Moral Reality and the Empirical Sciences

Thomas Pölzler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351383332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Are there objective moral truths (things that are morally right or wrong independently of what anybody thinks about them)? To answer this question more and more scholars have recently begun to appeal to evidence from scientific disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, biology, and anthropology. This book investigates this novel scientific approach in a comprehensive, empirically focused, partly clarificatory, and partly metatheoretical way. It argues for two main theses. First, it is possible for the empirical sciences to contribute to the moral realism/anti-realism debate. And second, most appeals to science that have so far been proposed are insufficiently empirically substantiated.

The book's main chapters address four prominent science-based arguments for or against the existence of objective moral truths: the presumptive argument, the argument from moral disagreement, the sentimentalist argument, and the evolutionary debunking argument. For each of these arguments Thomas Pölzler first identifies the sense in which its underlying empirical hypothesis would have to be true in order for the argument to work. Then he shows that the available scientific evidence fails to support this hypothesis. Finally, he also makes suggestions as to how to test the hypothesis more validly in future scientific research.

Moral Reality and the Empirical Sciences is an important contribution to the moral realism/anti-realism debate that will appeal both to philosophers and scientists interested in moral psychology and metaethics.

1 Introduction

Is there a reality that some of our moral judgments correspond to—a moral reality that is “out there,” “waiting to be discovered”? In answering this question, more and more researchers have recently begun to appeal to evidence from scientific disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, biology and anthropology. In this book, I will investigate this novel scientific approach in a comprehensive, empirically focused, partly clarificatory and partly metatheoretical way. I will argue for two main theses. First, it is possible for the empirical sciences to contribute to the moral realism/anti-realism debate. And second, most appeals to science that have so far been proposed are insufficiently empirically substantiated.

Claims about a “moral reality” and a “scientific approach” to this issue can be understood in different ways. Any investigation of these claims must therefore be preceded by clarifications of the particular understanding one assumes. This is the purpose of the following subsections, in which I will introduce you in detail to the scientific approach to the issue of moral reality. First, I will explain the philosophical debate about this issue, that is, the moral realism/anti-realism debate. Then I will sketch how and in which sense the scientific approach to this debate has recently become popular. Finally, I will specify my above main theses, identify ways in which this book advances our understanding of realist and anti-realist appeals to science, and outline the book’s content.

1.1 Moral Realism and Anti-Realism

Let us begin by getting clear about how to understand the question of moral reality. Moral realism (which affirms such a reality) and moral anti-realism (which denies it) are—quite obviously—views about morality. Morality involves questions like the following: Is it always wrong to break a promise? Ought we to maximize overall happiness? Are developed states morally responsible for mitigating climate change? Philosophers have addressed such questions from two different perspectives: the perspective of normative ethics and the perspective of metaethics.

Normative ethicists (or first-order ethicists) provide and justify answers to moral questions. Immanuel Kant, for example, argued that it is always wrong to break a promise because if people were free to break promises the whole social institution of making promises would collapse. John Stuart Mill argued that humans ought to maximize overall happiness because happiness is the only thing that humans desire as an end in itself. And according to some climate ethicists, developed states are morally responsible for mitigating climate change because these states have been the main beneficiaries of greenhouse-gas emitting activities.

The above examples demonstrate that normative ethicists take a stance on what is morally right, wrong, good, bad and so forth. In engaging in metaethics (or second-order ethics), in contrast, philosophers purport to remain morally neutral. Their aim is not to answer moral questions. Rather, they step on a higher level of abstraction and propose philosophical claims about such questions. Depending on the particular nature of these claims, we can distinguish four main areas of metaethics (see Huemer 2005: 1–2):

1. (1) Moral Semantics is about moral language, or more precisely about the meaning and reference of moral sentences and terms.
2. (2) Philosophical Moral Psychology¹ is about moral thinking, or more precisely about the meaning and reference of moral judgments and concepts.
3. (3) Moral Epistemology is about moral knowledge, or more precisely about the possibility and sources of moral knowledge.
4. (4) Moral Metaphysics is about moral reality, or more precisely about the existence and nature of moral properties and facts.

