Argument 1: Intrinsic values are necessary to make sense of uncontroversial commitments about morality.

1. Intrinsic value beliefs can make sense of many of our uncontroversial (common sense) moral commitments that would have to be dispensed with if intrinsic values don’t exist.
2. If intrinsic values are necessary to make sense of our uncontroversial moral commitments, then we have some reason to believe in intrinsic values.
3. Therefore, we have some reason to believe in intrinsic values.

The following commitments about morality seem to require intrinsic values:

1. We should help people even if we expect no benefit in return. An anti-realist (person who rejects intrinsic values) can reward and punish people to give incentives for moral behavior, but that suggests that we should only help others because some benefit is expected in return. On the other hand if people or their experiences have intrinsic value, then helping people would make a lot of sense.
2. We should try to care for people even if we currently don’t. An anti-realist can argue that we have social instincts to care for others, but if anti-realism is true, then this instinctual response (1) is limited and certainly has not guaranteed moral behavior and (2) can’t be rationally endorsed to those who lack it. On the other hand, if people or their experiences have intrinsic value, then we have a good reason to want to care for other people.
3. Morality is seen as rationally “action-guiding.” We ought to help people and we ought not hurt them. Anti-realists can guide our actions through indoctrination and incentives (reward and punishment), but these action-guiding elements are irrational. On the other hand, if intrinsic values exist, then it is rational to promote them. (“Ought” could indicate that some actions are preferable in the sense of making a real difference rather than just a way to achieve personal goals or satisfaction.)
4. Morality is seen as rationally important. If intrinsic values don’t exist, then morality could be important in the sense that we feel it to be important, but it would not be rational. On the other hand if intrinsic values exist, then morality is rationally important insofar as it encourages us to promote intrinsic values, which really matter.
5. Morality is seen as categorical in the sense that morality applies to everyone. If intrinsic values don’t exist, we can commit ourselves to a moral standard, but that is merely a personal choice. It wouldn’t really be wrong to choose to be immoral. On the other hand, if intrinsic values exist, then our actions will cause intrinsic benefit or harm whether or not we commit ourselves to moral standards.
6. We realize that it is important to protect and help everyone. We might have to attack or kill people if it is necessary to save people from genocide even if they are in another country. If intrinsic values don’t exist, then attacking and killing people from another country would not be rationally justified. It would be oppressive because it would impose one’s own preferences onto others in another culture. However, if people have intrinsic value, then it makes perfect sense to save them all from genocide no matter what country they are from.
7. We accept that morality is overriding. If intrinsic values don’t exist, then moral goals are just as important as any of our other goals. “Importance” without intrinsic values would only refer to or desires. If we desire money more than we desire to be moral, then it might make perfect sense to steal from people.

Argument 2: There are uncontroversial objective moral truths.

1. Certain objective moral truths are uncontroversial. (e.g. Killing people willy nilly is wrong.)
2. The best explanation for there being uncontroversial objective moral truths are intrinsic values. (e.g. Human life has intrinsic value.)
3. If the best explanation for uncontroversial objective moral truths are intrinsic values, then we have some reason to believe in intrinsic values.
4. Therefore, we have some reason to believe in intrinsic values.

uncontroversial moral truths include the following:

1. It is often wrong to kill people.
2. It is often wrong to steal from people.
3. It is often wrong to do bodily damage to other people.
4. It is often good to save people’s lives .
5. It is often good to help educate people.
6. It is often good to help people be happy.

Argument 3: uncontroversial emotions often involve intrinsic value beliefs.

1. Our emotions of love, grief, joy, and anger are uncontroversial and legitimate in at least some situations.
2. Such uncontroversial and legitimate emotions are often based on intrinsic value beliefs.
3. Therefore, it is a uncontroversial assumption that some things have value or disvalue.
4. We shouldn’t reject uncontroversial assumptions unless we have good reason to do so.
5. We don’t have a good reason to reject our ordinary evaluative judgments involving intrinsic values.
6. Therefore, our beliefs in intrinsic values are justified.

Non-controvesial emotions involving intrinsic values include the following:

1. We love people because we believe they really have value.
2. We feel grief when a loved one dies because we believe that someone of value might no longer exist.
3. We feel joy when a child has been born in our family because we believe that someone of value has been added to the world.
4. We feel anger when someone tortures an innocent person because we believe that something bad has happened.

Argument 4: Pleasure is good.

1. We don’t merely value pleasure because we like it.
2. We aren’t deluded into valuing pleasure from our instincts.
3. We don’t only value pleasure because of our cultural customs.
4. We value pleasure because we believe it is good.
5. We believe pleasure is good because of our experience of pleasure.
6. If something isn’t valued merely because we like it, or because of our instincts, or because of our cultural customs; then it might have intrinsic value.
7. Therefore, pleasure might have intrinsic value.

Argument 5: Pleasure is good in itself.

1. We don’t value pleasure only because it is useful to achieve some goal.
2. Either we value something because it’s useful or because it is worthy goal for its own sake (good in itself).
3. Therefore, pleasure is a worthy goal for its own sake (it is good in itself).

Argument 6: Pleasure has intrinsic value.

1. If something is a worthy goal for its own sake; then we either value it because we desire it for its own sake, or it has intrinsic value (we desire it because it is good).
2. We don’t value pleasure merely because we desire it.
3. Therefore, pleasure has intrinsic value.

Argument 7: Intrinsic values best explain our moral experiences.

1. Our moral experiences are best explained by the absence of intrinsic values (error theory [i.e. nihilism], non-cognitivism [e.g. emotivism], reductionism [e.g. relativism]), or by the existence of intrinsic values (moral realism).
2. If intrinsic values best explain our moral experiences, then we have some reason to believe in intrinsic values.
3. Intrinsic values do make the best sense out of our moral experiences.
4. Therefore, we have some reason to believe in intrinsic values.

Argument 8: Against error theory

1. Error theory claims that there are no intrinsic values but it admits that we do assume that intrinsic values exist.
2. If intrinsic values don’t exist, then our experience that pleasure is good would be delusional.
3. But the delusion of pleasure’s value would still seem to have intrinsic value. Even a delusional experience of pleasure is a good one to the extent that it’s pleasurable.
4. Therefore, Error theory cannot make good sense out of our moral experiences.

Argument 9: Against non-cognitivism

1. Non-cognitivism claims that our evaluative judgments are not based on beliefs. Instead, they are merely emotional expressions or commands.
2. If our evaluative judgments are merely emotional expressions or commands, then we value pleasure merely because we like it (either because of instincts or indoctrination).
3. However, we like pleasure because it feels good; not because of an instinct or indoctrination.
4. Therefore, Non-cognitivism can’t make good sense out of our moral experiences.

Argument 10: Against reductionism

1. Reductionism claims that our moral beliefs are actually about non-moral facts (such as preferences, instincts, or indoctrination).
2. But the value of pleasure can’t be reduced to instincts or indoctrination; we value it because of the experience.
3. Therefore, reductionism can’t make good sense out of our moral experiences.

Argument 11: Given the evidence, intrinsic values are the default position and we have no good reason to reject them.

1. If there is no reason to reject the existence of intrinsic value, then we should believe intrinsic value exists.
2. There is no reason to reject the existence of intrinsic value.
3. Therefore, we should believe in intrinsic value.

Argument 12: We should reject intrinsic values if they are unnecessary and strange, but they don’t seem to be particularly unnecessary or strange.

1. Although intrinsic values are referred to in our uncontroversial moral commitments and experiences, the best reason to reject intrinsic values is if they are unnecessary and strange.
2. If intrinsic values are strange and they aren’t required to explain our moral observations, then we should reject them.
3. It has been argued that intrinsic values are strange because they are irreducible to non-moral facts of the natural world.
4. However, intrinsic values are accepted as irreducible to non-moral facts because that is how we observe them.
5. Additionally, irreducible facts aren’t very strange.² There could be emergent facts that are irreducible, such as certain facts of psychology and chemistry.³
6. Therefore, we shouldn’t reject intrinsic values insofar as they are not strange and insofar as they are required to explain our observations.

Argument 13: We are more sure that intrinsic values are real than that they are illegitimately strange.

1. Either intrinsic values are illegitimately strange or we have good reason to believe in intrinsic values.
2. I am more certain that my moral experiences are legitimately explained by intrinsic values than the idea that intrinsic values are illegitimately strange.
3. If I am more certain that my moral experiences are legitimately explained by intrinsic values than the idea that intrinsic values are illegitimately strange, then we have more reason to think that intrinsic values aren’t illegitimately strange than to think that they are.
4. So, if we have to decide whether or not intrinsic values are illegitimately strange, then we should decide that they aren’t.

Argument 14: Intrinsic values should be accepted because we have good reason to accept them, but no good reason to reject them.

1. If we have good reason to accept intrinsic values, but no good reason to reject them, then we should believe in intrinsic values.
2. If the best reason to reject intrinsic values is because they are unnecessary and strange and that is not a good reason to reject intrinsic values, then we don’t have any good reason to reject intrinsic values.
3. We shouldn’t reject intrinsic values insofar as they are necessary and not strange.
4. Therefore, there is no good reason to reject intrinsic values.
5. Additionally, we do have good reason to accept the existence of intrinsic values.
6. Therefore, we should accept intrinsic values.

Conclusion

Many people think that intrinsic values require God or are too spooky to exist, but my arguments above give us reason to believe in them whether God exists or not, and they don’t seem so spooky after all. Intrinsic value could be quite ordinary and uncontroversial considering our emotions, commitments, and experiences.

If anything has intrinsic value, then “moral realism” is true, which is the view that morality has some sort of relation to reality itself. Morality is not merely a human invention, and morality is not merely about accomplishing goals.

Update (8/19/10): Fixed Argument 6. It was supposed to be a version of the Euthyphro dilemma.

Notes

The Nietzschean Argument From Disagreement

John Mackie’s “argument from relativity” suggested that the best explanation for persistent moral disagreement was that moral realism is false. Nietzsche’s argument is similar to Mackie’s, but he concentrates on the persistent moral disagreement involving professional philosophers and their failure to provide a plausible foundation for moral realism. Leiter argues that widespread moral disagreement among philosophers seems to be “best explained” by moral realism being false.

Exactly what kind of disagreements are relevant? I suggest the following:

1. Moral realists come in many varieties. There are naturalists, non-naturalists, coherence theorists, intuitionists, divine command theorists, and so on.
2. Identifying “right” and “wrong” requires us to adopt a theory, but there are multiple theories of this kind, such as Aristotelianism, utilitarianism, Kantianism, and so on.

What is Lieter’s argument? We can summarize his Nietzschean Argument from Disagreement as the following:

1. If any moral theory is true, then we would have probably found it by now.
2. We haven’t found the true moral theory yet.
3. So, it is likely that no moral theory is true.
4. If no moral theory is true, then moral realism is false.
5. Therefore, moral realism is probably false.

Each moral theory seems to be coherent and justified, and helps us satisfy our desire to live in a moral universe, but the theories are incompatible. They can’t all be right. Either one theory is right or all of them are wrong. Additionally, we have insufficient evidence to say which theory is probably true, so it seems reasonable to say that we have no reason to believe any of them in particular. Although each theory appears to be justified, they all appear to be so. Therefore, we can’t trust the justifications such theories require us to accept.

[Nietzsche asserts that] “all attempts to give reasons for morality are necessarily sophistical”—is established (“proved” [bewiesen] he says) by the work of the philosophers from Plato through to Kant. But in what sense do the moral philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Hutcheson, Mill, Kant, and Schopenhauer et al. establish or “prove” that “all attempts to give reasons for morality are necessarily sophistical”? Nietzsche’s thought must be that all these philosophers appear to provide “dialectical justifications” for moral propositions, but that all these justifications actually fail. (Leiter)

Moreover, it seems likely that moral theories exist to satisfy our emotional needs rather than our need to understand reality. “[T]he reason it is possible to construct ‘apparent’ dialectical justification for differing moral propositions is because, given the diversity of psychological needs of persons (including philosophers), it is always possible to find people for whom the premises of these dialectical justifications are acceptable” (Leiter). To suggest that our moral beliefs are based on our psychological needs rather than facts about reality is much more simple and much less metaphysically loaded than the explanation that moral realists require us to accept.²

Leiter admits that he can’t be sure that moral realism is false, but he believes that the falsity of moral realism seems to be the best explanation for various disagreements among philosophers. That means that he must admit that one of his premises could be false, but he thinks that all the premises are very likely to be true.

Objections

I will offer two sorts of objections. One, I will consider why certain premises of the argument could be false. Two, I will consider why the argument as a whole might be misguided.

1. Why might certain premises be false?

If any premise is false, then the Nietzschean Argument from Disagreement will no longer be persuasive. I don’t know that any of the premises are false, but I don’t find them all to be completely convincing either. There is some room for doubt. Such room for doubt seriously undermines the strength of the Nietzschean Argument from Disagreement because we can’t reject very plausible beliefs, such as the belief in moral realism, unless we have even more plausible reasons to reject them.

I agree with some of the premises, but I will question premises 1 and 2.

Premise 1: If any moral theory is true, then we would have probably found it by now.

It might be that we know so little about how morality relates to reality that we wouldn’t have found a good theory for it by now. After thousands of years we only recently developed Kantianism and utilitarianism. If these moral theories offer us any insight into morality, then we can expect to make quite a bit of more progress in the future.

The progress we have made in science could be analogous to the progress we make in ethics. I imagine that there might have been quite a few theories that explained the existence of lightning before the existence of modern science. For example, lightning could be caused by light particles, fire, or Zeus’s magic javelin. Philosophers could have debated about which theory is true for thousands of years despite the fact that all of these theories are false. We simply lacked the ability to know where lightning comes from back then.

The lack of progress that seems to plague ethics could be analogous to the lack of progress found in the philosophy of mind. There are many theories to explain the existence of minds. For example, Searle’s emergence theory, Descartes’s substance dualism, and functionalism. None of these theories are entirely satisfying or justified. It seems likely that all of the theories are false. If minds are real, then they are completely unlike anything else that exists. We don’t know for sure how minds can exist, but it seems possible that we will figure it out someday. Such an understanding might require an understanding of emergence phenomena. Additionally, it seems strange to say that minds don’t exist based on persistent disagreement in philosophy of the mind considering our psychological experiences.

We might lack the ability to understand where morality comes from just like we lack the ability to understand where minds come from. If intrinsic values are a real part of the universe, then they are radically different from everything else. I have suggested that they seem likely to be an emergent part of the universe, similar to minds. If that is the case, we are currently unable to fully understand morality, but it is still possible that moral realism is true. Additionally, it seems strange to say that morality doesn’t exist based on persistent disagreement in ethical philosophy considering our experiences of benefits and harms, just like it would be strange to conclude that minds don’t exist just because we can’t explain where they come from considering our mental experiences.

Premise 2: We haven’t found the true moral theory yet.

Even if we do know all of the most plausible moral theories and we have no way to determine which one is right, we would beg the question to assert that all moral theories are false. It might be reasonable for a philosopher to reject all moral theories considering that they might all be false, but it might also be reasonable for a philosopher to adopt whatever moral theory he or she believes to be best. This doesn’t seem to be any different than how many scientists rejected string theory and others adopted string theory despite not knowing for sure whether or not it is true.

2. Is the Argument Misguided?

The Nietzschean Argument from Relativity requires us to reject the fact that there is evidence for moral realism, and such evidence does not depend on moral theory any more than the evidence that minds exist depends on theories in the philosophy of the mind. Although the specifics of moral theories could all be false, there are certain moral beliefs that seem to be “almost certainly true.” We all agree that intense pain is bad, happiness is good, torturing others willy nilly is wrong, and so on. Why do we think we are certain about these beliefs? Because of our moral experiences. We have felt that pain is bad, we have experienced that happiness is good, and we know that other people’s pain is probably bad just like our own. I have my own argument for moral realism with little to no appeal to moral theory in my essay “An Argument For Moral Realism.” The Nietzschean Argument From Disagreement in no way disproves my conclusion.

Leiter suggests that morality has no explanatory power or causal significance. That might be true if moral realism is false, but it is quite possible that we experience intrinsic values and make decisions based on those experiences. We experience that pain is bad, so we try to avoid pain when no benefit is expected to be gained from it. We know other people’s pain is also probably bad, so we decide not to harm others willy nilly, and we pass laws prohibiting torture.

Leiter’s Challenges to Moral Realism

Leiter thinks that his Nietzschean Argument from Disagreement implies three challenges to moral realism:

1. Moral beliefs and experiences are better explained by the anti-realist than the realist.
2. Many moral facts are undetected by philosophers.
3. Ethical philosophers are not not coming to any sort of agreement from years of debate.

These statements could be taken to be problematic for the moral realist, but my objections already imply some possible answers to these issues:

1. I disagree that the anti-realist can better explain our moral experiences. The anti-realist requires that “pain is bad” means little more than “I dislike pain,” but this ignores what experiencing pain is really like. We experience that pain is “bad.”
2. I don’t know what moral facts Leiter thinks would be undetected by philosophers if moral realism is true, but I agree that foundational moral truths are undetected in the sense that we don’t entirely understand where moral facts come from. Why do we experience pain as bad? I don’t know. However, we don’t know why we have minds either. Our ignorance of foundational knowledge does not seem to imply the non-existence of entities we experience as real.
3. Ethical philosophers have made some progress (and therefore come to a great deal of agreement). They agree that slavery is wrong, for example. However, it is true that little progress has been made concerning the origins of morality. I don’t think that is a problem for moral realism just like it’s not a problem for anyone who thinks that minds exist despite our lack of progress concerning the origins of minds.

Conclusion

I agree that we have a good reason to be skeptical towards moral theories and just about any other speculative philosophical theory. However, I don’t agree that there is no philosophical progress involving those theories and we might occasionally find the answer to a difficult philosophical debate. We found a pretty good answer about what causes lightning and we might someday find a good argument that explains where minds come from. Inescapable disagreement concerning the origins of lightning or minds certainly doesn’t prove that lightning and minds don’t exist. In the same way we might one day find out where morality comes from and the current disagreement involving the origins of morality doesn’t seem to imply that morality doesn’t exist in a realist sense.

Finally, we can’t conclude that the best explanation for inevitable moral disagreement concerning moral theories is that moral realism is false when we consider that moral realism has evidence in everyday life, just like the evidence that we have minds.

Notes

I will describe (1) how I understand the Persistence of Moral Disagreement and (2) my objections to it.

The Persistence of Moral Disagreement

The argument from Moral Disagreement that I will discuss is based on the lecture by Stephen Stich, which is available on Youtube. I understand the argument as the following:

1. The existence of fundamental moral disagreement is a good reason to reject moral realism.
2. Fundamental moral disagreement exists.
3. Therefore, we have a good reason to reject moral realism.

Fundamental moral disagreement is moral disagreement that can never be solved through reason and knowledge of non-moral facts. Sometimes non-moral facts can help us solve a moral disagreement. For example, we might think that eating fatty foods is good idea until we find out that it’s unhealthy. Stitch wants to argue that not all moral disagreements are like that. Sometimes we really disagree about the nature of morality itself.

I will examine both of these premises.

Premise 1: Fundamental moral disagreement is a good reason to reject moral realism.

Is fundamental moral disagreement a good reason to reject moral realism? Stitch quotes moral realists who admit that fundamental moral disagreement could be a problem for moral realism. If we can’t find a single instance of a highly justified moral belief that we can agree on, then I agree that moral realism is probably false.

My objections

Objection 1: It might be that fundamental moral disagreement would have to be pervasive in order for it to be a problem for moral realism. Why? Because moral realism is probably false unless at least some of our moral beliefs are based on reality. If we can find some moral beliefs that are highly justified based on reality, then fundamental moral disagreement won’t prove that moral realism is false. Moral realism only claims that there is at least one moral fact. If we know one moral fact, then moral realism has already been established. A single instance of fundamental moral disagreement would certainly not convince us that our highly justified moral belief is false.

Objection 2: The moral realist philosophers cited by Stitch admit that some fundamental moral disagreement isn’t a problem:

• Richard Boyd: “[C]areful philosophical examination will reveal… that agreement on nonmoral issues would eliminate almost all disagreement about the sorts of issues which arise in ordinary moral practice.”
• David Brink: “It is incumbent on the moral realist… To claim that most moral disputes are resolvable at least in principle.”
• Michael Smith: “The notion of objectivity signifies the possibility of a convergence in moral views.”

None of these philosophers claimed that a single instance of fundamental moral disagreement would disprove moral realism.

Objection 3 Finally, one cause of moral disagreement could be based on a disagreement concerning moral facts. If we are to reject moral realism based on fundamental moral disagreement, then we would have to believe (a) that all moral opinions are open to fundamental moral disagreement and (b) we have no way to adequately justify any particular moral belief. It might be possible to justify a moral fact with other moral facts, which is perfectly compatible with fundamental moral disagreement.

Stitch’s argument, the Persistence of Moral Disagreement, seems to assume that non-moral facts have to be able to be used to justify moral facts. That assumption is not necessarily true. My experience of pain as “bad” seems to be based on the moral fact itself. No non-moral fact seems to account for my moral belief, but that isn’t to say that my belief is unjustified. (We justify psychological beliefs in a similar way. I can’t justify my belief that I have thoughts based on non-mental facts alone. My experience of my mind itself is the main reason that I believe that I have a mind.)

Premise 2: Fundamental moral disagreement exists.

Stitch uses studies of everyday people to establish that moral intuitions and everyday moral beliefs are relative to our culture. These moral intuitions and beliefs supposedly can’t be accounted for by non-moral beliefs. He admits that the examples of cultural moral differences are “disputable” and moral realists tend not to be convinced by them. Let’s consider some examples he gives:

1. Some cultures believe that harming animals for entertainment is morally permissible, but others don’t.
2. People from “honor cultures” believe that it is permissible use violence against those who insult us, but people not from honor cultures don’t believe violence is as justified in such situations.
3. People from “collectivist cultures” believe that infidelity deserves punishment but people from “individualist cultures” don’t feel as strongly about it.
4. People from “collectivist cultures” believe that blaming the wrong person for a crime to prevent a riot is more justified than people from “individualist cultures.”

Stitch argues that our non-moral beliefs can’t explain the moral differences. I agree. For example, the cultures that believe that harming animals for entertainment is morally permissible can simultaneously agree that animals can feel pain, just like us.

Stitch argues that the moral differences seem to be based on a culture’s situation. For example, people from “honor cultures” lack of police protection and they live in a situation in which their private property could easily be stolen.

My objection

Objection 1: The examples presented in no way prove that fundamental moral disagreement is possible because fundamental moral disagreement is agreement in ideal situations. Many people’s moral beliefs are poorly formed. The fact that people can thoughtlessly accept the moral beliefs of others isn’t shocking. Many people seem to form at least some moral beliefs thoughtlessly, which is not an ideal condition.

Another problem with cultural moral beliefs is our tendency to over-generalize. An honor culture might generally have a good reason to take insults very seriously. Perhaps insults in those cultures tend to be a real threat. People might insult others to see if they can be pushed around and manipulated. People from these cultures could generalize (and/or impulsively expect) insults to be a threat, but such generalization will be illegitimate in certain situations, such as situations that offer adequate police protection. (Vigilantism might also be appropriate when adequate police protection is unavailable.)

Objection 2: Almost everyone agrees that moral progress is possible, but moral progress implies that we can have highly justified moral beliefs based on reality. Although some “cultures” (used to) find slavery to be acceptable, just about everyone seems to know that such cultures are wrong. Abolition of slavery and moral education against the use of slavery is moral progress and implies that we corrected a false moral belief in favor of a true moral belief.

A better argument for fundamental moral disagreement might be based on what actual philosophers believe, but there does seem to be a great deal of progress and agreement among philosophers. Although most philosophers can’t agree which “moral theory” is true, they seem to make progress and reach a great deal of agreement about what is morally right given specific situations. Most philosophers now agree that slavery is wrong, capital punishment is wrong, freedom of speech is good, gender equality is good, and homosexuality should be a right.

Objection 3: Stitch needs to prove that fundamental moral disagreement is pervasive, but these examples do not prove that it is. It is inevitable that we can find moral agreement within each culture and disagreement across cultures considering that (a) people in a culture live in a similar environment and (b) people in other cultures live in a different environment. It isn’t surprising that not only do people disagree about what’s right and wrong, but people in a certain culture have the tendency to agree.

Additionally, moral disagreement is expected because (a) we are often uncertain about what’s best, (b) many of our values are immeasurable, and (c) many values seem to be incommensurable.

Uncertainty – People are almost certain that killing people willy nilly is wrong, but they aren’t quite as sure about how to appropriately respond to insults. Sometimes we have to respond to insults in the appropriate way to maintain the respect of others.

Immeasurable values – We don’t know how much our happiness is “worth.” For example, we have to decide if going to school is worth it. School offers many benefits, but it can also require a lot of hard work and suffering. We have no way to know for sure that it’s our “best option” despite the fact that it is generally a pretty good option. We simply can’t measure the values involved. How much happiness will it give us and how much suffering will we have to endure? What other options do we have and how will they measure up?

