There is dispute among EAs--and the general public more broadly--about whether morality is objective. So I thought I'd kick off a debate about this, and try to draw more people into reading and posting on the forum! Here is my opening volley in the debate, and I encourage others to respond.
Unlike a lot of effective altruists and people in my segment of the internet, I am a moral realist. I think morality is objective. I thought I'd set out to defend this view.
Let’s first define moral realism. It’s the idea that there are some stance independent moral truths. Something is stance independent if it doesn’t depend on what anyone thinks or feels about it. So, for instance, that I have arms is stance independently true—it doesn’t depend on what anyone thinks about it. That ice cream is tasty is stance dependently true; it might be tasty to me but not to you, and a person who thinks it’s not tasty isn’t making an error.
So, in short, moral realism is the idea that there are things that you should or shouldn’t do and that this fact doesn’t depend on what anyone thinks about them. So, for instance, suppose you take a baby and hit it with great force with a hammer. Moral realism says:
- You’re doing something wrong.
- That fact doesn’t depend on anyone’s beliefs about it. You approving of it, or the person appraising the situation approving of it, or society approving of it doesn’t determine its wrongness (of course, it might be that what makes its wrong is its effects on the baby, resulting in the baby not approving of it, but that’s different from someone’s higher-level beliefs about the act. It’s an objective fact that a particular person won a high-school debate round, even though that depended on what the judges thought).
Moral realism says that some moral statements are true and this doesn’t depend on what people think about it. Now, there are only three possible ways any particular moral statement can fail to be stance independently true:
- It’s neither true nor false.
- It’s false.
- It’s true but stance dependently—so it depends on what someone thinks about it.
But lots of moral statements just really don’t seem like any of these. The wrongness of slavery, the holocaust, baby torture, stabbing people in the eye—it seems like all these things really are wrong and this fact doesn’t depend on what people think about it. It seems very weird to think that what makes it wrong to torture people is what someone thinks about it—even weirder that statements like “torture is wrong,” are neither true nor false.
The view that these statements are neither true nor false has unique linguistic problems. Proponents claim that moral sentences are like commands—they’re not even in the business of expressing propositions. If I say “shut the door,” or “go Dodgers,” that isn’t either true nor false. But because of that, it makes no sense to ask “go Dodgers?” or “is it true that shut the door?” Similarly, it makes no sense to say “if shut the door then shut the door now, shut the door, therefore, shut the door now.” But it does make sense to say things like “is abortion wrong?” or “if murder is wrong, then so is abortion.” This shows that moral statements are, at least in many cases, in the business of expressing propositions—asserting things supposed to be true or false.
Now, there are all sorts of tricky ways people modify the view that moral sentences are neither true nor false to get around these counterexamples. I can’t discuss them in detail, but I can only say that they tend to be very gerrymandered and ad hoc, and while perhaps they can affirm the same sentences moral realists say, they don’t agree with the meanings. They’re analogous to religious liberals who say things like “God exists, but by that I mean that there’s love in the world.” Worse, they imply statements like “torture is wrong,” are neither true nor false. But they seem true!
Denying objective morality is counterintuitive in a second, very different way. If there are stance-independent reasons—reasons to care about things that don’t depend on what you actually care about—then moral realism is almost definitely true. Once that anti-realist admits there are reasons to care independent of your desires, it seems those reasons should give rise to moral reasons. If I have a reason to prevent my own suffering, it seems that suffering is bad, which gives me a moral reason to prevent it.
But this means that moral anti-realists must think that you can never have a reason to care about something independent of what you actually do care about. This is crazy as shown by the following cases:
- A person wants to eat a car. They know they’d get no enjoyment from it—the whole experience would be quite painful and unpleasant. On moral anti-realism, they’re not being irrational. They have no reason to take a different action.
- A person desires, at some time, to procrastinate. They know it’s bad for them, but they don’t want to do their tasks. On anti-realism, this is not a rational failing.
- A person wants to torture themselves. They have this desire—despite getting no joy from it—despite knowing the relevant facts. On anti-realism, they’re not being irrational.
- A four-year-old wants a cookie to be shaped like a triangle. They are willing to endure great future agony for this. On anti-realism, they’re not being irrational—so long as they’re informed about the relevant facts.
- A person has a very strong desire to be skinny. This motivates them to starve to death—leaving behind a life of joy and fulfillment. On anti-realism, one has no reason to not to do this. It might be bad, but one can’t claim that they’re acting foolishly.
- A person is depressed and cuts themself. When they do it, they are fully informed about the long-term consequences. On anti-realism, they are not acting irrationally.
This is all completely nuts! We take it as a totally ordinary assumption in normal life that there are some things that aren’t worth pursuing—that one is a fool to pursue. Anti-realism can’t maintain that obvious intuition. We call people mentally ill when they have certain aims, even when informed of the relevant facts, because we recognize it’s a sign of irrationality!
Okay, so far I’ve argued that moral anti-realism implies things that are really counterintuitive. It implies things that seem false when you think about them. But is this a problem? Anti-realists often admit that their position is counterintuitive, but think this isn’t a defect. The facts, after all, do not care about your feelings.
But I think this gets wrong how we come to know things. Consider the belief that, say, the law of non-contradiction is true. How do we know that? Or the belief that if space isn’t curved the shortest distance between two points is a line. Or even the belief that there’s an external world.
The way we know these things is by relying on appearances. We think about the subject and it appears that, say, a thing can’t both be a way and not be that way at the same time in the same sense. Our foundational beliefs are justified on the basis of them seeming right.