While it has occasionally been argued that moral realism and anti-realism are views in normative ethics,² I will here—in accordance with the broad majority of philosophers—assume that they must rather be regarded as (at least primarily) metaethical claims. This means that in investigating the question of moral reality we cannot hope for (significant) knowledge about what we morally ought to do (about whether we may break promises, whether we are obliged to maximize happiness, whether we are morally responsible to mitigate climate change and so on). What is at issue in this debate is rather the philosophical nature or status of morality.³

Assuming that moral realism and anti-realism are metaethical claims, which particular metaethical issue/s are they about? Here philosophers’ opinions diverge strongly. In fact, it is not even clear to which main area/s of metaethics the moral realism/anti-realism debate is most appropriately ascribed to. In light of my above characterizations (“moral reality,” “out there,” “waiting to be discovered”), the most obvious choice seems to be moral metaphysics. However, the moral realism/anti-realism debate has recently also been understood as a debate in moral semantics (concerning, for example, the truth-aptness and truth of moral sentences; Sayre-McCord 1988), in moral epistemology (concerning whether we have any moral knowledge; e.g., Horwich 1998), and in several non-metaphysical areas of metaethics combined (e.g., Boyd 1988).

Many of my theses and arguments in this book will hold on most or all plausible understandings of the question of moral reality. My explicit focus, however, will be on the most natural and historically most prominent metaphysical way of understanding this question (see, e.g., Brink 1989: 7; Huemer 2005: 4; Joyce 2007a; Miller 2014). In particular, I assume that moral realism and anti-realism are about the existence of objective moral properties (properties such as moral rightness, wrongness, goodness, badness). Proponents of any variant of realism believe that there are such properties (even though they disagree about their nature). Proponents of any variant of anti-realism, in contrast, deny their existence (even though they disagree about why these properties do not exist).

Moral Realism: Objective moral properties exist.

Moral Anti-Realism: Objective moral properties do not exist.

Needless to say, claims about the existence of objective moral properties can themselves be interpreted in different ways. So let me also briefly explain my understanding of these claims’ main concepts: “properties,” “existence,” “objectivity” and “morality.”

Properties and Existence

Properties are entities that are ascribed to things in order to characterize them. One important metaphysical debate about properties concerns the question of whether there can be properties that are not exemplified (i.e., not had by any thing). For example, could there be redness without anything in the world actually being red? In the context of our discussion, we fortunately need not concern ourselves with this debate. This is because when moral realists and anti-realists talk about moral properties, they almost unanimously mean exemplified moral properties. In other words, their disagreement is not about whether such properties exist in some abstract realm but about whether anything in the world is actually objectively morally right, wrong, good, bad and so on. (Shafer-Landau 2006: 210).

A concept closely related to properties—and one that I will also often use in what follows—is the concept of facts. Facts consist in the exemplification of properties by things. For example, to say that it is a fact that breaking promises is always wrong is just to say that breaking promises always exemplifies the property of wrongness. Since the moral realism/anti-realism debate is about the existence of exemplified objective moral properties (as just pointed out), this means that instead of saying that moral realists and anti-realists disagree about the existence of objective moral properties, we can also say that they disagree about the existence of objective moral facts. While moral realists affirm the existence of objective moral facts, moral anti-realists deny them.

Objectivity

In comparison to “properties” and “existence,” explaining the sense of objectivity that is at issue in the moral realism/anti-realism debate is a much more delicate matter. Different philosophical debates are based on fundamentally different accounts of this concept. In our particular context, objectivity is most often—and, I believe, most aptly—explicated as observer- (or mind- or subject‑ or stance-)independence (e.g., Huemer 2005: 2–4; Joyce 2007a; Miller 2014; Shafer-Landau 2003). For a property to be objective in this sense means that whether a thing has this property is independent from the mental states of observers—from what individuals believe about it, from what cultures dominantly believe about it, from how observers respond to it and so on.⁴

To better grasp the distinction between observer-independence and observer-dependence, it is helpful to look at some examples. A clear case of an objective property is squareness. Whether a thing is square is determined by whether it has four equal sides and equal angles. It does not matter whether any observer believes that the thing is square, desires that it is square, hopes that it is square and so on (Huemer 2005: 2). From our everyday lives we are familiar with subjective properties as well. Facts about what is “fashionable” or “red,” for example, do seem to depend on the mental states of observers. For a thing to be fashionable means that (particular) people believe it is fashionable, and for a thing to be red means that normal subjects under normal conditions respond to it by having red-experiences.⁵

