Moral Realism

Kevin DeLapp

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441148285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia etica e morale

Are moral values objective or are they relative to different cultural contexts and traditions? Do values have any place in a 'disenchanted' scientific conception of the world and, if so, how do human beings relate to such values culturally, psychologically, and epistemologically? This book examines contemporary responses to these questions. Moral Realism introduces students to contemporary debates concerning moral realism, including issues related to ethical naturalism, moral epistemology, moral motivation, cultural pluralism and moral disagreement. In the context of examining and connecting these different debates, the book presents its own unique form of moral realism according to which values may be belief-independent while also being characterized by an ontological pluralism that generates incommensurable moral disagreements and 'tragic' dilemmas. This idea serves as a guiding thread and also represents an attractive and neglected metaethical position in its own right. Specific attention is devoted to locating debates about moral realism in actual, embodied contexts, by looking to issues in experimental moral psychology, cross-cultiural anthropology and political science, permitting an accessible approach ideal for undergraduate students.

CHAPTER ONE

Values in a disenchanted world

1.1 Disenchantment

This book is about morality in the broadest, most fundamental sense. The philosophical study of such a topic is called “metaethics,” reminding us that we are not so much searching for particular answers to everyday ethical questions (e.g. is it okay to tell a small lie to bring about a greater good? do the ends justify the means?), but instead are seeking an understanding of the very idea of morality in the first place. What do we mean by moral words such as “good,” “right,” and “evil”? Do these words correspond to any objective facts, or are they merely (perhaps useful) artificial creations? The general position of this book is to defend a metaethical view commonly called “Moral Realism.” This view will not necessarily tell us what to do in actual, concrete situations (although we will consider some possible concrete applications in Chapter 7); rather, it is designed to help shed light on what morality itself is. Specifically, moral realists believe that something about our ethical beliefs, actions, and concepts is “real” in some sense—that a core aspect of morality is “not up to us” or is “independent” from us in some way. Moral realists believe that there are “moral truths” in the world and that an individual or even an entire culture might be “wrong” about moral matters.

On the one hand, some may find this sort of moral realism highly intuitive, if not downright obvious. After all, humans are constantly making moral claims about what “should” or “should not” be done, about what is “right” and “wrong,” about things or people which are “good” or “bad.” Morality is a ubiquitous and foundational dimension of our lives: our moral ideals and behavior are part of how we define ourselves as both individuals and groups. Indeed, morality is deeply intertwined with our sense that our lives and actions “have value” or “mean something” (cf. Wiggins 1976). Yet, on the other hand, the claim that “morality” is somehow “real” may strike others as naive and unhelpful. After all, “morality” is a broad domain of human experience and thought, and saying that “it” is real is rather like saying “biology” or “art” is real—either trivial or else a category mistake. Furthermore, even a cursory philosophical reflection is sufficient to recognize that there are formidable challenges facing moral realism: Where are these alleged moral facts, and why do people constantly (and often brutally) disagree about them? For morality to affect us in the alleged existential way that it does, must it not be at least partially subjective? Those who find this second line of reasoning more attractive may be called moral antirealists.¹

The very existence of this debate tells us something about the contemporary position in which morality finds itself. Metaethics as a domain of philosophical inquiry is by and large a uniquely modern phenomenon. This is not to say that earlier cultures or people never reflected on the foundations of morality, or did not have commitments to particular views which have analogs in modern metaethics. Even though the word “metaethics” wasn’t coined until well into the twentieth century, we can still, for instance, speak perfectly sensibly about Plato’s or Aquinas’s or Zhuangzi’s metaethical outlooks. But there are features of the modern world that undergird our approach to morality in fundamentally different ways than these earlier thinkers may have appreciated. Most notably, the specific terms of the contemporary realist/antirealist debate have arisen in response to what we might call a modern “disenchantment” with traditional substitutes for metaethics. The idea that modernity has been “disenchanting” in certain ways was popularized by Max Weber, “the father of sociology,” who famously remarked that, “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by ‘the disenchantment of the world’” (1948: 155). Since Weber’s time, the theme of “modernist dissatisfaction” has almost assumed the status of a truism. Rather than evaluate this theme in its generality, however, let’s look at three particular features of modern “disenchantment” that have been thought to generate unique challenges for moral realism.

