Here, I explain the problem with ethical naturalism: It can’t account for moral knowledge.* 1. Background: Ethical Naturalism Ethical naturalists claim that the nature of ethical properties (good, bad, right, and wrong) can be explained using entirely descriptive (non-ethical) concepts. E.g., maybe
I think that the idea that intuitions provide us with information seems really weird in the case of ethics. When I make this argument to people, they often provide examples of people disagreeing or people being wrong. This is like one person seeing a ghost and another person not seing a ghost and rather than saying someone is incorrect in their visual perception, they reject the idea of visual perception being a source of knowledge. I think that when people think about moral issues, they consider controversial issues like abortion or the trolley problems which are difficult and create a great deal of disagreement. So, the set that is used when thinking about intuitions are particularly ambiguous. Your example of torturing a baby is good because it seems like on of the most unambiguously wrong things possible.
People have such an incredibly strong drive to want to be moral realists that they have to justify it. Often utilitarians don't want to introduce other intuitions into moral calculus, just harm and pleasure. So, they might be motivated to like naturalism for this reason.
Hey Michael, just one recommendation. On substack you can add links to particular words, which looks aesthetically better than posting the link right next to the statement.
You claim that avoiding ethical intuition is a central motivation for naturalism seems suspicious to me; even granting the need for ethical intuition, I can still think of some motivations for naturalism.
One motivation is that naturalism better explains moral facts. Per non-naturalism, some moral facts are brute facts that have no explanation. Naturalism does not posit any (moral) brute facts, and so explains more. It seems to me that, if the brute facts posited by one theory are a subset of those posited by another, then, all else equal, we should accept the former theory. This advantage is admittedly not so great if one holds an ethical theory that only posits one fundamental principle, such as utilitarianism; however, if one posits many fundamental principles, as I believe you do, the gain is greater.
Another motivation is parsimony. The non-naturalist is ontologically committed to a distinctively normative type of fact, but the naturalist is not. Since, on any plausible ethical theory, there are a great many moral facts, this is a large gain regardless of whether you take parsimony to be about the number of object, or the number of types of object.
Finally, naturalism makes some evolutionary debunking arguments easier to avoid. If someone convincingly argues that the best explanation for our moral beliefs is naturalistic, then, rationally, the non-naturalist must give up either non-naturalism or all of his moral beliefs. Here is a sketch of an argument that would force him to make that choice:
1. Each moral belief has a known naturalistic explanation. (premise)
2. If a belief known to be true has a known explanation, then the fact that makes that belief true features in the belief's explanation. (premise)
3. If a fact features in a naturalistic explanation, then that fact is natural. (premise)
4. Some moral belief is known to be true. (premise)
5. If some moral belief is known to be true and every moral belief known to be true is made true by a natural fact, then moral naturalism is true. (premise)
6.1. Suppose that B is any moral belief known to be true. Then:
6.2. B has a known naturalistic explanation. (1, 6, categorical syllogism)
6.3. E is a known naturalistic explanation for B. (6.2, existential instantiation)
6.4. B is known to be true, and E is a known naturalistic explanation for B. (6.1, 6.3, conjunction introduction)
6.5. The fact that makes B true features in E. (2, 6.4, categorical syllogism)
6.6. The fact that makes B true features in E, and E is a naturalistic explanation. (6.5, 6.3, conjunction introduction)
6.7. The fact that makes B true is natural. (3, 6.6, categorical syllogism)
7. Every moral belief known to be true is made true by a natural fact. (6, universal introduction)
8. Some moral belief is known to be true, and every moral belief known to be true is made true by a natural fact. (4, 7, conjunction introduction)
9. Moral naturalism is true. (5, 8, modus ponens)
Premise 1 is false, but would likely be true of the non-naturalist in the situation described. Premise 2 is intuitively true; if someone can explain our beliefs without reference to their truth, those beliefs would be undermined. Premise 3 is obvious, provided that 'natural' is taken to mean what it typically means in metaethical discussions; for example, mathematical facts count as natural by this meaning, as do facts about God. An intuitionist cannot deny premise 4, and I've never heard of a non-naturalist who wasn't an intuitionist. Premise 5 is probably true since, if some moral beliefs are made true by natural facts, this is probably because moral properties are identical with certain natural properties.
