Can Your Worldview Handle Morality?

Moral Realism Isn’t Cheap, Friends

When people talk about objective morality, they usually just mean that whatever else morality is, it isn’t something entirely determined by our preferences, sentiments, opinions, or attitudes, etc. There’s something independent of our “mere fancies” that sets a moral standard. Typically, moral objectivity involves both moral values and obligations—statements represented by presumably true propositions such as “murder is bad” or “you should never slander people for fun.”

But when it comes to morality, we’re looking for more than just independence from stances or attitudes. What we want from morality—from a truly robust theory of moral realism—is not only moral facts, but also constraints around those facts, real strength behind them, and a high degree of success in our cognitive contact with them.¹ That is, we generally believe many true things about morality, and we’re generally justified in those beliefs.

Let’s take each of these in turn.

Stance-independence is what we’ve already touched on—namely, that moral facts are real and not dependent on our contingent attitudes. Put differently, some things really are good or bad, right or wrong, wholly irrespective of whether you or I like them or desire them.

Constraint is another critical—though often overlooked—feature: moral facts are neither arbitrary nor a total “free for all”. They’re subject to substantive limits. For example, it could not have been the case that “it is good to slander people for fun” was a moral fact. Most people would agree with this on a (probably, deeply) intuitive level. But the question, of course, is: What explains this? What, if anything, could constrain the moral landscape?

Strength means that morality carries real weight. Moral facts don’t just sit there, minding their own business—passive, inert, easy to ignore little things. No! They make demands. We feel those demands—and in many cases, we recognize that we have good, even compelling, reasons to follow them. So again: What gives morality this force? What accounts for its authority?

Success refers to our ability to know moral truths and be justified in our moral beliefs. In other words, any theory of moral realism worth its salt has to explain how we have reliable cognitive contact with moral reality.

Once the full range of considerations concerning moral realism is taken into view, at least this much should be clear: it isn’t cheap. These features seem to demand a rather rich metaphysical program—replete with all sorts of queer entities, indeed!²—if they’re to be accommodated at all. In other words, they’re really not the sort of thing—if we’re all just willing to shoot straight for a moment—that something as metaphysically impoverished as, say, physicalism, can handle. However, I would suggest that many forms of theism would struggle mightily with making sense of the complete suite of features as well.

So the question I leave for the reader is this: What worldview, if any, can offer a plausible account of all these desiderata? And by plausible, I don’t just mean logically consistent—logical consistency, as we all know, comes fairly cheap. I mean a worldview that naturally anticipates or predicts these moral features, rather than, you know, flagrantly retrofitting them through layer upon layer of ad hoc theorizing. In other words, a worldview that doesn’t merely accommodate moral reality, but actually makes sense of it.

For my money, I can think of two—maybe three (and you can probably guess one)—serious contenders. Maybe I’ll say more about them later. But for now, I’ve got a Costco run to make.

1. These are some of the desiderata proposed in The Moral Universe.

2. Of course, queer is contextual. What might seem strange or extravagant to the physicalist might feel perfectly at home to the Aristotelian.