First, organized religion has lost much of its uncontested status in the modern world. This is certainly not to say that individuals or cultures are necessarily becoming “less religious.” For example, while an increasing number of young Americans might be leaving the organized churches, mosques, or temples of their parents, their “spirituality” and the degree to which they see religion as important in their lives seems to be on the rise.² So-called mega churches are getting more mega, mission trips are on the rise, and far from Nietzsche’s provocative prognosis that, under conditions of modernity, “God is dead,” globalization instead seems to have generated more religious zeal and influence in political affairs worldwide (cf. Shah and Toft 2006). However, even if people are not necessarily becoming less religious, nonetheless the authority of religion is becoming more contestable. Theology can no longer be assumed as the “queen of the sciences” as it was for centuries, for theology is relative to a specific religious tradition which provides its starting assumptions, and modernity has confronted us with a variety of different, potentially competing religious traditions, and thus potentially divergent theologies. Choice of membership within different religious affiliations is more open, and atheism as a social-political identity is an explicitly articulated (if still controversial) alternative in a way that would have largely been a nonstarter two centuries ago.³ Religiousness has become more of a self-conscious phenomenon than an enthymematic constituent of identity: even for religious individuals, there is more of an awareness of religion qua religion (i.e. as something against alternatives). Sectarian fissures within historic religious traditions highlight the “open question” that confronts a particular faith. It is not obvious that we all live within the same Christendom, or Dar al-Islam, or under the same Heaven, mainly because, from a religious perspective, it is not clear that there is a monolithic “we” any longer. (Of course, there probably never was such monism; the point, though, is just that this plurality is harder to deny in the modern world.) Thus, even religious fundamentalism must be seen as a uniquely modernist phenomenon, that is, as a counter-culture response that only makes sense as opposition to (perceived) developments in mainstream modern cultures.

These modern religious trends have interesting implications for metaethics. If people traditionally associate morality with religion—that is, if religion is often the vehicle or context through which values are communicated, codified, celebrated, and enforced—then fragmentation in the authority of one may affect confidence in the other. We shall have much more to say about the relationship between moral realism and religion in subsequent chapters (see §§2.2 and 3.3), but at a minimum, uncertainty regarding religious truths subtracts one of the possible models for the sort of uncontested moral objectivity to which realists are attracted.

A second potential source of disenchantment can be a heightened awareness of cross-cultural differences. Some of these differences might be religious, but modernity has also presented myriad instances of cultural diversity that are more directly moral in nature. As we shall see in subsequent chapters (see §4.1), a tempting reason in favor of moral antirealism is that it not only seems to better explain and accommodate moral diversity, but it also might support more tolerant responses to such diversity (see §7.2). As with the modernist confrontation of religious diversity, sensitivity to cultural pluralism also problematizes a traditional source of moral authority.

Finally, for some, a third potential source of disenchantment is the elevation of modern science to a position of epistemological and cultural authority. “Science” here does not mean merely the experimental investigation of natural facts, but rather the wholesale cosmological outlook we can call the “naturalistic conception” of humans and the world. According to such a conception, both physical phenomena and “human nature” alike may be satisfactorily understood in purely materialistic, if not mechanistic, terms. Despite the apparent explanatory and pragmatic successes of such a program, it seems prima facie difficult to account for “values” in a plenum of pure “facts.” This is particularly challenging for moral realism. Can morality be “scientized” without sacrificing its objectivity or without reducing it to something nonmoral? What confidence can realists have in the existence of invisible “moral properties” that cannot be quantitatively measured, predicted, or understood through scientific models? We shall have much more to say about the relationship between science and realism in the ensuing chapters (see §§3.3 and 6.1), but the need for moral realism to respond to science as a worldview highlights something unique about modern metaethics.

