This is the sixth post in my moral anti-realism sequence; I wrote it as a standalone piece.
This post explains why I think confident belief in moral realism and moral uncertainty don’t go together. Since moral uncertainty often comes up in a moral realist context, I think this causes some problems for the concept.
In this sequence’s final post, titled The “Moral Uncertainty” Rabbit Hole, Fully Excavated, I will present three related but more cleanly defined concepts with which to potentially replace “moral uncertainty:”
- Deferring to moral reflection (and uncertainty over one’s “idealized values”)
- Having under-defined values (deliberately or by accident)
- Metaethical uncertainty (and wagering on moral realism)
My goal is for these concepts (alongside further distinctions and caveats) to capture as much of the original meaning of “moral uncertainty” as we can salvage.
What is moral uncertainty?
In a moral realist context, “moral uncertainty” means uncertainty about what we all-things-considered morally ought to do (MacAskill, Bykvist and Ord, 2020).
Moral anti-realists may use the same phrase, but to my knowledge, there’s been little discussion on how to conceptualize moral uncertainty under anti-realism. That will be the subject of my sequence’s final post, where I’ll also discuss how to allow for metaethical uncertainty (in case moral realism is correct after all).
Why I consider the concept unsatisfying
Moral realism implies the existence of a speaker-independent moral reality. Being morally uncertain means having a vague or unclear understanding of that reality. So there’s a hidden tension: Without clearly apprehending the alleged moral reality, how can we be confident it exists?
Moral realists may give various replies to this challenge. However, as I will argue in the following section, I think the only path to moral realism worthy of the name involves gaining clarity on the true object-level morality.
Note that philosophers use “moral realism” to mean different things. In this sequence’s first post (What Is Moral Realism?), I explained how I’m reserving the term for views that have action-relevant implications for effective altruists.
Also, note that my claim isn’t that moral uncertainty is altogether unworkable. Instead, I argue that moral uncertainty almost by necessity implies either metaethical uncertainty, (uncertainty between moral realism and moral anti-realism) or confident anti-realism.
Three inadequate replies
Below, I’ll describe three responses people might give in reply to my challenge and discuss why I find them inadequate.
(1) We know at least some moral facts, but certain aspects of morality could be forever unknowable
One way to disagree with me and claim that confident belief in moral realism and moral uncertainty do go together relies on the concept “irreducible normativity.” (See this post for a detailed discussion of the concept.) Proponents of irreducible normativity face a challenge. They have to explain how their concepts even operate, how normative concepts can be “irreducible” yet still meaningful. They must also explain how irreducible normative statements can successfully refer to a “normative reality.” I don’t think that a successful explanation exists, but I’ll now describe how someone could attempt to provide one and how it would relate to moral uncertainty.
A proponent of irreducible normativity might argue that we can ground moral realism in the introspective analysis of moral concepts, specifically of morally self-evident statements like “Torturing innocent children is wrong.” Their claim, then, is twofold:
(1) Moral statements are statements about a speaker-independent normative reality.
(2) Some such statements are self-evident (and therefore true).
Thereby, so goes the argument, we now have an existence proof for at least some moral facts. (They would further seek to establish that those are irreducibly normative moral facts.) From there, we are free to remain uncertain about other moral facts. We don't even need a recipe for discovering other moral facts because, for all we know, aspects of the true moral reality may – conceivably? – remain forever inaccessible to us.
No matter how I interpret it, I find the position sketched above, the idea that there are well-defined moral facts that could remain forever inaccessible to us, unintelligible. Even if there were an interpretation to make it intelligible, the stance would still be pointless. By “pointless,” I mean that, ex hypothesi, there would be absolutely no way to learn anything about specific aspects of the “moral reality” (beyond the self-evident statements), never, not even in theory. Therefore, those parts of the moral reality would be irrelevant for all practical purposes.
Still, I think the notion of “forever inaccessible moral facts” is incomprehensible, not just pointless. Perhaps(?) we can meaningfully talk about “unreachable facts of unknown nature,” but it seems strange to speak of unreachable facts of some known nature (such as “moral” nature). By claiming that a fact is of some known nature, aren’t we (implicitly) saying that we know of a way to tell why that fact belongs to the category? If so, this means that the fact is knowable, at least in theory, since it belongs to a category of facts whose truth-making properties we understand. If some fact were truly “forever unknowable,” it seems like it would have to be a fact of a nature we don’t understand. Whatever those forever unknowable facts may be, they couldn’t have anything to do with concepts we already understand, such as our “moral concepts” of the form (e.g.,) “Torturing innocent children is wrong.”
To conclude, “irreducible normativity” seems like a confused concept. At the very least, it would be pointless if there was a moral reality that we could never access. For these reasons, irreducible normativity cannot stand up to the challenge at the outset of this post.
