Reading: Meta-Ethics

Meta-Ethics

Ethics concerns what is good. Different things can be good in different ways. We just considered the nature of the good life. The quality of one’s life is something that can be evaluated for goodness. This makes it an ethical issue. Aristotle’s theory of virtue was part of our inquiry into the good life and good character. More familiar will be ethical theories of good action. The ethics of good action concerns what is morally permissible, obligatory, prohibited and superogatory (good above and beyond what’s obligated). Beyond lives, character and actions, social groups can be ethically good or bad. Social justice is the ethics of good society. So, ethics concerns the goodness of assorted things. Ethical inquiry into what is good, right or best is normative. That is, normative ethical inquiry is concerned with inquiry into how things ought to be. By contrast, when anthropologists examine the moral traditions of various cultures, they are generally aiming only to describe, explain and understand the ethical views of other cultures. They are not engaged in the normative project of trying to understand what moral code is best. In other words, they are out to understand what is regarded as good and bad by some culture or society. But they are not thereby concerned with what is good and bad. Inquiry into what is good and bad is normative inquiry and as soon as we engaging in this sort of inquiry, we are doing normative ethics.

We started doing normative ethics in the last chapter in examining the nature of the good life. In this chapter, we will not be doing normative ethics. Instead we will be asking more fundamental questions about the status of our moral claims and attitudes. For starters, we will consider the view that all our moral claims are false and all our attitudes about what is good or bad, right or wrong are mere delusions. Perhaps there is no value in the world whatsoever. This view is known as nihilism. Or, perhaps there is value in the world, but it is merely subjective. Moral subjectivism is the view that there is only right and wrong relative to me, or you or some other subject. This is a form of individualized moral relativism. A further possible mete-ethical position is collectivized versions of moral relativism. It might be that good and bad are matters of social convention, like laws or standards of etiquette. Perhaps the most popular view of this sort is cultural moral relativism, the view that what is right is right only relative to cultural groups and is determined by the values, standards and traditions of a culture. The assorted varieties of moral relativism deny that there are any objective moral standards and make morality a matter of the say-so or authority of people, either individually or in groups. A further view to consider is that morality is objective, at least for humans, and determined by the authority or say-so of God. This view is known as Devine command theory. And finally, we will consider the view that there is real value in the world and objective moral truths are based on this. This view, moral realism, is the one approach to ethics that takes there to be ethical truths but denies that they are based on the authority or say-so of any person, even God, or any group of people. We will take up each of these positions in turn in this chapter. In doing so, we are engaged in meta-ethics, inquiring into the status of morality, whether it is subjective or objective and how so. Our meta-ethical inquiry will set the stage for our final two chapters on the normative ethics of actions and social justice, the normative ethics of societies.

Nihilism

Nihilism is the view that there is no value in the world, nothing is good or bad, and we are just deluding ourselves in thinking that anything matters at all. On this view all of our ethical judgments are simply mistaken. Note that this is not the view that it’s morally fine to do as we please. That too is an ethical judgment and is no more true or reasonable than any other value judgment according to nihilism. We may not be able to decisively refute nihilism, but that would be no argument in support of it. And building a case for nihilism presents some obstacles. In particular, the nihilist owes us an error theory, an account of how our moral experience and judgments so badly mislead us.

We are moral beings. Morality is a central part of our lived experience. This is not the case for psychopaths and sociopaths, but this is just why these are pathologies. The psychopath and the sociopath are lacking in a central area of human functioning. That these individuals lack moral experience is no more reason to think the rest of us are deluded than to think that they are simply blind to something real the rest of us appreciate. The rest of us do have moral emotions. When we harm others, we are liable to feel guilty. And when we are harmed by others, we may feel indignant. We also have moral motivations. We are generally motivated to treat others fairly even when we can see some advantage in putting ourselves first. And we are motivated to condemn cruelty and praise kindness. Most of us fall short in assorted ways now and then, and we often recognize this ourselves whether someone else judges us or not.

In suggesting that our moral experience is just a delusion, the nihilist is offering a skeptical hypothesis. This might remind you of the more general skeptical hypothesis of Descartes’ evil deceiver. While we can’t rule out the more general skeptical hypothesis that all of our experience is a deceptive illusion, we generally tag this as a philosophical curiosity and continue to confidently believe that our senses provide us with fallible, but basically reliable evidence of an external reality. Worries about Descartes’ evil deceiver present no obstacle to scientific inquiry about the physical world and the benefits of this are pretty obvious even if it turns out that we are living in a simulation of some sort. I’ll suggest we treat nihilism in the same vein. Perhaps we can’t rule out the possibility that our experiences as moral beings are mere illusions. Yet, all the same, we can better understand our ourselves and benefit in ways we care about by engaging in systematic inquiry into our lived moral experiences. Our lived experience as moral beings presents us with prima facie evidence for thinking that morality is real in some sense. The nihilist owes us some compelling argument for doubting our lived moral experience before we should grant is moral skepticism any more credence than Descartes’s evil demon.

