Moral anti-realism is motivated by morality, not immorality

Also, I won't be shutting up about slave morality... a response to Bentham's Bulldog.

Being a moral anti-realist can be tough sometimes, if only because one is so often misunderstood. One is misunderstood even when one writes 17,000 word essays attempting to make one’s position as clear as possible.

Actually, it’s not that surprising. Intelligent human beings have been perplexed by the strange properties of morality for thousands of years. At this point there is no end in sight to philosophical debates about the ontological status of moral prescriptions. Are moral prescriptions facts, preferences, or something in between? The philosopher P. Kyle Stanford explains that:

…our moral psychology represents something of a kludge, whose rough edges, scars, and imperfect fit with the rest of our motivational psychology is revealed in our endless philosophical puzzlement (at least since Plato) concerning how anything could have the distinctive combination of characteristics that we seem to unreflectively attribute to moral obligations, facts, and properties. The phenomenology of moral demands combines elements from each side of the fundamental division between the subjective and the objective in ways found nowhere else in nature: Perhaps most saliently, we experience such demands as imposed on us without regard for our preferences in something like the way objective empirical facts are, but as nonetheless intimately connected to our motivational states in ways that such empirical facts never are. (Stanford, 2018 pp. 12-13)

It’s for these reasons that we still find so much disagreement among professional philosophers about the existence of moral facts.

Bentham’s bulldog (BB) criticized one of my posts a while back and I missed it. It came to my attention more recently because of a back-and-forth between BB and Scott Alexander. I suspect BB’s misunderstanding of what motivates moral anti-realism (especially anti-realism about slave morality) is common among moral realists, so it’s worth a response. In this response, BB will largely act as a stand-in for moral realists in general since I think his arguments are pretty representative.

According to BB:

When people object to slave morality, they are just objecting to morality. They are objecting to the notion that you should care about others and doing the right thing, even when doing so doesn’t materially benefit you. Now, one can consistently object to those things, but it doesn’t make them any sort of Nostradamus. It makes them morally deficient, and also generally philosophically confused.

I am very sure that I have never objected to caring about others (although I have objected to pitying them, which I regard as a separate issue). BB seems to be under the impression that those who talk about slave morality are secretly motivated by the desire to put babies into blenders, steal walking sticks from blind people, or engage in otherwise morally questionable behavior. Maybe this is true of others, but I’m pretty confident it’s not true of myself (or Nietzsche). In order to dispel this idea in my own case, I think it will be useful to briefly discuss the process by which I became a moral anti-realist. To be clear, I am an anti-realist about slave morality, master morality, and any other kind of morality you can think of. This doesn’t mean I think it’s morally acceptable to shove babies into blenders. It just means that I don’t believe in moral facts. I’ll explain that position in more detail further down.

I was definitely not born this way. I was a firm (if unexamined) moral realist until my mid-twenties. Was my moral anti-realist enlightenment caused by the sudden onset of an intense desire to walk past drowning children, assault babies, or otherwise cause mayhem and destruction unencumbered by moral hang-ups? Not really. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth.

Nietzsche’s attack on moral realism began in his early book Daybreak. In the preface to that book he describes his own motivations for anti-realism. As he put it, his faith in morality had to be withdrawn because of his own sense of morality!

… in this book faith in morality is withdrawn - but why? Out of morality! Or what else should we call that which informs it - and us?… there is no doubt that a 'thou shalt' still speaks to us too, that we too still obey a stern law set over us - and this is the last moral law which can make itself audible even to us… in this if in anything we too are still men of conscience: namely, in that we do not want to return to that which we consider outlived and decayed, to anything ‘unworthy of belief’, be it called God, virtue, truth, justice, charity; that we do not permit ourselves any bridges-of-lies to ancient ideals… (Daybreak, p. 4)

It would be a mistake to believe that moral anti-realists lack moral feelings or a conscience. So, what moral feeling informs Nietzsche’s attack on morality? It is simply his integrity, i.e., his desire not to believe in falsehoods. As with Nietzsche, I too have moral feelings, and as with Nietzsche my own sense of integrity requires me to examine unfounded beliefs like moral realism.

