Navigating Moral Realism with Agent-Binding

Summary

Agent-binding resolves Humean skepticism about moral realism. Hume’s is/ought problem: Moral claims (“lying is wrong”) cannot logically follow from descriptive facts. Agent-binding solution: Transform vague moral claims into empirically verifiable statements (“Agent X believes lying is wrong”). Positioning: Navigates between J.L. Mackie’s Error Theory (moral claims systematically false due to presupposing “queer” motivating properties) and Richard Joyce’s Moral Fictionalism (morality = useful fiction). Agent-binding compromise: Acknowledges no universal moral truths (agrees with Mackie) but maintains empirical validity within agent-bound contexts (avoids pure fictionalism). Provides conditional objectivity—moral statements can be true or false relative to specific agents. Key insight: Context-dependent truth evaluation offers coherent philosophical resolution without assuming universal moral realism or collapsing into pure skepticism.

Tags

• ethics
• philosophy
• agent-binding
• conditionalism
• moral-realism
• hume
• value-theory

Cross-References

• Related: The Myth of Objective Value

Notes

• Opens major ethics sequence (Batch 3)
• Philosophical positioning (Hume, Mackie, Joyce)
• Introduces agent-binding as key methodological tool
• Bridges from prior work to systematic ethical framework