Why I Believe In Objective Morality

"A person wants to eat a car."

New readers of this blog don’t know that in the good old days—when I was a wee lad of 18, and even 19—most of my articles were about morality. I wrote a 44-part article series arguing for utilitarianism (no need to read it, I think much of it isn’t very good) and one of my earlier decentish posts was a lengthy defense of moral realism. Still, that post was much too long, slightly overwrought, and written by my freshman self who was much less good at writing and less mentally clear than I am today. It’s past time I clarified why I’m a moral realist.

Let’s first define moral realism. It’s the idea that there are some stance independent moral truths. Something is stance independent if it doesn’t depend on what anyone thinks or feels about it. So, for instance, that I have arms is stance independently true—it doesn’t depend on what anyone thinks about it. That ice-cream is tasty is stance dependently true; it might be tasty to me but not to you, and a person who thinks it’s not tasty isn’t making an error.

So, in short, moral realism is the idea that there are things that you should or shouldn’t do and that this fact doesn’t depend on what anyone thinks about them. So, for instance, suppose you take a baby and hit it with great force with a hammer. Moral realism says:

1. You’re doing something wrong.

2. That fact doesn’t depend on anyone’s beliefs about it. You approving of it, or the person appraising the situation approving of it, or society approving of it doesn’t determine its wrongness (of course, it might be that what makes its wrong is its effects on the baby, resulting in the baby not approving of it, but that’s different from someone’s higher-level beliefs about the act. It’s an objective fact that a particular person won a high-school debate round, even though that depended on what the judges thought).

Moral realism says that some moral statements are true and this doesn’t depend on what people think about it. Now, there are only three possible ways any particular moral statement can fail to be stance independently true:

1. It’s neither true nor false.

2. It’s false.

3. It’s true but stance dependently—so it depends on what someone thinks about it.

But lots of moral statements just really don’t seem like any of these. The wrongness of slavery, the holocaust, baby torture, stabbing people in the eye—it seems like all these things really are wrong and this fact doesn’t depend on what people think about it. It seems very weird to think that what makes it wrong to torture people is what someone thinks about it—even weirder that statements like “torture is wrong,” are neither true nor false.

The view that these statements are neither true nor false has unique linguistic problems. Proponents claim that moral sentences are like commands—they’re not even in the business of expressing propositions. If I say “shut the door,” or “go Dodgers,” that isn’t either true nor false. But because of that, it makes no sense to ask “go Dodgers?” or “is it true that shut the door?” Similarly, it makes no sense to say “if shut the door then shut the door now, shut the door, therefore, shut the door now.” But it does make sense to say things like “is abortion wrong?” or “if murder is wrong, then so is abortion.” This shows that moral statements are, at least in many cases, in the business of expressing propositions—asserting things supposed to be true or false.

Now, there are all sorts of tricky ways people modify the view that moral sentences are neither true nor false to get around these counterexamples. I can’t discuss them in detail, but I can only say that they tend to be very gerrymandered and ad hoc, and while perhaps they can affirm the same sentences moral realists say, they don’t agree with the meanings. They’re analogous to religious liberals who say things like “God exists, but by that I mean that there’s love in the world.” Worse, they imply statements like “torture is wrong,” are neither true nor false. But they seem true!

Denying objective morality is counterintuitive in a second, very different way. If there are stance-independent reasons—reasons to care about things that don’t depend on what you actually care about—then moral realism is almost definitely true. Once that anti-realist admits there are reasons to care independent of your desires, it seems those reasons should give rise to moral reasons. If I have a reason to prevent my own suffering, it seems that suffering is bad, which gives me a moral reason to prevent it.

But this means that moral anti-realists must think that you can never have a reason to care about something independ of what you actually do care about. This is crazy as shown by the following cases:

1. A person wants to eat a car. They know they’d get no enjoyment from it—the whole experience would be quite painful and unpleasant. On moral anti-realism, they’re not being irrational. They have no reason to take a different action.

2. A person desires, at some time, to procrastinate. They know it’s bad for them, but they don’t want to do their tasks. On anti-realism, this is not a rational failing.

3. A person wants to torture themselves. They have this desire—despite getting no joy from it—despite knowing the relevant facts. On anti-realism, they’re not being irrational.

4. A four-year-old wants a cookie to be shaped like a triangle. They are willing to endure great future agony for this. On anti-realism, they’re not being irrational—so long as they’re informed about the relevant facts.

5. A person has a very strong desire to be skinny. This motivates them to starve to death—leaving behind a life of joy and fulfillment. On anti-realism, one has no reason to not to do this. It might be bad, but one can’t claim that they’re acting foolishly.

6. A person is depressed and cuts themself. When they do it, they are fully informed about the long-term consequences. On anti-realism, they are not acting irrationally.