Incommensurable values – We don’t have a good way to measure one sort of value with another. For example, should we shoot a suffering animal to put it out of it’s misery, or is a few more minutes of life worth more than the pain it will endure? Should we legalize euthanasia because human life can be worth less than the pain that will be experienced?

When we compare cultural differences we lack the ideal conditions that would be necessary to avoid uncertainty, the immeasurability of values, and the incommensurability of values. Of course, we might wonder if immeasurability and incommensurability of values will lead to fundamental disagreement (in ideal conditions). These factors seem like a pretty good reason to think that at least some fundamental moral disagreement would be inevitable, even if moral realism is true. If human life and suffering are both worth something, we might still have no way of knowing for sure which is more important.

Conclusion

The main problem with the argument “The Persistence of Moral Disagreement” is that some fundamental moral disagreement is not enough to have a good reason to reject moral realism. One single justified moral belief can be enough to establish moral realism. If we proved that one moral belief is impossible to justify, that wouldn’t disprove any other moral facts that have been established.

Moreover, pervasive moral disagreement might also be compatible with a highly justified form of moral realism because the ideal conditions that are could solve “fundamental moral disagreement” only include knowledge of non-moral facts. It might be that we can highly justify moral facts though our personal experience of moral reality.

Although I disagree that cultural moral differences are evidence for fundamental moral disagreement, I do agree that fundamental moral disagreement is a plausible view in at least some situations. However, some fundamental disagreement would be expected, even for a moral realist.

1. Pain is Superficial

Nietzsche has multiple passages where he discusses how he views pain to be superficial. For example, consider the following:

“Pleasure and pain are accompanying factors, not causes; they are second-rate valuations derived from a dominating value,–they are one with the feeling “useful,” “harmful,” and therefore they are absolutely fugitive and relative. For in regard to all utility and harmfulness there are a hundred different ways of asking “what for?” (Will to Power, Aphorism 702)

The main reason that pain is “second rate” is because the greatest pain is emotional, which is caused by certain “dominating” values. For example, the belief that a loved one died. We think that our loved ones are so very important, and their death is seen as “tragic.” All of this produces a great deal of suffering. Such suffering is “fugitive and relative” to the higher value, and it “accompanies” our thoughts rather than the cause of them. (The thought that a loved one died accompanies our grief , and our grief does not cause our thought that a loved one died.)

If our greatest suffering is a psychological phenomenon based on our values, then our greatest suffering shouldn’t be seen to be of greater importance than the values that produce them. The death of a loved one is what matters most, not that we feel grief about it. It would be absurd to say that our grief matters more than the fact that a loved one died. If grief mattered most, then the death of a loved one shouldn’t matter enough to cause grief in the first place.

Notice that Nietzsche doesn’t use this passage to reject pain’s intrinsic disvalue. He doesn’t say that our pain doesn’t matter at all. He just says that it is “second rate.”

What about physical pain? Couldn’t we decide to walk around hot coals to avoid pain? I don’t see why not. Pain could be superficial, but it can still be worthy of consideration. It is part of our cost-benefit analysis when we want to make decisions.

2. Pain Gives us Benefits

Nietzsche finds that pain can make us stronger and healthier in the long run. Consider the following passages:

What does not destroy me, makes me stronger. (“Maxims and Arrows,” Twilight of the Idols, Aphorism 8).

I assess a man by the quantum of power and abundance of his will: not by its enfeeblement and extinction; I regard a philosophy which teaches denial of the will as a teaching of defamation and slander–I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage; I do not account the evil and painful character of existence a reproach to it, but hope rather that it will one day be more evil and painful than hitherto– (Will to Power, Aphorism 382)

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities–I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not–that one endures. (Will to Power, Aphorism 910)

It isn’t entirely explained how suffering helps us become healthy, but it does seem impossible to know how to deal with suffering without having to experience it quite a bit. We can imagine that people who always gets what they want would end up as spoiled brats and wouldn’t know how to function properly. Such people could become furious and suffer a great deal in the rare instances that they don’t get what they want.

We are told that pain can do us a great deal of good. Certainly we evolved pain precisely because people who don’t experience pain have a lower reproductive advantage. Pain tells us not to bite our tongue, touch fire, and so on. However, none of this proves that pain isn’t intrinsically bad. There is something we don’t like about pain. It hurts. It would be absurd to totally ignore pain. It should be part of our cost-benefit analysis. If we are willing to feel pain, then we need to know why. If we have a choice of (1) feeling intense pain with no benefit, or (2) feeling pain with a benefit, then it would make sense to choose the second option.

3. We Should Embrace Pain

I believe that Friedrich Nietzsche was primarily interested in pragmatic arguments. He is skeptical about knowing the “truth” about reality, so he would rather concentrate on learning how to be healthy. If we have no reason to favor one theory over another, then we have some reason to accept the healthier theory. We then have a question, “Is it unhealthy to believe that pain is intrinsically bad?” If so, that could count as a reason to disbelieve that pain is intrinsically bad.

Nietzsche believes that the healthy person will have a positive outlook. The healthier we are, the more positive our outlook will be. Perhaps we can try to be healthier by adopting a more positive outlook. This isn’t entirely implausible given the fact that stress is such a huge cause of health problems.

Nietzsche’s endorsement of a positive outlook is what he calls “amor fati” (love of fate). Consider the following passages:

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it. (“Why I Am So Clever,” Ecce Homo, Aphorism 10)

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer. (The Gay Science, Aphorism 276)

Nietzsche thinks that the healthiest sort of person will have the most positive attitude. That means they would have to not only love everything that happens for its own sake including pain. To be optimistic enough to welcome pain because it brings us benefits isn’t good enough. We should welcome pain even if it brings us no benefit. Why? It would be healthy to do so.

Amor fati could be taken to be a challenge to intrinsic value insofar as we think pain is intrinsically bad. To think pain is intrinsically bad  might be too pessimistic for “amor fati.”

I will discuss the following two challenges to the view that amor fati and the view that pain is intrinsically bad are compatible:

1. We can’t psychologically embrace pain if we believe that it’s intrinsically bad.
2. If pain is bad, then the value of the world could be negated.

1. We can’t psychologically embrace pain if we believe that it’s intrinsically bad.

Is it possible to love pain even if we believe that it’s intrinsically bad? If we can learn to embrace our pain at all, then I believe that the answer is yes. Nietzsche wants us to embrace all the horrors of the world. We have to be able to be fully aware of such horrors and then laugh. Our personal suffering is inescapable. Pain hurts. There’s no way around that. If we can love intense pain (and whatever else is most horrible) despite preferring to avoid such things, then I don’t see why we can’t love our pain with an honest belief that our pain is intrinsically bad.

If I am correct, then we can “love something for its own sake” even if it is “bad just for existing.” Either we have to totally deny that various horrors are “intrinsically bad” or we can accept them despite being intrinsically bad. There doesn’t seem to be a big difference between the two possibilities.

It is a mistake to think that amor fati requires us to abandon our preferences entirely. It might be that we should prefer not to touch fire because it would be stupid to do so. To touch fire doesn’t seem to “make us stronger” or healthier. Sometimes doing painful things really does hurt us rather than “make us stronger.” The fact that pain is intrinsically bad (but loved anyway) makes good sense out of our preference not to feel pain needlessly. If we touch fire on accident it won’t be seen as “bad,”  but we would prefer not doing so when we have a choice.

If pain isn’t intrinsically bad, it would still be possible to prefer to avoid touching fire when we have a choice. We could love our life and the world as it exists in its entirety even if we touch fire on accident, but we might love our life in its entirety slightly more if we don’t touch fire on accident. However, this position is harder for me to understand. I’m not sure what it is about pain that would be seen as “less good” unless we either (1) dislike pain or (2)  believe pain is intrinsically bad. Nietzsche’s endorsement of amor fati seems to make it a lot easier to understand pain as being intrinsically bad.

2. If pain is bad, then the value of the world could be negated.

One of the earlier quotations suggested that the world would be better not existing because of all of the pain involved. Even if that isn’t the case currently, we could imagine that it could be the case in the future. There are two different responses I imagine one could have to this possibility while still endorsing amor fati. One, we could admit that the world could be “intrinsically bad overall” but love it anyway. Two, we could convince ourselves that pain is “superficial” and could never matter enough to negate the value of the world. Perhaps human life is worth an astronomical amount more than our pain could ever be worth.

Conclusion

Nietzsche was interested in pain and the common preoccupation with how terrible pain is, but he doesn’t say that pain isn’t intrinsically bad. He just talks about the fact that pain is superficial, pain can bring us benefits, and pain should be welcomed insofar as it would be healthy to do so.

Although amor fati could be seen to be incompatible with the belief that pain is intrinsically bad, I believe they are both compatible. Additionally, amor fati would not be against all intrinsic value beliefs. It is certainly possible to love life and the world as a whole if such things are intrinsically good, for example.

I have concentrated on one argument Nietzsche could have provided against pain having intrinsic value and I have described why I don’t find it to be convincing. However, it is possible that Nietzsche did reject intrinsic values and gave arguments against them other than the one I presented.

I will discuss the following:

1. Ways moral realism could be dangerous.
2. Ways anti-realism can be dangerous.

Ways moral realism could be dangerous.

Moral realism could be considered to be harmful to society or individuals in the following ways:

1. It rationalizes behavior that harms others.
2. Moral realism leads to guilt.
3. It encourages oppressive behavior.
4. It encourages us to be closed minded.

I will consider each of these.

1. It rationalizes behavior that harms others.

It can (a) encourage us to demonize our enemies and (b) help us rationalize the idea that some people deserve punishment. There is a view that people are wholly responsible for their actions and their choice to do evil makes them evil. Such people can be “dehumanized” or “demonized” and are viewed as something that needs to be destroyed.

People who do evil are not always seen as being evil. Instead, we might merely think that they “deserve” punishment. It wouldn’t be fair to let criminals “get away with” their crimes. We should punish them to “get revenge” or “get even.”

My Objection: I am a moral realist, but I see no reason to agree that evil exists. I also disagree that some people “deserve” punishment. Although it is horrible to harm others, that doesn’t mean that the person harming others is evil. We don’t fully understand why some people are serial killers, but it seems likely that they are insane, incompetent, immature, or ignorant.

2. Moral realism leads to guilt.

When we harm others, we have a sense that things would have been better if we did otherwise. We can “regret” our action. We might also have a sense that we “owe” something to those we harm. If we broke a friend’s TV set, then we feel an obligation to pay for it. However, guilt is often supposed to be more than these feelings. To feel guilt is to emotionally punish ourselves as though we deserve pain. This means that “guilt” for some people is based on the idea that people can deserve punishment.

The negative emotions caused by guilt can help motivate us to do good, but it can also be debilitating. It can make us too depressed to be productive members of society.

My Objection: Although I am a moral realist, I am not convinced that “guilt” is an appropriate emotion. It might be based on strange beliefs based on an idea of “evil.” We can reject “guilt” for the same reason that we can reject that some people deserve punishment.

3. It encourages oppressive behavior.

Those who believe something is wrong tell others what to believe. They tell others not to have an abortion or to refrain from homosexual behavior. Additionally, they want to control the behavior of others by making abortion illegal and to ban same-sex marriages. Such behavior seems to be oppressive. To tell others what to think about morality is oppressive, and it’s oppressive to tell other people what to do.

Moral realism states that there are moral truths, so it could be true that abortion is wrong, and it can be true that homosexual behavior is immoral.

My Objection: The big problem is that arrogant people tell other people what to think about morality without any justification to back it up. If we know that abortion is wrong, then we will have to be able to persuade others through reason.

Moral realism doesn’t tell us that whatever we personally believe about morality is known for certain. Just the opposite. When two people disagree about a moral truth, only one person is correct. We would have to assess the evidence to decide which person is more likely right. It might even be possible that neither person has anything near certainty. We might not really be sure about whether or not abortion is wrong.

I must admit that when we find out that something is wrong, then we have a good reason to tell others. It seems perfectly understandable to tell someone that torturing babies is wrong. “Forcing our opinion” on others isn’t such a bad thing in that case. In fact, it doesn’t even seem oppressive to make torturing babies illegal. I think we should do whatever we can to protect babies from being tortured.

4. It encourages us to be closed minded.

If we think we know right and wrong, then no one will be able to convince us otherwise. If we think homosexuality is immoral, then we will just think we are right no matter what anyone says.

My Objection: I see no reason to agree to this. Moral realism gives us no more reason to be closed minded about right and wrong than scientific realism gives a scientist a reason to be closed minded about which sort of string theory is true. A scientist could think one sort of string theory is true, but obviously we need evidence to be sure.

It might be that some religious people who think whatever the bible says about morality is the absolute truth will be closed minded, but that is not a position that moral realist philosophers agree to.

Ways anti-realism can be dangerous.

Is anti-realism dangerous? I am not completely sure, but uneducated versions of anti-realism can obviously be dangerous. The main line of thought is, “Nothing really matters, so I can do whatever I want.” I will discuss two ways that unsophisticated forms of anti-realism can be harmful:

1. It can’t tell us when tolerance is appropriate.
2. It doesn’t give us a reason to be altruistic.

1. It can’t tell us when tolerance is appropriate.

Anti-realism can’t tell us when tolerance is appropriate. Why do anti-realists insist that banning gay marriage is oppressive, but banning baby torturing isn’t? We shouldn’t be tolerant of harmful behavior. That’s all moral realists need to claim. If an anti-realist wants us to believe that we should be tolerant of people harming others, then they have to agree to something absurd.

Anti-realists could argue that appropriate uses of tolerance is (a) determined by each culture, and/or (b) our instincts, and/or (c) whatever ideal rational people would agree to.

If each culture determines when we should be tolerant, then we would have to agree that torturing babies is justifiable in certain cultures. If our instincts determine when we should be tolerant, then flawed instincts could allow horrific crimes. If ideal rational people determine when we should be tolerant, then an anti-realist will end up being just as intolerant as moral realists. Anti-realists will decide to stop people from torturing babies and tell others that torturing babies is wrong, just like moral realists.

Moreover, although anti-realists can try to tell us when we “ought” to be tolerant, it isn’t clear what this “ought” consists in. A moral realist can say that we ought not torture babies because “so much is at stake.” Torturing babies brings about something that “really matters” (extreme pain). On the other hand an anti-realist can’t make such a claim. We might be able to identify what we “ought” to do, but it doesn’t “really matter.”

2. It doesn’t give us a reason to be altruistic.

If moral realism is true, then harming people is a terrible thing to do. It really matters. But if anti-realism is true, then harming people is just something many people don’t like. If anti-realism is true, I will have a good reason to put my own interests above the interests of others. For an anti-realist, my pleasure and pain is very real to me despite the fact that they “don’t really matter,” and the pleasure and pain of others doesn’t matter at all (unless they matter to me). If I could steal from others to benefit myself, then I might as well do so.

A common response is that it is part of human nature to care about other people, but this isn’t very satisfying for two reasons. One, we could train ourselves to care less about other people. Two, we are often tempted to serve our own interests rather than the interests of others, and “caring for others” doesn’t always stop us from making decisions that harm others. A CEO of a car company can make a decision to increase profits by refusing to make a car safer. Lives could be endangered because it would be less profitable to make the car safer. Such a CEO will either be compelled to make the car safer out of compassion for others, or she won’t. Anti-realism seems to require that the story ends there, but moral realism could have more to say. For example:

• It might be possible for the CEO to make the right decision because other people’s lives “really matter.”
• It might be possible for the CEO to develop a stronger sort of compassion to others.

An anti-realist can insist that we develop our sense of compassion, but I see no reason why I would want to do so. Compassion and empathy are pretty painful. I don’t want to feel bad when bad things happen to other people unless their lives “really matter.”

Conclusion

Although some sort of unreasonable form of moral realism could lead to unjustifiable intolerance, revenge, and oppression, it is not clear that all sorts of moral realism would lead to these problems. Additionally, anti-realism could lead to some problems as well. I have not argued that anti-realism is more dangerous than moral realism. Any uneducated view of moral realism or anti-realism could lead to problems, but it isn’t clear that an educated view of either position would lead to the same problems.

Some claim that evolution (through genetic mutation and natural selection) poses a problem for moral realists: it seems that given evolution, we have reason to think we’re unlikely to have mostly true moral beliefs.

Here’s the argument:

(1) Our moral belief-forming mechanisms are selected only for the adaptive advantage they confer on us.

(2) If our moral belief-forming mechanisms are selected only for the adaptive advantage they confer on us, then they are unlikely to produce mostly true moral beliefs.

Therefore,

(3) Our moral belief-forming mechanisms are unlikely to produce mostly true moral beliefs.

It appears that science poses a problem for moral realists who think we have mostly true moral beliefs. That’s not ideal.

I have already argued that intrinsic values don’t require God precisely because materalists don’t have to be reductionists. It is possible that the human mind and intrinsic values are an emergent part of the universe. Craig does not say why such a view can be dismissed despite being widely accepted by philosophers. There are contemporary philosophers who believe in intrinsic values and don’t think they require God, and Craig’s argument would not phase these philosophers because they accept irreducible facts. Craig seems to completely disregard the worldview of such contemporary philosophers.

Craig’s Argument

Craig’s argument is the following:

1. Either we must be reductionistic materialists or theists.
2. Reductionistic materialism can’t account for intrinsic values.
3. Theism can account for intrinsic values.
4. Intrinsic values exist.
5. Therefore, God exists.

Reductionistic materialism is the view that the only real parts of the universe are the smallest material parts (particles and energy). Everything else is an illusion. Intrinsic values are not particles or energy, so intrinsic values (by definition) would be rejected by reductionistic materialists. (Of course, mental events would also have to be rejected by reductionistic materialists, and that seems to be sufficient reason to reject reductionistic materialism.)

How Plausible is Craig’s Argument?

I have two major objections against Craig’s argument. One, his argument is a false dilemma. Two, it could be a reductio ad absurdum.

Objection 1: His argument requires a false dilemma.

I agree that reductionistic materialists can’t account for intrinsic values, and I agree that intrinsic values exist. Therefore, I agree that we have to reject reductionistic materialism. However, I don’t agree that we “have to be theists.” Why? Craig presents us with a false dilemma. We don’t have only two choices (to be reductionistic materialists or theists). We could be atheistic platonists (people who believe intrinsic values constitute a separate reality), dualists (people who view the mind and body as two different sorts of reality), pluralists (people who think there are multiple sorts of reality), or materialistic emergence theorists (people who think that there is only one reality with multiple irreducible elements). Right now I find some sort of materialistic emergence to be plausible.

What is materialistic emergence? The view that material conditions give rise to new sorts of reality. The brain isn’t the mind. Instead, the mind exists as an irreducible part of reality that can’t be fully described in non-mental terms. However, the mind exists because of the brain. Additionally, the mind is part of material reality. It isn’t a separate substance or property. I think that intrinsic values exist from some sort of emergence as well.

Objection 2: He Provides a Reductio ad Aburdum.

William Lane Craig seems to think that he proved that God exists, but it seems more likely that he proved that one of his premises is false. I find his argument to be a a reductio ad absurdum. The conclusion, “God exists,” is not something anyone has to accept, so one of his premises is almost certainly false. Many people will then say, “Well, I guess intrinsic values don’t exist then,” and reject premise 4. However, I think premise 4 is true and I disagree with premise 1 instead. (I disagree that we either have to be reductionistic materialists or theists.)

One kind of bad argument: Premises of an argument should be more plausible than the conclusion. We need to start with things that are pretty certain to lead us to a conclusion that is no more plausible than the premises. There is something wrong with an argument if the conclusion is more certain than the premises. For example, “If I am in a dream world, then I can sit on this chair. I am in a dream world. Therefore, I can sit on this chair.” We know I can sit on this chair, but we don’t know I am in a dream world. We find it very implausible that I am currently in a dream world, so such premises don’t seem to give “evidence” of the fact that I can sit on this chair.

Another kind of bad argument: An even worse mistake for an argument is to provide a conclusion that we find to be more plausibly false than the premises are plausibly true. Plausible premises should lead to somewhat less plausible conclusions, but a bad argument can have seemingly acceptable premises that lead to an implausible conclusion. For example, “Killing is always wrong. If killing is always wrong, then we shouldn’t kill one person to save thousands of lives. Therefore, killing to save thousands of lives is wrong.” Some people would agree with both of the premises, but the conclusion is almost certainly false.

If an uncertain premise leads to an obviously false conclusion, then we have an example of a “reductio ad absurdum.” These are arguments should be meant to show that an uncertain belief is probably false because it leads to absurd consequences. The belief that killing is always wrong seems to lead to the absurd consequence that killing one person to save thousands of lives is also wrong.

Craig’s argument seems to be implausible for this reason. The premises might be accepted by some people, but it seems to lead to an absurd consequence. If we are to ever accept an argument for God, then the premises will have to be very close to certainty rather than merely “accepted by some people.”

Some Additional Constructive Criticism

Not only is Craig’s argument based on a fallacy, but I believe he uses some questionable methods of persuasion. His arguments might be made to “trick people to convert people to theism” rather than to rationally change people’s mind. (I think Craig is too intelligent and well-informed to use these fallacies on accident.) Consider the following:

Suppressed Evidence

To use suppressed evidence is to refuse to mention certain essential factors that could plausibly undermine an argument. We might not want to mention objections to our arguments when those objections might prove us wrong.

Craig neglects to show that the very people who might disagree with him (e.g. emergence theorists) do exist, and their worldview is considered to be very plausible by the experts. Such a worldview is apparently “not worth mentioning.” Even worse, many philosophers will reject reductionistic materialism and theism as plausible views. (I certainly think that reductionistic materialism is much less plausible than emergence materialism.) Craig assumes that we either have to be reductionist materialists or theists. Those might not even be plausible options. Instead, the more plausible options seem to include Platonism and emergence materialism, for example.

Moreover, Craig gives a list of “testimonials” from professional philosophers who seem to agree that materialism is incompatible with intrinsic value. For example, he quotes Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science from the University of Guelph, as saying the following:

The position of the modern evolutionist . . . is that humans have an awareness of morality . . . because such an awareness is of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth . . . . Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says ‘Love they neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves . . . . Nevertheless, . . . such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory . . . .

Obviously he didn’t quote the opinion of professional emergence theorists. This gives the impression that the majority of professional philosophers agree with him. The fact that some philosophers disagree with him is not mentioned at all, and he does not consider any serious objections to his own argument.

Appeal to Ignorance

An appeal to ignorance is perfectly blended with suppressed evidence to give us the impression that theism is the only possible foundation for intrinsic values. An appeal to ignorance is the suggestion that “we don’t know how to explain something being true, so it must be false.” However, failing to explain something doesn’t mean it’s false. For example, we didn’t always know how to explain what causes lightning without referring to God, but that doesn’t mean God really does cause lightning.

Supposedly we are expected to agree that since atheists can’t explain where intrinsic values come from, they have to reject intrinsic values altogether:

First, if atheism is true, objective moral values do not exist. If God does not exist, then what is the foundation for moral values? More particularly, what is the basis for the value of human beings? If God does not exist, then it is difficult to see any reason to think that human beings are special or that their morality is objectively true. Moreover, why think that we have any moral obligations to do anything? Who or what imposes any moral duties upon us?

No serious attempt to actually answer the question is ever given. The question is taken to somehow vindicate his position despite the fact that some atheistic philosophers really do try to answer this question.

Moreover, philosophers don’t have to explain everything just like scientists don’t have to explain everything. Scientists didn’t need to explain the cause of lighting before being able to do so, and we shouldn’t feel the need to explain the cause of intrinsic values before being able to do so.

Conclusion

William Lane Craig might have a much better argument that morality requires God elsewhere. Perhaps this argument is just the one meant for the masses rather than for other philosophers. Either way, his use of fallacies seem to lack integrity and I see no reason to think intrinsic values could only exist with God, as I have argued for elsewhere.

William Lane Craig is a major philosophical figure for many conservative Christians, and many people agree with his arguments, so it is worth our time to figure out where his arguments go wrong.

Related:

A Youtube Debate: Does Morality Require God? with William Lane Craig and Dr. Shelly Kagan.

1. Good & Bad
2. Oughts
3. Right & Wrong

1. Good/Bad

Good and bad refer to positive and negative value. I have discussed the difference between intrinsic value, final ends, and instrumental value in my essay, “What Does ‘Meaning of Life’ Mean?” but I will introduce the main concepts once again:

Intrinsic value

The most relevant sort of value to moral realism is intrinsic value—The idea that something really matters. If something is intrinsically good, then (a) all things equal, it is justified to promote that value; (b) it is better for that thing to exist than not to; and (c) we ought to promote that value. For example, it is justified to give someone an aspirin who has a headache because the pain is intrinsically bad (unless there is a countervailing reason not to).

Intrinsic values relate to moral realism in the sense that they seem to constitute moral realism. Moral realism is the view that there are moral facts that are not entirely constituted by our attitudes and beliefs. We didn’t just make up our values, and they aren’t just part of our instincts. Intrinsic values are moral facts that are not constituted by our attitudes or beliefs.

Instrumental value

However, instrumental value (usefulness) is also relevant to moral realism. Once we know that we are justified to help people avoid pain because pain is intrinsically bad, we still need to know the most effective way to accomplish our goal. These values are known as instrumental values. (The best means to an end is considered instrumentally valuable.) It is instrumentally valuable to use aspirin to get rid of headaches, so taking aspirin has some moral significance.

