Erik Hammar

This is the second part to an exchange on the objectivity of morality between myself and my friend Paul.  You can read Paul’s initiating defense of moral realism here. Below is my reply, which defends a different view.

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In initiating this exchange, Paul defends a view labelled non-natural moral realism. This is a theory about the nature of ethics. It says that there are certain things that are true in ethics, such as, that it is wrong to boil babies. Further, it says this is true not because of any physical fact, or more broadly, any natural facts about institutions, the beliefs people hold, or the emotions they feel, etc. Ethical truth is completely unaffected by such worldly things. Instead, it holds that it is wrong for us to boil babies, because doing so in some way violates rules which exist entirely independently of us. Admittedly, certain worries about ultimate justification in morality compel us towards this view. In his opening paragraph, Paul suggests we accept it if we wish to be able to really think boiling babies is wrong. But I believe this view to be implausible, even unintelligible, and the worries which propel us towards it, unjustified and confused.

Against this view, I shall argue that no abstract entities, or mysteriously pre-existing laws, have to exist for us to confidently judge and damn those who boil babies, and do other horrid things. In fact, it remains opaque what it would even mean for such facts to exist. This is a kind of constructivist view, in Paul’s original schematic (though I have some misgivings about that term, for various reasons.) Instead, I shall argue that far from being independent of us, they are our values, and it is in the light of this they can comprehensibly be important to us. Our values are sociobiological phenomena, yet that is not to denigrate them. Boiling babies is not wrong because it is an offence to some edict lingering in the depth of atoms or the demands of pure reason. It is wrong because – and centrally, this is in one sense all we can say about it – it is senselessly cruel. There is no “point of view of the universe” from which we can hope to justify our moral beliefs, however, we are not worse off for it.

It is worth noting, first, that in our normal daily lives, we go on without worrying about the nature of our ethical values. We have no problem arguing about ethical questions quite without regards for deep metaphysical issues. If you are contemplating boiling babies, I will have no problem giving reasons for why it is a bad idea. It is cruel, might be selfish, offend against the happiness, or rights, or freedom of the baby or its parents, and will likely bring no long term benefit, etc. We have a sense of these concepts and arguments, and whilst it is often difficult to know which stand to take, we are familiar with these kinds of considerations. A first important observation is that this ability, even among the less morally fine-tuned of our acquaintances, is in plain sight. At this level, we seem to be getting on fine without invoking deeper, metaphysical claims about the nature of ethical reality.

It is first of all important to make the point that accepting a constructivist view does not entail that all ethical concepts contain whatever content we want; we do not construct as we like. Paul seems at one point to suggest that non-natural moral realism (his view) offers the only sanctuary for the thought that “boiling a baby is wrong no matter how you feel about it”. However, the way he describes his position later does not necessitate this, so I will not assume he does not hold the stronger view that only non-natural moral realism can make sense of the sentence quoted above. Nevertheless, dispelling such worries is a good way to initiate my kind of constructivist argument. In some deeper sense, of course, it is true that the cruelty of boiling a baby would be a meaningless concept if there had never been anyone around for whom it could be wrong. But this does not lead to some hyperindividualist conceptual anarchy where, where “how you feel about it” determine the content of ethical concepts. It can easily be shown that facts can be fundamentally dependent on us, but at the same time are objective in the sense that they do not permit anyone to use them as they wish without being wrong.

To show this first point, it is easiest to consider social facts more generally: It is true that Barack Obama is the President of the U.S.A. no matter how I feel about it.  It does not follow that this would be so no matter what anyone thought about it, or had ever thought about it. The same is true, admittedly in a more complex sense, about the wrongness of boiling babies. And even less does it follow that there is an eternal fact about Obama’s presidency which exists fully independently of us. If there were no one around to sustain the institutions which make meaningful the notion of the American presidency, it would not be true that Obama were president. Yet, things being as they are, it is true no matter how I feel about it. In short, truth in ethics is not as simple. We are not simply stuck with a choice between eternal, independent laws on the one hand, and rampant relativism on the other, something we will understand more fully if we unravel the psychological impulses which tempt us towards the simplistic neatness of moral realism. And once this underlying fear has been left behind, we will be able to approach my constructivist view with less latent prejudice.

The psychological impulses towards moral realism lead us to ask: But what if things had not been as they are? Had it not been wrong to boil babies if things had been vastly different? We happily admit that if some things had been very different, Obama had not been president. We are more hesitant to agree that had things been different, boiling babies would not have been wrong. This die-hard worry is brought out best by considering moral sceptic. This is the (hopefully hypothetical) person who, when you urge them not to boil the baby because it is cruel, asks you for a reason why not to be cruel, why not to hurt others, etc. Aghast at this unruly maverick, we grapple for an ultimate justification to show that in the end, this bastard is not just of a different opinion, but wrong. But as powerful as this impulse for ultimate justification is, I believe it is in fact confused.

