On the objectivity of ethical judgments

The middle way between the Scylla of relativism and the Charybdis of absolutism

Is ethics a little bit like math? Image from makeuseof.com.

These days a lot of my students are moral relativists, that is, they deny the existence of objective moral judgments. Typically they do so out of good intentions, rooted in a sense of tolerance toward other cultures. Who am I, they implicitly ask, to judge the practices of this or that group?

Of course, they do judge the practices of one group or another. Just ask them whether they object to the Nazi perpetrating the Holocaust and their relativism immediately goes out the window. As it should.

Relativism is a form of what philosopher call “anti-realism” in matters of ethics. A relativist doesn’t think that there are facts of the matter about right and wrong, as there are facts of the matter, say, about whether Saturn has rings (assuming you are a realist about planetary features). It’s all opinion, and yours is just as good as mine.

Perhaps the current anti-realist / relativist trend is a predictable, and even welcome, corrective to centuries of its opposite, moral realism, especially the kind founded on religion. As everyone who has been brought up within one of the faiths in the Abrahamic tradition knows well, something is right (or wrong) because God says it is right (or wrong). That’s just as true and real as the rings of Saturn, and you better believe it, or else.

The problem with that sort of approach is that it was debunked by Socrates almost two and a half millennia ago, specifically in the delightful Platonic dialogue known as the Euthyphro. At one point, Socrates puts a crucial question to the obnoxious title character who thinks he knows exactly the difference between pious and impious because he understands the will of the gods so well: “The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods.”

Either way you answer, you are in trouble, despite the protestations of countless theologians during the past two millennia. If you take the first horn of the dilemma (something is beloved by the gods because it is holy), then it turns out that we don’t need gods to tell us what is moral, because there appears to be some sort of external standard to which even the gods must defer. If you take the second horn (something is holy because it is beloved by the gods) then you are for all effective purposes arguing that (divine) might makes right, so that morality doesn’t really exist. One way or the other, gods—if they exist—have nothing to do with morality.

Is there is a non-God invoking way to get moral realism, then? One of the most influential atheist philosophers of the 20th century, J.L. Mackie, didn’t think so. He proposed his famous “argument from queerness,” which pretty much dispatches of that possibility as well. According to Mackie, if moral realism were true then there would be objectively prescriptive moral rules, something like the laws of nature discovered by scientists. But—for a variety of reasons that he discusses in details—most philosophers don’t think that there is a moral equivalent of, say, the law of gravity. Therefore, objective moral values do not exist.

(The argument is called “from queerness” because it establishes that moral values would be a very odd sort of thing, if they were real.)

John Leslie Mackie proposed the argument from queerness against ethical realism. Image from Wikimedia.

Of course there have been critics of both Euthyphro’s dilemma and Mackie. This is philosophy, there are critics of everything. But I looked at a lot of the responses to both arguments and found them to be wholly inadequate and chiefly based on either unproductive logic chopping or a misunderstanding of what is being claimed in the first place.

So then what? If both realism and anti-realism in ethics are untenable, are we out of options when it comes to moral discourse? An interesting article by Tim Sommers in 3QuarksDaily, entitled “Two sources of objectivity in ethics” offers a third way, one very similar to something I have been arguing for a number of years, and which in a technical paper published when I was a graduate student in philosophy I referred to as moral quasi-realism.

Sommers first dispatches of modern simplistic forms of moral realism derived from a scientistic attitude to the problem, i.e., an attitude that assumes that if a question is meaningful there must be a scientific, empirically-based answer to it. Otherwise the question is meaningless or irrelevant. The worst example of this is found in Sam Harris’ infamous book, The Moral Landscape (see my review here). I am going to bet that Harris never read Mackie, and likely didn’t bother with the Euthyphro either. Amusingly, Sommers dispatches of Harris in a few lines:

“[Then] there is Sam Harris’s widely-read book from a few years ago: The Moral Landscape—How Science Can Determine Human Values. Now, if ‘science’ could determine human values, depending on exactly how it did so, we might well have an answer to [relativism]. Unfortunately, if I had been asked to review that book, I might have followed Wittgenstein who once said of a book that he would agree with it if you put the entire text in brackets and wrote in front ‘It is not the case that.’ … Harris’s central claim that ‘science’ will save ethics is either tautological—because whatever objective methods we develop to answer ethical questions will be, by an expansive enough definition, some kind of science—or false—since none of the existing sciences—physics, chemistry, or even biology—are likely ever to answer ethical questions.”

