I’m a real moral realist. By that, I mean that I’m a moral realist of such a kind as believes that there are facts about what ought to be valued, and what ought to be done, independently of what anyone believes or desires. For example, I think it’s wrong to cause suffering unnecessarily, and I think that would be true even if everyone woke up tomorrow morning believing the unnecessary infliction of suffering to be good, and desiring that suffering should be maximized. Another way of putting the point: the truths of morality are not contingent upon what humans happen to believe them to be; they are not invented, or “constructed”, or up to us in any way. They are objective – out in the world, to be discovered (in something like the way that the truths of mathematics are, on one view, to be discovered).
This may all seem utterly banal, but many who describe themselves as moral realists would nevertheless grumble at the description offered above.
“Of course we believe in moral facts”, they would insist, “but moral facts bottom out in human desires – to insist upon something more is gratuitous; a kind of outdated Platonism. Good, hard-headed, contemporary naturalists realize that there’s nothing more to reality than that which figures in scientific explanation”.
But if the facts of morality are reducible to the facts concerning that about which humans care, then – I insist – there are, really, no facts of morality. Humans can and do desire all sorts of silly and awful things; if there are no facts about what we ought to desire, then nothing matters – nihilism is true, and anything goes. If naturalism entails nihilism – I’m not saying it does – then, as far as I’m concerned, so much the worse for naturalism. It’s as good a reason as I’m aware of for rejecting a worldview that it can’t accommodate the objective wrongness of the Holocaust.
Why do people shy away from real moral realism, as I understand it? I’ve hinted above at one possible reason: the sense that the view is inconsistent with naturalism, the worldview on which (according to one construal, at least) all that exists are those entities and properties posited by the natural sciences. But naturalism is itself plagued by difficulties. For one thing, if one holds that naturalism ought to be accepted, then one invokes a notion of epistemic normativity which does not admit readily of a naturalistic explanation (and if epistemic normativity can be naturalized, the question then arises: why could not moral normativity be naturalized, as well?). More importantly, however, there is an implicit epistemological prioritization that needs to be justified by the naturalist: namely, the prioritization of scientific explanation over moral explanation. It’s open to the real moral realist to take the moral domain as fundamental and deny that a worldview is complete unless that domain is accounted for.
Another force militating against real moral realism is the moral (and, increasingly, epistemological) relativism that has swept much of the modern world. Moral relativism is the congenial-seeming position on which all moral judgments must be relativized to the individual; I have my moral truth, and you have yours, but it is sheer arrogance and folly to suppose that any moral truth – let alone mine – holds universally. While moral relativism may seem appealing insofar as it seems to promote tolerance; however, in fact it does no such thing, for it entails that a person with an intolerant personal ethic cannnot be regarded as in any way mistaken. And it would be logically inconsistent for someone to simultaneously affirm moral relativism and insist upon tolerance as a universal value (exactly the sort of value the denial of which defines moral relativism!).
Finally, some people have the sense that objective moral truths should not be believed in because they would, if they existed, have a bizarre ontological status. J.L. Mackie perhaps provided the most cogent statement of this line of argument. But it hangs upon a premise that seems unjustified: namely, that we should not believe in entities of a strange ontological status. Endorsement of that premise should lead one to disbelieve in all sorts of things of posited by contemporary science (physics, in particular) – the very discipline that many moral skeptics regard as the best guide to reality. Most importantly, as mentioned above, it is open to the real moral realist to simply take the reality of the moral domain as fundamental – as invulnerable to empirical falsification, just like, for example, the reality of subjective experience (though, of course, some naturalists deny that, too!).
I think it is probably true that morality needs to be metaphysically grounded; that is, we need some ultimate accounting for why there is a moral – or, for that matter, a normative – domain at all (i.e., why is reality such that it contains facts about what ought to be done?) The answer to that question may indeed be strange, if not incomprehensible – but, by my lights, not so incomprehensible as a world in which nothing matters.