Non-natural moral realism embodies the hope that the moral sceptic is wrong in the same kind of way as a schoolchild who believes the square root of nine is two is wrong. Such proof, we feel, would give us refuge, the final word against evil, as the sword of reason subdues the wickedly irrational amongst us. But would such a proof, if it could be proffered, give us the reassurance we yearn for? For what difference would it make if we did manage to show that boiling babies is not only cruel, but contrary to some independent law of reason, God, or (even more opaquely) the universe?

As the philosopher Bernard Williams has asked, why would the moral sceptic care? If he is a good man engaged in facetious questioning, he will already be acting morally and won’t want to be cruel, really. If he, instead, revels in doing evil, why would he care about our neat proof that he is not abiding by some distant, objective moral facts? It is not but for lack of proof of the irrationality of his actions that the Bond villain plots his plans. Nothing would be gained if we were able to call Shakespeare’s Iago not only selfish and treacherous, but irrational as well. The longing for objective, independently existing moral facts is a longing for reassurance that we will have our way. Yet even if we had proof on par with mathematical proof, in favour of such facts, we would be no closer to having things our way. Would it justify us to stop the sceptic from boiling babies? We already thought we were justified. That was never the issue. The problem was that he wasn’t.

These arguments are difficult, and I am myself still struggling with them. I’ve briefly covered enormously complex issues around the nature of reasons and objectivity. However, time to move on. We may now return, hopefully with a slightly new perspective, to the subset of objections raised and rebutted by Paul in his text.

The first one he formulates as a worry about the origins of eternal moral truths. Bar appeal to divine authority, how can his side explain how these magical facts have come to exist? Responding to this, Paul invokes the Euthypro problem (are things good because they are favoured by the gods, or favoured by the gods because they are good?) – curiously, as this does nothing to address the underlying worry of the origins of his purported kind of ethical facts. Indeed, he aptly summarises a counter to a theological attempt to defend the kind of view he holds. However, I do not think he can be more deeply faulted for doing so, since his view is evidently a secular one which, as shown by his reference to mathematics, takes moral facts to be objective and eternal in the sense that the application of reason necessitates us to accept them. They are abstract truths of rationality, accessible in some way somehow similar to the truths of mathematics.

Now, much has been said about the analogy between mathematics and ethics, and I alluded to it in my discussion above. There are many questions about how insight similar to the realisation that 1+1=2, could give us the compelling kind of reason for action that ethical facts seem to provide. I won’t say more in depth about this complex question, other than that it cries out for clarification and justification in order to move beyond sheer, unfounded speculation. Instead, I will finish by turning the tables on Paul’s second positive argument, that “we should believe what appears to be the case unless we have reason to doubt it”. I believe this argument will also address the analogy with mathematics indirectly.

Like in quantum physics, much of everyday common sense is not really helpful in ethics unless some dogmatic thinking is first cleared away. But once the simplistic distinction between relativism and non-natural moral realism is left behind, Paul’s common sense dictum can indeed be helpfully applied. On the one hand, we are asked to believe

1. that there are, and always would be regardless of whether and how we had evolved biologically and developed culturally, some abstract moral facts; and
2. that these facts are available to us in reasoning, and influence our decision-making, through some sui generis intuition of ours (was it necessary that we would have this intuition? or did it come about by evolutionary chance?), about which we can say nothing more than that it might be partly analogous to mathematics.

This is, roughly, Paul’s view. Against this, I have suggested that ethics is rightly taken to be constructed, meaning ethical values are underpinned by the social, cultural, and biological facts about us. Ethics is part of what we do, a phenomenon in the world – one that is very important to us. I have tried to show that the fact that ethics is in some sense constructed, does not mean there is no truth in ethics, or that ethics is simply a matter of whim and opinion. Such worries dispelled, we can judge the fantastic claims of moral realism with cooler heads, without fear of being left defenceless against the moral sceptic. Such an approach, I have argued, will lead us somewhat closer to understanding the nature of morality.

by Erik Hammar

21 August 2016

Dear reader, below is a text written by my friend Paul de-Font Reaulx. We thought it would be fun to write an exchange on a topic we have discussed a lot (without reaching any agreement), namely, the objectivity of morality. Are things right or wrong, really? And what would that even mean? Anyway, please see below for Paul’s introductory argument (as well as some background to what it is we are talking about). I’ll post my reply later on.

