Moral Observations
I had a section in my thesis with this title as well. I don't remember exactly what I covered in that section now, but I probably have a sharper idea of a moral observation now than I did back then anyway.
The basic idea comes from a set of two examples suggested by my lecturer in Moral Psychology. Consider a physicist seeing a streak of light in the window of a cloud chamber and thinking, "That's a pi meson." Next, consider someone looking at some kids setting a cat on fire, and thinking, (presumably among other things,) "That's wrong." There is an enormous body of theory that must exist for the physicist to make this 'observation'. How, then, is it different from the values that must exist in the latter example to make the judgement of wrongness from the empirical data provided? It seems that both agents have an equal claim to have made an "observation".
What, then, makes a moral observation different from a garden-variety moral judgement? Well, the basic idea is that moral intuitions are experience-dependent (cf. the entry titled, "The experience-dependence of intuitions"). It is one's actual experiences that enable one to form reliable moral intuitions. A moral observation, therefore, is going to rely far more on autobiographical data than it ever will on farfetched examples (cf. "The use of farfetched examples"). This is reinforced by a news story I saw in 1996. It was probably on Sixty Minutes. It was all about how there was this culture of historical revenge between the Serbs and the Bosnians. People were being interviewed as saying, "You can't understand unless you have experienced what we have experienced!" It seemed to me that statements like this were quite plausible and conditions like this could add to the disparity of the foundational assumptions of different cultures.
The basic idea comes from a set of two examples suggested by my lecturer in Moral Psychology. Consider a physicist seeing a streak of light in the window of a cloud chamber and thinking, "That's a pi meson." Next, consider someone looking at some kids setting a cat on fire, and thinking, (presumably among other things,) "That's wrong." There is an enormous body of theory that must exist for the physicist to make this 'observation'. How, then, is it different from the values that must exist in the latter example to make the judgement of wrongness from the empirical data provided? It seems that both agents have an equal claim to have made an "observation".
What, then, makes a moral observation different from a garden-variety moral judgement? Well, the basic idea is that moral intuitions are experience-dependent (cf. the entry titled, "The experience-dependence of intuitions"). It is one's actual experiences that enable one to form reliable moral intuitions. A moral observation, therefore, is going to rely far more on autobiographical data than it ever will on farfetched examples (cf. "The use of farfetched examples"). This is reinforced by a news story I saw in 1996. It was probably on Sixty Minutes. It was all about how there was this culture of historical revenge between the Serbs and the Bosnians. People were being interviewed as saying, "You can't understand unless you have experienced what we have experienced!" It seemed to me that statements like this were quite plausible and conditions like this could add to the disparity of the foundational assumptions of different cultures.