MORALITY: COULD IT HAVE A SOURCE?

WAS
THERE A ROOT BEFORE IT FLOWERS?

Abstract

It is a communal notion that morality, or moral truths, if there are any,

must have some sort of source. Nevertheless, if we scrutinize thoroughly at the moral
theories under which morality has a source, we will see that these theories, too, posit
subversive moral truths. There are several authors in this paper that discusses various
arguments in accordance with the roots and sources of morality. Different point of
views from different writers has been disseminated and it can be seen with its
contrasting results in this paper that each argument has its own perceptions and beliefs
regarding on this topic. The body of synthesis also contains different theories that have
been claimed and debated throughout the years. The moral issue here is that the claim
that some moral truth has no propositional grounding is compatible with the idea that it
has some concrete grounding (such as in the form of some concrete event, fact, or state
of affairs in the world).

Introduction
It is a communal notion that morality, or moral truths, if there are any, must have
some sort of source. If it is unethical to break a promise, or if our primary moral
obligation is to maximize happiness, these proofs must come from somewhere–perhaps
from human nature, or our agreements, or God. Such facts can’t be ungrounded,
floating free.

Nevertheless, if we scrutinize thoroughly at the moral theories that are supposed

to be examples of theories under which morality has a source, we will see that these
theories, too, posit subversive moral truths. This is not only interesting in its own right,
it is vital for it is sometimes thought to be an unacceptable figure of moral realism that,
accordingly, morality has no source, and so if we are moral realists, we must believe in
brute, inexplicable moral truths. Anyone who believes in moral truths at all must
believe that there are brutes and inexplicable ones; this is no opposition to moral
realism.
.
Moral realism pertains that some things have moral properties (properties such
as being morally wrong or being intrinsically good), and when something has a moral
property, that property is not had in virtue of the attitudes that any observers (actual or
hypothetical) have towards the thing, or in virtue of the practices they engage in
concerning it. In other words, these moral properties are objective, or “stance-
independent”. Moral constructivism is the view that things do have their moral
properties in virtue of such attitudes or practices.
 Also, from the perspective of evolution, the key to understanding morality lies in
identifying the adaptive functions that the mental processes that produce moral
behaviours, moral norms, moral judgements, moral emotions and moral beliefs evolve
to serve.

Body of Synthesis

The most popular answer, historically speaking, to the question, “Where do

moral truths come from?,” has been, “God.” As Locke wrote, the “true ground of
morality can only be the will and law of God”. Some writers still find the theistic
answer compelling. William Lane Craig, for instance, holds that “moral values cannot
exist without God,” and complains that “Atheistic moral realists seem to lack any
adequate foundation in reality for moral values, but just leave them floating in an
unintelligible way” (Craig 2004: 18, 19). Craig is here making the argument against
realism.
Other philosophical traditions appeal to other sources. Sentimentalists claim to
“ground morality in human nature,” in particular, in our tendency to approve and
disapprove of certain kinds of behaviour and character. Lara Denis (2008) uses this and
similar expressions in her characterization of Hume’s theory:
Hume takes morality to be independent of religion. In his ethical works, he clearly tries to
ground morality in human nature, and to make a case for morality that stands just as well
without a theistic underpinning as with one. ... [B]y basing morality in sentiment, he excludes
God as a moral assessor.

Contract Arians agree that morality is grounded in some way in us, but not in
our nature; rather, our moral obligations derive from the agreements we’ve made, or
would make, with each other. For example, according to Ronald Milo (1995: 184),
It is true (or is a fact) that a certain kind of act is wrong, for example, just in case a social
order prohibiting such acts would be chosen by rational contractors under suitably idealized
conditions.

Ideal observer theories hold that the truths of morality come from the attitudes of
an ideal observer (Firth 1952). For some Kantians, “our autonomy is the source of
obligation” (Korsgaard 1996: 104). Each of these views, including the divine-based
theory, is a form of constructivism about morality.

By contrast, “the realist must,” as Russ Shafer-Landau puts it, “say of the moral
standards she favours that they just are correct –not in virtue of their being selected or
created by anyone, but simply correct”(2003: 46).
‘Sentimentalism’, I mean cognitivist sentimentalism, as opposed to the expressivism,
sentimentalism of, say, Simon Blackburn. My theses in this paper are conditional on the
assumption that there are moral truths in the first place; thus, I set aside meta-ethical
expressivism, as well as Blackburn’s quasi-realism, which understands ‘moral truth’ to mean
something different than I mean by it (not the sort of thing that we believe).
Not all divine-based theories are forms of constructivism. On one kind of divine-based
theory (e.g., Adams 1999), a thing is good to the extent that it resembles God. This is a form of
realism about goodness.

