and ideas don't come from nowhere, though. That's part of why I would call myself a moral semi-realist. 

Another is from either Gödel’s or Tarski’s broader world of thought. It’s not technically within either of their theorems, but more broadly, I think it’s a self-referential claim within a quasi-sufficient quasi-formal structure and can’t stand. Third gets to the evolution of human psychology etc. (Massimo mentioned there’s a specific phrase for non-ev psych theories of the evolutionary development of human psychology, but that was eons ago.) Under this, our moral judgments evolved with our moral actions, and so they’re intertwined; this is kind of a spin-off of the point above.

Related to that would be the idea that our morals evolved as part of larger psychological evolution for Darwinian reasons.

And, if not self-referential, what outside standard do you use and how do you defend that against charges of the Euthyphro dilemma? 

I’m a moral semi-realist, if you had to label me. I’m not a moral realist, but I’m not a moral non-realist, let alone anti-realist, either, per the above, and I specifically reject subtheories within that like moral anarchism. And I am reminded that I need to get back to reading Walter Sinott-Armstrong.

==

Extensive addendum 

See Stanford's Plato for more on moral realism, including how its opposition to moral anti-realism is paired or twinned, as well as what the standard is for making realism-based moral judgments. Moral naturalism sounds nice, but it is not what it sounds like; Plato notes it's a subset of moral realism, and any version of it that does not say that not all claimed moral facts actually are moral facts because they're not naturalistically grounded is not where I'm at.

The real real problem with moral naturalism, as I see it, and as it appears that SEP doesn't see it, is the issue of what is a "moral fact"? Otherwise, it's a kind of tautological idea for anyone who is a methodological naturalist in general. Both moral realism and moral anti-realism are, for such a person, naturalistic. 

What I'm really looking for is, basically, something like an Academic Skeptic version of morals. That is, no moral statements are factual in a narrow sense; some are closer to being factual in how strong they're based on a naturalistic derivation. And, of course, moral skepticism best fits the bill; indeed, the breadth of views within it describe well the breadth of my speculations. Indeed, Sinnott-Armstrong is cited several times in the essay. See also the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry for moral epistemology.

Per his Wiki, Sinnott-Armstrong studied under noted scholar of Pyrrhonism Robert Fogelin. From that, it notes that he's long promoted coherentism, and per the Wiki on that, I take it as the second half of coherentism, the epistemological, not the truth-theory version. See IEP's entry for more.

To put it another way, moral skepticism, per the second half of SEP's article, parallels theories of knowledge. In other words, moral skepticism rejects the idea of moral knowledge as justified true moral belief, or something to that end. That said, per a diagram about two-thirds in, as I reject both halves of the traditional division between Academic and Pyrrhonic Skepticism, so I reject both halves of the similar division on moral skepticism. I say, instead, in both cases, that we can postulate general probabilities and therefore can make some degree of judgment rather than a suspended epoche, but that the probabilities are very general and can not be assigned precise percentages or even very narrow ranges in most cases.

Also, it should be noted that coherentism is NOT Quine's epistemological holism. 

This all said, I found S-A's book on Pyrrhonism sadly wanting. 

Finally, it should be noted that the SEP article on moral skepticism is BY Sinnott-Armstrong. That will make picking back up his "Moral Skepticisms" book even easier.