Visual experience is a good analogy here. When I see a table, I think there really is a table. Because it appears that there’s a table, I think I’m justified in believing there to be one unless given a strong reason to doubt it. Could I be hallucinating? Sure! But unless given a reason to think that I am, I shouldn’t think so.
But just as there are visual appearances, there are intellectual appearances. Just as it appears to me that there’s a table in front of me, it appears to me that it’s wrong to torture babies. Just as I should think there’s a table absent a good reason to doubt it, I should think it’s wrong to torture babies. In fact, I should be more confident in the wrongness of torturing babies, because that seems less likely to be the result of error. It seems more likely I’m hallucinating a table than that I’m wrong about the wrongness of baby torture.
People often object to relying on intuitions. But I’m curious how they get their foundational beliefs. One’s most basic beliefs always seem justified by the fact that they seem right. Such people should explain how they know that the physical world exists, the laws of non-contradiction and identity are true, the greater is greater than the lesser, something can’t have a color without a shape, and that the cumulative case for either atheism or theism is better than the other without relying at all on how things seem.
Now, people point out that our intuitions conflict and are historically contingent. But intuitionists don’t say that intuitions are infallible or that we should never revise them in light of evidence. We say that intuitions are the starting point on which you build your beliefs, but that upon learning new things, you should still obviously update your beliefs. Showing intuitions go wrong in various cases tells us nothing about their general reliability. It would be like saying you can’t trust that there’s a table in front of you because people sometimes hallucinate.
Furthermore, it’s hard to see how, absent relying on intuition, people know that our intuitions really are ever wrong. For instance, a common class of intuition that we know is wrong is that we have weird views about probability—we often think that the odds of A and B are higher than the odds of A alone. But absent relying on intuition, how do you know that the odds of A and B aren’t higher than the odds of A alone? The critics of intuitions rely on intuitions to discredit them.
Moral realists aren’t special pleading. We believe in moral facts for the same reason that we believe in any other basic kind of fact.
Now, anti-realists have a bunch of arguments and I can’t address them all. But let me just address three of them.
The first common one is the argument from disagreement. People argue that because we disagree about morality, it can’t be objective. But this misunderstands what it means for something to be objective. Something objective is true and its truth doesn’t depend on what you think about it. It won’t necessarily be known by everyone.
There’s an objective fact about the right theory of physics, whether God exists, and even whether morality is objective. But those things generate plenty of disagreement. So disagreement can’t be enough to necessitate subjectivity. Now, there are more complicated ways of making the argument, but I don’t really think any of them stick. Lots of other domains have similar disagreement to moral realism while being squarely objective.
The second common argument against moral realism is the argument from queerness. This argument says that moral facts are super weird. They’re utterly different from anything else. For this reason, you shouldn’t beleive in them as they’re just too foreign and alien.
But the world has lots of weird things. Fields, epistemic facts, planets, energy, mathematical facts, propositions, particles, God, consciousness, and much more. Sure morality is different—it’s about what you should do—but all these things are different from the others. The world is filled with weird stuff, so I don’t know why moral facts’ weirdness would be disqualifying.
Furthermore, it’s unclear why moral realism is supposed to be weird. It doesn’t seem weird to me that some things are bad. I’ve never heard a good explanation of what about moral realism makes it so weird. It just seems to be a brute intuition—one that I don’t share.
The only decent explanation I’ve heard of what’s supposed to be weird about morality is that it’s non-natural. Moral facts aren’t made of atoms—they’re not part of the physical world. But, such objectors claim, all the things that exist are parts of the physical world. Therefore, moral facts would be a new, radically different sort of thing.
But I reject that all the stuff that exists is physical. I think there’s lots of non-physical stuff—modal facts, God, consciousness, souls, mathematical facts, logical facts, epistemic facts, and so on. Some of those are controversial, but others are pretty plausible.
Take modal facts, for instance. Those are facts about what’s possible and necessary. So, for example, the fact that a married bachelor is impossible is a modal fact. That’s not a physical fact—it’s not about the physical world. It would have been true even if there never had been a physical universe, and it was true before the universe. It’s not merely the claim that there are no married bachelors but that there can’t be any—that them existing is impossible. But that fact isn’t about the physical world.
Or take logical facts. Any argument with true premises of the form “if P then Q, P,” will have a true conclusion. That’s not a fact about the physical world. It didn’t start being true at the big bang. It’s a necessary truth, with similar status to the moral facts.
Finally, consider epistemic facts. These are facts about what it’s reasonable to believe—what you should believe. For example “it’s irrational to believe what’s opposed by the evidence,” or “it’s irrational to believe there are square circles just because you find them cool.” That is, once again, not a fact about the physical world. But it’s a true fact. Like moral facts, epistemic facts are about what you should do—in this case, what you should believe, what reason demands you believe. Those who reject moral realism would seem to also have to reject epistemic realism and thus think that a person who claims that they think moral realism is true because they like the idea isn’t being irrational.
The last major objection to moral realism is called the evolutionary debunking argument. This argument says that evolution shaped our moral beliefs. The reason that we believe that torture is wrong is because believing that was evolutionarily beneficial. But crucially, believing that being beneficial doesn’t depend on it being true—it would be just as beneficial if it was false. So if our moral beliefs are shaped by blind evolutionary processes, it would be a miracle if they turn out to be right.
But I think even in cases like this, where someone tells a just-so story about how you might come to mistakenly believe what you do about some subject, you still have to evaluate their plausibility. You could tell a similar debunking story about our belief in the law of non-contradiction. But I think in such cases, we just have to consider the plausibility of the belief and see that, even though they can tell a consistent story of how you come to mistakenly intuit some fact, their account is less plausible.