Landau, himself a realist, presents a related argument against realism as follows:

Anti-realist argument relies on what is meant to be an embarrassing question for realists:
what makes moral judgements true? ...Realists don’t have any general answer to this question.
Constructivists do. They can point to some person(s), actual or idealized, whose attitudes are
responsible for fixing the truth ... . It might be an ideal observer, or one’s social group, or oneself.
(2003: 45)
The objection is not the epistemological one concerning how the realist could come to
know moral facts or principles, given that they are not constructed. It is a metaphysical
objection concerning where these facts and principles come from, or what makes them
correct, given that they are not constructed.

These issues arise for a related topic in ethics as well: the

internalism/externalism debate about normative reasons. Reasons internalism, which
corresponds to constructivism, is roughly the view that whenever a person has a reason
to do something, this is grounded in her (possibly idealized)desires (Brandt
1979,Williams 1981). Reasons externalism, which corresponds to realism, is the view
that at least some of our reasons are grounded in external states of the world, such as
objective evaluative facts, rather than in our desires (Quinn 1993, Parfit 2001). One
argument against internalism claims that, given internalism, reasons have an
objectionably arbitrary foundation, since the desires that ultimately explain our reasons
are, on this view, desires that we have no reason to have. Alan Goldman, a reasons
internalist, counters that externalismfaces a corresponding problem–exactly the
problem that Shafer-Landau and Craigallege for moral realism:
To be fair, we must compare the fact that the internalist can provide no reasons for
having the fundamental concerns that we do ... with the fact that the externalist can provide no
explanation of objective values (they are simply brute normative facts). (Goldman 2006: 484)
Shafer-Landau’s response to the objection is to admit that constructivists do
deliver the goods here while realists do not, but to point to other domains in which we
accept that there are laws without lawmakers, such as logic, math, and physics
(2003:45). But this “companions in guilt” response may be unpersuasive to some, who
believe that there are too many incorrect analogies between ethics on the one hand and
logic, math, and physics on the other.

Thus, both constructivism and reductionism are on a par with non-reductive

realism concerning the question of whether morality has a source. Assuming that there
are moral facts at all, then, even if reductionism or constructivism is true, some of them
must go unexplained.
 Moreover, Alasdair MacIntyre, his book is After Virtue—A Study in Moral
Theory, in 1981, came to the hypothesis in the actual world which inhabits the language
of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in
the imaginary world. If this view is true, the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts
which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. Simulacra of
morality continue to use many of the key expressions. But—very largely, if not entirely
lost comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.

However, Mr. MacIntyre is not denying the presence in human beings of a moral
sense. We have it, and use it, after a fashion. It functions as a factor in virtually all our
judgments of others, as though it were a secondary instinct or a primary intuition.
When we see or read about injustice and feel outraged, our moral sense is responsible.
We certainly want our children to be what we think of as good and decent people and
may be permanently depressed should they not turn out that way. We are, inveterately,
all of us, moralists. Yet it must be admitted, looking at the world and what nations,
organizations and individuals do, that moral ideas are having little if any effect on
human behaviour. A glance at the daily paper is sufficient evidence of this. It seems just
to conclude that while we do indeed have moral feelings and a few ideas of what
constitutes morality, we have no compelling theory which might help to make us
regard moral injunctions as having, say, a force behind them like the forces of nature,
which are inescapable. In short, our morals, on the theoretical level, seem no more than
sentiments.
Furthermore, two other authors have concerted on the general problem of
morality—E. F. Schumacher and Wendell Berry—from different points of view. A
classic statement by Schumacher occurs in his paper, "The Critical Question of Size,"
which appeared in Resurgence for May-June 1975. There he said:
“One of our fundamental needs is to be able to act in accordance with our moral
impulses. In a big organization our freedom to do so is inevitably severely restricted.
Our primary duty is to stay within the rules and regulations, which, although contrived
by human beings, are not themselves human beings. No matter how carefully drawn
up, they lack the flexibility of the "human touch."
The bigger the organization, the less it is possible for any member of it to act
freely as a moral being; the more frequent are the occasions when someone will say: "I
am sorry, I know what I am doing is not quite right, but these are my instructions" or
"these are the regulations I am paid to implement" or "I myself agree with you; perhaps
you could take the matter to a higher level, or to your member of parliament."
As a result, big organizations often behave very badly, very immorally, very
stupidly and inhumanely, not because the people inside them are any of these things
but simply because the organization carries the load of bigness. The people inside them
are criticized by people outside, and such criticism is of course justified and necessary,
but it bears the wrong address. It is not the people of the organization but its size that is
at fault. It is like blaming a car's exhaust on the driver; even an angel could not drive a
car without fouling the air.
 This is a situation of universal frustration; the people inside the organization are
morally frustrated because they lack freedom of action, and the people outside are
frustrated because, rare exceptions apart, their legitimate moral complaints find no
positive response and all too often merely produce evasive, meaningless, blandly
arrogant, or downright offensive replies.

