In this post I want to discuss the connections between these three issues, and argue for the need to have a theory that attempts to unify them in a coherent manner.
A good starting point is a discussion of moral realism. Let us define the moral realist position as the claim that there exist things like moral facts, and that these moral facts can be true independent of our perception or beliefs about them. Moral realism claims that sentences such as 'abortion is wrong' are the sort of sentences that attempts to describe reality, and the sort of sentences that can be true because when they successfully describe reality.
Due to the mind independenct nature of these sentences, we can connect moral realism with views such as moral objectivism - the claim that morality is objective. As a result, if two people have conflicting moral attitudes, they cannot both be correct and we could in theory use the objective moral standards to determine who is correct.
Now in many ways, moral realism does seem quite intuitive. In particular the claim that moral sentences can be truthful. Not all of them of course - 'rape is right' seems like an false sentence. Yet when I go around telling people that murder is wrong, it seems as if I am doing the correct thing; that what I say not only has impact, but also has content. That it is in some sense meaningful and backed up.
Now there are many challenges to moral realism. The most common challenge that I observe is the problem of disagreement. In particular, one might observe that different people will see the same issue in different ways, morally speaking. I might think that it is immoral for a women to have abortions, whilst someone else might think that such an action is morally permissible. The issue it seems is that I don't seem to have anything to ground my view, i.e. I lack any concrete evidence that would prove me correct over the other person. Intuitions also don't seem to fully resolve these issues because we might have very different intuitions depending on our upbringing and culture. As many people would argue, it is arrogant to assume that our own theory of morality is correct when none of us have 'real evidence'.
I say 'real evidence' because I'm making the comparison to theories in science where our evidence, one might argue, is concrete. We can see it, and we can point to it as evidence. This provides a rather nice epistemology about how we might know our scientific theories are correct, or at least provides justification in believing them. It seems with morality, our evidence is only what we feel, and perhaps the hope that other people feel the same way. Since we presumably want to be justified in our beliefs, this gives us reason to doubt that our own moral intutions correspond to any objective moral values. Furthermore, if we apply the same reasoning to every other individual, we might reject the idea of objective morality altogether. The thought is that since we have so much disagreement, and we have no way of verifying who is correct, perhaps there is no such thing as a 'correctness' in the first place.
There are two interesting lines we might go down from here. So far we have this recognition of an epistemic problem. If morality is true independent of what we know, how do we know that what we think is right (our 'own morality') is the truthful one? Furthermore, if morality is objective but is something completely in accessible to us, then why should we take our moral intuitions seriously at all. For example if I have no concrete evidence for the claim 'killing is wrong', then even if this claim is correct, the fact that I can't justify my belief in the claim should suggest I should not believe in it. In this sense, perhaps our whole talk of morality is an entire sham. Suppose we think indeed that we cannot epistemically access moral claims. Then either, 1) we are discussing things with content (because morality is objective), but we have no access to and have no way to justify, or 2) we are discussing things which are entirely without content and so our various claims about them are in some sense meaningless. I say in some sense, because many things that appear unsubstantiated by the world could have meaning if people's minds are influenced by them.
The argument so far has suggested that we be sceptical about moral sentences. It has given us many reasons to doubt the truth and justification when we make claims that 'killing is wrong'. What do we do now? One thing perhaps is to doubt the existence of morality in the independent reality. The question then is how we should respond to people making moral claims. You will presumably see everyone who is making moral claims as in some sense making meaningless statements. The exact content of what they see is empty, because whenever they use 'moral vocabulary' there is literally nothing for their words to point at.
At the same time, it seems like we do have significant motivation to follow by whatever rules our current system of morality has. For example, I do want to live in a society where people think killing each other is morally wrong, or where stealing is viewed as bad or where being kind is a good thing. And I say this independently of legal reasons. I want to live in a society where murder is bad for reasons beyond the law. Yet if I follow my very sceptical position towards moral realism, I will also have to be content with accepting that such wants, both in my beliefs and in my actions, lack real content. And that is unsatisfying I think.
In my next post I will discuss how we should connect our views on morality with our views on action, and how having a moral sceptical position is undesirable. I will then discuss ways we might justify our belief in moral realism.
