To many people, morality seems unnatural, unscientific, and possibly mysterious or supernatural, or subjective and arbitrary. I will argue that there are objective moral facts which are entirely natural, based on scientific concepts like instrumental valuation, recursive thought, and universalizability. We can then both explain why there are so many moral valuations we share in common, and understand we are prone to make certain frequent errors about the content or source of morality.
Scott Forschler is an independent scholar with a PhD in philosophy from the University of Minnesota, and a specialization in the foundations of morality and universalizability tests. He is writing a book called The Logic of Morality, and is the author of many scholarly articles on ethical theory, and other topics from Flannery O’Connor and Zen Buddhism, to the tension between perfection and workability in engineering design.