A Critical Examination of Moral Realism

Here I am with my paper entitled A Critical Examination of Moral Realism. In this paper, I have tried to critically evaluate the theory of moral realism. Initially I have put forward basic elements of moral relativism and finally I have drawn attention to some flaws in it.

Introduction
People come, early and easily, to think in moral terms: to see many things as good or bad, to view various options as right or wrong, to think of particular distributions as fair or unfair, to consider certain people virtuous and others vicious. What they think, when they are thinking in these terms, often has a large impact on their decisions and actions as well as on their responses to what others do. At the same time they admire those who are courageous and condemn people they judge to be unjust. Moral thinking is a familiar and vital aspect of our lives. Yet when people ask themselves honestly what it is they are thinking, in thinking some acts are right and others wrong, that some things are good, others bad, that some character traits are virtues, other vices, it turns out to be extremely difficult to say. This raises a puzzle that is at the centre of our understanding of our selves and of our understanding of morality. Moral realism represents one way in which this puzzle might be addressed.

Moral Realism
Moral realism is the doctrine that there are true sentences that contain moral predicates that accurately describe the real world. Moral realism I intend the analogous doctrine about moral judgments, moral statements, and moral theories According to objective moral realism, there exist moral properties that are not dependent on our beliefs or our attitudes about them. It is a metaphysical standpoint that states the existence of objective moral facts, in light of which moral judgements are true or false. These moral facts have determinate truth values that exist independent of mental states, by which I mean beliefs about what those truth values are and whether one can discover them. For some contemporary moral realists like Boyd, moral realism is analogous to scientific theories, such as physics, which are composed of primary laws that are not determined by our attitudes, but can explain other phenomena, independent of how one correctly or incorrectly theorizes about them.1Moral realism contrasts with non-cognitive metaethical theories like emotivism and with views according to which moral principles are largely a reflection of social constructs or conventions. Other associate moral realism specifically with the correspondence theory of truth, so they define moral realism as the claim that some moral judgements are true because they
1

Boyd, Richard N., How to be a Moral Realist, Foundations of Ethics, p163.

correspond to a (moral) fact or state of affairs. Correspondence can be seen simply as the relation that holds between a judgement and a fact when the judgement is true if and only if the fact obtain. Moral realist claim that the facts provide moral reason and requirement are independent of certain mental state. Moral realism then implies, for example that, if abortion is morally wrong. It would be still be morally wrong. It would still be morally wrong even if everyone who gets or judges an abortion would belief that it is not wrong and would choose it even if they were fully informed, rational, impartial, etc. Finally, among realist there is serious disagreement even about what shot of thing a moral fact is. My main concern in that paper was to defend the intelligibility of the realists metaphysical and epistemological claims attacks. But even if moral realism makes intelligible metaphysical and epistemological claim that are initially plausible, there may nonetheless to be good empirical reason for rejecting these claim. In this paper I consider rebuttal of my case for moral realism. There are two kind of argument; I shall consider one metaphysical, one epistemological. Although there have been many proponent of both kinds of argument. We can focus discussion by considering recent perspicuous formulation of these arguments by J. L. Mackies his book Ethics, he gives arguments against this theory.

Metaphysical Argument
As a representative metaphysical argument, consider J. L. Mackies well known argument from relativity2. According to Mackie, radical differences between rst order moral judgments provide a compelling reason to doubt the objectivity of values. Whil e it is not entirely clear what Mackie means when he denies the objectivity of values, he does seem to mean, minimally, that all claims to the effect that something has certain moral property are false. If Mackie is right about this, then we have very little moral knowledgefar less than we thought we had. Perhaps one could know that nothing is morally wrong, but one could not know of any particular action that it is morally wrongfor all claims to the effect that a particular action is right or wrong are false. Signicantly, Mackie does not think that scientic disagreement supports an analogous conclusion about science. He argues that the sceptical inference is compelling in the moral but not in the scientic case because moral and scientic disagreements have different explanations. While scientic disagreement is best explained by the fact that scientists draw different conclusions from inadequate evidence, disagreement about moral codes is better explained by peoples adherence to and

Mackie, J. L., Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.,p.36.