Notice that there are morally irrelevant instrumental values and morally relevant instrumental values. It can be effective to use a gun to murder someone, so using a gun to murder someone is what one should do in order to accomplish that goal, but the goal is immoral. Instrumental values are only morally good when they lead to promoting intrinsic value.

2. Oughts

The idea that we “ought” to do something is known as “prescriptivity” or “normativity.” For example, “All things equal, you ought not kill people” is an example of a normative or prescriptive statement. There are nonmoral and moral oughts. One ought to use a knife to cut bread, but that’s just a nonmoral instrumental ought. You ought to use an aspirin to get rid of a headache could be somewhat morally relevant, so it could be considered to be a moral ought.

One simple understanding of “ought” and how it relates to intrinsic value is that (a) if we morally ought to do something, then we are justified to do it; (b) it is better for you to do it than not to do it (it leads to more positive intrinsic value); and (c) it makes sense to hope that it is done. You morally ought to give an aspirin to someone with a headache because it is justified, it is better to do it than not do it, and it makes sense to hope you do it.

Some people see moral (ought) judgments as propositional attitudes similar to John Searle’s view of desire. Searle says that beliefs are “satisfied” (or “fulfilled”) when the belief is made to match the world; and desires are “satisfied” when the world is made to match our desire. Ought judgments look a little bit like Searle’s view of desire because we want the world to match our moral judgments. However, desires are personal and ought judgments are not as personal. We morally ought to do something (somewhat) irrespective of our desires. For example, I morally ought to give someone an aspirin who has a headache whether or not I desire that the person’s pain is avoided. (Desires can be relevant to what we ought to do, but it is merely one consideration. Intrinsic values can exist, even if desires do not.)

Subjective & Objective Oughts

Also note that there is a potential subjective and objective version of “ought” judgments:

Subjective oughts: What you ought to do based on your personal knowledge and ability. For example, you subjectively ought to teach math if that is the most productive moral action you can think of taking.

Objective oughts: What you ought to do based on perfect knowledge and ability. For example, you ought to cure AIDS, save maximal lives, prevent the most pain, etc.

Although we can only deal with subjective oughts in day to day life, intrinsic values could be used to develop a sort of infinite ideal. We ought to save lives, prevent pain, cause pleasure, and so forth. These general moral rules could be improved upon indefinitely. There might never be a “best” objective point reached. You might think saving 100 lives is “best” until you find out that omniscience would have enabled you to save 1,000 lives or more.

Obligations

The word “ought” is often taken to be synonymous with “obligation,” but we sometimes contrast “obligation” with “supererogatory” oughts, “advised” oughts, “unadvised” oughts, “permissible” behavior, and “impermissible” behavior:

Obligation: We are morally obligated to do something when (a) a great deal of intrinsic value is at risk and (b) no exceedingly difficult behavior is required. For example, we are obligated to save a drowning child when doing so will cost ourselves very little because a human life is at risk (assuming saving the child wouldn’t be too difficult). Horrible things can happen if we don’t take action. A human life could be lost.

Some people seem to think “moral obligations” are things required in order to be a good person (or avoid being a bad person). This is a different use of the term and it requires a far greater understanding of morality in order to make sense because it might be difficult or impossible to know what a “good person” is.

Advised: If you morally ought to do something without a great deal of intrinsic value at risk, then we might merely say that the behavior is advised or preferable (or encouraged). Giving someone an aspirin to help them alleviate a headache isn’t a big deal, but it is advised.

Unadvised: If you morally ought not do something without a great deal of intrinsic value at risk. For example, pinching a friend.

Permissible: If an action is permissible, then we aren’t morally forbidden from doing it. Permissible actions include unadvised, advised, and obligated actions.

Impermissible: Impermissible actions are “forbidden.” They are also a form of obligation.  An action is impermissible when a significant amount of intrinsic value would be lost (or when negative intrinsic value would be caused). For example, killing people is impermissible when it leads to a significant loss of value. (It might be permissible to kill someone when it is necessary to save hundreds of lives.)

Many people seem to think that actions are forbidden (or impermissible) when doing the action would make you a bad person, but this understanding requires a great deal of moral knowledge. We don’t need to know what makes someone a bad person to know that killing people is generally impermissible (leads to a significant loss of value).

Supererogatory: Supererogatory action requires that (a) a significant amount of value is at risk and (b) exceedingly difficult actions are required. For example, to devote one’s life to charity while demonstrating an ingenious amount of skill difficult to emulate, and while demonstrating an unusual amount of effort (that would be unreasonable to demand of others).

People tend to define supererogatory actions as being significantly above the call of duty. Such actions are heroic or saint-like, such as committing one’s life to charity or sacrificing oneself to save lives. Note that some people use the word “supererogatory” in a less strict sense and what I call “advised” behavior could be considered to be supererogatory.

Many people might say that supererogatory action is also “not required” to be a good person, but this definition will require significant moral knowledge that we tend not to demand of an everyday use of the word.

What is significant intrinsic value?

I have said that an action is an obligation if a great deal of intrinsic value is at risk. I have also said that an action is an obligation if it doesn’t require exceedingly difficult behavior. We might wonder where to draw the line. How exactly do we know if a great deal of intrinsic value is at risk, and how do we know for sure that the behavior is too difficult to be an obligation? My answer: We don’t need to. Ordinary language allows us to say that headaches aren’t significantly important but a human life is. Saving a baby drowning in a small pool of water could be quite easy, but saving a child drowning in a raging river could be exceedingly difficult.

It is quite possible that anti-realists are correct that our use of the term “moral obligation” is based on convention and/or instinct. However, a moral realist does not need the words to mean anything precise. As long as intrinsic values are relevant to our everyday understanding of “moral obligation,” that is enough to help us understand everyday moral behavior.

Why don’t we need to define what a “good person” is?

I admit that people sometimes use the word “obligation” as a requirement to be a good person, but I deny that this definition is feasible because (a) it is too difficult to know what a good person is and (b) we don’t know if our understanding of “good person” reflects anything “real.” Anti-realists might be correct that our idea of a “good person” is based on nothing other than a shared convention and/or instinct.

Although our ordinary use of the word “obligation” does not require a rich understanding of the “good person,” I do think we can talk about what it means to be a good person in an abstract sense that could be useful. A “good person” is one we view as worthy of emulation or worthy as a teacher. This practical understanding of a good person could be quite helpful for our personal moral growth even though it doesn’t seem to be necessary for our understanding of moral obligations in general.

3. Right/Wrong

Right and wrong concerns appropriate behavior. Right and wrong refers to little more than obligations and impermissible behavior. It is right if it’s obligated (or supererogatory) and wrong if it is impermissible.

There are also subjective and objective sorts of right and wrong to match the respective objective and subjective obligations (or supererogatory or impermissible behavior). John Stuart Mill said that it is right to “maximize happiness” and wrong not to. This would be an objective sort of ought. However, we might subjectively merely ought to do what we can to make people happy given a reasonable amount of effort. (We could cure AIDS, but that doesn’t sound very realistic as a goal for every living person.)

1. Define mental realism.
2. Describe Searle’s account of mental causation.
3. Discuss the analogy between moral and mental realism.

1. What is Mental Realism?

Searle believes that consciousness is irreducible to non-consciousness.¹ You know what pain is because you have experienced it before. You can’t define pain as brain activity because the description of the brain activity is insufficient to understand what pain is.² We know that other people have pain because they have similar biology to us and experience pain for similar reasons. (Touching fire, for example.)

Searle describes consciousness as an irreducible emergent feature. Non-mental facts of the universe (about brains) somehow cause consciousness. Searle rejects what he calls “materialism”³ (the view that only particles and energy really exists) and believes that mental realism is compatible with naturalism⁴ (the view that there is only one reality and everything is causally connected to particles and energy).

In order to be a mental realist, we hope to admit that mental phenomena actually does something. If the mental description of pain was irrelevant to our behavior, then the mental description would be causally inert. This is what Searle calls mental epiphenomenalism, which means that mental events qua mental don’t do anything.⁵ Epiphenomenalism is against our experience of mental events. For example, the way we experience pain seems to be a good reason to try to avoid pain. It feels bad. However, if epiphenomenalism is true, then we don’t actually try to avoid pain because of how it feels. We would merely avoid pain (when we do) because of our non-mental brain activity.

It is possible to be a mental realist and to be an epiphenomenalist, but this is not a very interesting position. Realists will want to be able to prove that something is real, irreducible, and can have a causal impact.

2. Mental Causation

How mental causation is possible is mysterious. Physicists see the world as being entirely determined and predictable in terms of atoms, energy, and physical laws, with an additional component of random events (through quantum physics). If mental causation is real, then somehow a part of the universe other than particles and energy is going to end up having an impact on particles and energy. Nonetheless, Searle attempts to understand how mental causation might be possible. Some philosophers think Searle is too optimistic about mental causation in part because he advocates libertarian free will, but I don’t think Searle should have to advocate libertarian free will.⁶

Searle provides us with two hypotheses concerning mental causation. The first hypothesis is simply that there is no mental causation, and the second is that we have free will. I will also describe a third hypothesis: mental causation without free will.

Hypothesis 1: Epiphenomealism

He considers that we might experience that we have free will (and the mental description of our actions are causally effective), but such an experience might make no difference. Hypothesis 1 states that our mental activity is caused by our brain state at every moment. He draws a diagram of it as the following:

The top area (deliberations and the decision) is the psychological level of description, and the bottom area (neuron firings) are part of the non-psychological level of description. Neuron firings cause the irreducible description of deliberations on reasons, and neuron firings later on cause the decision. However, the decision wasn’t made because of reasons because reasons are part of an epiphenomenal mental event. More importantly, neuron firings (our brain state) at one moment cause our brain state some time later. Physical causes are all that matter.

Searle also argues that we experience our mental events (deliberations) as being insufficient to cause our decision. No problem. If hypothesis 1 is correct, it’s just an illusion. Neuron firings (brain states) were all that mattered all along.⁷

This diagram is pretty much how any mental event could be represented. No matter what we experience within our first person perspective, it is caused by nothing other than brain states.

Hypothesis 2: Libertarian Free Will

We experience that we have free will, and the psychological level of description is causally effective. Searle argues that his diagrams will no longer be of use, and our mind is a “system feature” of the brain.⁸

I propose the following diagram for hypothesis 2 in order to present mental causation at this level, even though it is probably an over-simplification:

This is a diagram of light hitting our eye and causing a brain state (e.g. of a baseball being thrown at us), which gives us a visual experience from the psychological level of description, which could partially cause us to react in a certain way (e.g. to try to catch the ball), which causes a brain state, and the brain state causes the bodily movement of catching the ball.

This diagram could also be used to show why we try to avoid pain. We touch fire, the brain state is affected by the fire, we experience pain from the brain state, the pain partially causes us to try to remove our hand from the fire, the intention to remove our hand causes a brain state, and the brain state causes our hand to be removed from the fire.

Notice that hypothesis 2 requires that the psychological level of description is capable of causing particles to move in the brain. However, Searle at one time admitted, “There are no gaps in the brain,” which is to say that everything is sufficiently caused in the brain (Mind 159).⁹ This is a big problem because Searle argues that we have free will. If our free will can move particles in indeterminate ways, then the non-psychological level of description will also be indeterminate. How does he try to solve this problem? By admitting that the non-psychological level of description might not have causally sufficient conditions because of quantum physics. “If we keep on going down to the quantum-mechanical level, then it may seem less surprising that we have an absence of causally sufficient conditions” (Rationality 288). Searle might imagine that the psychological level of description is only effective because it can effect the quantum-mechanical level. Searle uses vague terms to explain how mental causation can be possible when he says, “The right way to think of this is not so much “top-down” but as system caution. The system, as a system, is made up of the elements… the system as a conscious system can have effects on individual elements, neurons and synapses, even though the system is made up of them” (Rationality 289).

Hypothesis 3: Non-Libertarian Mental Causation

We could hypothesize the same thing as hypothesis 2 except without free will. Either we don’t experience free will or our free will experience is an illusion. Either way, it seems possible to use reasons without free will. We could try to avoid pain because it feels bad, even if we don’t have free will.

Hypothesis 3 might also require us to admit that particles in the brain will be moved by the psychological level of description. It might not move particles in a random way, but it might still move them in unexpected ways. Brain states will no longer be sufficient to cause other brain states when described in exclusively in a non-psychological way. However, this does not necessarily require us to admit that the quantum-mechanical level is involved in the process because there is nothing necessarily random about mental causation.

Analogy With Moral Realism

The main analogy with moral realism, is in at least three ways. One, moral realism also requires us to accept irreducible parts of the world. A moral realist would argue that the badness of pain is irreducible to non-moral reality. We can’t understand badness by describing particles and so forth.

Two, if moral realism is true, then we hope that it is causally effective. We hope that the badness of pain actually matters as we experience it by making a difference (helping us decide to avoid pain, for example).

Three, both moral realism and mental realism might require us to accept emergence. Morality and psychology are irreducible levels of description, but they seem to depend on particles (material reality) to exist.

If we can reasonably accept mental realism despite these metaphysical claims, then we might be able to reasonably accept moral realism as well.

Conclusion

I do not know that Searle’s understanding of mental realism is the best theory at this time or that it is the best theory possible, but his theory is sensitive to our actual psychological experiences, and it seems to be a fairly reasonable theory to accept. There are probably other mental realist theories that would also be analogous to moral realism.

If Searle is right that we can reasonably accept an irreducible, causally effective, emergent part of reality, then it might be reasonable to accept moral realism. If moral realism is uniquely unacceptable because it isn’t as reasonable as mental realism, then we need to know what makes moral realism unacceptable.

Notes

Abstract

This is a discussion that attempts to answer the question, “Is there a meaning of life?” This is a central moral question. If there is a meaning of life, then something “really matters” and we can find out what we ought to do. (Not everyone believes in a meaning of life. Some people are nihilists or relativists and think that value is a human creation.) I introduce the idea that the meaning of life requires “intrinsic value,” describe what it would mean for intrinsic value to exist, and argue that we have better reason to believe that intrinsic value exists than the opposite. I then defend intrinsic value from four objections.

Posts included in the ebook:

1. Denying the Meaning of Life
2. Mischaracterizations of “Intrinsic Value”
3. What Does “Meaning of Life” Mean?
4. What is Moral Realism?
5. A Moral Realist Perspective
6. A Moral Anti-Realist Perspective
7. An Argument for Moral Realism
8. Objections to Moral Realism Part 1: The Is/Ought Gap
9. Objections to Moral Realism Part 2: Intuition is Unreliable
10. Objections to Moral Realism art 3: Argument from Queerness
11. Objections to Moral Realism Part 4: Moral Beliefs Can’t Motivate
12. How to Find the Meaning of Life
13. What is the Meaning of Life?

If you like this ebook, you might want to take a look at my older ebook, Contemporary Metaethics Part 1.

I also made a permanent webpage to put my ebooks, and I’ve updated my about page.

We can provide evidence that X has intrinsic value based on the following evidence:

1. We experience X as good (or bad).
2. We know X is good (or bad) for everyone.
3. X’s intrinsic value explains our moral experiences.
4. Our experience of X’s value can’t be fully accounted for as a “final end,” usefulness, and/or a pre-existing desire.

I will attempt to explain each of these elements of evidence:

1. We experience X as good (or bad).

We experience pleasure as good and pain as bad. This fact is undeniable. So far we still can’t say that pleasure or pain are intrinsic values because of several reasons. For example, we might just have a personal interest to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

2. We know X is good (or bad) for everyone.

It might be a universal fact that everyone experiences pleasure as good and pain is bad, but that’s not the point I want to make. (It’s possible that everyone lives within the same illusion.) I want to say that something with intrinsic value really matters even if you don’t personally care about it. If you want something intrinsically valuable, that valuable thing matters, even if I don’t care about your interests. For example, your pain matters even if I don’t care about you. Intrinsic value provides us with a reason to care about something (or to at least nurture our feelings of care.)

We can know that something is good (or bad) for everyone in at least two ways. One, through induction (generalization). We know it’s bad to feel pain and we know that other people can also feel pain (and therefore experience that their pain is bad) because we observe other people’s behavior and biology. Their biology and behavior is similar to our own, so we have good reason to believe that they also feel pain and experience it as bad.

Two, attempts to explain why the valued thing isn’t good (or bad) for everyone are less plausible than the alternative. It seems more plausible to think that pain is bad for everyone than to think that pain is only bad when we experience it. To say, “My pain is bad, but yours isn’t” might make sense given various assumptions, but I see no reason to accept those assumptions.

3. X’s intrinsic value explains our moral experiences.

One reason to choose one theory over another is that the theory is the best explanation of our experiences. This is not a controversial statement when it comes to science and the importance of observation to verifying scientific hypotheses. However, it is less clear that our moral experiences are relevant because morality might be nothing more than a human invention or psychological disorder.

I agree that our moral experiences don’t provide conclusive proof that something has intrinsic value, but they do provide some evidence. If there are any intrinsic values and we somehow know about them, then it is reasonable to think that we already know a little about them. Intrinsic values are a hypothesis in part to explain our actual moral experiences, and intrinsic values are in part meant to help us correct our false moral beliefs (and identify deceptive moral experiences).

How can we use moral experiences to help us justify the belief in an intrinsic value? Consider the following. We know that “all things equal, it’s wrong to give people pain.” This is evidence that pain is intrinsically bad insofar as pain’s intrinsic disvalue explains our belief that it’s wrong to cause pain willy nilly. It is possible that our belief that it’s wrong to cause pain willy nilly is false, but that would require us to reject just about everything we think we know about morality. Our belief that it’s wrong to cause pain willy nilly is just about as certain as moral beliefs get.

To repeat, the belief that it’s wrong to cause pain willy nilly does not by itself prove that pain is intrinsically bad. There might be a better explanation for this moral judgment, but such an intuitively appropriate judgment is something we want our moral theories to be able to explain.

4. Our experience of X’s value can’t be fully accounted for as a “final end,” usefulness, and/or a pre-existing desire.

We often say that something is good or bad because it is useful, a psychologically satisfying goal (a final end), or desired. If something is only good for one of these reasons, then we aren’t talking about intrinsic value.

Usefulness – We don’t say pleasure is good because it’s useful. Sometimes pleasure is the opposite of useful and tempts us to over-indulge in unhealthy behavior.

Final ends – Although intrinsic values we care about tend to be well-understood to be psychologically satisfying goals (final ends), we don’t understand pleasure to be merely satisfying in this way. Instead, we understand that pleasure is good because it feels good. A final end could be valued due to delusion, but pleasure seems to be valued for a good reason.

Desired – If something is valued merely because it is desired, then we have no reason to think it is really good. Money can be desired for its own sake, but money isn’t “really good.” To desire money in this way seems delusional. However, pleasure is not valued in this way. Instead, pleasure is valued because it feels good.

Conclusion

Some people seem to think that dozens of things have intrinsic value, and this doesn’t help us build a plausible view of intrinsic value. Even G.E. Moore was overly-liberal with identifying intrinsic values (and even suggested that books have intrinsic value). A healthy dose of skepticism is required to try to best identify intrinsic values, and the four criteria mentioned in this essay seem to allow us to provide plausible evidence of intrinsic values. Although I argued that pain has a great deal of evidence of having intrinsic value, it is possible that my evidence is insufficient. We could use the criteria here to find out that nothing has intrinsic value after all.

This view of morality is known as moral skepticism. The opposing views are often called moral intuitionism or moral realism, and state that there are objective facts of morality independent of human opinion. I’ll do these views an injustice and summarize them in the question: “Don’t you know that slavery is morally wrong?”.

I can understand the attraction of such claims - this blog is a living witness – but still I think moral skepticism holds because political and moral matters are fundamentally different from mathematical or scientific claims based on logic, data gathering, experimentation, statistical analysis, falsification etc. In politics and morality, we’re stuck with mere opinions; opinions which can be better than others, based on the reasoning and the arguments supporting them, but which nevertheless cannot pretend to be the truth. There will always be people with other opinions which may be supported by equally good arguments. Of course, also in matters of scientific or mathematical truth will there always be people with other opinions – take the example of global warming, or the vaccination sceptics - but these other opinions can be easily dismissed by facts, experiments, proofs etc. (which doesn’t mean that these opinions will go away; many people are immune to facts and proof). The same is not the case for basic political and moral questions. These questions may also be supported by data and experiments, but ultimately they rest on arguments for or against value judgments, and hence they can’t be settled on a purely cognitive or scientific basis (in other words, they aren’t – or better don’t have to be – caused by the mere ignorance or stupidity of one of the parties).

So, if data aren’t sufficient and truth and certainty aren’t a possible result of politics and morality, and if, as a result, there will always be a plurality of contradicting opinions, should we just keep on arguing indefinitely? Obviously we don’t. We decide on these questions all of the time. A large proportion of political activity is taken up by decisions on moral matters. And many consider those decisions not only necessary but also urgent. But then how do we decide? How do we distinguish good from bad decisions? We decide, not simply on the basis of facts and experiments, and certainly not on the basis of proof or a priori given truth or knowledge. Instead we use reasonable procedures guaranteeing the best possible decisions in a situation of uncertainty and urgency. These reasonable procedures produces reasonable decisions, not true or certain decisions. It is not because truth and certainty are unavailable that we have to find ourselves at the other extreme of arbitrary, impulsive and purely individual decisions. It is not because we cannot be certain of something that we cannot act in a reasonable way. There’s space between moral realism and moral nihilism, or between moral subjectivism and moral objectivism.

(source)

Reasonable decisions have at least the following six characteristics:

• First of all, reasonable decisions have to have a high level of acceptability and have to be relatively easy to attain and to execute. The decisions of the majority of the people are more difficult to attain but also more acceptable and therefore easier to execute than the decisions of an individual, a monarch or a minority. A decision by consensus is, of course, even more acceptable, but it is also much more difficult to attain. The system of majority decisions seems to be the most reasonable one because it strikes the right balance between the two different criteria of acceptability and ease.
• However, a reasonable decision has other characteristics as well. A decision of a majority can have terrible consequences, even if it is highly acceptable to the majority and easy to attain and to execute, especially when it is directed against a minority. A decision is a solution to a problem and should not cause problems that are worse than the one it tries to solve. The consequences of a decision should be taken into account. In other words, a reasonable decision is a responsible decision, in the sense that responsibility means taking into account and being accountable for the consequences of your actions. See here about the “tyranny of the majority“.
• A reasonable decision must be the best possible one under the given circumstances. This means that all possible decisions must be allowed to appear and to be defended in public before the actual decision is taken. The advantages and disadvantages of each one must be compared to the advantages and disadvantages of all other possible decisions. The choice between competing decisions must take place in public and as many people as possible should participate in this choice, otherwise we may not find the best possible decision. If we exclude some people, we may exclude some possible solutions or some arguments against or in favor of some solutions. In order to be able to identify the best solution, the choice of a solution should be preceded by thorough examination of every possible or proposed solution and by public argumentation and deliberation. A maximum number of people should consider every possible solution. Reasonable decisions or reasonable solutions to problems should be public and should involve massive and free participation. Dictatorial, secret or impulsive decisions can only by chance be the best possible decisions. There are more detailed posts on this here,here, and here.
• We should not be impulsive, but some things are urgent nevertheless. Sometimes we do not have time for massive participation and for thorough consideration of all possible solutions and arguments. Timeliness is also a characteristic of reasonableness. A decision that comes too late can never be called reasonable.
• The characteristic of timeliness is balanced by the characteristic of provisionality. Every reasonable decision is provisional, experimental (but not in the scientific sense) and therefore possibly transitory. It must be possible to correct or revoke a decision if it turns out to be the wrong one, if better arguments for other decisions turn up or if the circumstances change. This makes the speed of some decisions more acceptable. Regret and self-criticism are important democratic values. There is a Scottish rock band, The Proclaimers, that sings: “what do you do when democracy’s all through, when ‘minority’ means you, when the rest can’t see its true?”. The members of the band are Scottish nationalists who favor independence. However, there seems to be no Scottish majority ready to follow them. The error in their argument is that democracy is never “all through”. You can always continue to advocate your case and maybe, some day, you will find the right argument to convince a majority.

• The provisional character of a decision should, of course, be balanced against the need for stability and continuity. Decisions that change all the time are not the best possible decisions either.

These remarks indicate that democracy and freedom of speech are necessary or at least very helpful to arrive at the best possible decisions. Of course, massive participation and free discussion are also important in the discovery of scientific truth. But the “massive participation” is limited to scientists with knowledge of the domain in question. No one will propose a nation-wide referendum to decide on the correctness of the theory of relativity for example. Moreover, scientific discussions rest heavily on data, proof, experiments etc., which doesn’t have to be the case in moral and political matters.

Politics is not concerned with an a priori given truth. Political decisions do not exist because someone declares them after contemplation of the truth. They exist because a democratic majority has taken a decision with its limited knowledge of the moment and after reasonable, public and large-scale discussion, and because afterwards experience has shown that the decision has done what was expected and that arguments for other decisions have remained unconvincing. Reasonable procedures and experience, rather than truth, data, proof etc. give legitimacy to decisions.

