There are objective moral values

The Lakeland Lectures pt. 1

Uh, yeah. So I happened to become an ethics professor for this fall semester. I hope it’s not a permanent or terminal condition. I don’t like it anymore than you do.

I try to reconcile myself with the situation by recalling that scene from Judge Dredd (the mediocre 1995 Stallone version (which nonetheless has incredible set design)) where Dredd is forced to teach ethics at the academy after a bit of wanton murder and a little too severe extrajudicial executions -

Anyhow, last few weeks, I’ve also happened to encounter a few posters online, insistently maintaining that there’s no absolute ground of moral value whatsoever, WHILE ALSO not skipping a beat in stating their various moral objections to certain lamentable states of affairs in the world around us.

This is incoherent, of course. If there are no absolutes, their objections ultimately have no meaning. They have no force, no normative weight over and above any and all opinions of those committing whatever atrocities are in focus (yes, we’re thinking about the ongoing genocide in Palestine).

So why are there moral absolutes?

Why and how can we be sure that there are objective moral values?

The obvious route is through establishing the existence of God, but without going quite that far, it would be sufficient to show that there’s something like Plato’s Form of the Good, the ineffable Dao, the Brahma of the Indian traditions, the reality of Moksha or nirvāṇa or the Lakota Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka.

And this is actually trivial. As St. Paul writes, “… since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” (Rom. 1:20).

So the cosmological arguments, based in the logically necessary principle of causation, clearly shows that the existence of ANY contingent reality, even down the least smidgen of vague perception inherent to the most primitive organism, necessitates a ground of being that’s immutable and transcendent, and which by definition is goodness itself, since what is good is actual and potentially desirable (and the ground of being is perfectly actual).

But this is generally too much to swallow for people of a non-religious persuasion (or who are sitting on the fence), so I thought we’d focus on another route towards moral absolutes here.

This approach is based in the perceptions of moral intuitions. We have immediate ethical or moral intuitions that persist irrespectively of cultural variations in terms of customs or traditions. There seem to be immutable moral intuitions throughout every society that go beyond any conceivable instinct towards self- or group-preservation.

Perceptions of moral value that transcend both what Lewis calls “the herd instinct”, as well as any immediate desire for self-preservation, precisely since they present as something over and above both of these. The moral intuition presents as something distinct from any conceivable desire or fear:

Here is a third way of seeing it. If the Moral Law was one of our instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us which was always what we call ‘good,’ always in agreement with the rule of right behaviour. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage.

(C. S. Lewis. Mere Christianity.

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The Naturalistic Objection

An obvious counterargument to this point is that what we experience as a moral imperative could be explained as a by-product of evolution—a mechanism that has helped preserve altruism and a willingness to cooperate, which over millions of years has promoted the survival of humans and their predecessors. What we experience as a compelling moral intuition could, in reality, be something like a mechanical adaptation in a survival-optimizing biological machine. According to critics who maintain this objection, we therefore have no clear reason to believe that such an experience reflects any enduring moral reality that exists independently of ourselves (and is therefore objective).

Lewis’s Counterargument

Lewis’s response to this objection is debated, but it contains a clear and interesting point. It’s based in the idea that in concrete moral experience, humans indeed do perceive something beyond mere self-preservation, beyond loyalty to kin, and even beyond a concern for the well-being of humanity as a species. The moral experience transcends these and often serves to judge even our own self-preservation or concern for the group’s advantage at the expense of others. For example, we often feel that justice as a principle, even for other people or species, outweighs our own claims to safety and security. Many of us have felt drawn to risk life or health for a good cause or a higher principle under threat, a phenomenon expressed radically in the idea that it would be better for the entire world to perish than for even a single sin to be committed.

This response can be summarized with the counter-question of whether evolution could reasonably explain the emergence and widespread occurrence of such a tendency. A trait that strongly prioritizes other goals at the expense of our own survival or reproduction, or that leads us to set aside the advantages of our own group, seems to have a strongly negative correlation to biological fitness. At first glance, it appears to diminish an individual’s ability to survive and reproduce, making it difficult to conceptualize as a result of successive evolutionary adaptation. This tendency, or tendencies of this type, should rather have been selected against or, at the very least, modified to the extent that our experiences and behaviors would prioritize personal or group survival.