Precisely, so let us not waste any more time on that sort of thing and move on to the core of Sommers’ article, which is that if we look at things from outside the narrow confines imposed by the false dichotomy of realism vs anti-realism, there are two sources of objectivity in ethics, firmly grounding what I call the project of quasi-realism.

The first such source can most easily be understood by making an analogy between ethics and health. Since we are biological organisms of a certain kinds, there are objective statements about what is or is not, biologically speaking, healthy for us.The fact that people don’t always act accordingly, or that they have different opinions about it, is irrelevant. When your doctor tells you not to smoke, or to drink less, she is making a normative, not just descriptive, statement. You ought not to smoke, or you ought to drink less (if you wish to keep healthy and live longer).

Similarly, from an ethical perspective, we are highly social beings capable of language and sophisticated reasoning, so there are certain things that are objectively good or bad for us from a moral perspective (if we care about human welfare and flourishing). Random violence from others is bad, access to education is good; being another person’s slave is bad, being able to pursue our projects as rational agents is good. And so forth.

As Sommers puts it, welfare, like health, is at least partially objective and empirically ascertainable. Notice, though, the qualifier “partially” and notice also my “if” parenthetical statements above. There are many ways to be healthy or unhealthy, medically speaking; and there are many ways of being ethical or unethical, morally speaking. Which is why facts (and therefore “science”) underdetermine moral philosophy. We need the facts, but they do not, by themselves, uniquely fix what we ought to do. Which is why we also need to reason and argue about them on the basis of our values and preferences.

And that brings me to Sommers’ second source of objectivity in ethics. We have just concluded that ethics is a kind of reasoning about means to our ends in terms of welfare or flourishing. Again: IF we want people to be able to pursue their autonomous projects THEN we need to guarantee them not only safety and access to food and shelter, but also higher level goods, like education, health care, and so forth. This sort of instrumental reasoning can be raised one level, so to speak, in order for us to reason (and argue) about the ends themselves, not just the means to achieve them. What should our overall goal be? Maximizing human agency? Flourishing? Happiness? Pleasure? How should we balance these different goals in the context of a diverse society where people have different understandings of what flourishing, happiness, and so forth mean in the first place?

Here Sommers makes the same comparison between ethics and mathematics that I’ve been proposing for years as a sensible way to demystify what it means to arrive at objective ethical judgments:

“If [all of this] sounds unlikely, even mystical, compare mathematics. Mathematics is also all in our head. The principles lead to axioms which lead to proofs. But they begin as intuitions to be balanced and fit together. All the rigor comes later. … There are whole disciplines—rational decision theory and microeconomics, at least—devoted to systematizing how we think about reasoning about means to ends. There is controversy there and competing axioms are proposed. But almost no one thinks that developing an axiomatic approach to instrumental reasoning is subjective.”

While Sommers applies this parallel with mathematics to ethics in particular, I have developed a general application of it to the nature of philosophical inquiry more broadly construed. For me all branches of philosophy—from ethics to metaphysics, from political philosophy to aesthetics—work in the way Sommers describes: they take as input certain facts about the world and then build alternative accounts of how to think about those facts. This is not science because the facts of the world always grossly underdetermine our philosophical accounts, and the job of the philosopher can be thought of as that of: (i) arriving at new accounts that are internally coherent and externally congruous with the best available facts; and (ii) critically examining existing accounts in order to either reject or refine them.

Sommers summarizes his take, with which I wholeheartedly agree, in this way:

“So here are at least two potential sources of objectivity that can inform our ethics. On the one hand, welfare, what is good and bad for persons, is (at least partly) objective—it’s really out there, part of the furniture of the world. On the other hand, reasoning about what to do is a kind of reasoning. Like all reasoning, it goes on inside our heads, but, like all reasoning, it (potentially) has a kind of objective rigor to it.”

It will come to no surprise to my regular readers that this is exactly the approach used in virtue ethics, and in particular (but certainly not only) by the Stoics. There is no paradox at all involved in acknowledging that moral facts are not Platonic ideas out there in the world, and yet rejecting the relativist conclusion that anything goes, or that when we say “X is unethical” we are simply expressing a strong dislike, as some anti-realists maintain. There are good reasons, based on facts about human nature, and which can be explored philosophically, for arriving at ethical judgments.

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P.S.: the sort of “if…then” approach to ethical reasoning discussed above is known as using conditional imperatives, and has been introduced in ethics by Philippa Foot. You can find her original 1972 paper here.