8.2 Hedonic Reasons as Ultimately Justifying and the Relevance of Neuroscience

Richard Joyce, who believes that morality is globally mistaken in making normative claims on people that do not wholly derive from their own desires or institutional commitments (2001, 2006a), in his chapter defends ethics from more piecemeal undermining by neuroscience while suggesting that it will be undermined globally in other ways. My perspective is very different. I think that while some parts of natural human morality may rest on illusion, hedonically grounded practical reasons, and at least those parts of morality that rest on them, very likely have some objective normative standing. I will suggest that the hedonic good and bad in human life provide a grounding for this. Since harms and benefi ts are central to much, although not all, of natural human morality (including duties not to harm or deprive of goods), and suffering is often an unproblematic and important harm, just as pleasure, or happiness, is often an unproblematic and important good, the normative status of hedonic reasons bears importantly on central parts of natural human morality. Their standing is subject to undermining by any neuroscientifi c and other discoveries suggesting that they are based merely in recently evolved adaptations for shared confabulation that serves social cooperation. However, their standing is also open to similarly scientifi c confi rmation that our intuitive hedonic judgments and reasons really respond to perceptions of psychologically and biologically deep affective realities that are plausibly a source of ultimate and objective normatively justifying reasons.