Moral realism is the view that there are facts of the matter about which actions are right and which wrong, and about which things are good and which bad.
"Perhaps our common moral perceptions are the result of evolution hard wiring into us beliefs that caused our ancestors to behave in ways that led to reproductive success."
I think this gets to the heart of the matter. Evolution designed wings that somehow grasp the fundamentals of aerodynamics. These fundamentals are real, at least in a sense. Similarly, morality is about coordinating actions in group settings. Evolution primed us to be able to recognize actions and beliefs that facilitated success in bands of gossiping foragers who got to choose who they did and did not cooperate with. Furthermore, we evolved to view morals as sacrosanct rather than instrumental, because people who viewed them this way proved over time to be better candidates for cooperation.
The fundamentals of aerodynamics may be real, and the beneficiality of e.g. cooridated group activities may be real, but there's a gap between that and saying that this is a moral fact. Who says this benefit constitutes what is morally right?
Absent flying, there are no fundamentals of aerodynamics. Absent human cooperation there are no moral rights. Morals and fundamentals of aerodynamics are both emergent solutions to particular problems.
When someone says that moral realism is true, I'm not sure what exactly is being claimed. When someone makes an ordinary moral statement like "killing babies is wrong" I can understand their speech-act as something like a policy proposal: "let's not kill any babies (and let's punish anyone who does, etc.)". But I'm not sure what policy proposal the statement "moral realism is true" is supposed to correspond to. (Unless it's something like "let's do whatever most people say we should do, ceteris paribus", as seems to be suggested by your post.)
Since the claim being argued for is not (in my view) prima facie meaningful, the comparison between the quality of evidence for factual claims and evidence for moral claims falls flat.
“ if morality is real you ought not to do bad things.”
Let me summarize the argument as
1) Morality is either real or unreal.
2) If morality is real, everyone ought not to do bad things.
3) If morality is unreal, there are no bad things, just stupid things or inconvenient things, and no one has any obligations that they did not embrace by choice.
4) considering possible states of the world and strategies, to act as if morality is real is more prudent that acting otherwise.
Does this argument deduce an ought from an is? No. It escapes Hume through two escape hatches. It has a premise with an ought in it, premise 2. And it does not conclude that we ought to do anything. Rather, it recommends a strategy as more prudent. If we take the conclusion as containing the same kind of ought that appears in the premise, we equivocate between what we ought to do as a matter of moral obligation (premise) and what we ought to do as a matter of prudence (conclusion).
To go further would require another premise:
3a) If acting as if morality is real is more prudent than alternative strategies, then morality must be real.
This premise does not seem self-evident, and Hume has the other escape hatch anyhow.
I apologize if my summary seems like a straw man.
I am confused by the status of “morality is real.” This seems to be both a factual claim and a normative claim at the same time. If morality is real, it is both. I suppose we should then distinguish between facts and preferences instead.
My post is several related short essays. The improved version of Pascal's wager isn't where I am claiming that it might be possible to derive an ought an is. I do that in the final chunk of the post.
“If morality is real you ought not to do bad things.”
Is this an analytically true statement, or a rhetorical obfuscation? Can we get a solid enough grip on what the subject (morality) and the predicate (is real) to use standard logic?
I guess we could taboo them, and just talk about doing bad things, which is also a bit slippery at the boundaries.
Either we ought not do bad things, or that is not the case. Not doing bad things seems like a better strategy, whichever fork of the disjunction is true.
Note that the meaning of “bad things” changes depending on which fork is true, although I guess the members of the set might not change.
It is a description of what "do bad things" means — do things you ought not to do. If morality is not real there are no bad things, just thinks mistakenly believed to be bad.
If it is merely a definition, we can throw out the confusing terms and just use the definition.
But there is still a problem, because there are things I ought not to do for purely prudential reasons, or due to social customs, or other contingent reasons. Or is that a misuse of “ought?”
It is a correct use of "ought" if you add the normative premise that you ought to be prudent or follow social customs. It is a correct but different meaning in a sentence of the form "In order to achieve X you ought to do Y," which does not by itself imply that you ought to do Y.
> It is only a slight exaggeration to say that almost everyone believes in moral realism and almost everyone, at least in the circles I usually move in, denies believing in it.
Count me as someone who moves in the same circles, and subscribes to something closer to moral realism than to the more popular consequentialism and utilitarianism. (It's got elements of utilitarianism in there too, and a chunk of cultural relativism.)
OTOH, I'm not an academic; I'm a (retired) engineer. So perhaps "what works" is a bit stronger in my makeup, and "can I express it as a theory" is a bit weaker. Certainly I can't express my moral approach as any kind of simple theory.
> If morality is real and you act as if it were not, you will do bad things — and if morality is real you ought not to do bad things. If morality is an illusion and you act as if it were not you may miss the opportunity to commit a few pleasurable wrongs but since morality correlates tolerably, although not perfectly, with rational self interest, the cost is unlikely to be large. It follows that if you are uncertain which of the two explanations is correct you ought to act as if the first is.
I think there's an excluded middle here. When I encounter arguments about morality, they are generally about areas where moral feelings are NOT shared. Should all females subordinate themselves to all males? Is a zygote of equal moral worth to the woman whose uterus it might successfully implant itself in? Is respecting private property more important than saving lives? Is silence equivalent to violence?
No one argues about whether killing random members of your own social group/tribe/nation is good; at most they argue about what penalty it's appropriate to impose. And they'll continue not to argue about this regardless of what moral theories they profess. They also won't, in general, have any particular desire to do so. (Someone who has harmed or threatened you is not a RANDOM member of your social group, and someone you've "othered" is not a member of YOUR social group. Humans regularly argue about whether killing people in those categories counts as "murder", and often decide otherwise.)
Morality gets interesting when thinking about tradeoffs - which principle should take precedence in some particular case? Was that particular killing "murder", "self defence", or "war"? At an individual level, is this statement on my resume "lie", "exaggeration", "normal resume speak", or "excessively modest"? Should I edge a bit closer to what feels like "lie" to me, because "everyone does it" and "I really need this job"? (And humans are really good at finding ways to reclassify actions as "not really wrong".) I don't think anyone really needs reasons not to do things they themselves believe to be wrong.
"Is respecting private property more important than saving lives?"
That's an interesting example of a disagreement about positive questions masquerading as a disagreement about normative questions. The obvious response by a supporter of private property is that respecting private property results in fewer people dying — a positive rather than a normative claim.
As some evidence, consider that Maoist China, a society which disapproved of private property, had a famine in which some thirty million people died.
You can cherry pick examples to "prove" either side of this. The Irish potato famine is the first other-side example to come to mind.
Also, of course, there's a difference between "when people are starving, it's often appropriate to force people with plenty to feed the starving" and "there should be no private property at all, even if that were to have the side effect of people starving".
My point was not that my side of the argument is correct, although I think it is, but that the disagreement was mainly on a positive question not a normative one.
I suspect we'd have to unpack a lot of our individual unstated assumptions for you to understand what I meant, and me to really understand where you are coming from, and this is, of course, just a side issue.
The nerd in me wants to keep on piling detail upon detail until we get to the bottom of it. The part of me equipped with common sense suggests we should just drop this one as turning out to be a really bad choice of illustrative example.
Actually, it occurs to me that people who profess to believe in a set of moral rules may frequently find that their own moral intuitions don't agree with the theory they subscribe to. If my religion says "thou shalt not commit adultery" and my intuitions says "consensual sex among adults is always OK" or "men should spread their seed as widely as they can manage", I might well need lots of reasons to support conforming to the rules of my religion even though, if asked, I'd probably say that adultery is wrong.
I distinguish between perceptions, positive or normative, and theories based on perceptions. In just the same way, one could hold a positive theory that was inconsistent with your observations of the real world. I just mentioned an example in my response to someone else. Lots of people believed that the legalization of abortion and contraception would result in many fewer children being born to single mothers. The opposite happened.
In both the positive and the moral versions, one response is to revise the theory, the other is to ignore the facts. As Hegel is supposed to have said when someone offered evidence against his historical theories, "so much the worse for the facts." The adulterous Christian might give in to temptation, planning to later repent, or he might abandon Christianity or switch to some much less restrictive version.
