Moral realism
Encyclopedia
Moral realism is the meta-ethical
view which claims that:
This makes moral realism a non-nihilist
form of cognitivism
. Moral realism stands in opposition to all forms of moral anti-realism
, including ethical subjectivism
(which denies that moral propositions refer to objective facts), error theory (which denies that any moral propositions are true), and non-cognitivism
(which denies that moral sentences express propositions at all). Within moral realism, the two main subdivisions are ethical naturalism
and ethical non-naturalism
.
According to Richard Boyd
, moral realism means that:
Most philosophers today accept or lean towards moral realism, as do most meta-ethicists, and twice as many philosophers accept or lean towards moral realism as accept or lean towards moral anti-realism. Some examples of robust moral realists include David Brink, John McDowell
, Peter Railton
, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord
, Michael Smith, Terence Cuneo, Russ Shafer-Landau
, G.E. Moore, John Finnis
, Richard Boyd
, Nicholas Sturgeon, Thomas Nagel
, and Plato
. Norman Geras
has argued that Karl Marx
was a moral realist.
The minimal model
, on the other hand, leaves off the metaphysical thesis, treating it as matter of contention among moral realists (as opposed to between moral realists and moral anti-realists). This dispute is not insignificant, as acceptance or rejection of the metaphysical thesis is taken by those employing the robust model as the key difference between moral realism and moral anti-realism. Indeed, the question of how to classify certain logically possible
(if eccentric) views—such as the rejection of the semantic and alethic theses in conjunction with the acceptance of the metaphysical thesis—turns on which model we accept. Someone employing the robust model might call such a view "realist non-cognitivism," while someone employing the minimal model might simply place such a view alongside other, more traditional, forms of non-cognitivism.
The robust model and the minimal model also disagree over how to classify moral subjectivism (roughly, the view that moral facts are not mind-independent in the relevant sense, but that moral statements may still be true). The historical association of subjectivism with moral anti-realism in large part explains why the robust model of moral realism has been dominant—even if only implicitly—both in the traditional and contemporary philosophical literature on metaethics.
In the minimal sense of realism, R.M. Hare could be considered a realist in his later works, as he is committed to the objectivity of value judgments, even though he denies that moral statements express propositions with truth-values per se. Moral constructivists like John Rawls
and Christine Korsgaard
may also be realists in this minimalist sense; the latter describes her own position as procedural realism.
has argued that the game theoretic
advantages of ethical behavior support the idea that morality is "out there" in a certain sense (as part of the evolutionary fitness landscape
). Journalist Robert Wright
has similarly argued that natural selection
moves sentient species closer to moral truth as time goes on.
Writer Sam Harris
has also argued that ethics could be objectively grounded in an understanding of neuroscience
.
, etc.) to be applied straightforwardly to moral statements. We can say that a moral belief is false or unjustified or contradictory in the same way we would about a factual belief. This is a problem for expressivism
, as shown by the Frege-Geach problem.
Another advantage of moral realism is its capacity to resolve moral disagreements: If two moral beliefs contradict one another, realism says that they cannot both be right, and therefore everyone involved ought to be seeking out the right answer to resolve the disagreement. Contrary theories of meta-ethics
have trouble even formulating the statement "this moral belief is wrong," and so they cannot resolve disagreements in this way.
, arguing that people possess various selfish motivations that they pursue instead, or else are simply mistaken about what is objectively right.
Others are critical of moral realism because it postulates the existence of a kind of "moral fact" which is nonmaterial and does not appear to be accessible to the scientific method
. Moral truths cannot be observed
in the same way as material facts (which are objective), so it seems odd to count them in the same category. One emotivist
counterargument (although emotivism is usually non-cognitivist
) alleges that "wrong" actions produce measurable results in the form of negative emotional reactions, either within the individual transgressor, within the person or people most directly affected by the act, or within a (preferably wide) consensus of direct or indirect observers.