participation in different ways of life.3One immediate concern about Mackies argument is that it seems to prove too much: it is not true that, in general, where differences in belief covey with differences in ways of life, we ought to draw similar conclusions. Mackies argument, in particular, one might argue that moral controversy and the controversy about human origins are disanalogous in ways that ultimately prove crucial. I will not explore arguments to that effect here, since I do not claim that the present difficulty is decisive. My purpose in raising this prima facie difficulty for Mackies argument is to highlight a quite general challenge for those who would have us draw conclusions about the metaphysics of morality from the existence of moral disagreement: such arguments naturally invite the charge that they prove too much. In order to successfully respond to this charge, proponents of such arguments must explain why we should not draw the same surprising metaphysical conclusions wherever we nd apparently similar phenomena. Metaphysical arguments from disagreement is that in general such arguments have the form of inference to the best explanation arguments, according to which the best explanation of the kind of disagreement that we nd in the moral domain is the preferred conclusion of the proponent of the argument: that there are no objective values or alternatively, that moral facts are relative facts, or that what look like moral claims are really just expressions of emotion, and so on. Because metaphysical arguments are inference to the best explanation arguments, one who offers such an argument must show that her favoured conclusion better explains the data than any alternative hypothesis does. One competing hypothesis is the perfectly mundane one that the questions with respect to which we disagree are difficult ones, and at least some of us are getting them wrong; the others include the wide range of surprising candidate metaphysical hypotheses familiar from the metaethics literature. Again, there is no guarantee that such a case cannot be made on behalf of some preferred explanation. The point is just that it is not enough to point to a hypothesis that would adequately explain the relevant features of moral disagreement if it were true: one must show that the hypothesis better explains those features than would any competing hypothesis if it were true. Thus, any metaphysical argument for the skeptical conclusion that we have little or no moral knowledge immediately inherits two potential vulnerabilities. First, to the extent that parallel reasoning applied to other domains would lead to conclusions that we are unwilling to accept,

Ibid.,p.36.

it is potentially vulnerable to the charge that it proves too much or over generalizes. Second, inasmuch as such an argument is an inference to the best explanation argument, it is vulnerable to the provision of formidable competing explanations of moral disagreement. In the next section, I consider a line of epistemological argument which possesses neither of these vulnerabilities. And the main problem for moral realism is epistemological. How can we justify our belief that some sentence containing moral l predicates are true? One strategy is to model moral realism after scientific. However, scientific realism is not without its own problem. In particular, there is the pervasive under determination of theory by the evidence. Nevertheless, the scientific method, as fallible as it is, remain the best epistemological technique for forming theories, however uncertain, incomplete, and logically inconsistent though they may about the real world out there, because of the link scientific theory and empirical observation.

An Epistemological argument
If there were objective values and if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing anything else.4 Mackie argues that we do not have this special sense to discern these objective values, since this implies that we possess a faculty of moral intuition that allows one to perceive the objective rightness or wrongness of something. Furthermore, Mackie asserts that to postulate a faculty of moral intuition is not sufficient in understanding the rightness or wrongness of something. Mackie asks, What is the connection between the natural fact that an action is a piece of deliberate cruelty say, causing pain just for fun-and the moral fact that it is wrong? Postulating this faculty does not help us to understand the consequential link between the two.5 As a result Mackie believes that it makes more sense to postulate as subjective retort which could be causally related to the detection of the natural features on which the supposed quality is said to be consequential.6 Let us now consider Boyds argument as a response to these problems. Boyd wanted to demonstrate how our moral beliefs and methods are similar, in relation to their objectivity and inter-subjectivity, to our conception of our scientific beliefs and methods. He therefore attempted to demonstrate how scientific realism and moral realism share common features. He asserts that scientific realism is the doctrine that scientific methodology is adept in

5 6

Ibid p.20. Ibid p.20.

supplying knowledge of unobservable (theoretical) entities.7, for example electromagnetic fields and knowledge concerning how observable phenomena behave. By understanding this scientific methodology and applying it to our moral reasoning he believed that this would help us with a reliable method for obtaining and improving moral knowledge. Moral properties such as good, wrong, just and unjust, exist in peoples actions, events, states of affairs. The relationship between these can be ascertained through moral reflection and disputation, in the same way as improvements in scientific knowledge can be made through similar procedures.8 This is the nature of the process of dialectic. Since scientific explanation must stop at a set of basic facts, the moral realist will claim that the same is true for morality.

Conclusion
As we have seen that above mentioned arguments go against moral realism.

Copp. David The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory. Oxford University Press, 2006. Mackie, J. L., Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong., New York: Penguin, 1977.
Boyd, Richard N., How to be a Moral Realist, Foundations of Ethics, Blackwell

Publishing, 2007. Mackie John., The subjectivity of Values., Foundations of Ethics, Blackwell Publishing, 2007. s

7 8

Boyd, Richard N., How to be a Moral Realist, Foundations of Ethics, p166. Ibid p.163.