Like, suppose that I give the theory that everything in the world was created by a brain worm. You point out that that’s crazy—a brain worm being fundamental is very complicated, it can’t make the world. I say that the brain worm is fundamental and misleads you into thinking it’s complicated plus that complexity is a virtue plus that brain worms can’t create the world. I point out that people often are misled by brain worms. It’s true that I can tell an internally consistent story of how you come to be mistaken across the board, but the story is just not at all plausible. Same with the story on which all of our beliefs about morality are wrong—random side effects of blind evolution.
Or suppose that I try to debunk the existence of love. I note that it would be evolutionarily beneficial to think you’re in love because that aids in reproduction. Adding love to your ontology is an extra posit. While I could tell an internally consistent debunking story, one would need to evaluate its plausibility. And such a story wouldn’t be plausible—it would be very unintuitive, just like the debunking story of the anti-realist.
Now, is it true that our evolutionary beliefs are the byproducts of blind chance so that it would be a huge coincidence if they were true? No, I don’t think so. Here’s my account of how we have true moral beliefs: evolution makes us super smart, and then we figure out the moral truths. This is the same way we come to have true beliefs about modal facts, logical facts, mathematical facts, and so on. There’s no special challenge for moral facts (now, I think us having such rational capacities is surprising on atheism, but to account for how we know tons of other things, we should already grant that we have those rational capacities even if we’re atheists).
So if you think you know stuff about math—like that there are infinite prime numbers—then however you explain that will apply also to the moral domain.
Why should we accept this account? Well, mostly for the reason I explain above—that it’s the only way to make sense of our moral knowledge, which we have, as shown by the arguments given above. But furthermore, it’s a better explanation of our moral beliefs.
We believe lots of random things about morality that seem to have no clear evolutionary benefit. We believe that people on the other side of the world matter intrinsically as much as nearer ones (some people don’t but many do), that the better than relation is transitive (if A is better than B and B is better than C then A is better than C), that spatiotemporal location doesn’t affect one’s moral worth, that if A is wrong and B is wrong then doing A then B is wrong, and so on.
Many of these don’t plausibly enhance survival, and are niche and formal. This makes sense if we’re really figuring out the moral facts. In contrast, on anti-realism, you’d expect most of our moral beliefs to be geared towards survival—believing having many kids is obligatory. It would be surprising that many of the strongest intuitions—like the belief in transitivity—are things that are formal, non-emotional, and don’t plausibly directly enhance our survival.
Of course, I’d grant that many of our moral intuitions are affected by evolution. Evolution gives us many false moral inclinations, but those can be overcome by sufficient reflection. An analogy with mathematics is appropriate—we have some unreliable mathematical intuitions because of evolution, but we can still form many true mathematical beliefs by reflecting.
Finally—and I know this won’t move atheists, but just explaining my views—I reject the evolutionary debunking argument because I believe in God. If God exists and wants us to know the truth about morality, it makes sense that we’d have true moral beliefs and set up the world such that the evolutionary process produces us with true moral beliefs.
Moral anti-realism is certainly an internally consistent position. But it’s a very implausible one. It gives up many of the most obvious truth about the world—the stance independent wrongness of torture—on the basis of super lame arguments. Absent some extremely compelling reason to accept it, we should remain convinced that it’s false. Some things really are wrong.
[Vote explanation]: The most important reason for my favoring moral realism is my sense that some goals (e.g. promoting happiness, averting misery) are intrinsically more rationally warranted than others (like promoting misery and averting happiness).
In the same way that some things are true and worth believing, some things are good and worth desiring. We should ultimately find the notion of justified goals to be no more deeply mysterious than that of justified beliefs. To deny the objective reality of either goodness or truth would seem to undermine inquiry, and there's no deeply compelling reason to do so. (For one thing: in order for there to be a suitably objective normative reason, normative realism would have to be true!)
You were negative toward the idea of hypothetical imperatives elsewhere but I don't see how you get around the need for them.
You say epistemic and moral obligations work "in the same way," but they don't. Yes, we have epistemic obligations to believe true things... in order to have accurate beliefs about reality. That's a specific goal. But you can't just assert "some things are good and worth desiring" without specifying... good according to what standard? The existence of epistemic standards doesn't prove there's One True Moral Standard any more than the existence of chess rules prove there's One True Game.
For morality, there are facts about which actions would best satisfy different value systems. I consider those to be a form of objective moral facts. And if you have those value systems, I think it is thus rationally warranted to desire those outcomes and pursue those actions. But I don't know how you would get facts about which value system to have without appealing to a higher-order value system.
Far from undermining inquiry, this view improves it by forcing explicitness about our goals. When you feel "promoting happiness is obviously better than promoting misery," that doesn't strike me as metaphysical truth but expressive assertivism. Real inquiry means examining why we value what we value and how to get it.
I'm far from a professional philosopher and I know you have deeply studied this much more than I have, so I don't mean to accuse you of being naive. Looking forward to learning more.
You raise a fair challenge about epistemic norms! Yes, I do think there are facts about which beliefs are most reasonable given evidence. But I'd argue this actually supports my view rather than undermining it.
The key difference: epistemic norms have a built-in goal - accurate representation of reality. When we ask "should I expect emeralds to be green or grue?" we're implicitly asking "in order to have beliefs that accurately track reality, what should I expect?" The standard is baked into the enterprise of belief formation itself.
