A while back I put up on this site what my take on resolving the moral question is. After examining a number of different solutions, from intuitionism to ethical naturalism (Foot, Anscombe, and Brandom -- the last of whom presents a proposal which seems to be a hybrid of Aristotelian naturalistic "virtue ethics" and Kantian rationalism) and then on to Searle's speech-act based answer to the emotivist denial and the prescriptivist solution, as well as a Kantian style argument for the power of rational thinking to drive moral judgment, I tried to cover all the bases by looking at some additional approaches. These also included considering a Wittgensteinian solution (based on Wittgenstein's later work) which finds moral standards in our "forms of life" (Beardsmore) as well as the "sentimentalism" argument of Jesse Prinz (which elaborates a logic of sentiment in terms of the logic of description) and the evolutionary-biological thesis of James Q. Wilson (which seats moral judgments in certain species-specific capacities identifiable as human). Considering all the options, I concluded that none are quite right though all seem to have something to commend them. I offered my own tentative explanation here under the post entitled Realizational Ethics in which I tried to lay out a step by step account (not quite an argument!) that would lay bare the moral valuing mechanism and show why it works.

In a nutshell, I proposed that moral valuing involves looking at actions in the most complete way, i.e., a way that considers them in light of the quality of the intentions that underlie them and which they express and not just instrumentally (in terms of the outcomes they bring about). Unlike Searle, I argued that intentions aren't entities (a strange choice of words for such phenomena, to say the least) but that they are just a way we have of talking about some things (and therefore distinguishing them from other kinds of things, picking this up from Dennett's notion of the "intentional stance"). Nevertheless, there is a reality to them if we recognize that what we mean when we consider intentions per se is the state of the mental life of the agent, what he or she is emotionally inclined to do. And this can be looked at referentially, no less than we do with the phenomena of the observable physical world, because it makes sense to speak of intentions and selves, and about the manifold mental features of our lives.

From there I suggested that judging actions in the most complete way is to look at them as expressing intentions which is to say expressing the mental state of the acting self as opposed to considering their worth instrumentally or in terms of whether or not they satisfy some need, desire, requirement, etc. That is, we may consider actions in any of these other ways and put a value on them based on their role in addressing these elements in our psychological lives because valuing just is an adjunct of rationality per se. You can't be rational in making choices unless you can prioritize and, to do that, you need a basis for sorting, you need a scale of significance. But actions, per se, cannot be fully and adequately evaluated unless and until we also take into account the underlying motivations, the intentions they express, and these can be understood as aspects of an agential self, the state of the agent's mental life at the moment he or she is acting . . . .