<\/p>\n
This time we bring you a dialogue on moral realism authored by our newest philosopher Greg Damico (you might recall Greg as the BC philosopher who recently won the national Rockerfeller prize<\/a>).<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Perhaps today, Bert, I can convince you of my moral realism.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 I am quite convinced that you<\/em> are a moral realist, Manny.\u00a0 But I suppose that what you hope to convince me of is the truth of moral realism itself.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Yes, indeed.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 Remind me what you mean by the term.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 I suppose really there are two things I mean by \u2018moral realism\u2019.\u00a0 Just as with any kinds of statements, one might ask, first, what they mean<\/em>, and, second, whether they are true<\/em>.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 The answer to the second depending, I suppose, on the answer to the first.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Naturally.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 Fine.\u00a0 So the realist gives a particular answer to these two questions.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 Our answer to the first question is that a statement like \u2018Louis is good\u2019 is much like \u2018Louis is intelligent\u2019.\u00a0 When a speaker sincerely asserts \u2018Louis is intelligent\u2019, we take him to be attempting to express some objective fact about the world, viz.<\/em> the fact of Louis\u2019s intelligence.\u00a0 In just the same way, moral realists hold that when a speaker sincerely asserts \u2018Louis is good\u2019, that speaker is attempting to express another objective fact about the world, viz.<\/em> the fact of Louis\u2019s goodness.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 I think I\u2019m already getting off the bus.\u00a0 But tell me the realist answer to the second question as well.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 The answer to the second question is that many of our moral claims are in fact true<\/em>.\u00a0 That is, not only are we attempting to express these distinctively moral facts when we use the associated moral language, but in fact we are also succeeding<\/em> in that attempt.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 I see.\u00a0 That seems like a minimal step to take, given the realist\u2019s answer to the first question.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 How do you mean that?<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 I just mean that it would be strange for someone to think that moral claims purport to express objective facts, but then to turn around and say that they\u2019re all false!<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Well, you\u2019d just have to think\u2014and this shouldn\u2019t sound weird to you<\/em> at all\u2014that there aren\u2019t, after all, any objective moral facts.\u00a0 I find it in fact an interesting and worthy view.\u00a0 My friend Mack has this view, and he\u2019s had some followers.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure he would agree with you that his view is queer insofar as it proposes that we are all systematically in error about the moral claims we assert.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 But according to him, the error is not a matter of being confused about the meaning<\/em> of what we\u2019re saying.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 That\u2019s right.\u00a0 We err only insofar as we think that the claims we make are true<\/em>.\u00a0 As I say, he would acknowledge, I think, some queerness in this feature of his view; but he thinks it\u2019s far queerer to suppose that there really are moral facts that could ground the truth of those claims.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 Yes, well I suppose I\u2019m on board with him there.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 I\u2019ve personally never felt any intellectual discomfort on this point.\u00a0 Perhaps you could try to explain the source of your own discomfort?<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 I\u2019ve thought a bit about this.\u00a0 It\u2019s always better to have arguments for one\u2019s views than to have only brute intuitions.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 We can certainly agree on that.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 If nothing else!\u00a0 I guess I think I have two reasons for my disbelief in moral facts.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 I\u2019m all ears.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 First of all, these alleged facts\u2014or at least our relation to them\u2014would have to be quite different from the more familiar sorts of facts, like scientific facts, for example, or even simple observational facts.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Can you say a bit more about that?<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 Well, let\u2019s go back to your own example. \u00a0I\u2019m happy to admit some objective fact of Louis\u2019s intelligence largely because it admits of a very public and obvious verification<\/em>.\u00a0 Or take something even simpler like:\u00a0 \u2018Louis is wearing a brown and blue shirt.\u2019\u00a0 The truth of this, if and when it is true, just smacks us in the face.\u00a0 All we have to do is to look and see<\/em> whether Louis is indeed wearing a brown and blue shirt.\u00a0 And, if he is, we could show anyone who denies it to be wrong simply by pointing to Louis\u2019s shirt.\u00a0 There would seem to be nothing at all analogous to this in the case of your alleged moral facts.\u00a0 To what shall I point to prove Hitler\u2019s evil<\/em> or to prove the justice<\/em> of an equal distribution of goods?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 I think that is indeed a worthy challenge, and I shall try to respond to it in due course.\u00a0 But what\u2019s your second reason for skepticism about moral facts?<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 The second one dovetails rather nicely with the first, or so it seems to me.\u00a0 The fact that there are no obvious things to point to in order to prove moral facts makes possible a very large amount of disagreement<\/em> about morality.