moral truth
We may all agree that it's wrong to steal or assault. And we may all say that the truth of claims like 'James deserves punishment' or 'James needs to make recompense' hangs on it indeed being a fact that what James did was wrong - he stole from George; he kicked Geoffrey. If James hadn't done something like that, then the punishment of him or the expectation of recompense would itself be immoral.
Now, 'James did a wicked thing' is what we call a moral judgement; it's true or false depending on the facts of the case. But what of statements like 'it's wrong to steal'? Are there higher order facts in virtue of which such statements are true?
The character we may call the moral Nihilist says there are no such facts, and that morality is therefore a sham. The contender we may call the Conventionalist claims that the facts in question are the moral conventions we hold to in our culture. The contender we may call the Platonist holds that there's a domain of supra-human moral truths existing beyond our culture - perhaps in the mind of God? - and that our higher order ethical claims are true if they correctly represent these supra-human facts.
All three options face serious problems: Nihilism is abhorrent; Conventionalism is absurd; Platonism is incomprehensible. I'll focus on the latter two since nihilism is too corrupt to discuss. Conventionalism is absurd because it implies that if we'd held to different conventions, then it might have been morally good to assault or steal. But someone who thinks this doesn't even understand what 'morally good' means. And the Platonist saves moral truth from the Nihilist and the Conventionalist at the expense of asking us to believe what we don't really understand. In truth we only credit notions like 'moral facts in a Platonic realm' or 'moral truths in the mind of God' with any content because we're pretty sure that moral truths are true and so we think there must be something that makes them true. But whilst we can encounter James doing the wicked thing - stealing from George, we can't similarly encounter that which makes it true that assault is an evil. So the truth-maker of our statement 'murder is wrong' must, we think, exist in some 'other world', or perhaps in the world's 'metaphysical structure', or in 'the mind of God', etc. But, if we're honest, I suggest, we don't really know what these phrases mean. For typically, when you ask someone what they mean by the world's intrinsic moral structure, they just say 'I mean that which makes our moral truths true'. But this is as useful as saying 'X is true in virtue of boggle' and 'Boggle? Oh, that's what makes X true'.
What then shall be our alternative? It's this: moral truths are norms or rules. As such they aren't made true by anything. They aren't made true by Platonic facts because we don't know what those are. They aren't made true by how we go on, because they themselves are the very norms of our going on!
Wittgenstein somewhere imagines someone asking how it is that the white disk here in this O fits so neatly and so inexorably inside the black circle surrounding it. He dissolves the question by pointing out that the circle defines the disk's perimeter, so there's no such thing here as one thing fitting another thing. So too, I suggest, with moral truths. 'Assault is an evil' is a rule or norm which partly defines the meaning of 'evil'. If someone wants you to explain what 'morally wrong' meant, you could say 'well, stealing or assault, for example: these are morally wrong'. To ask 'but even so, what makes it the case that assault is wrong?' is like asking 'but even so, what makes it the case that the disk fits into the circle?'
The conventionalist says that moral truths are made true by how we go on. They want to answer the 'what makes it the case...?' question, and to give it an answer which refers to our moral lives. For them, if we went on differently, then different moral truths will obtain. Assault will now no longer be an evil. But this is a nonsense. For that to truly be the case, the word 'wrong' would have to remain constant, so that when one said 'and now assault is no longer morally wrong' one wasn't just saying 'assault is no longer called 'wrong''. (Nobody thinks that we as a community are forced to use particular words.)
It's tempting to think that if assault cannot become not wrong without a change in the meaning of 'wrong' then something must be constraining us here. This, it might be said, is akin to our being constrained by the facts if we want to count as truth-telling when we say 'James stole from George'. It's just that now the facts are somehow supra-worldly, metaphysical, etc., and they constrain what shall and what shan't properly be called 'wrong'.
This putative 'constraint', however, is what Wittgenstein called a 'shadow cast by grammar'. It'd one again be like saying 'the white disk in the O is constrained by its black perimeter'. In truth, however, the disk is defined, and not constrained, by its perimeter.
If we want to use the word 'morally wrong' correctly, we must use it in accord with the norms for its use. It's not as if we first know what 'morally wrong' means, and then determine that lying, thieving, assaulting, murder, are wrong. No, I suggest: we instead learn what 'morally wrong' means by learning that lying, thieving, etc are exemplars of it.
The approach to moral truth which I've sketched here is alarming to some. This, I suggest, is because they can't help assimilate my approach to conventionalism. They do this because i) they can't shake from their heads the idea that moral truths must be made true by something; because ii) hearing my talk of moral conventions or norms, and noting the contingency of our norms, they assume that this makes moral truth itself contingent; because iii) they want to know that they're accountable to something outside themselves in their moral judgement - that they can't just make stuff up - not just in their ethical but in their meta-ethical judgement, that is; because iv) they subscribe to what elsewhere I've called a 'theistic' understanding of religion - so that they imagine that we can, for example, understand what's meant by 'God's moral command' independently of our knowing that assault is wrong, so that we could then genuinely explain why assault is wrong by saying that it traduces God's command.
By contrast, what I've suggested is that i) moral truths (to murder is to commit an evil) are not made true; they do not correspond to facts; they are norms not descriptions, rules not facts. To say 'it's true that murder is evil' is to say nothing more than 'murder is evil', which is itself just to share a norm for talk of 'evil'. ii) The contingency of our having the norms we do, the contingency of there being non-psychopathic creatures such as (most of) ourselves, is one thing. The necessity prescribed by the norm 'murder is wrong' is another. That we call unmarried men "bachelors" is contingently true. Even so, "bachelors are unmarried men" is not a claim that's made true by the facts; it's truth and its meaning are instead of a piece. There's no such thing as a married bachelor; there's no such thing as a moral murder. Moral claims are neither subjective nor objective in character; those terms aptly characterise claims people make, not the norms they deploy. iii) If you want to be moral, you simply can't make up your own norms - because to be moral just is to act according to moral norms. And what are they? Well, here's one: murder is an evil. iv) To ask 'why is assault wrong?' is like asking 'why is black darker than white?' In other words, it's not a good question since the very question takes a norm for a claim. Asking 'but why is assault wrong?' is like asking 'but why should I act morally?' The one who asks it has already become alienated from the moral life in a worrying way.
To conclude: someone is worried about relativism or nihilism. They're worried that unless we ground our moral life in something beyond itself, something to which justificatory reference can be made for why theft is wrong, then our morality is baseless or unwarranted. They're worried that the truth of 'theft is morally wrong' can't be left hanging on our human conventions. They want something more unshakeable, more apodictic. What I've been suggesting in the above is that they can in fact enjoy the absolute necessity, the complete rigidity, of the truth of 'theft is morally wrong', without any appeal to God. They can enjoy this not because 'theft is wrong' is grounded in something more fixed than human convention. They can enjoy it instead because 'theft is morally wrong' is a rule which partly determines the meaning of 'morally wrong'. To change the rule would be to change the meaning of 'morally wrong' ie to change the subject. Hence it isn't possible that one day theft will become not wrong - since then 'wrong' will also have changed in meaning.
Coda: The Euthyphro dilemma asks if certain moral truths ('theft is wrong') are true because they are what God dictates, or whether instead God must recognise the truth of the moral claims. The former seems to suggest that God could have made theft or murder right, and that looks mad. The latter seems to restrict God's power. But we can escape this dilemma by, again, seeing that moral truths are not claims, are not made true by anything.
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