(2) Uncertainty between a minimalist version of moral realism and more far-reaching versions
I will now discuss another attempt at replying to my challenge. This attempt is compatible with moral naturalism, so it doesn’t rely on irreducible normativity. It goes as follows:
Someone might say that moral realism is true because we can see that some moral truths are self-evident. (So far, this argument resembles the one in the section above). Further, they may say we can be morally uncertain because of the possibility of other moral truths, the chance that there are moral truths in addition to the ones we’ve already recognized. Either way, the person might say, moral realism is true – what we’re uncertain about is simply the extent of the moral reality. In one scenario, that moral reality consists of only the moral statements we already recognize (a “minimalist” moral reality). In the other scenario, it also contains further-reaching moral truths.
I will call the above an argument for “minimalist moral realism.” My reply is that, sure, if we want to use terminology this way, we can say, “minimalist moral realism is true.” However, I wouldn’t consider “minimalist moral realism is true” exciting news for effective altruists. After all, it just implies that aspects of the moral reality are clear/unambiguous, so that some moral statements are (near-) universally compelling and agreed-upon. That’s a sound basis for rejecting sentiments of nihilism or moral relativism – but as I’ve argued in previous posts, moral anti-realism differs from those two views! Minimalist moral realism doesn’t say anything about how to address open normative-ethical questions within effective altruism (e.g., it doesn’t promise answers to questions of population ethics or theories of value).
That said, arguably “minimalist moral realism” has been the life-changing insight that got many people into effective altruism in the first place.
In any case, when I look at how effective altruists speak of moral realism’s practical implications, “minimalist moral realism” seems too weak to qualify. Therefore, in my preferred terminology, “minimalist moral realism” is not moral realism.
To summarize, the issue with self-evident moral statements like “Torturing innocent children is wrong” is that they don’t provide any evidence for a moral reality that covers disagreements in population ethics or accounts of well-being. To be confident moral realists, we’d need other ways of attaining moral knowledge and ascertaining the parts of the moral reality beyond self-evident statements. In other words, we can’t be confident moral realists about a far-reaching, non-trivial, not-immediately-self-evident moral reality unless we already have a clear sense of what it looks like.
(3) We may be seeing enough of a blurry moral reality (analogies to chemistry and mathematics)
Lastly, someone might argue that we don’t have to see the moral reality clearly to ascertain that it’s there. Instead, maybe we only have to discern enough of its blurred contours.
Imagine you’re seeing a big grey animal behind the bushes, but you’re uncertain whether it’s an elephant, a hippo, or a rhino. Either way, you are a “realist” about the big grey animal: there is an animal out there and a fact of the matter of its species membership.
Analogously, in the early days of research into mathematics or chemistry, the early investigators in these fields must have “seen” enough to understand that there’s something there, that there’s structure for them to excavate. Accordingly, one could argue that people’s earliest concepts for mathematics or chemistry (or “alchemy,” as people called it) were already pointing at the relevant “realities.”
Someone might now argue that the above domains are analogous to moral realism. Maybe moral concepts are pointing at a well-defined reality whose governing principles we don’t yet (fully) understand, but which could become clear to us eventually.
Ultimately, these analogies fail. Depending on what we mean by “early days,” the pre-scientific concept of ”alchemy” was very much not the same as Lavoisier’s scientific concept of chemistry. Similarly, cavepeople who counted wooly mammoths on the grassland probably didn’t understand the idea of a formal system. Without that notion, one can’t understand why mathematics produces a rich “reality” the way it does. Even if some caveperson formed the thought “counting and things related to it,” that thought would have remained under-defined – it wouldn’t have been identical to our modern concept of mathematics. For a caveperson thinking “counting and things related to it,” it seems natural to include negative numbers. But what about fractions, irrational numbers, imaginary numbers? What about geometry? Set theory? These concepts have some similarities to “counting,” but how much similarity is enough to qualify? Of course, the point here is that, since the caveperson didn’t have any further specifying thoughts, there isn’t a correct answer to our question about reference. (Besides, even modern mathematics has branches grounded in different axiomatizations, so, in the absence of further clarifications, “mathematics” isn't wholly specified, either.)
What’s unique about mathematics and chemistry is precisely what’s absent in the domain of morality. Mathematics and chemistry have commonly accepted, rigorous methodologies for determining what counts as “domain knowledge.” Moral philosophy doesn't have that: no agreed-upon methods, not even well-defined building blocks. Moreover, even within the utilitarian tradition, where we find the sort of moral reasoning that’s most analogous to mathematical or scientific thought, philosophically sophisticated reasoners hold long-standing, foundational disagreements. (For instance, they disagree on defining morally relevant well-being/welfare or how to approach population ethics.) For these reasons, without already favoring a particular approach or object-level moral theory, we can’t expect the study of morality to function analogously to chemistry or mathematics. Moral realists may think they’re seeing the blurred contours of a crisp and far-reaching moral reality, but maybe “blurred contours” are all that’s there.