I am not going to try to answer the question, “Is there a meaning of life?” in this essay. Instead, I want to clarify what the question means. What would it mean if there is a meaning of life? What would it mean if there isn’t? The belief that there is a meaning of life (i.e. that something really does matter) is basically what philosophers call “intrinsic value.” If something really matters, then it has a very important sort of value. In general, we want to increase the number of good things and decrease the number of bad things in the world.

Intrinsic values has been part of philosophical discourse for thousands of years, but it has rarely been described well, and even philosophers seem to misunderstand what “intrinsic values” are supposed to refer to. In order to describe intrinsic values, I will discuss the following:

1. What the term “intrinsic value” does and does not refer to.
2. How people misunderstand intrinsic values

What the term “intrinsic value” does and does not refer to.

My definition of intrinsic values

Intrinsic values have the following three characteristics:

• If something has intrinsic value, then it is good in itself just for existing.
• If something has intrinsic value, then all things equal, it is appropriate to promote it.
• If something has intrinsic value, then it is good no matter who attains it.

Something is often said to have intrinsic value if it is “good for its own sake” or “good in itself” or has “absolute worth.” The idea is that some things (perhaps pleasure, happiness, and human life) are good whether or not they are useful in any sense. Intrinsic value is not merely about what we desire, and it seems to make little sense to say that certain things (such as happiness) is really valuable to me, but not for you. It would be better for everyone to be happy than not. It would be better for more people to exist than less. It is bad to lose our happiness or to lose our life.

Intrinsic value seems like a requirement for morality. Killing is wrong if human life is “good in itself” just for existing. Causing pain is wrong if happiness is “good in itself” just for existing. In order to know why an action is morally justified, we want to know why our action produces good things (or doesn’t produce anything bad.) All things equal, it is a good idea to promote something intrinsically good (such as happiness.) All things equal, it is good to avoid something intrinsically bad (such as suffering). If something is intrinsically good, then it is good no matter who attains it. Assuming happiness has intrinsic value, it’s better for two people to be happy than one. Assuming suffering has intrinsic disvalue, it’s better for one person to suffer than two.

If you decide to eat chocolate, then you might say that you did it to get pleasure. This makes perfect sense to most people. The chocolate might not be healthy, but it does give us something we understand to have value.

If you decide to make money, then we might want to know why. If you reply, “money is the meaning of life,” then we will have a good reason to worry. Money simply isn’t “good in itself.” Money has to be used for something good. If money is needed to buy food, then we might still wonder if the action is justified. What’s so good about food? If you reply that food is necessary to survive, then we might again ask what’s so good about survival. Either survival is not really important “in itself” and we will want to know why you want to survive, or survival (human life) must be “good in itself.”

There is an ancient question in philosophy, “Are things good because they are desired, or are they desirable because they are good?” Intrinsic values is an answer: Things are not merely good because they are desired. Some things are desirable because they are good. Happiness is experienced as being wonderful, and that why we desire it. We don’t want to say that happiness is good just because we desire it.

We think that morality is inescapable. We can opt out of some of our obligations, but not our moral obligations. You are obligated to be a good doctor if you are a doctor, but you can decide to quit. You are obligated to refrain from killing people, but you can’t opt out of that obligation. You can’t say, “Well, I don’t care about morality,” or “I don’t want to be a good person anymore.” Intrinsic values can explain why morality is inescapable: There is something of real value. It would be horrible to destroy something that has real value (happiness or human life.)

We think that helping others makes sense. To help other people attain happiness or avoid pain makes perfect sense if happiness is intrinsically good, and helping others avoid pain makes sense if pain is intrinsically bad. People who are selfish and are willing to harm others to benefit themselves are criticized because they fail to realize that some things “really matter” and are good or bad no matter who attains it. To say that pain is only bad when I feel it, but it isn’t bad when other people feel it seems absurd.

Some people insist that morality only requires empathy, but empathy tends to give us pain. We don’t necessarily want to feel bad when other people feel bad. We might have the choice to stop having empathy by training ourselves to be “desensitized.” Perhaps violence in movies can help us stop empathizing with other people. If nothing “really matters,” then to insist that we improve our sense of empathy rather than neglect it seems irrational. To merely want to coerce others into being moral seems oppressive, and if nothing really matters, it would also seem totally unjustified.

Final Ends

Aristotle introduced the idea of “final ends” or “ultimate ends.” (Basically meaning “final goals” or “ultimate goals.”) His point was that we psychologically accept that some goals are worth having (even if they aren’t useful), but others aren’t. Wanting to eat chocolate for pleasure might be worthy enough to justify eating chocolate sometimes. Wanting to avoid a headache seems to be a good reason to take an aspirin. Aristotle seemed to think that final ends were intrinsic values, but they don’t have to be. Instead, final ends might be strictly description of our psychology. Although final ends are things we desire for their own sake, they might not “really matter.”

In other words, desiring something (in itself) is not the same thing as something being good in itself. We would desire happiness just because we enjoy it, even if we found out that happiness “doesn’t really matter.” Intrinsic values usually seem to be final ends (things we desire for their own sake), but not all final ends are necessarily intrinsic values. Money can be valued for its own sake, but it doesn’t have intrinsic value.

Just like intrinsic values, final ends are not merely useful. Pain is pretty useful, but we still hate pain. We don’t say pain is good, even though it is very helpful to us to have a capacity for pain. To say that pain is bad is to say that it is bad for its own sake. We wouldn’t want to have pain “just for the heck of it.”

The reason that Aristotle called final ends “final” is because he imagined that they would be the last justification you need for an action. He saw that there can be a long chain of justifications: Getting a job helps get money, getting money helps get food, getting food helps us survive. The final justification for getting a job in this example is survival. Most people would agree that survival is desired for its own sake, and it would be quite strange for someone to challenge such a justification and say, “So what? Survival is terrible!” (Survival might not be so great if we would experience too much pain, but avoiding pain seems to be a final end as well.)

Instrumental value

We often confuse intrinsic value with instrumental value or “usefulness.” A machine gun might be useful at killing people, but guns do not have intrinsic value. Money might be useful at helping us survive, but money is not intrinsically valuable. Usefulness is relevant to ethics because we need to know how to achieve our goals. Even if we find out that intrinsic values exist, we still need to know how to promote them. The fact that happiness is intrinsically good is less controversial than the best way to attain happiness for oneself or others.

Although we often say worthless things are “useless,” intrinsic values are useless qua intrinsic value. It isn’t the usefulness of intrinsic values that make them good. They are good despite not being useful. If we found out that there is no meaning of life and nothing really matters, things could still be useful. A machine gun could be useful to kill people, for example. Although we might say that machine guns are “good for killing people,” we might still wonder if machine guns are “really good.”

People often argue that pain isn’t really bad considering that it is often part of our learning experiences. This means that pain can be useful, but it doesn’t mean that pain isn’t intrinsically bad. Many of us believe that pain is intrinsically bad precisely because there is something bad about pain despite the fact that it can be useful. It’s horrible for a child to suffer greatly before dying from a disease at least partly because the pain is horrible. Torturing people is also horrible at least partly because of the pain. It would be pretty absurd to say that pain is good, even when it doesn’t lead to anything good. Useful things can lead to something good, but they aren’t really good on their own.

How people misunderstand intrinsic values

There are at least three ways that people have commonly misunderstood intrinsic values: One, people confuse it with usefulness. Two, people don’t understand that intrinsic values can have different implications depending on the situation. Three, people don’t understand that we can disagree about what has intrinsic value.

People confuse intrinsic values with usefulness

Some people argue that pain can’t be bad because it does us a lot of good. Pain is part of how we learn survival skills. Touching fire teaches us that fire is dangerous. Getting cut with a knife teaches us that knives are dangerous. However, this is merely to point out that pain can be useful for attaining something good. Pain is not something worth seeking for its own sake. We don’t want to experience pain unless it leads to something of significant worth. In other words, pain is not worth avoiding at all costs. Whether or not pain is an acceptable consequence of our actions depends on the situation. Whether or not something intrinsically good is worth attaining can depend on the situation. (e.g. Pleasure isn’t worth attaining when it leads to illness.)

Pain can be useful to attain other intrinsic values, but that doesn’t prove that pain is good. That only proves that pain might be an acceptable cost to attain various benefits. Sometimes an action is appropriate despite the fact that pain will occur, such as when we decide to go to college (because the knowledge we hope to gain will be of greater value than the pain we will endure). Pain is part of our cost/benefit analysis and pain is considered to be a “cost” rather than a “benefit.”

Intrinsic values can have different implications depending on the situation.

Some people have argued that masochists seek pain, so pain can’t be intrinsically bad. This appears to be nothing more than a misunderstanding of “intrinsic value” for two reasons. One, masochists do not seek pain because they think pain is worth seeking for its own sake. They get some kind of pleasure from various painful experiences, and they decided that the pain is worth having. For example, I love it when a horror movie gives me fear, even though fear is not a comfortable emotion. Why? Because fear also gives us an adrenaline rush. In other words, masochism is just one more situation when pain might be acceptable. Pain isn’t an acceptable cost unless it leads to something of significant value.

To seek pain in some situations (such as mutual sexual acts involving masochism) is merely evidence that seeking pain isn’t always “wrong,” but that is only because the cost can be worth attaining certain benefits. All things equal, it is wrong to cause pain. We can only justify causing pain when we have a good reason for doing so.

People don’t understand that we can disagree about what has intrinsic value.

Someone might argue that it is possible for the masochist to seek pain for its own sake, but our psychological desires don’t prove that something has intrinsic value. Some people can simply be wrong. Many people love money for its own sake, but they are wrong to think money has intrinsic value.

Although I disagree that masochists really do seek pain for its own sake, it is always possible that a better example of disagreement can be found. Not everyone agrees about what has intrinsic value, such as those who believe money does.

Agreement doesn’t prove that something has (or doesn’t have) intrinsic value. Instead, we need to examine our actual moral experiences and decide which theory is the best explanation for them.

Conclusion

If happiness and human life really matter as we often assume, then we don’t have to make up our own meaning of life because the meaning of life is to promote happiness and the survival of human beings. (Of course, there might be several things that have intrinsic values that could be added to the list.) I am not saying that every waking moment must be devoted to helping others because we can only demand that each person attains a certain level of virtue. I am not saying that everyone should be doctors or scientists. There appears to be a huge variety of ways we need to contribute to humanity, and we are often most productive when we become specialists and do what we most enjoy. We need some people to be doctors, others to be theoretical philosophers, others to be scientists, others to be comedians, and so on. You can decide how to promote intrinsic values on your own, but we are all obligated to avoid doing significant harm.

Check this: for “Tradition”, the respondents had to choose between various options, of which the main options were Analytic and Continental. See the difference between the old fossils and the new and rising stars:

Target faculty: Analytic 91%; Continental 4%
Philosophy faculty or PhD: Analytic 81%; Continental 7%
Philosophy graduate student: Analytic 85%; Continental 10%
Philosophy undergraduate: Analytic 74%; Continental 18%

And for meta-ethics, here’s the differences between moral realists and anti-realists, for the same range of people:

Target faculty: Moral realism 56%; Moral anti-realism 28%
Philosophy faculty or PhD: Moral realism 56%; Moral anti-realism 28%
Philosophy graduate student: Moral realism 50%; Moral anti-realism 35%
Philosophy undergraduate: Moral realism 48%; Moral anti-realism 36%

And science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism?

Target faculty: scientific realism 75%; scientific anti-realism 13%
Philosophy faculty or PhD: scientific realism 70%; scientific anti-realism 16%
Philosophy graduate student: scientific realism 62%; scientific anti-realism 21%
Philosophy undergraduate: scientific realism 54%; scientific anti-realism 25%

And what about God: theism or atheism?

Target faculty: atheism 73%; theism15%
Philosophy faculty or PhD: atheism 70%; theism 16%
Philosophy graduate student: atheism 64%; theism 21%
Philosophy undergraduate: atheism 62%; theism 20%

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand

I will divide this post in the following sections:

1. Introduction
2. Plato’s Forms
3. God
4. The world of natural science
5. Now what?

Introduction

What are intrinsic values?

The question is not, “Will we despise murder and punish murderers if God doesn’t exist?” Certainly that will continue to happen whether or not such “morality” has any real basis. Instead, the question is, “Will murder ‘really matter’ if God doesn’t exist?” or “Will anything have intrinsic value if God doesn’t exist?” I am only interested in a foundation for intrinsic value because human psychology and institutions involving “moral practice” could exist, even if they aren’t justified.

I have already discussed intrinsic values in “Is There a Meaning of Life?” but I will briefly describe them again. Most values are just about how useful something is. Money is useful to buy stuff, food is useful for staying alive, television is useful to attain pleasure, and guns are useful to help us kill people. Usefulness is not intrinsic value because such goods by themselves don’t really matter. Having money, food, television, and guns doesn’t make life meaningful without giving us something else which has real meaning. Happiness, knowledge, and human life might have real value. These are the kinds of things that seem to “really matter.” If they really matter and have intrinsic value, then they are not good because we desire them. Instead, they are desired because they are good. They are not only good if I have them; they are good no matter who has them. The more people with happiness the better.

So, food by itself is worthless. Food can be stored and never used. Food on a deserted planet won’t “really matter” in any sense. However, food can be used to help us survive. If human life has value, then survival has value. In that case food can help us attain something with intrinsic value.

Why is intrinsic value important for justifying morality? One reason is because morality doesn’t seem like something we can reject or dismiss. We can say, “I don’t want to be a good student” or “I don’t want to be a good artist,” but we don’t have the option to say, “I don’t want to be a good person.” We can reject being a student or artist without serious problems, but deciding not to be a good person does lead to big problems. We can opt out of our obligations as a student or artist, but we can’t opt out of our moral obligations.

What is a foundation?

In this case a foundation is what “makes something true” and explains how it is possible. What makes the sentence “George Washington was the first president of the USA” true are the actual facts in the world (including facts about human institutions). What makes the sentence, “There is a rock in front of me” true is the fact of an actual rock being in front of me. The problem is that morality doesn’t seem to be true because of facts in the same way that the above statements are true.

Russ Shafer-Landau suggested that it is possible that no foundation is needed for morality. To convince us of this he “would point to correct logical standards or physical laws… and claim that there isn’t anything that makes such things true—they simply are true (Moral Realism: A Defense, 47). However, I think it will be fruitful to take a look at what some people propose to be the foundation for morality and why they think such a foundation could be necessary.

Plato’s Forms

Plato lived at a time when people started to have doubts about intrinsic values and decided that morality was “just a matter of taste.” Justifying intrinsic value seemed out of reach. In order to combat this moral skepticism and show that morality can be justified, Plato introduced his theory of the Forms.

Plato was the inventor of idealism. His Forms were originally called “Ideas,” and these ideas were perfections (ideals) to be found as part of reality. So, Plato decided that part of reality is very little like the world as we experience it. The world as we experience is imperfect, it’s full of change, and everything gets destroyed. In contrast, the Forms are eternal, unchanging, and perfect.

One way the Forms could justify our moral beliefs is by having a Form of the ideal person. People who approximate the ideal person are good, and people who do not are bad.

Another way the Forms could justify our moral beliefs is by trying to embody various ideals, such as knowledge and happiness. To embody something that approximates knowledge would be good, and not doing so (being ignorant) would be bad. To embody something that approximates happiness would be good, and not doing so (to be miserable) would be bad. These ideals sound a lot like intrinsic values.

Plato decided that there are gradations between the eternal and the physical parts of the world. The closer something is to the eternal, the better. So, the eternal parts of the universe that embodies perfect knowledge and happiness could have the most intrinsic value. To embody an approximation of these ideals could have some intrinsic value as well.

He thought we could learn about the Forms because our soul was a part of reality closer to the Forms. However, Plato never made it clear how we can know about the Forms. He suggested that somehow we already learned about the Forms (before we were born as free floating souls), but we have forgotten about them. So, we can somehow try to remember them. This answer is not compelling.

A major problem of Plato’s Forms emerges: We have intrinsic values, but it appears impossible for us to know anything about them. We have justified intrinsic value at the cost of moral skepticism.

God

Many Christians believe that God is the source of all intrinsic value in much the same way the Plato’s Forms were. Somehow God is the embodiment of all the Forms. So, instead of living up to the perfect (ideal) person, we should try to live up to the embodiment of perfection itself (God). These Christians seem to agree with Plato that the perfections are intrinsic values. It is better to exist than not to exist, so God exists. It is best to have knowledge, happiness, and virtue, so God has these perfections as well.

These Christians then agree with Plato that to approximate perfection is good, and not doing so is bad, and they agree with Plato that existing closer to the eternal realm is better than existing closer to the physical realm. The eternal realm is the source of all intrinsic value, and the physical realm is worthless.

So, the Christian justification for morality is little more than plagiarism of Plato. However, Christians have some additional answers to help explain our moral knowledge:

1. Divine revelation allows us to know moral facts when God tells someone what those facts are.
2. Jesus was God manifested on Earth so he could tell us moral facts.
3. We are supernatural souls and God has given us a power to know moral facts through “intuition.”
4. God has given us social instincts to help guide us towards intrinsic value and help us learn what has intrinsic value.

The world of natural science

I do not wish to argue that natural science is currently able to tell us about intrinsic values. I merely want to say that the world described by science (sociological, anthropological, economic, psychological, and physical) is the same world in which moral facts appear to exist. We know at least some moral facts through direct experience, such as the experience of pain. We know pain is bad because of how it feels, and pain itself is part of our psychology.

To say that pain is intrinsically bad appears plausible based on our experience, and God (or the Forms) do not seem relevant to our justification that “pain is bad.” It seems absurd to tell someone, “You can’t know that pain is intrinsically bad unless you find out God exists!” (If God exists, I don’t think it can even experience pain.)

Still, someone might argue, “Well, pain can’t just be bad for no reason because it’s subjective. It might be delusional.” The problem here is that pain would still be bad even if it was a hallucination. Pain doesn’t pretend to be something else. It can’t misrepresent reality. Pain is nothing more than a psychological experience, just like a hallucination.

It is true that some philosophers seem to believe that nothing but quarks, strings, photons, and/or electrons really exist, and everything else is a hallucination, and these philosophers will be unable to justify intrinsic values. Therefore, some other kind of understanding of reality is necessary to enable intrinsic values to exist. I propose that the foundation of intrinsic value is reality itself, but not all of reality. Moral facts are found in an emergent part of the universe. Just like many believe the mind emerges from the brain, it appears that morality emerges from certain conditions of reality as well.

There is nothing about the physical reality of quarks and strings that forces everyone to accept that they are the only real part of the world. It seems obvious enough that we have minds as well. (Try to disprove that fact!) Scientists and philosophers alike often accept that the mind is an emergent and irreducible phenomenon that is more than the sum of its parts. Morality might also be an emergent and irreducible phenomenon that is more than the sum of its parts.

So, how exactly might we get morality from the universe? First you have to get brains, which give us minds. Some mental activity is pain, which is enough to say that something intrinsically bad exists. The moral implications of pain isn’t reducible to nonmoral facts, just like mental facts don’t seem reducible to nonmental facts. The mind doesn’t seem to be “just the brain” just like we can’t explain what pain is to someone just by pointing to various brain states. In the same way we might be unable say that the badness found in pain is nothing more than nonmoral facts about the mind. (Pain is a morally relevant mental state.) It might be that all moral facts depends on the existence of mental activity, but nonmoral mental states, such as seeing the color green are not morally relevant.

The world of natural science is the most plausible foundation for morality

If intrinsic values require a foundation, then we don’t currently know for sure what it is. We can speculate that Plato’s Forms, God, or the natural world could be the cause of morality, but the natural world is the most plausible answer. Plato’s Forms and God should not be accepted as real without substantial evidence, and evidence of these things are difficult to provide given the fact that they appear to be separate from the natural world. (Even if we did accept that they exist, they might not help us know anything about morality.) It would be much easier to find evidence that intrinsic values from the natural world, and such a hypothesis only requires a view of the universe as a reality that causes some entities to emerge from other entities found in nature (e.g. the mind emerges from the brain).

Additionally, the view that intrinsic values emerge from the mind give us a pretty simple method of attaining moral knowledge. If intrinsic values emerge from the mind, then we will avoid Plato’s problem of moral skepticism, and the Christian reliance of questionable sources of knowledge. We will not have to rely on the possibility that Jesus is God, that the Bible is historically accurate, that we have a kind of supernatural intuition, that the testimony of people who talk to God is accurate, that our social emotions are good, and so on. Such Christian forms of knowledge might be accurate, but we might never know for sure if they are.

Now what?

People have assumed God is the foundation for intrinsic value for hundreds of years, and many still do. This assumption is essential for an argument for God and an argument against intrinsic values, but these arguments don’t make sense given the fact that intrinsic value does not require God.

The moral argument for God

Some people have tried to argue that God must exist because intrinsic value exists. So far that argument appears blatantly unsound. The argument looks like the following:

1. We know intrinsic values exist.
2. Intrinsic values could only exist if God exists.
3. Therefore God exists.

This argument fails for at least two reasons. One, there are other reasons that intrinsic values can exist, such as Plato’s Forms or the natural world itself. So far God doesn’t even appear to be the best explanation, so we can’t even conclude that “God probably exists” by realizing that intrinsic values exist. Two, we have to be sure that intrinsic values exist, but many people aren’t so sure.

The argument against intrinsic values

Many atheists who have rejected God’s existence have decided that they should also reject the existence of intrinsic values. They seem to accept an argument like the following:

1. God doesn’t exist.
2. If God doesn’t exist, then intrinsic values don’t exist.
3. Therefore, intrinsic values don’t exist.

This argument given by atheists fails because intrinsic values don’t require God’s existence.

Conclusion

If my foundation for intrinsic values is plausible, then we have good reason to accept that morality does not require God. In that case an atheist can have a solid foundation for intrinsic values.

I have not proven that God doesn’t exist. If you believe in God or the Platonic Forms, it is still preferable to account for intrinsic values in terms of our experience rather than supernatural (or non-natural) phenomena with very questionable evidence. If something ordinary and full of common sense can explain and justify morality, that seems much more plausible than a demand for faith or questionable kinds of evidence.

To accept that intrinsic values exist from the natural world is much like accepting that lightning occurs from the natural world. To say that lightning is created by God doesn’t help a scientist do his job. I propose that we can know a lot about the foundation of intrinsic value within the world of natural science as well. People who argue that God must be the foundation to intrinsic value give up to fast, just like the people who argued that God is the cause of lightning.

But, as is usually the case with the middle ground, that is not an easy position to take.  The big question that moral realists have to answer is “how do we know good and bad?  how do we recognize right and wrong?”  Because of the difficulty of this question, there are quite a few forms of moral realism.

Rationalist morality theories

The first group of theories I’d like to look at at the rationalist moral theories.  As the name indicates, these theories view morality as coming out of our capacity to think. Just like rationalist epistemology, the most basic form of rational moral truth is the one that is self-evident.  This is the theory of intuitionism, which is best exemplified by the modern British philosopher G. E. Moore.

Just like rationalistic epistemology, we can deduce from intuitions with formal logic.  In other words, we can think our way to various moral principles.  Kant promotes such an approach in what is known as formalism.

A particularly popular form of rationalist morality is called contractarianism.  It is associated with several influential philosophers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Rousseau is responsible for the title and the basic idea:  He suggested that, once upon a time, humanity was in a state of savage anarchy.  Each person felt free to do whatever they needed to do to get what they wanted.  However, the fact that everyone else was doing the same meant that no-one was really free at all.  Whatever time they weren’t spending on getting what they needed would be spent protecting themselves from each other!

So, says Rousseau, our ancestors got together, sat down, and thought this through — at least metaphorically.  More literally, certain ways of dealing with anarchy evolved over thousands of years.  But the principle is the same:  We each agree to give up some of our freedom to take whatever we want, in order that we all can get what we need.  The Social Contract, it’s called.

This idea was very influential in its time, especially on the American and French Revolutions.  Our founding fathers quite literally outlined the processes of our government and the rights and obligations of the citizenry in a social contract known as the Constitution.  We call our system democracy, of course, but the Constitution limits our democratic freedom — the freedom of the majority — in order to protect the minority.  And since you never know when it’ll be your turn to be the minority, it has worked out quite well!

Naturalistic moral theories

The next group of theories, as you might suspect, are founded on ideas of a more empirical nature.  Here, morality is something you experience in some fashion.  These theories are called naturalistic.  The simplest suggests that we perceive good and bad quite directly, with a “sixth sense,” a moral sense.  This is the brain child of the Earl of Shaftesbury.  We often say to each other “that doesn’t look right,” and “can’t you see that that’s wrong?”

Egoism says that right and wrong can be perceived in terms of certain special feelings we call happiness.  The term egoism is unfortunate here, because we tend to think in terms of selfishness and hedonism, which would be more appropriately placed under the subjectivist or emotivist form of relativism.  The epicureans are examples of egoism:  Things like friendship, honor, and even altruism give us certain positive emotions by which we recognize that they are good.  Other things make us feel guilty or ashamed.

Analogous to contractarianism in the rational view, there is utilitarianism in the natural view.  Invented by Jeremy Bentham and developed by the Mills, utilitarianism is best known for the phrase “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Like egoism, happiness is seen as the way in which we perceive good and bad.  This time, however, it is not our own happiness alone, but the happiness of those around us as well.

