Oct 6 JDN 2460590

In the last few posts I have only considered arguments against moral realism, and shown them to be lacking. Yet if you were already convinced of moral anti-realism, this probably didn’t change your mind—it’s entirely possible to have a bad argument for a good idea. (Consider the following argument: “Whales are fish, fish are mammals, therefore whales are mammals.”) What you need is arguments for moral realism.

Fortunately, such arguments are not hard to find. My personal favorite was offered by one of my professors in a philosophy course: “I fail all moral anti-realists. If you think that’s unfair, don’t worry: You’re not a moral anti-realist.” In other words, if you want to talk coherently at all about what actions are good or bad, fair or unfair, then you cannot espouse moral anti-realism; and if you do espouse moral anti-realism, there is no reason for us not to simply ignore you (or imprison you!) and go on living out our moral beliefs—especially if you are right that morality is a fiction. Indeed, the reason we don’t actually imprison all moral anti-realists is precisely because we are moral realists, and we think it is morally wrong to imprison someone for espousing unpopular or even ridiculous beliefs.

That of course is a pragmatic argument, not very compelling on epistemological grounds, but there are other arguments that cut deeper. Perhaps the most compelling is the realization that rationality itself is a moral principle—it says that we ought to believe what conforms to reason and ought not to believe what does not. We need at least some core notion of normativity even to value truth and honesty, to seek knowledge, to even care whether moral realism is correct or incorrect. In a total moral vacuum, we can fight over our values and beliefs, we can kill each other over them, but we cannot discuss them or debate them, for discussion and debate themselves presuppose certain moral principles.

Typically moral anti-realists expect us to accept epistemic normativity, but if they do this then they cannot deny the legitimacy of all normative claims. If their whole argument rests upon undermining normativity, then it is self-defeating. If it doesn’t, then anti-realists need to explain the difference between “moral” and “normative”, and explain why the former is so much more suspect than the latter—but even then we have objective obligations that bind our behavior. The difference, I suppose, would involve a tight restriction on the domains of discourse in which normativity applies. Scientific facts? Normative. Interpersonal relations? Subjective. I suppose it’s logically coherent to say that it is objectively wrong to be a Creationist but not objectively wrong to be a serial killer; but this is nothing if not counter-intuitive.

Moreover, it is unclear to me what a universe would be like if it had no moral facts. In what sort of universe would it not be best to believe what is true? In what sort of universe would it not be wrong to harm others for selfish gains? In what sort of world would it be wrong to keep a promise, or good to commit genocide? It seems to me that we are verging on nonsense, rather like what happens if we try to imagine a universe where 2+2=5.

Moreover, there is a particular moral principle, which depends upon moral realism, yet is almost universally agreed upon, even by people who otherwise profess to be moral relativists or anti-realists.

I call it the Hitler Principle, and it’s quite simple:

The Holocaust was bad.

In large part, ethical philosophy since 1945 has been the attempt to systematically justify the Hitler Principle. Only if moral realism is true can we say that the Holocaust was bad, morally bad, unequivocally, objectively, universally, regardless of the beliefs, feelings, desires, culture or upbringing of its perpetrators. And if we can’t even say that, can we say anything at all? If the Holocaust wasn’t wrong, nothing is. And if nothing is wrong, then does it even matter if we believe what is true?

But then, stop and think for a moment: If we know this—if it’s so obvious to just about everyone that the Holocaust was wrong, so obvious that anyone who denies it we immediately recognize as evil or insane (or lying or playing games)—then doesn’t that already offer us an objective moral standard?

I contend that it does—that the Hitler Principle is so self-evident that it can form an objective standard by which to measure all moral theory. I would sooner believe the Sun revolves around the Earth than deny the Holocaust was wrong. I would sooner consider myself a brain in a vat than suppose that systematic extermination of millions of innocent people could ever be morally justified. Richard Swinburne, a philosopher of religion at Oxford, put it well: “it is more obvious to almost all of us that the genocide conducted by Hitler was morally wrong than that we are not now dreaming, or that the Earth is many millions of years old.” Because at least this one moral fact is so obviously, incorrigibly true, we can use it to test our theories of morality. Just as we would immediately reject any theory of physics which denied that the sky is blue, we should also reject any theory of morality which denies that the Holocaust was wrong. This might seem obvious, but by itself it is sufficient to confirm moral realism.

Similar arguments can be made for other moral propositions that virtually everyone accepts, like the following:

1. Theft is wrong.
2. Homicide is wrong.
3. Lying is wrong.
4. Rape is wrong.
5. Kindness is good.
6. Keeping promises is good.
7. Happiness is good.
8. Suffering is bad.

With appropriate caveats (lying isn’t always wrong, if it is justified by some greater good; homicide is permissible in self-defense; promises made under duress do not oblige; et cetera), all of these propositions are accepted by almost everyone, and most people hold them with greater certainty than they would hold any belief about empirical science. “Science proves that time is relative” is surprising and counter-intuitive, but people can accept it; “Science proves that homicide is good” is not something anyone would believe for an instant. There is wider agreement and greater confidence about these basic moral truths than there is about any fact in science, even “the Earth is round” or “gravity pulls things toward each other”—for well before Newton or even Archimedes, people still knew that homicide was wrong.

Though there are surely psychopaths who disagree (basically because their brains are defective), the vast majority of people agree on these fundamental moral claims. At least 95\% of humans who have ever lived share this universal moral framework, under which the wrongness of genocide is as directly apprehensible as the blueness of the sky and the painfulness of a burn. Moral realism is on as solid an epistemic footing as any fact in science.