The Source of Moral Rules

In my last post I said that there is

a problem for objectivist accounts of morality. Objectivists need to explain why, if there are universal moral rules, so many people seem to be wrong or mean or unjust so much of the time. If there are universal moral rules and they are knowable, then why isn’t it easy to a) act morally and b) agree on what the most moral action is?

How objectivists explain moral diversity depends, in part, on what they think is the source of moral rules.

Ignorance and fallibility: One possible explanation for moral disagreements is that the human mind is fallible. Thus, moral rules might be knowable but some people might be mistaken about what they are. For instance, if moral rules exist independently of us in what philosophers call a “Platonic realm”–much like mathematical truths–then they can be discovered by reasoned thought. However, following through with reasoned thought can be quite difficult or even impossible for some people in some situations.

Self-interest or evil: Another possible explanation for disagreements about morality is that self-interest leads us to deceive ourselves about what is right or leads us to reject what is morally right in favor of what is profitable or pleasurable. Some people believe that there is a natural (psychological, biological, social) source for morals. According to a naturalist account, moral rules are the set of actions that make human lives go well–by avoiding pain, by getting love and admiration, by having healthy lives. But on this account, there is often a trade-off between short-term self-interest and the long-term public or general interest. This preference for immediate pleasure over helping others is sometimes construed as weakness of the will or as desire winning out over reason.

Free will: It seems like some religious accounts might have an especially hard problem dealing with this question of moral diversity or of people defying moral rules. Because if God is the creator of humans, and also perfect, and also good, why weren’t humans created so that they could know and do only good? Why is there evil behavior in this world? One answer that religious accounts give to this question is that humans were created with free will. Having the freedom to act immorally also gives humans the possibility of acting morally. Having the ability to make a wide range of choices and of taking credit (or blame) for those choices is a central feature of being human.

Morality and Consistency

Last week I argued that a shared human psychology and social experience provide the foundations for morality. That observation is relevant to what we’ll discuss in class this week: moral relativism and moral objectivism.

The moral relativist and subjectivist hold that there are no universal moral rules. Basically, morality is relative to something else, like the culture that you were raised in.

This view has (at least) one virtue, which is that it explains the diversity that we see in various people’s and society’s moral beliefs. It also points to a problem for objectivist accounts of morality. Objectivists need to explain why, if there are universal moral rules, so many people seem to be wrong or mean or unjust so much of the time. If there are universal moral rules and they are knowable, then why isn’t it easy to a) act morally and b) agree on what the most moral action is?

Looking at the survey questions that I gave you the first week of class, it appears that only one person can be clearly identified as a moral objectivist or what Pojman calls a “moral absolutist.” Such a view has certain virtues: it is obviously consistent, and its consistency makes it rational. According to this view, there are universal moral rules that are either given to us by a higher being or can be discovered. For this reason, it is possible to identify individuals who act immorally and cultures who have immoral norms. Morals are thus a matter of fact and not mere opinion. When two people disagree about a moral choice, it’s possible that they have different interpretations of more general moral rules, or it’s possible that one of them is wrong. It’s not possible that “what’s right for me may not be right for you” any more than it’s possible that mathematics is different for me than it is for you.

I also identified (at least) six consistent relativists or subjectivists among the surveys. Relativists hold that:

• moral rules do not exist as absolutes independent of individuals or cultures,
• moral rules can and do change from place to place, time to time,or person to person
• we may make our own moral rules (technically, that’s subjectivism)
• moral choices legitimately differ from one person to the next or that people are unconstrained by moral rules
• (and sometimes) that morals are a matter of opinion and not fact.

The remaining 31 responses to the survey gave a set of responses that I could not clearly interpret. Probably, some of these sets of answers are inconsistent. That would be easy to understand: the testing conditions were not ideal, we had not yet spent time talking about morality, some of the questions were ambiguous, and some of these insights about the nature of morality require deeper thought than many people have given to them. It is also likely that some of these sets are not inconsistent. Rather, they express subtle positions that require more words to explain than this survey permits.

If you feel like commenting, I’d be interested in seeing your reaction to the quiz and whether you have thought about these questions before. It should be possible to comment anonymously.