Olga Shared this one. I think Greg Damico is using it. If anyone hits a NY Times paywall, let me know and I’ll send you the text.
Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts – The New York Times
Why our Children don’t Think there are Moral Facts
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4 responses to “Why our Children don’t Think there are Moral Facts”
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I think most of this text does a good job criticizing the school’s attempted distinction between facts, beliefs, and value claims, and I do find it concerning that a school would teach such an underdeveloped kind of relativism. Of course, as a subjectivist, I do believe that whether or not you think drug dealers are wrong, is entirely relative to your subjective patterns of evaluation. But for one, I don’t see any utility in teaching this to 12 year olds, who probably aren’t equipped with the prior knowledge or intellectual capacity to properly understand a more sophisticated subjectivism, which leads to point two, why in the world teach these kids an underdeveloped subjectivism? I largely agree with this writing’s implications that doing so is socially irresponsible.
That said, while I see this as a decent criticism of a school’s curriculum, I don’t see it as much in terms of defending moral realism or attacking anti-realism. Of course, it could be claimed that this was written for an audience of realists, addressing a specific issue that realists would be interested in addressing, and therefore didn’t need to spend time arguing in favor of realism, as that position was already assumed. That’s fine, I suppose, but there are some remarks in the article that do attempt to poke holes in subjectivism. Let’s examine the following quote:
“If it’s not true that it’s wrong to murder a cartoonist with whom one disagrees, then how can we be outraged? If there are no truths about what is good or valuable or right, how can we prosecute people for crimes against humanity? If it’s not true that all humans are created equal, then why vote for any political system that doesn’t benefit you over others?”
This is a response I am met with time and time again. When I say morality is subjective, I am met with “So you think… like… we just shouldn’t prosecute murderers or something?” The short and funny response would just be “You’re stating consequences that follow from subjectivism which you subjectively dislike. Your subjective dislike of the consequences of subjectivism is not an argument against subjectivism.” But that would be rather weak and boring.
I find this realist notion curious, as it almost always seems to be a case of projection from the speaker. Many realists I’ve talked to about this seem to find comfort in the notion of objective morality, as it allows them to be sure in their judgments of right and wrong, and allows them to avoid the potentially uncomfortable notion of judging others based on subjective opinions. They’ve lived their lives believing they only support punishing people who’ve done something objectively wrong, and that it’s only justified to punish someone who’s acted wrongly. So when this objective grounding is threatened, they feel as though they would lose their authority to support prosecuting murderers and such, and they often seem to assume I share this need for an objective justification. They incredulously claim that I can’t justify punishing murderers, or thieves, or so on, due to the mistaken assumption that objective justification is necessary.
One cause of this seems to be a failure to realize that, under subjectivism, even “fairness” and “logical consistency” become only subjectively valuable. I say this because it often appears that their belief that a justice system can’t be justified under subjectivism comes from the notion that, if some person is right to murder, then we can’t judge them, because they’re doing what’s right for them. Who are we to judge them for that? This just seems to assume fairness as objectively valuable. But under subjectivism, it isn’t. I could simply respond with “I don’t care if I have no objective justification to punish the murderer, I care about human well-being, I value a society structured in a way that allows people to pursue meaningful lives, and murder opposes these values. Because I care about these things, I will enforce them, simply because I want to and I can.”
That, however, can be a rather distasteful bullet to bite, and luckily, is not the only option available to us. After all, many of us do value fairness, so even if subjectivism were true, we who value fairness can’t just toss it out the window. My response to the argument that I have no right to enforce my subjective moral values over the murderers is pretty much: No matter what, somebody is having somebody else’s values forced onto them, whether it be the murder victim who wants to live, or the murderer who wants to murder. I value a society where people aren’t murdered, the murderer does not value this. Our values are incompatible, one will have to be enforced over the other. If we’re both equally justified in our actions (mine being prosecuting murderers and dissuading people from committing murder, and theirs being murdering for fun), then fairness would have it that we’re both equally justified in trying to enforce them over the other. Luckily, there are more people who oppose murder, than those who are in favor, and so we are able to work together to promote our values over theirs.
