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