The biggest problems are premises 1 and 4. A naturalist could motivate naturalism by making premise 1 true, but it might be very difficult to do so. Given the difficulty of evolutionary psychology, premise 1 may never be true. Premise 1 could probably be weakened to "it is known that each moral belief has a natural explanation", and this would probably make premise 1 easier to bring about, but I'm too lazy to reformulate the argument in the needed way. Premise 4 is what makes this motivation dependent on moral intuition. The trouble with it is that some naturalistic explanations of our moral beliefs would make premise 4 implausible. In that case, it would be necessary instead to adopt some form of anti-realism.
I can understand the motivation for recommending Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape: He writes for a popular audience, he argues for some form of moral naturalism, and the book has been widely discussed.
However, I cannot recommend the book. I have read it, and the book does not present good arguments, presents a muddled argument that is hard to make sense of, largely ignores academic metaethics to its detriment. In an endnote to chapter 1, Harris says the following:
"Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy. There are two reasons why I haven’t done this: First, while I have read a fair amount of this literature, I did not arrive at my position on the relationship between human values and the rest of human knowledge by reading the work of moral philosophers; I came to it by considering the logical implications of our making continued progress in the sciences of mind. Second, I am convinced that every appearance of terms like “metaethics,” “deontology,” “noncognitivism,” “antirealism,” “emotivism,” etc., directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe."
Harris does not appear to take academic metaethics very seriously (note also the weird way he wedged “deontology” in with all the metaethical terms!). I’m about as harsh a critic of contemporary analytic philosophy that you’ll find working in the field, but Harris’s remark goes too far even for me. I would be pleasantly surprised, and an enthusiastic proponent, if he'd managed to present a compelling and well-argued position. But Harris doesn't. He botches the job quite thoroughly.
Someone with this hostile an attitude towards what informed people actually have to say about the topic is liable to confuse readers rather than present a helpful introduction to naturalist realism. I’d probably just refer people to Railton.
In the history of the world no person has ever justified a moral statement with anything other than “is” statements.
“I have intuition X” is an “is” statement.
“I have feeling X” is a statement about the way the world is.
Your intuitions and feelings are not a special type of thing that are magically excluded from what “is.”
Your feelings and intuitions are things that exist. They can, and have, be studied by science.
Thus, moral statements are not a special or different kind of statement from “is” statements. They are “is” statements. Moral philosophy that views moral statements as special or different kinds of statements from “is” statements is errant moral philosophy.
Sam Harris is right to say that science can tell us everything we need to now about morality but he is mistaken to conclude that utilitarianism is what naturally follows from the scientific image. What naturally follows from the scientific image is that this so-called “moral intuition” felt by Homo sapiens is actually an entirely self-interested hypothetical imperative.
Your “moral intuition” is not something that gives you access to some moral truth that exists externally like “slavery is unjust.” Here’s what’s actually going on. Your feelings tell you that slavery makes you feel bad and your “intuition” is a prediction, based on your current belief about the way the world is, that opposing slavery and living in a world without slavery will make you feel good not bad.
Science tells us that you will (non-free will) take actions that you predict will make you feel good not bad. That is what you WILL do. It’s not a choice. That is how Homo sapiens operate.
So the only thing that can coherently make an action “right” or “wrong” is whether or not it achieves the intention of your immutable will to feel good not bad. You have done the right thing if it succeeds in making you feel good not bad. And you will have done the wrong thing if it ends up making you feel bad not good.
Hitler did what he did because he predicted that his actions would make him feel really really good. As it turns out those actions made him feel really really bad. (You don’t scream angrily a lot and commit suicide when you feel really really good) Hitler predicted wrong. He got the “is” wrong. That is the only coherent thing it can mean to say that Hitler did the “wrong” things.
Slavery wasn’t abolished because people suddenly intuited the moral truth that slavery is unjust. If people could intuit an external moral truth we would not be having this conversation. Slavery was abolished because it started making people “feel bad not good” as they learned more and more about what “is,” namely that black people are just like us, where the previous belief was that they are very different from us in an important way. The previous belief about what “is” made it not feel bad to enslave black people. A new belief about what “is” (black people are just like us) brought about by experiences made it feel bad to enslave black people. It was a new and different belief about the way the world “is” that changed the “morality” of slavery.
