There are two answers to that question: historically and philosophically.

Historically, biological evolution. Animals that have that, reproduce and stick around, leaving it embedded in the most foundational levels of inherited consciousness. It’s thus inevitable but still accidental. But it is a happy accident, because…

Philosophically, if you didn’t have that deep background history handing that gift on to you (the capability of experiencing satisfaction and the foundational pleasures of it), but you were given the capacity to choose what to have, you’d still choose that. Because it is better to exist satisfied than to either not exist or to exist not satisfied. And those are the only three options.

And by “better,” we mean better from the POV of the person on the chosen path (i.e. compare each hypothetical person’s expected self-report of how they will feel about it, and compare across them to see which one can objectively claim to be better off than the others).

On that last point see: The Objective Value Cascade.

You say that morals are made up because they are the best tool for us to further ourselves and our own personal satisfaction.

I wonder though, why do we have an impulse to be satisfied? Where does the desire to further ourselves come from?

Numbers are invented words that signify quantities.

The way I say this is, “we invented numbers so we could count things”! LOL!

You will benefit from reading my chapter in TEC. It has a whole section on the difference between moral universalism and moral relativism, how both can be moral realism, and what empirical evidence it would take to confirm one over the other.

That section will also give you the tools to argue the points you want.

When asking “how do you argue,” the clue is that moral truth only follows from true beliefs, which only follow from conclusions reached without fallacy from true facts. Most moral claims (e.g. “cultures of oppression”) derive fallaciously from the facts, or from false claims to fact, or both (often indeed both). So you point that out. You get a person’s beliefs about moral facts to become knowledge of moral facts (justified true belief) by getting them to abandon all fallaciously reached conclusions—and reach conclusions only without fallacy—and all false beliefs (beliefs contrary to fact)—and start over with only true beliefs (actual facts). When they do that, surprise! They end up where you are. Hence, why you were right.

What you may not understand here is that moral relativism does not entail that what is moral is just “whatever” a culture says. That form of cultural relativism exists conceptually, and would be anti-realist; it would fall into the category of error theory. But realist moral relativism is not the view that morality is just arbitrarily whatever a culture randomly strikes upon. Realist relativism is the same as physical relativism: sometimes facts can be objectively true for one person that are not objectively true for another (whether I am moving, or whether you are moving, is relative to our respective frame of reference, yet remains an objective fact).

Hence it can still be the case that what a moral relativist is saying is false. For example, if a culture’s morals regarding women are based on the belief that women are emotionally and cognitively crippled, then their morals are objectively false. Just as if they believed you were flying past them at 1000 mph when in fact they were only driving 50. The relativism of velocity there is still true; but their belief is still false. Whereas if we discovered that in some culture somewhere, women really were all so emotionally and cognitively handicapped that they ought to be treated like children, then it would be objectively true that in that culture women should be treated like children, while it also remained objectively true that women in our culture should not. Hence moral relativism could be objectively true, and thus be moral realism.

It’s just that no such culture as that imaginary one I just described exists in reality; only in false belief. Thus, only factually false morals can follow from it. Even if relativism is true. You might start to see here why relativism probably isn’t true; but you really need to see how I show that in TEC. Because there is a difference between something being logically necessarily the case (“morality can not be relative”) and being contingently empirically the case (“morality is not relative…for members of the human species”); and the latter still has to be proved with evidence (it cannot simply be presumed; nor can the converse).

But even if we were to discover that there were, objectively in fact, two different kinds of people, such that different moral values followed without fallacy from true facts for each (which would be a realist condition of moral relativism), it would still be an objective fact of the world that you ought to obey the morals that follow for whichever type of person you were. And you can each argue with the other over whether you are in fact obeying that morality, the one you really ought to be. You’d simply be arguing over whether the moral system purported to follow for one type of person actually follows for that type of person—without fallacy, and from only true facts. Because you can only have moral knowledge if your morals are justified true beliefs (as knowledge is by definition justified true belief).

OK! Thanks for the reply. There is a lot of ground to cover here – and I do recall reading your entry on Objective moral facts, just don’t recall all points to a tee obviously.

I’m not sure I fully understand moral relativism is a form of moral realism, since at least in my understanding, it is distinct from moral realism. From your discussion, I think you mean there’s an overlap (some basic norms), and then others may differ. If that’s the case, how am I (as a moral realist) supposed to argue that cultures oppressing women are worse than those who do not (or where oppression is mitigated to a large extent)?

For that discussion to be fruitful, both parties have to agree that there is a universal, objective standard on how people should be treated. Typically, I don’t see that happening (maybe this is how it is), and there’s various other examples one could think of where this discussion would go off-rails.

Your discussion on moral realism is fruitful, but I believe it’d have been more useful if you could survey how and why you’re a moral realist rather than an anti-realist. In the discussion I quoted in my comment earlier, I asked my interlocutor the question on murder because they’d claimed that the Nazis cannot be condemned for their actions since they were operating from their moral premises (subjectivism). In this context, I don’t understand how my rejoinder is mistaken, albeit I have understood your reply.

(Not to mention moral realism itself has various forms, and that semantic nuance will take me more time to unentangle).

Indeed, you are confusing different things, which I find is a common error in this subject. I recommend you read my corrective article Objective Moral Facts. Although I don’t survey the terms realism and anti-realism there, that article will clue you in to the mistake you are making: moral relativism is a form of moral realism.

Just as physical relativism is: if I drive past you at 50mph while you stand still, it is an objective fact (a true and thus real fact) that you are moving at 50mph and that you are standing still, because velocity is relative to frame of reference. In my frame of reference, I am sitting still and you are flying past me at 50mph. Both facts are true. And they are real facts of the world.

Thus, if it were true that “one moral fact obtains for me” (e.g. it is true that “I ought not murder”) and “a different moral fact obtains for them” (e.g. it is true that “they ought to murder”), these would still be objectively true facts of the world. They would be real moral facts. All moral realism requires is that there be moral facts and that they be true. And so it is in this case.

What you are thinking of is a different distinction, which is between relative and universal moral facts. Both are true objective facts (just as with our relative velocity) and thus both are realism.

There is evidence that there is a universal morality true for all human beings, which I survey in The Real Basis of a Moral World. Which may or may not hold for certain aliens or AI, and possibly small subsets of humans like sociopaths, but the latter is actually unlikely (and even the former may be), because moral facts do not derive from mere incidental “preferences,” they are a function of what a fully rational and informed person would do, and most “preferences” are irrational, poorly reasoned, or uninformed, and thus cannot in any sense produce “true” moral facts—just as what you “want” to believe does not produce true beliefs or even knowledge, no matter how certain you are your beliefs are true. Because knowledge is justified true belief, not whatever you “prefer.”

For example, if sociopaths adopted the moral dictum “kill whoever you want,” the rest of us would kill them (or imprison them or otherwise undermine all their life goals), which is contrary to their every interest, and therefore it is not factually true that they ought to kill whoever they want. Thus even sociopaths cannot escape the true moral facts of the same universal morality applicable to us all.

I cover all of this, including all these questions about relative vs. universal moral facts, in my peer reviewed treatment of moral realism in The End of Christianity.

Since as I understand it, moral anti-realism (in particular in this context: moral subjectivism) entails that there are no moral facts (right/wrong). Hence if some agent Y wants to kill a moral anti-realist, they have no way to appeal to a yardstick (axiom/fact).

I was told in a discussion that my use of this example demonstrates my lack of understanding of moral anti-realism. Would like to know your thoughts.

Fixed. Thanks!