Here, Schumacher has described a designer problem. Keeping organizations

small, so that people can respond to their moral intelligence, is what is needed. But for
the designer it is indeed a moral problem. In these circumstances, bigness should
simply not be allowed. But our society has a long way to go to recognize and obey this
rule. Our moral theory is weak and inoperative at our level of social complexity.

In contrast to the reflection of Wendell Berry, in an essay, "Poetry and Place," in

his book, Standing by Words, he says:
“If some Christians make it an article of faith that it is good to kill heathens or
Communists, they will sooner or later have corpses to show for it. If some Christians
believe, as alleged, that God gave them the world to do with as they please, they will
sooner or later have deserts and ruins in measurable proof. If some Christians really
believe that pride, lust, envy, anger, covetousness, gluttony, and sloth are deadly sins,
then they will make improvements in government that will sooner or later be tangible
and quantifiable.
That it is thus possible for an article of faith to be right or wrong according to
worldly result suggests that we may be up against limits and necessities in our earthly
experience as absolute as "the will of God" was ever taken to be, and that "the will of
God" as expressed in moral law may therefore have the same standing as the laws of
gravity and thermodynamics. In Dryden's day, perhaps, it was still possible to think of
"love one another" as a rule contingent on faith. By our own day such evidence has
accumulated as to suggest that it may be an absolute law: Love one another or die,
individually and as a species.
If so, then the difference between that law and a physical law such as the law of
gravity is only a difference in the proximity of cause to effect. If I step off the roof, I will
fall immediately; if, in this age of nuclear weapons, toxic chemicals, rampant
destruction of soil, etc., we do not love one another, we or our children will suffer for it
sometime. It is a critical difference, for it explains why people who do not ever willingly
step off a roof will fearlessly regard their neighbours as enemies or competitors or
economic victims. The uncertainty of the term between offense and punishment under
moral law licenses all our viciousness, foolishness, and pride. Though most of us know
that it is moral law—which is finally apt to look suspiciously like natural law— that
visits our sins upon our children (and other people's children), still, to the worst side of
our nature, deferred justice is no justice; we will rape the land and oppress the poor,
and leave starvation and bloody vengeance (we hope) to be "surprises or "acts of God"
to a later generation.
 Because moral justice tends not to be direct or immediate, obedience to moral
law, whether or not we think it divine, becomes a matter of propriety: of asking who
and where we think we are, and on whose behalf (if anyone's) we think we are acting.”

This concluding paragraph by Berry shows the importance of moral theory-

concerned with why we think right is right and wrong is wrong. We cannot have a
moral theory without metaphysical conceptions of whose and what we are and of an
order which governs our being. Alasdair MacIntyre goes to Aristotle for help, but we
think he might have found it simpler if he had given attention to Eastern philosophy.
He might have found in the Bhagavad-Gita and in Mahayana Buddhism the idea
that we are all expressions of the one self, units of self-conscious awareness with a
common origin. It follows that we are parts of one another, expressions of a common
identity; that we are different by reason of the lenses through which we look, our
instruments of perception. These lenses are what some have called souls, our avenues
and powers of perception.
While all have essentially the same powers, we use them differently according to
our conception of the self and our idea of what is good. One in essence, we are
differentiated by our motives, which vary widely, leading to moral judgments of one
another. Great souls are those who have developed their instruments of perception to
the point of true impartiality. They see things whole and are therefore in fundamental
agreement, as may be seen in the work of Great Teachers. The differences in what have
come down to us as their teachings are almost certainly differences in development and
attitude of their followers, the source of partisanship and conflict.