Intuitively, it is hard to disagree with the notion.  But is is in fact a difficult one.  How do you know if others are happy?  We’re often not even certain if we ourselves are happy!  What makes others happy may not be the same as what makes us happy.  How are we to add up the various kinds of happiness?  Is every person equal in the equation, or are some people’s happiness more important than others?  What about the poor minority in this case:  Is it okay for them to be unhappy, as long as the majority is happy?  Bentham thought that we could develop a “hedonistic calculus” to figure these things out — others are far from certain about that.

Again, our founding fathers were influenced by utilitarianism as well as the social contract, and the Declaration of Independence is loaded with utilitarian concepts (and contractarian ones!)  Thomas Jefferson in particular was very interested in these issues.

There are many additional details to utilitarianism, and to many of these moral theories.  But you will have to go to your local philosophy professor for those.

One of the things you may have spotted as you read the preceding paragraphs is that these rationalist and naturalist theories are not terribly exclusive:  In fact, we could combine them all without stretching them too far out of shape.  Just like the US has the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and just like science is a blend of rationalism and empiricism, we can use all six of the theories under moral realism at once!

Virtue ethics

There is one more branch of moral realism to talk about.  This one is called virtue ethics.  Instead of looking at good and bad as something impersonal that we need to recognize via reason or a moral sense, virtue theory sees good and bad as a quality of the person him or herself.  It is a virtuous person that creates good acts, not good acts that add up to a virtuous person!  This is also often called perfectionism.

It is found in a variety of interesting places:  Aristotle proposed a virtue ethics in his famous Nichomachean Ethics;  Buddha outlined a virtue ethics in his sutras;  Plato has a virtue ethics, as do the stoics;  and Frederic Nietzsche promotes a virtue ethics in Thus Spake Zarathustra, the book introduced “Superman” to the world!  The idea is simple:  Follow certain practices and you will become a virtuous man or woman.  Then do what you will, and the results will be good.

I like virtue ethics a lot, but I have to admit there’s a danger in it.  Who decides what constitutes a virtuous person?  The Nazis read Nietzsche and decided that they were the master race and could do no wrong.  Nevermind that Nietzsche would never recognize his Superman in boot-stomping blackshirts — Nietzsche was dead by then!  Even the gentle Buddhists have had to face the problem:  If a certified enlightened master decides it might be a good idea to sleep with his students or take all their money, does that make these things moral?  To respond by saying we were mistaken about his enlightenment is too easy a way out of the dilemma!

Another version of virtue ethics, called situational ethics, was developed recently by a Christian theologian named Joseph Fletcher.  Uncomfortable with the “follow these rules or burn in hell” theology of some Christians, he said that Jesus had a quite different idea of morality (one quite like Buddha, actually).  If you cultivate a loving attitude, you will naturally begin to do more good and less bad.  In fact, whatever is done with love is by definition a good act.  You could point out that some people do pretty awful things in the name of love, but we could consider these mistaken examples of love.  But you could also argue that this is an example of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy:  If something good comes out of love, fine; If something bad comes out of love, then, well, that wasn’t real love!

Another aspect of his theory is that morality is always situational.  He means that morality is always a matter of a real person in a real situation, and we can’t really judge them from outside that situation.  Hypothetical moral situations, he says, are never real.  There are always more details to be taken into account!  This sounded way too much like moral relativism to conservative Christians, and so today many people misunderstand poor Fletcher and assume he was some kind of nasty nihilist!”

The History Of Psychology, Part 2: The Rebirth

Dr. C. George Boeree

© Copyright 1999 C. George Boeree

Ali.♥

I will explain Humean psychology, four Humean objections against moral realism, and my reply to those objections. The Humean objections to moral realism that I will discuss are the following:

1. Intrinsic values don’t exist because they can’t motivate.
2. Moral experience indicates that moral values are desires.
3. Even if there are intrinsic values, they still can’t motivate.
4. We can’t reason about moral values.

1. Humean Psychology

Humean psychology basically says that beliefs and desires are totally different kinds of things. The difference between beliefs and desires reflects Hume’s gap between “ought” and “is” (prescriptive and descriptive facts). What we desire is prescriptive and what we believe is descriptive.

According to Humean psychology, all reasoning is means-ends reasoning. A belief can help you know how to best satisfy a desire. You can desire an apple, and the belief that an apple is on the table will give me a reason to pick up the apple. All reasoning will be like this. We can’t reason about which desires to accept or which desires to reject. Desires aren’t true or false.

Of course, we can reason about which desires we really have. Sometimes we are wrong about which desires we have. Some pain in the stomach might be hunger. Sometimes we might not know why our stomach hurts. We will desire to alleviate the pain in our stomach and eating food would then be the appropriate means to achieve such an end, but it might take us a moment to figure out why our stomach hurts.

I have already discussed how anti-realists are interested in final ends. For a Humean, all our desires are actually final ends. A final end is something we find to be of importance without being useful. It’s valued for its own sake. Whenever we have a desire, we must desire it for its own sake. To value something for any other reason would be just to value it in order to satisfy a desire.

Our desires must be “given.” We can’t decide on which desires we want, which desires we should have, or commit ourselves to having a desire. This is why Hume said, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions” (Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Section III).

2. Intrinsic values don’t exist because they can’t motivate.

Objection: Some philosophers have argued that what some believe to be intrinsic values just reflect their desires. The argument is basically the following:

1. Our moral values reflect either beliefs or desires, but not both.
2. Our moral values are motivational.
3. Desires are motivational, but beliefs aren’t.
4. Therefore, moral values reflect desires.
5. If moral values reflect desires, then they aren’t intrinsic values.
6. Therefore, moral values aren’t intrinsic values.

To say “pain is intrinsically bad” is to say “I desire people to avoid pain,” or possibly “I desire myself to avoid pain.” One reason to accept this is because moral values don’t appear to be beliefs. Moral beliefs would be unable to motivate us, but moral values always reflect a pro-attitude and reflect a motivation. To say that murder is wrong is to communicate a motivation to eliminate murder. To say that pain has intrinsic disvalue communicates a motivation to avoid pain (and perhaps to help others avoid pain.)

My Reply: There are at least three ways to attack this argument. We can either reject premise 1, premise 2, or premise 3:

Rejecting Premise 1

It could be false that “our moral values reflect either beliefs or desires, but not both.” Why not both? I don’t know how this premise can be justified. It is a metaphysical premise about the nature of beliefs, desires, and moral values. I want to suggest that we have to admit that it is possible for a moral value to reflect both a belief and a desire. It is possible to find out that something is good, even if we already desire it.

Rejecting Premise 2

It could be false that “our moral values are motivational.” Correlation doesn’t indicate an identity. Sure, we might (almost) always have a desire that correlates with a moral value, but that fact doesn’t prove that the moral value is a desire. It is possible that moral values are not in and of themselves motivational. Instead, the fact that we are motivated to promote intrinsic values could be a contingent fact about human beings. In other words we usually already have a desire for it.

How can we know if all values are motivational? I propose the following ways:

1. To identify values that would not be motivational.
2. To identify situations when values don’t motivate.

Identifying values that would not be motivational – Consider what it would be like to find out something has intrinsic value that we have no interest in, such as rocks. Even if we somehow found out rocks had intrinsic value, we might be unable to care. Taking care of rocks is not something that humans are willing to do. It isn’t surprising that we don’t talk about values that we can’t find motivational because these aren’t of any interest to us.

Identifying situations when values don’t motivate – Consider that we probably don’t always desire what we believe to be good. Even if we found out that human life has intrinsic value, we might not be motivated to help people who would die without our help. Many people claim to value human life, but they don’t donate most of their money to charities. It is reasonable to admit that sometimes we don’t desire what we believe to be good because we have a degree of selfishness. To be selfish doesn’t prove that we actually believe that we have more value than anyone else.

Rejecting Premise 3

It could be false that “desires can motivate, but beliefs can’t,” but I won’t discuss this possibility because it would require us to reject Humeanism entirely. Premise 3 will be justified if Humean psychology is justified.

3. Moral experience indicates that moral values are desires.

I have already discussed some reason to deny that we experience moral values to be desires. When we experience pain, we experience that there is something bad about it. The belief that pain is bad is not the same thing as the desire to avoid pain. We desire to avoid pain precisely because there is something bad about it. We can then believe that pain is bad and simultaneously desire to avoid pain. We can believe pain has intrinsic value, and simultaneously have a desire to avoid pain.

There are at least one way a Humean might try to show that moral values are desires—A Humean could point out that our desires are like our moral values. There are two experiences that seem to indicate that desires are like moral values. One, we can’t have conflicting moral values. Two, we can have genuine conflicting moral obligations.

Can desires conflict with our moral values? – A Humean would point out how absurd it would be for a person to sincerely say, “All things equal, murder and torture are wrong,” but to want to be murdered or to experience pain. This could reflect that moral values are desires because desires can’t conflict in this way, but desires can conflict with our beliefs. We can’t desire something and its opposite at the same time without an overriding reason to do so. You can’t desire pleasure but desire not to have that same pleasure simultaneously. It is also important to notice that desires can conflict with our beliefs: The fact that a mountain exists has nothing to do with whether or not I want it to exist. I can believe a mountain exists, but want it not to exist.

We could restate the argument as the following:

1. Moral values are either beliefs or desires, or both.
2. You can’t desire x and not-x simultaneously.
3. You can’t desire x and value not-x at the same time.
4. All beliefs are compatible with all desires. (It is possible to have any belief and any desire at the same time.)
5. Not all moral values are compatible with all desires.
6. Therefore, moral values don’t reflect beliefs.
7. Therefore, morel values reflect desires.

Reply: The moral experience that desires can’t conflict with moral values can be explained by a moral realist in at least two ways. First, it might be possible to desire something and its negation simultaneously. I will not discuss this possibility because it would require us to reject Humean psychology entirely. Second, we can argue that premise 3 is not sufficiently justified: Perhaps you can desire not-x and judge that x is good at the same time. Intrinsic values could merely correlate with our desires as a contingent fact of human beings. What I said earlier about how “it is possible that moral values are not in and of themselves motivational” can apply here as well. Knowing that pain is bad and desiring not to have pain are two different things and it’s a contingent fact that the desire to avoid pain correlates with the fact that pain is intrinsically bad. (Additionally, it is possible that some intrinsic values won’t correlate with our desires.)

Can we have genuine conflicting moral obligations? – Consider that we can’t reject an obligation on the grounds that it conflicts with another obligation, as argued by Bernard Williams in “Ethical Consistency.”¹ Conflicting obligations are those that can’t both be satisfied. Perhaps you have to go to school, but you also have to go to the hospital to see an injured friend. It might be impossible to do both. No matter which obligation you satisfy, you could appropriately still feel regret, and you might feel that you have to “make it up” to whoever you wronged by your decision (if anyone.) We can then give the following argument to reject moral realism:

1. Moral obligations reflect either beliefs or desires.
2. When we have two conflicting beliefs, we have a good reason to reject one of them.
3. When we have two conflicting moral obligations, we don’t have good reason to reject one of them.
4. So, moral obligations aren’t beliefs.
5. Therefore, moral obligations are desires.

Reply: This experience can be explained by a moral realist in at least four ways. One, if there is only one intrinsic value, then our obligations might never actually conflict. This is the position of classical utilitarianism, which has already been defended by some philosophers. This answer basically states that regret doesn’t reflect true moral beliefs when we do the right thing, but regret could reflect true moral beliefs when we do the wrong thing. If moral obligations never conflict, then premise 3 might be false because moral obligations might be able to reflect beliefs.

Two, the realist could admit that we can have two conflicting obligations nothing-else-considered: You might decide not to go to work because you need to spend time with a suicidal friend, for example. But all-things-considered, it might be better to spend time with your suicidal friend instead of go to work. If it was at any point possible to do both, then at that point you would have had an all-things-considered obligation to do both. So, we would just find out that you broke an all-things-considered obligation after all. The two obligations didn’t have to conflict by necessity. (They didn’t at some earlier point in time, so a wrong decision was made at some point.)

Williams would find option two and three to be dismissive of our experiences involving the fact that regret seems to make a lot of sense when we fail to live up to an obligation. Basically these replies deny that we have two conflicting obligations, so they can’t explain why regret seems appropriate.

Williams also argued that such dismissive replies neglect the fact that we should avoid getting into situations that give us two conflicting obligations. If we can’t have conflicting obligations, then we have no reason to avoid getting into situations that require us to break an obligation. For example, we could accept the duties of a 50 hour work load when we also have obligations to a sick mother we need to spend time with.

I am unconvinced by Williams’s rebuttal that we need to avoid getting into situations that could give us conflicting obligations, and this somehow provides evidence that obligations aren’t based on beliefs. If all things equal, we have an obligation to avoid such situations, then the moral realist would justifiably feel regret when he or she gets into such a situation due to negligence.

Three, if there are multiple intrinsic values, then our obligations could be expected to conflict. Let’s say that pleasure has intrinsic value and pain has intrinsic disvalue. In that case eating chocolate will be good insofar as it gives us pleasure and bad insofar as it can contribute to health problems (and therefore pain) later on. We might feel regret for eating chocolate, even though it was good to get the pleasure; and we might also regret not eating it, even though it could contribute to pain later on. There might be no way to determine which course of action is all-things-considered best in this situation, so it could make sense to feel regret either way. However, it might not make sense to feel regret if we found out that we really made the right choice all-things-considered.

Four, obligations might involve both beliefs and desires. our desires can lead us to regret, so intrinsic values might have nothing to do with regret. We might be able to reject an obligation in the form of a belief, but still be unable to reject the obligation in the form of a desire. For example, we might desire to go to work and spend time with a depressed friend, even when these obligations conflict. We might decide we have an all-things-considered obligation to spend time with our friend, but we will still regret not going to work. In this case we might simply desire to both go to work and spend time with a friend. The desire does not necessarily match the all-things-considered value judgment. We might desire many things, even if we can’t satisfy them all. We might then feel regret concerning any of the desires that don’t get satisfied.

4. Even if there are intrinsic values, they can’t motivate.

This objection against realism is basically a practical one:

1. If moral values reflect beliefs, then they can’t motivate us.
2. However, the whole point of moral values is to motivate us.
3. Therefore, moral values don’t reflect beliefs.

Reply: I disagree that the whole point of moral values is that they motivate us. We can know that pain is bad separately from the fact that we desire to avoid it. To repeat from earlier, the reason that we tend to discuss moral values when we desire them rather than intrinsic values we don’t desire is that we are simply not interested in the possible moral value of rocks and so forth. In fact, our interest in morality might be limited to the intrinsic value of things that coincides with our desires. The intrinsic disvalue of pain coincides with our desire that people don’t feel pain.

It is quite possible for desires to coincide with intrinsic values, and it is quite possible that we can nurture desires that coincide with intrinsic values. For example, we can choose to nurture our desire for people to avoid pain. We might also be able to do the opposite: Neglect our desire for people to avoid pain. Nurtured desires might become stronger and better at motivating us, and desires we neglect could become weaker. Therefore, intrinsic values themselves don’t need to be motivational in order to have practical implications. Perhaps we can choose to indulge and “exercise” some desires and ignore others.

Of course, we do want to admit that morality needs to be effective in order to be worth discussing. If we found out that moral values don’t influence the world at all, then we might suspect that they don’t exist. I have two responses to this problem. One, moral beliefs don’t have to motivate us in order to be effective. Instead, we might be able to decide which of several desires to act on. We can desire to do something with greater intrinsic value and to do something selfish. We might be able to then decide to do whatever has greater intrinsic value.

Two, we might be able to change the motivational impact our desires have on us by neglecting them or encouraging them. For example, a drug addict can rid themselves of their addiction by neglecting it. Additionally, we might be able to develop our desire for others to avoid pain by developing close relationships with others.

5 We Can’t Reason About Moral Values

If moral values merely reflect our desires, then it might be true by definition that we can’t reason about moral values. Some philosophers, such as A. J. Ayer, have argued that moral reasoning is only means-to-ends reasoning.² What food you “should eat” depends on nonmoral facts about health. It is the nonmoral beliefs we have that matters to a moral debate. We don’t argue about what has intrinsic value.

Furthermore, it could be argued that some arguments concern a discovery about “what we really desire.” We can be wrong about what we really desire, so people can spend time trying to separate what they value as a means and what they value as an end in itself.

Reply: There are at least two ways that a moral realist could respond to this problem. One, a moral realist can agree that we don’t reason about intrinsic values. If we can know intrinsic values through intuition, for example, then we might not have to provide much argument for them. Intrinsic values might be self-evident and require no argument. So, it is quite possible for a moral realist to admit that we don’t argue about intrinsic values.

Two, a moral realist can meet the challenge by showing how we do argue about intrinsic values. My Argument for Moral Realism might be one such example because it involves the argument that pain has intrinsic disvalue. What is most important about arguments is the evidence given. Intuition might therefore even be used in arguments. “We have an intuition that x is an intrinsic value” could be considered to be an argument.

Additionally, arguments involving intrinsic value don’t necessarily require any desires. We probably don’t have any desires regarding the following two arguments:

Argument 1

1. Imagine a world with nothing but plants.
2. Now imagine a world with plants and woolly mammoths.
3. We have an intuition that the world with plants and woolly mammoths is better.

This argument is not concerning means-ends reasoning, it has nothing to do with our behavior, and it might have nothing to do with our desires. Therefore, the argument probably isn’t about finding what we “really desire.”

Argument 2

1. We experience that pain is bad, and we desire to avoid it for that reason.
2. Therefore, pain’s disvalue isn’t just our desire to avoid it.
3. Therefore, pain might have an intrinsic disvalue.

This argument makes it clear that pain does not have to be based on our desires, and it is not means-ends reasoning. So, it’s certainly not about finding out “what we really desire.” It is reasoning based on our psychological experiences. Moreover, it doesn’t necessarily require practical implications. Sometimes we can realize pain is bad without feeling a desire to avoid small amounts of pain. Sometimes we might not feel a desire to avoid pain because we might just accept that we can’t get rid of it.

The fact that we can argue about intrinsic values can also be treated as an objection that we experience moral values as merely reflecting desires. Such arguments are examples of moral experience that reflects beliefs. Consider other examples of moral experience—We experience moral mistakes, moral progress, and moral evidence.

Consider each of these elements:

Moral mistakes: Some people falsely believe that pain isn’t bad. This belief can be corrected once they understand that we experience that pain is bad separable from our desires. Some people falsely believe that we have no reason to accept that mammoths have intrinsic value, but the above argument gives at least a small amount of evidence that mammoths do have intrinsic value. People commonly accept moral mistakes as part of their everyday experience.

Moral progress: Once we have corrected our mistaken beliefs, we can correct them. This is moral progress. People commonly accept moral progress as part of their moral experience.

Moral evidence: Intuition is evidence of moral facts. It might not be infallible, but it is worthy of consideration. People commonly accept moral evidence as part of their everyday experience.

Conclusion

Some philosophers believe that Humean psychology and moral experience has refuted moral realism. However, Humean psychology and the moral experiences examined here in no way refute moral realism. It is quite possible to be a moral realist and accept Humean psychology.

If Humean psychology is incompatible with moral realism, then we will have to agree that “moral values are motivational.” Although we might experience that moral values are motivational, that could be just because we already had the desire. Our moral values can often (or always) correlate with our desires. All the objections to moral realism above require that we accept that our moral values are motivational. If our moral values aren’t motivational, then we have no reason to think that they reflect desires.

This paper is divided into the following sections:

1. I will explain J. L. Mackie’s argument from queerness.
2. I will review relevant arguments I have made in the past. In particular, I will touch upon my argument for moral realism and my past arguments for the claim that morality is irreducible.
3. I will relate my past arguments to the argument from queerness.
4. I will discuss the ontological objections against morality being irreducible.

1. Mackie’s Argument from Queerness

The main argument against the irreducibility of morality is Mackie’s argument from queerness, which states that our moral experiences require us to accept substantial metaphysical claims without an appropriate justification. Therefore, we should think of our moral experiences as being delusional. It looks something like the following:

1. Moral realism requires substantial metaphysical claims.
2. Substantial metaphysical claims should be rejected unless they are appropriately justified.
3. Ethical metaphysical claims are not appropriately justified.
4. Therefore, we should reject ethical metaphysical claims.

An argument for queerness pretty much states that Occam’s razor forces us to reject moral realism, and the argument from queerness can be reformulated to apply whenever we make any unjustified substantial claim. It is more plausible that I forgot where I put my keys than the possibility that a ghost moved it; it is more plausible that a person has a hallucination than that a person sees a unicorn; and it is more plausible that I accidentally deleted a computer file than that someone broke into my house to delete it.

I agree that moral realism requires intrinsic values, and intrinsic values are part of an irreducible domain. We can’t reduce intrinsic values to nonmoral facts of psychology or physics. Mackie might argue that such an “irreducible domain” is an insufficiently justified substantial metaphysical claim. However, I will defend that such a metaphysical claim is sufficiently justified.

2. Review: My Past Arguments

In An Argument for Moral Realism I argue that we experience that pain is bad, and I argue that pain is bad no matter who experiences it, which leads us to the conclusion that pain has intrinsic disvalue. I then defend these premises from various objections. One objection to pain’s intrinsic disvalue is that our moral experience can’t be philosophically analyzed, but this objection would force us to admit that we can’t philosophically assess the existence of observation. We know we observe things by directly experiencing our observations.

I then spent some more time defending the view that introspection can be reliable by relating it to introspection involving philosophy of mind in my essay on The Is/Ought Gap. In particular, my argument can be found in the following two sections:

1. How could a materialist reject the materialistic is/ought gap?
2. The argument for a materialistic is/ought gap.

It is here that I argued that introspection is a reliable source of information concerning the philosophy of mind because we have direct experience of mental phenomena. This experience provides us with some reason to believe that mental phenomena is irreducible. It is impossible to understand the experience of green through non-mental descriptive facts. This kind of irreducibility is a substantial metaphysical claim, but it is justified. Additionally, this kind of irreducibility isn’t metaphysically illegitimate considering that it is compatible with materialism. Although psychology and morality may be irreducible metaphysical domains, they can still be part of the same reality as everything else.

3. The Problem: An Earlier Reply to Mackie

My defense of moral introspection implies an objection against the argument from queerness. In particular, premise 3 of the above version of the argument from queerness is implausible because we can justify our ethical metaphysical claims. Some metaphysical claims in ethics are justified, just like metaphysical claims in philosophy of mind are justified. Although I have given us some reason to reject the argument from queerness, there is much more to be said on the subject. Many people will still be unconvinced that we have good reason to believe that ethics is an irreducible metaphysical domain. I will consider the following three objections:

First, moral metaphysics might be disanalogous to psychological metaphysics. In particular, we experience some psychological facts directly. I will argue that this objection is unconvincing because we can experience some moral facts directly.

Second, it can be debated whether or not psychology is irreducible. Some philosophers are identity theorists and believe that brain activity is identical to mental states. I will argue that this objection is unconvincing because some mental states (probably) can’t be understood through a description non-psychological facts.

Third, it isn’t clear that we have more reason to accept morality’s irreducibility than reject it. In particular, we shouldn’t accept substantial metaphysical claims without substantial evidence, and perhaps we don’t have substantial evidence. I will argue that this objection is unconvincing because we can justify the fact that morality is irreducible in a very similar way to how we can justify other substantial metaphysical claims.

4. Ontological Objections to Intrinsic Values

Is ontological moral philosophy analogous with mental philosophy?

The objection: One could argue that metaphysical claims of psychology can easily be justified through introspection because we can examine our direct experience of psychology. For example, we know what it is like to experience the color green because we have actually done so. To experience it is to have direct access to part of reality. That part of reality is the psychological domain. We can say that the psychological domain is metaphysically irreducible in the sense that non-psychological descriptions can never fully describe our experiences of psychology. No matter how many non-psychological facts are cited, you will never know what “the experience of the color green” is. However, we do not have a direct access to the moral domain. Therefore, we can’t know that the moral domain is irreducible.

My reply: We do have direct access to some moral claims because some moral claims are part of our psychological experience. To experience pain is enough to decide that pain is bad, and we realize other people feel pain in the same way, which is enough for us to realize that it’s a good idea to give someone an aspirin when they have a headache. The “badness” of pain is part of our experience of pain.

If we have direct access to moral facts through our experiences, then there is a new worry: Isn’t the moral domain reducible to the psychological domain? It is quite possible that the moral domain is part of psychology, but if it is, then it is an irreducible domain of psychology. What I claim is that moral facts are irreducible to nonmoral facts. Whether or not moral facts could be psychological facts wouldn’t be enough to prove that moral facts aren’t irreducible to nonmoral facts. Psychological facts are not by definition non-moral.

Is psychology irreducible?

Objection: I claim that we know moral facts are irreducible the same way we know psychological facts are irreducible, but some will argue that psychological facts are reducible to non-psychological facts. If our experiences can’t prove that psychology is irreducible, then they might also fail to prove that morality is irreducible. Some philosophers are identity theorists of the mind. They believe that mental states are identical to various brain states. There can be various brain states that correspond to a single mental state. (This is to say that the mind is multiply realizable. A single mental state can exist from various brain states.)

