Doxazo Theos

The Plausibility of Naturalistic Moral Realism

A promising new view has emerged in metaethics: naturalistic moral realism (NMR), the view that moral properties and facts are akin to abstract objects, such as numbers or necessarily true propositions. Because abstract objects are often taken to be necessarily existent and expressive of objective facts about reality, perhaps viewing morality in a similar way could sufficiently ground its objectivity apart from any reference to non-naturalistic views such as theism. For example, the moral property justice exists in the same way redness does, and moral facts such as murder is wrong exists and is true in the something like the way the proposition 2 + 2 = 4 does. Call this view naturalistic moral realism (NMR, for short). According to NMR, moral properties and facts a part of, or at least arise from, the natural world. This view is championed by atheist philosopher Michael Martin, and others have followed suit (e.g., Paul Kurtz, Louise Antony, Erik Wielenberg, Walter Sinnot-Armstron, Henry Shafer-Landau, David Brink, Roderick Firth, Richard Boyd). Without heralding NMR an unprecedented success too hastily, let me briefly mention some of the difficulties that I see at least on a surface level.

1. Epistemological Objection
First, if moral properties and facts are akin to abstract objects, then NMR faces the same difficulties traditional platonism does; chiefly, the epistemological objection. If moral properties and facts exist in the same way abstract objects do (i.e., a se and causally impotent), then such a view would render moral properties and facts unknowable. In order to have knowledge of something external to our minds, there has to be a relation between our minds and that something. But how can an unextended, causally effete abstract object or moral principle enter such a relation? Treating moral properties and facts like abstract objects would render moral knowledge impossible.

2. Unintelligibility Objection
Second, if we could somehow have knowledge of abstract moral properties and facts, they would nonetheless be unintelligible. Just what it means to say that moral properties such justice and charitableness, or moral facts such as murder is wrong, exist of themselves is wholly unclear. I understand what these properties and facts mean when related to persons (e.g., the judge exacted justice; Al’s charitableness is admirable), but to say there exists entities called justice or the fact murder is wrong without moral subjects is rather uninformative.

3. Normativity Objection
Third, if we could have knowledge of abstract moral properties and facts and they were intelligible to us, why should we feel obliged to obey them? Why should we be duty-bound by them? They are no different than any other property or fact. For example, while the laws of physics might objectively describe and even delimit feasible courses of behavior, I have no obligations to them. They’re just there. They would be abstractly, not practically relevant to my behavior. As it is sometimes put, such laws are merely descriptive, not prescriptive. But it is the latter that conveys normativity. Prominent ethicist Richard Taylor points this out:

A duty is something that is owed…But something can be owed only to some person or persons. There can be no such thing as duty in isolation…Our obligations can … be understood as those that are imposed by God…But what if this higher-than-human lawgiver is no longer taken into account? Does the concept of moral obligation…still make sense?…the concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain but their meaning is gone

Nothing about a brute given conveys normativity. If it is true that one cannot move from an is to an ought, as Hume argued, NMR is in patent violation of this. (Note too that I cannot choose to obey the law of gravity or the law laws of logic, whereas I could choose to obey moral facts. There seems to be relevant disanalogy here.) The problem would be even more pressing were such abstract moral facts to conflict with my own self-interests. For example, say it is a brute fact that it is a duty to keep promises. Who or what is to hold me accountable to this fact should I choose to lie to get ahead instead? I am reminded of Stephen Crane’s short poem, “A man said to the universe”:

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“That fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

I take Crane’s point to be effectively saying the same: brute givens do not convey normativity.

4. Taxi Cab Objection
Fourth, if we could have knowledge of abstract moral properties and facts and they were intelligible to us and they did convey normativity, what makes them have the moral status they do? Why are good properties good, bad properties bad, and moral facts obligatory? The defender of NMR has a ready response: moral properties are good and bad brutely, and all moral propositions are brute facts. Just charitableness is a brute good, greed is a brute vice. Similarly, just as it is a duty to keep promises is a brute moral fact, so is murder is wrong.

