Against moral realism

Here’s my primary problem with moral realism: I can’t think of any acceptable epistemic framework that would give us a way to justifiably update our beliefs in the objective truth of moral claims. I.e. I can’t think of any reasonable account of how we could have justified beliefs in objectively true moral principles.

Here’s a sketch of a plausible-seeming account of epistemology. Broad-strokes, there are two sources of justified belief: deduction and induction.

Deduction refers to the process by which we define some axioms and then see what logically follows from them. So, for instance, the axioms of Peano Arithmetic entail the theorem that 1+1=2 – or, in Peano’s language, S(0) + S(0) = S(S(0)). The central reason why reasoning by deduction is reliable is that the truths established are true by definition – they are made true by the way we have constructed our terms, and are thus true in every possible world.

Induction is scientific reasoning – it is the process of taking prior beliefs, observing evidence, and then updating these beliefs (via Bayes’ rule, for instance). The central reason why induction is reliable comes from the notion of causal entanglement. When we make an observation and update our beliefs based upon this observation, the brain state “believes X” has become causally entangled with the truth of the the statement X. So, for instance, if I observe a positive result on a pregnancy test, then my belief in the statement “I am pregnant” has become causally entangled with the truth of the statement “I am pregnant.” It is exactly this that justifies our use of induction in reasoning about the world.

Now, where do moral claims fall? They are not derived from deductive reasoning… that is, we cannot just arbitrarily define right and wrong however we like, and then derive morality from these definitions.

And they are also not truths that can be established through inductive reasoning; after all, objective moral truths are not the types of things that have any causal effects on the world.

In other words, even if there are objective moral truths, we would have no way of forming justified beliefs about this. To my mind, this is a pretty devastating situation for a moral realist. Think about it like this: a moral realist who doesn’t think that moral truths have causal power over the world must accept that all of their beliefs about morality are completely causally independent of their truth. If we imagine keeping all the descriptive truths about the world fixed, and only altering the normative truths, then none of the moral realist’s moral beliefs would change.

So how do they know that they’re in the world where their moral beliefs actually do align with the moral reality? Can they point to any reason why their moral beliefs are more likely to be true than any other moral statements? As far as I can tell, no, they can’t!

Now, you might just object to the particular epistemology I’ve offered up, and suggest some new principle by which we can become acquainted with moral truth. This is the path of many professional philosophers I have talked to.

But every attempt that I’ve heard of for doing this begs the question or resorts to just gesturing at really deeply held intuitions of objectivity. If you talk to philosophers, you’ll hear appeals to a mysterious cognitive ability to reflect on concepts and “detect their intrinsic properties”, even if these properties have no way of interacting with the world, or elaborate descriptions of the nature of “self-evident truths.”

(Which reminds me of this meme)

None of this deals with the central issue in moral epistemology, as I see it. This central issue is: How can a moral realist think that their beliefs about morality are any more likely to be true than any random choice of a moral framework?