Is Morality Subjective?

Setting aside nihilism, we now turn the idea that morality is subjective. We first need to ask just what we mean by “subjective.” There is a broad sense in which your entire lived experience is subjective. It is, after all, your experience and you are a subject. But there are many aspects of our subjective experience that usually confidently take to reflect an objective reality. My subjective visual experience informs me that my bike has a flat tire and my subjective tactile experience quickly confirms this. This subjective gives me a pretty good reason to confidently believe that my bike tire is, as an objective matter of fact, flat. Setting aside skeptical curiosities like Descartes’ evil deceiver, if we are observant and scientific about things, it seems that we can learn quite a bit about what is objectively true on our subjective experience. But because this broad sense of what is subjective includes experiences that track objective reality, it also doesn’t get at what is supposed to be interesting about the notion that morality is subjective.

Rather, the idea of subjectivity that we want to capture in connection with moral subjectivism is the idea something about you as a subject determines how things are for you or relative to you. Things we care about and things we prefer seem to work this way. You determine what you prefer or care about and no thing or person can do that for you. What’s best relative to your preferences and concerns depends entirely on you and you may prefer things I don’t prefer. The subjectivist takes morality to work like what we prefer or care about, but not like other aspects of our subjective experience that track things that are objectively real or true. So, we’ll call moral subjectivism the view that there is no objective goodness, but only what is subjectively good relative to individual subject.

Moral subjectivism is no mere psychological thesis, but an ethical thesis. If I regard the death penalty as morally justifiable in some cases and you don’t, that is just a psychological observation about our differing beliefs and attitudes. The possibility that one of us gets this moral issue wrong remains open. Moral subjectivism, as an ethical view, is the view that what is right is right only relative to me or relative to another and what is right relative to me or another is determined by our respective opinions and attitudes. It is not just individual moral beliefs and attitudes that are relative to individuals according to the subjectivist, but morality itself that is relative.

Moral subjectivism is a form of individualized moral relativism and it has some obvious appeal. Everyone wants to think that they are good and subjectivism allows us all to set the standard of goodness for ourselves. Subjectivism appears to be highly egalitarian since it entails that no one’s moral opinion is better than anyone else’s. And it provides a usually convenient route to avoiding unpleasant conflicts. The person who seeks to terminate an unpleasant conflict of opinion on some moral matter by saying “what is right relative to you just isn’t what is right relative to me” is appealing to something like moral subjectivism. Though adding that we should just agree to disagree would be inconsistent with moral subjectivism. And we’ll take this point up as the first of a series of objections to moral subjectivism. The key to appreciating each of these objections is to see them as concerns about what is deductively entailed by moral subjectivism.

1. No Conflicts over Moral Matters

Moral subjectivism doesn’t resolve any conflicts of moral opinion, it rather dissolves the appearance of conflict between moral opinions. People may have conflicts about what to do in any case, but there are no conflicts about who is right on moral matters exactly because rightness itself is relative to subjects on this view. For suppose I think the death penalty is just punishment in some cases and you think the death penalty is unjust. The death penalty itself can’t be both just and unjust, that would be a contradiction. But moral subjectivism doesn’t say that the death penalty is both just and unjust. It says that the death penalty is just relative to me and unjust relative to you. There is no contradiction or conflict in this. So, there is no disagreement between us to resolve. According to moral subjectivism, there are no grounds for agreeing to disagree because we never actually disagree about the same moral matters. My approval of the death penalty is just about what is right relative to me and your disapproval is about something entirely different, what is right relative to you. Conflicting opinions concerning moral matters can be unpleasant (though they don’t have to be) and moral subjective provides a convenient escape from conflict. We might be careful what we wish for, though. While moral subjectivism shields us from conflict and criticism, it also rules out resolving conflicts reasonably, with brings us to our next objection.

2. No Reasoning about Morality

Suppose you feel strongly about the injustice of the death penalty and you’ve thought a good deal about why you think it is wrong. A disappointing corollary of the no conflicts objection is that your issues with the death penalty are just about you. They can’t, in principle, provide any reason for a supporter of the death penalty to change their mind. Reasoning with people presupposes a shared reality we can reason about. But this is just what moral subjectivism denies in the realm of morality. Suppose you attempted to argue that killing is always wrong and so the death penalty is wrong. A supporter of the death penalty could happily grant that you have a good argument, but since wrongness in this argument is only about what is wrong relative to you, your argument presents no objection to the supporter’s argument that the death penalty is just relative to the supporter. Since rightness and wrongness are relative to individuals according to moral subjectivism, you and the supporter aren’t even offering arguments about the same thing. According to moral subjectivism, no objective basis exists for reasoning about the moral status of the death penalty.