But moral norms lack this inherent goal. When you say some goals are "intrinsically more rationally warranted," I'd ask: warranted for what purpose? The hypothetical imperative lurks even in your formulation. Yes, promoting happiness over misery feels obviously correct to us - but that's because we're humans with particular values, not because we've discovered some goal-independent truth.
I'm not embracing radical skepticism or saying moral questions are nonsense. I'm making a more modest claim: moral questions make perfect sense once we specify the evaluative standard. "Is X wrong according to utilitarianism?" has a determinate, objective, mind-indpenden... (read more)
This is mostly a repost from Bentham's blog. I wrote an extensive rebuttal to that post here:
https://www.lanceindependent.com/p/moral-realist-quackery-another-response
Bentham also wrote an earlier, extensive post about moral realism. I offered a comprehensive critique of that here:
https://www.lanceindependent.com/p/benthams-blunder-full-post
I do not find Bentham's case for realism even a little persuasive. I think he relies extensively on questionable methods and presuppositions and does little to advance any compelling argument for moral realism.
I've become increasingly confident that there are no good arguments for moral realism, that it is deliberatively and explanatorily redundant, that we can account for all observations without positing moral facts, that naturalist accounts of moral realism are trivial and fail to achieve the aspirations of any interesting and robust account of anything and largely "succeed" by terminological gerrymandering, and that non-naturalism relies almost entirely on questionable appeals to "intuitions."
Furthermore, non-naturalist realism routinely appeals to notions such as external reasons and irreducible normativity that m... (read more)
The tone of the beginning of this article—putting "quackery" in the title, the insulting opening line "Bentham's Newsletter is back at it with bad arguments for moral realism"—makes me think it's not going to give a fair assessment of the arguments. I didn't read it for that reason. If you want to persuade people like me, you should skip the insults.
I'm continually unsure how best to label or characterize my beliefs. I recently switched from calling myself a moral realist (usually with some "but its complicated" pasted on) to an "axiological realist."
I think some states of the world are objectively better than others, pleasure is inherently good and suffering is inherently bad, and that we can say things like "objectively it would be better to promote happiness over suffering"
But I'm not sure I see the basis for making some additional leap to genuine normativity; I don't think things like objective ordering imply some additional property which is strongly associated with phrases like "one must" or "one should".
Of course the label doesn't matter a ton, but I'm curious both what people think of as the appropriate label for such a set of beliefs and what people think of it on the merits.
(For those interested, I recorded a podcast on this with @sarahhw and @AbsurdlyMax a while back)
I'm not an axiological realist, but it seems really helpful to have a term for that position, upvoted.
Broadly, and off-topic-ally, I'm confused why moral philosophers don't always distinguish between axiology (valuations of states of the world) and morality (how one ought to behave). People seem to frequently talk past each for lack of this distinction. For example, they object to valuing a really large number of moral patients (an axiological claim) on the grounds that doing so would be too demanding (a moral claim). I first learned these terms from https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/ which I recommend.
Assuming we're not radically mistaken about our own subjective experience, it really seems like pleasure is good for the being experiencing it (aside from any function or causal effects it may have).
In fact, pleasure without goodness in some sense seems like an incoherent concept. If a person was to insist that they felt pleasure but in no sense was this a good thing, I would say that they are mistaken about something, whether it be the nature of their own experience or the usual meaning of words.
Some people, I think, concede the above but want to object that lower-case goodness in the sense described is distinct from some capital-G objective Goodness out there in the world.
But sentient beings are a perfectly valid element of the world/universe, and so goodness for a given being simply implies goodness at large (all else equal of course). There's no spooky metaphysical sense in which it's written into the stars; it is simply directly implied by the facts about what some things are like to some sentient beings.
I'd add that the above logic holds fine, and with even more rhetorical and ethical force, in the case of suffering.
Now if you accept the above, here's a simple thought experiment: consider two states of the world, identical in every way except in world A you're experiencing a terrible stomach ache and in world B you're not.
The previous argument implies that there is simply more badness in world A, full stop.
Much more to be said ofc but I'll leave it there :)
Something I wish more internet anti-realists were aware of is that most anti-realist metaethicists these days (like Derek!) endorse a form of expressivism or "quasi-realism" on which they can sincerely affirm claims like:
"It's wrong to hit a baby with a hammer no matter what anyone thinks about it"
because (on their view) what this claim expresses is not a belief (that is in any way beholden to what does or doesn't exist in the world) but rather a non-cognitive attitude of opposing hitting babies with hammers no matter what anyone thinks about it.
The tricky thing about this view is that we're naturally inclined to read the "no matter what anyone thinks about it" phrase as external to the moral judgment, asserting its metaethical objectivity, whereas they want to reinterpret it as internal to the judgment, and hence simply part and parcel of the attitude that they are happy to express without any metaphysical commitments whatsoever.
One reason this is worth clarifying, especially in this Forum, is that I think the metaethical question matters much less, practically speaking, than the first order question of whether you're willing to engage in normative moral discourse. Quasi-realists ... (read more)
I voted 65% but I think anti-realism is obviously true or we're using words differently.
To see whether we might be using words differently, see this post and this one.
To see why I still voted 65% on "objective" and not 0%, see this post. (Though, on the most strict meanings of "objective," I would put 0%.)
If we agree on what moral realism means, here's the introduction to the rest of my sequence on why moral realism is almost certainly false.