It might depend on whether his moral perception supported his moral theory or contradicted it.
It's possible we may be in violent agreement here, except for using different terms to mean the same things, and perhaps the same term to mean different things.
I think my "moral intuitions" are perceptions, in your terminology, and I generally treat them as primary.
The problem with moral realism is that it is not possible to establish a clear distinction between "Psychopats" and "Normal" as has been shown by the behavioural geneticists, we are all in a spectrum. Their findings (that DNA has a dramatic effect on human psychology and that psychiatric disorders are caused by many genes of small effect) send us in the direction of Hume. Morality is inside the brain, is not perceived. But our brains are different to one another, so morality has to be different.
Are you under the impression that our perceptions are an accurate reflection of reality? That things we experience in our minds as "red" have some fundamental, observer independent "red" quality about them? Why is human perception the arbiter of physical facts? Why are the likely dramatically different perceptions
Is the flavor we call "vanilla" a part of the objective physical truth of the collection of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms we call 'vanillin'?
But physical facts are independent of the observer, morality is not, it exists inside the brain.
For example, lets say Person A´s father was unjustly executed and therefore he thinks that the death penalty is always wrong. Person B´s father was murdered in a robbery so he thinks the death penalty is justified in some cases. Both of them can be right, there is no contradiction.
Person A may see the apple as green and person B as red, but both of them can´t be right, one of them has to be wrong.
Whether morality exists only inside the brain is precisely the question. I'm suggesting possible evidence that it, like physical reality, exists outside and is perceived.
People's perception of physical reality can be different. One of them is right, one is wrong. How do you know that isn't true of moral reality.
But "the death penalty is always wrong" is not what I am describing as a perception, any more than "global temperature is rising because of human production of CO2" is. Both of those are theories based on perceptions. The perception, for Person A, is "it was wrong to execute my father."
¨Whether morality exists only inside the brain is precisely the question. I'm suggesting possible evidence that it, like physical reality, exists outside and is perceived.¨
I heard Sean Carroll and Richard Dawkins make the same point but on the opposite direction as to why they were atheists. That different civilizations independent of each other had very different religions.
Lets say when Hernan Cortes met the Aztecs he had found that they had an exact copy of the Gospel and it could be determined that they hadn´t copied it. That could be considered evidence that the Gospel is the word of God. But they didnt have such thing. I may be wrong but the argument seems to be kind of circular: if we found evidence for moral realism then moral realism would be true.
Personally I don´t consider myself a moral nihilist but a moral subjectivist. In my view morality is the product of culture, education, DNA and some white noise.
My claim in that post, as I tried to make clear, was not that moral realism or intuitionism was true. It was that one could get information on whether they were true from observing positive facts, that if certain non-moral facts turned out to be true that would be evidence for moral facts.
Your Aztec hypothetical is support for my position. Whether the Aztecs had religious writings consistent with Christianity is a fact of reality not a fact of religion or morality. But if it had turned out that they did, that would have been evidence for the truth of Christianity, hence for Christian moral claims, positive evidence for a normative claim.
What I mean is that when you say: ¨Suppose one could show that some widely held moral beliefs did not contribute to either reproductive or societal success. If such evidence existed, and if we observed consistency across humans of moral judgement, that would be evidence for the existence of moral facts that humans can perceive. Hence it would be evidence for those moral facts that humans do perceive.¨ you are moving poor Hume his ladder, you are changing the fundamental nature of reality, the metaphysics. To the best of my knowledge there are no widely held moral beliefs that dont contribute to societal success. Hume´s law applies to the world as we know it, if it were different we would have to reclassify what we consider an ought and what we consider an is. I once read that Francis Galton did a statistical study on prayer and concluded that it didn´t extend lifespan. If the evidence had shown that it did praying would stop being taugth at religious schools and start being taught at medical schools.
Color does not exist independently of the observer. It exists only in our mind!
ALL perceptions are creations of our mind. There's nothing fundamentally "red" about light with a wavelength around 700nm. "Red" is a creation of our minds that helps us distinguish between objects, but it's incoherent to say that it's an objective property of an object.
If our brains were wired differently, we would see colors differently, it wouldn't be any more or less an accurate representation of fundamental reality than the sensations we currently experience are.
If everyone sees something as red except for one person, this isn't proof that that person is wrong, it proves he has a different perceptual system as everyone else. Different species may see that apple as looking entirely different, so why is the average human perception the one that represents physical reality?
Color is a VISUAL property, it by definition cannot exist independently of visual perception systems.
If you're still not convinced, why don't we extend this line of thinking to other senses. Is the flavor we call 'vanilla' the REAL flavor of the vanillin molecule?
......
.....what could it even mean for a molecule to have a "real", observer independent flavor? It's incoherent. Obviously molecules do not have objective, fundamental properties called flavors to them. Flavor is just something our minds usually create in the presence (though not exclusively) to help us distinguish different foods. If other people or species experience a different taste to us (or no taste at all), they aren't wrong about the "true" flavor of a molecule.
¨There's nothing fundamentally "red" about light with a wavelength around 700nm. "Red" is a creation of our minds that helps us distinguish between objects, but it's incoherent to say that it's an objective property of an object.¨
You are wrong. ¨Red¨ is a linguistic symbol to describe an object that reflects light with a wavelength around 700nm. It is an objective property of the object independent of the observer. We use red because is shorter, but we could use ¨object that reflects light with a wavelength around 700nm¨.
That's one very specific use of the word 'red'. But people can experience 'red' in the absence of any light and any objects reflecting light. People aren't "wrong" for reporting having a "red" experience in the absense of light, 700nm wavelength or not.
But when somebody says the object is red, they're not talking about wavelengths! People were going around talking about red apples long before they knew anything about light and wavelengths. When people say something is red, what they're saying is they have a red color experience when they look at that object.
It's fine to claim that color refers to a wavelength of light, but if you do that then you cannot use color in reference to perceptions, because it has ceased to have a relation to perceptions, which is what this discussion was about to begin with!
We do not perceive wavelength, we percieve color (i.e. we experience colorful visual sensations). Depending on how an organism's perceptual system is structured, they can have what you might consider 'red' color sensations when their eyes receive 700nm light, they might have what you may call 'green' color perceptions, or something else entirely. And they may have these experience in the complete absence of light such as an hallucination or a dream.
If you call color a description of light wavelength, then it's no longer usable as a descriptor of our perceptions, and that was the whole point of color being brought up in the first place.
And that "red" apple is reflecting a lot of different wavelengths, a lot of which we cannot see. Why is the correct "objective" description of an object based on the very narrow perceptual system of a typical human being?
Do you think we have any reason to believe that the physical reality we perceive is real? I'm just carrying over that argument to moral reality.
If you think the argument doesn't work, do you have a better reason to believe in material reality? If you don't, do you act as if you didn't believe in it? I find it hard to imagine what life would be like if one didn't.
If course I treat physical and moral reality in the conventional ways; that disjunction is *your* problem, since you claimed to provide a logical foundation. How people behave was never at stake (you can simply be wrong).
The general point about non moral facts (such as peoples beliefs/intuitions) being evidence for moral facts is very much true, and fits nicely in a Bayesian framework, this makes the issue of moral disagreement (at least among roughly rational agents) even more interesting given Aumann's agreement theorem, my guess is that some resolution would probably involve justification about priors.
"It is only a slight exaggeration to say that almost everyone believes in moral realism and almost everyone, at least in the circles I usually move in, denies believing in it." At least in the circles I'm familiar with, roughly the opposite seems to be true, that is very few people would actually openly commit themselves to moral anti-realism (even if they clearly belief such), and those who do, often try their hardest to salvage every last bit of moral realism, moral language, ethical norms and such (would be happy to give examples) as opposed to just strictly speaking/thinking in terms of positive facts and preferences and beliefs etc. If I was to speculate I would say that this small group of moralistic anti-realists (who seem to me to be most anti-realists) probably experience many of the moral properties that regular people experience, but consciously find such properties too spooky.