3. Moral Infallibility

According to Moral Subjectivism, right and wrong relative to you is determined by your opinions and attitudes. The makes each of us morally infallible. The only way a person could do wrong, on this view is by failing to act according to their own opinions and attitudes. Now consider the case of Dylann Roof, white supremacist and mass murderer, who killed nine African Americans at a church meeting in 2015. Roof acted in accordance with his opinions and attitudes. According to moral subjectivism, his actions were right relative to him. Of course, they were wrong relative to just about everyone else, but subjectivism denies that there is any objective moral standard according to which our moral opinions and attitudes are better than Roof’s. We humans often have self-righteous tendencies, but securing infallibility through moral subjectivism comes at a high price.

4. Moral Growth Undermined

Thankfully, we are not always self-righteous. We do sometimes question our own moral positions and occasionally change our view about the morality of some practice. A person might, for instance, think that eating fast food hamburgers is morally unproblematic at one time and then become convinced that animals deserve some kind of moral regard that speaks against practices like factory farming. When moral views change in this fashion, people do not merely drop one moral belief in favor of another. Typically, they also think that their prior moral opinion was mistaken. They take themselves to have discovered something new about what is morally right. Subjectivism has no problem with changes in moral standards. But subjectivism cannot account for any changes in our moral beliefs as being changes for the better. This is because the subjectivism recognizes no independent standard of goodness against which the new moral opinions can be evaluated as better than the old moral opinions.

5. Anything Goes

A deep concern that underlies several of the foregoing problems is that moral subjectivism renders morality arbitrary. Anything can be right relative of an individual on the subjectivist view. If a person deems torturing innocent kittens just for fun right, then it is right relative to that person and there is no higher moral standard from which kitten torture can be condemned. It is hard to see how kitten torture could be made right relative to anyone just by that person deeming it OK. This is the problem of arbitrariness. Our experiences as moral beings are not so arbitrary. Our moral judgments and attitudes are usually somewhat more systematic and principled. Moral subjectivism seems more appealing when we focus mainly on hot button moral issues where people’s opinions conflict. But most moral issues aren’t like this. Almost everyone agrees, perhaps with some special exceptions, that it is wrong to cheat, lie, steal and kill. We even tend to agree of most of the cases where we’d make exceptions to these general moral rules. Moral subjectivism has little to offer in the way of explaining our broad agreement on most moral matters. And this suggests that morality is not so arbitrary.

Moral Relativism

Perhaps rather few people take moral subjectivism seriously. The idea that a person can make something right, even just relative to themselves, merely by deeming it right may strike you as a non-starter. But collectivized versions of moral relativism enjoy widespread popularity. The most popular is Cultural Moral Relativism (which we’ll abbreviate as CMR). CMR is the idea that what is right is right relative to a culture and determined by that culture’s values and standards. Culture, along with religion, is often the means by which moral beliefs are transmitted. We often accept things as right or wrong based on what is accepted in our culture or religion. But is cultural tradition sufficient to make a moral attitude correct? CMR says yes. In considering this collectivized version of moral relativism, we face collectivized versions of many of the same objections raised against moral subjectivism.

First let’s note that there are many possible varieties of moral relativism depending on who gets to say what is right or wrong for whom. I don’t think anyone is a chess club moral relativist or a garden society moral relativist. People are much more inclined to take culture to identify the social groups relevant to morality. And this sounds appealing given that moral traditions are often incorporated into cultural traditions. Keep in mind, though, that ethics is about what moral opinions are best, not what moral opinions are regarded as best by people or how they come to be held by people. While most of us are pretty likely to inherit our moral opinions from the dominant traditions in our culture, being entrenched by culture might not be the best guide to what is good. Given this, we might ask why it is culture that gets to decide right and wrong rather than the chess club or the garden society. Moral Relativism seems to suffer a kind of arbitrariness at the level of selecting the groups to which right and wrong are supposed to be relative.

Next, what is it for a group to deem something right or wrong? As we are culturally engrained to think egalitarianism is a good thing, most of us would probably say that a group deems something right when a solid majority of its members deem it right. But why not take a group to deem something to be right with the strongest and most aggressive members of the group deem it right? This is how things work with gangs and outlaw militias. If right and wrong are merely matters of convention, why should we favor egalitarian democratic say-so over gangland style strongman say-so? Note that it won’t do to appeal to values independent of the say-so of groups or their members here, since CMR denies the existence of any independent values.

Now let’s consider some problems for CMR. You will recognize several of these as collectivized versions of the problems we encountered for moral subjectivism.

