Is moral truth a priori and not a natural property of the universe? So says Dr. Russ Shafer-Landau (as articulated in Whatever Happened to Good and Evil in 2003; and Moral Realism: A Defence in 2005). Even though I’m sympathetic to his project, he’s just wrong. And not merely wrong, but too obviously wrong for this to still be a thing in 21st century philosophy. Here I’ll explain why I think that. And in the process you’ll get a feel for how to actually think about moral realism, and how to better understand what morality actually is and how a morality is determined to be true.
This connects with a recent and very relevant interview of me on this same issue by J.J. Chipchase at Naturalistic Philosophy, titled On Moral Theory and Truth with Richard Carrier – Part I. There I outline many aspects of my take on metaethics that inform the following.
Ethical Non-Naturalism: The Phlogiston of Philosophy
I shall be quoting the analysis of Andrew Fisher, in Metaethics: An Introduction (2011), first from pp. 73-74 therein, because he does an already good job of articulating Shafer-Landau’s arguments in terms anyone can understand.
Fisher explains that on one form of moral realism “the features that make moral claims true are not natural features but rather they are non-natural,” e.g. “the non-naturalists would claim that if ‘killing is wrong’ is true then this is because killing has the non-natural moral property of wrongness.” “But,” Fisher then asks, “why on earth would anyone in this post-Enlightenment, scientific day and age think that (a) there are moral properties and (b) these are non-natural?”
One reason why, of course, is to promote Divine Command Theory. Which I wrote about recently (in The Moral Bankruptcy of Divine Command Theory). But there is another, nontheistic approach argued by Russ Shafer-Landau. He writes (as quoted in Fisher, p. 75):
As I see it, there are genuine features of our world that remain forever outside the purview of the natural sciences. Moral facts are such features. They introduce an element of normativity that cannot be captured in the records of the natural sciences. They tell us what we ought to do; how we should behave; what is worth pursuing; what reasons we have; what is justifiable and what not. There is no science that can inform us of such things.
A similar sentiment is echoed by David Copp (ibid.):
There remains a stubborn feeling that facts about what is right or wrong, what is good or bad, and what we have reason to do, have something distinctive in common, and that this common feature [normativity] is something that a natural fact could not have.
Of course we know this is false. The sciences discover and prove normative propositions all the time: best practices in surgery, engineering, agriculture, and every other field, are all normative propositions about what we ought to do to achieve certain goals. They are empirically discovered and proved as securely as any other facts of the world.
Even the desires that define the goals are scientifically, empirically discoverable. The field of psychology, for example, often demonstrates what desires exist in people, which people, and when. That surgeons want to save their patients’ lives is not some mystical Platonic other dimensional faerie magick. It is an objective, physical, empirical fact about the structure of their brain and the effects of that structure on the surgeon’s actions and personal phenomenology. And the existence of the desire entails the existence of the goal which entails all normative propositions about how best to obtain that goal in the circumstances the surgeon finds themself in (once we add in all scientific and other knowledge about the world).
I discussed this before in respect to the debate between Michael Shermer and Massimo Pigliucci and in my writings referenced there (in Shermer vs. Pigliucci on Moral Science). Most people think of Shermer or Sam Harris on this issue, but neither of them is a very good philosopher, and neither has produced a proper case for the conclusion that moral facts are scientific facts. So they are easy targets for any fan of a straw man.
One should note that even the scientific method itself is an empirically demonstrated normative proposition: from observing the comparative results of following it or not following it, we now know it is an empirical fact of the natural universe that one ought to follow the scientific method as well as one can if one wants to know true facts about the universe (and about us, as occupants of that universe). Science itself is therefore a scientifically proven normative proposition, and that is a natural fact, a fact of the natural universe. Nothing else need be the case but the physical facts of the universe, for that normative proposition to be true. And the only way to make that normative proposition false, would be to change some relevant facts about the physics of the universe. (Indeed, ultimately, all epistemology, and thus all facts, are built on normative propositions: for the die-hards who want to explore that, see Epistemological Endgame.)
So already, right out of the gate, Shafer-Landau and Copp are dead wrong. They’ve gone straight off the rails of sound reasoning. They seem not to know that normative propositions are a thing in medicine and engineering. Or that they are empirical propositions, routinely discovered by the scientific method. And they don’t see the obvious fact that moral norms might be the same kinds of things.
What Do You Think a Social Science Is?
Fisher continues:
[According to Shafer-Landau], ‘Naturalism … claims that all real properties are those that would figure ineliminably in perfected versions of the natural and social science’ (2003: 59). The idea is that if, for example, perfected physics requires there to be quarks, then quarks are natural properties; if perfected chemistry requires there to be sodium, then sodium is a natural property; and so on. If this is right, then we have a way of determining which properties are natural, and consequently which properties are non-natural: namely, asking which properties would figure ‘ineliminably in a perfected version of natural and social sciences’.
Note his apt inclusion of social sciences. Quarks and sodium are natural properties of physical sciences. So what are the natural properties of social sciences? The facts of social systems. Which are physical systems. Because sociology reduces to psychology which reduces to neurology which reduces to chemistry which reduces to physics (on the nature and consequences of different kinds of reductivism, see my discussion in Sense and Goodness without God, III.5.5). Just as sodium reduces to quarks (and leptons and bosons etc.).
But social systems are more complex than “just quarks in motion.” Just as sodium is more complex than “just quarks in motion,” which is why sodium is different from uranium, for example, even though both are just “quarks in motion” (on this “only just x” fallacy, which I call the modo hoc fallacy, see the previously mentioned section of Sense and Goodness without God). Unlike isolated brains, brains interacting in social systems behave in ways that reflect the structure and behavior of the social system. So if sodium is a natural property of chemistry, then (minimally) brains are a natural property of psychology, and then systems of interactions among brains are a natural property of sociology.
Moral facts are facts about social systems. They are therefore every bit as much natural properties as sodium or quarks are in Shafer-Landau’s sense. So not only did Shafer-Landau’s train of reasoning slide off the rails, it has also fallen off a cliff into the sea.