Another counterargument comes from moral realism's ethical naturalism
. Particularly, understanding "Morality" as a science
addresses many of these issues.
Meta-ethics
In philosophy, meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments. Meta-ethics is one of the three branches of ethics generally recognized by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics. Ethical...
view which claims that:
- Ethical sentenceSentence (linguistics)In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...
s express propositionPropositionIn logic and philosophy, the term proposition refers to either the "content" or "meaning" of a meaningful declarative sentence or the pattern of symbols, marks, or sounds that make up a meaningful declarative sentence...
s. - Some such propositions are true.
- Those propositions are made true by objective features of the world, independent of subjective opinion.
This makes moral realism a non-nihilist
Moral nihilism
Moral nihilism is the meta-ethical view that nothing is moral or immoral. For example, a moral nihilist would say that killing someone, for whatever reason, is neither inherently right nor inherently wrong...
form of cognitivism
Cognitivism (ethics)
Cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false , which noncognitivists deny...
. Moral realism stands in opposition to all forms of moral anti-realism
Anti-realism
In analytic philosophy, the term anti-realism is used to describe any position involving either the denial of an objective reality of entities of a certain type or the denial that verification-transcendent statements about a type of entity are either true or false...
, including ethical subjectivism
Ethical subjectivism
Ethical subjectivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:# Ethical sentences express propositions.# Some such propositions are true.# Those propositions are about the attitudes of people.This makes ethical subjectivism a form of cognitivism...
(which denies that moral propositions refer to objective facts), error theory (which denies that any moral propositions are true), and non-cognitivism
Non-cognitivism
Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences do not express propositions and thus cannot be true or false...
(which denies that moral sentences express propositions at all). Within moral realism, the two main subdivisions are ethical naturalism
Ethical naturalism
Ethical naturalism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:# Ethical sentences express propositions.# Some such propositions are true....
and ethical non-naturalism
Ethical non-naturalism
Ethical non-naturalism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:# Ethical sentences express propositions.# Some such propositions are true.# Those propositions are made true by objective features of the world, independent of human opinion....
.
According to Richard Boyd
Richard Boyd
Richard Newell Boyd is an American philosopher who has spent most of his career at Cornell University, though he also taught briefly at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of California, Berkeley...
, moral realism means that:
Most philosophers today accept or lean towards moral realism, as do most meta-ethicists, and twice as many philosophers accept or lean towards moral realism as accept or lean towards moral anti-realism. Some examples of robust moral realists include David Brink, John McDowell
John McDowell
John Henry McDowell is a South African philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford and now University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written extensively on metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, and meta-ethics, McDowell's most influential work...
, Peter Railton
Peter Railton
Peter Albert Railton is John Stephenson Perrin Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1980. His research interests center on contemporary metaethics and normative ethics, as well as consequentialism...
, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord
Geoffrey Sayre-McCord
Geoffrey Sayre-McCord is a philosopher who works in moral theory, meta-ethics, the history of ethics, and epistemology and has written extensively in these areas. He is known especially for his work on moral realism and on David Hume's moral theory. He has also written on contractualism...
, Michael Smith, Terence Cuneo, Russ Shafer-Landau
Russ Shafer Landau
Russ Shafer-Landau is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Before moving to Wisconsin, Shafer-Landau taught for several years at the University of Kansas as well as at the University of Compton. He completed his PhD work at the University of Arizona...
, G.E. Moore, John Finnis
John Finnis
John Finnis , is an Australian legal scholar and philosopher, specializing in the philosophy of law. He is Professor of Law at University College, Oxford and at the University of Notre Dame, teaching jurisprudence, political theory, and constitutional law...
, Richard Boyd
Richard Boyd
Richard Newell Boyd is an American philosopher who has spent most of his career at Cornell University, though he also taught briefly at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of California, Berkeley...
, Nicholas Sturgeon, Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics...