1. Anything Goes (again)

CMR has it that whatever is right according to values and traditions of a culture is right relative to that culture. On this view, a culture’s moral code defines what is right relative to it (again, what is right, not just what is considered right). In some cultures, it is considered right for fathers and brothers to kill female family members who have been raped. Such “honor killings” strike us as morally horrible, and indeed for this reason CMR will count honor killings as wrong relative to our culture. But also, according to CMR, the mere fact that honor killings are in line with the moral codes of other cultures makes these killing morally right relative to those cultures.

According to CMR, all it takes for something to be right relative to a culture is for that culture to deem it right. So, if a culture deems racism, genocide, slavery or pointless sadistic torture right, then it is right relative to that culture. And this strikes many as a reductio ad adsurdum of CMR, a refutation of CMR on the grounds that it leads to absurd consequences. When a view deductively entails an absurd consequence, that constitutes a powerful objection to it. So, we can formulate this argument against CMR as follows.

If CMR is correct, then honor killings are morally right relative to cultures that deem them right.

Honor killings are not right (full stop)

So CMR is not correct.

This argument is valid. And the first premise correctly identifies a straightforward deductive consequence of CMR. So, the only way to avoid the conclusion that CMR is a bad theory about the nature of morality is by denying the second premise and maintaining that in fact honor killings are right relative to certain cultures (again, are right, not merely are considered right). So how might such a denial of the second premise go?

The relativist might start by asking, “Who are we to judge that honor killings are not right (relative to cultures that deem them right)?” If the best answer we can supply in reply to this question amounts to nothing more than a veiled appeal to the moral standards of our own culture, then the relativist has a point. But why suppose the best we can do in replying to this question is a mere appeal to the standards of our culture? Granted honor killings are wrong relative to the standards of most cultures. But most cultures may adopt moral standards the oppose honor killings for very good reasons. If members of cultures that accept honor killings fail to appreciate those reasons, that might be due to a culturally induced moral blind spot rather than morality itself depending on cultural attitudes. Having some sense of the moral worth of persons may be all that is needed to see the injustice in honor killings and it is far from obvious that this recognition depends in any way on cultural traditions or values. We recognize our own moral worth regardless of cultural traditions and values. Basic human sympathy and compassion is all that is required to recognize the same moral worth in other persons. For a culture to deem honor killings morally just would then seem to require denying the full humanity of women. It seems at least possible for a culture to get things wrong on this point. But . . .

2. CMR makes Culture Morally Infallible

According to CMR, what is right relative to a culture is whatever is deemed right relative to a culture. Since the moral standards of a culture define right and wrong relative to a culture, the standards of a culture can’t, by definition, get morality wrong. On the face of it, the case of honor killings looks like a straightforward counterexample. Further evidence of cultural fallibility (the possibility of a culture getting morality wrong) can be found in your choice of genocidal episodes, culturally condoned practices of slavery, colonialism, caste systems, etc. We seem to have an abundance of compelling evidence for the fallibility of culturally engrained moral standards. This evidence for cultural fallibility is, like any sort of evidence, itself fallible. It could be that what we regard as evidence of another culture’s fallibility only looks like evidence through the distorted moral lens of our own culture. But this only suggests that our own culture fallible in its moral judgments, which is not possible according to moral relativism. CMR deductively entails that cultures are morally infallible, abundant historical and current evidence not-with-standing.

3. Reasoning about Morality is Undermined on CMR

A straightforward consequence of the moral infallibility of cultures on CMR is that it will be conceptually impossible any reason or argument to be offered against the moral standards of a culture. Since what is right relative to a culture is defined by that culture’s standards, no rational argument to the contrary is possible. Those who disagree with a culture’s moral standards, whether members of that culture or another, have no rational basis for doing so and will simply be wrong by definition. CMR has it that moral standards are based on the authority of the culture. The commands of an authority are merely to be followed, not rationally questioned. There is no room for reasoned argument where things are made so by the say-so of authority. Yet this stands in sharp contrast to the experience many of us have as moral beings. We do reason about what is right. We sometimes critical question the moral dictates of authority figures, cultural norms or even our own opinions. But where there is no truth of the matter independent of cultural standards, there is no reasoning to do. We can only obey, or challenge cultural authority with our own. But any challenge to cultural authority will be simply mistaken about the nature of morality according to CMR.

4. The Moral Reformers Dilemma

The impossibility of moral growth entailed by CMR can be understood in terms of the moral reformer’s dilemma. We recognize a few remarkable individuals as moral reformers, people who, we think, improved the moral condition of their society in some way. Common examples include the Buddha, Jesus, Ghandi, and Martin Luther King Jr. While the relativist can allow that these individuals changed the moral views of their societies, none can be said to have changed their societies for the better. This is because the the cultural moral relativist recognizes no standard of moral goodness independent of what is accepted in a culture and identifying any changes in a culture’s moral standards as changes for the better requires a standard of goodness independent of those standards. The relativist is committed to taking the most overt and violent forms of racism, for example, to be right relative to pre-civil rights American society and wrong relative to post-civil rights American society. But since standards of goodness are determined by the prevalent views in a society, there is no standard of goodness to appeal to in evaluating the change our society underwent in the civil rights movement as a change for the better. According to societal Moral Relativism, anyone who takes Martin Luther King to have improved American society by leading it to reject many forms of racism is just mistaken about the nature of morality.