\u00a0 And the vast disagreement, I suggest, is good reason to think that there is no truth of the matter.\u00a0 There is never any serious disagreement over the color of someone\u2019s shirt.\u00a0 But disagreement over the legitimacy of, say, the death penalty, is massive.\u00a0 And anyway, I am very reluctant to judge other people or other cultures, located, as they are, in different places and in different times.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 I\u2019d like to respond to this second reason, first, if that\u2019s okay.\u00a0 I find it a little bit easier to address.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 Sure.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 First of all, there is nothing wrong with being slow to judge other people.\u00a0 But note that we may judge others\u2019 actions<\/em> without judging the others themselves.\u00a0 Good people, do, after all, sometimes do bad things.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 That\u2019s an interesting point.\u00a0 So I could, for example, hold that it was wrong for American Southerners in the early 1800s to engage in slavery without judging all those slave-owners to be evil people.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Quite.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 That\u2019s fair enough.\u00a0 But I\u2019m still not ready to give up on my skepticism.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Nor should you be.\u00a0 You\u2019ve given me some good challenges to think about.\u00a0 But let\u2019s see if I can make any farther progress in responding to your criticisms.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 By all means.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 You bring up the fact of disagreement.\u00a0 First of all, there may be less disagreement than you imagine.\u00a0 There may well be disagreement over whether the death penalty, say, is immoral.\u00a0 But all parties to the dispute presumably believe that citizens generally have a right to life and that the state generally has a right to punish those who transgress the law.\u00a0 The dispute may come down to the question of whether the state has been administering the death penalty fairly, or whether those convicted of capital crimes count as citizens in the relevant sense.\u00a0 And this last question, notice, isn\u2019t a moral question at all!<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 Perhaps, but I think there are other cases where the disagreement is clearly over moral questions.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 That may be, but this brings me to the rest of my response.\u00a0 And it\u2019s this:\u00a0 Disagreement on something does not entail that there\u2019s no fact of the matter.\u00a0 On the contrary:\u00a0 If anything, genuine disagreement between you and me presupposes that there is something about which<\/em> we disagree.\u00a0 Note, further, that there is often disagreement over non-moral matters.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 Can you give me an example?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Sure.\u00a0 There may once have been rather serious disagreement over the shape and size of the earth.\u00a0 And today we might observe serious disagreement over, for example, which fundamental particles exist, or over who killed John Kennedy.\u00a0 But no one doubts for a minute that there are indeed objective answers to these questions.\u00a0 It\u2019s clear that someone did in fact kill John Kennedy, despite our disagreeing over the identity of that someone.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 I suppose I have to concede that as well.\u00a0 What about my first complaint, that moral facts don\u2019t seem to be testable or discoverable?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Yes, that\u2019s a bit tougher.\u00a0 But let me begin by observing that, though some facts are easily verified, not all are.\u00a0 The color of someone\u2019s shirt is checked easily by our eyes, but there are other facts you would admit that are rather more distant from simple everyday observation.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 What do you have in mind?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Well, one might point to mathematical examples.\u00a0 Take some famous unproved claim, like Goldbach\u2019s Conjecture. \u00a0I don\u2019t remember what it says.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 I do.\u00a0 The conjecture is that every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Oh good.\u00a0 I\u2019m glad someone remembers it anyway!<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 So what was the point you wanted to make about the conjecture?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Just this:\u00a0 No one doubts that it\u2019s either true or false.\u00a0 That is, either every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes or some even number cannot be so expressed.\u00a0 And yet, it\u2019s rather difficult to find out which is the case.\u00a0 The conjecture has been around for quite some time, and it remains unsolved.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 I see, yes.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 But in fact we needn\u2019t appeal to mathematics to make the point.\u00a0 There are scientific questions that are also difficult to answer.\u00a0 There is, presumably, some fact of the matter about the origins of the universe or about the behavior of fundamental particles\u2014and yet these facts are anything but easily ascertained.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 I take the point.\u00a0 Still, questions of morality seem even further removed from observation than do those questions you mention just now\u2014with the possible exception of Goldbach\u2019s Conjecture. \u00a0I\u2019ll have to think about that.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Yes, well I concede that all scientific questions would seem to have to have some<\/em> sort of connection, however tenuous or indirect, to observation.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 What, then, of morality?\u00a0 Surely moral questions don\u2019t have any<\/em> connection to observation.\u00a0 You don\u2019t deny that, do you?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Well, no, although I\u2019ve heard of others denying it.\u00a0 My friend Nick seems to have that view.