Somewhat paradoxically, this means that I now feel morally obligated to be a moral anti-realist. You may think there’s a contradiction in there somewhere, but I assure you that moral anti-realism does not preclude acting on the basis of morality any more than culinary anti-realism (i.e., the idea that there are no eternal “facts” about good taste) would preclude choosing foods on the basis of flavor.

But why did I become interested in the debate between moral realism and anti-realism in the first place? In large part it’s because I found that my own genuine, heart-felt moral convictions were constantly being contradicted by people who obviously felt as deeply and strongly about their own convictions. Let me give a couple of examples.

Coming from conservative religious types was the moral outrage about teaching evolution (along with moral outrage about marijuana use, swearing in music, and other non-issues). In my younger days I was skeptical about macroevolution. That is no longer the case, but even then I couldn’t imagine trying to get teachers fired for teaching about a scientific theory that they genuinely believed in. To my mind, punishing somebody for simply stating what they believe to be true will always be morally outrageous. Yet many people do it, and do so with an unshakable sense of moral conviction.

More recently, a similar situation has arisen from the political left. I have seen many cases of professors and graduate students being morally condemned and professionally punished for talking about IQ, genetics, hormones, race, sex/gender, and especially the combination of these topics. Again, I was baffled by the attempts to morally condemn and punish people who simply seemed to be following their curiosity about these subjects and expressing their true beliefs. As with the conservative censors, all of this is being done by people with an unshakable sense of moral conviction.

I was perplexed by the fact that my own family and colleagues could have moral convictions that were so fundamentally different from my own. What’s more, it’s not as if I thought these were bad people. My devoutly Christian uncle would gladly have persecuted teachers for presenting evolutionary theory (and would gladly see that everyone who smokes marijuana is put in a cage), but in personal or professional matters I’m sure there are few people as reliable and trustworthy as he is. Similarly, my hyper-woke undergraduate mentor was a genuinely great mentor to me despite the fact that she seemed to get off on trying to cancel people for having moderately right-wing opinions.

So, who is really in touch with the moral facts? Is it the religious conservatives condemning the teaching of evolution, the wokesters condemning research into sensitive topics, or me, the free-speech absolutist who thinks that teachers should be able to teach what they want and scientists should be able to research what they want? I think it would be a serious act of hubris to assume that my own moral intuitions on these topics are objectively true while opposing intuitions are objectively false.

It would be especially hubristic given the historical facts indicating that my brand of free-speech absolutism was essentially non-existent for almost all of human history. Pretty much everyone has always agreed that blasphemy of one kind or another is morally objectionable, while I (along with some other WEIRD people like me) now take the opposite stance that the punishment of blasphemy is always morally objectionable. It would be a strange world indeed if some funny looking Europeans happened to stumble upon a new moral fact in the 18th century that had been missed by every other civilization that has ever existed.

Did John Stuart Mill discover a new moral fact?

It was around the time that I was contemplating these issues that I started to read Nietzsche. Perhaps more importantly, I started reading the philosophical commentaries about Nietzsche’s work written by professional philosophers, which help to make clear some of Nietzsche’s more obscure ideas. At some point during my first year of graduate school I saw the light and was baptized into the unholy waters of moral anti-realism. To my knowledge, Nietzsche was the first modern thinker to stumble into this new territory:

My demand upon the philosopher is known, that he take his stand beyond good and evil and leave the illusion of moral judgment beneath himself. This demand follows from an insight which I was the first to formulate: that there are altogether no moral facts. (Twilight of the Idols, The “Improvers” 1)

I promise that this realization, at least in my own case, had nothing to do with a secret, unexpressed desire to kick babies right in their stupid faces without needing to feel bad about it.

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BB implies that those who drone on about slave morality (like me) simply don’t care about others. These people (like myself) must believe that “there’s something confused or mistaken or cucked about caring about others”. As someone who does occasionally drone on about slave morality, I can safely say that I also occasionally care about others. There is nothing either confused or cucked about my caring disposition. Given that I’m not opposed to caring for others, I am sure that BB is confused about my position on morality. Let me try to clarify.