I consider myself a pretty strong anti-realist, but I find myself accepting a lot of the things you take to be problems for anti-realism. For instance:
I think that these things really are wrong and don't depend on what people think about it. But I also think that that statement is part of a language game dictated by complex norms and expectations. The significance of thought experiments. The need to avoid inconsistency. The acceptance of implications. The reliance on gut evaluations. Endorsement of standardly accepted implications. Etc. I live my life according to those norms and expectations, and they lead me to condemn slavery and think quite poorly of slavers and say things like 'slavery was a terrible stain on our nation'. I don't feel inclined to let people off the hook by virtue of having different desires. I'm quite happy with a lot of thought and talk that looks pretty objective.
I'm an anti-realist because I have n... (read more)
I think of moral naturalism as a position where moral language is supposed to represent things, and it represents certain natural things. The view I favor is a lot closer to inferentialism: the meaning of moral language is constituted by the way it is used, not what it is about. (But I also don't think inferentialism is quite right, since I'm not into realism about meaning either.)
Another angle on the mystery: it is possible that there are epistemic norms, moral norms, prudential norms, and that's it. But if you're a realist, it seems like it should also be possible that there are hundreds of other kinds of norms that we're completely unaware of, such that we act in all sorts of wrong ways all the time. Maybe there are special norms governing how you should brush your teeth (that have nothing to do with hygiene or our interests), or how to daydream. Maybe these norms hold more weight than moral norms, in something like the way moral norms may hold more weight than prudential norms. If you're a non-naturalist, then apart from trust in a loving God, I'm not sure how you address this possibility. But it also seems absurd that I should have to worry about such things.
Evolutionary debunking arguments - we can explain the vast majority of moral beliefs without positing the existence of extra substances -- therefore, we shouldn't posit them!
We can also explain this epistemic normative belief of yours without positing that it's true, therefore...?
I don't think there are any normative facts, so you can finish that sentence, if you'd like. In other words, I don't think there's no objective feature in the world that tells you that you need to have x beliefs instead of y beliefs. If one did actually believe this, I'm curious about how this would play out (i.e. should someone do a bunch of very simple math equations all the time because they could gain many true beliefs very quickly? Seems weird).
On just having true beliefs, I would say that when you give some ontology of how the world works, you'd expect evolution to give us truth-tracking beliefs and or processes in many instances because it is actually useful for survival/reproduction (though it would also give us wrong beliefs, but we do see this -- i.e. we believe in concepts that don't REALLY carve reality like chairs because they're useful).
The best defence of this I have seen is Michael Huemer's Ethical Intuitionism.
What would this even mean? If I assert that X is wrong, and someone else asserts that it's fine, how do we resolve this? We can appeal to common values that derive this conclusion, but that's pretty arbitrary and largely just feels like my opinion. Claiming that morality is objective just feels groundless.
It's epistemically inaccessible, explanatorily redundant, unnecessary for any pragmatic aim, just a relic of the way our language and cooperative schemes work. I'm not sure the idea can even really be made clear. Empirically, convergence through cooperative, argumentative means looks incredibly unlikely in any normal future. I voted for the strongest position because relative to my peers I have the most relativistic view I know and because of my high (>.99) credence in antirealism. But obviously morality is sort of kind of objective in certain contexts and among certain groups of interlocutors, given socially ingrained shared values.
I've been a moral realist for a very long time and generally agree with this post.
I will caveat though that there is a difference between moral realism (there are moral truths), and motivational internalism (people will always act according to those truths when they know them). I think the latter is much less clearly true, and one of the primary confusions that occur when people argue about moral realism and AI safety.
I also think that moral truths are knowledge, and we can never know things with 100% certainty. This means that even if there are moral truths in the world (out there), it is very possible to still be wrong about what they are, and even a superintelligence may not figure them out necessarily. Like most things, we can develop models, but they will generally not be complete.
[resolved]
Meta: I see that this poll has closed after one day. I think it would make sense for polls like this to stay open for seven days, by default, rather than just one?[1] I imagine this poll would have received another ~hundred votes, and generated further good discussion, had it stayed open for longer (especially since it was highlighted in the Forum Digest just two hours prior).
@Sarah Cheng
- ^
... (read more)I’m unsure if OP meant for this poll to close so soon. Last month, when I ran some polls, I found that a bunch of them ended up closing after the
70%➔ 90% agree90% agree
The consciousness argument:
The personal i... (read more)
Strong disagree. I am not closed to being persuaded on this, though, but I haven't found your arguments convincing yet.
Even before going into details, though, I'd like to start with the end. I see that you find it intuitively very hard to reject the stance-independent wrongness of torture. If it boils down to intuitions, I find it as hard to accept that morality could be anything other than a human invention that is useful for some instrumental needs, and nothing more.
I am still starting to explore the philosophical grounds for my intuitions, but at the mo... (read more)
I really appreciated this post. Like many here, I find it hard to make sense of our strongest moral convictions, especially about things like torture or slavery, without concluding that some moral facts are objective. As C.S. Lewis put it, we don’t call a line crooked unless we have some idea of a straight one.
I understand the concern that moral facts might seem metaphysically strange, but I don't think they are any stranger than logical or modal truths. Denying them also seems to undermine the kind of moral discourse we often want to ... (read more)
(Vote Explanation) Morality is objective in the sense that, under strong conditions of ideal deliberation (where everyone affected is exposed to all relevant non-moral facts and can freely exchange reasons and arguments) we would often converge on the same basic moral conclusions. This kind of agreement under ideal conditions gives morality its objectivity, without needing to appeal to abstract and mind-independent moral facts. This constructivist position avoids the metaphysical and epistemological problems of robust moral realism, wh... (read more)
The arguments presented in this essay are neither novel nor convincing and rely on intuitions the author holds that I do not and that the author does not justify
edit: I did not expect this aspect of my vote to become a comment
This is a deeply unconvincing post.