Thus, as Fisher describes it (the remaining quotes are from pp. 81-87):
[For] Shafer-Landau ethics is not a natural or social science. He argues this because he thinks that what demarcates natural and social science from other disciplines is that they discover their principles and truths a posteriori. What makes something a science is that it precedes through experimentation, observation and empirical testing. So if ethics is a science then these features should be central to ethics – but, according to Shafer-Landau, they are not. Rather, in ethics we come to discover moral truths a priori.
Not at all true. We discover normative propositions, in all the practical sciences (like medicine and engineering) as well as in moral reasoning, by discovering what people desire (in the latter case, what they want out of life, the kind of person they want themselves to be, how they want the social system they must interact with to treat them, and so on) and by discovering what behaviors best obtain those desires (and by extension what habituated virtues will most reliably cause those behaviors).
All of this is discovered a posteriori, not a priori. We do not know, and cannot know, what people want most dearly, by any a priori method. Nor can we know a priori what they would want when given more information (about themselves and the world). And we do not know, and cannot know, what virtues and behaviors will best get them what they want, by any a priori method. And yet knowing both those things is alone sufficient to entail an entire system of normative propositions about how people most ought to behave (see my answer to the last question in the Naturalistic Philosophy interview). Moral facts are thus a posteriori facts. They are not a priori. Shafer-Landau’s derailed train has sunk to the sea floor.
So when Shafer-Landau argues, as Fisher puts it, that “some moral questions such as ‘Is it right to keep promises?’ or ‘Is genocide wrong?’ … we don’t discover an answer through empirical tests,” he is simply full wrong. We do indeed discover the answer through empirical tests. We discover the motives, the reasons people care about and obey moral propositions, though empirical observations (“tests,” whether formal or informal). And we discover the consequences that demarcate moral from immoral outcomes through empirical observations (again “tests,” whether formal or informal). Thus, the answer to “Is it right to keep promises?” depends entirely on what the consequences are of doing so—which is an empirical question—and what consequences people really most want to produce in the world from their decisions, when fully and correctly informed of what all those consequences are and what all they really want out of life—which is, again, all an empirical question.
This can’t be avoided by insisting morality must be deontological, either. Because deontological ethics are either self-evidently false or reduce to consequentialism. I discussed this in detail already in Open Letter to Academic Philosophy: All Your Moral Theories Are the Same.
The Parallel to Philosophy of Mind
Fisher continues:
Shafer-Landau writes: ‘The sort of non-naturalism that I find appealing is one that bears a very close structural parallel to certain non-reductionist theories in the philosophy of mind” (2003: 72). What are these parallels? Shafer-Landau points to three (ibid.: 71– 4). The first is the multiple realizability of mental states; the second is property dualism; and the third is the anti-reductionist’s accommodation of supervenience.
Do you know what is also multiply realizable? Video games. Automobiles. Desks. Pretty much everything that exists. Do you know what we normally call multiple realizability? Abstraction. The word “desk” refers to a pattern of organization that can be realized infinitely many ways, in wood, plastic, stone, the bones of blood-sacrificed goatherders. Does that make “being a desk” a nonnatural property? No.
Honestly, how can any philosopher stay employed today and still be claiming that abstracted properties (properties, like physical shape, that can be shared by many objects) are not natural properties? And as with any of those things, so are mental states. Just as many materials can form a desk, just as many arrangements of circuitry and software can realize the same video game, so can many different material systems produce the same mental phenomena. I should not have to explain this. This is modern science 101.
Since “multiple realizability” does not make anything “non-natural,” it can’t do so for moral facts either. Sociology has discovered a number of partial laws governing social system interaction. Organize a society a certain way, and you can predict certain things will result. The entire field of economics is based on this.
Economics, by the way, is multiply realizable. American dollars look nothing like Canadian dollars and aren’t made of the same stuff. Yet they are all natural objects and they obey the same laws of economics. Indeed, American paper dollars and American gold coin dollars look nothing alike and are not made of the same stuff. Yet they are nearly identical in how they function within the economy. A dollar is a dollar. And “being a dollar” does not make coins and bills “nonnatural,” nor does it make the “dollar” as an abstraction nonnatural. The fiduciary value of “the dollar” is without remainder the causal effect of a particularly arranged social system of interacting brains composed solely and without remainder of quarks and leptons and bosons. There is nothing left we have to “add” to make dollars have the value they do. All we need are the quarks and leptons and bosons (and the spacetime manifold they inhabit), arranged in that particular way.
As for dollars and economics, so for moral facts. (See my articles on Moral Ontology and Goal Theory.)
Science has of course found no evidence of substance dualism, despite centuries of trying. It’s as dead a theory as, again, phlogiston. And as all properties are the logically entailed effects of substances arranged in particular structures, there isn’t any relevant property dualism either. It’s natural physics all the way down.
That said, theory of mind is the only place left for property dualism to hide. Because neuroscience has yet to develop the instrumentation necessary to explore what causes qualia or why.
Though even if we choose to demarcate a property dualism in the mind, neither of the properties involved are likely to be nonnatural. We do not yet know, it is true, exactly how the brain generates the qualia it does. But we do know it is the physical meat of the brain that does it. Remove the meat, the qualia go away. Split brain patients provide a good example of this. As do patients who suffer brain damage or have areas of their brain temporarily numbed. Electrically stimulate a designated area of the meat, and the expected qualia are produced. Mix up the meat’s wiring, and you mix up the qualia (survey the documented varieties of synesthesia, including synesthesia induced by physical interference in normal brain chemistry…you know, drop some acid). And so on.
So there is no evidence yet supporting the conclusion that qualia are metaphysically distinct from the physical information processing of the organ of the brain. I’ll grant you could speculate such a thing (and this all comes down to whether philosophical zombies are logically possible). But speculation in, speculation out.
And that’s only for the mind.
