On Michael Shermer’s defence of moral realism

“Is there anyone (other than slave holders and Nazis) who would argue that slavery and the Holocaust are not really wrong, absolutely wrong, objectively wrong, naturally wrong?”

Yes, I would (and I don’t think I’m either a slave holder or a Nazi). That quote ends Michael Shermer’s recent defence of moral realism on his Skeptic blog.

My disagreement with Shermer comes down to what we even mean by morality being “objective” rather than “subjective”. Indeed this particular disagreement can account for a lot of people talking past each other. Shermer explains:

It is my hypothesis that in the same way that Galileo and Newton discovered physical laws and principles about the natural world that really are out there, so too have social scientists discovered moral laws and principles about human nature and society that really do exist. Where? In our nature.

I agree fully with Shermer that we have a human nature, and that there are objective facts about what humans want and desire, that there are facts about how to fulfill those desires, about how humans can successfully interact with each other, given our natures, and about what will lead to humans flourishing. Everyone who is not a blank-slater would surely agree. It follows that we can objectively describe human nature and human morality.

Again quoting Shermer:

Take cooperation. Over billions of years of natural history and thousands of years of human history, there has been an increasing tendency toward the playing of cooperative “nonzero” games between organisms. This tendency has allowed more nonzero gamers to survive. Thus, natural selection favored those who cooperated by playing nonzero games, thereby passing on their genes for cooperative behavior.

That segment is descriptive. But Shermer thinks we can segue from an objective and descriptive account of human morality to an objectively prescriptive one. I suggest that he is mistaken. Stripped down to the bare bones, I regard all moral “oughts” as instrumental; that is, they are of the form:

(1) We want X;
(2) In order to obtain X we have to do Y;
(3) Thus we ought to do Y.

Thus the “oughtness” of doing Y is in order to achieve X. I interpret Shermer as saying that where both statements (1) and (2) are objectively true, then (3) is also objectively true, and thus we have an objective ought. Applied to a specific implementation we have:

(1a) We want a happy and flourishing society;
(2a) We can’t have a happy and flourishing society if there is slavery;
(3a) So we ought to prohibit slavery.

If we grant that (1a) and (2a) are true then (3a) is true, and it can be rephrased as “slavery is morally wrong”. And that is how Shermer concludes that slavery is “absolutely wrong, objectively wrong, naturally wrong”. I hope I’m not misrepresenting him; apologies if so but this is a good-faith attempt to elucidate his argument.

And yet, to me, that does not get you objective moral prescriptions. The oughtness derives from the “we want …”. We want, and therefore we ought. But “ought” prescriptions that depend entirely on what humans want are subjective, since human wants and desires are the very epitome of things that are subjective.

Yes, the above statements (1) and (2) might be objectively true, but that doesn’t give you an objective ought, since an objective ought would be one that is entirely independent of human desires or feelings. And it doesn’t work if one omits the reference to human values and desires. The possible alternative:

(A) Slavery is incompatible with a happy and flourishing society;
(B) We ought to prohibit slavery.

… simply does not work, being one of those leaps from an “is” to an “ought” that Hume warned against. The oughts are instrumental and so necessarily derive from a human goal.

The debate over moral realism is about whether moral oughts derive from humans, from what we want and desire, or whether there is some externally derived obligation on us to act in certain ways regardless of what we humans think about that or whether we like the consequences.

In other words, if moral prescriptions and moral values are “real”, having independent existence, then it must be possible that:

(1) We want X;
(2) In order to obtain X we have to do Y;
(3) But actually, morally, we ought NOT do Y.

Or, in a specific implementation:

(1a) We want a happy and flourishing society;
(2a) We can’t have a happy and flourishing society if there is slavery;
(3a) But morally we ought to promote slavery as much as possible.

… because morality is real, it has independent existence, and is not just an instrumental account of human feelings and desires. (If you’re thinking that morality could not possibly be so out of kilter with human values, then you’re conceding that it can have no independent existence or standing, but is derived from human values and feelings, and so is subjective.)

At least that’s how I conceive of moral realism, though one thing I’ve learned when discussing morality is that plenty of people disagree even on how to define the terms. So maybe I’m wrong, and maybe by “moral realism” one means that human nature is real (which it indeed is), and human aims and desires are real (they indeed are), and that in order to attain those desires various oughts follow instrumentally. Agreed, they do. What is then “real” is human nature, and also “real” are facts about how to attain goals that are in line with our nature.

I gather that that’s the sense in which Shermer declares himself to be a moral realist. I suspect, however (though could be wrong) that most moral philosophers would not agree that that’s what “moral realism” entails. Indeed, it could be that disagreement over whether that amounts to moral realism explains much of the rather intemperate altercations between Shermer (along with Sam Harris) and philosophers.

The other problem with arriving at an objective moral scheme down this road is that, while we all have a lot of human nature in common, we are also all different. We all want different things, at least to some extent. While we can agree on vague declarations about “human flourishing”, when it came to detailed implementation we would all have somewhat different ideas of what sort of society we wanted. That’s why no moral scheme arrived at along these lines can actually be coherent and objective.

Isn’t it clearer to accept that human morality is created out of each of our sets of values, and thus that it is necessarily subjective? And that there is nothing wrong with that!