This is all completely nuts! We take it as a totally ordinary assumption in normal life that there are some things that aren’t worth pursuing—that one is a fool to pursue. Anti-realism can’t maintain that obvious intuition. We call people mentally ill when they have certain aims, even when informed of the relevant facts, because we recognize it’s a sign of irrationality!

Okay, so far I’ve argued that moral anti-realism implies things that are really counterintuitive. It implies things that seem false when you think about them. But is this a problem? Anti-realists often admit that their position is counterintuitive, but think this isn’t a defect. The facts, after all, do not care about your feelings.

But I think this gets wrong how we come to know things. Consider the belief that, say, the law of non-contradiction is true. How do we know that? Or the belief that if space isn’t curved the shortest distance between two points is a line. Or even the belief that there’s an external world.

The way we know these things is by relying on appearances. We think about the subject and it appears that, say, a thing can’t both be a way and not be that way at the same time in the same sense. Our foundational beliefs are justified on the basis of them seeming right.

Visual experience is a good analogy here. When I see a table, I think there really is a table. Because it appears that there’s a table, I think I’m justified in believing there to be one unless given a strong reason to doubt it. Could I be hallucinating? Sure! But unless given a reason to think that I am, I shouldn’t think so.

But just as there are visual appearances, there are intellectual appearances. Just as it appears to me that there’s a table in front of me, it appears to me that it’s wrong to torture babies. Just as I should think there’s a table absent a good reason to doubt it, I should think it’s wrong to torture babies. In fact, I should be more confident in the wrongness of torturing babies, because that seems less likely to be the result of error. It seems more likely I’m hallucinating a table than that I’m wrong about the wrongness of baby torture.

People often object to relying on intuitions. But I’m curious how they get their foundational beliefs. One’s most basic beliefs always seem justified by the fact that they seem right. Such people should explain how they know that the physical world exists, the laws of non-contradiction and identity are true, the greater is greater than the lesser, something can’t have a color without a shape, and that the cumulative case for either atheism or theism is better than the other without relying at all on how things seem.

Now, people point out that our intuitions conflict and are historically contingent. But intuitionists don’t say that intuitions are infallible or that we should never revise them in light of evidence. We say that intuitions are the starting point on which you build your beliefs, but that upon learning new things, you should still obviously update your beliefs. Showing intuitions go wrong in various cases tells us nothing about their general reliability. It would be like saying you can’t trust that there’s a table in front of you because people sometimes hallucinate.

Furthermore, it’s hard to see how, absent relying on intuition, people know that our intuitions really are ever wrong. For instance, a common class of intuition that we know is wrong is that we have weird views about probability—we often think that the odds of A and B are higher than the odds of A alone. But absent relying on intuition, how do you know that the odds of A and B aren’t higher than the odds of A alone? The critics of intuitions rely on intuitions to discredit them.

Moral realists aren’t special pleading. We believe in moral facts for the same reason that we believe in any other basic kind of fact.

Now, anti-realists have a bunch of arguments and I can’t address them all. But let me just address three of them.

The first common one is the argument from disagreement. People argue that because we disagree about morality, it can’t be objective. But this misunderstands what it means for something to be objective. Something objective is true and its truth doesn’t depend on what you think about it. It won’t necessarily be known by everyone.

There’s an objective fact about the right theory of physics, whether God exists, and even whether morality is objective. But those things generate plenty of disagreement. So disagreement can’t be enough to necessitate subjectivity. Now, there are more complicated ways of making the argument, but I don’t really think any of them stick. Lots of other domains have similar disagreement to moral realism while being squarely objective.

The second common argument against moral realism is the argument from queerness. This argument says that moral facts are super weird. They’re utterly different from anything else. For this reason, you shouldn’t beleive in them as they’re just too foreign and alien.

But the world has lots of weird things. Fields, epistemic facts, planets, energy, mathematical facts, propositions, particles, God, consciousness, and much more. Sure morality is different—it’s about what you should do—but all these things are different from the others. The world is filled with weird stuff, so I don’t know why moral facts’ weirdness would be disqualifying.

Furthermore, it’s unclear why moral realism is supposed to be weird. It doesn’t seem weird to me that some things are bad. I’ve never heard a good explanation of what about moral realism makes it so weird. It just seems to be a brute intuition—one that I don’t share.

The only decent explanation I’ve heard of what’s supposed to be weird about morality is that it’s non-natural. Moral facts aren’t made of atoms—they’re not part of the physical world. But, such objectors claim, all the things that exist are parts of the physical world. Therefore, moral facts would be a new, radically different sort of thing.

But I reject that all the stuff that exists is physical. I think there’s lots of non-physical stuff—modal facts, God, consciousness, souls, mathematical facts, logical facts, epistemic facts, and so on. Some of those are controversial, but others are pretty plausible.

Take modal facts, for instance. Those are facts about what’s possible and necessary. So, for example, the fact that a married bachelor is impossible is a modal fact. That’s not a physical fact—it’s not about the physical world. It would have been true even if there never had been a physical universe, and it was true before the universe. It’s not merely the claim that there are no married bachelors but that there can’t be any—that them existing is impossible. But that fact isn’t about the physical world.

