Quotes from

A Neurocomputational Perspective

By Paul Churchland

Chapter 14: 'Moral Facts and Moral Knowledge'

1. 'The Epistemology and Ontology of Morals'
Moral truths are roughly as robust and objective as other instances of truth, but this objectivity is not secured by their being grounded in pure reason or in some other nonempirical support. It is secured in something very like the way in which objectivity of scientific facts is secured.
The grammatical and semantic differences that appear to distinguish moral from factual propositions no longer loom large, because propositions no longer appear as the primary means of knowledge representation in any case.
(a) A child's acquisition of an elementary moral consciousness is not primarily a matter of his internalizing a set of discursive principles.
(b) Such acquisition os a genuine case of learning something about the objective world.

2. 'Moral Prototypes and Moral Development'
Immediate and automatic discriminations: they are ampliative discriminations relative to the often meager peripheral stimulation that triggers them, and they are highly corrigible for that very reason. But they are not the result of applying abstract general principles, nor the result of drawing covert discursive inferences, at least in a well-trained individual.
Children learn to recognize hundreds of prototypical social/moral situations, and the ways in which the embedding society generally reacts to those situations and expects them to react.
One and the same situation can activate distinct prototypes in distinct observers. Moral argument then consists in trying to reduce the exaggerated salience of certain features of the situation, and to enhance the salience of certain others, in order to change which prototype gets activated.
What the child is learning in this process is the structure of social space and how best to navigate one's way through it.
What is problematic is whether this process amounts to the learning of genuine Moral Truth, or to mere socialization. Can we specify under what circumstances it will amount to something more than this?

3. 'Praxis, Theoria, and Progress'
An exactly parallel problem arises with regard to the learning of Scientific Truth.
There remains every reason to think that the normal learning process, as instanced both in individuals and in the collective enterprise of institutional science, involves a reliable and dramatic increase in the amount and the quality of the information we have about the world.
The members of the society are learning how best to organize and administer their collective and individual affairs.
Moral knowledge has just as genuine a claim to objectivity as any other kind of empirical knowledge.
"Superemperical" virtues such as simplicity and conceptual unity play a role that is comparable in importance to adequately comprehending the data of experience.
The stern father prototype is one that almost everyone possesses. It activates the "sibling" prototype most of us possess.
Less primitive attempts:
party to a contract
maximizing private benefit under collective constraints
universalizable rules
maximizing general utility
There is no reason why our moral consciousness and moral understanding should not continue to improve and our theoretical science may do so.