These three sources of potential disenchantment—religious contestation, cultural pluralism, and the naturalistic conception of the world—are obviously intertwined. It has been by turning the scientific method of observation and measurement toward other cultures (whence the birth of modern disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, etc.) that cultural pluralism has been showcased. And insofar as religion is a dimension of culture, pluralism in the one goes hand in hand with pluralism in the other. Science and religion have also been viewed as linked in especially intimate ways vis-à-vis modernist disenchantment. Leveraging Weber’s thesis, Charles Taylor also reflects a prevalent sentiment when he places secularism at the heart of disenchantment, diagnosing what he describes as,

a fundamentally different existential predicament from that which dominated most previous cultures and still defines the lives of other people today. That alternative is a predicament in which an unchallengeable framework makes imperious demands that we fear being unable to meet. We face the prospect of irretrievable condemnation or exile, of being marked down in obloquy forever, or of being sent to damnation irrevocably . . . the form of danger here is utterly different from that which threatens the modern seeker, which is something close to the opposite: the world loses altogether its spiritual contour, nothing is worth doing, the fear is of a terrifying emptiness, a kind of vertigo, or even a fracturing of our world and body-space. (1989: 18)⁴

It is not necessary to agree fully with Taylor’s specifically religious diagnosis of disenchantment in order to recognize that a metaethical view such as moral realism faces serious challenges. And the focus of this book is certainly not to defend religion per se (indeed, we shall see in the coming chapters that there are deep incompatibilities between religion and moral realism), nor to nostalgically lament the rise of cultural diversity or scientific paradigms. After all, these three sources of potential disenchantment are not bad things: the freedom of (and from) religion, increased sensitivity to and celebration of cultural diversity, and the explanatory power and practical benefits of modern science can all be wonderful aspects of modern life. The point is not to lament the “loss” of blindly monolithic religions, ethnocentric assumptions, or nonscientific mysteriousness. But in their absence, we do have to confront hard questions about the foundations of morality which religious, cultural, and nonscientific frameworks naively obscured. In this way, modern metaethics arises as an opportunity to think about morality in a “de-mythologized” way (to borrow Rudolf Bultmann’s term). Modernist disenchantment, then, is a precondition for metaethics as an inquiry distinguishable from theology, casuistry, or social science. In a disenchanted world, moral realism cannot be blithely taken for granted—it must be actively argued for. The question this book seeks to address, then, is this: can morality survive the modernist gauntlet of secularism, scientism, and pluralism and emerge as a distinctive sphere of meaning with some anchorage in our conception of “reality”?

1.2 Meta-metaethics

Using the sort of “disenchantment” we discussed above as a starting point for a theory of moral realism differentiates this book from most other defenses of realism. Usually, realism is assumed—whether implicitly or explicitly—to be a default position in “commonsense” phenomenology. This alleged status of realism being “innocent until proven guilty” means that realists only primarily need defensive strategies against attackers, rather than needing to articulate their own positive arguments. If we take disenchantment seriously, however, this will not do. A satisfactory theory of moral realism will need not merely to poke holes in the theories of its rivals, but to articulate proactively a way in which morality can be “real” even in the face of cultural pluralism and a scientific conception of the world.

Yet, a defense of any metaethical position must ultimately be answerable to the experiences and perspectives which generated the questions to which it is a response. If morality is one of the things that give meaning to our lives, then a metaethical conclusion that takes us so far away from the needs and values with which we started as to be unrecognizable to us will have missed the whole point of metaethical theorizing in the first place. This is not an argument that metaethics can never tell us anything new or surprising, or that it can never call for sometimes drastic revisions in our understanding of morality. Nor is this an argument that there is any “default” consensus—whether realist or antirealist—which can settle debates preemptively. It is rather a metaphilosophical axiom—or, to coin a term, a “meta-metaethics”—which this book shall presume.

One meta-metaethical axiom we shall assume going into our discussion of moral realism is that morality (whatever that might mean and regardless of whether it turns out to be “real” or not) is important in some sense. William James makes the observation that moral (or metaethical) theorizing not only always begins from some starting point (which provides the explananda for the metaethical theory), but that this starting point is itself intrinsically moral.

What is the position of him who seeks an ethical philosophy? To begin with, he must be distinguished from all those who are satisfied to be ethical sceptics. He will not be a sceptic; therefore so far from ethical scepticism being one possible fruit of ethical philosophizing, it can only be regarded as that residual alternative to all philosophy which from the outset menaces every would-be philosopher who may give up the quest discouraged, and renounce his original aim. That aim is to find an account of the moral relations that obtain among things, which will weave them into the unity o...