Caring about others is an unavoidable part of being human. While it may seem cynical to think of caring in evolutionary terms, it remains a fact that in many situations it’s evolutionarily advantageous to care about your friends, family, and even a wider group. In many situations it’s also advantageous to signal to other people that you are a generous, compassionate, magnanimous person who would gladly get their pants wet to save a drowning child. Ultimately, that’s why we so commonly do care about these categories of people and why most of us would gladly save the drowning child (though most of us wouldn’t think about these actions in terms of inclusive fitness or signaling theory). The fact that caring for others is often adaptive in no way robs that caring of its importance or authenticity. One does not need “moral facts” to justify caring about others or saving drowning children, just as one does not need “culinary facts” to justify enjoying a big juicy steak. Caring about others is just as much of an evolved, adaptive instinct as salivating at the thought of well-cooked meat.

Somebody else might not like steak, and while I may think that steak-haters are tasteless heathens, I need not believe that my preference for the steak is objectively true. In the same way, I can believe that somebody who doesn’t care for the life of a drowning child is objectionable without relying on the existence of moral facts. If I watched someone ignore a drowning child, I would probably think of them as a sociopath, pussy, or a number of other derogatory terms. I would condemn their actions to others and would definitely avoid being friends or colleagues with them. I would do all of that without needing to believe that they are objectively immoral or that their disregard for the child was based on a factual error.

It is in this sense that moral anti-realism is not the same as moral relativism. I am not a relativist about either food or morality. Some food is better than others and I don’t consider my opinions on culinary creations to be arbitrary. There are obviously facts about the types of food people typically enjoy, just as there are facts about the types of moral precepts people typically endorse. This does not mean it is a fact that sugar is tasty or that saving a drowning child is morally good.

I have preferences about the kind of world I would like myself and my loved ones to live in. For example, I would rather live in a group operating under the moral assumption that female genital mutilation (FGM) is bad than one in which it is prescribed by God. I use the example of FGM simply because there is still moral disagreement about the practice, even among Westerners. My moral anti-realism does not make me a relativist and I have no hang-ups about condemning the practice.

Despite being a moral anti-realist, my preference for certain moral codes over others isn’t arbitrary. It would cause me great distress to know that a loved one was subjected to FGM (and it causes me a certain amount of distress thinking about all the innocent children who are currently subjected to it), and so I would rather live in a world where the practice didn’t exist. There’s nothing arbitrary about that. But the fact that my preference isn’t arbitrary doesn’t mean it’s a fact.

Here are three purported facts:

1. Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo. 

2. 2+2 is 4. 

3. Refusing to save a drowning child is morally wrong. 

The first of these is an empirical fact. We can never be perfectly sure that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo unless we were actually there, but we can approach certainty about the event given all of the available evidence. I’m comfortable calling that statement a fact. The second statement is the result of a logical deduction of the kind that we generally consider to be a fact (i.e., given the axioms and definitions involved, 2+2 is necessarily 4). The third statement is different. This purported fact can’t be seen, smelled, or heard, so eyewitness testimony (as with the battle of Waterloo) is not possible. There is no experiment I can run to determine the validity of this fact and there is no logical deduction I can make to arrive at this conclusion without baking other (probably unfounded) assumptions into the premises. I would submit to you that the third statement is more like a preference than a fact. At the very least, it has many of the characteristics of a preference that can’t be attributed to the first two statements. Nevertheless, many of us intuitively feel that the third statement is factual.

So, if moral facts are not empirical and not logical (at least in the same way that math is), how then do we perceive moral facts? In fact, we have decent empirical evidence and theoretical frameworks which allow us to make some conclusions about the ways in which moral facts are supposedly perceived.

There are two levels of analysis to consider here: one for groups and one for individuals. Evolutionary developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello argues that the evolution of “objective” morality was necessitated by the shift into groups larger than the Dunbar number (~250). At that point we were forced to change from thinking about norms in terms of reciprocity to thinking about norms from an objective perspective.