The question of the objectivity of moral rightness, wrongness, goodness, badness and so on can be understood as asking whether these properties’ metaphysical status resembles that of squareness or rather that of fashionableness/redness. Suppose it were always wrong to break promises. Would breaking promises still be always wrong if I myself believed that it is not always wrong to break promises, if the culture in which I live dominantly believed that it is not always wrong to break promises, if humans did not respond with disapproval to breaking promises and so on?

Morality

Finally, understanding our metaphysical definition of the moral realism/anti-realism debate also requires considering the notion of morality.

What it means for a property to be moral depends on what moral sentences and judgments purport to refer to, and thus on what these sentences and judgments mean. This is a highly controversial issue. For example, must a judgment purport to refer to objective moral facts in order to qualify as moral? Must it be accompanied by corresponding motivation? Must it entail categorical reasons for action? Must it be about a particular subject matter, such as harm or fairness? One’s answers to many of these questions strongly affect the plausibility of the existence of objective moral truths. Both moral realists and anti-realists have accordingly put great efforts into substantiating particular conceptual accounts of moral sentences and judgments (in particular, those accounts that are entailed by or fit well with their respective metaphysical views).

Most strongly and clearly, the plausibility of moral realism and anti-realism depends on the semantic/philosophically psychological question of what (if anything) moral sentences and judgments purport to refer to. Suppose, for example, moral sentences and judgments did not purport to refer to objective moral facts. Of course, this would not affect which kinds of objective facts exist. The world’s inventory would remain unchanged. Yet such a non-objectivist moral semantics and philosophical moral psychology would imply that whatever objective facts do exist, none of them deserve to be called moral. This is because moral facts are those facts that we purport to refer to when we speak and think about morality (see Huemer 2005: 4–7; Loeb 2008: 355, 359–360; Shafer-Landau 2003: 17).

In what follows, it will be helpful to be able to relate moral realism and anti-realism most naturally and economically to their semantic and philosophically psychological presuppositions. I will therefore often state these claims in terms of objective moral truths (i.e., objectively true moral sentences and judgments). In particular, I will understand realism as the affirmation and anti-realism as the denial of objective moral truths. This alternative formulation does not betray the fact that moral realism and anti-realism are essentially about moral reality—or at least, it does not do so as long as one assumes what I take to be the most plausible conception of moral truth.

In this book I assume that moral truth is best understood in a “correspondence-theoretic” sense (see Huemer 2005: 38–44; Miller 2009: 138–140; Sayre-McCord 2015). According to this understanding, moral truth is about the correct representation of moral facts. A moral sentence or judgment is true if and only if it correctly represents such a fact. For example, the sentence “Breaking promises is always wrong” is (objectively) true if and only if it is an (objective) fact that breaking promises is always wrong, and the sentence “We ought to maximize overall happiness” is (objectively) true if and only if it is an (objective) fact that we ought to maximize overall happiness.

Assuming this correspondence-theoretic understanding of moral truth, the claims that objective moral truths exist or do not exist entail moral realism or anti-realism in the metaphysical sense. Suppose some moral sentences and judgments were objectively true. Then objective moral facts would have to exist. After all, objective moral facts are what make objectively true moral sentences and judgments true. If no moral sentence and judgment were objectively true, on the other hand, then there could be no objective moral facts either (otherwise, given plausible assumptions about the relation between moral metaphysics and epistemology, some of these sentences or judgments would actually be objectively true) (see Huemer 2005: 5; van Roojen 2013).⁶

1.2 The Scientific Approach

In this book, I do not argue for moral realism or anti-realism. As stated at the beginning, my aim is rather to assess recent attempts to support or undermine these views by appeal to scientific evidence. Let us thus also consider this scientific approach in m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Metatheoretical Considerations
• 3 Folk Moral Realism
• 4 Moral Disagreement
• 5 Moral Judgments and Emotions
• 6 The Evolution of Morality
• 7 Conclusion
• Index