In addition, an Evolutionary Roots of Morality in Theological Perspective by

Stephen J. Pope, 2004 claims that:
Theological ethics can interpret the relation between evolution and morality in at
least three ways. The reductionist approach holds that morality emerges because it is
adaptive. The independent approach maintains that morality develops without
registering the influence of evolution. Finally, the interdependence position holds that
morality reflects the influence of evolution to the extent that the latter shapes human
emotional capacities and predispositions, for example, those regarding reciprocity and
kin preference. The third approach is more suitable for theological ethics, which attends
to ways in which natural desires can be ordered to serve morality, for example, to be
habituated to virtue, and to ways in which we must strive to curb or minimize their
disruptive effects on human communities.

The remaining last three authors are the evolutionary theorists who argued in
the evolution of morality;
Eminent evolutionary theorists George Williams (1989) argued that at least one
mechanism that mediate morality- moral reasoning- evolve as by-product of non-moral
reasoning process. This theory encourages asking whether the metal mechanisms that
dispose people to behave in moral ways and the mechanisms that produce a moral
sense served adaptive functions in the environments of our ancestors.
 Several theorist have likened the acquisition of a sense of morality to the
acquisition of language (e.g., Hauser, 2006; Richerson and Boyd, 2005). All people
inherit the capacity to develop a moral sense that is governed by a “grammar” that
induces them to sense that it is right to obey rules, to conform to moral norms, to help
members of their group, to uphold systems of cooperation, and to punish transgressors.

Moral Issue

In grasping into the question of where morality comes from, it mean to be

inquiring into the following non-causal, philosophical question; assuming some moral
claims are true, what makes them true? What grounds them? In virtue of what are they
true? This grounding relation is an explanatory relation in that when one fact is
grounded in another, or made true by it, the latter explains the former–in at least one
way of explaining. The claim that some moral truth has no propositional grounding (the
issue here) is compatible with the idea that it has some concrete grounding (such as in
the form of some concrete event, fact, or state of affairs in the world).
The opposite of a moral truth having a ground in this sense is the idea of a moral
truth being brute. We can get a grip on what it is for a moral truth to be brute by
reviewing a moral system on which this phenomenon is especially perspicuous: the
theory of prima facie duties of W.D. Ross. Ross takes as fundamental the notion of a
prima facie moral obligation, which one has when one has a moral reason, but an
veritable one, to perform some action. According to Ross’ theory, whenever it is true
that some person has an all-things-considered moral obligation–“a duty proper” (Ross
1930: 19) –this is true in virtue of the fact that the person has a prima facie obligation to
do something, and has no conflicting prima facie obligations that match or outweigh it
(Ross 1930: 41).
Consider, for illustration, Ross’ view about promises-supposing the person
promised to drive a friend to the airport. According to Ross, I therefore have a prime
facie obligation to do it (and will have an all-things-considered obligation to do it so
long as there are no competing and outweighing prima facie- The relation discussed
here is a species of the “explanatory dependence” of Correia (2008), obligations in play).
Rossian principle: If a person has made a promise to perform some act, then the person
has, in virtue of that, a prima facie moral obligation to perform that act.
In still other words, promise-breaking is a wrong-making feature of actions.
What’s more, this principle, according to Ross, expresses a basic prima facie duty, a
basic moral fact. This fact, Ross would say, has no source, and cannot be explained in
terms of any allegedly more basic truth, such as, for example, the principle of utility.
In a striking passage (1930: 29-30), Ross declares,
The moral order expressed in these propositions is just as much part of the
fundamental nature of the universe, as is the spatial or numerical structure expressed in
the axioms of geometry or arithmetic.
Craig (2004: 19) expresses this common view as follows:
 Atheistic moral realists affirm that moral values and duties do exist in reality and
are not dependent upon evolution or human opinion, but they insist that they are not
grounded in God. Indeed, moral values have no further foundation. They just exist.
How, these critics might say, could that fact be a fundamental fact of reality,
alongside such other putatively and more acceptably basic facts as the law of non-
contradiction, the fact that there is something rather than nothing, and the fundamental
laws of physics? It can be tempting to ask, Who says that if you make a promise, you
have to keep it? Where did this rule come from?