We might find out that the mind is reducible to non-mental states just like water is reducible to H2O. When you touch and taste water, you don’t experience H2O. When H2O is described to you, you don’t know anything about experiencing water, but that just means that our experience of water is deceptive. Perhaps our experience of pain is deceptive in the same way. Pain is really a brain state (or disjunctive chain of possible brain states), but we experience it in a strange way.

My reply: John Searle, Thomas Negal, Saul Kripke, and Frank Jackson have done a good job at replying to this objection already.² They argue that our experience of the world is often illusory, but consciousness in particular is something that can’t be an illusion. The actual experiences we have can’t be an illusion insofar as we describe nothing more than the experience itself. Pain, for example, is just an experience. To have a hallucination of pain is the same thing as a real pain. In a similar way we can’t accept that consciousness as a whole is a hallucination. If it was, who would be having it? Hallucinations require hallucinaters.

At this point I would like to provide two additional arguments for the reliability of our introspective evidence: One, we know our experiences exist because we have direct access to them. Introspection is reliable when it gives us direct access. Two, the feel (or qualia) of the experience includes real properties of something that exists, even if that something that exists is nothing other than our mental events.³ We have direct access to the properties of our experiences. The fact that some introspective evidence is reliable for these two arguments should give us reason to consider the possibility that it might also give us reliable evidence that some psychological facts are irreducible.

In conclusion, we should accept that a mental state, such as “the experience of pain,” is an ontologically real state, and we can’t intuitively understand the experience of pain to “really be something else,” but some overriding reason might be presented that forces us to accept pain as being reducible. In the same way the “badness of pain” is part of our pain experience and likewise must be accepted as a real state, can only be intuitively understand as being irreducible, but an overriding reason may someday be presented to force us to reject it as being irreducible. We currently have no overriding reason to reject the irreducibility of psychology or morality, so the burden of proof has been shifted to those who believe such domains to be reducible.

Do we have sufficient reason to accept morality to be irreducible?

Objection: It could be argued that we still don’t have better reason to accept that morality is irreducible than the opposite. Although we can justify the fact that morality is irreducible, it isn’t clear if the justification is sufficient. We shouldn’t accept a claim with more metaphysical implications than necessary, and it could be objected that “it isn’t necessary to accept that morality is irreducible.” Consider the following:

1. My keys aren’t where I left them.
2. I didn’t move my keys.
3. No other human or animal moved my keys.
4. Therefore, a ghost moved my keys.

Although this argument is absurd, it can be justified to some extent. We might then worry: Is the justification that morality is irreducible insufficient similar to how this argument for a ghost is insufficient? This argument provides a justification for the belief that a ghost moved my keys. All of the premises can be justified. Our memory is a pretty reliable source of knowledge and I remember leaving my keys somewhere. I also remember not moving them, and I can have good reason to believe that no humans or mammals were around. Perhaps I am the only person around for 10 minutes before I realize my keys aren’t where I left them. The problem is that we need a stronger justification in order to accept such a claim with so many metaphysical implications. We can’t accept new kinds of entities unless it is truly the most justified possibility. It is more likely that one of the premises is false than that the conclusion is true. In particular, our memory is not reliable enough to prove the existence of ghosts. Sometimes our mind plays tricks on itself and we put our keys somewhere other than where we remember putting them. Although it is also more likely that an illusionist is playing a trick on me than the possibility that ghosts exist, it is even more likely that my mind is playing a trick on itself. (Notice that we don’t have to know for sure which premise is false to know that the conclusion is unacceptable.⁴)

My reply: The objection is unconvincing because we have some reason to believe that the irreducibility of morality could be the best explanation of our moral experience. Consider these three arguments for substantial metaphysical claims:

Argument 1

1. We have observations.
2. Having observations are impossible without having psychological experiences.
3. Therefore, psychological experiences exist.

Argument 2

1. My experience of seeing a television is best explained by a television actually existing.
2. Therefore, it is much more plausible that a television exists than otherwise.

Argument 3

1. We experience the notion of “bad” through moral experience.
2. It is impossible to understand the fact that something is bad given a description of nonmoral facts.
3. Therefore, moral facts are irreducible.

Argument 1 and 2 are sufficiently justified, and the reason that they are sufficiently justified is that we have no overriding reason to reject them, and they reflect the best possible explanation for a phenomena. Argument 1 is about as justified as any metaphysical argument can be because the best explanation for being able to observe things is to have psychological experiences. Argument 2 is very plausible. It might be that I am hallucinating that a television exists, but this would be very unusual. The only reason to think someone is hallucinating is when there are overriding reasons to believe their experience to be deceptive. So, the best reason to think that someone is seeing a television is because there really is a television.

Argument 3 is sufficiently justified for the same reason Argument 1 and 2 are justified. It is also the best explanation of our experience, and we have no overriding reason to doubt it. How do we know it is the best explanation for our experience? Because we can’t intuitively accept that nonmoral facts could somehow give us moral facts. (Perhaps someday it will be proven that we can get moral facts from nonmoral facts, but we have no reason to believe it yet.)

What reasons do we have to doubt Argument 3?

1. If it is possible to understand moral facts from a description of nonmoral facts.
2. If introspective evidence is unreliable.
3. If nothing could possibly be irreducible.

Is it possible to understand moral facts from a description of nonmoral facts?

I have already given some reason to believe we can’t understand moral facts from a description of nonmoral facts. In particular, it is very intuitive. We can’t see how important something is just by looking at atoms flying around, just by looking at the brain, or even by looking at nonmoral psychological states.

The possibility of understanding moral facts from a description of nonmoral facts is the best strategy to prove that moral facts are reducible, but no argument of this sort has been convincing. For example, it has been proposed that “maximizing pleasure” means the same thing as “good.” However, pleasure doesn’t seem to be good by definition. Why? Because there is a kind of importance involved with morality. “Maximizes pleasure” doesn’t impress upon us any sort of importance. It might be that maximizing pleasure is always important, but understanding the word “importance” doesn’t guarantee an understanding of the word “pleasure.” Additionally, there might be things that are important other than pleasure. (I already argued that pain is important.)

If “maximizing pleasure” did mean the same thing as “good,” then the reason we find maximizing pleasure to be important is because we desire it. However, there is something important about pain other than just the desire to avoid it. The desire to avoid pain isn’t something we can choose, and it isn’t something that happens just because of our instincts. We desire to avoid pain because of how it feels.

Is introspective evidence unreliable?

I have already discussed why introspective evidence is reliable. (For example, we can sufficiently justify the fact that we have observations through our psychological experiences.)

Is it impossible for something to be irreducible?

I see no reason to accept that “nothing could possibly be irreducible.” Someone could argue that we have good reason to believe nothing could be irreducible, but I have no idea what that reason would be.

Conclusion

I have argued here and elsewhere that moral facts are irreducible, and this possibility is more plausible than its alternative. We intuitively accept that no description of nonmoral facts will be sufficient to understand a moral fact. We can justify ethical metaphysics in the same way that we can justify psychological metaphysics. Even if we aren’t sure whether or not introspective evidence can sufficiently justify that moral facts are irreducible, we can be sure that introspective evidence can be reliable, and introspection is therefore worthy of consideration. Finally, there are no overriding reasons to reject that moral facts are irreducible.

Note that I am not an expert of intuition and I have read relatively little on the subject. Still, the little that I do know can clarify some issues people tend to have concerning intuitions, and I am able to respond to superficial objections.

What is Intuition?

Philosophers often speak of “intuition.” There is more than one meaning to the word, even in philosophy; but philosophers do not use the word “intuition” to mean “hunch,” “popular opinion,” or “extra sensory perception.” The word “intuition” stands for our ability to understand the world in a way that is difficult for us to verbalize. When scientists, mathematicians, or ethicists talk about intuition, they are referring to their ability to grasp which statements are probably true without being able to give an account of all the reasons and justifications for their beliefs. Here are five ways we can try to understand intuition:

1. Intuition is our ability to grasp self-evident truths.
2. Intuition is an instinctual process.
3. Intuition refers to introspective evidence.
4. Intuition is based on coherence.
5. Intuition is common sense.

I will discuss each of these five sorts of intuition, and then the four objections to intuition.

Intuition is our ability to grasp self-evident truths.

A self-evident truth is something that we are justified to believe without additional justification. We can then speculate that we recognize that something is self-evident through some kind of intuition. Self-evident truths do not necessarily justify themselves, and they don’t necessarily lead to certainty. They merely assure us that not every justification must be justified because some justifications are justified through self-evidence. This helps us avoid an infinite regress. If every justification required a justification, then we would worry that no justification would ever be justified, and we could never have a fully justified belief.

Beliefs we believe are “self-evident” might be misidentified as such, but some beliefs seem to be very reliable without a further need of justification. How do we know “1+1=2?” We can know it just by thinking about it. Perhaps an understanding of the statement is enough to know it’s true. If so, intuition might be able to be an ability to grasp self-evident truths. On the other hand some philosophers believe that all mathematical truths are tautologies.¹ Based on the definition of the numbers, we can know that the statement must be true. Denying the statement does lead to an absurdity, and that might be because denying the statement leads to a self-contradiction (the opposite of a tautology).

A supporter of self-evident intuition (also known as rational intuition) will argue that no argument is necessary to know that “1+1=2″ is true and the meaning of the numbers are more than just definitions. Perhaps numbers can be defined with nothing other than logic, but that might be missing a more profound meaning that numbers have.

A supporter of self-evidence intuition might also argue that we could only endorse tautologies and reject contradictions given the fact that we have intuitions about tautologies and self-contradictions. We know through intuition that tautologies have to be true and self-contradictions have to be false.² So even if mathematics can be reduced to logic (tautologies and self-contradictions), it still wouldn’t necessarily prove that we should reject self-evidence intuitions. They might even be necessary in understanding logic and mathematics.

If we know “1+1=2″ through self-evident intuition, we might also know “torturing people for fun is wrong” in the same way. Just knowing the meaning of the words might be enough to know it is true.

Is self-evidence reliable? It is possible that we are mistaken about self-evidence entirely, but we really are certain some beliefs are true just by knowing what the belief consists of. “1+1=2″ is a good example. We don’t need to be math majors making use of esoteric proofs to be sure that it’s true. If it’s not self-evidence, then we can call it something else. Either way, this kind of intuition is the most reliable sort of evidence despite the fact that no additional justification is required. We don’t need to prove such beliefs are true. However, self-evidence is not infallible. If we have identified a statement as being self-evident, we should be able to defend the belief.

2. Intuition is an instinctual process.

We might have some beliefs because of instincts. Our unconscious instinctual beliefs tend to be reliable enough to help us attain a reproductive advantage.

The belief that “1+1=2″ could be one we immediately recognize to be true through our instincts. In a similar way some or all intuitive ethical beliefs could be justified in a similar way. We might all agree that cannibalism, incest, and necrophilia are wrong because of our instincts. Such behavior does not necessarily lead to real harm, but such behavior might have had a tendency to reduce one’s reproductive advantage throughout our evolutionary history. People who were repulsed by such actions might have then acquired a reproductive advantage. Some people have argued that ethics is somehow based on our instincts.³

The theory that ethics is based on our instincts is not completely arbitrary because morality might have a tendency to give us a reproductive advantage. There is a kind of trial and error involved. Additionally, instincts could be a guide to ethics without indicating moral anti-realism. An realist could admit that what has intrinsic value is also something we believe has intrinsic value due to the reproductive advantage involved.

One could object that evolution could lead to delusional beliefs whenever doing so would lead to a reproductive advantage. We don’t want to exclusively justify our beliefs “just because they are useful to us” because we might then live in denial and choose to be delusional. I agree with this objection. However, the belief that “1+1=2″ might be instinctual without being delusional, so it is quite possible for instinctual beliefs to be a reliable source of knowledge in general.

Instincts are generally reliable or we wouldn’t have them. However, they are not infallible. It is also plausible that some people have different instincts than others. (Perhaps some sociopaths lack an instinct to value other people.) Instincts can be questioned and some additional justification for instinctual beliefs should be available in order to resist our doubts.

3. Intuition refers to introspective evidence.

Some beliefs are intuitive because they are based on our introspective evidence. We have a difficult time verbalizing and justifying introspective evidence, just like we have a hard time verbalizing and justifying our “intuitive beliefs.” It could be that many of our intuitive beliefs are actually based on introspection. The belief that “pain is bad” might not simply be self-evident, but it might be immediately evident upon our experience of pain. We can then contemplate our experience of pain in order to know whether or not our belief that “pain is bad” is justified through the experience.

My argument for moral realism requires the use of introspection, and the “intuitive evidence” that I use might actually be based on nothing other than our experience of morality. Our experience of pain might justify our belief that “pain is bad” and knowledge that other people experience pain in the same way could justify our belief that “pain is bad for no matter who experiences it.”

There is also an attempt to verbalize our introspection in phenomenology, and the view that intuition is based on introspection, is similar to Henri Bergson’s view, who argues that we can attain knowledge through self-sympathy.⁴

Some philosophers discuss “perceptual intuition,” which might also be a kind of introspective intuition. We have a perceptual intuition when we see a red apple, that the apple is red. We know it immediately from the experience. In a similar way, we might immediately see that “1+1=2″ is correct through our experience of seeing it, and we might know that “pain is bad” is true through our experience of pain. I technically believe something more is happening in the mathematical and pain examples than “perception,” so this liberal interpretation of perceptual intuition might include any sort of personal experience that allows us to know something immediately upon seeing it, thinking it, or experiencing it in some other way.

Is introspective evidence reliable? If we have a perceptual intuition of mathematical and logical truths, then yes. Introspective evidence is also the way we know about thoughts and perception in the first place, which is very strong evidence that there are thoughts and perceptions.

4. Intuition is based on coherence.

Some beliefs are intuitive because they cohere with our unexamined beliefs, observations, and introspection.

Intuition based on coherence is the kind David O Brink defends in his book, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics.⁵ Scientists might have “scientific intuition” based on his or her other beliefs. Once a scientist has been sufficiently introduced to scientific facts, a kind of scientific world view might emerge that makes scientists able to predict yet-to-be-discovered scientific facts. This ability could be improved by further knowledge of scientific facts. This kind of knowledge might be a lot like what Aristotle thought of as practical wisdom. A belief could be justified through coherence without explicit verbalization. This kind of intuition might be important for theoretical physicists, such as Einstein, who could hypothesize about the nature of the universe with remarkable accuracy.

Perhaps mathematical and ethical intuition could also be justified in this way through coherence intuition. Knowing more mathematical facts can help us immediately recognize more mathematical statements to be true. We might all immediately recognize that “1+1=2″ but only an expert will immediately recognize that “2938234+34234 =2972468.” In a similar way unconscious ethical beliefs might be improved when one acquires ethical expertise.

Coherence theorists have to be able to tell us how we should decide which belief should be rejected whenever there are two or more beliefs that contradict. One solution is that some beliefs have a greater power of coherence than others. If one belief is required to justify five of our other beliefs, it would have a greater coherence power than a belief that justifies three of our beliefs. (This is an over simplification of what we actually have to do, but it’s the general idea.) If two beliefs contradict and no other beliefs are relevant, then it might be impossible to decide which belief to reject.

Consider the following beliefs:

1. We have an afterlife.
2. Our existence has intrinsic value.
3. Murder is wrong.

Of these beliefs the first seems incompatible with the other two. It makes sense to say murder is wrong if our existence has intrinsic value (and given the fact that our existence is mortal). However, we have a choice: Should we reject that we have an afterlife or should we reject that murder is wrong? It makes the most sense to reject that we have an afterlife than to reject that murder is wrong because we are much more certain that murder is wrong than the immortality of the soul.⁶

Is coherence intuition reliable? If scientists have a kind of scientific intuition based upon unconsciously held beliefs and coherence, then yes. It is true that coherence is not infallible and some people’s coherence intuitions are different, but experts have better intuitions than non-experts. Coherence intuition is evidence that something is true, but the results of intuition shouldn’t be taken to be anything close to certainty without further investigation. Further investigation could be an attempt to verbalize that which was on first examination too difficult to verbalize: We need to figure out why we find certain beliefs so intuitive, or we need to investigate whether or not our intuition is correct through observation and/or introspection.

5. Intuition is common sense.

Some beliefs are intuitive because they are based on successful unconscious assumptions. These assumptions should be defensible. We might not be able to prove common sense assumptions are true, but common sense requires that there be no overriding reason to reject them.

There are different levels of justification common sense assumptions can have. All common sense assumptions should cohere with our beliefs just as much as the alternative. (Sometimes neither a belief nor its negation will perfectly cohere with our other beliefs.) Some common sense assumptions are highly justified because the assumption is in some sense necessary. Common sense is open to the possibility that observation, self-evidence, coherence, and/or introspective evidence are all relevant when deciding whether or not a belief is “necessary.”

Consider the following 3 examples of common sense intuition:

Example 1: It might be necessary to understand the world by assuming that inductive reasoning is effective. We could argue that we might not be able to prove that inductive reasoning is effective, but denying that it is leads to the absurdity that empirical knowledge becomes impossible. Gravity might stop working tomorrow, but that is very implausible. Our belief that gravity will keep on working is one of our most reliable beliefs, but the belief is only justified if inductive reasoning can be effective.

Example 2: “1+1=2″ might be justified by common sense because we rely on the truth of the statement for so many other things in our lives. For example, lots of mathematical truths depend on the fact that “1+1=2,” so we need to assume its truth in order to assure that our other mathematical beliefs are justified. If “1+1=2″ is false, it leads to the absurdity that other mathematical statements we know are true would also have to be considered to be false.

Example 3: Ethical statements might be justified through common sense. “All things equal, causing pain is wrong” might have to be assumed to be true in order to justify several of our other ethical beliefs, such as “torturing people for fun is wrong.”⁷

Coherence theorists sound a lot like they endorse what I have described as “common sense” because if they agree that we need our beliefs to cohere with our observations and introspective evidence. However, there are two differences between common sense and coherence. One, common sense assumptions can be rationally permissible as long as there are no overriding reasons to reject them, but coherence generally demands that a belief be justified through evidence of some sort. Two, common sense assumptions could admit that some beliefs are self-evident, or something a lot like being self-evident. Some beliefs are very plausible whether or not we have additional justification for that belief in the form of coherence, introspective evidence, or observation.

One reason that coherence alone might have to take a back seat to common sense is that it might be unable to appropriately decide which of two contradictory beliefs to reject. Only one belief might need to be rejected and we should reject whatever belief is less plausible. How do we know if a belief is plausible? We can consider our observations, introspective evidence, and/or self-evidence. In particular, coherence theorists don’t accept self-evidence. Consider the following three beliefs:

1. 1+1=2
2. 2+2=3
3. 4+4=6

“1+1=2″ contradicts the other two beliefs. However, “2+2=3″ might cohere with “4+4=6.” Someone who had more beliefs that cohere with “2+2=3″ might use coherence to reject that “1+1=2.” Coherence in this situation might not be a good way to decide which belief to reject. Instead, self-evidence might be more appropriate. The belief that “1+1=2″ is one we are certain is true even if we hold beliefs that contradict with it. All beliefs that contradict with such a self-evident truth should be rejected.

Is common sense intuition reliable? Some people’s common sense differs from others’, just like coherence intuition. In that case two different people might disagree about what is “intuitively true,” and they both might be permissibly justified to have their belief. I admit that common sense does not indicate absolute reliability. However, an expert’s common sense (or good sense) is relatively reliable. The results from common sense intuition are worth further investigation, just like coherence intuition. The results of common sense intuition must be defended, and some assumptions will prove to be much more reliable than others.

2. Objections to Intuition

The arguments against intuition wish to prove that it is unreliable. Here are different reasons people try to reach that conclusion:

1. Intuition is just popular opinion.
2. Intuition is mysterious.
3. Different people have different intuitions.
4. Intuition can’t be justified without vicious circularity.

Intuition is just popular opinion.

Either some people misunderstand intuition as being nothing more than “popular opinion,” or we could find out that intuition really is nothing more than popular opinion. We didn’t want intuition to just be popular opinion, but maybe it is anyway.

The main reply to this objection is to merely take another look at the kinds of intuition that I have already discussed: Intuition can refer to self-evidence, instincts, introspection, coherence, or common sense. Once we talk about these forms of evidence rather than “intuition,” it is pretty clear that we aren’t just talking about popular opinion. Coherence might be a lot like “popular opinion” for many people, but coherence for an expert is a lot more sophisticated than the coherence for everyone else.

A philosopher might reject self-evidence entirely, but whatever is happening instead of self-evidence is a very reliable kind of evidence. Intuitions are not infallible, but the results warrant further investigation.

Intuition is mysterious.

The charge that intuition is mysterious is mainly a charge against self-evidence or innate ideas.⁸ I have four replies against this objection. First, whatever we believe to be “self-evident” tends to be very plausible.

Second, there are at least four other kinds of intuition other than self-evidence, which are not mysterious.

Third, it is true that intuitions tend to be difficult to verbalize, but this merely indicates that a kind of unconscious practical wisdom is at work. Not all justified beliefs are easy to explicitly defend to other people. That doesn’t in itself prove that such beliefs are unreliable.

Fourth, intuition (even of self-evidence) is not necessarily evidence of “innate ideas,” which was Descartes’s explanation for some intuitive knowledge. Innate ideas are God-given concepts or truths, such as the concept of perfection. I agree that innate ideas might not exist. However, intuitions can be quite reliable with or without innate ideas.

Different people have different intuitions.

I already admitted that different people have different intuitions. This is especially true of coherence intuition, in which experts have more reliable intuition than the rest of us. Disagreement concerning intuition can prove that intuitions are fallible, and I would admit that even the intuition of experts is fallible. However, intuition is reliable enough to be worth further investigation. When it comes to science we can test the intuitions through observation. (More specifically, using a hypothesis and experiment.) When it comes to ethics we might make use of introspective evidence and observations. For example, our experience of pain gives us important evidence that “all things equal, it is wrong to cause pain.”

Richard Joyce argues that people’s actual intuitions have not been sufficiently examined by scientists, and such intuitions are merely anthropological facts.⁹ This might be true of instinctual intuitions, which are probably reliable to some extent, but there are kinds of intuition that are even more reliable. In particular, expert coherence intuitions are more relevant than the intuitions of other people. Why would a philosopher need to know which intuitive beliefs are most common? Intuition isn’t meant to provide us with an ad populum argument.¹⁰ Although knowledge of instinctual beliefs could be somewhat relevant, the coherence intuitions of experts tends to be much more relevant than the opinions of everyone else.

Intuition can’t be justified without vicious circularity.

In “The Problem of Intuition” Stephen Hales argues that intuition can’t be justified without the use of intuition.¹¹ Therefore, intuition can’t be justified without vicious circularity. I believe that he means “intuition of self-evidence” by the word “intuition,” so his argument appears to be saying that self-evidence can’t be justified without self-evidence. I am not committed to the existence of self-evidence, but I will give three responses to his objection of circularity:

1. If we accept that there are self-evident truths, then haven’t we already avoided circularity? We don’t need to justify a self-evident truth because it is self-evident. They are justified just by understanding them. Hales argues that self-evidence must be axiomatic or it’s entirely unjustified. Perhaps I just don’t understand his argument, but I thought the whole point of self-evidence was that they are justified for free.
2. I am not convinced that we do need intuitions of self-evidence in order to justify the use of intuitions of self-evidence. There are other kinds of intuition other than the self-evident variety, and those intuitions could justify self-evidence.
3. Intuitions other than the self-evident variety can be verbalized in terms of observations, introspection, coherence, instincts, and common sense. Therefore, we might find a way to justify self-evidence in terms of these other forms of justification. For example, common sense could dictate that we could assume that intuition is a reliable form of justification as long as we can defend such an assumption. Rejecting self-evidence might lead to the absurdity of rejecting logic. If that is the case, then self-evidence is necessary for every kind of justification possible and we would have to reject the possibility of knowledge despite the fact that we know at least some of our beliefs are true.

I could be wrong about what he means by “intuition.” If he literally means that every kind of intuition can’t be justified without intuition, then I can still reject his argument because “intuition” can mean different things. There’s nothing viciously circular about justifying one kind of evidence with another kind of evidence. For example, we might know that “murder is wrong” based on a coherence justification.

The problem of intuition stated here appears to actually describe the huge problem of epistemology in general:

How can we know what knowledge is? Any answer to this question seems to lead to vicious circularity. (Wait. Are you sure you know that’s what knowledge is?) For example, if all knowledge is empirical, then how can we justify that? Do we observe that all knowledge is based on observation? That would be circular reasoning. (Assuming observation is reliable, we can observe that it exists.) You get the idea.

There are three ways we can try to know what knowledge is:

1. Use an infinite regress. We can justify what knowledge is, and justify that justification, and justify that, and so on.
2. Use circular reasoning. We know that knowledge is X, and we know X is knowledge because it is X.
3. Use a self-evident truth.