Conventional cultural practices as the correct way (not incorrect way) to do things go beyond early humans’ ad hoc ideals that two partners created for themselves and that they could just as easily dissolve. The correct and incorrect ways to do things emanate from something much more objective and authoritative than us, and so individuals cannot really change them. The collective intentionality point of view thus transformed early humans’ highly local sense of role-specific ideals into modern humans’ “objective” standards of the right (correct) and wrong (incorrect) way to perform conventional roles. Such an agent-independent or “objective” point of view is not sufficient for judgments of fairness or justice, but it is necessary, as has been explicitly recognized in one way or another by moral philosophers from Hume with his “general point of view,” to Adam Smith with his “impartial spectator,” to Mead with his “generalized other,” to Rawls with his “veil of ignorance,” and to Nagel with his “view from nowhere.” (Tomasello, 2014 pp. 96-97)

At a group level, moral precepts comes to be seen as objective or factual simply because most everyone in the group agrees on it. This is how we come to perceive many kinds of facts, moral or otherwise. I assume that Richard Nixon was the 37th president not because I was witness to the event or because of my historical knowledge of the period, but because everyone else agrees about it and nobody ever disputes it.

It is this same heuristic that we often apply to determine what is a moral fact. Almost everyone agrees that refusing to save a drowning child (and callousness at an innocent person’s suffering more generally) is a moral atrocity, so we have no trouble perceiving that as a moral fact. Saving drowning children is just how good human beings behave, full stop. We may adopt some post-hoc rational system to justify our intuitions about this (e.g., utilitarianism), but the initial intuition requires no intellectual justification. It only requires that we have functional human moral adaptations (e.g., a sense of empathy, the ability to learn from others, the ability to adopt impersonal social norms, etc.).

But this labeling of moral norms as facts is a category error! Facts, as the term is normally understood, do not require anybody to agree with them to be factual. If an Orwellian government took over the world and changed the history books to say that Richard Nixon was in fact the 35th president, and everyone in the world now believed it, that would not make it a fact.

On the other hand, morality does change based on what people believe (though moral realists would obviously deny this). If everyone in a society agrees that slavery is morally acceptable, then slavery is morally acceptable within that society, as it has been almost everywhere for all of human history.

Obviously the moral realist would disagree that slavery was ever morally acceptable (even when every large civilization practiced slavery), but I would argue that they are just begging the question. To most people at most times since the dawn of agriculture, slavery was practiced as a matter of course and wasn’t even a moralized issue. Slavery is not morally acceptable to us, the enlightened peoples of modern Westernized first world society. But slavery was obviously morally acceptable to many people in the last 10,000 years. The recourse of the moral realist is to posit the existence of an objective, eternal source of moral facts (i.e., God), and this seems to be something like what BB does.

Given the lack of evidence for an objective, eternal source of moral facts many moral realists would resort to “faith”, but if an argument relies on that kind of faith I simply lose all interest. To be clear, I’m not really an atheist in the normal sense of the word. I just don’t believe in the kind of God that comes up with eternal, unchanging moral laws. And if that God is the one that exists, it is a strange fact that no holy books ever ban slavery. The Quran, Bible, and Vedas are just fine with the practice while many other religious texts ignore it. Presumably BB’s God doesn’t have anything to do with Judaism, Islam, or any other major religion, since they all condoned slavery at some point.

Other arguments I’ve come across for an objective, eternal source of moral facts are unconvincing. I also find it highly implausible that Western civilization stumbled onto the correct eternal moral facts about slavery and equality while nearly every other complex civilization simply misperceived the facts.

At an individual level, people are much more likely to consider a moral precept objectively true (i.e., factual) if they feel very strongly about it. The more important a moral precept is to somebody, the more likely they are to claim that it is objective. In a series of experiments, Goodwin and Darley (2008, 2012) found that people labeled moral statements as being more objective (which is probably synonymous with factual in this context) the more strongly they agreed with the moral statement. This was not true for statements of taste (e.g., in movies or music) where the degree of agreement had no relationship with how objective one perceived the statement to be.

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On Slave Morality

I hope to have established that my moral anti-realism isn’t driven by a secret desire to put babies into blenders. That being said, why focus so much on slave morality? And is slave morality just morality, as BB claimed?

I focus on slave morality because it is the water we swim in. It permeates our culture so deeply that many of us (e.g., BB) have come to believe its assumptions are eternal facts rather than being highly particular to our specific time and place (which they are). To those who have imbibed the slave morality Kool-Aid, slave morality just is morality, as BB claimed.

Moral equality is the primary claim of slave morality. The assumption of moral equality is so historically peculiar that an explanation is required as to why it emerged where and when it did. Despite its historical peculiarity, 2,000 years of Judeo-Christian influence has led to a situation in which many people (like BB) think that moral equality is an objective, eternal fact.