The Pascals Wager you suggest, whilst I know you find to be very forceful, I think among many of the committed anti-realists even if they were 99% sure that moral properties existed and irreducible normativity was a thing. They would probably be almost indifferent to their existence, even if they as a matter of fact ought to care, and acknowledged this as being true. So I think your argument isn't very forceful with respects to the target demographic. I should also add that I can personally easily imagine lots scenarios where I do come to believe in moral properties, a simple "moral property detector" that seems to involve something very primitive/fundamental would be an example of such a scenario, say naturally occurring crystals that glow red when you point it at a baby being stomped on and green when you point it at a someone giving money to the against malaria foundation etc.
I’m not religious and never have been: I come from a non-religious family. I generally behave according to my own sense of morality, because I don’t usually find it difficult to do so, and because it makes me feel better. My morality is similar to other people’s, but not exactly the same in all respects.
This is normal. Morality differs at least slightly from person to person, so that any two people are unlikely to agree about every detail.
It seems to me that the topic of abortion is more political than moral. Forcing women to have unwanted children is (a) authoritarian behaviour and (b) likely to result in unhappy mothers and unhappy children, and increasing the unhappiness of the population is not a good thing to do politically. Of course, this is easy for me to say, because I live in western Europe, where abortion is readily available and uncontroversial for most people.
So far as the consquential argument for legalizing abortion (and contraception), the problem is that what actually happened was the opposite of what that argument predicted. When abortion and contraception were being legalized in the U.S., the argument in favor was that doing so would sharply reduce the number of children born to unmarried mothers, "unwanted" children. Abortion and contraception were legalized and the number of children born to and reared by single mothers went sharply up.
A plausible explanation is that the changes increased the availability of non-marital sex for men, since women who didn't want children no longer faced a serious risk of pregnancy. Men who could get sex without a long run commitment were under less pressure to marry. Women who wanted children were less able to find a suitable man to help with the project, so many chose to be single mothers.
I'm not a utilitarian, so the claim that the consequences of legalizing abortion was a large increase in the fraction of children brought up by single mothers, isn't an adequate justification for me of laws against abortion. But half your argument assumes that laws against abortion result in more unhappy mothers and unhappy children so you ought to be bothered by the fact that what actually happened was the precise opposite of what that arguments assumes.
I'm going on the American experience — I don't know how well it fits what happened in Europe.
Thanks, the statistics are indeed interesting and somewhat unwelcome. However, another explanation is that, from 1965 to 1990, marriage simply became regarded as less essential, as a result of social changes unrelated to abortion. I wouldn’t discard your explanation, it’s probably relevant, but I don’t think it’s the whole story.
With contraception and abortion both available, I suppose that most women who have children want to have children, whether married or single, so those children are not unwanted. Children of single mothers may be less happy, on average, than children of married couples; but probably happier on average than unwanted children. I’m guessing, I have no statistics on this subject.
Although I eventually got married at the age of 43, I’m not a big enthusiast for marriage in general. If two people want to stay together, they can do so without a government licence; if they don’t want to stay together, either they’ll split up or they’ll stay together unhappily, not providing a good environment for children. Marriage may provide some intangible psychological benefit to some people, and it may have tax and other advantages provided by the government.
The situation in most of Europe as I understand it is abortion on request in the first trimester, in some countries also the second. Late term abortion is supposed to be only with pressing reasons, such as a threat to the life of the mother. How that works out in practice I don't know — it probably varies from one country to another.
That's more restrictive than U.S. law was until very recently.
Here in Spain (a Catholic country), abortion is available on request in the first 14 weeks. This may be a problem for some, but I suppose it should be enough in most cases. I read that abortion rates have been falling since the availability of ‘emergency contraception’: the morning-after pill.
I literally don't even know what something being 'morally true' could possibly mean. It's "morally wrong" to do something? What does that mean? I oughtn't do it? Why not? Because it's morally wrong?
If it's to do with social benefit, why 'ought' I do what provides social benefit, other than a fiat declaration of the morality of such an action?
I'm ok with your conclusion that it's "logically possible to get positive evidence for normative conclusions", but I think it's a struggle to understand what the nature of the normative conclusions are without thinking of consistent moral beliefs (to the extent they exist) as the outcome of a kind of constant negototiation (or if you prefer a political settlement) among all members of a society such that the conclusions are slowly changing over time within a polity as well as changing between different cultures and ages.
I don’t think that the active attitude (negative or positive) of a person described as moral relativist towards some human action can be considered inconsistent from the point of view of a relativist. Let’s us assume for example that I am such a relativist and I see my mother being murdered in front of my eyes. Most likely I’m going to feel a wild range of emotions towards the culprit because it is something that I do not want being done to me. I’m going to try to stop the murderer, persuade him to stop and try to punish him afterwards. All things that are consistent with both being a secret moral realist and not realizing it, or having a set of commitments and behaviour that try to minimize the chance of finding myself in such unwanted situations (without necessarily believe there is anything wrong with the situation in itself). For example if I find my mother being eaten alive by a lion, I’m going to try and stop the lion, kill him if necessary or convenient, without thinking of the lion as committing a morally wrong action. Moral relativism does not entail respect towards others moral systems or actions.
Moreover this does not even apply to moral skeptics or error theorist. Being convinced that there are no moral facts whatsover doesn’t entail being indifferent to what happens to my own life or others as a consequence of some actions. For example I might think that the proposition “lying is wrong” is epistemically incorrect but still act to minimize the chance of being lied to because I find it inconvenient to achieve my goals. Which is not the same as the non-cognitivist position which says that “lying is wrong” is in reality an expression of taste or preference.
Taking for a moment the moral realist point of view and try to apply your argument to them is fallacious. I still observe the same kind of apparent inconsistency in other moral realists, but that will not give me ground to say that they are secretely moral relativists. Let us assume that lying is wrong and that my professor believes this is a moral fact. I still observe that when a student push back on a professor’s theory that is wrong, the professor even knowing that he is wrong, actively lies to the student because he wants to defend his pride. From this behaviour I still cannot derive that the professor is a secret moral relativist because his action is inconsistent with his moral beliefs. Maybe the professor is simply mistaken and overran by emotions, which is a possibility that is taken seriously by lots of religions, enfacizing how human beings are morally fallacious even with the best of intentions.
Summing up I do not see how one can derive that the moral relativist position is inconsistent with an active attitude towards actions.
Passing to your improved Pascal’s Wager I think that there is a critical mistake in your line of reasoning. Mainly that it is not seems that common sense morality roughly correlates with individual self interest, but rather with social interest. For example let us assume that we have a society full of virtuous people that do not lie, steal and all other common sense virtues. In that society it is extremely convient to be a thief and a lier for one individual. But for a society it is not convinient having thiefs and liers going around. And that is why the equilibrium is not a population with all virtuous people.
To your third argument, you say that it is theoretically possible to derive some oughts from specific sets of is. As for that you give the following set of is statements as a possible example: intuitionism is true and there exist some behaviours considered good that are not explain by evolution or other explanations. However this set of “is-statements” has some problems in “Hume’s eye”. First the hypothesis of “intuitionism is true” by himself denies the is-ought impossibility. So if you use in one of your premises “you can derive oughts from is” it is not surprising that at the end you find it possible to do so. Intuitionism claims that “intuitions (that are a fact) know (or approximate) moral truths”, which is the exact negation of Hume’s position. We cannot assume it to be true in order to prove Hume’s argument false. The second problem is that even if there exist behaviours considered good not explained by any other theory, this is not enough to prove that intuitions are a source of moral knowledge. Maybe they are a source of absolutely no knowledge. Maybe they are just a collective fever dream similar to the one that people in the Matrix where subjected to while enslaved by evil machines. All of those alternatives and many others are compatible with Hume’s position and it is not clear why we should ignore them.
The is statement in my argument is not "intuitionism is true," which would be a normative claim, but "reported moral perceptions are consistent with each other," which is a positive claim.
It is true that one can imagine more explanations for consistent normative perceptions. But that is true for consistent positive perceptions as well — as I pointed out, your senses could be lying to you. Do you conclude that you have no good reason to believe that there is a physical world out there and your senses give you information about it? If you don't, you are applying standards of evidence to the normative argument that you are not willing to apply to the positive argument. If you do, how do you manage to live your life without any knowledge of physical reality?