But this leaves us wondering why the brutes are this way. Usually when something is said to be brute, there is something about that thing’s nature that would lead us to think it is brute. For example, certain axioms in logic and mathematics are sometimes said to be brute facts because they unprovable—any attempt at their proof winds up assuming their validity. But moral properties and facts do not seem like this at all. Even most necessary truths are not like this—they require some kind of explanation explanation (“for example, ‘Water is necessarily H₂O’ still requires an explanation for water’s existence and structure”–Copan). So even if murder is wrong is a necessary truth, nothing about it suggests no further explanation is required (it certainly isn’t analytic). There does not seem to be anything about the nature of moral properties and facts that suggest themselves to be brutes.

Simply claiming they are brute and leaving it at that smacks of what Alexander Pruss and Richard Gale have dubbed the taxi-cab fallacy: arbitrarily dismissing a request for explanation (like a passing cab) once one wants to go no further. But the situation does push us to go further. Otherwise, we’re left with what seems like a remarkable coincidence: just those moral properties and facts we would hope to be brutes are brutes! What’s better is that we’ve naturally evolved in such a way as to successfully exemplify and enforce them. As it has been said, “It’s as if the moral realm knew we were coming!” This effectively brings out the next difficulty.

5. Speciesism Objection
Fifth, even if we could have knowledge of abstract moral principles and they were intelligible to us and they did convey normativity and this does not lead to the taxi cab fallacy, why think they’re any more applicable to humans than any other creature? If the moral realm just exists wholly apart from creatures, wouldn’t it be just as true and binding for one species as another? When a lion kills a zebra or a pack of male hyenas collectively inseminate a female hyena, who don’t we charge lions with murder or hyenas with gang-rape? What makes us so special? To suggest that moral principles are part of the natural framework of reality but then suggest they’re only relevant to human behavior is speciesism—the unjustified bias towards one’s own species.

6. Queerness Objection
Sixth, even if we could have knowledge of abstract moral principles and they were intelligible to us and they did convey normativity and this does not lead to the taxi cab fallacy and this didn’t occasion speciesism, it isn’t entirely clear that abstract objects themselves are complimentary to a naturalistic worldview, much less objective moral principles. There are of course varying degrees of naturalism, some strong and some modest. Stronger varieties, such as those committed to a hard-core materialism or only to objects existing within space and time are not just uncomfortable bedfellows of abstracta, they do not share the same bed at all. The vindication of one is the falsification of the other. Hence Howard Robinson’s remark that “materialist theories are incompatible with realist theories…the tie between nominalism and materialism is an ancient one”. But more sophisticated versions of naturalism try to make room for abstracta. Take Graham Oppy’s, a contemporary defender of naturalism, for example:

a. There are no entities which are causally related to things hereabouts but which are not spatially related to things hereabouts (hence: no souls, no spooks, no entelechies, no gods), and b. there is no sufficiently good reason for believing in the kinds of entities which are denied to exist in a.

There is no prima facie inconsistency between Oppy’s definition of naturalism and the existence of abstract objects. However, there are good reasons for thinking there is at least tension between the two. This is because abstract objects, and moral principles, seem to be very queer entities in the naturalistic universe. The late atheist J. L. Mackie agrees:

If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe. Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty of … perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else.

7. Probabilistic Objections
Seventh, even if we could have knowledge of abstract moral principles and they were intelligible to us and they did convey normativity and this does not lead to the taxi cab fallacy and this didn’t occasion speciesism and they weren’t in tension with naturalism, it is unlikely that our moral faculties would have evolved in such a way for us to have justified moral beliefs. This unlikely because, on naturalism, the belief-forming mechanism responsible for our moral beliefs wasn’t concerned with whether such beliefs were true. Perhaps evolutionary naturalism could explain how a moral belief-forming mechanism in us could be advantageous, but explaining how those beliefs have come to have the content they do is a whole different monster.