I provided a plausible explanation for the emergence of moral equality, with much supporting research, in the essay that BB quoted in his original post. Although a kind of moral equality can be found in certain Eastern traditions, the modern notion of equal human rights for each individual clearly emerged in 18th century Europe after 2,000 years of “equality before God” was forced upon the European mind by Christianity. This process was nicely documented by Larry Siedentop in his 2014 book Inventing the Individual.

The assumption of moral equality is one of the defining features of slave morality as opposed to master morality. So let’s talk about its factual basis. Here are two more purported moral facts:

1. Refusing to save a drowning noble child is morally wrong. 

2. Refusing to save a drowning common child is not morally wrong.

Most likely you agree with 1, but disagree with 2. In many cultures, however (where a variety of words have been used to connote noble and common), both of these statements would be unobjectionable (though 2 might be unobjectionable only to a high-born person).

For example, would an average Indian Brahmin man 200 years ago consider it morally wrong to refuse to save a drowning child if that child was from an untouchable caste? I’m no expert on Indian culture, but my understanding is that a Brahmin probably wouldn’t risk himself to save an untouchable and probably wouldn’t feel too bad about it. As recently as 2003, a National Geographic article reported that "Dalits [untouchables] are not allowed to drink from the same wells, attend the same temples, wear shoes in the presence of an upper caste, or drink from the same cups in tea stalls." Given these observations, it seems likely that many people from upper castes would feel no moral obligation to save a drowning Dalit child, even as recently as 2003.

In discriminating based on caste, has the Brahmin simply misperceived the moral facts? This is presumably where myself and BB would disagree. There are no objective moral facts for the Brahmin to misperceive. Instead, we adopt moral prescriptions by observing the actions and opinions of our own group during our development. Jonathan Haidt argues that in doing so we come to occupy a “moral matrix”, i.e., a consensual hallucination. We consensually hallucinate the existence of objective moral facts with those in our group.

It is very difficult to see past our own moral matrix since, to us, our moral matrix consists of blatantly obvious, easily observable moral facts. To the Brahmin, it is blatantly obvious that the untouchable doesn’t deserve the same moral regard as people from his own caste. The problem, of course, is that what people consider to be blatantly obvious within the realm of morality is highly contingent on their own temperament and experiences during development.

If the vast majority of people you have known considered people of a lower caste to be morally inferior, then you would be much more likely to perceive caste differences as a moral fact. If, as with most Westerners, the vast majority of people you’ve known consider all people to be of equal moral worth, then you are much more likely to perceive moral equality as a fact. As a moral anti-realist, I am simply someone who managed to escape the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) moral matrix!

That means that while in practice I tend to treat people as moral equals, I no longer regard moral equality as an objective, eternal moral fact. It is rather a highly peculiar moral conviction that culturally evolved at a specific time and place.

BB claims that moral facts have always been the same.

Were the moral facts that are true today true in the past? Yes!

How can a moral precept be a fact before that moral precept even exists? Was moral equality a fact before anyone ever acted it out or thought about it? What about before humans existed at all? Obviously BB would say yes, but that claim requires a highly anthropocentric worldview in which eternal facts about human beings existed billions of years before human beings emerged.

I’m still not entirely sure what a moral fact is or how one is discovered, but what I can say with confidence is that people’s perception of moral facts can be massively different depending on their cultural upbringing. BB would presumably just say that those who held different moral views are wrong and have always been wrong, but I have yet to observe the objective, eternal standard by which moral realists must make that judgment.

There are some near universals among moral prohibitions (e.g., murder, incest, theft, etc.), but beyond this core there can be massive differences in the moral prescriptions of different groups at different times.

Do you, as a good modern Western educated person, have a moral obligation to save a drowning child? Most people believe that you do, and that’s good enough! The evolutionary origins of our moral instincts almost certainly involved avoiding the moral condemnation of others (thus avoiding being killed, exiled, or otherwise losing social standing among your peers). Despite being a moral anti-realist, if I saw someone who refused to help a drowning child I would be morally outraged along with you! I would condemn them too! My outrage would be no less authentic given that I recognize it as the result of an evolved cognitive adaptation rather than the perception of an objective moral fact. Similarly, I’m very sure that I wouldn’t hesitate to get my pants wet to save a drowning child. I just don’t need to believe in moral facts to make that decision. To my knowledge, there’s no evidence that a person’s position on the ontological status of morality has anything to do with their capacity for moral feeling or action.