Taking “reported moral intuitions are consinstent with each other, thus those intuition are evidence for moral realism”, still it seems to miss the mark to me in 2 main regards. First, the argument from disagreement seems to be much much stronger for moral statement than for positive claims. For example my intuitions about moral claims being all wrong (error theory intuitions which I genuinely had before even studying bits of philosophy) seems to me to be pretty internally consistent, and wildely shared. Maybe people with moral skeptic or error theory intuitions are not the majority but are a sizable chunk of the population nonetheless. And this does not seem apply to basic positive claims like the tiger over the table. So in your view there must be a minimum share of the population that agrees on something, and achieving that share is a condition to start believing something. Which seems to be a sort of “super majority rule” on what is real and what isn’t, and to me it seems weird that simply having more people agreeing on something can change the truth value of a proposition. On another hand you might have a more “continuous” approach to this process, simply increasing your confidence in a proposition the more people agree with it. Ex: 99% of people agree that murder is wrong= 99.999…% confidence in this moral claim. Which is sensible but still doesn’t solve the Hume’s gap because you’ll never reach 100% confidence, and it is arguable wheather this could convince the remaining 1% of your moral claim (even assuming fully rational beings).
And this bring us to the second point and your, I believe correct, analogy with positive claims. It is true that, aside from difference in degrees of disagreement, moral skepticism has similar features with epistemological skepticism (in fact, not by chance, I am also sympathetic with this view). But I don’t see a total skeptic completely unable to act as you imagine. You might hold different propositional attitudes that differ from the strongest “I believe” and that might induce you to act. For example I doubt that a person playing the lottery will say that he “believed” he would win, but maybe that he “hoped” he would win. Similarly, a person running from a clearly non venomous bug because bug-phobic probably does not “believe” that the bug can cause him any harm or pose any danger to him, but still runs from it because he is scared. So you can act because you “fear”, “hope”, “desire” etc. something, not only because you “believe” something. The substancial difference in my eyes that there is between moral realism and epistemological realism is that the first one entails a change in behaviour if you grant it, while the second one doesn’t. So I’m much more willing to abandon epistemological skepticism in a debate that moral skepticism, although I agree with you that the two are correlated and then I would defend both given no other choice.
The point I was making was not that intuitionism and moral realism are correct but that one can get non-moral evidence about whether they are correct. Arguing that they are correct would be a different essay — the chapter of mine or the book of Huemer's I linked to.
I still don’t understand how you could get some evidence for a moral claim. Getting some evidence for some proposition X in my mind is like trying to test proposition X. If proposition X is a moral proposition then, in order to test it, you would have to assume an evaluative premise (let’s say, for the sake of argument, “intuitions are a good proxy for moral truths”). But that is exactely Hume’s point, you need at least one evaluative claim in your premeses to deduct a moral claim. I’ve re-read Huemer’s entire book to check if i’ve miss something on this specific issue, but he seams to me to concede that Hume was right in asserting the is-ought gap (the entire chapter 4 of his book is dedicated to analize this question). That entire chapter seems to me like a launch-pad for defending moral intuitionism and abandoning the idea of trying to derive oughts from solely descriptive statements.
Maybe I’m completely missing the point of Huemer’s first 4 chapters and your third argument in this post, and my brain just does not understand them, even if I’m trying hard to. And that maybe makes sense since you and I appear to have wildly different intuitions about moral philosophy.
My point is that you might be able to get evidence for the claim that intuitions are a good proxy for moral truths by observing the consistency of intuitions by different people and the lack of any other plausible explanation for that consistency. If intuitions are consistent there must be a reason. That different people are observing the same moral facts is a possible reason. If you can eliminate other plausible reasons you have evidence for that one.
Let’s see if I can be more clear about what my doubts are in the logical structure of that argument. One we already discussed and concluded, the induction problem argument which as you said can also be applied to everything, leading to a radical skeptical position. I agreed with you on this issue. The second and the one where we got lost I think, is a more serious problem that arises even if you concede the epistemological power of induction. To me it seems that the claim “X is a good proxy for moral truths and we can test this claim” (where X could be whatever you want, intuitions, the bible or something else) is, in reality, multiple separate claims: “moral realism is true and moral values are stance indipendent”, “X is a method to acces knowledge about moral facts” and “X is common enough in group Y such that discernible patterns appear in the Y”.
Now if you want to test the original claim by looking to patterns of X in group Y, it is going to be an incomplete inductive proof, since you just dealt with the 3rd statement, giving no reason or proof for the other 2 statements. As an example let’s say that X is “believing everything that is in the bible”, Y is “christians” and propositions 1 and proposition 2 are false. If proposition 3 was true and we do a test looking for patterns in christians about believing the bible, we would still see a postive result from our test. Same thing we can do by imagining P1 and P3 to be true while P2 being false. Or even the case for “moral subjectivism” where P1 is false but P2 and P3 are true. So we conclude that the 3 proposition could be truth indipendent from one-onother.
So in order to deafeat Hume’s claim one must show that:
- P1 is true (otherwise the question become “why should I abide to what group Y is doing?” Or “why should I be part of group Y” like “why should I abide by the rule’s that this ‘human race’ seems to intuit? Maybe I shouldn’t or don’t want to be a ‘moral human’, maybe I should be one new kind of human, an ‘anti-moral human’”)
- P2 is true
- P3 is true
This to me suggests that the hypothetical scenario where we see positive results while testing P3 and the only explanation is that P2 is true, still fails to disproof Hume’s claim. A solid disproof of Hume’s claim would need also to demonstrate that P1 is true, and I do not see any way of doing that. At least I haven’t seen any convincing proof of that, even with hypothetical scenarios.
David, If I'm not mistaken, I have heard you say something to effect that you tend to make consequentialist arguments over moral ones, largely because you think you have better arguments along those lines, and that you and socialists will typically disagree about the facts, but in general will share the same basic moral assumptions. I'm curious if I have your position right, because this is something I'm very split on, especially when you consider that egalitarianism is assumed to have inherent value by many people, which I don't think is true (Huemer wrote a paper arguing that egalitarianism does not have inherent value, and it's pretty convincing).
That's a reasonable summary of my position. I expect that there are some disagreements in normative beliefs. But I think a libertarian society is enough superior in its consequences to anything very different to be preferred under most moral systems people actually hold. And I don't have very powerful arguments for my moral positions. I think Huemer, whose basic position is close to mine, believes he does, but I believe he is mistaken.
> Perhaps our common moral perceptions are the result of evolution hard wiring into us beliefs that caused our ancestors to behave in ways that led to reproductive success. Perhaps we have been indoctrinated by our societies with beliefs that make societies more likely to survive, consistent across societies because societies that didn’t conform didn’t survive.
Ding ding ding!
Two things:
1. Looking at history really tells me not to trust intuitions. Slavery, sexism, the Holocaust, etc. etc. etc.
2. Most importantly - there is every reason to think that there is just physics. We *want* to believe more (we're special, we don't really die, etc.) and loads of smart people have wasted their lives trying to prove this. So we really have to beware of giving into our desires.
I don’t think you are arguing against Hume's actual position. He pointed out that if a deductive logical argument has only statements containing “is”, but the conclusion has an “ought” in it, some purely logical slight of hand has occurred. They are different sorts of predicates. In his comments immediately after the passage where he disparages the deductive method, he concludes that we use a variety of perception to come to moral conclusions. Here is the passage, from his A Treatise of Human Nature:
“In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason shou’d be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the reader; and am perswaded, that this small attention wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason. [Sect. 2. Moral distinctions deriv’d from a moral sense ] Thus the course of the argument leads us to conclude, that since vice and virtue are not discoverable merely by reason, or the comparison of ideas, it must be by means of some impression or sentiment they occasion, that we are able to mark the difference betwixt them. Our decisions concerning moral rectitude and depravity are evidently perceptions;”
It’s not obvious that he would agree with your account in this blog post, but his complaint about deductions indeed would not apply to it.
"Perhaps our common moral perceptions are the result of evolution hard wiring into us beliefs that caused our ancestors to behave in ways that led to reproductive success."
I think this gets to the heart of the matter. Evolution designed wings that somehow grasp the fundamentals of aerodynamics. These fundamentals are real, at least in a sense. Similarly, morality is about coordinating actions in group settings. Evolution primed us to be able to recognize actions and beliefs that facilitated success in bands of gossiping foragers who got to choose who they did and did not cooperate with. Furthermore, we evolved to view morals as sacrosanct rather than instrumental, because people who viewed them this way proved over time to be better candidates for cooperation.