Of these options, the third appears best given our current options, but philosophers have tried all three possibilities, which corresponds to infinitism, coherentism, and foundationalism. Hales decides that we must either be foundationalists or reject intuition (and therefore most or all of philosophy), but we should consider all three of these theories:

Infinitism: Justifications can be justified indefinitely. We will never be done justifying beliefs because every justification can also be justified.¹² It might be permissibly rational to believe something as long as it is currently the best option available. We can start off with assumptions without justifications, and we only reject our beliefs when they are “falsified” (or at least implausible considering that there are better alternatives.) Some assumptions are necessary, but we can reject assumptions when they become unnecessary. This view of epistemology is similar to Karl Popper‘s.¹³ Some people say that this view requires an infinite regress, but that would require us to accept that no belief is justified unless the justification is also justified. Some beliefs can be rationally held without a justification. The common sense theory of knowledge might not fully justify absolute knowledge because all justifications might rely on assumptions.

Coherentism: Beliefs are justified depending on how important they are for coherence. This view allows circularity. Some beliefs are justified by other beliefs, and our whole worldview as a whole can then be used to justify our beliefs. Coherence is circular because every belief can be considered to be a partial justification for every other belief it coheres with. We could then imagine that A justifies B, B justifies C, and C justifies A. Coherence avoids an infinite regress because only a set of coherent beliefs is necessary to have a maximally justified belief. The coherence theory of knowledge doesn’t justify absolute knowledge because beliefs are not completely proven to be true.

Foundationalism: Some beliefs are self-evident. We avoid circularity because we just know that something is true without any other justification required. We also avoid the problem of requiring an infinite regress because self-evident truths stop our need to justify justifications.

Hales seems to assume that all beliefs must be justified, but we can be rational by holding some nonjustified beliefs. There is a difference between beliefs that are rationally permissible and beliefs that are justified. Beliefs are rationally permissible as long as they aren’t incoherent (and as long as there aren’t overriding reasons to reject them). Beliefs are justified when we have evidence that they are true (and as long as there aren’t overriding reasons to reject them). Absolute knowledge might require foundationalism, but we might live our lives without absolute knowledge. Instead, we could just admit that epistemological justification is possible, some beliefs are more justified than others, and some beliefs are very accurate. (Science has proven that it can be very reliable despite the fact that it is always willing to improve.) Once absolute knowledge is rejected, coherentism and infinitism will be acceptable theories of knowledge.

Conclusion

When we give intuitive evidence, we generally show that a theory of belief is absurd based on our intuitions, or that we must agree to a theory or belief because rejecting the theory or belief would be absurd. Such absurdity is based on our unconscious understanding of various kinds of justification; such as self-evidence, instincts, introspection, coherence, and common sense.

These five sorts of intuition are not infallible, but they can indicate a very strong justification that something is true. (This seems especially true for introspective evidence and self-evidence.) Although our intuitions are difficult to verbalize, sometimes we can verbalize them in order to provide an explicit justification for our intuitive beliefs. One of the least reliable forms of justification might be common sense intuition, but even common sense assumptions are (at least) rationally permissible (unless we have an overriding justification to reject them).

The use of intuition to provide us with self-evidence might allow us to attain absolute knowledge, but philosophers don’t have to accept that absolute knowledge is possible. The other forms of intuition only provide us with at least enough justification to warrant further investigation. Sometimes intuition can shift the burden of proof by providing one possibility with more evidence than the alternatives.

Notes

Here “is” refers to descriptive facts (nonmoral facts) and “ought” refers to prescriptive facts (moral facts). The idea of there being an ontological gap is that there is something different about description and prescription and one domain is not the same thing as the other (one domain is not reducible to another). The idea of there being an epistemological gap is that we can’t know prescriptive facts from descriptive facts. Both kinds of is/ought gaps require that we accept that something is in the “is” domain or the “ought” domain. Nothing can be in both domains.

I will discuss the following:

1. David Hume’s discussion of the is/ought gap
2. John Searle’s discussion of the is/ought gap.
3. Lawrence Becker’s discussion of the is/ought gap.
4. Intrinsic values and the is/ought gap.
5. The ontological interpretations of the is/ought gap.
6. The epistemological interpretations of the is/ought gap.
7. Two ways people have used the is/ought gap as an argument against realism.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the arguments against moral realism. In particular, I will discuss these two objections to realism:

1. The ontological argument: Moral realism requires us to accept a new irreducible kind of property, but such a property isn’t necessary. Instead of accepting irreducible moral properties, we should just admit that we are deluded about morality.
2. The epistemological argument: We can’t know about moral facts through observation, but that’s how we know about everything. Therefore, moral knowledge is impossible.

These arguments will be discussed when I discuss the different interpretations of the ontological and epistemological is/ought gap because the arguments can be understood in various ontological and epistemological ways.

1. Hume’s Discussion of the Is/Ought Gap

The is/ought gap is famously introduced by Hume, who presents us with the challenge: “How do you get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is?’”¹ Hume realized that many people argued about what is the case in order to argue what ought to be the case. This kind of argument implied that we could get what ought to be the case from what is the case, but it wasn’t yet clear how it could be done. Some moral realists have offered answers to this question by explaining how we can observe moral facts, but they can only do so with a moral theory. One way might be to merely attempt to explain moral observations we have in order to discover the moral theory that they imply. However, I have discussed a different answer to that question: We experience moral facts, similar to how we experience psychological facts. We can develop moral theory based on how we experience our final ends (benefits), and then by justifying the fact that other people will have similar experiences and final ends. Everyone’s final ends matter, not just our own.

But Hume didn’t just say that he wanted to know how to get “ought” from “is.” He also discussed that prescriptive and descriptive facts seemed quite different. Hume states that sentiments are not subject to truth or falsity, and morality seems to require sentiments. This implies that it is impossible to get “ought” from “is” because moral endorsements would then just be an emotional reaction. Consider these two quotations:

Reason is the discovery of truth or falshood. Truth or falshood consists in an agreement or disagreement either to the real relations of ideas, or to the real existence and matter of fact. Whatever, therefore, is not susceptible of this agreement or disagreement, is incapable of being true or false, and can never be an object of our reason. Now ‘tis evident our passions, volitions, and actions, are not susceptible of any such agreement or disagreement; being original facts and realities, compleat in themselves, and implying no reference to other passions, volitions, and actions. ‘Tis impossible, therefore, they can be pronounc’d either true or false, and be either contrary or conformable to reason. (Treatise, Part I, Section I)

[I]t is a requisite that there should be some sentiment, which it touches; some internal taste or feeling, or whatever you please to call it, which distinguishes moral good and evil, and which embraces the one and rejects the other.²

Here it appears that Hume is saying that emotions are neither true nor false, and moral endorsements are based on emotions. Therefore, we should conclude that moral facts can’t exist because morality is merely an expression of our emotions. This is the position of non-cognitivists. Hume never made it clear that he was a non-cognitivist, but his moral theory seems to imply that he should be.

I will now explain the various arguments and interpretations involving the is/ought gap.

2. Searle’s Discussion of the Is/Ought Gap

John Searle decided that we can get a nonmoral “ought” from a promise. If I make a promise, then there is a sense that I should do what it takes to fulfill the promise. So, we can get “ought” from “is” because we can get a prescriptive statement (you should do x) from a descriptive fact (a promise to do x).³

This kind of “ought” is not a moral ought. There can be moral considerations that override my reason to fulfill my promise.

Although Searle does not answer Hume’s challenge because Hume wants to know how to get moral “oughts,” Searle still attempts to explain how we can get a kind of prescriptive fact from a descriptive one. If Searle is right, that means that prescriptive facts are not exclusively moral, and prescriptive facts might be somehow connected to descriptive facts.

3. Becker’s Discussion of the Is/Ought Gap

Lawrence Becker agrees with Searle that we can get a nonmoral “ought” from “is,” but he thought we could also get a “moral” ought from nonmoral “oughts” given that there are no overriding reason against doing so. If you should accomplish a goal all-things-considered, then you morally ought to accomplish the goal.⁴

We can get a nonmoral “ought” from a goal. (If you have a goal to eat chocolate, you should buy a chocolate bar.) If you have no overriding reason not to eat it, then (all-things-considered), you morally ought to eat it.

The problem with Becker’s account of moral prescriptive facts is that they aren’t necessarily important. If the goal is important, then the moral “ought” is important; but what’s so important about eating chocolate? Eating chocolate doesn’t sound important enough to be worthy of being a moral “ought.”

4. Intrinsic Values and the Is/Ought Gap

Intrinsic values seem important enough to help us get a moral “ought” from “is.” If intrinsic values are descriptive facts, then we can get prescriptive facts from descriptive facts. All things equal, if human life has intrinsic value, we shouldn’t kill people.

Even intrinsic values can lack importance. The pleasure from eating chocolate might have a small amount of importance, but it still doesn’t sound important enough to be worthy of being called moral. Perhaps we have conventionally required things to be relatively important in order for us to label it is “moral,” but this is just a matter of degree. There is nothing particularly different about eating chocolate for pleasure or reading philosophy for pleasure in the sense that both actions are done out of pleasure. The only difference is the quality and/or quantity of pleasure involved.

5. Ontological Gap

The ontological gap states that “is” and “ought” are different kinds of being (existence). “Goodness” and “wrong” refer to a different kind of property than “hot” or “solid.” One kind of property doesn’t depend on people, but the other does. There are at least three different ways of understanding an ontological gap:

1. Moral facts are not reducible to nonmoral facts (or vice versa). Moral facts and nonmoral facts are two different domains.
2. Moral facts are not reducible to descriptive facts (or vice versa). Moral facts and descriptive facts are two different domains.
3. Morality is not factual at all.

I will consider each of these:

Moral facts are not reducible to nonmoral facts.

Moral realists will agree that moral facts are not reducible to nonmoral facts. That’s the whole point of intrinsic value. Some things are important, but particles and energy are not constitutive of moral facts. Nothing important happens on the level of physics, so physics could be said to only entail nonmoral facts.⁵

There is an objection against realism involving a view that moral facts aren’t reducible to nonmoral facts, but this is a strange argument considering that part of my definition of realism is precisely that moral facts can’t be reduced to nonmoral facts. For example, reductionists who believe that everything reduces to physics might argue that morality is delusional because it can’t be reduced to physics. Everything that doesn’t reduce to physics must be rejected. However, reductionism is not a persuasive reason to reject moral realism because we don’t yet know how to reduce sociology, mathematics, or psychology to physics either. The fact that we can’t reduce these kinds of facts is better evidence that reductionism is false than evidence that they don’t really exist.

The real problem for realism is if we can reduce moral facts to nonmoral facts. Such a reduction would prove that moral facts are dispensable. We could just talk about psychology, for example, instead of morality. (We would also find out that moral facts don’t really matter. Importance would just be a matter of something like desires, and other people’s pain would be of no rational concern to each of us.)

What about Becker? Lawrence Becker’s answer to the is/ought problem seems to imply an answer to the gap between the moral and nonmoral. His answer is that we can get the moral from the nonmoral because he reduces moral facts to all-things-considered judgments involving goal satisfaction. This answer appears to be a challenge to moral realism. If we can get moral judgments from nonmoral judgments, then what good are intrinsic values?

One problem with Becker’s account of moral judgments lacks the importance required for moral judgments. Goals alone are not enough to give us moral judgments because they can lack importance. Although I agree that all things equal, eating chocolate might be good, it is only superficially so. Consider the following:

Becker must admit that those who want to spend hours counting blades of grass could be morally justified doing so because there are no overriding reasons not to. The fact that counting blades of grass is unimportant isn’t in and of itself an overriding reason not to do it. Although most people might have overriding reasons not to spend hours counting blades of grass considering that such a goal will conflict with their other goals, it is logically, metaphysically, and physically possible that a person would have no such conflicting goals. If Becker is correct, this person morally “ought” to spend hours counting blades of grass.

What about Intrinsic values? Notice that I earlier claimed we can get “ought” from “is” using intrinsic values. It might be true that intrinsic values are descriptive facts, but they are moral facts either way. Therefore, I admit that intrinsic values do not let us get moral facts from nonmoral facts.

In conclusion, we can’t get “ought” from “is” In the sense that moral and nonmoral facts are two separate domains. Arguments concerning what “is” the case that somehow give us what “ought” to be the case must have make use of a hidden premise, which would tell us how “is” is relevant to the ethical issue at hand. For example, capital punishment might be wrong if it kills innocent people given the hidden premise that people have intrinsic value. The hidden premise is itself a moral fact.

Moral facts are not reducible to descriptive facts.

Descriptive facts could include moral descriptions (e.g. torture is wrong), but that seems to miss the point. (Descriptive facts might include both moral descriptions and nonmoral descriptions.) The point seems to be that material facts and moral facts seem to be different kinds of things. (Material facts can include any fact within the materialist’s metaphysics: Particles, energy, minds, and anthropological facts can all exist for a materialist.) So, descriptive facts should be taken to be facts of the material world. Facts of the material world might include moral facts, so not all moral realists will agree that prescriptive facts aren’t descriptive. (The is/ought gap could be rejected by arguing that something can be both prescriptive and descriptive: Both a materialistic fact and a moral fact.) Instead, a materialist can agree that psychological and moral facts are caused by particles and energy. (We could agree to materialism as long as all material entities are causally connected.) Materialism itself doesn’t require that we accept that everything is ontologically reducible to physics (particles and energy), so it is possible for a materialist to agree that an irreducible moral domain exists. I discuss why some people agree to a materialistic is/ought gap and what it would mean to deny a materialistic is/ought gap.

If moral facts are materialistic, we can get “ought” from “is” in the sense that materialistic facts can include moral facts.⁶ In that case the premise that “pain is bad” would be a materialistic fact because such an experience of pain is materialistic, and it can give us reason to avoid pain, and it gives us reason to help other people avoid pain. However, not everyone rejects the materialistic is/ought gap. Consider these alternatives to moral facts being materialistic:

• A dualist might argue that moral facts are part of the psychological realm, but psychological facts are quite different than materialistic facts.
• A pluralist or idealist might argue that moral facts are a different domain than the psychological realm and the materialistic realm. For example, someone could argue that moral facts are based on Platonic forms.
• Some might argue that moral facts are supernatural. For example, moral facts might depend on a supernatural deity’s existence. This position is especially mysterious and requires something like divine revelation.

All three of these positions have difficulty in explaining why psychological facts and moral facts are causally linked to (or dependent on) the material world. The dualist, idealist, and pluralist might still have some access to moral facts through introspection, but tying moral facts to the supernatural make it very unclear how we could know moral facts. If the existence of moral facts depends on something we can’t experience, and the supernatural tends to be something that people can’t experience, then we can’t experience moral facts.

I do not wish to argue that we have to be materialists to understand moral facts. It might be that a dualist, pluralist, or idealist can accept the existence of a materialistic world, and it is even possible for them to accept that moral facts are materialistic (or at least tied to psychological facts).

Those who believe that moral facts are materialistic are left with a question: How can we be sure that moral facts are materialistic? This is what I will discuss next.

How could a materialist reject the materialistic is/ought gap? Minds, for example, might be caused by our brain; but minds are not entirely explained and understood in terms of our brains (or in terms of particles and energy). For example, my experience of the color green doesn’t seem like it’s the same thing as neurons firing in my brain. We can describe neurons firing in my brain, but new information is introduced when I describe my experience of the color green. A materialist can then say that minds are not the same thing as brains, but minds are caused by brains. A materialist would then say that minds are part of the physical world, minds are caused by brains, but mental facts are irreducible to nonmental facts. For example, John Searle argues that mental facts are emergent system feature of the brain. If he is right, mental facts require irreducible emergent properties to be caused by the brain.

A materialist might then reject the is/ought gap in the sense that moral facts are also part of the material world. Although moral facts might require irreducible emergent properties, those properties are caused by particles and energy, like everything else.

It can be important for a realist to reject the materialistic is/ought gap because all the relevant facts appear to be materialistic (or psychological). Torturing to others for fun involves physical actions and psychological facts, but torturing others is something we believe to be wrong based on our belief that physical and psychological facts determine moral facts. So, assuming that all relevant facts are materialistic, we must admit that we can know moral facts even if we only know materialistic facts. Moral facts are also materialistic facts.⁷

On the other hand, some philosophers will also reject a materialistic is/ought gap by denying that moral facts require irreducible moral properties. We might find out that mental facts are nothing more than various configurations of particles and energy, and moral facts might be reducible in a similar way. (This would be a form of anti-realism.)

I have not actually argued that we know for sure that moral facts are materialistic. Instead, I simply pointed out the fact that psychology can be taken to be a materialistic fact despite the fact that we don’t experience it as being part of physics. This could be seen as speculative: We can theorize about psychology being materialistic, but it hasn’t been fully justified yet.

However, there is some independent evidence that psychology is materialistic in the sense that it is causally tied to solid objects. The mind of each creature seems to depend on the complexity and configuration of its brain; brain damage can alter someone’s psychology; and our desires and beliefs can influence our body’s movements.

Now we are left with the question: Do we have evidence that moral facts are also dependent on the material world? My answer is, “Yes.” We know moral facts from a combination of psychological and biological facts. The motivations, the ability to cause pain, the ability to damage someone’s biology are all essential facts to determine if an action is beneficial, harmful, justified, right, or wrong. The badness of pain influences our psychology to avoid pain and to help other people avoid pain, but pain is a psychological phenomenon.

In conclusion, just like we have evidence that psychology is dependent on the material world, we also have evidence that moral facts are dependent on the material world. In particular, our experience of moral facts influence our psychology.

The argument for a materialistic is/ought gap: Some materialists also reject moral facts on the ground that such facts imply moral realism and require emergent properties. Such materialists accept that moral facts imply irreducible emergent properties, but they reject that there could be such properties. John Mackie introduced this position and what he called the “argument from queerness.”⁸ The main idea is that we shouldn’t accept queer entities or properties (new kinds of existence) unless we have sufficient reason to do so. He even admits that we often behave as though such irreducible moral facts exist (such as intrinsic values). Such irreducible moral facts might even be required to explain our moral experiences. However, all the worse for our moral experience. We would do better to admit that our moral experiences are delusional than to admit that a new kind of entity exists.

I have already argued that anti-realists that try to make sense out of our moral experiences will fail to do so (because our moral experiences require us to accept altruistic actions as justified, but such actions are not justified for an anti-realist.) Mackie would agree with my argument, but he would reject my belief that the burden of proof is on the anti-realist. Most philosophers will accept that our moral experiences can give us evidence of moral facts. If this is right, then our moral experiences are evidence of moral realism because anti-realists will not be able to make as much sense out of our moral experiences.

However, Mackie would argue against the belief that moral experiences are evidence of realism. Moral experiences merely prove that we are delusional. In order for us to side with Mackie, we will need to accept one of the objections I mentioned in my argument for moral realism. (Such objections were meant to argue that we can’t accept that “pain is bad no matter who experiences it.”) In particular, these two are relevant:

1. Our thoughts and feelings can’t be philosophically analyzed.
2. Pain’s subjective ontology causes it to be less real than required for it to have intrinsic disvalue. Pain is something like an illusion.

I have already discussed why these are not good reasons to reject that “pain is bad for everyone,” and my arguments will also be equally relevant concerning evidence that point to morality being irreducible.

I have discussed why introspective evidence can be a reliable source of knowledge (that we have observation, for example), and now I will argue that introspective evidence can be a reliable source of ontological justification. Introspective evidence is very relevant to ontological knowledge. In particular, we have reason to believe that the mind might not be reducible to the brain in the sense that our experience of green doesn’t appear to be the same thing as neurons firing in a certain way. The fact that an experience of green is multiply realizable in the brain (different brain states can cause a specific experience of green) coupled with our knowledge of experiencing green gives us a strong reason to reject that certain brain states are “exactly the same thing” as our experience of green. It might make more sense to say that brain states can cause our experience of green (than t say that the experience of green is nothing other than brain states).

Given my example, we have pretty strong evidence that our introspective evidence can give us a justification for ontological beliefs. In particular, the fact that an experience of the color green is not “exactly the same thing” as a certain brain state.

If introspective evidence concerning our moral experiences can be used as evidence of moral ontological properties (just like it can give evidence concerning psychological ontological properties), then we also have reason to accept that pain is bad, and to accept that pain is bad for others; and therefore, that pain is intrinsically bad. The argument I gave for moral realism could then be considered to be based on reliable evidence.

One could object here that I haven’t yet given introspective evidence that morality is irreducible. Sure, we can’t understand the experience of the color green using non-psychological facts, but maybe we can understand moral facts using nomoral facts. My reply to this objection is that we can’t understand the badness of pain through a nonmoral description. We can experience the badness of pain, but no amount of nonmoral facts will ever be able to fully describe the experience of the badness of pain.

At this point the anti-realist would need to give us a reason to believe that introspection involving mental ontology and moral ontology are disanalogous. They must be different in some important sense, or the reliability of psychological introspection should indicate the reliability of moral introspection. Introspection involving moral ontology could give us reason to believe that there are irreducible moral facts, just like there appear to be irreducible psychological facts.

In conclusion, we do have reason to believe our moral experiences are reliable just like our psychological experiences are reliable. We therefore have some reason to accept that moral facts are materialistic. If intrinsic values are descriptive (materialistic) facts, then we can get “ought” from “is” in the materialistic sense using intrinsic values. The fact that pain is bad is enough to give someone an aspirin, and that fact might be part of materialistic metaphysics.

Morality is not factual at all.

If morality isn’t factual at all, then there can’t be moral statements. No moral sentence could be true or false. “Hitler is viscous” wouldn’t be true or false, and “charity is good” wouldn’t be true or false. This is the commitment held by non-cognitivists (people who deny that moral sentences can be true or false). Non-cognitivists are anti-realists, so their arguments are relevant. I will treat the arguments against non-cognitivism given by other philosophers to be sufficient. In particular, non-cognitivism is against our moral experience.⁹ Additionally, a non-cognitivist will have to reject that our moral experience is reliable, but I already argued above why we have some reason to believe that our moral experience (introspection) can be reliable. (If our moral experiences are reliable, then we have a good reason to accept moral realism.)

If a non-cognitivist rejects our moral experiences, then it isn’t clear why they don’t side with Mackie, who also rejects our moral experiences. I suppose they want to preserve more of our moral experiences than Mackie, but then they appear to want things both ways: They want to agree with Mackie that intrinsic values are queer and unjustified, but also accept that our moral experiences are worthy of consideration. Then the problem is that our moral experiences will provide us with our evidence for intrinsic values rather than non-cognitivism.

In conclusion, noncognitivism will be rejected and moral facts are possible. We can discuss which moral statements are true or false, even if all moral statements are false.

6. Epistemological Gap

Most philosophers seem to refer to the epistemological is/ought gap and believe that we can’t know prescriptive facts from descriptive facts. Observation, for example, seems to give us evidence of descriptive facts rather than prescriptive facts. I will first discuss the different kinds of epistemological is/ought gaps, and then I will discuss the argument against moral observation. The argument states that we can’t know prescriptive facts because all facts are justified by observation, but we can’t observe prescriptive facts.

Just like the ontological gap, there is more than one way of interpreting the epistemological gap:

1. We can’t know moral facts from nonmoral facts.
2. We can’t know moral facts from materialistic facts.
3. We can’t know moral facts because all facts are descriptive.

The epistemological gaps are tied to the ontological gaps, as I explain below:

We can’t know moral facts from nonmoral facts.

If moral facts are not reducible to nonmoral facts, then we can’t know moral facts given nonmoral facts. Although moral realists will agree with this statement, they point out that a moral theory can be sufficient to derive moral facts from nonmoral facts. Seeing children torture a cat is enough to judge the children as doing something wrong.

Of course, the moral theory might have to be justified on moral grounds rather than nonmoral grounds. If we only know nonmoral facts, then we can never know moral facts. So, how do we ever get to know any moral facts? Because we experience them. I already explained this position in my post, A Moral Realist Perspective.

My position is not one necessarily endorsed by all realist philosophers. Some seem to merely believe that we non-reflectively start off with moral intuitions or moral beliefs, and we are then able to observe moral facts. We could then theorize about which nonmoral facts determine moral facts based on our actual moral observations, intuitions, and assumptions.

In conclusion, we can know moral facts from nonmoral facts given bridging premises, such as “human life has intrinsic value.” This premise would help us conclude that killing people is a bad idea given biological facts involving death and how essential living bodies are for our own existence.

We can’t know moral facts from facts of materialism.

If moral facts are not reducible to materialistic facts, then we can’t know moral facts given facts of materialism. I already mentioned how this gap can be rejected by moral realists. We have some reason to believe that moral facts are facts of materialism. Moral facts might be an irreducible sort of material fact. Once realists reject the materialist is/ought gap, they can escape the objection that all we know are materialistic facts, so we can’t know moral facts. If I am right that moral facts are materialistic, then I am right that we can know moral facts from materialistic facts.

We can’t know moral facts because all facts are descriptive.

One might admit that moral statements are “descriptive” in the sense that they describe part of the material world, but that is not what is meant by the assertion above. What is being asserted is the position that moral sentences are noncognitive (neither true nor false), so we can’t know any nonmoral facts. This is just a trivial conclusion based on noncognitivism. Moral realists will reject noncognitivism, so they will not agree to this epistemological problem.

In conclusion, we will not agree that we can’t know moral facts because we reject that all facts are (by definition) descriptive. Some facts might be prescriptive. It isn’t necessary at this point to admit that there are true moral facts because moral statements might all be false. Noncognitivism can be rejected, even if Mackie is right that all moral statements are false.

