Values and Morals: Outline of a Skeptical Realism

Here, I advance a skeptical moral realism.*

[ *Based on: “Values and Morals: Outline of a Skeptical Realism,” Philosophical Issues 19 (2009): 113-30. ]

Usually, in discussions of moral realism, we talk about whether “evaluative properties exist” or don’t exist; or we ask whether “evaluative properties are objective” or not objective.

I think some but not all evaluative properties are real. That counts as a “moral realist” position as the term is usually understood, but it’s a skeptical realism.

1. Background

Realism about evaluative properties holds that evaluative properties are “real”. There are three points here: (a) evaluative adjectives, such as “good” or “admirable” refer to properties, (b) some things have these properties, and (c) these properties do not depend on observers’ attitudes towards the things that have them.

There are two kinds of evaluative terms:

1. Thin evaluative terms have a purely evaluative meaning, e.g., “good” and “should”.

2. Thick evaluative terms combine evaluative and descriptive meanings; they also commonly express particular emotional attitudes that are assumed to be appropriate to the type of thing in question. E.g., “courageous” is partly evaluative (it implies good), it is also partly descriptive (it implies something about overcoming fear), and it expresses a kind of admiration or respect.

2. Why Some Thick Evaluative Properties Are Unreal

The use of thick evaluative terms usually presupposes certain substantive value judgments, for example, that it’s good to overcome your fears. So a thick evaluative property may fail to exist because those substantive value judgments are false in an important way.

Example: Consider the judgment “Fifty Shades of Grey is a dirty movie.” There are two ways this could be mistaken:

(i) It could be descriptively mistaken. If, e.g., there are no sexual depictions in the movie, then it’s not dirty, regardless of your values.

(ii) It could be evaluatively mistaken. If, e.g., there is nothing bad about explicit sexual depictions, or if disgust is not an appropriate reaction to them, then it wouldn’t be correct to call any movie “dirty”, however much sex it shows.

In the latter case, we could say that the thick evaluative property of “dirtiness” doesn’t exist.

A thick evaluative property may also be unreal because use of the term presupposes importantly false factual beliefs. For example, the property of holiness might fail to exist because there is no God.

3. Does Morality Exist?

3.1. “Moral” and “Immoral” Are Thick: The Case of Selfish Reasons

Philosophers sometimes characterize morality in thin evaluative terms. Examples:

• James Rachels: “The morally right thing to do, in any circumstance, is whatever there are the best reasons for doing.”

• G.E. Moore: “The assertion ‘I am morally bound to perform this action’ is identical with the assertion ‘This action will produce the greatest possible amount of good in the Universe’”.

Perhaps they are introducing a special, philosophers’ technical usage of “moral”. In that case, I agree with them that morality in the philosophers’ sense is real.

But that just is not how “moral” is used in ordinary English. In ordinary English, it’s a thick evaluative term.

The easiest way to see that is to consider actions that one should do solely out of self-interest. Suppose I have $100 to spend. And suppose, for example, that (improbably enough) the action that would produce the most good in the universe, and the action that I have most reason to do, is to spend that money on myself. There’s no one else who would get more enjoyment out of the money than me. But now suppose that I, in a fit of excessive altruism, give the money to a poor child who actually gets less benefit from it than me. So I acted imprudently, even irrationally.

Q: Did I act immorally?

Even utilitarian philosophers can sense that the word “immoral” doesn’t fit here. Notice that even if you agree that the action was sub-optimal, and not what I had most reason to do, it still sounds bizarre to call it immoral.

So that shows at least some thickness to the concept of “morality” and “immorality”.

Btw, this is why it’s a semantic error to describe either egoism or utilitarianism as a moral theory. They’re theories of practical rationality, not morality in the ordinary English sense.

3.2. “Sexual Immorality”

Most philosophers will accept the above example of the thickness of moral concepts—i.e., they will agree that “moral” only applies to non-selfish reasons for action. But there’s more to the ordinary use of “moral”, and some of the extra content is bizarre from the standpoint of most philosophers’ views.