Indeed.
... (read more)The central focus on "torturing babies" being objectively wrong (and the not particularly subtle hidden basis that this is all due to the existence of God) is particularly odd as a choice in this forum, which is disproportionately Jewish, where by halakhic law people are required by God to circumcise male babies (and is also just common among Americans in general).
Morality is Objective
Two claims, one: moral facts do not exist, two: if they did, you could ignore them without making truth broadly your enemy.
One:
Some seemings can be cross verified extensively, such that you end up either believing in those seemings or ending up incapable of functioning in the world. For instance, if it seems like a table exists to my visual perception, this is extremely cross verifiable. If I believe murder is wrong, this is not cross verifiable at all.
If I say "there is not a table here", then to maintain this position I have to hold ... (read more)
I don't see how something like morality could be objective. I can't imagine what it would look like for someone to convince someone else that an action was wrong, for a reason that isn't stance-dependent to them (i.e. a reason they don't already find at least partially compelling).
When I was reading much more about this, this made me sympathetic to something like Sharon Street's humean constructivism. In short (and from memory) it's the view that we can't avoid feeling reasons for actions (if you see a truck driving towards... (read more)
80%➔ 50% agreePeople keep forgetting that meta-ethics was solved back in 2013.
fwiw, I think the view you discuss there is really just a terminological variant on nihilism:
Distinguish how we determine something from what we are determining.
There's a trivial sense in which all thought is "subjective". Even science ultimately comes down to personal perspectives on what you perceive as the result of an experiment, and how you think the data should be interpreted (as supporting some or another more general theory). But it would be odd to conclude from this that our scientific verdicts are just claims about how the world appears to us, or what's reasonable to conclude relative to certain stipulated ancillary assumptions. Commonsense scientific realists instead take our best judgments to reflect fallible verdicts about a mind-independent truth of the matter. The same goes for commonsense moral realists.
100%➔ 60% disagreeBefore reading the article: The argument I often hear in support of moral realism appeals to moral experience, but moral experience seems totally consistent with moral anti-realism being true. I don't know what evidence for moral realism would look like even if it were to exist, but that would just mean that there's no reason to prefer either view (anti-realism vs. realism).
After reading: This Cuneo-style argument that Matthew used in this writing is interesting. I forgot about the bad company argument that I learned about several years ago. Don't I... (read more)
I think "morality" as we discuss it and as I use it has many realish properties - I think things would be good or bad whether or not moral agents had ever come to exist (so long as moral patients did), I think we can be uncertain about which theory of ethics is "right" to begin with, and I don't think the debate to resolve this uncertainty is ultimately semantic. I think ethics has most of the stuff real things have except for the "being real" part.
I'm not super confident on this, but I note that most sorts of explanations of what ethics is either fa... (read more)
20%➔ 10% agreeI'm pretty confused about this, but currently I look at it something like this:
Moral sentences state beliefs whose validity doesn't depend on whether or not anyone approves of them. These beliefs are about facts in the world, the same world that physics describes, just different aspects of it.
Epistemically, I am a coherentist: a belief is more justified the better it fits within the most explanatorily coherent system of beliefs. I see reflective equilibrium as a useful method for approaching that coherence.
In physics,... (read more)
I was unable to come up with a non-assertive, non-arbitrary-feeling grounding for moral realism when I tried very hard to do this in 2021-22.
My vote isn't further towards anti-realism, because of:
I do not like the expression ‘Morality is objective’, because it comprises both claims I'm very confident are not objective (“You ought not to kill”) and claims I'm very confident are objective (“Suffering is bad”). More generally, I am a moral anti-realist by default, but am forced to recognize that some moral claims are real—specifically, certain axiological claims—because their objective reality is revealed to me via introspection when I have the corresponding phenomenal experiences (such as the experience of being in agony).
I see morality as objective because positive conscious experiences are objectively good, and negative conscious experiences are objectively bad. Then there is subjectivity in figuring out what increases expected total hedonistic welfare.
I am just picking one of these examples, but an anti-realist could call this a rational failing. People can have many different desires, and thus many different reasons for action, e.g. you could have a desire - and thus a reason - to procrastinate, while at the same time, have a stronger desire - and thus a stronger reason - to work. An anti-realist could say that one is irrational for not do... (read more)
You're selling me a horse and you tell me "this horse is fast". I look at the horse and say "yeah, it looks like it would be a pretty fast runner compared to other horses". To which you reply "no, no, it's not about what you think makes it fast. This horse is fast. Fact. It would be fast even if it were the only horse ever. Even if nobody thought it was fast... it would be."
And you go on to tell me that because the horse looks fast, I should believe it is "objectively" fast.
Now I do presume that the horse is fast, in that it appe... (read more)
(Deleted my lazy comment to give more colour)
Neither agree nor disagree - I think the question is malformed, and both 'sides' have extremely undesirable properties. Moral realism's failings are well documented in the discussion here, and well parodied as being 'spooky' or just wishful thinking. But moral antirealism is ultimately a doctrine of conflict - if reason has no place in motivational discussion, then all that's left for me to get my way from you is threats, emotional manipulation, misinformation and, if need be, actual violence. Any antirealist wh... (read more)
A couple of side points:
1. Bentham's Bulldog's post ascribes some consequences to moral anti-realism, but does not give an argument to show why they follow, and there appears to be no such implication. There are plenty of versions of anti-realism. Also, there is a conflation of moral anti-realism and rationality anti-realism, which are not the same. That said, I agree that moral realism is true - at least, if properly defined; the definition in the OP is open to different interpretation about what counts as "thinks about it".