The argument against moral observation

Although there are different interpretations of the epistemological is/ought gap, any of them could lead to a single problem: It doesn’t seem possible to know moral facts. This is the conclusion of the argument against moral observation:

The argument against moral observation is the following:

1. We can’t know moral facts from observation.
2. We know everything from observation.
3. Therefore, we can’t know moral facts.

This argument can be based on any of the three epistemological is/ought gap interpretations, so it is relevant no matter which interpretation of the gap we are considering.

The problem with this argument is that neither premise has been proven or sufficiently justified. The argument is mainly just a challenge to realists to explain how we can know about moral facts. I will discuss how each premise can be questioned:

Premise 1: Realists have often accepted premise 2 (that we know everything from observation), but rejected premise 1: I have already given the arguments given by Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Nicholas L Sturgeon, and Richard N Boyd, who argue that we can observe moral facts. They basically argue that observation is theory-relative, and we need a moral theory to help explain our moral observations. No observation is reducible to our actual experiences. Observations require assumptions and theory in order to make sense. I can see my hand, but that observation requires me to have assumptions about solidity, biology, and selfhood.

It was Geoffrey Sayre-McCord who related the problem of observation to the is/ought gap.¹⁰ He agrees that there might be an is/ought gap; but if there is, then it is no more a problem for morality than it is for psychology. Just like the is/ought gap, there appears to be something like an is/thought gap. (We might not be able to reduce psychology to non-psychological facts, or morality to nonmoral facts.) Observation by itself isn’t sufficient to give us moral facts, and observation by itself isn’t able to give us psychological facts. Of course, we do observe both moral and psychological facts once we realize that certain assumptions or theory is involved. Certain observed behavior and biology indicates certain psychological facts, and certain observed behavior and biology indicates certain moral facts.

Premise 2: I have already discussed the fact that premise 2 seems false, which asserts that we know everything through observation. I argued the opposite: We know about moral facts through personal experience rather than purely from observation. This is equally true about mental phenomena: We directly experience mental phenomena. In that case “we don’t know everything from observation,” so the second premise would be false. In that case we might suspect that it is true that we “don’t know moral facts through observation” just like it might be true that we “don’t know psychological facts through observation.” Instead, we can experience psychological and moral facts, and we can know about them through introspection.

In conclusion, the argument against moral observation is unconvincing because observation is not the only way we know about the world. We also know some things through introspection. (Of course, some people might define observation in a way that includes introspection. In that case the argument is false because we can know about moral facts through personal experience.)

Conclusion

How do you get “ought” from “is?” It depends on what you mean by the is/ought gap:

• If you mean, “How do you get moral facts from nonmoral facts?” then you can’t get “ought” from “is.” You can only get “ought” from “is” by making use of a moral premise. Moral facts can’t be known if we are only given nonmoral facts.
• If you mean, “How do you get moral facts from materialistic facts?” then you can get “oughts” simply from the fact that some materialistic facts are already moral facts. (Although a dualist might argue that moral facts are mental facts rather than material. In that case we can still know about moral facts in the same way through introspection.)
• If you mean, “How do you get moral attitudes considering they aren’t factual?” then we will have to reject the assertion that moral attitudes are noncognitive.
• If you mean, “How do we know moral facts from nonmoral facts?” then we can only know moral facts through introspection or given other moral facts. “Pain is bad” will imply that we shouldn’t torture cats, and that people who are torturing cats are doing something wrong because of the cat’s biology and psychology.
• If you mean, “How do you observe moral facts?” then the answer might be that we don’t. Instead, we can experience moral facts through introspection.

I will argue that a moral realist can account for our moral experiences involving the badness of pain, the importance of morality, the inescapability of moral obligations, and the importance of altruism. These experiences and intuitive positions are all going to be difficult for the anti-realist to explain.

1. An Argument from Moral Experience

If we have evidence that anything in particular has intrinsic value, then we also have evidence that moral realism is true. Our experiences of pleasure and pain are probably the most powerful evidence of intrinsic value because such experiences are tied to our belief that they have intrinsic value. My argument that pain has intrinsic disvalue is basically the following:

1. We experience that pain is bad.
2. We experience that pain is important.
3. The disvalue of pain is irreducible.
4. The disvalue of pain is real.
5. If pain is bad in the sense of being important, irreducible, and real, then pain has intrinsic disvalue.
6. Therefore, pain has intrinsic disvalue.

I am not certain that the premises are true, but I currently find good reasons for accepting them. Therefore, we have reason for accepting the conclusion. The conclusion could be read saying, “We have reason to believe that pain has intrinsic disvalue.” If we accept that pain has intrinsic disvalue, then we will simultaneously accept moral realism.¹

In order to examine the plausibility of my argument, I will examine each of the premises:

We experience that pain is bad.

We know pain is bad because of our experience of it. If someone described their pain as extremely wonderful, we would doubt they are feeling pain. Either the person is lying or doesn’t know what the word “pain” means. When a child decides not to touch fire because it causes pain, we understand the justification. It would be strange to ask the child, “So what? What’s wrong with pain?”

We experience that pain is important.

If pain is important in the relevant sense, then it can provide us reason to do something without merely helping us fulfill our desires. In other words, we must accept the following:

1. The badness of pain isn’t just an instrumental value.
2. The badness of pain is a final end.

Pain’s badness isn’t an instrumental value – Pain’s disvalue is not an instrumental disvalue because pain can be quite useful to us. Pain can tell us when we are unhealthy or injured. We evolved pain because it’s essential to our survival. Pain’s bad for a different kind of reason. Pain’s disvalue is found in our negative experience, and this is why pain is a candidate for having an intrinsic disvalue.

Whenever someone claims that something has intrinsic value, we need to make sure that it’s not just good because it’s instrumentally valuable. If it’s merely useful at bringing about something else, then it’s not good in and of itself (as intrinsic values are). Pain is perhaps the perfect example of something that is useful but bad. If usefulness was the only kind of value, then pain would actually be good because it helps us in many ways.

Pain’s badness isn’t just our dislike of pain – We dislike pain because it feels bad.² If pain didn’t feel bad, then we wouldn’t have such a strong desire to avoid intense pain. Pain means “feels bad” and it is manifested in various experiences, such as touching fire. We have to know the meaning of “bad” in order to understand pain at all. We attain an understanding of “bad” just by feeling pain.

If pain was only bad because we dislike it, then we couldn’t say that “pain really matters.” Instead, the badness of pain would just be a matter of taste. However, we don’t just say pain is bad because we dislike it. We also say pain is bad because of how it feels.

Avoiding pain is a final end – A final end is a goal people recognize as being worthy of being sought after for its own sake. Money is not a final end because it is only valuable when used to do something else. Pleasure and pain-avoidance are final ends because they are taken t be worthy of being avoided for their own sake.

We know that avoiding pain makes sense even when it doesn’t lead to anything else of value, so avoiding pain is a final end.³ If I want to take an aspirin, someone could ask, “Why did you do that?” I could answer, “I have a headache.” This should be the end of the story. We understand that avoiding pain makes sense. It would be absurd for someone to continue to question me and say, “What difference does having a headache make? That’s not a good reason to take an aspirin!”⁴

Both realists and anti-realists can agree that pain is bad, and they can both agree that pain is a final end. Our desire to avoid pain is non-instrumental and such a desire is experienced as justified. (However, the ant-realist might argue that it is only taken to be justified because of human psychology.)

If pain is a final end, then we understand (a) that pain is important and (b) it makes sense to say that we ought to avoid pain.

Pain’s disvalue is irreducible.

If the badness of pain was reducible to nonmoral properties, then we should be able to describe what “bad” means through a non-moral description. However, we currently have no way of understanding pain’s badness as being something else. We can’t describe pain’s badness in non-moral terms. If someone needs to know what ” bad” means, they need to experience something bad.

To say that some moral states are irreducible is just like saying that some mental states are irreducible. Pain itself can’t be described through a non-mental description. If we told people the mental states involved with pain, they would still not know what pain is because they need to know what it feels like.

Someone could argue that “bad” means the same thing as something like “pain,” and then we would find out that the badness of pain could be reduced to something else. However, pain and the badness of pain are conceptually separable. For example, I could find out that something else is bad other than pain.

They could then reply that “bad” means the same thing as a disjunction of various other bad things, such as “pain or malicious intent.” But people who disagree about what constitutes what is “bad” aren’t just arguing about the meaning of the word “bad.” They are arguing about what has the property “bad.”⁵ Additionally, the word “bad” would no longer have any importance. If “bad” just means “pain or malicious intent,” then why care about it? Why ought I refrain from causing pain or having a malicious intent?

It could be that we can find out that “bad” and “pain” are identical, but then “bad” might not be entirely reducible to “pain” (or a disjunction of bad things). We might still think that there are two legitimate descriptions at work. The “pain” description and the “bad” description. (Some people think water is H₂O through an identity relation similar to this.) This sort of irreducible identity relation require us to deny that pain is “important.” (If the identity theory did require us to deny that pain is “important,” then we would have a good reason to reject such an identity theory.)

I have given reason to think the word “bad” is irreducible, but I haven’t proven it. If someone could prove that pain isn’t important, and we can reduce pain to something else, then I will be proven wrong. I just don’t see any reason to agree with that position at this time. I discuss the badness of pain as irreducible in more detail in my essays “Objection to Moral Realism Part 1: Is/Ought Gap” and “Objections to Moral Realism Part 3: Argument from Queerness.”

The badness of pain is real.

If the badness of pain is real, then everyone’s pain is bad. Pain isn’t bad just for me, but not for you. It states that we don’t all merely share a subjective preference in avoiding pain, but that pain’s badness is something worthy of being avoided and helping others avoid it. Why does it seem reasonable to believe pain’s badness to be real? There are at least four reasons. One, I experience that my pain hurts and I know that other people do as well. Two, it’s not just people’s subjective preferences in question. People hate pain because of how it feels. Three, people’s pain exists (and if pain exists, then the badness of the pain exists). Four, I see no reason to deny that the badness of other people’s pain exists. I will discuss this final consideration in more detail when I discuss anti-realist objections.

We have no good reason to deny that pain is bad. We experience that pain is bad for ourselves, and other people experience that pain is bad for themselves as well. Even though pain is subjective, there is nothing delusional about our belief that pain is bad. It’s not just a personal like or a dislike. We don’t just agree to treat other people’s pain as important as part of a social contract.

The belief that the badness of pain is real and “pain is bad no matter who experiences it” will be rejected by anti-realists. If I gave food to the hungry, it would be absurd to question why I did it. Imagine someone who disagrees with my action and says, “Other people’s pain is irrelevant. You should only try to avoid pain for yourself, so feeding the hungry is stupid.” This person’s position is counterintuitive to the point of absurdity. We have all accepted that other people’s pain matters. It makes sense to feed the hungry, it makes sense to give to charity, and it makes sense to give someone an aspirin who has a headache. We don’t have to benefit from helping other people. To deny that “pain is bad no matter who experiences it” isn’t a position that many people can find acceptable. (I suppose some sociopaths might find it acceptable.)

If pain is bad, important, irreducible, and real, then pain has intrinsic disvalue.

I want to suggest this premise to be justified in virtue of the very meaning of intrinsic value. If pain is bad, important (worthy of being desired), irreducible, and real; then I think we have already established that pain has intrinsic disvalue by definition. We have established moral facts that could give us what we ought to do, such as, “We ought to avoid pain.” Such an ought judgment is not merely based on my personal belief or desire; it’s based on the fact that pain is important no matter who experiences it.

Conclusion: Pain has intrinsic disvalue

If my premises are true, then the conclusion follows. I have given reason for accepting the premises, so we have some reason for accepting the conclusion, and the conclusion entails the truth of moral realism. I will take all of my premises to be sufficiently justified, but I will consider why someone might decide that the badness of pain “isn’t real.” An anti-realist could attempt to deny that “pain is bad no matter who experiences it.” The strongest evidence that badness is real is the fact that denying it seems to require unjustified philosophical commitments. I will attempt to show that the alternatives are less justified in the next section.

2. Anti-Realist Objections

Anti-realists will claim that badness is not real. Five reasons to deny the reality of pain are as follows:

1. Our thoughts and feelings can’t be philosophically analyzed.
2. The only bad thing about pain is that we don’t like it.
3. Pain’s subjective ontology causes it to be less real than required for it to have intrinsic disvalue. Pain is something like an illusion. (“Subjective ontology” merely refers to subjective reality, or subjective existence.)
4. Pain’s subjective ontology causes it to be in a separate place than the rest of the universe.
5. What’s good or bad is only good or bad to someone in particular.

I will consider each of these objections and explain why they are implausible. One of the best reasons to believe that pain has intrinsic value is because rejecting that pain is bad no matter who experiences it is implausible. My argument requires us to accept that I have mentioned all of the most plausible explanations to our moral experiences. I can’t be certain that I have mentioned all of the most plausible explanations, but I will take it as the burden of proof for the anti-realist to mention any that I left out.

Our thoughts and feelings can’t be philosophically analyzed.

The proposition that “our thoughts and feelings can’t be philosophically analyzed” is one that lacks a justification, and we should reject it considering our knowledge of observation’s reliability through introspective evidence. It will be tempting for philosophers to reject my argument because I take our moral experiences seriously, but such experiences could be an unreliable source of information. People often believe that only observation can count as a reliable source of evidence. Yes, empirical knowledge is very reliable. However, that doesn’t prove that no other form of justification is possible.

We have found that empirical knowledge is one of the most reliable kinds of knowledge.⁶ Gathering information through observation is the foundation of science. Some philosophers will reject any form of justification other than observation, and they might argue that our experience that pain is bad is a subjective state that can’t be analyzed. We can’t know if pain is bad just by experiencing it, and we certainly have no basis to say that pain is bad no matter who experiences it.

This is a very dismissive response to all phenomenological (introspective) evidence.⁷ If our first-person experiences don’t matter, then we also have no way to know that we have observation. We know we have observation because we experience it first hand (and an introspective analysis of our experiences can give us reason to trust observation).⁸ So, observation is not the only way to attain knowledge. We require a first person experience in order to justify that observation exists, we require a first person experience in order to justify that pain exists, and we require a first person experience in order to justify that observation and pain have certain properties. One property that pain has is that it’s bad.

The only bad thing about pain is that we don’t like it.

I have already discussed why I don’t think pain isn’t just bad because we dislike it, but there is more to be said. The statement “the only bad thing about pain is that we don’t like it” lacks justification because pain feels bad, and that is a good reason to dislike it. It was bad even before we decided we don’t like it (or at least it being bad is conceptually separable from disliking it). However, some people have taken our interests to be the source of all value in the sense that satisfying desires is good and unsatisfied desires are bad. However, this belief can’t be satisfactorily justified. Consider these three possible reasons that personal interests could be viewed as the source of all value:

1. Neglecting desires can lead to pain and satisfying desires can lead to pleasure. (However, this view of personal interest is based on the value of pleasure and pain, so it doesn’t help us avoid the view that pain is bad for everyone.)
2. Personal interest is the source of all value because our desires are under our personal control. We don’t have to dislike pain. (This answer is unsatisfying because it our natural reaction to pain is that it is bad. If someone was able to no longer dislike pain, then we would wonder if that person even experienced pain anymore.)
3. Personal interest is the only possible source of motivation. We can’t be motivated by other people’s interests. (This answer is unsatisfying because it is possible that intrinsic value exists even if we can’t be motivated to promote goals with intrinsic value. It is also possible for our personal interests to coincide with goals that have intrinsic value.)

If pain is only bad because we dislike it, then pain would appear not to be bad no matter who experiences it. At least not in the sense that it really matters. Instead, avoiding pain could just be a personal preference. However, I disagree that this view of pain’s badness makes sense. Its badness is actually a good reason to dislike it in the first place.

Pain isn’t real because of its subjective ontology.

Some people do think that physical reality is more real than mental reality. Why would someone think mental content isn’t very real? Sometimes we have experiences that are “only in our head.” Optical illusions are only in our mind. Hallucinations are only in our mind. Beauty might be some kind of an illusion, and the fact that we experience that pain is bad is also believed to be some kind of an illusion.

I am not convinced by this objection because pain isn’t taken to be anything other than what it feels like. An illusion is a deceptive experience. To see a cow in the distance, which is actually just a cardboard cutout of a cow, is an illusion when it deceives us. Pain can’t be taken to be deceptive. It doesn’t make us believe it is something out in the world like a cow or a rock. It’s just a feeling.

Still, many people seem to think that there is something not very real about our thoughts and feelings. You see a cow, but your experience of the cow is less real than the actual cow. A materialist might be tempted to say that physical particles and energy are the most real kinds of thing, and the mind and mental experiences are not as real. However, I don’t see how this view can be justified. Something is ontologically objective if it exists outside the mind (including minds), and something is ontologically subjective it is exists inside the mind. Either way, we are talking about part of reality.

Pain’s subjective ontology causes it to be in a separate place than the rest of the universe.

Some people seem to enjoy a very peculiar kind of relativism where everyone lives in a separate universe.⁹ Ontological subjectivity and objectivity seem different enough that they might indicate a severe separation of reality. Minds are each within a kind of bubble that separates mental stuff from physical reality. When you experience that pain as bad, it is really bad for you, but you are so separate from the reality other people exist in that their pain doesn’t exist for you, and so their pain can’t be bad for you. Such a view admits that pain really is bad and might even have intrinsic disvalue, but only within each person’s perspective. Each person lives in something like a separate reality.

I do not find this objection to be plausible enough to fully discuss, but I suspect some people agree to it, and such a view might motivate a kind of anti-realism. Instead of endorsing this kind of relativism, I endorse the view that every person exists in the same reality and our thoughts and feelings are all part of the same reality. We simply are unable to directly know each others’ thoughts and feelings. Instead of having direct knowledge of other people’s consciousness, we can indirectly know their thoughts and feelings through their behavior, biology, situation, and verbal reports. We know that our biology causes us pain when we touch fire, and people with similar biology will feel similar pain when they touch fire.

What’s good or bad is only good or bad to someone in particular.

This position could be a problem for moral realism if good and bad were merely based on subjective desires or if we each live in a relativistic reality bubble. I have already discussed both of those possibilities. I see no other reason to find the statement “what’s good or bad is only good or bad to someone in particular” to be a threat to the reality of intrinsic value. Even if good or bad things can’t exist without someone in particular, that doesn’t prove intrinsic values don’t exist.

It could be true that specific people must be benefited or harmed in order for intrinsic value to be attained. I agree that intrinsic values don’t float around in the universe. They have to be manifested appropriately. Pain doesn’t exist without being experienced by someone, but it could really matter when it does exist. Other people’s pain could really matter, even if I don’t personally care about it.

3. Objections against Anti-Realism

An anti-realist will have some difficulty in explaining the following:

1. Why morality is important.
2. Why moral obligations are inescapable.
3. Why altruism is justified.

I can’t prove that a moral anti-realist will be unable to account for these three intuitive moral beliefs, but I currently don’t understand how they could be accounted for. This is a challenge to anti-realists. Until these intuitive beliefs can be accounted for by the anti-realist, we will have additional reason to doubt anti-realism in general.

Why morality is important.

Some people argue that morality is important because it concerns our desires. This answer does explain why morality can be important to someone in particular, but there are two reasons it isn’t satisfying. One, it implies ethical egoism. Breaking traditional moral rules, such as “thou shalt not kill,” could be the best way to satisfy personal desires.

Two, personal desires are often unimportant. We might think someone’s personal desire to count blades of grass is irrelevant to morality, unlike our desire to avoid pain.

On the other hand intrinsic values can make sense out of morality’s importance. Pain really matters, so it is important to be moral (and reduce the pain in the world).

Why our moral obligations are inescapable.

I can decide to stop being a doctor in order to abandon my obligations of being a good doctor. However, we can’t decide to stop being moral in order to abandon our moral obligations. The anti-realist could argue that we can’t escape moral obligations because they are simply our obligations to satisfy our desires. We can’t stop caring about satisfying our desires, so we can’t stop caring about morality. However, this anti-realist does not properly answer the question. I need to know why I should have obligations to treat other people with respect and why it’s a good idea to give strangers an aspirin when it helps them get rid of a headache. As I said before, killing people could occasionally be the best way to satisfy my desires.

Again, intrinsic values can make sense out of the inescapability of our moral obligations. It is important that we don’t cause people pain because it really matters. We say that we are obligated not to cause pain because it would be horrible to cause severe harm. The more harm an action could cause, the more important it is not to do the action.

Why altruism is justified.

If pain isn’t bad for everyone, then we need to know why the examples of altruism (helpfulness) are so intuitive. Why do we take other people’s pain as worthy of consideration? Why do we find it so reasonable to help other people avoid pain by giving them an aspirin? Let’s consider these three possibilities:

1. Instincts: We are social animals. We care for people by nature. We want people to approve of us. (However, this answer isn’t entirely satisfying because we want people to approve of us based on our actual virtue and worth. It might be true that we are happy to get approval of others, but we would also prefer to be worthy of that approval.)
2. A social contract: We are rationally justified to help other people because human beings are interdependent. We require cooperation in order to live.
3. Cultural practice: We have been indoctrinated into a moral institution. Part of that institution requires us to find everyone’s pain to be worthy of consideration.

These three answers are unsatisfying for at least three reasons:

1. These views imply ethical egoism.¹⁰ We wouldn’t be able to justify a personal interest in helping other people avoid pain unless it would benefit ourselves to do so, which is counterintuitive. Helping other people seems like a good thing that doesn’t need a selfish justification.
2. These views can’t account for the importance of morality itself. Without intrinsic values, we would want everyone to follow moral rules except ourselves. It’s within our personal interest to cheat whenever it would benefit us to do so, but we intuitively believe moral demands are always worthy of consideration.
3. Totalitarian regimes make sense if morality isn’t important. We might as well all agree to a social contract that can watch us at all times and punish us whenever we break the rules of the social contract. This could help us avoid Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature where life is “nasty, brutish, and short.”¹¹

If morality isn’t really important, then altruistic moral demands are not worthy of consideration. It might be possible to free ourselves from our instincts, social contract, and cultural practices. We sometimes have an interest of helping other people without conscious regard to ourselves, but we might be able to train ourselves to lose this interest. A wise philosopher would be able to reject morality and accept a kind of personal egoistic ethic. However, this is a highly counter-intuitive result. It would be absurd for wise philosophers to reject morality, stop caring about people, and commit crimes in order to selfishly benefit themselves. In order to accept such a counter-intuitive result, we would need a persuasive justification.

I do not deny that instincts, a social contract, or cultural practices play a role in our moral beliefs and motivations, but the role they play is limited. If our motivation in valuing other people’s pain were solely from one or more of these sources, it wouldn’t prove that pain doesn’t have intrinsic value. It might still make sense to say that other people’s pain is bad because they experience it as bad. However, if pain doesn’t have intrinsic value, then these sources of motivation might be the only ways to explain why we value other people’s pain.

Finally, intrinsic values can account for altruism. Everyone’s pain is bad, so it’s better for one person to feel pain than two. We should then do what we can to reduce the pain in the world.

Conclusion

We have good reason to accept that pain is intrinsically bad considering that it feels bad no matter who experiences it and the alternatives to this view do not seem plausible. Additionally, the moral realist can explain why it is intuitive to believe everyone’s pain has disvalue and why we have a good reason to want to help people avoid pain. Anti-realism can explain altruistic ethics to some extent, but it’s only skin deep. Anti-realists will have various ways to try to explain why people are altruistic, but altruistic action is not justified for anti-realists because they can only justify ethical egoism. Ethical egoism is counterintuitive considering that giving an aspirin to someone with a headache makes sense without any personal benefit required. I do not expect that the anti-realist will be able to justify their rejection of pain’s intrinsic disvalue sufficiently, and the anti-realist will have the burden of proof considering their counterintuitive results. I have attempted to consider the best reasons to believe that pain lacks intrinsic disvalue, but those reasons lack sufficient justification.

There might be a foolproof argument that proves that pain lacks intrinsic disvalue, but I don’t know of it. Most anti-realists do not provide such a proof. Instead, anti-realists argue that intrinsic value isn’t needed in order to explain our moral understanding or our moral experiences. (We should reject intrinsic value because it is a queer property, and nothing queer should be accepted unless it is necessary to do so.) I have argued that the anti-realist is wrong. We do need intrinsic value in order to explain our understanding of morality and moral experiences. If we reject intrinsic value, then we have various counterintuitive conclusions:

1. We should become ethical egoists in order to know what we want out of life and to find out how to get it.
2. “Ethics” isn’t important, but wise people will tend to develop their own egoistic ethic just because it is a natural behavior given our psychology. We want to satisfy our desires, and “ethics” is nothing more than an attempt to satisfy our desires.
3. We can’t expect or demand that anyone take our desires into consideration. Of course, some people will try to coerce others into behaving in certain ways. (They might try to force others into treating them nicely.)
4. We should agree to live by a social contract, but we should cheat and break the rules of the contract whenever we would be benefited by doing so, and perhaps that is a good reason to want to live in a totalitarian state that can watch us all at all times to keep us in line.