, and Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
. Norman Geras
Norman Geras
Norman Geras is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester. In a long academic career, he has contributed substantially to the analysis of the works of Karl Marx, particularly in his book Marx and Human Nature and the article 'The Controversy About Marx and Justice', which...
has argued that Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
was a moral realist.
Robust versus minimal moral realism
The robust model of moral realism commits moral realists to three theses:- The semantic thesis: The primary semantic role of moral predicates (such as "right" and "wrong") is to refer to moral properties (such as rightness and wrongness), so that moral statements (such as "honesty is good" and "slavery is unjust") purport to represent moral facts, and express propositions that are true or false (or approximately true, largely false, and so on).
- The alethic thesis: Some moral propositions are in fact true.
- The metaphysical thesis: Moral propositions are true when actions and other objects of moral assessment have the relevant moral properties (so that the relevant moral facts obtain), where these facts and properties are robust: their metaphysical status, whatever it is, is not relevantly different from that of (certain types of) ordinary non-moral facts and properties.
The minimal model
Moral universalism
Moral universalism is the meta-ethical position that some system of ethics, or a universal ethic, applies universally, that is, for "all similarly situated individuals", regardless of culture, race, sex, religion, nationality, sexuality, or any other distinguishing feature...
, on the other hand, leaves off the metaphysical thesis, treating it as matter of contention among moral realists (as opposed to between moral realists and moral anti-realists). This dispute is not insignificant, as acceptance or rejection of the metaphysical thesis is taken by those employing the robust model as the key difference between moral realism and moral anti-realism. Indeed, the question of how to classify certain logically possible
Logical possibility
A logically possible proposition is one that can be asserted without implying a logical contradiction. This is to say that a proposition is logically possible if there is some coherent way for the world to be, under which the proposition would be true...
(if eccentric) views—such as the rejection of the semantic and alethic theses in conjunction with the acceptance of the metaphysical thesis—turns on which model we accept. Someone employing the robust model might call such a view "realist non-cognitivism," while someone employing the minimal model might simply place such a view alongside other, more traditional, forms of non-cognitivism.
The robust model and the minimal model also disagree over how to classify moral subjectivism (roughly, the view that moral facts are not mind-independent in the relevant sense, but that moral statements may still be true). The historical association of subjectivism with moral anti-realism in large part explains why the robust model of moral realism has been dominant—even if only implicitly—both in the traditional and contemporary philosophical literature on metaethics.
In the minimal sense of realism, R.M. Hare could be considered a realist in his later works, as he is committed to the objectivity of value judgments, even though he denies that moral statements express propositions with truth-values per se. Moral constructivists like John Rawls
John Rawls
John Bordley Rawls was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard University....
and Christine Korsgaard
Christine Korsgaard
Christine Marion Korsgaard is an American philosopher and academic whose main scholarly interests are in moral philosophy and its history; the relation of issues in moral philosophy to issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the theory of personal identity; the theory of personal...
may also be realists in this minimalist sense; the latter describes her own position as procedural realism.
Science and moral realism
Cognitive psychologist Steven PinkerSteven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author...
has argued that the game theoretic
Game theory
Game theory is a mathematical method for analyzing calculated circumstances, such as in games, where a person’s success is based upon the choices of others...
advantages of ethical behavior support the idea that morality is "out there" in a certain sense (as part of the evolutionary fitness landscape
Fitness landscape
In evolutionary biology, fitness landscapes or adaptive landscapes are used to visualize the relationship between genotypes and reproductive success. It is assumed that every genotype has a well-defined replication rate . This fitness is the "height" of the landscape...
). Journalist Robert Wright
Robert Wright (journalist)
Robert Wright is an American journalist, scholar, and prize-winning author of best-selling books about science, evolutionary psychology, history, religion, and game theory, including The Evolution of God, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, The Moral Animal, and Three Scientists and Their Gods:...
has similarly argued that natural selection
Natural selection
Natural selection is the nonrandom process by which biologic traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution....
moves sentient species closer to moral truth as time goes on.
