A Liberal Realist Answer to Debunking Skeptics

Here, I address moral skeptics and give an empirical case for moral realism.*

[ *Based on: “A Liberal Realist Answer to Debunking Skeptics: The Empirical Case for Realism,” Philosophical Studies 173 (2016): 1983-2010. ]

I. Background

Some things that moral anti-realists have said previously:

a. The Disagreement Argument: Anti-realists argue that different individuals and societies have such widely divergent intuitions that it is implausible that they are all referring to some independently-existing reality. Either there’s no reality that we’re referring to with “good”, “bad”, “right”, and “wrong”, or that reality varies across cultures or individuals.

b. Debunking Skepticism: Some say our moral intuitions are shaped by our genes, which are products of natural selection. But even if objective values existed, natural selection would not care about them. Natural selection only cares about reproductive fitness. So it’s unlikely that natural selection happened to give us intuitions that reliably track objective moral reality. Thus, we don’t have any knowledge of objective moral reality, even if such a thing exists.

(Note: You can also have debunking arguments that appeal to culture, in line with argument (a), and argue that it’s unlikely that our culture would have happened to give us intuitions that track objective moral truth. The best argument might appeal to a combination of genes and culture to explain our moral intuitions.)

That’s the context: I’m responding to those people. I think that they have misconstrued the empirical facts.

II. A Moderate Liberal Realist View

Intuitionism

Anti-realists particularly want to reject ethical intuitionism. There are two forms of intuitionism:

Moral sense theory holds that human beings have a separate faculty dedicated solely to cognizing moral truths, the “moral sense”. This is the view that most critics of intuitionism attack.

Rationalist intuitionism holds that human beings have a general capacity for a priori knowledge (“the intellect”, “reason”, or “the understanding”). It enables us to cognize mathematical truths, metaphysical truths, miscellaneous other necessary truths (“nothing can be entirely red and entirely blue”), and necessary ethical truths (“it’s wrong to cause harm for no reason”). This is the view that most intuitionists actually hold.

Note: I’m not here interested in skepticism about a priori knowledge in general. I’m only interested in arguments (like those in sec. I above) that claim to find something special about morality that is problematic, beyond ordinary (non-moral) a priori knowledge.

Liberalism

Liberalism is a broad value orientation that recognizes the moral equality of individuals, promotes respect for the dignity of the individual, and opposes needless coercion and violence. This is a coherent (albeit vague) ethical perspective. I assume that, if there are objective values, it is prima facie plausible that liberalism might be the objectively correct moral stance.

In this sense, virtually every ethicist today is a liberal. But the notion of “liberalism” isn’t empty or trivial, because few societies in history accepted it.

Modest realism

My moral realism is modest: I don’t claim that all or most moral beliefs constitute knowledge, only that some do. I don’t claim that all moral beliefs are rational or that none are influenced by genes or culture; I claim only that reason plays a role in some moral intuitions.

It is the anti-realists who have an extreme view: They claim that no moral intuitions should be trusted, and no moral beliefs constitute knowledge. On their view, e.g., we don’t know that it’s wrong to throw children into a fire for fun.

III. The Facts About Moral Progress

The relativists point to great variation in moral values across cultures. But they overlook the convergence in moral values over time. Societies around the world have been converging toward liberal values over the course of human history. About this, notice:

• This is what you would expect if liberalism is the objectively correct moral stance. This is also what happens with non-moral beliefs: people’s descriptive beliefs about the world start out (in primitive societies) widely divergent and incorrect; over time, people around the world have converged toward the objectively correct, scientific beliefs.

• This is the flip side of the relativists’ argument from disagreement: If (as almost all anti-realists think) divergence in moral values is evidence against realism, then convergence must be evidence for realism. One can’t have it both ways.

Some examples:

• War used to be much more common. Steven Pinker says that in primitive societies, 20-25% of people died at the hands of other people, mostly in inter-tribal warfare.

• Murder has dramatically declined over time, largely because fewer things are seen as good reasons for killing someone. E.g., it used to be deemed appropriate to duel to the death over an insult. The murder rate in Europe today is ten times lower than in 1300 A.D.

• Medievals endorsed torturing people to extract confessions.

• Execution used to be widely prescribed for many offenses, including sodomy, working on the Sabbath, etc.

• Slavery has been widely practiced throughout human history.

• Explicit, severe racism and sexism were common until very recently. In 1950’s America, black people had to sit in the back of the bus, couldn’t use “white” drinking fountains, etc.

• When the U.S. was founded, there were no democracies; today, about half the world is democratic.

• Conquering other people to rule over them used to be considered “great” (this is how “Alexander the Great” got his name). Today, imperialism is widely condemned.

Notice:

• These changes in moral practice were partly due to changing moral beliefs. E.g., slavery was abolished because of a growing sense that it was unjust.

• These changes are all in the direction of liberalism.

• This trend has been going on, around the world, for centuries.

How can we explain this?

IV. Anti-Realist Explanations?

Liberal genes

First theory: Maybe liberal values are adaptive, and that is why they have spread.