\u00a0 And I think the old philosopher Ben Tham had it as well.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 Weird.<\/p>\n MANNY: \u00a0Frankly, I agree with you, Bert.\u00a0 But in any case, what I deny is simply that ethics is a science.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t follow from ethics not being a science that ethics doesn\u2019t concern objective fact.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 I don\u2019t know about that!\u00a0 If our five senses are irrelevant to ethics, then how could we ever have any knowledge of ethical facts?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Yes, well this is where things get a little mysterious, I have to admit.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 Perhaps untenably mysterious.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Perhaps, but bear with me.\u00a0 One possibility is that moral facts are conceptual facts.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 And what does that mean, Manny?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 It means that grasping the concepts involved in moral claims is sufficient to determine whether those claims are true or false.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 I don\u2019t understand what you\u2019re saying.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 On this view, moral facts would be much the same as claims like:\u00a0 \u201cAll green things are colored things\u201d or \u201cAll bachelors are unmarried\u201d.\u00a0 If you understand what it is to be a green thing and what it is to be a colored thing, you can in effect deduce<\/em> from that understanding the claim that all green things are colored things.\u00a0 Similarly, if you understand what it is to be a bachelor and what it is to be married, you can in effect deduce from that understanding the claim that all bachelors are unmarried.\u00a0 So the thought would be that, if we could just get a more complete grip on the relevant moral notions\u2014like goodness and justice\u2014we could deduce the true moral claims from that conceptual understanding.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 That sounds crazy!\u00a0 The claim that all bachelors are unmarried is just about the simplest fact I can think of.\u00a0 It\u2019s just so obviously<\/em> true.\u00a0 But moral claims aren\u2019t like that all!<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 I agree that the truth of moral claims is not obvious.\u00a0 But that doesn\u2019t mean that they\u2019re not conceptual claims.\u00a0 The concept of goodness is, presumably, much harder to pin down than is the concept of being a bachelor.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 I\u2019m still unconvinced.\u00a0 I don\u2019t even know if I accept that there is some concept of goodness.\u00a0 Where does this concept come from?\u00a0 And how is it that we have access to it?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Yes, well this brings me to another point I wanted to make.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 And what point is that?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 The following:\u00a0 I quite agree that we do not measure moral claims up against our five senses, the way we do for scientific claims.\u00a0 Nevertheless, I think I know<\/em>, for example, that Hitler was evil, and that the killing of innocents is wrong.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 I know you think you know those things, my dear Manny!\u00a0 But how in the world is such knowledge even possible?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 I think I know these things not through any of my five senses but rather through intuition<\/em>.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 So the moral claims you make turn out to be about your own feelings?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Not at all, though my good friend and mentor David, with whom I seem to disagree on almost every significant point of philosophy, has such a view.\u00a0 This is often called the subjectivist<\/em> view.\u00a0 It seems clear to me, however, that, though I certainly experience feelings of approval when I think about the death penalty applied in certain cases, say, nevertheless the permissibility of the death penalty does not consist in<\/em> those feelings, but is rather a cause of<\/em> those feelings.\u00a0 It\u2019s difficult for the subjectivist to explain why we have certain feelings, or why certain feelings are appropriate.\u00a0 We all agree, let us suppose, that we experience feelings of disapproval when we think about the killing of innocent people.\u00a0 But what I can say that the subjectivist cannot is that I experience those feelings precisely because I perceive that such killing is wrong<\/em>.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 So how exactly is your view different from the subjectivist\u2019s?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 I say that I know moral facts through<\/em> intuition, not that moral facts are about<\/em> my intuitions.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 So if moral facts are to have the objectivity you claim\u2014or, at any rate, if they are to be discoverable<\/em>, then we must all have the same intuitions.\u00a0 Right?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 But it seems that we do not!<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Well, again, I think there\u2019s not as much disagreement as there may at first blush seem.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know that I really think we all have the very same intuitions on all moral questions.\u00a0 But I do think there is very substantial agreement, ultimately, on a very large number of the deeper moral questions.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 I am not unmoved by all your fine argumentation, Manny.\u00a0 But I still find moral realism a difficult view.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Consider the following:\u00a0 One of my moral beliefs is that the death penalty is permissible.\u00a0 And I would not accept this thought to be paraphrased away in such a way that the claim comes out to be\u2014quite surprisingly!\u2014about me<\/em>, or about my culture<\/em>, or anything like that.\u00a0 No.\u00a0 When I say that the death penalty is permissible, I take this claim at face value.