Qualia are a special case because they lie at the frontier of the science of the mind. Though also scientifically unexplored, and in many points perhaps beyond present means to scientifically explore (so they have that in common at least), there is no other parallel here with moral facts. Moral facts are like the facts of sociology, economics, political science, military science…there is no case to be made that metaphysically alien properties have anything to do with these, any more than there is any basis for believing gremlins and fairies are involved in them either. They are solely and without remainder produced by the physical systems that realize them. We know this, because you can’t have the properties without the systems, and you can’t have the systems without the properties (for more on that, see The God Impossible)—and most importantly, we can explain why that is: we can show why an economic law operates, without positing anything more than physical systems with the requisite physical properties. That’s why a natural-nonnatural property dualism is as dead a theory in this domain as the theory of faeries is in explaining the foibles of household laundry.
Meanwhile, “supervenience” as a concept does not entail the existence of nonnatural properties. Once you eliminate substance dualism, and properties as the inalienable realization of physical systems, and abstractions as repeated patterns of physical arrangement, there is nothing left. The logical possibility space is fully exhausted. There is no room left for any “fourth thing” for supervenience to refer to.
But be that as it may (maybe someone can convince me there is some intelligible thing yet left that the word could be referring to), supervenience does not make moral facts nonnatural anyway, any more than it does for economic or political facts, or the fact of something being a desk.
So moral facts are not like qualia. Not in any relevant way. This is a fallacy of false analogy. But more importantly, if qualia are “real properties that figure ineliminably in perfected versions of brain science,” and indeed they undeniably are even on Shafer-Landau’s most dualist imaginings, then qualia are natural objects. By Shafer-Landau’s own definition of what’s natural! So how can he get to nonnatural properties with this analogy, even if the analogy were valid? Oh right. He can’t. (Should a mistake like that pass peer review?)
Let’s Try a Better Analogy: Mammals
Of course, the actually correct analogy I’ve already referenced: the facts of sociology, politics, economics, etc. But let’s assume we didn’t notice that. Let’s try Shafer-Landau’s thinking on mammals. Because that will show how silly it is.
Fisher describes Shafer-Landau’s concerns about multiple realizability like this:
Shafer-Landau thinks that this point about multiple realizability is true for moral properties. Let us consider the moral property of wrong-ness. We judge many actions wrong even though they have many different and distinct properties. For example, an action might cause pain or pleasure; it might be illegal or legal; public or private. Yet despite this variety we still think that all these actions can have the property of wrongness.
Let’s rewrite that paragraph:
Shafer-Landau thinks that this point about multiple realizability is true for animals. Let us consider the moral property of being a mammal. We judge many animals to be mammals even though they have many different and distinct properties. For example, a mammal might be tiny or giant; it might be aquatic or arboreal; it might be an herbivore or a carnivore. Yet despite this variety we still think that all these animals can have the property of being a mammal.
I won’t insult you by explaining further. Reductio ad absurdum. We’re done with this argument.
Let’s Try a Better Analogy: Surgery
The desire for the surgeon to save his patient is a natural property of the surgeon. All the facts of how best to achieve that are natural properties of the surgeon, the patient, and the rest of the universe.
Consider one key step: suturing, i.e. closing the wound caused by their surgery, which is necessary in most cases for the safest and most successful healing and thus the greatest chance of survival for the patient.
There are many different ways to suture a patient after surgery. Not only that, but many are equally effective, so that it does not matter which the surgeon uses. Some may be less effective, but can’t be realized in the circumstances, e.g. a battlefield surgeon working with improvised materials will have their options limited. But let’s consider the case of different but equally effective suturing techniques.
This is multiple realizability. “A surgeon ought to suture her patient after surgery, if the surgeon wants to save her patient’s life” is true not because of any nonnatural properties of sutures. There are only natural properties. That one technique is as effective as another is a physical fact of human flesh, suturing needles, and suture materials. One does not have to appeal to nonnatural properties to explain why they are both equally effective. Physics fully explains it already. We can identify physical facts in common between both suture techniques that realize equally the same outcome (saving the patient’s life).
Moral judgments operate exactly the same way as surgical judgments. The only difference in fact is that surgical judgments pertain to the goal of surgery, while moral judgments pertain to the goal of morality.
Which means, once you identify the goal of morality, you are half way to discovering true moral facts. Just as once you identify the goal of surgery, you are half way to discovering true surgical facts.
And since moral facts are by definition (by which I mean, the only definition of any use that corresponds to how nearly everyone uses these words in practice) “that which a person ought to do above all else,” you need to identify that which a person really would want above all else (if they were adequately informed of what’s relevantly true). Because only what they want above all else can produce a true conclusion about what they ought to do above all else. Because a greatest desire entails a greatest goal which by being greatest supersedes all other goals. Therefore the resulting imperatives supersede all other imperatives.
That’s morality.
Everything else is false.
Conclusion
Schafer-Landau failed to notice:
- Moral facts have no relevant similarity to qualia. Just as all other social facts don’t, from economics to political or military science.
- Qualia are natural facts anyway, by Shafer-Landau’s own definition of natural facts.
- The sciences discover and establish the truth of normative propositions all the time. We see this in medicine, engineering, agriculture, etc.
- Moral facts are facts about social systems (even more particularly, about agents in social systems). They are therefore every bit as much natural properties as sodium or quarks are in Shafer-Landau’s own sense.
- Moral facts are only ever discovered a posteriori, never a priori.
- And we know this because (a) all moral systems are actually in fact consequentialist, and what consequences a behavior has can only be known a posteriori—quite simply, the morality of a behavior cannot be assessed in ignorance of a behavior’s effects; and (b) no moral system can be true that an agent has no sufficient reason to obey, and what reasons an agent has to obey can only be known a posteriori.
And none of his peer reviewers noticed any of these things either. Nor any other philosophers he bounced any of this off of. That’s a problem.
Meanwhile, most philosophers don’t realize:
- True imperatives in all domains only ever consist of what best achieves the most overriding goal of the agent. No one has discovered any other way of making an imperative proposition “true.” Not in thousands of years of trying.
- All other imperatives are literally false. Because an agent, for whom an imperative is supposed to be true, will always desire some other outcome more. So it will always literally be true that they ought to do something else.
- Therefore, if there are true moral facts, they can only be facts about what best realizes what the moral agent would most want when relevantly informed.