I used to think that my “moral intuition” was some magic portal to an external moral truth, but then I read science and learned otherwise. Science knows what my “moral intuition” is better than I did. Now I know better too.
Socrates nailed it. He intuited it before the science even confirmed it. Virtue = Wisdom
Get the “is” right” and you will get the ought right.
Get the “is” wrong and you will likely get the ought wrong, except by fluke.
"Moral facts explain lots of stuff. For instance, Adolf Hitler ordered the Holocaust because he was evil, and not, for example, because he couldn’t control his actions, or he had some major misunderstanding, etc"
I'm curious as to how you regard moral facts as explaining people's actions in more detail. From a slightly different perspective you could easily reverse the judgment and say something like:
"Adolf Hitler was evil because he ordered the holocaust"
For surely it is only in virtue of the specific things that Hitler did that we would think to attribute the predicate "evil" to him. And of course for each specific thing you could give another explanation in terms of non moral facts like:
"He ordered the holocaust because he had false beliefs about Jewish people and was a man full of hatred", going on like this indefinitely.
Since we could explain the action without recourse to moral concepts (and arrive at them as it were, at the end of interpretation of action) what does the moral judgment add to the explanation of action as opposed to being merely a judgment of the person's actions or character?
“In the moral case, you can think of alternative theories, and they explain exactly the same observations in perfectly analogous ways. Let’s say someone proposes to explain why Hitler ordered the Holocaust by appealing to Hitler’s evil, along with the theory that extreme racial hatred constitutes (a form of) evil. Someone with an alternative value system could posit that extreme racial hatred constitutes good, and this person could then explain exactly the same events, equally naturally. To the extent that the “evil” theory unifies observations (per sec. 3 above), the same unification could be achieved by the “good” theory.
(…)
That’s like the naturalist’s moral explanations. You can substitute an alternative theoretical reduction and “explain” exactly the same facts.”
How do you square that with your argument that converging moral values among the peoples of the world constitute evidence for objective morality?
I think that the idea that intuitions provide us with information seems really weird in the case of ethics. When I make this argument to people, they often provide examples of people disagreeing or people being wrong. This is like one person seeing a ghost and another person not seing a ghost and rather than saying someone is incorrect in their visual perception, they reject the idea of visual perception being a source of knowledge. I think that when people think about moral issues, they consider controversial issues like abortion or the trolley problems which are difficult and create a great deal of disagreement. So, the set that is used when thinking about intuitions are particularly ambiguous. Your example of torturing a baby is good because it seems like on of the most unambiguously wrong things possible.
People have such an incredibly strong drive to want to be moral realists that they have to justify it. Often utilitarians don't want to introduce other intuitions into moral calculus, just harm and pleasure. So, they might be motivated to like naturalism for this reason.
Hey Michael, just one recommendation. On substack you can add links to particular words, which looks aesthetically better than posting the link right next to the statement.
You claim that avoiding ethical intuition is a central motivation for naturalism seems suspicious to me; even granting the need for ethical intuition, I can still think of some motivations for naturalism.
One motivation is that naturalism better explains moral facts. Per non-naturalism, some moral facts are brute facts that have no explanation. Naturalism does not posit any (moral) brute facts, and so explains more. It seems to me that, if the brute facts posited by one theory are a subset of those posited by another, then, all else equal, we should accept the former theory. This advantage is admittedly not so great if one holds an ethical theory that only posits one fundamental principle, such as utilitarianism; however, if one posits many fundamental principles, as I believe you do, the gain is greater.
Another motivation is parsimony. The non-naturalist is ontologically committed to a distinctively normative type of fact, but the naturalist is not. Since, on any plausible ethical theory, there are a great many moral facts, this is a large gain regardless of whether you take parsimony to be about the number of object, or the number of types of object.