The difference between myself and BB is that I recognize my own moral feelings as resulting from an instinct which evolved because it helped my ancestors (and their kin) to survive and reproduce. Instead of tracking “objective” reality (as our eyes track the movement of an animal or our nose tracks the chemical composition of the air we breathe), our moral instincts track social reality. As a highly social creature, it is of the utmost importance that we keep track of what most other people in our group morally condemn, both so we can avoid getting caught doing those things and so we can properly condemn others who do them. Tracking the moral perspective of our group is not something we have ever had to think about. We instinctively pay attention to what the people around us express moral outrage about and we are very likely to adopt the same moral sentiments as those in our immediate peer group.

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Let’s pretend I’m right for a second. Given that there are no moral facts, why do so many philosophers, theologians, and activists insist that there are? What is gained for them by the existence of moral facts? Well, what is gained should be obvious. Can you not see that the sky is blue? Can you not see that 2+2 is 4? Can you not see that refusing to save a drowning child is wrong? People who disagree with us about obvious, verifiable facts must be either insane or corrupt. And that is exactly how we treat those who disagree with us about moralized issues. The purported existence of moral facts allows us to treat people who morally disagree with us as if they are claiming that the sky is green or that 2+2 is 5. We treat them as if they are disagreeing about easily observable, verifiable facts despite the fact that moral prescriptions aren’t really like that.

I have a preference for beef over chicken, but attempting to impose that preference onto other people would be very rude. We don’t impose our preferences onto others, but we do impose our facts onto other people as a matter of course. For example, we do not just allow people like Terrence Howard to believe that 1 x 1 = 2 in the same way that we would allow him to prefer chocolate over vanilla ice cream. We feel obligated to correct his factual error just like we would feel obligated to correct someone who said that Nazis were the good guys.

Simply put, it’s easier to justify imposing moral impositions onto other people if those moral impositions are seen as objective facts rather than preferences. That is one plausible explanation for why we evolved (culturally or genetically) to treat moral impositions as if they are facts despite the fact that they have many of the characteristics of preferences. We treat moral prescriptions like facts because it’s useful to do so, not because it’s true.

I believe that moral anti-realism is one logical conclusion of the Darwinian revolution. The fact that many intellectuals (even Darwinians) are still moral realists is just a hangover from a pre-Darwinian worldview. As Nietzsche said:

God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. — And we — we still have to vanquish his shadow, too. (The Gay Science 108)

Moral realism is just one of those shadows. Hopefully it’s clear, however, that moral anti-realism doesn’t mean that we must do away with condemnation of anti-social behaviors.

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Is the difference between myself and BB (along with other moral realists) that they simply care more about other people than I do? Or that they care more about morality than I do? It would be convenient for them if I (along with Nietzsche and other moral anti-realists) was some kind of serial baby blender who cared nothing for others or for truth or justice. But that is not the case. To the contrary, I am a moral anti-realist precisely because of my moral conviction that truth is good, and that anti-realism is true. This moral conviction that truth is good does not result from an intellectual or logical exercise, but rather from a visceral, instinctual disdain for falsehoods.

To the moral realist, moral conviction among anti-realists may seem like a paradox. But my love for truth (which may be understood as a moral code of sorts) is in the same category as my love for big juicy steaks. Just as I would fight to save my steaks from the evil vegan horde who would have me eating disgusting veggie burgers, so also would I fight to save the pursuit of truth from religious zealots and wokesters. My conviction for both steak and truth does not rely on a “moral fact”. To the contrary, they are both convictions that come from within. Truth is good to me and my love for it does not depend on the existence of objective moral facts.

Everyone sees this subjectivist stance as reasonable within the realms of taste in food or music, but when it comes to morality many people seem to think that without the belief in objective moral facts, all moral conviction must go out the window. At least in my own case, my moral convictions have not wavered. The difference is that I now recognize these convictions as resulting from evolved cognitive adaptations rather than from the perception of an eternal source of moral truth.