Conclusion

The claim that morality couldn’t have a source –that some moral facts must be
ungrounded –is not just the same as Hume’s claim that one cannot derive an ought
from an is. Hume’s law is, I take it, a claim about the legitimacy or validity of drawing
certain inferences. As such, it is either a normative claim of epistemology or rationality,
or a claim of logic. But our topic here is one in metaphysics-about what grounds certain
kinds of truth. That some truth is made true by another truth can of course be involved
in a valid inference from one to the other. But this isn’t the only way to make for a valid
inference, and, even in the cases in which this is what makes for some valid inference,
the metaphysical fact of grounding is itself prior to, and would explain, the fact of
Obviously true (Lewis 1989: 129). There remains the puzzle of how there could
be true but non-trivial analyses; but this isn’t the place to try to solve the so-called
paradox of analysis.
Identity claims linking the moral to the non-moral are themselves moral claims
apply to constitution claims linking the moral to the non-moral. There are certainly
epistemic objections to moral realism that relate to Hume’s law, but there is also a
separate “source” or grounding objection to moral realism, which has been a concern.

The claim that morality couldn’t have a source is like an instance of the familiar
idea that explanation must come to an end somewhere. But this does not makes it
uninteresting. One might think that it does make it uninteresting because we all agree
that explanation must stop somewhere, and so the claim that it does, along with its
obvious implications, are rather uninteresting truths. Initially, one might have thought
that along all of the chains of explanation that there are, we will find the most basic
moral truths appearing somewhere in the middle of a chain and never at the beginning
of one. Indeed, Evans and Shah suggest that this is a core commitment of most kinds of
meta-ethical theory (here I partly repeat a passage quoted earlier):

And the problem with primitivism according to both the anti-realist and the
reductivist, is that it is committed to there being at least some normative facts at the
bedrock level of explanation. This commitment is widely held to be naive at best, and
childish at worst; a holdover from some earlier, less enlightened vision of the universe.
 The core conviction of every anti-realist, then, is that the best available meta-
normative theory has no room for normative facts that cannot be explained by some
appropriate body of non-normative, attitudinal facts. The constructivist, the
expressivist, and the error theorist all share this conviction, (Evans and Shah
forthcoming)

I have tried to explain why we should doubt that this picture is correct. It seems
that there must always be at least one moral “bridge principle” (whether a grounding
conditional, an identity claim, a claim about property structure, or a constitution claim)
bridging the non-moral to the moral, and that this principle must be fundamental.

It is an implication of the view defended here that there may be many more brute
facts than one might have thought. Indeed, for any category of truths (biological truths,
historical truths, golf-related truths), there may be brute truths in that category. Thus, it
may be that the sense in which not all moral facts have a source is the same sense in
which, say, not all legal facts have a source. There may be no source for the most
fundamental truths concerning the notion of legality, such as that what it is for there to
be a law in some jurisdiction that prohibits some act just-
nor is our topic the question, Why be moral?, or the related question of the
normativity of moral requirements (Foot 1972, Korsgaard 1996). Even if there are no
reasons to be moral, we can still ask, Given that it is true that I morally ought to do
such-and-such, what makes this true?, or, more generally, Given that M is a moral truth,
what makes it true? is for such-and-such conditions to hold. It will just be part of the
nature of legality that this principle holds.

Most of us agree that constructivism is true of legality, in the sense that

properties like being against the laws; and we would continue to maintain this even if
we learned that there were brute legal facts.
Moral realism provides no source for morality. Constructivists should admit that
their fundamental moral principle is an unconstructed moral truth. There are other
reasons to be a constructivist and there can still be a distinction between realism and
constructivism even if both views recognize unconstructed moral truths; constructivism
holds that moral properties are stance-dependent, while realism does not. But
constructivism, even reductionist forms of it, cannot construct all of morality for not all
moral truths can have a source.

References

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A SYNTHESIS PAPER ON MORALITY:

COULD IT HAVE A SOURCE? WAS THERE
A ROOT BEFORE IT FLOWERS?

ETHICS
E167
GE102
BPED 1B

GLEAN JOY BANAAG

Student

MR. MANUEL CAINGCOY

Instructor