The Case Against Moral Realism
post by Zero Contradictions · 2024-11-07T10:14:26.269Z · LW · GW · 1 commentsThis is a link post for https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-case-against-moral-realism.html
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Moral realism is an explicit version of the ordinary view of morality. It has the following assumptions:
- Good and evil are objectively real.
- We have the ability to recognize good and evil.
- We have an objective moral obligation to do good and not do evil. Likewise, we have an objective moral right to not have evil done to us.
- Society depends on morality to exist. The social order is created by human goodness, and it is destroyed by evil.
There are many problems with moral realism, including:
- Moral realism has no definition of good and evil. If good and evil are objectively real properties or substances, like temperature or oxygen, it should be possible to define them in scientific terms.
- Why are we obliged to do good and not do evil? Moral realism does not explain why we have this obligation, nor how it is imposed on us.
- Moral judgments vary between individuals, cultures and societies. If good and evil are objective, and humans have essentially the same ability to recognize good and evil, then we would expect moral judgments to be mostly the same. But they are not.
- In most cases, moral disagreements cannot be resolved by rational persuasion. If good and evil are objective, and humans have the ability to recognize good and evil, then we should be able to resolve moral disagreements with evidence and arguments. But we can’t.
- Morality is ad hoc. Moral judgments can’t be reduced to a small number of principles applied consistently. The ad hoc nature of morality is hard to explain if morality reflects objective good and evil.
- If moral realism is true, then most people would be morally good. But evil is pervasive. Individuals and societies don’t behave in a morally good way, generally speaking. Morality is often linked to hypocrisy.
Let’s go through these problems in more detail, starting with the definition of good and evil.
What are good and evil?
If good and evil are objectively real, then we should be able to measure them, analogous to how we measure height or temperature. We could construct a device to measure things on this objective moral dimension, in a way that is free from personal biases. Then we could use the device to resolve moral conflicts, in the same way that we can use a ruler to resolve a disagreement about height. But of course, we can’t do any of those things for good and evil.
(see the rest of the post in the link)
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comment by AnthonyC · 2024-11-07T13:42:53.176Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I agree with the thrust and most of the content of the post, but in the interest of strengthening it, I'm looking at your list of problems and wanted to point out what I see as gaps/weaknesses.
For the first one, keep in mind it took centuries from trying to develop a temperature scale to actually having the modern thermodynamic definition of temperature, and reliable thermometers. The definition is kinda weird and unintuitive, and strictly speaking runs from 0 to infinity, then discontinuously jumps to negative infinity (but only for some kinds of finite systems), then rises back towards negative zero (I always found this funny when playing the Sims 3 since it had a" -1K Refrigerator"). Humans knew things got hot and cold for many, many millennia before figuring out temperature in a principled way. Morality could plausibly be similar.
The third and fourth seem easily explainable by bounded rationality, in the same way that "ability to build flying machines and quantum computers" and "ability to identify and explain the fundamental laws of physical reality" vary between individuals, cultures, and societies.
For the fifth, there's no theoretical requirement that something real should only have a small number of principles that are necessary for human-scale application. Occam's Razor cuts against anyone suggesting a fundamentally complex thing, but it is possible there is a simple underlying set of principles that is just incredibly complicated to use in practice. I would argue that most attempts to formalize morality, from Kant to Bentham etc., have this problem, and one of the common ways they go wrong is that people try to apply them without recognizing that.
The sixth seems like a complete non-sequitur to me. If moral realism were true, then people should be morally good. But why would they? Even if there were somehow a satisfying answer to the second problem of imposing an obligation, this does not necessarily provide an actual mechanism to compel action or a trend to action to fulfil the obligation. In fact at least some traditional attempts to have moral realist frameworks, like Judeo-Christian God-as-Lawgiver religion, explicitly avoid having such a mechanism.