Schafer-Landau shares these failures of the broader philosophical community. The previous list of failures are mostly peculiar to him (though not solely; others commit these same errors).
Philosophy needs to make some serious progress here. We know what imperatives actually are. We know they are a posteriori. We know science can empirically discover them. We know what natural facts make one imperative supersede another. We know moral imperatives are imperatives that supersede all other imperatives. We know moral facts are facts about social systems and the agents within them. We know social systems and the agents within them are natural facts and wholly constituted by natural facts. And we therefore know moral facts are wholly constituted by those natural facts, and are therefore natural facts themselves.
Let’s just accept this already, and get to work on describing the scientific research necessary to discover what they are.
Richard,
Huge fan of your work, and I highly agree with the thesis you’re arguing, but I’ll throw a bone to you that’s caused me great difficulty in talking with others about this topic.
Aren’t these moral truths simply made true by manufactured, contractual arrangements? In that, there’s nothing inherently wrong with say, breaking a promise in it of itself, and as you allude to, facts as to why breaking a promise may or may not be bad, have to do with social facts that can be empirically studied. I agree with that, but that still makes moral questions situationally dependent to be measured for their truth or falsity (i.e., breaking a promise in one tribe may have bad consequences, and in another it may be perfectly permissible).
I think part of what people are looking for in these kinds of dialogues, is something more along the lines of a mathematics of morality, and a way of discovering empirical moral facts that aren’t as flexible, but that generalize in a very strong and universal sense. Much as Nietzsche said: “there are no moral phenomenon, only a moral interpretation of a phenomenon.” In that regard, there’s no such thing as moral “truth” per se, there’s only moral agreement, and in making scientific observations of moral systems, that is what you’re actually measuring.
Nobody I know frankly (except perhaps people like Shafer-Landau) would argue that science can’t study empirical facts about moral relations between people, systems and societies, etc. Perhaps that takes us more into a debate about objective morality that’s a little bit beyond the scope of this post, but I’d be curious to get your thoughts.
There are two different things in there.
First, moral facts can derive from (or about) consensual understood contracts. And social contract theory (which includes implicit contracts) is a big part of the science of moral facts. But they are not merely that. Moral facts arise from situations without contractual facts. In fact, they precede and govern even the concept of a contract.
In this case, for example, the reasons you ought to keep promises have to do with the consequences of doing so or not doing so to your social security (e.g. reciprocal effects) and your sense of self (e.g. whether you like or loathe yourself for who your behavior has made you become, or must retreat into a mental illness to escape self-loathing, which will in turn cause yet more self-defeating behaviors). That’s long before questions of social contract even arise.
In fact, social contracts themselves are governed by imperatives. So, is it even moral for there to be a social contract that permits unlimited promise breaking? Even if everyone “consented” to it, it would be disastrous in practice (promises would become meaningless, and therefore you have to compare the society that results where promises don’t exist, and one where they do, and only one of those is universally more desirable to live in), and therefore it actually is self-defeating even to approve such a contract. You therefore ought not to.
So what actually happens is a limited promise breaking contract, e.g. one where it is understood you can break them (and others can break them on you) in certain accepted conditions. But how one chooses the best contract to consent to, is itself governed by pre-contractual moral facts about which outcome (which society, that results from each contract option) is actually what you really desire (when fully informed and reasoning coherently).
The second part of your query relates to situations you didn’t consent to. If you are stuck in a society that has certain rules, which like any environment you didn’t fully choose, you have to navigate it best you can. In that case there will be the moral facts of what you must do given your limited abilities to change the society, and there will be moral facts about how that society ought to change. Again, a society may be operating on a shitty social contract (e.g. it may be a society that wholly lacks the utility of promise keeping because it allows any and all promise breaking). And the moral fact of the matter will then be, that it ought not be doing that.
Essentially yes, that’s what we should be doing. “Mathematics” is too ambiguous a word, because people associate the wrong things with it, but think of Game Theory, for example, which is mathematics but not like a law of gravity or something. Game Theory is a key component of any science of morality. And yes, the rest is looking for empirical facts of relevance to answering questions in morality. And not just universal facts, but also situational facts, since a complete moral science should also advise on how to handle non-standard situations, and that requires empirically understanding such situations.
That’s all false. Morality does not derive from agreements. Morality governs agreements. So there is indeed a truth of the matter which agreements we should enter into. And it derives from facts quite beyond any human ability to alter by agreement (we can’t “agree” to be impervious to harm or to not need food or to be omniscient, for example).
The issue is more fundamental than that. We aren’t talking about whether science “can” study relevant things. We are talking about the fact that you can’t even know what a moral fact is, until you know how human bodies, human minds, and social systems and the physical world operate. Or until you know what humans even desire, what they do and don’t want, what they like or loathe. And all of those things are only known scientifically or proto-scientifically. Science (in the broadest sense, as in, empirical knowledge gathering) thus precedes moral knowledge. Therefore, moral knowledge can never be a priori.
Moral realism (and therefore TAG and presup) seems to confuse truth and realism.
Compare:
“Killing is wrong” is true. (Answer: yes, if…)
“Killing is wrong” is real. (Answer: Huh?)
From the post:
“All of this is discovered a posteriori, not a priori. We do not know, and cannot know, what people want most dearly, by any a priori method. Nor can we know a priori what they would want when given more information (about themselves and the world). And we do not know, and cannot know, what virtues and behaviors will best get them what they want, by any a priori method.”
Then the goal of a study of morality would be to:
a) Find “what [people] would want when give more information (about themselves and the world”
b) Create models that predict the effect of behaviors on satisfying those wants, given what we know about ourselves and the world.
Did I miss a question in there?
You just repeat what the article says. I can’t tell why. And I don’t know what the sentence “killing is wrong is real” means.
Moral realism is a specific terminology in philosophy, to distinguish anti-realism. It parallels scientific realism and antirealism. On scientific realism, the objects in theories actually exist outside our minds. On scientific antirealism, they do not. Moral realism is the same.