The fundamentals of aerodynamics may be real, and the beneficiality of e.g. cooridated group activities may be real, but there's a gap between that and saying that this is a moral fact. Who says this benefit constitutes what is morally right?
Absent flying, there are no fundamentals of aerodynamics. Absent human cooperation there are no moral rights. Morals and fundamentals of aerodynamics are both emergent solutions to particular problems.
When someone says that moral realism is true, I'm not sure what exactly is being claimed. When someone makes an ordinary moral statement like "killing babies is wrong" I can understand their speech-act as something like a policy proposal: "let's not kill any babies (and let's punish anyone who does, etc.)". But I'm not sure what policy proposal the statement "moral realism is true" is supposed to correspond to. (Unless it's something like "let's do whatever most people say we should do, ceteris paribus", as seems to be suggested by your post.)
Since the claim being argued for is not (in my view) prima facie meaningful, the comparison between the quality of evidence for factual claims and evidence for moral claims falls flat.
Maybe I spoke too hastily.
“ if morality is real you ought not to do bad things.”
Let me summarize the argument as
1) Morality is either real or unreal.
2) If morality is real, everyone ought not to do bad things.
3) If morality is unreal, there are no bad things, just stupid things or inconvenient things, and no one has any obligations that they did not embrace by choice.
4) considering possible states of the world and strategies, to act as if morality is real is more prudent that acting otherwise.
Does this argument deduce an ought from an is? No. It escapes Hume through two escape hatches. It has a premise with an ought in it, premise 2. And it does not conclude that we ought to do anything. Rather, it recommends a strategy as more prudent. If we take the conclusion as containing the same kind of ought that appears in the premise, we equivocate between what we ought to do as a matter of moral obligation (premise) and what we ought to do as a matter of prudence (conclusion).
To go further would require another premise:
3a) If acting as if morality is real is more prudent than alternative strategies, then morality must be real.
This premise does not seem self-evident, and Hume has the other escape hatch anyhow.
I apologize if my summary seems like a straw man.
I am confused by the status of “morality is real.” This seems to be both a factual claim and a normative claim at the same time. If morality is real, it is both. I suppose we should then distinguish between facts and preferences instead.
My post is several related short essays. The improved version of Pascal's wager isn't where I am claiming that it might be possible to derive an ought an is. I do that in the final chunk of the post.
Looking forward to it.
“If morality is real you ought not to do bad things.”
Is this an analytically true statement, or a rhetorical obfuscation? Can we get a solid enough grip on what the subject (morality) and the predicate (is real) to use standard logic?
I guess we could taboo them, and just talk about doing bad things, which is also a bit slippery at the boundaries.
Either we ought not do bad things, or that is not the case. Not doing bad things seems like a better strategy, whichever fork of the disjunction is true.
Note that the meaning of “bad things” changes depending on which fork is true, although I guess the members of the set might not change.
It is a description of what "do bad things" means — do things you ought not to do. If morality is not real there are no bad things, just thinks mistakenly believed to be bad.
If it is merely a definition, we can throw out the confusing terms and just use the definition.
But there is still a problem, because there are things I ought not to do for purely prudential reasons, or due to social customs, or other contingent reasons. Or is that a misuse of “ought?”
It is a correct use of "ought" if you add the normative premise that you ought to be prudent or follow social customs. It is a correct but different meaning in a sentence of the form "In order to achieve X you ought to do Y," which does not by itself imply that you ought to do Y.
> It is only a slight exaggeration to say that almost everyone believes in moral realism and almost everyone, at least in the circles I usually move in, denies believing in it.
Count me as someone who moves in the same circles, and subscribes to something closer to moral realism than to the more popular consequentialism and utilitarianism. (It's got elements of utilitarianism in there too, and a chunk of cultural relativism.)
OTOH, I'm not an academic; I'm a (retired) engineer. So perhaps "what works" is a bit stronger in my makeup, and "can I express it as a theory" is a bit weaker. Certainly I can't express my moral approach as any kind of simple theory.
> If morality is real and you act as if it were not, you will do bad things — and if morality is real you ought not to do bad things. If morality is an illusion and you act as if it were not you may miss the opportunity to commit a few pleasurable wrongs but since morality correlates tolerably, although not perfectly, with rational self interest, the cost is unlikely to be large. It follows that if you are uncertain which of the two explanations is correct you ought to act as if the first is.
I think there's an excluded middle here. When I encounter arguments about morality, they are generally about areas where moral feelings are NOT shared. Should all females subordinate themselves to all males? Is a zygote of equal moral worth to the woman whose uterus it might successfully implant itself in? Is respecting private property more important than saving lives? Is silence equivalent to violence?
No one argues about whether killing random members of your own social group/tribe/nation is good; at most they argue about what penalty it's appropriate to impose. And they'll continue not to argue about this regardless of what moral theories they profess. They also won't, in general, have any particular desire to do so. (Someone who has harmed or threatened you is not a RANDOM member of your social group, and someone you've "othered" is not a member of YOUR social group. Humans regularly argue about whether killing people in those categories counts as "murder", and often decide otherwise.)
Morality gets interesting when thinking about tradeoffs - which principle should take precedence in some particular case? Was that particular killing "murder", "self defence", or "war"? At an individual level, is this statement on my resume "lie", "exaggeration", "normal resume speak", or "excessively modest"? Should I edge a bit closer to what feels like "lie" to me, because "everyone does it" and "I really need this job"? (And humans are really good at finding ways to reclassify actions as "not really wrong".) I don't think anyone really needs reasons not to do things they themselves believe to be wrong.
"Is respecting private property more important than saving lives?"
That's an interesting example of a disagreement about positive questions masquerading as a disagreement about normative questions. The obvious response by a supporter of private property is that respecting private property results in fewer people dying — a positive rather than a normative claim.
As some evidence, consider that Maoist China, a society which disapproved of private property, had a famine in which some thirty million people died.
You can cherry pick examples to "prove" either side of this. The Irish potato famine is the first other-side example to come to mind.
Also, of course, there's a difference between "when people are starving, it's often appropriate to force people with plenty to feed the starving" and "there should be no private property at all, even if that were to have the side effect of people starving".
My point was not that my side of the argument is correct, although I think it is, but that the disagreement was mainly on a positive question not a normative one.
I suspect we'd have to unpack a lot of our individual unstated assumptions for you to understand what I meant, and me to really understand where you are coming from, and this is, of course, just a side issue.
The nerd in me wants to keep on piling detail upon detail until we get to the bottom of it. The part of me equipped with common sense suggests we should just drop this one as turning out to be a really bad choice of illustrative example.
Actually, it occurs to me that people who profess to believe in a set of moral rules may frequently find that their own moral intuitions don't agree with the theory they subscribe to. If my religion says "thou shalt not commit adultery" and my intuitions says "consensual sex among adults is always OK" or "men should spread their seed as widely as they can manage", I might well need lots of reasons to support conforming to the rules of my religion even though, if asked, I'd probably say that adultery is wrong.
I distinguish between perceptions, positive or normative, and theories based on perceptions. In just the same way, one could hold a positive theory that was inconsistent with your observations of the real world. I just mentioned an example in my response to someone else. Lots of people believed that the legalization of abortion and contraception would result in many fewer children being born to single mothers. The opposite happened.
In both the positive and the moral versions, one response is to revise the theory, the other is to ignore the facts. As Hegel is supposed to have said when someone offered evidence against his historical theories, "so much the worse for the facts." The adulterous Christian might give in to temptation, planning to later repent, or he might abandon Christianity or switch to some much less restrictive version.
It might depend on whether his moral perception supported his moral theory or contradicted it.
It's possible we may be in violent agreement here, except for using different terms to mean the same things, and perhaps the same term to mean different things.
I think my "moral intuitions" are perceptions, in your terminology, and I generally treat them as primary.
The problem with moral realism is that it is not possible to establish a clear distinction between "Psychopats" and "Normal" as has been shown by the behavioural geneticists, we are all in a spectrum. Their findings (that DNA has a dramatic effect on human psychology and that psychiatric disorders are caused by many genes of small effect) send us in the direction of Hume. Morality is inside the brain, is not perceived. But our brains are different to one another, so morality has to be different.