Consider the phrase “a woman of loose morals”. This does not refer to a woman who causes needless pain, violates people’s rights, or fails to donate to famine relief. It refers to a woman who is unusually receptive to sexual propositions. Even if you agree that it is way worse to fail to donate to famine relief than it is to be overly receptive to sexual advances, you can probably still sense that it would be inappropriate to describe a neighbor who fails to donate as having loose morals.

Or consider the use of “immoral” and “immorality” in the Bible. I did a word search to find all occurrences of these words (NIV translation). Most are immediately preceded by the word “sexual” or “sexually”. There are zero cases where they are used for clearly non-sexual behavior (though some cases are ambiguous).

So it appears that in popular parlance, the use of “immoral” contains such presuppositions as (a) it is bad for a woman to have many sexual partners, (b) this is much worse than it is for a man to have many sexual partners, and (c) this particular species of badness is an appropriate target for righteous disapproval and blame.

At least, those presuppositions were common in earlier times. They’re diminishing today; “loose morals” is archaic, as is “sexual immorality”. So we may be in the midst of a change in the meaning of “moral”, so that it is becoming more normal to describe, say, failure to donate to charity as “immoral”.

3.3. Maybe Morality Is Unreal

So you can see why morality might be unreal, even though “moral realism” in the philosophers’ sense is true: namely, because the above presuppositions are false. There is not a distinctive way in which female sexual promiscuity is bad. Pleasure is good; promiscuity causes more pleasure for oneself and others; so it is prima facie good.

Objection 1: Promiscuity is immoral because it creates risks of unwanted pregnancy and disease.

Reply: (a) If it’s the risks to oneself that count, then other unhealthy behaviors such as eating junk food and failing to exercise should be deemed even more immoral. (b) If it’s the risks to others that count (paternalistically, I suppose), then promiscuity should be more immoral on the part of men, since it is men who are causing a risk of unwanted pregnancy for others. (c) Taking sufficient precautions (such as using condoms) should reduce or eliminate the “immorality”. (d) In any case, it’s hard to see how righteous disapproval and blame are appropriate reactions.

Objection 2: Most people in history have intuited that female promiscuity (etc.) is bad, so it’s probably bad.

Reply: We have compelling defeaters for that intuition:

(a) There is wide variation in sexual morality across societies. Your intuitions are probably heavily influenced by the culture you happened to be born in. E.g., most societies accepted polygamy, whereas we tend to view it as ‘immoral’. Our society used to view homosexuality as ‘immoral’, whereas we today and the ancient Greeks consider it fine. Etc. So humans are probably highly unreliable about sexual morality.

(b) Evolutionary psychology can explain many otherwise weird aspects of people’s beliefs about sexual morality (esp. the ones that are not explained by cultural conditioning). E.g., the male/female double standard is explained partly by the fact that females can only reproduce once per 9 months, whereas males can reproduce almost unlimited times; also by the fact that the mother of a child is always known when the child is born, but there can be uncertainty about the father.

(c) The people who have studied ethics the most (e.g., professional ethicists) are the least likely to share the intuitions about the wrongness of female promiscuity and other traditional claims about sexual morality.

3.4. What About Altruism?

Another possible mistake in the concept of “moral reasons”: The implicit assumption that there is a distinctive type of reason for action that applies to actions that benefit others, as opposed to oneself. If you think (as I guess G.E. Moore thought) that we have the same sort of reason for benefitting anyone, that at least suggests that there aren’t any distinctively moral reasons, as opposed to just practical reasons in general.

4. Are Any Values Real?

If we reject “morality”, why would we still believe that any evaluative properties are real?

Briefly, because there are some evaluative judgments for which we lack the sort of defeaters mentioned in 3.3 above: some of our intuitions don’t vary a lot with culture or have very convincing evolutionary debunking explanations or diminish as one studies the subject more. Take, e.g., the intuitions:

• Benefits are pro tanto good.

• Enjoyment and happiness are (pro tanto) benefits.

• We have pro tanto reason to produce good things.

All of those seem trivially true, and I don’t think there are any strong defeaters for them. Together, they entail the substantive judgment that we have reason to produce enjoyment & happiness.