5. Tolerance Undermined

In each of the objections we have considered to moral subjectivism and CMR, we have reasoned deductively from a clearly formulated relativistic view about the nature of morality to morally problematic consequences. In each case we have appealed to evidence contrary to the consequences of the respective forms of moral relativism. That is, we’ve first gotten clear about the view we are considering, and then we have asked what would follow from that. In each case, the consequences have been unsavory. We’ll conclude our critical evaluation of moral relativism with one more such case, the case of tolerance. Here we encounter a sad irony. Fans of cultural relativism often endorse relativism in part because it seems to support tolerance and respect for people of diverse cultures. CMR does take the differing moral standards of different cultures to be right relative to their respective cultures. It rejects the notion that the moral standards of one society could be objectively correct. This line of thought has led many who value cultural diversity and tolerance to embrace Moral Relativism. But this is a mistake. Moral Relativism does not entail that we should be tolerant of diversity. And this can be seen clearly by reasoning deductively from what CMR says.

According to CMR, whatever a culture deems right is right relative to that culture.

Culture X deems intolerance of other cultures right.

Intolerance of other cultures is right relative to Culture X.

The argument here is straightforward and valid. CMR entails that we should be tolerant of diversity if and only if our culture deems tolerance of diversity to be a good thing. If a culture deems intolerance to be good, then, according to CMR, intolerance is good relative to that group. Considering one of the other consequences of CMR, since goodness is relativized to cultures, our culture’s view that tolerance and respect for diversity is good fails to provide the intolerant group with any grounds for reconsidering its intolerance. CMR thus turns out to be a deeply conservative view in the sense that it undermines all possible reasons for changing our moral outlook. CMR is a view that gives a dominant racist culture moral standing and further denies us any reasonable grounds for arguing against the intolerance of a dominant racist culture. People who value tolerance and respect for diverse individuals or groups would do much better to endorse tolerance and respect as objective real moral value. The widespread embrace of CMR among multiculturalists is ultimately self-defeating.

[For yet another compelling line of argument against Moral Relativism, see Paul Boghossian’s piece, “The Maze of Moral Relativism (Links to an external site.).” Boghossian argues that attempts to relativize morality undermine the normativity of moral beliefs altogether and so ultimately collapse into nihilism, the view that nothing matters, nothing is good. If you prefer to listen, here’s a Philosophy Bites podcast (Links to an external site.) in which Boghossian explains his line of argument.]

Relativism and the Social Sciences

Assorted branches of the social sciences are in the business of trying to better understand and explain the diversity of cultural practices and world views. But in describing culturally based beliefs about what is right or wrong, they are not defending ethical claims about what is right or wrong. The social sciences are often concerned with what people in different cultures believe is right or wrong. And social scientists will often discuss a kind of descriptive cultural relativism in explaining how what is regarded as good or bad in various cultures is relative to the respective values and traditions of those cultures. Here, what social scientists refer to as cultural relativism is best understood as the view that what is regarded as good or bad is often relative to culture and understanding cultures well requires suspending judgment about culturally relative standards of good and bad. But the question of what is good or bad remains an open question for ethics.

Suspending judgment is methodologically important for understanding. This is just as true in philosophy as it is in sociology or anthropology. We suspend judgment at the stage of trying to understand a new view. Only once we have a clear understanding can we then turn to critical evaluation. Social sciences like anthropology and cultural and ethnic studies are out to understand cultural practices and perspectives. Suspending judgment is essential to doing this well. So, guarding against ethnocentrism is important when an anthropologist investigates cultures that are different from her own. But the methodological importance of suspending judgment for the sake of better understanding is not a permanent obstacle to critical evaluation of the moral points of view transmitted through culture. Ethics, unlike sociology or anthropology, is a fundamentally normative discipline. Its goal is to evaluate moral views and try to see which is most reasonable in light of the kinds of ethical evidence and argument we can uncover. Here we benefit from the social sciences and the understanding they produce of the moral perspectives of different cultures.