Or take logical facts. Any argument with true premises of the form “if P then Q, P,” will have a true conclusion. That’s not a fact about the physical world. It didn’t start being true at the big bang. It’s a necessary truth, with similar status to the moral facts.

Finally, consider epistemic facts. These are facts about what it’s reasonable to believe—what you should believe. For example “it’s irrational to believe what’s opposed by the evidence,” or “it’s irrational to believe there are square circles just because you find them cool.” That is, once again, not a fact about the physical world. But it’s a true fact. Like moral facts, epistemic facts are about what you should do—in this case, what you should believe, what reason demands you believe. Those who reject moral realism would seem to also have to reject epistemic realism and thus think that a person who claims that they think moral realism is true because they like the idea isn’t being irrational.

The last major objection to moral realism is called the evolutionary debunking argument. This argument says that evolution shaped our moral beliefs. The reason that we believe that torture is wrong is because believing that was evolutionarily beneficial. But crucially, believing that being beneficial doesn’t depend on it being true—it would be just as beneficial if it was false. So if our moral beliefs are shaped by blind evolutionary processes, it would be a miracle if they turn out to be right.

But I think even in cases like this, where someone tells a just-so story about how you might come to mistakenly believe what you do about some subject, you still have to evaluate their plausibility. You could tell a similar debunking story about our belief in the law of non-contradiction. But I think in such cases, we just have to consider the plausibility of the belief and see that, even though they can tell a consistent story of how you come to mistakenly intuit some fact, their account is less plausible.

Like, suppose that I give the theory that everything in the world was created by a brain worm. You point out that that’s crazy—a brain worm being fundamental is very complicated, it can’t make the world. I say that the brain worm is fundamental and misleads you into thinking it’s complicated plus that complexity is a virtue plus that brain worms can’t create the world. I point out that people often are misled by brain worms. It’s true that I can tell an internally consistent story of how you come to be mistaken across the board, but the story is just not at all plausible. Same with the story on which all of our beliefs about morality are wrong—random side effects of blind evolution.

Or suppose that I try to debunk the existence of love. I note that it would be evolutionarily beneficial to think you’re in love because that aids in reproduction. Adding love to your ontology is an extra posit. While I could tell an internally consistent debunking story, one would need to evaluate its plausibility. And such a story wouldn’t be plausible—it would be very unintuitive, just like the debunking story of the anti-realist.

Now, is it true that our evolutionary beliefs are the byproducts of blind chance so that it would be a huge coincidence if they were true? No, I don’t think so. Here’s my account of how we have true moral beliefs: evolution makes us super smart, and then we figure out the moral truths. This is the same way we come to have true beliefs about modal facts, logical facts, mathematical facts, and so on. There’s no special challenge for moral facts (now, I think us having such rational capacities is surprising on atheism, but to account for how we know tons of other things, we should already grant that we have those rational capacities even if we’re atheists).

So if you think you know stuff about math—like that there are infinite prime numbers—then however you explain that will apply also to the moral domain.

Why should we accept this account? Well, mostly for the reason I explain above—that it’s the only way to make sense of our moral knowledge, which we have, as shown by the arguments given above. But furthermore, it’s a better explanation of our moral beliefs.

We believe lots of random things about morality that seem to have no clear evolutionary benefit. We believe that people on the other side of the world matter intrinsically as much as nearer ones (some people don’t but many do), that the better than relation is transitive (if A is better than B and B is better than C then A is better than C), that spatiotemporal location doesn’t affect one’s moral worth, that if A is wrong and B is wrong then doing A then B is wrong, and so on.

Many of these don’t plausibly enhance survival, and are niche and formal. This makes sense if we’re really figuring out the moral facts. In contrast, on anti-realism, you’d expect most of our moral beliefs to be geared towards survival—believing having many kids is obligatory. It would be surprising that many of the strongest intuitions—like the belief in transitivity—are things that are formal, non-emotional, and don’t plausibly directly enhance our survival.

Of course, I’d grant that many of our moral intuitions are affected by evolution. Evolution gives us many false moral inclinations, but those can be overcome by sufficient reflection. An analogy with mathematics is appropriate—we have some unreliable mathematical intuitions because of evolution, but we can still form many true mathematical beliefs by reflecting.

Finally—and I know this won’t move atheists, but just explaining my views—I reject the evolutionary debunking argument because I believe in God. If God exists and wants us to know the truth about morality, it makes sense that we’d have true moral beliefs and set up the world such that the evolutionary process produces us with true moral beliefs.

Moral anti-realism is certainly an internally consistent position. But it’s a very implausible one. It gives up many of the most obvious truth about the world—the stance independent wrongness of torture—on the basis of super lame arguments. Absent some extremely compelling reason to accept it, we should remain convinced that it’s false. Some things really are wrong.