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It is my pleasure to start off this discussion on the objectivity of morality, an exemplary non-question according to some, and a lingering existential worry amongst others. I defend the claim that there are objective moral facts – such as the fact that boiling babies is wrong – which determine the rightness and wrongness of actions. By their being objective I mean that they do not depend on the attitude of anyone; boiling a baby is wrong no matter how you feel about it. In other words I will be defending the view that some actions are – lo and behold – actually wrong.

I will refer to my position as ‘moral realism’, and for those interested I will defend a more specific version usually called ‘non-naturalist moral realism’. Moral realism is distinct from ‘error-theory’, which claims that there are no moral facts. It is also distinct from ‘constructivism’, which claims that there are moral facts but these are not independent of our attitudes. For example, a constructivist might hold that boiling babies is wrong because we are in consensus with regards to the abhorrence of the action. A moral realist makes a stronger claim, arguing that even if we happened to be in a community where everyone were happy baby-boilers, baby-boiling would still be wrong, full stop.

Perhaps sweepingly I speculate that moral realism is the position held by most of us before we ever read philosophy, or were exposed to pop-cultural references to Nietzsche. I will in this post argue that this is not a position we have reason to move from. It is natural for a reasonably critical person to turn sceptic at this point, and I intend to dispel such scepticism below. I will do this by first arguing that it is much more intuitive to be a moral realist than any alternative unless we have reason not to, and that the most popular reasons not to be a moral realist are actually quite poor.

‘Alright, so why should I prefer moral realism to constructivism or error-theory?’

I argue that moral realism – not considering objections to it as of yet – is preferable to constructivism and error theory. This positive account can be broken into two propositions:

• It appears that some acts are plainly wrong no matter what anyone thinks about it
• We should believe what appears to be the case unless we have reason to doubt it

Let us start by elaborating on (1). I suggest that when we (or at least most people) reflect on our instinctive attitude to an action such as genocide we find that it is not something like ‘I strongly disapprove of genocide and so do many other people’. Rather it is more definitive, like ‘genocide is morally wrong’. Someone might well reinterpret this instinctive attitude to genocide as actually being mere aversion and closer to the former statement, in light of some of the objections below for example. I do not contest this, but for now I only claim that on the face of it – ‘pre-philosophy’ – actions such as genocide appear to us to be objectively wrong, no matter how we later make sense of those appearances.

Let us progress to (2). This is an intuitive claim which deserves to be pulled out a little bit. Basically I suggest that we should hold as a general principle to believe that things are as they first appear to us, unless we have reasons to doubt those appearances. In some cases, such as if we were in the desert and saw an oasis in the distance, we do have reasons to doubt appearances. However, try to imagine doing the same even if you didn’t have reason to doubt appearances. You would not be able to drink coffee (there’s nothing in the cup), play Civilization (Persia didn’t just conquer my capital) or anything else that makes life bearable. It is reasonable to conclude that we should believe that things are as they appear unless we have reason not to. Finally let us apply the same principle to moral realism. We should doubt that some actions are objectively wrong only once we have reason to doubt that they are.

Now objections have indeed been given, and some provide good reason to question moral realism. My aim for the remainder of this post is negative; to handle some of the most available objections to moral realism, and show that they provide insufficient grounds for rejecting moral realism. I then conclude that we should maintain our belief in there being objective moral facts until better reasons to reject it come our way (that’s Erik’s job).

Let us progress to the negative case. Due to scope I will handle only three objections which I believe constitute the majority of the scepticism to moral realism. If you don’t worry about an objection then you can skip that section.

‘When there is no God to provide morality, where are these facts supposed to come from?’

I would speculate that a worry such as that above underlies a significant portion of popular suspicion of moral realism, and this is why I bring it up. It can be put as an argument using some quintessential existentialist quotes: ‘If there is no God, everything is permitted’ (Ivan Karamazov – Dostoyevsky [arguably]), ‘God is dead’ (Nietzsche), and hence there is no wrong or right. The intuition which drives the argument is that moral facts would have to come from some source – a lawgiver. In the absence of such a source there cannot be objective moral facts.

The argument is actually weak, because Ivan’s cynicism leads to some counterintuitive consequences which can be made clear (as with most things) with the help of Plato, using the main argument in his Ethyphro. Now, if God is the source of morality, then God’s will defines what is right. This means that God could not be evil, because whatever he would will would be the good by definition; that God is good becomes a tautology (a necessary truth). But to some – including myself – this is very counterintuitive. When we say that ‘God is good’ we intend something more than a tautology such as ‘a bachelor is an unmarried man’. Furthermore, consider the case of Abraham and Isaac. Had God allowed Abraham to sacrifice his son this would make us want to question the goodness of God. But we would not be able to, because Abraham’s sacrifice would be good by definition. Unless we want to equate any possible decision of God with the good, we should not accept that God is the source of moral facts.