Divine Command Theory

We have yet to consider the idea that morality is somehow grounded in religion. One popular view that does so is known as Devine command theory (DCT), the view that morality is just a matter of God’s commands. According to DCT, what is right is right simply because God commands it. Note that like moral subjectivism and CMR, DCT takes morality to be based on say-so of some authority. It’s just that the authority in the case of DCT is God rather than the individual, culture or society. For this reason, even though DCT makes morality objective in a sense, DCT is open to some of the same objections we have encountered for other authority-based views of morality. DCT view makes ethics easy, so long as we can be sure we know what God commands. If we can somehow be confident about that, ethics requires no critical thinking, just total obedience. We had a much earlier encounter with DCT in our discussion of Plato’s dialogue, Euthyphro. In that dialogue Socrates asks if the gods love what is good because it is good or if what is good is good because the gods love it. DCT is the later option, that what is good is good because God loves it. The central problem for DCT Plato points towards with the question famously raised by Socrates is, again, that DCT makes ethics completely arbitrary. In principle, God could command that anything be right. God could command that we torture puppies, commit genocide, and treat children like livestock. According to DCT, if God does command these things, then they are right, end of story. In fact, many people have sincerely taken God to have commanded these things (perhaps except for the puppy torture). However, hopefully, the idea that any of these things could be morally right strikes you as absurd. In spite of our occasionally differing ethical opinions, ethics does seem to be systematic and coherent. Right and wrong are not completely arbitrary. It seems at least that there is some reasoned systematicity to our ethical opinions in spite of the differences we sometimes arrive at. If this is right, then we should reject any meta-ethical view that makes ethics completely arbitrary. And this means rejecting the view that right and wrong is simply a matter of God’s command.

The religious believer has better meta-ethical options than DCT. When I share Plato’s compelling objection to DCT, it’s not uncommon for someone to object that God would never command us to torture innocent puppies because God is good. I think this is exactly the right response for a believer to offer. But this response is not a defense of DCT. Any believer that makes this move is joining Socrates in rejecting DCT and taking God to command what is good because it is good. If God is essentially good, then what is right is not made right merely by his command. Rather he commands what he commands because of his goodness. When the religious believer takes God’s goodness to be what is ethically fundamental he abandons conventionalist meta-ethics in favor of a kind of theological ethical realism. Of course, the challenge of understanding God’s good nature remains.

If ethics is a matter of authority as both DCT and moral relativism would have it, then there is no inquiry to engage in beyond figuring out what the relevant authority says. This would make ethics a singularly boring topic to look into. But we will find quite a few interesting things to say about plausible normative ethical theories. So, we might take our inquiry into normative ethics in the next chapter to constitute one further argument against authority approaches to ethics like DCT, moral relativism and moral subjectivism. Ethics just isn’t as dull as these views would have it.

Objective Morality

We’ll now turn to the idea that morality is objective. In thinking of morality as objective, we just mean that goodness and badness, right and wrong, aren’t determined by the say-so, will, authority or preferences of any subjects, not even God. Nor do these things depend on our collective say-so, will or preferences as in the case of moral relativism. Objective morality is independent of the unique experiences of subjects/ Morality is also independent of the shared experiences, values and traditions of social groups and cultures. What could it be for morality to be objective in this sense? One possibility is that there is real value in the world. Perhaps happiness is fundamentally good, quite aside from the fact that we generally prefer it. Perhaps people matter objectively and have a kind of moral value that transcends their importance to themselves or other subjects.

An immediate concern for the idea of real objectively existing value is that we can’t see or otherwise empirically detect such value. We have no scientific instruments for registering and measuring the fundamental objective value of happiness, or community, or persons. Of course, we may subjectively value these things, but then we subjectively value assorted different things and this seems to favor moral subjectivism or relativism. But bear in mind that my subjective sense of the importance of people or happiness might just be subjective in the way that my visual experience is. That is as a subjective indicator of independent objective facts.

So now let’s consider a range of fairly commonplace objections to the idea that morality is objective. Here we will find that pretty good answers can be given, at least provisionally, to many of the sources of doubt people often have about the idea of objective morality.

1. But Morality isn’t like Science!

If objective moral value is real, shouldn’t we expect to find some scientific confirmation of this, some proof or evidence of its existence? Perhaps, but what sort of proof or evidence we should we expect to find remains an open question. It may be helpful to consider the sort of proof or evidence science has been able to provide for the most fundamental features of physical reality. Note first that we don’t have any direct observational evidence of the existence of fundamental physical forces like gravity or electromagnetic charge. We know fundamental forces only through their effects. You can observe the effects of gravitation when you fall off a bike, for instance. Less hazardously, but also often more depressingly (if you haven’t been riding your bike, for instance) you can measure, in excruciating detail, the effect of gravity when you step on the bathroom scale. But nowhere here do you get to observe the force of gravity itself. You only get to observe its manifestations, it effects. It is far from clear so far how real fundamental moral value is any worse off. We can’t observe goodness or badness in the way we can a reading on a bathroom scale or a voltmeter, but perhaps we do have similarly indirect experience of it. We frequently have very powerful and vivid experiences of indignation when we are wronged. And we may have experiences of satisfaction when justice is served, or experiences of joy or gratitude at the realization that something is good. These are aspects of our experience. They are not just widespread, pervasive parts of our experience of the world. It would not be unreasonable to seek some account of our moral experience. The too common suggestion that these things are “merely subjective” doesn’t explain much. Perhaps one thing the subjectivist can explain are the occasional points of difference in moral approval or disapproval between different individuals. But we may be far too impressed with the difference among our moral attitudes. Note for instance, that our moral sense is well enough aligned from one person to the next that we can all appreciate the often subtle moral dynamics of stories. No one has any trouble recognizing for instance, the various virtues and vices in the characters in a novel or a play, for instance. We are all similarly largely on the same page when it comes to identifying fortuitous events and tragedies.