If we take theism and naturalism as our two competing hypotheses in explaining the objectivity of morality, we have reason to prefer theism over naturalism. J. P. Moreland makes this point well:

If evolutionary theory is all there is to the development of the cosmos from the big bang to man, then any view which postulates the brute existence of morals would seem to do so in an ad hoc way. The general background theory would count against the veridicality of the claim to know that morals exist, even though it would still be logically possible for them to exist. If theism is true, one’s background theory explains the existence of human morality. But if one … accepts [evolutionary naturalism], then it would seem more reasonable to accept an evolutionary, subjectivist view of morality. The existence of objective values would still be possible, but it would be unlikely and ad hoc, given this background theory. The claim to intuitively perceive such values would have such a background theory as a defeater. The background theory of theism supports such claims and makes them prima facie justified because it removes the background theory (atheistic evolution as the only account for human life and morality) which is the defeater.

More could be said in support of a probabilistic argument here, such as how theism’s account of objective morality is simpler and has more scope. But in short, where (OM) is objective morality, (N) is naturalism, and (T), theism, Pr(OM|N) < Pr(OM|T).

8. Ad Hoc-ness
Finally, even if we could have knowledge of abstract moral principles and they were intelligible to us and they did convey normativity and this does not lead to the taxi cab fallacy and this didn’t occasion speciesism and they weren’t in tension with naturalism and the probability of having justified moral beliefs on naturalism is greater than or equal to than that on theism, NMR seems extremely ad hoc. Traditionally, the naturalist has agreed with the theist that if morality is objective, God is needed as their ontological foundation. Consequently, the naturalist has bitten the bullet and defended moral relativism. Only recently, however, has NMR been seriously entertained. To me this shows that the recent and powerful defenses of moral realism has is forcing naturalists to seek alternative explanations. Rather than stomach the moral relativism naturalism would their view seems to entail, naturalists sneaking their hands into the theist’s ontological cookie jar.

To summarize, if naturalistic moral realism can explain how we could have knowledge of abstract moral principles, how such principles could be intelligible in abstracto, how they could convey normativity, why this normativity applies only to virtues instead of vices, how this doesn’t occasion speciesism, how they are straight (as opposed to queer) in a naturalists universe, how the probability of having justified moral beliefs about them could be high or greater than or equal to than that on theism, and it how it isn’t really ad hoc, then I guess NMR isn’t so implausible, after all. One is left wondering why anyone would be reluctant to embrace this fashionable new trend with the utmost of philosophical confidence.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Apologetics, Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

4 Responses to “The Plausibility of Naturalistic Moral Realism”

mattghg Says:
March 5th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
I suppose the naturalist might well concede that Pr(OM|N) Pr(T|OM&E), where E is the rest of the evidece.

I agree with this whole of this post, though. I’d have thought that moral realism, even if not impossible on atheism, would still be unacceptable, given that it seems to make moral agents a whole lot “more “at home” in the universe than is securarly comfortable” (Nagel).
Alexander R Pruss Says:
March 13th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
1. I am not sure the normativity worry is so bad. According to AMR, it is a brute fact that it is a duty to keep promises (say). Given that it is a duty to keep promises, does it make sense to ask why I should feel obliged to keep promises? What better reason for feeling obliged to do something is there than being obliged to do it?

2. Perhaps the atheist should just abandon the doctrine that abstracta are causally ineffective. Granted, that would sit poorly with naturalism. But need an atheist be a naturalist? (Most Western atheists are naturalists, of course.)
Alexander R Pruss Says:
March 13th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
It’s worth noting that besides moral normativity and Platonism about abstracta, the same issues arise with respect to rational normativity (whether epistemic or practical or prudential), which many people (erroneously) think is distinct from moral normativity.
Chad McIntosh Says:
March 14th, 2008 at 1:07 am
I was curious to see Martin make that same point in his reply to Copan. I have not read the ethicists Martin cites in support of this point, but it seems to me, even if conceded, the normativity issue isn’t resolved. Say it is a brute fact that it is a duty to keep promises. Why isn’t it is a duty to lie to get ahead a brute fact? It is hard to see how one could avoid arbitrariness here. Even supposing we conceded that only the former is a valid duty-binding principle, the issue of normativity still doesn’t seem resolved because there isn’t any sort of practical accountability, collectively or individually (especially in the face of self-interest or majority-ruled evils).

4 Responses to “The Plausibility of Naturalistic Moral Realism”

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