Adoption in the animal kingdom—where one animal takes care of and supports the offspring of another—is an example of altruism that, at the cost of the agent’s survival chances, promotes the survival of another’s offspring. If we only have Darwinism as an explanatory model, this type of behavior, which is seen in many species that live in groups, is an anomaly incredibly difficult to explain. The traits that foster this kind of behavior should have disappeared long ago and not spread as widely as they seem to have.

One possible answer lies in the idea that altruism is, in fact, composed of a complex set of experiences and behavioral patterns that, in aggregate, provide survival advantages, but which in some cases lead to behaviors in individuals that, when viewed in isolation, have negative effects on survival or reproduction.

Thus, moral intuition could be explained as part of a complex, adaptive behavioral pattern where radical altruism is sometimes an inevitable side effect, even if it occasionally comes with survival disadvantages. However, this would require that expressions of radical altruism cannot be separated from the broader altruistic behavior pattern that promotes survival. In other words, it would simply be impossible for evolution to modify our altruistic behavior in such a way that the more uncompromising forms disappear, while still preserving the survival benefits.

An Abductive Counterargument

The defender of the modern argument for objective moral values can, however, accept the naturalistic objection in substance—that the existence of a fundamental moral intuition does not necessarily require the actual existence of objective moral values—and at the same time apply an abductive argument against a final naturalistic explanation.

Abductive arguments are based on the idea that a particular explanation for a specific state of affairs can be made more likely than others. In line with this, the naturalistic explanation for the experienced moral intuition can be challenged because it is an anomaly difficult to explain in relation to an exclusively materialist context, but a given in a framework of absolute and perceptible moral values.

At best, the naturalistic approach can explain moral intuition as a more or less likely, random adaptation in humans as a species, but it has a peculiar character in that it reinforces an illusion, unlike normal perception, which provides us with information about external reality.

The theist or the Confucian can then emphasize this problem and simply argue that moral intuition, whether it arose from evolution or not, actually gives us information about the objective moral reality, at the center of which stands the Good-in-itself. Given that our experiences generally connect us to reality, and considering that the existence of a moral intuition is something we would naturally expect if objective moral values are real, but not something we would expect if naturalism is true, moral realism becomes a more reasonable or better explanation than naturalism for the fact that we simply experience a definite moral order.

The survival benefits that altruism or moral behavior bring are also clearly conceivable without any strong moral experience. What suggests that evolutionarily advantageous actions must necessarily be linked to a strong subjective experience of right and wrong?

Direct Experience as Evidence

Another response to the naturalistic critique is found in emphasizing the validity of moral experience. We can deepen Lewis's basic reasoning and argue that the experience itself, regardless of its exact content or whether its origin lies in an evolutionary adaptation, provides us with good enough reasons to believe that objective moral values exist.

We can begin by addressing the evolutionary explanation. As is well known, humans, according to the naturalistic perspective, see the trees in the forest or the walls of a house around us because of an evolutionary adaptation of our perception to our environment—but this does not mean that the trees we see are merely an illusion. On the contrary, it is usually believed that the adaptation occurred precisely so that we can get the most accurate and actionable information about the environment we live in, so that we can better survive.

Moral experience can be compared to physical pain in just this way. Pain can be exhaustively explained as an evolutionary adaptation, correlating with objective phenomena at the neurological level and producing measurable consequences in behavior. But the subjective experience of pain—the phenomenal existence of pain itself—can hardly be an illusion. If someone experiences pain, it exists, and if no pain is felt, it does not exist. Regardless of what happens in the brain or what reaction these neurological phenomena trigger, the existence of pain as a phenomenal reality depends on the concrete subjective experience of feeling hurt somewhere.

Pain also has a clear and distinct character when analyzed, showing similarities to other feelings of discomfort, and in absolute terms, it differs from various forms of well-being.

Moral intuition works in a similar way. Whether it emerged as a result of evolution or correlates with particular processes in the brain that aim to trigger certain types of socially beneficial behavior, it clearly exists as an immediate subjective experience. No one who experiences it can deny that the intuition itself is real, since its very existence resides in the fact that it is part of a person's conscious experience.

Can we then conclude from the nature of this tangible experience that we are actually encountering an objective moral reality?

Yes. It is possible to draw such a conclusion based on a particular type of experience of this moral intuition—those that (pace Lewis) can be clearly distinguished from feelings of empathy, pleasure, or discomfort. In these cases, we seem able to experience pure moral facts, such as the evil inherent in punishing a person for a crime they did not commit, even if we lack empathy for that person.