Even in the case of hot button moral issues, thoughtful people can often appreciate the conflict in terms of understandable moral values. To take one such current issue, the moral value of having our government protect us from dangerous criminals crossing our southern border is obvious to all. Often less easy to appreciate, but also powerfully compelling, is a sympathetic understanding of the plight of people who seek asylum in our country. There may be a number of narratives and perspectives to consider in approaching complex issues like immigration. Assorted values may be at issue in different ways in these diverse perspectives, but even here, the situation doesn’t present obvious difficulties for the idea of objective morality. On the face of it, security for citizens matters. And so, does concern for the basic human rights of others. Why not take these both to be plain truths, not unlike how its plainly true that it hurts to fall off a bicycle (which itself is rather obviously a bad thing).

The idea of real objective moral value appears to be on par that of real objective fundamental physical forces in science so far. We have not found any deep difference between ethical inquiry into objective moral value and scientific inquiry into the nature of the physical world yet. There may be important dis-analogies between ethics and science to uncover and explore and we may get to some of them ahead. But so far so good for the idea of objective moral value.

2. Dogmatism and Intolerance

If there were objective moral truths, wouldn’t this lead to people who have this truth, or at least think they do, to be dogmatically confident in their correctness? People who are dogmatic in their moral views do tend to think their views are objectively correct. So perhaps we should be concerned about this correlation. But is it objectivism that leads to dogmatism, or rather dogmatism that leads to misguided objectivism? For a person who is dogmatically sure of their view, asserting their view as objectively correct is sometimes convenient way of rationalizing their intolerance of other views. But too often, when we do encounter characters of this sort, the intolerant bigot or religious fanatic for instance, we also find pretty good reasons to think their views are objectively false. Dogmatism is much more highly correlated with being objectively wrong than with thinking there is an objective truth of a matter when there isn’t one.

Here we find further useful analogy with science. Science is concerned with discovering objective matters of fact. But this is not achieved through dogmatic certainty. Progress is science is more often a matter of overcoming dogmatism through open-minded evidence-based inquiry. Our reasons for thinking scientific results reveal objective truths is generally strengthened by testing these views against alternative hypotheses and critical challenges. Dogmatism is an obstacle to getting at the truth in science simply because it suppresses potentially revealing evidence. Open minded evidence-based inquiry is our best means of learning what is objectively true because it aims to consider all possible explanations and evaluating each in light of conflicting views.

For there to be objective morality is for there to be truths about what is good that don’t depend on our beliefs, attitudes or wills. A proper appreciation of this should be humbling since it alerts us to the possibility of getting things wrong. Our confidence in our moral opinions should not be absolutely certain if morality is objective. Dogmatism only serves to shut us off from potentially important evidence and argument. This doesn’t mean we should never be confident, it just means that our degree of confidence should be based on how thoroughly we have considered the evidence, reasons and objections. Even where this justifies high levels of confidence in our moral views, we should never be too confident to consider further evidence and insight from other perspectives. Confidence based on thorough consideration of evidence and reasons is not the same thing as absolute dogmatism. Well-reasoned confidence is rationally incompatible blinding certainty.

3. Won’t Objective Morality lead to Intolerance?

This concern may be based on confusing the existence of objective truths with dogmatic certainty as we’ve just discussed. And as that discussion suggests, acknowledging our fallibility in ascertaining objective truths should lead us towards tolerance of competing views, not away from it. The best way we have of getting at objective truth, in ethics as in science, is to consider the full range of possible views and critically evaluate each in light of the others and the evidence. So getting at true moral beliefs suggest that we should be tolerant of diverse moral beliefs, even given that many of them will get morality wrong.

But then, false moral beliefs are liable to be the springs of bad actions. Must we also tolerate these? That is a separate and more difficult question. Note that there doesn’t seem to be anything morally problematic about intolerance of some bad actions. To the contrary, we may have a moral duty to not tolerant murder, fraud and other bad things. But objective morality may also require us to respect human autonomy in ways that leave us vulnerable to actions motivated by false moral beliefs.