All realist moral theories assert true moral facts exist (just as all theories in scientific realism do). Some antirealist moral theories assert there are no true facts of the matter. And some assert there might be but it is impossible to ever know what they are. And some assert there are true facts but only about such things as feelings or opinions, not about moral imperatives themselves being true. And since what Shafer-Landau and I mean by true moral facts are the existence of moral imperatives that are true and discoverable, all moral antirealism is excluded. We are therefore arguing over how moral facts are true: naturally or nonnaturally (the only two categories of moral realism).
“Is moral truth a priori and not a natural property of the universe? So says Dr. Russ Shafer-Landau (as articulated in Whatever Happened to Good and Evil in 2003; and Moral Realism: A Defence in 2005). Even though I’m sympathetic to his project, he’s just wrong.”
The pragmatism of the late Richard Rorty offers a more concise method for pursuing answers to this dilemma. Rorty grounded his philosophy in the the premise that humans like all animals have emerged from biological evolution. The tradition of analytic philosophy that still exerts a stranglehold on the way we think about “reality” developed throughout the prescientific period of human history. The brains of Homo Sapiens developed cognitive capacities uniquely more complex than those of any other animal species, crucially the unique capacity to acquire and use language. Simply put we could not only make barks and noises that warned others of danger or threatened intruders or rivals, we also came over time to enjoy sitting around talking about everything under the sun using an ever-expanding vocabulary to prolong the conversation. Especially in the discipline we call analytic philosophy, heavily saturated at first with supernatural and then metaphysical language, we came to believe we could observe the universe the way it “really” is and arrive at TRUTH. We came to believe that we were observing the ‘essence’ of objects and phenomena, when all we were doing was observing how things work in fields of active sense perceptions organized cognitively by neurological processes accessing memory of culturally accumulated linguistic knowledge transmitted orally or in writing or today though recently invented media.
Like all animals, our behavior involves navigating an environment in order to fulfill needs and accomplish species-specific purposes. A she-bear takes her cub to a remembered shallow part of the river to ‘teach” it where and how best to catch a local abundance of leaping salmon. The mother engages neither in pedagogy nor morality because she has no language to put her behavior under a linguistic description. What she is doing is following learned best practices to satisfy her need for food and her species-specific purpose to preserve her genetic offspring.
Consistent with linguistic analysis, the statement, ” The Evil of slavery is a moral TRUTH that mandates universal abolition” does not pick out either an a priori truth nor a natural moral law. Rather it infers what humankind has learned about better (more productive, efficient, empathetic) ways of treating other human beings AND the ways of talking about slavery today that would have perplexed ancient Greek philosophers. Emancipation of all people from involuntary servitude best serves the needs and purposes of modern western people living in technologically advanced, prosperous, educated, civil, free-market societies. Of course we encapsulate and commend the process of exploring and initiating “best practices” into linguistic concepts of moral principle, natural law, human rights that seem to have a free standing transcendent status independent of the individual or collective “mind” or “mindset.” Carrier’s discussion of moral theory as “consequentalist” implies a kind of Rortyian pragmatism riddled with analytic philosophical jargon that renders the subject unnecessarily complicated and confusing.
I can’t discern a coherent point here. Evolution has little to do with moral truth. Moral truth has been discovered over millennia by experiment. There is no way to empirically discover moral truth except by understanding what people really want when informed and rational, and how best they can obtain it. And reality is complicated. Your lust for the simple is the lust of a simpleton, not a respecter of science.
Also, the ancients would have understood modern arguments against slavery. They even made many of those arguments themselves, or near to. Musonius Rufus, the “second Socrates,” pointed out the immorality of living on the labor of others; Seneca, echoing centuries-old Stoic political philosophy, pointed out the proto-Rawlsian scandal of slavery (we should always consider that any one of us could end up a slave; and being a slave was an accident of history and not indicative of one’s actual worth or ability); Aristotle pointed out that slavery existed solely as an expediency of domination and would decline in conjunction with the rise of technologies of automation (as well as equality of education); freedom fighters in Greece and Rome, including actual rebelling slaves as well as people fighting not to become slaves, gave many speeches on the matter of why slavery is evil and warrants armed rebellion (yes, the ancients were as well versed in hypocrisy as Christians would later be); Cicero spoke of the Stoic belief in the universal human rights possessed by one’s very nature, and that they applied equally to slaves; Tacitus spoke of the evils of inhumane treatment of slaves. There may have been more that wasn’t preserved.
Any actual abolitionist treatises that might have been written, like we know of the free love literature there was, would not have been popular even to the early medieval Christian elite, and thus may simply not have been preserved—one place we’d like to look is in the writings of the Stoic Chrysippus, and the later Epicureans. But abolitionists used all the same arguments the ancients were already using. So they would not have considered assembling them into a case to be alien. They may have fallen on deaf ears, just as they did in nearly the entirety of Christendom. But that’s not the same thing.
“That’s morality.”
Nah, that’s what you define as morality. Don’t expect others to agree with your idiosyncratic definition.
You can’t escape moral facts by playing semantic games like that. You can call it what you want. What in fact you ought most to do, is still what you ought most to do. And that follows by logically necessary entailment from what you want, and how the world works. And there is a fact of the matter of what you want. And there is a fact of the matter of how the world works.
This (the truth conditions for and existence of hypothetical imperatives) is not idiosyncratic. It has been a well-proved fact since Kant, the point was modernized by Foot, and is now accepted by countless philosophers. The rest follows by logical entailment. I provide the formal syllogisms in The End of Christianity.
There is no escaping these things.
Any more than you can escape the fact that the earth is, alas, round.
Very clear and logical article. But I’m not convinced of the reductionist part. I genernally find that whole things are more than the sum of their parts. I’m sure that you probably reduce to the table of elements but I find the whole Richard much more than that, thank whatever gods there may or may not be.
I don’t understand what your objection is. You are simply repeating my own point that “only just x” is a fallacy. We are more than the sum of our parts: we are also the arrangement of those parts. I discuss this in detail in the cited section of Sense and Goodness without God. Just check its index for the modo hoc fallacy.