In the same way, we can experience the justice of someone being rewarded for their merits and good deeds, even if we envy the person and have no respect for them. We can perceive that the recognition is just, and we may even feel that our envy is unjust.

In these situations, we experience something concrete in what we interpret as just actions, something positive, and we experience the absence of this positive aspect in what we interpret as unjust actions. If we study this positive character of the experience more closely, it becomes clear that it resembles, but is nevertheless distinguishable from, direct emotional experiences of pleasure, such as joy, gratitude, relief, fulfilled expectations, or similar feelings.

This positive aspect of the experience has a distinct character or quality that leads us in a certain direction and away from another. It tends to promote what we consider to be goodwill, justice, tenderness, and compassion, and to reject what we perceive as injustice, oppression, inhumanity, etc. This positive aspect has a distinct identity that defines and differentiates it.

Thus, we can establish that in our experience, there exists a particular moral intuition—a sense of moral facts—that guides us in a specific direction. This intuition can be used unjustly, or we could allow it to lead us to self-criticism and improvement, but regardless, the intuition is based on a distinct experiential reality, just like pain or love.

But does this really give us good reasons to accept moral realism, i.e., that actual values exist independently of us? To understand this, we must discuss our hypothetical moral experience in detail.

Let’s say we experience something unjust in what we judge as a morally relevant action, such as someone abusing a child. In this case, we perceive a conflict between the action and something else—a discrepancy between the action and a principle or pattern with which the action is not compatible for some reason.

Notice that this applies even if we have completely misjudged what we see—the perceived discrepancy exists even if no actual abuse occurred. The experience captures a kind of structural conflict between motive and pattern, regardless of whether the motive is actually realized in the world or not. It’s important to emphasize that this doesn’t mean we have an infallible moral sense that can always detect whether an action is just or not. Our moral intuition concerns the experience of harmony or conflict with an underlying pattern, and we can have this experience in relation to, for example, fiction, thought experiments or literature as well as real-life events.

This experience of harmony or conflict with an underlying pattern, which gives the event or motive moral significance, can be clearly separated in our minds from experiences of pleasure, empathy, our preferences, and what we know benefits ourselves and others. It cannot be reduced to any of these things, because in our experience, it is clearly distinguishable from them. These are immediately non-identical.

Thus, in certain cases, we can have a direct and immediate experience of this structure or pattern that gives our actions a moral dimension. When we experience the action or motive and simultaneously experience the discrepancy or conflict, we also directly perceive the pattern or structure itself. In the same way, we immediately perceive mathematical principles when we recognize musical harmonies. I can immediately perceive that something is unjust or just, in the same way I can directly perceive that a square die has, and must have, six sides.

In this sense, we can have direct experiences of an objective moral reality—and for someone who has clearly and distinctly experienced such encounters, there is undeniable warrant for the actual existence of an absolute moral reality.

It should be emphasized that these good reasons also presuppose access to the experience, so for someone who is unaware of having had these kinds of experiences, they cannot, of course, be used to support the existence of an objective moral reality. For such a person, the argument becomes, at best, a form of indirect testimony and has a lower epistemic status.

However, as long as such experiences are available to a person, this is one of the most compelling and easily grasped arguments for the existence of an objective moral reality. The immediate experience of what is right and wrong in relation to a moral norm allows us to know that there truly is a distinction between right and wrong—even if we would have a completely mistaken view of the nature of moral reality.

Strong moral intuitions testify to an underlying moral principle, that there is a possible harmony between our actions and morality. It is precisely the insight into this possible harmony and the fact that it draws us in, which is our actual experience of an objective morality—not specifically our experiences of and our relations to the content of our moral norms.

The validity of such an experience cannot be refuted by arguing that the content of our moral norms is socially constructed. The content is not what is essential; it is the experience of a possible harmony. Nor can the experience be invalidated through the genetic fallacy in referencing an evolutionary origin. The experience is real. The experience of the abstract harmony and its inherent goodness is as palpable and undeniable as pain.

There is pain, and there is harmony, for I experience both immediately.

It is even possible to use the evolutionary explanation in arguments for the existence of objective morality. It is entirely plausible that evolution has, in fact, gradually led humans to develop a more and more refined ability to discern moral reality, in much the same way that evolution has enhanced our once rudimentary vision and allowed us to perceive more clearly the physically existing reality around us.

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But the kicker is that if we accept objective moral values, which we’re rationally obligated to do, then there’s also no way around the existence of somehing like the Dao. Or the Brahma. Or Plato’s Form of the Good.

Or of God.