\u00a0 That is, I take it to be about the death penalty and permissibility<\/em>.\u00a0 I think that what makes the death penalty permissible is not anyone\u2019s laws or set of moral norms.\u00a0 I think that there is something about the very nature of the death penalty that allows the concept of moral permissibility, at least in certain cases, to apply to it.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 I think I see your point.\u00a0 When, for example, you encounter someone who thinks that the death penalty is not permissible, you\u2019re not content to say that you\u2019ve got your feelings and he\u2019s got his.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 That\u2019s right.\u00a0 I think the death penalty is permissible.\u00a0 Period.\u00a0 For all people at all times and places.\u00a0 And I hardly deny the non-moral anthropological fact that some cultures have rejected the death penalty as morally impermissible.\u00a0 But I think the death penalty is permissible for them as well.\u00a0 I think they have simply misperceived the moral facts.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 I feel much clearer on the nature of moral realism now, Manny.\u00a0 And I am more sympathetic to it than I was before.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 I\u2019m happy to hear that!<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 But surely there would be more for realists to say.\u00a0 There would be more to say, for example, about the nature of these moral facts they posit, or, relatedly, about how exactly the semantic analysis of moral claims is supposed to work.\u00a0 Can you say anything further about these matters?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Well, these are rather large questions, and so perhaps they are for another time.\u00a0 But I can say a few words.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 Please.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 The most obvious way, probably, of being a moral realist is to think that there are genuine features or properties<\/em> of goodness, justice and the rest that apply to particular things or to people, to actions or to states of affairs.\u00a0 If one is antecedently inclined to suppose that something like this is what\u2019s going on in non-moral cases, then this would be a natural extension of that sort of view.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure I understand.\u00a0 What do you mean by the non-moral cases?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 I just mean non-moral claims quite generally.\u00a0 One might have thought that, say, what explains the fact that tomatoes are red is that there is some property<\/em> of redness that applies to tomatoes.\u00a0 And so in just the same way, one might hold that, say, what explains the fact that Gandhi is a good man is that there is some property<\/em> of goodness that applies to Gandhi.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 And the facts that these properties hold of various things\u2014goodness of Gandhi, and all the rest\u2014would be discerned by something like intuition.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 That\u2019s probably the most natural thing to say.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 What other possibilities are there?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Well, personally I think that all moral facts can be discovered just by thinking long and hard about the nature of the human will and the nature of practical reason.\u00a0 According to me, what grounds the truth of moral facts is human reason as such.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 So acting immorally is acting irrationally.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 In a nutshell, yes.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 Interesting.\u00a0 Any other realist views on the table?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 My friend Stu, though a realist, has an unusual view.\u00a0 He seems to think that the truth of moral facts is grounded in a certain empirical fact about what human beings desire.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 And what fact is that?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 That we all desire happiness.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 So, according to him, the moral facts would be different if we didn\u2019t all desire happiness?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Presumably, although I think he thinks that that\u2019s a very big \u2018if\u2019.\u00a0 Probably he thinks that human beings by their very nature desire happiness, though he rarely allows himself to talk that way.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 There certainly are a lot of possibilities!<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Well, the questions of morality are very subtle and difficult.\u00a0 But it seems to me that morality would be of rather limited interest unless there really were answers to those questions.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 Are you offering that as another argument in favor of moral realism?<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 I suppose I am.\u00a0 Are you not yet convinced?<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 I feel a bit overwhelmed, both because you\u2019ve given me reason to doubt my relativism and because you\u2019ve offered me so many alternative views to take!\u00a0 I\u2019ll need some time to sort out my thoughts on all this.<\/p>\n MANNY:\u00a0 Then let\u2019s continue our discussion another time.<\/p>\n BERT:\u00a0 Yes, that\u2019s what we ought to do.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n March 19, 2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This time we bring you a dialogue on moral realism authored by our newest philosopher Greg Damico (you might recall Greg as the BC philosopher who recently won the national Rockerfeller prize). MANNY:\u00a0 Perhaps today, Bert, I can convince you of my moral realism. BERT:\u00a0 I am quite convinced that you are a moral … Continue reading Critical Thinking Note 10: Greg Damico on Moral Realism<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-critical-thinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/73"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24,"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions\/24"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}