Our physical senses are different too — some people are colorblind, some are deaf. Is that an argument against physical facts being real?
Are you under the impression that our perceptions are an accurate reflection of reality? That things we experience in our minds as "red" have some fundamental, observer independent "red" quality about them? Why is human perception the arbiter of physical facts? Why are the likely dramatically different perceptions
Is the flavor we call "vanilla" a part of the objective physical truth of the collection of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms we call 'vanillin'?
But physical facts are independent of the observer, morality is not, it exists inside the brain.
For example, lets say Person A´s father was unjustly executed and therefore he thinks that the death penalty is always wrong. Person B´s father was murdered in a robbery so he thinks the death penalty is justified in some cases. Both of them can be right, there is no contradiction.
Person A may see the apple as green and person B as red, but both of them can´t be right, one of them has to be wrong.
Whether morality exists only inside the brain is precisely the question. I'm suggesting possible evidence that it, like physical reality, exists outside and is perceived.
People's perception of physical reality can be different. One of them is right, one is wrong. How do you know that isn't true of moral reality.
But "the death penalty is always wrong" is not what I am describing as a perception, any more than "global temperature is rising because of human production of CO2" is. Both of those are theories based on perceptions. The perception, for Person A, is "it was wrong to execute my father."
¨Whether morality exists only inside the brain is precisely the question. I'm suggesting possible evidence that it, like physical reality, exists outside and is perceived.¨
I heard Sean Carroll and Richard Dawkins make the same point but on the opposite direction as to why they were atheists. That different civilizations independent of each other had very different religions.
Lets say when Hernan Cortes met the Aztecs he had found that they had an exact copy of the Gospel and it could be determined that they hadn´t copied it. That could be considered evidence that the Gospel is the word of God. But they didnt have such thing. I may be wrong but the argument seems to be kind of circular: if we found evidence for moral realism then moral realism would be true.
Personally I don´t consider myself a moral nihilist but a moral subjectivist. In my view morality is the product of culture, education, DNA and some white noise.
My claim in that post, as I tried to make clear, was not that moral realism or intuitionism was true. It was that one could get information on whether they were true from observing positive facts, that if certain non-moral facts turned out to be true that would be evidence for moral facts.
Your Aztec hypothetical is support for my position. Whether the Aztecs had religious writings consistent with Christianity is a fact of reality not a fact of religion or morality. But if it had turned out that they did, that would have been evidence for the truth of Christianity, hence for Christian moral claims, positive evidence for a normative claim.
Sorry, I didn´t make my last point clear.
What I mean is that when you say: ¨Suppose one could show that some widely held moral beliefs did not contribute to either reproductive or societal success. If such evidence existed, and if we observed consistency across humans of moral judgement, that would be evidence for the existence of moral facts that humans can perceive. Hence it would be evidence for those moral facts that humans do perceive.¨ you are moving poor Hume his ladder, you are changing the fundamental nature of reality, the metaphysics. To the best of my knowledge there are no widely held moral beliefs that dont contribute to societal success. Hume´s law applies to the world as we know it, if it were different we would have to reclassify what we consider an ought and what we consider an is. I once read that Francis Galton did a statistical study on prayer and concluded that it didn´t extend lifespan. If the evidence had shown that it did praying would stop being taugth at religious schools and start being taught at medical schools.
Color does not exist independently of the observer. It exists only in our mind!
ALL perceptions are creations of our mind. There's nothing fundamentally "red" about light with a wavelength around 700nm. "Red" is a creation of our minds that helps us distinguish between objects, but it's incoherent to say that it's an objective property of an object.
If our brains were wired differently, we would see colors differently, it wouldn't be any more or less an accurate representation of fundamental reality than the sensations we currently experience are.
If everyone sees something as red except for one person, this isn't proof that that person is wrong, it proves he has a different perceptual system as everyone else. Different species may see that apple as looking entirely different, so why is the average human perception the one that represents physical reality?
Color is a VISUAL property, it by definition cannot exist independently of visual perception systems.
If you're still not convinced, why don't we extend this line of thinking to other senses. Is the flavor we call 'vanilla' the REAL flavor of the vanillin molecule?
......
.....what could it even mean for a molecule to have a "real", observer independent flavor? It's incoherent. Obviously molecules do not have objective, fundamental properties called flavors to them. Flavor is just something our minds usually create in the presence (though not exclusively) to help us distinguish different foods. If other people or species experience a different taste to us (or no taste at all), they aren't wrong about the "true" flavor of a molecule.
¨There's nothing fundamentally "red" about light with a wavelength around 700nm. "Red" is a creation of our minds that helps us distinguish between objects, but it's incoherent to say that it's an objective property of an object.¨
You are wrong. ¨Red¨ is a linguistic symbol to describe an object that reflects light with a wavelength around 700nm. It is an objective property of the object independent of the observer. We use red because is shorter, but we could use ¨object that reflects light with a wavelength around 700nm¨.
That's one very specific use of the word 'red'. But people can experience 'red' in the absence of any light and any objects reflecting light. People aren't "wrong" for reporting having a "red" experience in the absense of light, 700nm wavelength or not.
But when somebody says the object is red, they're not talking about wavelengths! People were going around talking about red apples long before they knew anything about light and wavelengths. When people say something is red, what they're saying is they have a red color experience when they look at that object.
It's fine to claim that color refers to a wavelength of light, but if you do that then you cannot use color in reference to perceptions, because it has ceased to have a relation to perceptions, which is what this discussion was about to begin with!
We do not perceive wavelength, we percieve color (i.e. we experience colorful visual sensations). Depending on how an organism's perceptual system is structured, they can have what you might consider 'red' color sensations when their eyes receive 700nm light, they might have what you may call 'green' color perceptions, or something else entirely. And they may have these experience in the complete absence of light such as an hallucination or a dream.
If you call color a description of light wavelength, then it's no longer usable as a descriptor of our perceptions, and that was the whole point of color being brought up in the first place.
And that "red" apple is reflecting a lot of different wavelengths, a lot of which we cannot see. Why is the correct "objective" description of an object based on the very narrow perceptual system of a typical human being?
Consistency simply doesn’t close the logical gap; you’re shifting to the problem of induction, which is also infamously unsolved.
Do you think we have any reason to believe that the physical reality we perceive is real? I'm just carrying over that argument to moral reality.
If you think the argument doesn't work, do you have a better reason to believe in material reality? If you don't, do you act as if you didn't believe in it? I find it hard to imagine what life would be like if one didn't.
Really enjoyed your post and the comments. Still thinking about it.
If course I treat physical and moral reality in the conventional ways; that disjunction is *your* problem, since you claimed to provide a logical foundation. How people behave was never at stake (you can simply be wrong).
The general point about non moral facts (such as peoples beliefs/intuitions) being evidence for moral facts is very much true, and fits nicely in a Bayesian framework, this makes the issue of moral disagreement (at least among roughly rational agents) even more interesting given Aumann's agreement theorem, my guess is that some resolution would probably involve justification about priors.
"It is only a slight exaggeration to say that almost everyone believes in moral realism and almost everyone, at least in the circles I usually move in, denies believing in it." At least in the circles I'm familiar with, roughly the opposite seems to be true, that is very few people would actually openly commit themselves to moral anti-realism (even if they clearly belief such), and those who do, often try their hardest to salvage every last bit of moral realism, moral language, ethical norms and such (would be happy to give examples) as opposed to just strictly speaking/thinking in terms of positive facts and preferences and beliefs etc. If I was to speculate I would say that this small group of moralistic anti-realists (who seem to me to be most anti-realists) probably experience many of the moral properties that regular people experience, but consciously find such properties too spooky.
The Pascals Wager you suggest, whilst I know you find to be very forceful, I think among many of the committed anti-realists even if they were 99% sure that moral properties existed and irreducible normativity was a thing. They would probably be almost indifferent to their existence, even if they as a matter of fact ought to care, and acknowledged this as being true. So I think your argument isn't very forceful with respects to the target demographic. I should also add that I can personally easily imagine lots scenarios where I do come to believe in moral properties, a simple "moral property detector" that seems to involve something very primitive/fundamental would be an example of such a scenario, say naturally occurring crystals that glow red when you point it at a baby being stomped on and green when you point it at a someone giving money to the against malaria foundation etc.