This is super-implausible. First we’d have to explain why people had illiberal values in the past. That seems much easier to explain by appeal to evolution. For instance, making war on neighboring tribes, killing the men of those tribes, and then kidnaping the women, could lead to greater reproductive success for the men of your tribe. That’s probably why war was so common in earlier times, and why earlier peoples regarded so many things as legitimate provocations for war.

But then, that makes it hard to turn around and claim that the opposite trend, a trend toward rejecting war and violence, is evolutionarily explained. Much (perhaps almost all?) of the moral progress we’ve seen has been progress toward overcoming tendencies that could easily be explained as products of our genes and culture. You can’t simultaneously explain X and the rejection of X by evolution.

Some of the changes in values have been very rapid, e.g., the turn away from racism and sexism since the 1960’s. These can’t be explained by genetic changes.

Variable gene expression

Maybe there are genes that simultaneously dispose you toward illiberal values if you’re in a poor society, but liberal values if you’re in an advanced, prosperous society. So as societies advanced economically, the genes’ expression changed.

It’s not obvious why such genes would be advantageous. But even if they would be, this hypothesis is unlikely, because humanity has not had enough experience with shifting between prosperous and poor societies to produce enough selective pressure for that type of gene. Until recently, everyone always lived in poor, primitive societies.

Consistency & the expanding circle

Perhaps liberal moral progress results from the application of general reasoning capacities and an innate capacity to try to justify one’s behavior to others. The latter capacity might have evolved to enable successful cooperation within one’s social group. But when we apply our general reasoning capacities, consistency leads us gradually to extend moral consideration beyond our social group. This could explain the progress toward liberalism without positing that liberalism is objectively correct.

Problems:

• There is nothing inconsistent about extending moral consideration only to one’s own social group. (Consider how we today believe in special obligations towards our own children, which we don’t have toward other people’s children. This partiality is not inconsistent. Nor is it inconsistent to be partial to your own tribe.) You need to appeal to a substantive, ethical intuition to the effect that people in other tribes are equally important.

• Moral progress is not only about extending moral concern from one’s own tribe to other groups. It also involves abandoning dumb rules within your group, e.g., rules against premarital sex, or the practice of dueling over perceived insults. (If all we did was to expand the circle of moral concern, then we would just extend dueling so that everyone was free to duel anyone else.)

Cultural change

Of course, our values have changed because our culture changed. Contemporary people don’t all independently figure out that slavery is wrong; we are taught it by our culture.

But why has our culture changed in the ways that it has? Sometimes, you hear non-moral explanations for isolated parts of the trend. E.g., maybe slavery was somehow economically less efficient for industrial economies as compared to agrarian economies, and that was the real reason why it was abolished.

But it’s hard to find any explanation that takes into account the full phenomenon of liberal progress. Slavery wasn’t just abolished in the U.S. It was gradually abolished everywhere in the world. At the same time, changes have been occurring along multiple other dimensions, all in the direction of a single, coherent ethical perspective, that of liberalism (see III above again). How can one explain all of that?

V. The Liberal Realist Explanation

Slavery was abolished because it was unjust. War is declining because war is horrible. Democracy is spreading because it is better than dictatorship. And in general, liberalism has been spreading because liberalism is the correct moral stance. I suggest that that is the best explanation of the empirical facts.

Beliefs move toward truth

In general, in any subject matter, societies tend to progress over time, from ridiculously false views to more accurate (or more nearly true, or more likely to be true) views. So if there are facts about morality, you would expect to see the same thing happen with moral beliefs.

This doesn’t depend on any specific theory of moral knowledge. It just depends on our having some way of knowing moral truths. People tend to progress toward better ideas in any area, as long as there is any way of knowing things in that area—this works in experimental sciences, history, a priori fields such as mathematics, even games (modern chess players are better than earlier chess players).

Overcoming bias

Suppose we have a capacity for identifying moral truths, by purely rational intuition. But suppose that at the same time, we have biases, emotions and desires that tend to lead us away from the moral truth. Maybe we got these biases from our genes and culture. Many are quite strong biases. Then you would expect that human beings would start out with very bad (incorrect) moral beliefs. They might also vary widely across cultures (depending on how strong cultural influences are compared to biology).

But some people are less biased than others in their society, so they are able to see defects in their society’s current value system. These people exert pressure towards changing their society’s value system.

Suppose also that liberalism is the correct moral stance. Then we’d expect that moral reformers would be consistently exerting pressure moving society towards liberalism. These reformers tend to be of above-average social influence, partly due to greater-than-average intelligence and reflectiveness.

The reformers are not unbiased. They are merely relatively less biased than the average of their society. So they don’t see all the way to the moral truth. They just see their way to something a little better than what their society currently has. (E.g., Abraham Lincoln, though a committed abolitionist, was still, by today’s standards, shockingly racist.)

But once society has reformed a little bit, the next generation of reformers can see their way to the next improvement. Over time, progress accumulates. Over centuries, we go from horrible values to fairly decent ones.

I suggest that that is what has happened. That is the explanation for liberal moral progress over the course of history. That, as far as I can see, fits all the evidence.