“Moral” ideas and behaviors (I hesitate to call them “facts”) seems to be based on shared concerns that I list here http://edward-t-babinski.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-moral-question.html Does anyone doubt that those are the most basic concerns that led to people agreeing to teach “moral” behaviors to their children and also to enforce such behavior in adults?
Keeping in mind the basic list of concerns above, one must add that each person also lies at the center of ever widening circles of concern, i.e., for one’s self, family, friends, (tribe), job, city, country, corporation, planet. Not to mention circles of concern for pets, non-human species, even institutions and ideas–making it enormously difficult to get all those circles of concern to overlap. (But one can see obvious benefits to drawing nearer rather than further from such a goal.)
In short, “explaining morality” seems easy compared with the question of how to reconcile the above mentioned “circles of concern.” Every philosopher and theologian has their pet explanation of “morality.” They are a dime a dozen. But the practical matter is the most complex and difficult, i.e., how to reconcile different “circles of concern.”
Lastly, “moral” ideas and behaviors cannot be found in individual atoms, nor in the molecules that move around individual atoms (i.e., individual atoms are dragged about by the molecules of which they are a part and which follow different rules of interaction on different scales). Nor can “morality” be found in the trillions of electro-chemical impulses in the brain-mind that move information around from neuron to neuron. Morality is what occurs between whole embodied persons and groups of persons, even between the corporate institutions they form, and between ideas that people value and that we are concerned to perpetuate. Reconciling all such circles of concern on different levels is the hard part.
That is just one component of a well-worked-out-and-tested ethical theory. And IMO not necessarily the most complex and difficult. But none of it is simple, any more than any other science. And yes, working this out would be part of any proper research project in a formal empirical moral science.
I would like somebody to please describe a moral good, a moral evil, or any moral fact or principle or truth, known to be true a priori, a moral principle that can be demonstrated to be an absolute by pure reason, demonstrably a universal moral truth.
Please, just one, that is all I ask.
Neither what Dr. S-L said as represented, nor much of what you wrote directly against his ideas made much sense to me. It’s probably that I don’t have enough of an education in philosophy, but it might also be that this whole thing is putting “natural” through the wringer.
Talking about natural propertied of constructed things seems very strange. Usually non-natural is for stuff humans make is there some other alternative to natural than the synonyms for (hu)man-made? (e.g synthetic elements are not (appreciably?) naturally occurring unless you want to go against convention and say that humans are natural so stuff we make is also natural, but then I haven’t the slightest idea what that “natural” means nor of what value is its use)
Beyond that, it even seems rather odd to talk about “natural properties of termite mounds” outside of the physical properties of the materials, but, once again, that’s still a bit of a weird way to phrase it.
If we are methodological or philosophical naturalists then isn’t “natural properties” redundant? They’re just… properties, right? The best I can come up with is that some properties of things constructed by agents are a-natural along the same lines as neutral actions generally being amoral.
I also think “social facts” is a stretch unless you mean it analogous to maths being discovered such that those facts “exist” regardless of whether or not we know them. Additionally, the less rigorous the field, the more we should err towards using conjecture rather than fact. The “facts” in EvoPsych (in, not about) are minimal at best and so on. Economics is thoroughly fucked as well; “rational actors” my ass!
My reading comprehension is shot right now, so if you have the time, I look forward to my vigorous correction.
I share your annoyance at the terminology the philosophy academy is using. I’m working within the definitions used by Shafer-Landau. I actually prefer a different way of cobceptualizong what is natural vs. nonnatural, and I think mine actually corresponds to how these words are actually used practice by normal people (see Defining the Supernatural).
Social facts are simply the facts about social systems, including merely their description. There also happen to be repeatable structures with predictable features of their history, e.g. democracy, specific kinds of democracy, Game Theory, and so on.
Economics, meanwhile, doesn’t use traditional rational actor theory anymore. They’ve developed more sophisticated ways of modeling economic behavior (information disparity, deception effects, incompetence, cognitive biasing, competing loyalties, etc., are integrated into it now). Rational choice theory no longer presumes what you think.
Loving all the recent updates. I now check the blog with my coffee every morning and these articles are such a welcome break from some of my other philosophy readings, whose authors by contrast seem to be trying as hard as they can *not* to be understood.
I have a question about how one should go about presenting and advocating for these views to a person, or to a larger public, that is not familiar with philosophy and/or suspicious of philosophically-styled formulations. I know, Richard, that you do not consider yourself a politician or an advertiser: that your approach, instead, is to lay out the facts and the arguments and to leave the persuasive finesses to others. However, you also have experience as a debater and a public defender of these views, and I would like your take on this from that perspective. At a recent townhall, for example, a republican candidate came down on an atheist with the question, “if there is no god, where do your rights come from?” In other contexts, such as in interviews or debates, believers will aggressively ask things like, “if murder isn’t wrong because god says it is, why is it wrong?” Of course these are superficial questions, as your DCT article demonstrates, but in the face of a direct and pointed public challenge, a direct and pointed answer is required. Otherwise you will lose the audience and make the DCT position ‘seem’ more straightforward. It will not do to begin by saying, “Well, if one were relevantly informed and perfectly rational, and given our best understanding of social contract theory and the ways to maximize human wellbeing in interdependent social systems, one would always conclude that certain principles and behaviors lead to better consequences than others.” It also doesn’t help very much only to say things like, “morality comes from us,” or “we have rights because rights are good things to have,” or “murder is wrong because its consequences are bad.” More elaboration is required.
So I am wondering how best to answer these kinds of questions (a) in a way that is concise and direct but also accurate, and just as importantly (b) in a way that will set up and invite the kind of follow-up conversations that a moral realist wants to have. As I said, this is more a question about presentation and strategy than substance, but I think it is still very important to think about. In light of (a) and (b) how would you go about answering, or beginning to answer, questions like [1] “Where does morality comes from?” [2] “Why is ‘x’ (murder/lying/stealing) wrong?” And [3] “Where do rights come from?” Again I am not so much asking for your complete views on these questions; I know that you have provided them. I am asking instead how to effectively summarize and communicate those views at the outset of a conversation or debate.
Thanks again for these ethics posts. They are my favorites.