I’m not religious and never have been: I come from a non-religious family. I generally behave according to my own sense of morality, because I don’t usually find it difficult to do so, and because it makes me feel better. My morality is similar to other people’s, but not exactly the same in all respects.
This is normal. Morality differs at least slightly from person to person, so that any two people are unlikely to agree about every detail.
It seems to me that the topic of abortion is more political than moral. Forcing women to have unwanted children is (a) authoritarian behaviour and (b) likely to result in unhappy mothers and unhappy children, and increasing the unhappiness of the population is not a good thing to do politically. Of course, this is easy for me to say, because I live in western Europe, where abortion is readily available and uncontroversial for most people.
So far as the consquential argument for legalizing abortion (and contraception), the problem is that what actually happened was the opposite of what that argument predicted. When abortion and contraception were being legalized in the U.S., the argument in favor was that doing so would sharply reduce the number of children born to unmarried mothers, "unwanted" children. Abortion and contraception were legalized and the number of children born to and reared by single mothers went sharply up.
" In 1965, 24 percent of black infants and 3.1 percent of white infants were born to single mothers. By 1990 the rates had risen to 64 percent for black infants, 18 percent for whites." (https://www.brookings.edu/research/an-analysis-of-out-of-wedlock-births-in-the-united-states/) The current national figure is over 40%.
A plausible explanation is that the changes increased the availability of non-marital sex for men, since women who didn't want children no longer faced a serious risk of pregnancy. Men who could get sex without a long run commitment were under less pressure to marry. Women who wanted children were less able to find a suitable man to help with the project, so many chose to be single mothers.
I'm not a utilitarian, so the claim that the consequences of legalizing abortion was a large increase in the fraction of children brought up by single mothers, isn't an adequate justification for me of laws against abortion. But half your argument assumes that laws against abortion result in more unhappy mothers and unhappy children so you ought to be bothered by the fact that what actually happened was the precise opposite of what that arguments assumes.
I'm going on the American experience — I don't know how well it fits what happened in Europe.
Thanks, the statistics are indeed interesting and somewhat unwelcome. However, another explanation is that, from 1965 to 1990, marriage simply became regarded as less essential, as a result of social changes unrelated to abortion. I wouldn’t discard your explanation, it’s probably relevant, but I don’t think it’s the whole story.
With contraception and abortion both available, I suppose that most women who have children want to have children, whether married or single, so those children are not unwanted. Children of single mothers may be less happy, on average, than children of married couples; but probably happier on average than unwanted children. I’m guessing, I have no statistics on this subject.
Although I eventually got married at the age of 43, I’m not a big enthusiast for marriage in general. If two people want to stay together, they can do so without a government licence; if they don’t want to stay together, either they’ll split up or they’ll stay together unhappily, not providing a good environment for children. Marriage may provide some intangible psychological benefit to some people, and it may have tax and other advantages provided by the government.
The situation in most of Europe as I understand it is abortion on request in the first trimester, in some countries also the second. Late term abortion is supposed to be only with pressing reasons, such as a threat to the life of the mother. How that works out in practice I don't know — it probably varies from one country to another.
That's more restrictive than U.S. law was until very recently.
Here in Spain (a Catholic country), abortion is available on request in the first 14 weeks. This may be a problem for some, but I suppose it should be enough in most cases. I read that abortion rates have been falling since the availability of ‘emergency contraception’: the morning-after pill.
you shouldn’t stop an Eskimo from putting his aged father on an ice flow and shoving him out to sea
I presume we are assuming that the aged father does not wish to be shoved out to sea. If he does, then it’s much more complicated.
I literally don't even know what something being 'morally true' could possibly mean. It's "morally wrong" to do something? What does that mean? I oughtn't do it? Why not? Because it's morally wrong?
If it's to do with social benefit, why 'ought' I do what provides social benefit, other than a fiat declaration of the morality of such an action?
I'm ok with your conclusion that it's "logically possible to get positive evidence for normative conclusions", but I think it's a struggle to understand what the nature of the normative conclusions are without thinking of consistent moral beliefs (to the extent they exist) as the outcome of a kind of constant negototiation (or if you prefer a political settlement) among all members of a society such that the conclusions are slowly changing over time within a polity as well as changing between different cultures and ages.
I don’t think that the active attitude (negative or positive) of a person described as moral relativist towards some human action can be considered inconsistent from the point of view of a relativist. Let’s us assume for example that I am such a relativist and I see my mother being murdered in front of my eyes. Most likely I’m going to feel a wild range of emotions towards the culprit because it is something that I do not want being done to me. I’m going to try to stop the murderer, persuade him to stop and try to punish him afterwards. All things that are consistent with both being a secret moral realist and not realizing it, or having a set of commitments and behaviour that try to minimize the chance of finding myself in such unwanted situations (without necessarily believe there is anything wrong with the situation in itself). For example if I find my mother being eaten alive by a lion, I’m going to try and stop the lion, kill him if necessary or convenient, without thinking of the lion as committing a morally wrong action. Moral relativism does not entail respect towards others moral systems or actions.
Moreover this does not even apply to moral skeptics or error theorist. Being convinced that there are no moral facts whatsover doesn’t entail being indifferent to what happens to my own life or others as a consequence of some actions. For example I might think that the proposition “lying is wrong” is epistemically incorrect but still act to minimize the chance of being lied to because I find it inconvenient to achieve my goals. Which is not the same as the non-cognitivist position which says that “lying is wrong” is in reality an expression of taste or preference.
Taking for a moment the moral realist point of view and try to apply your argument to them is fallacious. I still observe the same kind of apparent inconsistency in other moral realists, but that will not give me ground to say that they are secretely moral relativists. Let us assume that lying is wrong and that my professor believes this is a moral fact. I still observe that when a student push back on a professor’s theory that is wrong, the professor even knowing that he is wrong, actively lies to the student because he wants to defend his pride. From this behaviour I still cannot derive that the professor is a secret moral relativist because his action is inconsistent with his moral beliefs. Maybe the professor is simply mistaken and overran by emotions, which is a possibility that is taken seriously by lots of religions, enfacizing how human beings are morally fallacious even with the best of intentions.
Summing up I do not see how one can derive that the moral relativist position is inconsistent with an active attitude towards actions.
Passing to your improved Pascal’s Wager I think that there is a critical mistake in your line of reasoning. Mainly that it is not seems that common sense morality roughly correlates with individual self interest, but rather with social interest. For example let us assume that we have a society full of virtuous people that do not lie, steal and all other common sense virtues. In that society it is extremely convient to be a thief and a lier for one individual. But for a society it is not convinient having thiefs and liers going around. And that is why the equilibrium is not a population with all virtuous people.
To your third argument, you say that it is theoretically possible to derive some oughts from specific sets of is. As for that you give the following set of is statements as a possible example: intuitionism is true and there exist some behaviours considered good that are not explain by evolution or other explanations. However this set of “is-statements” has some problems in “Hume’s eye”. First the hypothesis of “intuitionism is true” by himself denies the is-ought impossibility. So if you use in one of your premises “you can derive oughts from is” it is not surprising that at the end you find it possible to do so. Intuitionism claims that “intuitions (that are a fact) know (or approximate) moral truths”, which is the exact negation of Hume’s position. We cannot assume it to be true in order to prove Hume’s argument false. The second problem is that even if there exist behaviours considered good not explained by any other theory, this is not enough to prove that intuitions are a source of moral knowledge. Maybe they are a source of absolutely no knowledge. Maybe they are just a collective fever dream similar to the one that people in the Matrix where subjected to while enslaved by evil machines. All of those alternatives and many others are compatible with Hume’s position and it is not clear why we should ignore them.
The is statement in my argument is not "intuitionism is true," which would be a normative claim, but "reported moral perceptions are consistent with each other," which is a positive claim.
