Moral Realism

Morality Is Discovered, Not Invented

In my previous post, I argued that if we take seriously the idea that some things matter, we will find ourselves committed to

Value Realism: there exists stance-independent value (i.e., value that obtains independently of anyone’s beliefs, preferences, emotions, or attitudes).

Similarly, in this post I will suggest that if we take the ordinary idea of morality seriously, then we will find ourselves committed to the related, but distinct, view known as

Moral Realism: the truths of morality are stance-independent, such that they obtain independently of anyone’s beliefs, preferences, emotions, or attitudes.

In other words, if moral realism is true, then the truths of morality are not contingent upon what humans happen to believe them to be; they are not invented, or “constructed”, or up to us in any way. They are objective – out in the world, to be discovered (in something like the way that the truths of mathematics are, on one view, to be discovered). Moreover, the fundamental moral truths must be necessary: invariant, and not possibly otherwise.

Why should we think about morality in this way? Because, in short, it best captures the way that, on reflection, morality seems to most of us - and, all else being equal, we should believe things are as they seem (lest we fall into extreme skepticism). We perceive a realm of duties and values, and these duties and values seem to have a kind of authority, so that it is up to us to conform ourselves to them. If it is truly wrong to inflict suffering on innocent beings for fun, then even if everyone woke up tomorrow morning believing the contrary, it would still be wrong.

Why do people shy away from Moral Realism, as I understand it? In contemporary society, one common reason is the sense that the view is inconsistent with Naturalism, the worldview on which (according to one construal, at least) all that exists are those entities and properties posited by the natural sciences. But Naturalism is itself plagued by difficulties. For one thing, if one holds that naturalism ought to be accepted, then one invokes a notion of epistemic normativity which does not admit readily of a naturalistic explanation (and if epistemic normativity can be naturalized, the question then arises: why could not moral normativity be naturalized, as well?¹). More importantly, however, there is an implicit epistemological prioritization that the naturalist needs to justify: namely, the prioritization of scientific explanation over moral explanation. It’s open to the moral realist to take the moral domain as fundamental and to insist that a worldview is incomplete if the moral domain is unaccounted for.

Another force militating against Moral Realism is the moral (and, increasingly, epistemological) relativism that has swept much of the contemporary world. Moral relativism is the (initially) congenial-seeming position according to which all moral judgments must be relativized to the individual, or to the culture in which one resides. It might seem that widespread adoption of moral relativism would be desirable insofar as it would tend to promote tolerance - but in fact, on relativism, tolerance is only good insofar as one, or one’s culture, regards it as such. And it would be logically inconsistent for someone to simultaneously affirm moral relativism and insist upon tolerance as a universal value (exactly the sort of value the denial of which defines moral relativism!).

Finally, some (most famously, J.L. Mackie) have had the sense that we should not believe in the existence of stance-independent moral truths because such truths would be…really, really weird. But this concern rests upon a thought that seems unjustified: namely, that we should not believe in the existence of entities with a strange ontological status. Endorsement of that thought should lead one to disbelieve in all sorts of things posited by contemporary science (physics, in particular) – the very discipline that many moral skeptics regard as the best guide to reality. Most importantly, as mentioned above, it is open to the Moral Realist to simply take the reality of the moral domain as fundamental as invulnerable to empirical falsification - just like, for example, the reality of first-person experience (though, of course, some naturalists deny that, too!).

Perhaps it’s true that there is something somewhat strange about morality. The mind (or at least my own mind) rebels at ungrounded necessities, and so there is something unsatisfying about a view one which morality is simply a set of brute, explained necessities; we can reasonably wish for some ultimate account of why there is a moral – or, for that matter, a normative – domain at all (i.e., why is reality such that it contains facts about what ought to be done?) The answers to such questions may indeed be strange, if they are even comprehensible; however, by my lights, nothing could be so incomprehensible as a world in which nothing mattered morally.

1. Note that some moral realists indeed are naturalists, believing that moral truths are identical to, reducible to, or supervenient upon natural features of the world. I will likely discuss this view in a future post. For my part, I do not find it plausible: I think that moral truths must be non-natural (given any ordinary understanding of “naturalness”).