That’s a good question, but one that relates more to the field of rhetoric and the psychology of persuasion, which I am not sufficiently expert at to give you confident answers to. I can answer based on my experience. But really, we need experts in psychology and rhetoric to advise us as to what the science says actually works.
So take that caveat to heart.
That said, here is the best I can think of:
In political discourse, Stick with social contract theory. Because that’s the reality: they are asking about laws and polity, not really morality. We all need a civil society to live our lives in (that’s an undeniable fact; their arguments against atheism in fact frequently rely on it as a premise, since atheism supposedly leads to chaos and the dissolution of a civil society as we range across the earth rounding up sex slaves and skeet shooting kittens). And that requires certain laws and rights to be protected by collective action. That also cannot be denied. Again, they admit it themselves often enough. And that’s all you need argue.
There does not need to be some cosmic adviser for us to see that history teaches us that when you take away religious freedom or freedom of speech or basic property rights or privacy rights, things go to hell in a handbasket, and that benefits no one. This is why, for example, the Satanic Temple is doing better at teaching Christians why Church-State separation is so important than atheists had done, because as soon as Christians realize that allowing a religion to use the government to promote itself opens the door to any religion to do so, they suddenly realize why that’s a bad idea. All you have to do is get them to realize how their own Golden Rule then applies, and that the only way to ensure the “wrong” religion doesn’t do this is to prohibit all religions from doing it.
The bottom line is, laws exist as agreements between us that we need to make and uphold simply to be able to live in a tolerable and sustainable environment, and we even then put systems in place to dissuade or even stop anyone who breaks the agreement (e.g. police, courts, etc.).
So in political discourse, it’s much easier to show why as a matter of practical fact we all need certain laws and rights. Just discuss well documented cause and effect, the examples of history. We need x because otherwise everything goes to crap and everyone suffers eventually. The question is simply, do we want to live in a scary, shitty society, or a society that’s not?
The deeper question of whether rights are more than just a practical tool we invented to make life livable and society more peaceful and stable really doesn’t matter. And I wouldn’t waste time even trying to explain it to them. Unless they actually want to spend the time to seriously explore the deep philosophical issues in it. And if they aren’t, then don’t even bother. Only argue at the level of practical historical facts.
Morality, meanwhile, is a completely different thing than laws. Plenty of morals ought not be legislated. Because the causal effect of legislating them is worse than allowing them. For example, we can’t have a defamation law whereby anything anyone says that could be interpreted by anyone as false is illegal. Abuses and injustice multiply under a system. Even the British system, which limits which lies can be prosecuted, still had a burden of evidence on the accused, which leads to abuse and manipulation of the law to cause more evil than any of the lies themselves. So laws are a matter of pragmatic fact: what works and what doesn’t is a matter of empirical reality.
But we still then have a morality of honesty. And we choose our friends and business partners and suppliers and merchants and everything else based on whether we trust them to be honest or whether we find them to be liars, and how much and in what ways. So there is a level of pragmatic reality there as well (e.g. you should be an honest person, if you want good friends, business relationships, etc.). But then we get to the psychological reality as well, as understood by Kant et al. (e.g. you should be an honest person, because you loathe dishonest people, so if you become one, you will at some level of your being loathe yourself; you should be an honest person, because it feels better to love truth and hate lies, and reality is easier to live that way if people would only let you; etc.).
And that all requires exploring the science and sociology of how moral behaviors impact the individual and their social system. In other words, it requires realizing that it’s deep, complicated, and dependent on a vast array of facts and reasoning. If someone refuses to accept this because they want everything to be simple, they are simply still a child that hasn’t grown up yet. And there is little use in arguing with a child. When they become an adult, you can have an adult conversation with them about why you want to be a moral person and why they should, too, and how we actually find out what a moral person is. Reading ancient slave manuals, probably not how.
So, in the context of all that, I start the conversations like follows, but quickly stop wasting my time with them if the person inquiring ceases being an adult about it…
[1] “Where does morality comes from?”
The facts of human psychology and social systems.
The need of being a person satisfied with who they have become and how they are living, and the need to maintain and navigate a social system that makes that possible, with the least needless hindrance.
Everything else is about what gets us to that and what gets in the way of that.
[2] “Why is ‘x’ (murder/lying/stealing) wrong?”
When aware of all the facts and reasoning coherently, you would not like yourself if you were a person who does x (which is why immoral people try to lie to themselves about what they are really doing, why, and what it really does, to them and others). And the social system will turn on you in multiple ways if you do x, not only by direct reciprocity (e.g. you will end up with shitty friends or in jail) but by systemic reciprocity (by doing x you endorse and contribute to a society that does x, and you would not like a society that does x to you).
And [3] “Where do rights come from?”
Rights are what a political system must defend in order for human happiness to generally available. They are therefore the minimal laws a polity must agree to enforce for all their own good. Every other social system trends toward a greater proportion of unwanted ills.
And this comes from the physical facts of how social systems function. Permit people to frivolously sue you for any perceived sleight, and sweeping harm comes to many people, and eventually possibly to you, so there is no actual benefit to your wanting such a law. It’s worse to have that law than to suffer being sleighted. This is a bare fact of what the outcomes will be when you organize a social system a certain way. Thus, enforcing a right to free speech is the only way we can maintain a civil society that benefits everyone; and if everyone is not benefited, they have reason to lead a revolution in their own better interests. Exactly as Americans did in 1776.
Societies without basic rights are therefore more unstable. And ultimately harmful to most of the people in them. It is therefore not actually in any majority’s interests to abolish them. Though they can foolishly forget this when they are in power, not realizing that someday they won’t be and someone else will use the very apparatus against them that they created. So best not to create that apparatus in the first place. Then it won’t be around for anyone else to use against you someday.
-:-
I actually say a lot more about this in Sense and Goodness without God, especially in how I show every reason Christian apologist J.P. Moreland said we should be moral, is actually the same reason atheists have to be moral (see V.1, pp. 291ff.) and in elucidating the actual facts of what happens when we are immoral (V.2.1, pp. 313ff.). You’ll get a lot more ideas there.
Nevr got this.
Do facts “-isness” intail morality “-oughtness”?