It is true that one can imagine more explanations for consistent normative perceptions. But that is true for consistent positive perceptions as well — as I pointed out, your senses could be lying to you. Do you conclude that you have no good reason to believe that there is a physical world out there and your senses give you information about it? If you don't, you are applying standards of evidence to the normative argument that you are not willing to apply to the positive argument. If you do, how do you manage to live your life without any knowledge of physical reality?
I’m sorry I misunderstood your argument.
Taking “reported moral intuitions are consinstent with each other, thus those intuition are evidence for moral realism”, still it seems to miss the mark to me in 2 main regards. First, the argument from disagreement seems to be much much stronger for moral statement than for positive claims. For example my intuitions about moral claims being all wrong (error theory intuitions which I genuinely had before even studying bits of philosophy) seems to me to be pretty internally consistent, and wildely shared. Maybe people with moral skeptic or error theory intuitions are not the majority but are a sizable chunk of the population nonetheless. And this does not seem apply to basic positive claims like the tiger over the table. So in your view there must be a minimum share of the population that agrees on something, and achieving that share is a condition to start believing something. Which seems to be a sort of “super majority rule” on what is real and what isn’t, and to me it seems weird that simply having more people agreeing on something can change the truth value of a proposition. On another hand you might have a more “continuous” approach to this process, simply increasing your confidence in a proposition the more people agree with it. Ex: 99% of people agree that murder is wrong= 99.999…% confidence in this moral claim. Which is sensible but still doesn’t solve the Hume’s gap because you’ll never reach 100% confidence, and it is arguable wheather this could convince the remaining 1% of your moral claim (even assuming fully rational beings).
And this bring us to the second point and your, I believe correct, analogy with positive claims. It is true that, aside from difference in degrees of disagreement, moral skepticism has similar features with epistemological skepticism (in fact, not by chance, I am also sympathetic with this view). But I don’t see a total skeptic completely unable to act as you imagine. You might hold different propositional attitudes that differ from the strongest “I believe” and that might induce you to act. For example I doubt that a person playing the lottery will say that he “believed” he would win, but maybe that he “hoped” he would win. Similarly, a person running from a clearly non venomous bug because bug-phobic probably does not “believe” that the bug can cause him any harm or pose any danger to him, but still runs from it because he is scared. So you can act because you “fear”, “hope”, “desire” etc. something, not only because you “believe” something. The substancial difference in my eyes that there is between moral realism and epistemological realism is that the first one entails a change in behaviour if you grant it, while the second one doesn’t. So I’m much more willing to abandon epistemological skepticism in a debate that moral skepticism, although I agree with you that the two are correlated and then I would defend both given no other choice.
The point I was making was not that intuitionism and moral realism are correct but that one can get non-moral evidence about whether they are correct. Arguing that they are correct would be a different essay — the chapter of mine or the book of Huemer's I linked to.
I still don’t understand how you could get some evidence for a moral claim. Getting some evidence for some proposition X in my mind is like trying to test proposition X. If proposition X is a moral proposition then, in order to test it, you would have to assume an evaluative premise (let’s say, for the sake of argument, “intuitions are a good proxy for moral truths”). But that is exactely Hume’s point, you need at least one evaluative claim in your premeses to deduct a moral claim. I’ve re-read Huemer’s entire book to check if i’ve miss something on this specific issue, but he seams to me to concede that Hume was right in asserting the is-ought gap (the entire chapter 4 of his book is dedicated to analize this question). That entire chapter seems to me like a launch-pad for defending moral intuitionism and abandoning the idea of trying to derive oughts from solely descriptive statements.
Maybe I’m completely missing the point of Huemer’s first 4 chapters and your third argument in this post, and my brain just does not understand them, even if I’m trying hard to. And that maybe makes sense since you and I appear to have wildly different intuitions about moral philosophy.
My point is that you might be able to get evidence for the claim that intuitions are a good proxy for moral truths by observing the consistency of intuitions by different people and the lack of any other plausible explanation for that consistency. If intuitions are consistent there must be a reason. That different people are observing the same moral facts is a possible reason. If you can eliminate other plausible reasons you have evidence for that one.
Let’s see if I can be more clear about what my doubts are in the logical structure of that argument. One we already discussed and concluded, the induction problem argument which as you said can also be applied to everything, leading to a radical skeptical position. I agreed with you on this issue. The second and the one where we got lost I think, is a more serious problem that arises even if you concede the epistemological power of induction. To me it seems that the claim “X is a good proxy for moral truths and we can test this claim” (where X could be whatever you want, intuitions, the bible or something else) is, in reality, multiple separate claims: “moral realism is true and moral values are stance indipendent”, “X is a method to acces knowledge about moral facts” and “X is common enough in group Y such that discernible patterns appear in the Y”.
Now if you want to test the original claim by looking to patterns of X in group Y, it is going to be an incomplete inductive proof, since you just dealt with the 3rd statement, giving no reason or proof for the other 2 statements. As an example let’s say that X is “believing everything that is in the bible”, Y is “christians” and propositions 1 and proposition 2 are false. If proposition 3 was true and we do a test looking for patterns in christians about believing the bible, we would still see a postive result from our test. Same thing we can do by imagining P1 and P3 to be true while P2 being false. Or even the case for “moral subjectivism” where P1 is false but P2 and P3 are true. So we conclude that the 3 proposition could be truth indipendent from one-onother.
So in order to deafeat Hume’s claim one must show that:
- P1 is true (otherwise the question become “why should I abide to what group Y is doing?” Or “why should I be part of group Y” like “why should I abide by the rule’s that this ‘human race’ seems to intuit? Maybe I shouldn’t or don’t want to be a ‘moral human’, maybe I should be one new kind of human, an ‘anti-moral human’”)
- P2 is true
- P3 is true
This to me suggests that the hypothetical scenario where we see positive results while testing P3 and the only explanation is that P2 is true, still fails to disproof Hume’s claim. A solid disproof of Hume’s claim would need also to demonstrate that P1 is true, and I do not see any way of doing that. At least I haven’t seen any convincing proof of that, even with hypothetical scenarios.
David, If I'm not mistaken, I have heard you say something to effect that you tend to make consequentialist arguments over moral ones, largely because you think you have better arguments along those lines, and that you and socialists will typically disagree about the facts, but in general will share the same basic moral assumptions. I'm curious if I have your position right, because this is something I'm very split on, especially when you consider that egalitarianism is assumed to have inherent value by many people, which I don't think is true (Huemer wrote a paper arguing that egalitarianism does not have inherent value, and it's pretty convincing).
That's a reasonable summary of my position. I expect that there are some disagreements in normative beliefs. But I think a libertarian society is enough superior in its consequences to anything very different to be preferred under most moral systems people actually hold. And I don't have very powerful arguments for my moral positions. I think Huemer, whose basic position is close to mine, believes he does, but I believe he is mistaken.
> Perhaps our common moral perceptions are the result of evolution hard wiring into us beliefs that caused our ancestors to behave in ways that led to reproductive success. Perhaps we have been indoctrinated by our societies with beliefs that make societies more likely to survive, consistent across societies because societies that didn’t conform didn’t survive.
Ding ding ding!
Two things:
1. Looking at history really tells me not to trust intuitions. Slavery, sexism, the Holocaust, etc. etc. etc.
2. Most importantly - there is every reason to think that there is just physics. We *want* to believe more (we're special, we don't really die, etc.) and loads of smart people have wasted their lives trying to prove this. So we really have to beware of giving into our desires.
https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
I don’t think you are arguing against Hume's actual position. He pointed out that if a deductive logical argument has only statements containing “is”, but the conclusion has an “ought” in it, some purely logical slight of hand has occurred. They are different sorts of predicates. In his comments immediately after the passage where he disparages the deductive method, he concludes that we use a variety of perception to come to moral conclusions. Here is the passage, from his A Treatise of Human Nature:
“In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason shou’d be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the reader; and am perswaded, that this small attention wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason. [Sect. 2. Moral distinctions deriv’d from a moral sense ] Thus the course of the argument leads us to conclude, that since vice and virtue are not discoverable merely by reason, or the comparison of ideas, it must be by means of some impression or sentiment they occasion, that we are able to mark the difference betwixt them. Our decisions concerning moral rectitude and depravity are evidently perceptions;”
It’s not obvious that he would agree with your account in this blog post, but his complaint about deductions indeed would not apply to it.