What justifiably confident moral realism could look like
Convergence arguments seek to establish that, under ideal reasoning conditions, sophisticated reasoners agree about first-order (“object-level”) moral questions. If successful, these arguments could convince me that there is a moral reality which, if only we looked at it the right way, came to present itself to us like Mount Fuji on a clear summer day. However, I’m an anti-realist because I think convergence arguments are ultimately unsuccessful. (I will argue for this in future posts.)
Summary and takeaways
Philosophers have identified and argued for different versions of moral realism. Some of them turn out to be unintelligible on close inspection (“irreducible normativity”), while others appear trivially true but inconsequential for effective altruism (“minimalist moral realism”). What I am interested in are versions of moral realism that are intelligible and action-relevant if true. The path to moral realism has to go through convergence arguments. Therefore, moral uncertainty implies metaethical uncertainty or confident anti-realism (“moral uncertainty and confident moral realism cannot go together”).
Under metaethical uncertainty, we must first specify the object of our uncertainty. For instance, are we explicitly hoping that moral realism worthy of the name is true and staking all our caring capacity into that? Alternatively, are we uncertain about what to value in a sense that's also compatible with anti-realism? How would we update our values – do we have in mind a targeted reflection strategy, or are we looking to reflect open-mindedly? Finally, how do we factor in the possibility of ending up with under-defined values?
I will explain all these concerns in a future post. In short, the upshot is that we need a more refined set of concepts to do justice to metaethical uncertainty.
Upcoming posts
- Dismantling Hedonism-inspired Moral Realism applies this post’s theme (that moral realism and moral uncertainty don’t go together) to common arguments for hedonism-based moral realism
- The Life-Goals Framework: How I Reason About Morality as an Anti-Realist introduces my framework for ethical reasoning and argues that “life goals” differ between people
- The “Moral Uncertainty” Rabbit Hole, Fully Excavated explains how to approach various kinds of “morality-related uncertainties” (and related matters) within the life-goals framework
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Adriano Mannino and Lydia Ward for helpful comments on the draft.
References
Harris, S. (2010). The Moral Landscape. New York: Free Press.
MacAskill, W., Bykvist, K., and T. Ord. (2020). Moral Uncertainty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Parfit, D. (2011). On What Matters, Volume I. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thanks for this post, it seems really well researched.
As I understand, it sounds like you're saying moral uncertainty implies or requires moral realism to make sense, but since moral uncertainty means "having a vague or unclear understanding of that reality", it's not clear you can justify moral realism from a position of moral uncertainty. And you're saying this tension is problematic for moral realism because it's hard to resolve.
But I'm not sure what makes you say that moral uncertainty implies or requires moral realism? I do think that moral uncertainty strongly favours cognitivism about ethics (the view that moral statements express truth-evaluable beliefs). And it's true that cognitivism naturally suggests realism, because it's somewhat strange to be both a cognitivist and an antirealist. But it seems coherent to me to entertain a cognitivist kind of antirealism/nihilism/error theory as one of the theories you're uncertain about. If that's right, it's not clear to me that this kind of problematic tension exists for most kinds of moral uncertainty.
I say a bit more about this here, for what it's worth. Also note that I have not read the other posts in your sequence, so I may be lacking context. Likely I've missed something here — curious to hear your thoughts.
I don't say that moral uncertainty implies or requires moral realism to make sense. Primarily, my post is about how the only pathway to confident moral realism requires moral certainty. (So the post is primarily against confident moral realism, not against moral uncertainty.)
I do say that moral uncertainty often comes up in a moral realist context. Related to that, perhaps the part you’re replying to is this part:
"Since moral uncertainty often comes up in a moral realist context, I think this causes some problems for the concept.”
By “problems" (I think that phrasing was potentially misleading), I don’t mean that moral uncertainty is altogether unworkable or not useful. I mean only that, if we make explicit that moral uncertainty also includes uncertainty between moral realism vs. moral anti-realism, it potentially changes the way we'd want to deal with our uncertainty (because it changes what we're uncertain about).
A further premise here is that anti-realism doesn’t deserve the connotations of the term “nihilism.” (I argue for that in previous posts.)
If someone thought anti-realism is the same as nihilism, in the sense of "nothing matters under nihilism and we may as well ignore the possibility, for all practical purposes," then my point wouldn't have any interesting implications.
However, if the way things can matter under anti-realism is still relevant for effective altruists, then it makes a difference how much of our "moral uncertainty" expects moral realism vs. how much of it expects anti-realism.
To summarize, the "problem" with moral uncertainty is just that it's not precise enough, it doesn't quite carve reality at its joints. Ideally, we'd want more precise concepts that then tell us more about how to operate under various subtypes of uncertainty.
Ok, thanks for the reply Lukas. I think this clarifies some things, although I expect I should read some of your other posts to get fully clear.