We could then turn to the idea that, if you choose to do nothing, because they’re not doing anything wrong, then that means you’re still acting on your subjective value of fairness, although misguidedly in my opinion. The choice to do nothing is still a choice, and if the choice is motivated by the fact that one feels they have no justification to punish the murderer because the murderer isn’t doing anything wrong, you are simply making a choice based on subjective values of fairness, which in this instance leads to a person being murdered. This strikes me as odd. If we are trapped with acting on subjective values no matter what, and we have equal justification to enforce our values as the murderer has to enforce theirs, then it doesn’t seem rational to simply say “they’re not doing anything wrong by committing murder, so I can’t punish them.”
Everything I’ve said here is within the context of a simpler kind of subjectivism. If, however, we get into more sophisticated notions of reasons and normativity, it becomes even clearer that the realist attempted shot at subjectivism fails. I’ll try to keep this short, as it’s already too long. We could, plausibly, claim that when action is right, it is also one the agent has reason to do, and vice versa for an action being wrong. Let’s take a subjectivist position where not only can right and wrong only exist in context of some end, aim, or goal, but that those ends are relative to our subjective patterns of evaluation, leading to the conclusion that what each agent has reason to do is what would promote valuable elements of a state of affairs, and what would oppose disvaluable elements of a state of affairs.
With this perspective, while it is technically possible for a would-be murderer to have reason to murder, if doing so would actually promote a state of affairs that is more valuable to them than the alternative, I imagine this would be incredibly rare. Most of the time, murdering someone may provide them with some valuable experience, but that value would be heavily outweighed by the disvalue of the consequences, meaning they have stronger reason not to murder, than to commit murder, and therefore would be wrong (according to their own values) to commit the murder.
But the fact that they may be wrong according to their own values, for entirely egoistic reasons, doesn’t really have anything to do with providing justification for us to punish them. That, instead, comes from what we have reason to do. If I value human wellbeing, and I disvalue pointless suffering and pain, these both provide me reason not only to oppose murder, but to cooperate with others to create systems that dissuade murder. The difference between this, and the earlier described subjectivism, is that it is no longer simply justifiable to punish the murderer under the subjective value of fairness, but it is that I have strong reason to punish the murderer. By the very nature of reasons and normativity, it is what I ought to do. It is not simply an option available to me permissible under fairness, but a moral obligation placed on me by my subjective value set.
So when we turn to this article’s examples, why punish people for murdering cartoonists or committing war crimes? Because that’s what I have reason to do, what I ought to do, based on the relationship between my subjective values, reasons, and normativity more broadly. Why support a political system that supports everyone, instead of just me? Because I care about creating, living in, and participating in, a society that serves as a collaborative effort to allow humans to live well and pursue meaning. I care about this because I generally value human welfare for its own sake. These values make it so that what I have reason to do, and what I ought to do, is support political systems that maximize wellbeing and the ability for people to pursue meaning.
I hope this makes some semblance of sense.
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I’m also on board with McBrayer’s condemnation of teaching facts and opinions as a dichotomy in K-12 education. As he points out, this mushes together metaphysics and epistemology, more specifically truth and justification. Not a very promising intellectual foundation for critical thinking.
I can see how McBrayer’s presumption of moral realism touches a nerve here. And I appreciate your complaint that moral realism is too often invoked as necessary for justifying accountability and retribution. That, I think, is a naive realism. Retributivism, the justification for punishment on the grounds that the wrong doer deserves it, does require something like moral realism. But moral realism doesn’t automatically justify retributivism.
Like many contemporary philosophers, I’m partial to compatibilism about free will. That is, I think any viable conception of free will will have to be compatible with causal determinism. But if determinism is true, then the murderer could not have simply chosen to act differently under the specific circumstances where he committed a murder. But if he wasn’t free to choose against murdering, this will undermine our usual justification for retributive punishment. The upshot is that moral realism isn’t enough to justify retributive punishment, you also need classical liberation free will and the prospects for this view aren’t good.