The alternative is to say that moral facts are independent of God, but that he embodies it perfectly. In this case it is not a tautology to say that God is good, it is an informative statement. But if moral facts are independent of God, then his existence should not obviously have bearing on their existence. In other words, we are about as well off with or without God when it comes to objective moral truths.

‘Fine, but where are all these ‘objective moral facts’? I don’t see them!’

Even if objective moral truths wouldn’t need a lawgiver to exist, that doesn’t mean that they do. In fact, it might strike one as very strange that they would. The argument is roughly that unlike chairs, dogs, trees and other objects, it’s not clear where all these objective moral facts are lying about. My belief that the cat is on the mat is made true by a certain state of the world, namely the cat being on the mat. I also believe that genocide is morally wrong, but what is it that makes this belief true? The fact that would make genocide wrong does not seem to be of the same kind as the cat being on the mat, but rather of a less available non-natural kind which I seem unable to point to. Because moral realism would have to posit such strange entities as non-natural objective moral facts, which we have no reason to believe exist, we should abandon it in favour of the alternatives.

I do not hope to dispel the worry from this objection, but show that it is far from the intimidating aberration it might appear at a distance. I do this by arguing that the same charge can be brought against many things which we do not doubt the objectivity of. The clearest example of such a case is mathematics. Most people believe that mathematics is objective, and subsequently that there are objective mathematical facts which makes ‘1+1=2’ true for example. Sceptics of ‘mathematical realism’ are at least rarer than sceptics of moral realism.  It is far from clear however where these mathematical facts are found, and it is easy to argue that they are as elusive as moral facts.

I suggest that if we feel inclined to reject the existence of objective moral facts because of their metaphysical strangeness, then we should also reject other entities which seem to be equally strange, unless we can show that they are different. But we don’t want to reject the existence of objective mathematical facts, and hence we should not reject the existence of objective moral facts from the same argument.

In other words, there are lots of strange entities which we rarely question the existence of, and which we certainly cannot point to. It is easy to be harsher against objective moral facts because somehow they seem even stranger, and are usually in question more than mathematical facts for example, but I find it is far from clear that they should be.

‘But hang on, the obvious difference between moral and mathematical facts is that people disagree about morality all the time, but not mathematics!’

Someone might reasonably point out that a people’s beliefs of what is wrong and right differ, while few people dispute that the square root of 36 is 6. To give more force to the argument, we can observe that cultures through history have differed significantly in what they took to be moral behaviour. Take as an example the view on suicide in medieval Japan compared to medieval Europe, where it was considered honourable in the former and disgraceful in the latter. The fact that humans have differed so much in their moral beliefs and do not converge on some single point suggests that there is no such point to converge towards, and that there are no underlying objective moral truths which our beliefs correspond to after all.

As above I will not be able to refute this charge decisively, but I believe that I can show that it is far from sufficient to settle the question at hand. Firstly, the charge seems to get its force from the idea that we can all see very clearly what is right and wrong in all questions, and despite this we find that our beliefs differ profoundly. This is not the case. Aristotle remarked that ethics is complicated, and often we are far from certain as to how we should act. It is only when we reflect deeply on difficult questions that we might be able to discern an answer. The fact that clear answers are rare does not imply that are no answers.

Therefore we should not at all be surprised that one (or both) view is erroneous in questions such as suicide, which is a difficult moral question. If however we would find a culture which defied what we take to be the most basic moral facts, such as it being wrong to torture innocent people with equal moral value to ourselves for fun, then moral realism should be abandoned. This is an empirical discussion which I cannot dwell on now, but only say that I have yet to find such a case.

Secondly, we do make errors in mathematics as well, and some take a very long time to figure out. The Busemann-Petty problem provides an example for those who are interested, where a solution which was accepted by the mathematical community was later refuted. Therefore the difference between morality and mathematics appears to be one of degree, in that morality is more vague and difficult, rather than being clear-cut. Hence the argument from disagreement fails to show that mathematics is decisively more objective than morality.

‘Wow, that’s awesome, I’m convinced!’

Good to hear! Now I realize not all readers might be as easily persuaded as my imaginary interlocutor, and I will humbly admit that I have not settled the debate. I do hope however to have shown why the most available objections to moral realism fail to provide a serious challenge to it in their more primitive forms. I leave it to Erik to do better.

by Paul de-Font Reaulx

18 August 2016