4. What about Cultural Diversity

Just as human beings are fallible as individuals, we should acknowledge that human beings are fallible in groups. Culture’s can get morality wrong. To take a couple of pretty clear examples, American culture got it wrong in practicing slavery until about a century and a half ago. More recently, German culture got morality wrong in the holocaust. We’ve already suggested that cultures that condone honor killings are getting morality wrong. But acknowledging the moral fallibility of cultural traditions doesn’t by itself suggest we should be intolerant of other cultures. For starters, where we find a morally significant difference in the practices accepted by two or more cultures, acknowledging fallibility should alert us to the possibility that it is our own culture that has things wrong.

Many of the things billed as moral matters in cultural or religious traditions are not really moral issues at all. There may be objective moral truths, and yet none that speak to how animals should be butchered, whether women should wear veils, how many spouses a person can have, whether sins need to be confessed in a particular manner and so forth. Many of the things deemed morally obligatory or forbidden in many cultural or religious traditions might turn out to be morally optional according to what is objectively morally correct. Cultural variation along these lines may be benign. Though we might worry further about how transgressors of otherwise morally benign cultural standards are treated.

Next, many variations among cultures may amount to different ways of expressing the same underlying objectively good things. For instance, it may be morally good to express appreciation for hospitality. Slurping one’s noodles is a way of expressing this in Japan, but not so much in most other places.

Finally, cultural identities and the traditions through which these are expressed might in various ways have positive objective moral value in their own right. Cultural traditions and values bind communities of people together and to a common shared past. Most of us find positive value in our varying cultural backgrounds and identities. Objective morality might require tolerance and respect for these, at least when nothing of greater moral importance is at stake. Morality probably doesn’t require tolerance and respect of cultural traditions of marauding and pillaging.

5. Objective Moral Truths would be Absolute

We may be concerned that if there are objective moral truths, these would be absolute in the sense of not allowing for exceptions. Perhaps objective moral truths would be like universal laws of nature in that they hold in all places and at all times. So, if “thou shalt not kill” is an objective moral truth, we might worry that this would rule out killing self-defense.

This concern is hasty in linking the idea objective truth to truth that is absolutely universal and exceptionless. For moral truth to be objective is just for it to hold independent of certain feature about us like our wills, attitudes and beliefs. So here is a logically coherent, if silly view: there is just one objective moral truth and it holds that that Jimmy shall not flush his dead goldfish down the toilet. This view is silly because it fails to explain any of our moral intuitions or evidence. But it does provide a clear example of how there could be moral truths that don’t involve exceptionless general rules.

Next, note that many general rules still allow for exceptions. US Tax laws are general rules that apply to all income earners in the US and they allow deductions for IRA contributions, except if you have earned more than a certain amount. In this case the exception is explicit and written into the rules. But this needn’t be the case. In fact, the most fundamental laws of science are ceteris paribus laws, laws that hold “all things being equal.” So, for instance, Newton’s law of universal gravitation does not accurately describe the falling of a well-made paper airplane. Paper airplanes don’t violate the laws of physics. When we try to understand the objective truths of physics, we do so with the understanding that the forces our fundamental laws describe often operate in interaction with other forces and the results will not always align neatly with the generalizations suggested by individual laws. Similarly, when we identify an exception to a general moral rule like “don’t kill” we expect an explanation of this exception in terms of some factor that is itself morally compelling. Our moral rules typically hold generally, but ceteris paribus. It is a mistake to infer absoluteness from objectivity in ethics, just as it is in science and other realms.

Conclusion

Unless you have had some prior philosophical education, you have probably assumed that morality is either subjective, a matter of society’s say-so, or a matter of God’s say-so. People of religious faith tend to go for Divine command theory and non-believers tend to merely substitute society’s say-so for Gods. The idea that morality is independent of these things and so can be the subject of critical inquiry is rather unfashionable outside of philosophical circles. At least that seems to be the bias in contemporary American culture. This chapter has followed fairly standard practice in introductory ethics texts in alerting readers to the hazards of popular opinions about the nature of morality as grounded in authority or say-so, and in defending the notion that morality is objective against some common misconceptions. This is hardly the end of the meta-ethical story. There remain several views about the specific nature of morality to explore. But the popular favorites, Devine command theory and moral relativism, have been nearly universally rejected by philosophers since Plato for the sorts of reasons we have covered in this chapter. Hopefully you find these reasons compelling. Morality grounded in authority or say-so doesn’t afford much opportunity for critical inquiry. The work of this chapter has been to clear away such intellectual dead ends and prepare the way for inquiry into normative ethics. Critical inquiry into substantive theories of what is right and wrong, good or bad, presupposes and object of inquiry that is independent of God’s say so or our subjective say-so, either individually or collectively. Seeing how such inquiry can proceed may give you further cause for taking the idea of objective morality seriously. The evidence we have to work with starts with our experience as moral beings. While this experience is ours, that doesn’t imply that it is subjective in the sense of simply being up to us to decide. Our moral sense makes more sense, and provides the opportunity for further inquiry, when our moral experience is understood as a guide to things larger than ourselves.