But even if we lack free will and retributive punishment is unjustifiable, it can still be a plain fact that murder is morally wrong, or that torturing kittens just for fun is bad. Moral realism doesn’t depend on or entail retributive punishment. So, I’d agree that the attraction to moral realism for the sake of accountability and judgment of wrongdoers is misguided. Underlying this is the concern that the desire for accountability would be a purely instrumental rationale for moral realism. What we should want is a theoretical foundation for moral truths. Some feature of reality that grounds moral truth. Here I do think the realist project is viable and consciousness is key. But I’ll leave the defense of realism there.
I would, however, take this opportunity to open space for a kind of anti-realism about morality that doesn’t throw us back onto the hazards of moral relativism (which still looks like a hazard for your approach to subjectivism).
A central insight of Hume’s is that moral evaluations don’t appear to be claims about how things are. This is the famous “is/ought” divide. There is no collection of claims about how things are (which are truth assessable) that entail any claim about how things ought to be (for instance, about what is right or wrong). Even Kant, a presumed moral realist, doesn’t take issue with this. Rather Kant takes the moral law to be an imperative, a command of the autonomous will. Commands aren’t the kinds of sentences we can evaluate for truth or falsity. The drill sergeant that yells “March” isn’t asserting some claim to truth we can evaluate against the evidence, he’s telling the new recruits to do something. Morality is cleanly in the realm of practical reason for Kant.
This suggests one way to be an anti-realist about morality and still take morality seriously (for instance, taking some moral commands to apply universally, and in a way that makes judgment and even punishment rational). Descriptive claims say something about how things are and so can be evaluated for truth. But this isn’t the role of moral commands. Moral attitudes just aren’t about how things are and for this reason we should expect them to be evaluated as true or false. But they can still be evaluated as good or bad, permissible or prohibited, right or wrong. On this view truth is just the wrong evaluative metric for moral attitudes and judgements. The appropriate metrics are goodness, rightness, permissibility. We should take moral judgement just as seriously as judgments about what is true, we just shouldn’t treat them as judgements about what is true. This sort of anti-realist metaethics make no difference to normative ethics. We can still take the categorical imperative, for instance, to be the moral law, we should just avoid the confusions that follow when we think of moral laws as truths.
Here we have a kind of anti-realism about morality that rejects the call for truth makers for moral truths as simply missing the nature of moral attitudes, but still supports our usual moral intuition that murder is wrong, that it is wrong to torture innocent kittens just for fun, etc. It’s just a philosophical error to think taking these moral claims seriously depend on treating them as normal truth assessable subject predicate assertions. Moral claims aren’t descriptive claims; they are the commands of practical rationality that hold no matter what your ends are.
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This idea, that “truth is just the wrong evaluative metric for moral attitudes and judgements. The appropriate metrics are goodness, rightness, permissibility” is one I find useful and incredibly appealing. I don’t think I’ve thought about it like that before, but it seems like it makes a lot of sense. It definitely fits the phenomenological experience or morality better, in my opinion. If I understand what you’re saying correctly, I would accept that moral attitudes and judgments are better understood as commands, than truth apt propositions. It’s not that I propose that it would be wrong for me to torture kittens for fun, and then subjectively adopt that as my opinion. Rather, due to the nature and structure of my evaluative consciousness and rational agency, I am subject to a moral imperative to not torture kittens for fun. I think where we’d differ is in my claim that these imperatives are relative to subjective evaluative set of each agent, which may lead to some of those hazards of relativism.
I would still argue that “it would be wrong for me to torture kittens for fun” is itself a truth apt proposition, and would count as what some call a “particular moral fact”. In that sense, I think moral facts do exist, just as descriptive claims about the commands an agent is subject to as a result of their evaluative set.
As for the hazards of relativism, there are many bullets I’m happy to bite in that regard. I don’t necessarily see any issue saying “someone may be right to torture kittens for fun”, because that can be met with “it is right for me to stop that person from torturing kittens for fun”. That said, I do think that certain things like Nazism are incompatible with the structure of practical agency, and can only happen under severe epistemic error or sheer egoism.
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You are sounding kind of realist curious right there at the end.
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