The factness of a molecule of the rapist’s penis meeting the molecule of the unwilling wench’s vagina sez absolutly naught about rightness or rongness’v the twain meeting.
How duz this rightness/rongness evun uccur in an amoral molecular universe?
I pondr:
‘ought *most* to do’ ..’ *adequately* informed of what’s relevantly true’
Rather imprecise and wonky language
for morality methinks…
Social systems are more than just atoms. They are how those atoms are arranged and thus how they move. So get off the modo hoc fallacy.
The factness of rape being bad is the same as the factness of choosing to be cut on by an incompetent surgeon is bad. Or the factness of not destroying the reputation of your brand if you want to make a living off of a product you are selling. And so on.
As I commented for Loftus in The Christian Delusion (p. 101), “any rational would-be rapist who acquired full and correct information about how raped women feel, and what sort of person he becomes if he ignores a person’s feelings and welfare, and all of the actual consequences of such behavior to himself and his society, then he would agree that raping such a woman is wrong.”
These are all facts of atoms arranged in certain ways: the facts of a human brain, which are different facts than facts about a tree because they are arranged differently than a tree, and thus brains can feel and know things that trees cannot; and the facts of social systems, which are also different facts than facts about a tree because they are arranged differently than a tree, and thus social systems can hunt you down and throw you in jail or kill you in the act, or simply shun and vilify you, and a tree cannot.
It’s all just atoms. But arrange them differently, and different facts result. Because of what those arrangements then cause to happen.
Is this subject covered in next month’s (March) online course you’re teaching?
I assume further exploration of it will be relevant and on-topic. I have some thoughts and observations but haven’t read SGG yet and want to have that under my belt before shooting from the hip 😉
Yes. There will be a whole week unit on it!
And registration should still be open.
We pragmatists recognize that words do not “have meanings” but have usages intelligible from a situated point of view. Philosophers should ask how individuals are using language or a linguistic consensus from a particular point of view to put phenomena (objects) under a description consistent with specific needs, interests and purposes. Scientists use language subsequent to describing how things work not to discover “essences.” A working description of water from a common scientific point of view is H2O; from the physiological perspective of a dehydrated person it is a potable liquid necessary to quench thirst and sustain life; from the perspective of a businessman caught in a rainstorm water is “wetness” that will stain his Italian silk suit. None of these properties addresses the “essence of water in reality”, a major concern of analytic philosophers held over from antiquity, apart from the way we are using a word in our vocabulary to describe “water” in relation to other objects in our cognitive-linguistic experience.
The fatal weakness of Carrier’s essay is that he assumes foundational meanings derived from analytic philosophy tradition rather than doing the hard work of bringing specific human motives and actions under a coherent description of what he believes take place in a properly labeled “MORAL” context. For example: “Of course we know this is false. The sciences discover and prove normative propositions all the time: best practices in surgery, engineering, agriculture, and every other field, are all normative propositions about what we ought to do to achieve certain goals. They are empirically discovered and proved as securely as any other facts of the world.” There is nothing “wrong” with the statement and most of us get the gist of it (there is even a vague pragmatist allusion). The analogies (for example) to surgery seem forced and bizarre though they may be admitted in some descriptive sense. I do not believe that the best description of a contemporary surgeon acting on the imperative to use sterilized instruments relates well to a “moral” context. Certainly sterilizing instruments may be characterized intelligibly as “normative,” in the sense of “required’ by best medical hygienic practices but I do not see a moral issue that the surgeon faces. The whole essay is obscurely bloated with undefined terms, “Moral Truths,” “Natural Facts,” the dreadfully obsolete term “Qualia,” and so on.
Since I repeatedly say exactly the opposite, I am starting to conclude you are delusional.
Then you didn’t read this essay.
If you agree normative propositions about surgery exist, when a surgeon has a desire to save their patients, and you agree the desires of a surgeon are empirical facts, then since moral facts are those normative propositions that override all other normative propositions, and since desires that override all other desires produce normative propositions that override all other normative propositions, moral facts are simply those normative propositions that fulfill our greatest desires. There is no avoiding this. If you have a greatest desire, it is a fact that you ought to do what best obtains it, more than anything else, precisely because you do not desire anything else more.
It therefore becomes a question of discovering what your greatest desires actually are: what is it that you really want most out of life, and why?
Answer that question truthfully, and a whole system of moral facts is inescapably entailed—once you take into account true facts of how the world will react to your behavior, and what that behavior will psychologically do to you as a person.
There are no other true moral facts.
P.S. If you think “qualia” is obsolete in the field of philosophical discourse today, you clearly don’t know what you are talking about.
“You can call it what you want. What in fact you ought most to do, is still what you ought most to do. And that follows by logically necessary entailment from what you want, and how the world works.”
Nope. The traditional understanding of morality is that it’s what you ought to do even if it’s the last thing you want to do. Traditional understanding of morality has nothing whatsoever to do with what an individual wants and is in fact always above the individual’s wishes. Defining this away is playing semantic games.
False. If you have no reason to do x, there can be no sense in which it is true that you ought to do x. Period.
You are confusing mistaken desires with actual. We can be mistaken about what we want; and once we realize we want something more, the truth of what we ought to do comes out.
Thus, if someone does not want to do x, you can never truthfully say they should do x, unless you can explain to them how in fact doing x is what they would really want most if they understood what they really want and how the world really works.
Otherwise, all you are talking about is how you want people to behave—not how they actually should behave.
And only the latter will ever persuade anyone to behave that way. The rest is impotent pontificating.
I recently read your article on James the Just. It fits perfectly with my thesis that the so-called “Jerusalem Mother Church” in no way dominated the early Jesus movements and that James, the so-called brother of Jesus, was not the James the Just to whom Josephus referred. As you obviously know, your argument destroys the already deeply flawed ZEALOT thesis. The historical methodology I employ in my new book “Jesus, the God Within: Foundations of a Forgotten Faith” parallels (but does not reproduce) your historical approach. Like you, I am a historian, not a New Testament apologist and also like you, I am an atheist.
Keep up your interesting work.
Not on topic.