Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Thu Jul 12, 2018 3:20 pm
Immanuel Can
While you're contemplating your answer, perhaps you'll forgive me for pressing on - while my mind is on the issue.
If we define 'objective' as 'pertaining to an observed or unobserved object', the question is: what does it mean to say 'morality is objective'? In what way does morality pertain to an observed or unobserved object? And what is that object?
That's a great question. Do I have a duty to care about the pandas in China, or about the melting of the polar caps -- which, if it happens, will be unlikely to make any great impact on my own life? I don't observe either. And how about the war-injured kid in the Congo? I don't even know his name, and have never seen him. Can they have a moral claim on me, in spite of that?
Or is that quite what you're asking? Are you asking if the subject "morality" can itself be observed? Or are you asking if there's an authority behind morality, to stand as guarantor, that can be observed?
I'll let you explain which question interests you, or frame it another way, okay?
To be specific, in what way does the moral assertion slavery is wrong pertain to an object? Or, more simply, in what way is it about an object? And what is that object? The critical question is: is slavery right or wrong? If slavery is objectively right or wrong, there must be something that verifies or falsifies the assertions slavery is right and slavery is wrong.
Indeed so.
The object can't be slavery itself - that feature of reality about which we can make falsifiable factual assertions. Because if the object of the assertion slavery is wrong were slavery, then the object of the assertion slavery is right would also be slavery. So two morally contradictory assertions would have the same object. And one and the same object - slavery - can't verify contradictory moral assertions. Slavery can't be objectively both right and wrong - morally good and bad.
Well, the law of non-contradiction would also give us that, so I agree. But we might ask if "good" and "bad" are nouns or adjectives. I think it's the latter, isn't it? "Slavery" is the noun, and the word we want to attach to it adjectivally is "bad."
Adjectives are not always straightforwardly observable. I am very "tall," but not compared to a basketball player, perhaps. My "tallness" is both observable and real; but it requires a qualitative attribution that comes from a different process than mere see-and-know. It's no less real, and no less observable for all that; but it's a little less statistical and less clear how we understand I'm "tall."
So it seems that the object of the moral assertion slavery is wrong is the wrongness (the immorality) of slavery. It must be the wrongness of slavery that objectively justifies the moral assertion slavery is wrong. But what and where is the wrongness of slavery? After all, if morality is objective, the wrongness of slavery seems to be the object - the evidence - that verifies the truth of the moral assertion slavery is wrong.
Maybe "evidence" is the wrong word. That partakes more of the see-and-know idea, which would put us in the wrong paradigm. Morality is adjectival, correct? So we won't just see and know that slavery is bad. We'll need something more than eyes to be able to tell it.
No problem. We've got other senses. Our ears hear things, our nose smells things, and so on. But do we have a moral sense? Perhaps. People from Aristotle on have talked about a nebulous sense called "conscience" (literally, "knowing-along-with"), a kind of intuition that tells us when we've run afoul of something morally. And it's this little faculty that seems our most instant problem in the case of slavery -- we feel it's wrong in our conscience, perhaps, but we're having a hard time explaining why.
But our ears work because they pick up sound. And our eyes work because they admit light. But what does our conscience run on?
Some people say, "Mere social convention." That's certainly true for some things, and it explains why cultures are different. But there are a few things for which it doesn't work. Trans-socially, incest is a taboo. Betraying your clan or friends is also of very wide provenance. And there are places where wives are beaten for cultural reasons; but we think maybe the people who are doing it still know, on some level, it's wrong. Maybe they don't. But we think they might. And this shows that what people DO might not always be a good indicator of what they know about morality.
What if there are universals? What if all consciences that are not diseased have some intuition about them? Would that justify morality?
Well, no. Because there might be universal
false beliefs as well as
true ones. At one time, every living person on the planet believed the earth was flat. That didn't make it flat. Besides, as Hume pointed out, we can't get any "oughts" from any number of "is"s.
It seems reasonable to conclude that if the wrongness of slavery is the object that verifies the moral assertion slavery is wrong, the wrongness of slavery must be one of those putative unobserved objects.
But to say, "the wrongness makes it wrong" is surely circular.
But what and where is the wrongness of slavery? If it's an unobserved object, how do we know it exists? And we must know it exists, because otherwise we can't know that the moral assertion slavery is wrong is a fact - a true factual assertion. And how do we know that the unobserved object, the rightness of slavery, doesn't exist?
Right. We will have to cast beyond the object "slavery" itself. Slavery can't be said to be
inherently wrong in that sense; it can't make itself wrong by it's own wrongness. But we do think it's objectively wrong. And we don't want to surrender that intuition without a fight.
So where to go? Let me suggest that the right question is, "What
makes slavery wrong?" That is, what feature of the institution we call slavery is wrong, and why is it wrong? We already know it's not inherent, but must be something larger than and external to the issue of slavery considered all alone.
A good answer might be, "Dehumanization." Slavery deprives people of their individuality, their identity as an agent, their freedom and dignity. But from where do we get the confidence that dehumanization is wrong? Like when we looked at slavery, we've only moved the issue back one step: we've now made it dehumanization, but are no closer to being able to say why it's wrong.
And there's another problem. If the justification for claiming that slavery is objectively wrong is the wrongness of slavery (whatever that is), the dog is chasing its tail. (Perhaps it needs to re-think the premise.)
Right. And the same with dehumanization. We don't actually know from dehumanization that dehumanization is, in any meaningful or binding sense, wrong.
Now we don't just have the freedom of slaves at stake. Dehumanization impinges on every man, woman and child on the planet, potentially at least. What gives us our dignity as humans? What rationally compels our rights?
But if you think my deduction from the premise morality is objective is incorrect, please correct me and develop your version of the objectivity of moral assertions. How do you account for the objectivity of morality? What does it mean?
Now we're all the way back to ontology. What feature of our existence grounds our strong moral intuition that slavery, or dehumanization, or whatever, is wrong?
Let me tell the story one way.
We are all here by accident. We are the early product of a cosmic explosion, and the late product of material and biological forces that are utterly impersonally and indifferent to our existence, even if they created it. Our present existence is contingent. Our future is eternal cosmic oblivion when the universe reaches heat death. And in the meanwhile, some quirk of biological evolution has made us feel, contrary to the facts, that we have meaning and a strange thing called morals. This too is contingent. It might not have happened; and even if it presently serves some evolutionary function difficult to specify, evolution itself is indifferent to the question of whether or not we had to exist.
Now, within that ontology, we are left with this task: explain why slavery is wrong.
That's where that story leaves us.
So let's try another.
We are not here by accident. We are here by design. We are not merely the playthings of impersonal cosmic forces, but are placed here deliberately, to fulfill a particular destiny that may well extend beyond the present age. In the meanwhile, there are definite things that need to happen, and we have a role in it all. Among our roles is to do a thing called, "the right thing." Among the right things we are to do, avoiding dehumanizing others in any way is one of the chief ones. And we will be both laudable if we fulfill it, and accountable if we do not, regardless of our subjective feelings about that. Thus, slavery is objectively wrong, because it does not fit with the purpose for which we were created, the activities for which we were designed, and even more importantly, with the moral identity of the Creator who put us here.
Comments?