Finally, naturalism makes some evolutionary debunking arguments easier to avoid. If someone convincingly argues that the best explanation for our moral beliefs is naturalistic, then, rationally, the non-naturalist must give up either non-naturalism or all of his moral beliefs. Here is a sketch of an argument that would force him to make that choice:
1. Each moral belief has a known naturalistic explanation. (premise)
2. If a belief known to be true has a known explanation, then the fact that makes that belief true features in the belief's explanation. (premise)
3. If a fact features in a naturalistic explanation, then that fact is natural. (premise)
4. Some moral belief is known to be true. (premise)
5. If some moral belief is known to be true and every moral belief known to be true is made true by a natural fact, then moral naturalism is true. (premise)
6.1. Suppose that B is any moral belief known to be true. Then:
6.2. B has a known naturalistic explanation. (1, 6, categorical syllogism)
6.3. E is a known naturalistic explanation for B. (6.2, existential instantiation)
6.4. B is known to be true, and E is a known naturalistic explanation for B. (6.1, 6.3, conjunction introduction)
6.5. The fact that makes B true features in E. (2, 6.4, categorical syllogism)
6.6. The fact that makes B true features in E, and E is a naturalistic explanation. (6.5, 6.3, conjunction introduction)
6.7. The fact that makes B true is natural. (3, 6.6, categorical syllogism)
7. Every moral belief known to be true is made true by a natural fact. (6, universal introduction)
8. Some moral belief is known to be true, and every moral belief known to be true is made true by a natural fact. (4, 7, conjunction introduction)
9. Moral naturalism is true. (5, 8, modus ponens)
Premise 1 is false, but would likely be true of the non-naturalist in the situation described. Premise 2 is intuitively true; if someone can explain our beliefs without reference to their truth, those beliefs would be undermined. Premise 3 is obvious, provided that 'natural' is taken to mean what it typically means in metaethical discussions; for example, mathematical facts count as natural by this meaning, as do facts about God. An intuitionist cannot deny premise 4, and I've never heard of a non-naturalist who wasn't an intuitionist. Premise 5 is probably true since, if some moral beliefs are made true by natural facts, this is probably because moral properties are identical with certain natural properties.
The biggest problems are premises 1 and 4. A naturalist could motivate naturalism by making premise 1 true, but it might be very difficult to do so. Given the difficulty of evolutionary psychology, premise 1 may never be true. Premise 1 could probably be weakened to "it is known that each moral belief has a natural explanation", and this would probably make premise 1 easier to bring about, but I'm too lazy to reformulate the argument in the needed way. Premise 4 is what makes this motivation dependent on moral intuition. The trouble with it is that some naturalistic explanations of our moral beliefs would make premise 4 implausible. In that case, it would be necessary instead to adopt some form of anti-realism.
I can understand the motivation for recommending Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape: He writes for a popular audience, he argues for some form of moral naturalism, and the book has been widely discussed.
However, I cannot recommend the book. I have read it, and the book does not present good arguments, presents a muddled argument that is hard to make sense of, largely ignores academic metaethics to its detriment. In an endnote to chapter 1, Harris says the following:
"Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy. There are two reasons why I haven’t done this: First, while I have read a fair amount of this literature, I did not arrive at my position on the relationship between human values and the rest of human knowledge by reading the work of moral philosophers; I came to it by considering the logical implications of our making continued progress in the sciences of mind. Second, I am convinced that every appearance of terms like “metaethics,” “deontology,” “noncognitivism,” “antirealism,” “emotivism,” etc., directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe."
Harris does not appear to take academic metaethics very seriously (note also the weird way he wedged “deontology” in with all the metaethical terms!). I’m about as harsh a critic of contemporary analytic philosophy that you’ll find working in the field, but Harris’s remark goes too far even for me. I would be pleasantly surprised, and an enthusiastic proponent, if he'd managed to present a compelling and well-argued position. But Harris doesn't. He botches the job quite thoroughly.
Someone with this hostile an attitude towards what informed people actually have to say about the topic is liable to confuse readers rather than present a helpful introduction to naturalist realism. I’d probably just refer people to Railton.
In the history of the world no person has ever justified a moral statement with anything other than “is” statements.
“I have intuition X” is an “is” statement.
“I have feeling X” is a statement about the way the world is.
