Practical considerations: an examination of psychological realism, and a proposal for psychological realism as a tie breaker

Abstract

I have always had an interest in ethics with attempts to combine ethical discourse with considerations of natural facts, such as those revealed by the biological sciences and psychology. Indeed, I have a special interest in that new (and controversial) field in science known as sociobiology, and with sociobiology's claims that it can help us in the field of ethics. Another theory that has caught my attention is Owen Flanagan's psychological realism, in which it is claimed that considerations of realism might allow us to reject those normative moral theories that fail to pass the test of psychological realism. In this thesis I intend to look both at sociobiology and at psychological realism, explicating their positions and examining them. However, my look at sociobiology is done here primarily as a consideration of whether or not sociobiology can provide an interesting auxiliary to psychological realism, a kind of extra substance to that its figure. I shall then see how sociobiology and psychological realism go together. The presentation of sociobiology will be in the first chapter, in which I shall also briefly consider evolutionary ethics. This, however, is only to help illustrate a point made by Owen Flanagan with respect to psychological realism - the is/ought gap prevents a consideration of natural facts from providing any normative reasons for rejecting a moral theory, but instead only practical reasons. The second chapter will deal with a presentation and analysis of Flanagan's psychological realism. However, this is not the only aim of my thesis. Indeed, it can be viewed mainly as a lead up to the main project of this thesis. This is a desire to push for a new kind of psychological realism that is more ambitious than Flanagan's minimal version. This more extensive version of psychological realism will include considerations of difficulty, rather than just considerations of possibility or impossibility. Chapter 3 will present an initial look at such a more ambitious project, but I will conclude that such extensive psychological realism fails, for it must rely upon bridging the gap between ought and is. Chapter 4 will present my completed version of a more extensive psychological realism, which I will try to use to provide a possible solution to what I perceive as being a tie between utilitarianism of the act variety with Kantianism.