2. Moral realism says nothing a... (read more)
100%➔ 80% agreeUm, see above :)
I haven't read much about moral objectivity versus non-objectivity because it seems like forming an opinion on this debate wouldn't change how I actually behave that much.
That said my not-thought-through intuitions are very non-realist.
(edit: spelling/clarity)
You've written elsewhere that you think even ostensibly good or bad actions only have like a ~50.01% chance of actually having good or bad outcomes in the long run due to the butterfly effect. So let's say that a particular instance of torturing someone, due to a long, unexpected chain of cause and effect, ultimately leads to a flourishing future for everyone. So in your view, was this action then objectively morally right? Or do you say no, since it was bad in expectation, it was still objectively morally wrong despite its ultimate consequences?
If you go ... (read more)
I find it intuitive that there could be a small set of objective moral facts but much smaller than is generally believed for moral realist positions + i do not think this can be justified rationally to a large degree. I think there can be contextual moral facts (as in "rational agents in a society would agree to cooperate on problem X" or "rational agents would agree to behave in a certain way on a moral problem, given following constraints"), but I do not think these are enough to justify an objective moral realism position.
I think the set of sensible moral views and positions is large, and thus think that morality is mostly not objective.
I just wanted to comment to say I'm very confused about this question/framing - I tried to figure out why and I think it's something to do with uncertainty about what "objective" even means.
Wondering if anyone has a good exploration of what it means for a thing to be objective?
(My intuition is that I have a "sense of the objective" and that that is pointing at "things I anticipate other people will agreeing with", or "things I'd feel annoyed/crazy if people contradicted", - this would point to there being at thing that is objective morality, but is argued from a subjective frame so I'm not sure that's right - so is there an objective definition of objectivity?)
I believe that the purpose of morality is to promote everyone's well-being. We can use the scientific method to determine how each action, rule, trait, and motive affects overall well-being. Science is objective. Therefore, it is possible to make objective statements about the morality of actions, motives, and traits.
Subjective in the sense that there is no inherently 'goodness' quality to things, but objective in the only useful sense that humanity and maybe sentient life can have better or worse experiences according to a fundamental baseline.
Grounded in valence (pain/pleasure), which seem pretty real to me.
I don't this is an important or interesting question, at least not over the type of disagreement we are seeing here. The scope of the question (and of possible views) is larger than BB seems to acknowledge. At the very least, it is obvious to me that there is a type of realism/objectivity that is
1. Endorsed by at least some realists, especially with certain religious views.
2. Ontologically much more significant then BB is willing to defend.
Why ignore this?
30%➔ 20% disagreeI think that regardless of whether we humans are capable of accurately assessing whether something is a moral truth or not, there are some moral truths. I also buy that intuitions are a reasonable starting place for beliefs, but that's the one I'm less confident in.
I'm a Christian so well, bit of a slam dunk in the same direction OP...
I somewhat struggle to understand how objective morality works if you are not a theist on religious in some sense, but I'm not a moral philosopher so I'll be missing a lot.
Even though I think morality is objective, most likely I'm as long long way from that true North Star. I shudder to think what percentage I'm right with my own current ideas about morally, especially when I look back and see how much my ideas of morality have changed during my life.
Suffering never fails to be undesirable, even if only individual subjects experience it as such. The redness of red is real, even if not everyone perceives red at the same time.
There's no evidence of this, and the burden of proof is on people who think it's true. I've never even heard a coherent argument in favor of this proposition without assuming god exists.
While I don't necessarily think these are all the best arguments out there for moral realism - and I would even reject a few points that Bentham makes, since I'm a naturalist myself - I still think it's a great introduction and I find many of the antirealist responses to these sorts of concerns completely unconvincing.
Roughly speaking, I find emotivism to be the most convincing metaethical theory
The sense of moral objectivity that I'm currently sympathetic to is some kind of constructivist account like the one introduced by John Rawls.
I think morality needs to be objective in some sense so that we can use it to resolve conflicts between different sets of values that different people hold. We need to construct moral principles so that we can resolve disputes between different subjectively held sets of values and live together in ways that are as mutually advantageous as possible. I would define "advantageous" in terms of values... (read more)
If morality is subjective, there is nothing that promotes love over hate, peace over war, etc. apart from what we think. And so someone who thinks war is moral IS CORRECT under subjective morality, while another person who things the same war is immoral IS ALSO CORRECT.
I think the person wanting to eat a car is irrational because they will not be promoting their wellbeing by doing so and their we... (read more)
I lean in favor of (some kind of) normative realism. My grounds for this are the relatively-basic ones: it certainly seems, for example, that some choices are plain irrational or that some states-of-affairs are bad in a stance-independent way. And of course, robust realists will always point to the partners-in-crime of moral facts, in other kinds of a priori domains.
My main source of uncertainty — indeed, the reason I flip back and forth between realism and anti-realism — is (various presentations of) the epistemological objection to moral realism. I... (read more)
"So, for instance, suppose you take a baby and hit it with great force with a hammer. Moral realism says: 1. You’re doing something wrong."
Moral realism doesn't say that hitting a baby with a hammer is wrong. Moral realism entails that there is some fact about the morality of hitting a baby with a hammer. Probably, that moral fact is that it is wrong to do this, but moral realism is not a theory about specific moral facts. It's a theory that moral facts are possible.