Writer Sam Harris
Sam Harris (author)
Sam Harris is an American author, and neuroscientist, as well as the co-founder and current CEO of Project Reason. He received a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Stanford University, before receiving a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA...
has also argued that ethics could be objectively grounded in an understanding of neuroscience
Neuroscience
Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. However, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that collaborates with other fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics,...
.
Advantages
Moral realism allows the ordinary rules of logic (modus ponensModus ponens
In classical logic, modus ponendo ponens or implication elimination is a valid, simple argument form. It is related to another valid form of argument, modus tollens. Both Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens can be mistakenly used when proving arguments...
, etc.) to be applied straightforwardly to moral statements. We can say that a moral belief is false or unjustified or contradictory in the same way we would about a factual belief. This is a problem for expressivism
Expressivism
Expressivism in meta-ethics is a theory about the meaning of moral language. According to expressivism, sentences that employ moral terms–for example, “It is wrong to torture an innocent human being”–are not descriptive or fact-stating; moral terms such as “wrong,” “good,” or “just” do not refer...
, as shown by the Frege-Geach problem.
Another advantage of moral realism is its capacity to resolve moral disagreements: If two moral beliefs contradict one another, realism says that they cannot both be right, and therefore everyone involved ought to be seeking out the right answer to resolve the disagreement. Contrary theories of meta-ethics
Meta-ethics
In philosophy, meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments. Meta-ethics is one of the three branches of ethics generally recognized by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics. Ethical...
have trouble even formulating the statement "this moral belief is wrong," and so they cannot resolve disagreements in this way.
Criticisms
Several criticisms have been raised against moral realism: The first is that, while realism can explain how to resolve moral conflicts, it does not explain how these conflicts arose in the first place. The Moral Realist would appeal to basic human psychologyPsychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
, arguing that people possess various selfish motivations that they pursue instead, or else are simply mistaken about what is objectively right.
Others are critical of moral realism because it postulates the existence of a kind of "moral fact" which is nonmaterial and does not appear to be accessible to the scientific method
Scientific method
Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...
. Moral truths cannot be observed
Observation
Observation is either an activity of a living being, such as a human, consisting of receiving knowledge of the outside world through the senses, or the recording of data using scientific instruments. The term may also refer to any data collected during this activity...
in the same way as material facts (which are objective), so it seems odd to count them in the same category. One emotivist
Emotivism
Emotivism is a meta-ethical view that claims that ethical sentences do not express propositions but emotional attitudes. Influenced by the growth of analytic philosophy and logical positivism in the 20th century, the theory was stated vividly by A. J. Ayer in his 1936 book Language, Truth and...
counterargument (although emotivism is usually non-cognitivist
Non-cognitivism
Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences do not express propositions and thus cannot be true or false...
) alleges that "wrong" actions produce measurable results in the form of negative emotional reactions, either within the individual transgressor, within the person or people most directly affected by the act, or within a (preferably wide) consensus of direct or indirect observers.
Another counterargument comes from moral realism's ethical naturalism
Ethical naturalism
Ethical naturalism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:# Ethical sentences express propositions.# Some such propositions are true....
. Particularly, understanding "Morality" as a science
Science of morality
Science of morality can refer to a number of ethically naturalistic views. Historically, the term was introduced by Jeremy Bentham . In meta-ethics, ethical naturalism bases morality on rational and empirical consideration of the natural world...
addresses many of these issues.
Further reading
- Moral realism - article from Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyStanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a freely-accessible online encyclopedia of philosophy maintained by Stanford University. Each entry is written and maintained by an expert in the field, including professors from over 65 academic institutions worldwide...
- Hume, DavidDavid HumeDavid Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
(1739). Treatise Concerning Human Nature, edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Oxford University PressOxford University PressOxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...
, 1888. - Kim, Shin (2006). "Moral Realism", The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fieser & Dowden (eds.). (link)