Am I A Moral Fetishist?

No!

A friend, in criticizing my moral realism, once described the non-natural moral facts as my “strange moral fetish objects.” More seriously, charges of moral fetishism are often levied at those of us who take the moral facts themselves to provide us with motivating reasons. The charge is generally as follows: suppose that it turned out that the moral facts were very bizarre — things that currently seem to give us no reasons. Let’s even imagine the true moral law were something we currently regard as appalling — requiring frequent blood sacrifice, for example. The claim is that moral realists who take an acts being right as sufficient to motivate taking the act fetishize morality, and, as a result, would engage in brutal, pointless blood sacrifice if the moral law so commanded it.

It’s worth noting that this is almost certainly an impossible thought experiment — one that couldn’t happen in any possible world. The moral facts are necessary — they’re true in all possible worlds. Thus, it couldn’t be the case that there were bizarre but true moral facts any more than it could turn out to be the case that 1+1 was equal to 2 in some far-off world. Thus, this is not on the table as a kosher thought experiment — it’s rather like asking one to calculate the area of a square circle.

Logically impossible thought experiments cannot give people reasons to abandon their views. Much like the mathematical facts couldn’t be something bizarre and unknowable involving 2+2 being equal to 27 — and imagining that those who are committed to the proposition that one epistemically ought to believe the true mathematical facts must think that if 2+2 were equal to 27 they should believe it is no objection to this view — the moral facts couldn’t be different from what they are.

But while this thought experiment is almost certainly a logical impossibility it is, at the very least, a genuine epistemic possibility. Given this, perhaps it can feature in thought experiments, just like we can ponder what it would be like if the Goldbach conjecture tuned out false, despite it probably being impossible for it to be false.

In order to see whether the charge of objectionable fetishism — caring about rightness rather than caring about people — really sticks, it’s worth comparing it to the charge of epistemic fetishism. This charge would claim that a person who follows the evidence where it leads would have to think that they should believe bizarre claims, like that there is no external world, the earth is flat, everything is false, there is no consciousness, and so on, if that was where the evidence lead. Yet the response to this bizarre charge would seem to be biting the bullet — if it turned out the evidence lead to weird places, then let our beliefs follow it. The reason it seems bizarre to believe the earth is flat is because it is epistemically unjustified — but were it epistemically justified, it would no longer seem bizarre at all.

Now, let’s compare this to the response in the moral case. Let’s first consider what morality is. As I’ve argued before, morality describes something like what we’d do if we were totally rational and impartial — if we cared about everyone and all the right things. Thus, for it to be objectively moral to partake in blood sacrifice, there must be some good reason to do blood sacrifice — a reason that we’d pick up on if we were sufficiently rational and impartial. I can’t imagine what that would look like, but if our opposition to blood sacrifice is caused purely by partiality and foolishness, then it ceases to have any genuine force.

This is the fundamental problem with the fetishism objection — it fails to grasp that morality is intrinsically worth caring about. Things that are moral are necessarily important. Thus, the objection is like asking if friendship really didn’t matter much whether we should promote it. Well, the reason we seek out friendship is because it seems to matter — both for ourselves and others. But if it turned out that (somehow) friendship wasn’t the type of thing we’d care about if we were rational and impartial, then there is something that we’re missing that renders friendship unimportant. But moral realism shouldn’t be blamed for holding that if we’re missing important facts, those facts don’t mysteriously go away.

If the things that seem good to us only seem good to us because we’re foolish and partial, such that were we wiser and more impartial they’d no longer seem good to us, then they are not genuinely good. It’s hard to see how it could be the case that greater impartiality and wisdom would cause us to cherish blood sacrifice, but, then again, this is a logically impossible scenario, so we shouldn’t expect it to be easily conceivable.

Instead of thinking about logically possible things, let’s consider more relevant scenarios. Suppose a committed deontologist found out that utilitarianism were true — if they were more rational and impartial, they’d be a utilitarian. It seems very obvious that this knowledge should make them a utilitarian. After all, it means that their non-utilitarianism is built on error. And we have no reason to maintain beliefs built on errors.

Thus, the fetishism charge lacks force. Caring about morality itself is not objectionable fetishism, because morality is, by its nature, worth caring about.