Your intuitions and feelings are not a special type of thing that are magically excluded from what “is.”
Your feelings and intuitions are things that exist. They can, and have, be studied by science.
Thus, moral statements are not a special or different kind of statement from “is” statements. They are “is” statements. Moral philosophy that views moral statements as special or different kinds of statements from “is” statements is errant moral philosophy.
Sam Harris is right to say that science can tell us everything we need to now about morality but he is mistaken to conclude that utilitarianism is what naturally follows from the scientific image. What naturally follows from the scientific image is that this so-called “moral intuition” felt by Homo sapiens is actually an entirely self-interested hypothetical imperative.
Your “moral intuition” is not something that gives you access to some moral truth that exists externally like “slavery is unjust.” Here’s what’s actually going on. Your feelings tell you that slavery makes you feel bad and your “intuition” is a prediction, based on your current belief about the way the world is, that opposing slavery and living in a world without slavery will make you feel good not bad.
Science tells us that you will (non-free will) take actions that you predict will make you feel good not bad. That is what you WILL do. It’s not a choice. That is how Homo sapiens operate.
So the only thing that can coherently make an action “right” or “wrong” is whether or not it achieves the intention of your immutable will to feel good not bad. You have done the right thing if it succeeds in making you feel good not bad. And you will have done the wrong thing if it ends up making you feel bad not good.
Hitler did what he did because he predicted that his actions would make him feel really really good. As it turns out those actions made him feel really really bad. (You don’t scream angrily a lot and commit suicide when you feel really really good) Hitler predicted wrong. He got the “is” wrong. That is the only coherent thing it can mean to say that Hitler did the “wrong” things.
Slavery wasn’t abolished because people suddenly intuited the moral truth that slavery is unjust. If people could intuit an external moral truth we would not be having this conversation. Slavery was abolished because it started making people “feel bad not good” as they learned more and more about what “is,” namely that black people are just like us, where the previous belief was that they are very different from us in an important way. The previous belief about what “is” made it not feel bad to enslave black people. A new belief about what “is” (black people are just like us) brought about by experiences made it feel bad to enslave black people. It was a new and different belief about the way the world “is” that changed the “morality” of slavery.
I used to think that my “moral intuition” was some magic portal to an external moral truth, but then I read science and learned otherwise. Science knows what my “moral intuition” is better than I did. Now I know better too.
Socrates nailed it. He intuited it before the science even confirmed it. Virtue = Wisdom
Get the “is” right” and you will get the ought right.
Get the “is” wrong and you will likely get the ought wrong, except by fluke.
"Moral facts explain lots of stuff. For instance, Adolf Hitler ordered the Holocaust because he was evil, and not, for example, because he couldn’t control his actions, or he had some major misunderstanding, etc"
I'm curious as to how you regard moral facts as explaining people's actions in more detail. From a slightly different perspective you could easily reverse the judgment and say something like:
"Adolf Hitler was evil because he ordered the holocaust"
For surely it is only in virtue of the specific things that Hitler did that we would think to attribute the predicate "evil" to him. And of course for each specific thing you could give another explanation in terms of non moral facts like:
"He ordered the holocaust because he had false beliefs about Jewish people and was a man full of hatred", going on like this indefinitely.
Since we could explain the action without recourse to moral concepts (and arrive at them as it were, at the end of interpretation of action) what does the moral judgment add to the explanation of action as opposed to being merely a judgment of the person's actions or character?
“In the moral case, you can think of alternative theories, and they explain exactly the same observations in perfectly analogous ways. Let’s say someone proposes to explain why Hitler ordered the Holocaust by appealing to Hitler’s evil, along with the theory that extreme racial hatred constitutes (a form of) evil. Someone with an alternative value system could posit that extreme racial hatred constitutes good, and this person could then explain exactly the same events, equally naturally. To the extent that the “evil” theory unifies observations (per sec. 3 above), the same unification could be achieved by the “good” theory.
(…)
That’s like the naturalist’s moral explanations. You can substitute an alternative theoretical reduction and “explain” exactly the same facts.”
How do you square that with your argument that converging moral values among the peoples of the world constitute evidence for objective morality?