This is a pedantic point, but the more commitments you unnecessarily build into moral... (read more)
I lean towards moral realism being true, though I prefer ontologically light versions of it.
Life has meaning only because we, as extremely biased living creatures, decide to give it meaning.
I have moderate credence in phenomenal conservatism and think that it probably implies some form of realism.
Thanks for opening this important debate! I'd like to offer a different perspective that might bridge some gaps between realism and anti-realism.
I tend to view morality as something that evolved because it has objectively useful functions for social systems—primarily maintaining group cohesion, trust, and long-term stability. In this view, moral judgments aren't just arbitrary or subjective preferences, but neither are they metaphysical truths that exist independently of human experience. Rather, they're deeply tied to the objective requirements for sustai... (read more)
I think morality is objective in the sense that there as some stable state of the universe with the maximum pleasure over time, which is the morally ideal state, but I don't think we'll ever know exactly how close we are to that ideal state. But it is still an objective fact about the territory, we just don't have an accurate map of it
Some moral judgements (e.g., pain is bad) certainly strike me as prima facie objectively true. Moreover, I find most arguments against the objectivity of morality very weak (e.g., argument from disagreement). However, I do think that epistemic worries of various kinds (e.g., epistemic access and evolutionary debunking) count against the objectivity of morality. Overall, I would assign somewhat less than 50% probability to the proposition that morality is objective, but the view should nonetheless be taken very seriously.
yes
I lean towards moral realism, but I think the reliance on intuition in a lot of arguments for moral realism is a deep methodological misstep. If a fact seems true to someone and false to someone else, the truth or falsity of that fact is not going to be enough, standing alone, to explain its intuitiveness.
If I say “X seems true, and the truth of X is a salient explanation for why it seems that way,” this isn’t actually a good or salient explanation until we can also offer some account of why it seems false to others. Perhaps their intuitive faculties... (read more)
Infinite
Moral truths don't semantically work the same way as prototypical truths, and they are not objective the same way, but they are objective in a way that is just as important. I think I will translate an essay I have explaining this and publish it here on the forums.
Universal subjectivism (which gets most of what you want out of realism) or non-naturalism are the best options in metaethics
80%➔ 10% disagreeAs an atheist-leaning agnostic, I find Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape to be the closest approximation of objective morality I have encountered, and it best captures the form of subjective morality I follow. However, I still view morality as a human construct: the flourishing of life is not objectively good, and the suffering of life is not objectively bad.
There are many "moralities". Also, every moral framing is something we have to choose for ourselves and "breathe life into", as it were. Morality is therefore, by definition, subjective.
- I don't think the universe itself cares about morality and what we do -- so, in this sense, no, probably not objective
- But I also despise the notion that anyone can just come up with a value system where forced female genital mutilation (don't ask) is ok. Just no. Fuck that system. I think it's a reasonable approximation that there is some value system that is the ideal "true" one for all humanity and we have been moving closer to it through history. In this sense, I think there is (to a good approximation) an intersubjective system / a
... (read more)The universe just is. Putting right and wrong on various states is fundamentally subjective. I think that given certain goals or conditions, you could get to objective morality, but those conditions are themselves subjective
Human nature is objective, so human morality must be so too
Morality is partly objective. It is hardwired into our brains in terms of aversion to death and the suffering of others, all else being equal. Anyone will slow down if a dog crosses the road, unless it is an emergency.
I'm a multi-level utilitarian with a classical notion of wellbeing. That of a time integral of the value-component of momentary consciousness. "Objectivity" I here interpret as "there being an absolute truth about it", and for this absolute truth I rely on my strong belief that the concept of omniscience is ultimately coherent, although unimplementable.
I used to think morality is objective. However, I think people's perspective of what exactly is morale and isn't morale (the range or spectrum) is much more subjective. How much weight to give to each element? So it depends if we're talking about the concept or theme of morality as a "whole" or a scale of morality. Based on the scale weight, I voted with somewhat disagreeing.
My impression (admittedly based on limited exposure and minimal formal study of Philosophy) is that moral anti-realists make the mistake of selectively applying scepticism a la Agrippa’s trilemma to moral claims that they don’t apply to non-moral claims.
A super brief summary of my reasoning is as follows:
-The only empirical information we have is qualia
-Qualia is often valenced as ‘good’ experience and ‘bad’ experience
-Therefore ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ exist and moral realism is true to the extent that we trust any form of empir... (read more)
Executive summary: This exploratory argument defends moral realism—the view that some moral truths are objective and stance-independent—by asserting that denying such truths leads to implausible and counterintuitive implications, and that our intuitive moral judgments are as epistemically justified as basic logical or perceptual beliefs.
Key points:
- Definition and Defense of Moral Realism: The author defines moral realism as the belief in stance-independent moral truths and argues that some moral facts (e.g., the wrongness of torture) are too intuitively com
... (read more)When you say “objective” here, do you mean epistemic or ontological objectivity? Because it seems like you mean both at different parts of the post. But that’s not fair. You need to stick to one usage. It would be like telling someone to meet you at the bank, and when they ask “do you mean the money place or the edge of the river?”, and you say “both”.
40%➔ 0% agreeLike this slider- objectivity is a spectrum. The most subjective thing possible is a pure taste satement 'I like ice-cream'. A pure objective statement is '1+1=2'.
In the world of inter-subjectivity there are statements like 'Democracy is superiour to dictatorship'. This has elements of both objectivity and subjectivity.
I think morality is an intersubjective agreement (hence the influence of culture) but supported by biological roots (we possess a biological distaste for suffering and injustice, and a biological capacity for... (read more)
is ought problem