A Prelude to Moral Realism
By David Baggett
The question of why believe in robust moral objectivity (“moral realism”) has been raised in recent years more and more. Jerry Walls and I are currently writing a book on the topic, which is appropriate, since answering the question well in short compass isn’t possible except for those already convinced about it. In this short entry I’m going to discuss just one aspect of this discussion—one of the genuine challenges of arguing for (or against) moral realism in our contemporary moment.
In the book we’ll canvass various challenges against moral realism and an array of evidential considerations in favor of it. We’ll also discuss several alternatives to moral realism, such as error theory (sometimes called nihilism), variants of expressivism (emotivism, prescriptivism, quasi-realism, etc.), and constructivism. I can’t do all that here.
Instead, I want to point out an interesting aspect of the whole discussion among those who see morality differently. Some have what we might call generally reductionist analyses of ethics, treating sturdy ontologies on which morality relies as a gratuitous indulgence. Often we see phrases among such folks like “obscurantist” and “metaphysical extravagance.” These are bad. Parsimony is their preference—the more stripped of substantive ontology or metaphysics a view is, the more likely it’s true.
Of course what’s animating their perspective on these matters is the idea that simplicity trumps. It’s the traditional concern of Ockham’s Razor: let’s get rid of anything we don’t need. If a deflationary or reductionist analysis of morality gets us all we want, then embrace that approach. Desacralize anything you can to avoid superstition or anything extraneous. If at all possible to square the features of morality with something like a naturalistic perspective, do it.
Of course the challenge faced by this approach is showing that nothing of importance is lost in the process of adopting simpler explanations. Applying a principle of parsimony assumes that the theories in question explain the relevant facts (at least roughly) equally well. I’ve always personally been struck by a line from William James, directed at the knights of the (Ockham’s) Razor, that whereas they feared superstition, he feared desiccation.
James’s concern had exactly to do with this worry that prematurely adopting too thin of an analysis results in losing too much of importance. And here there’s something at play almost like a psychological predilection: whereas some seem aesthetically drawn to pared-down analyses, others seem to naturally gravitate to richer pictures. By calling the pictures “richer,” I don’t mean to imply “truer,” even though I find myself in the latter category. By “richer” I mean something more like openness to something transcendent, something sacramental, something more than what naturalism can provide.
What I’m finding interesting about this phenomenon is that it largely functions pre-theoretically. It’s less a deliverance of our analysis than what inclines us toward accepting one analysis over another. There’s no knock-down argument in favor of naturalism on which folks convinced of it are basing their naturalistic bias. It rather tends to be an axiomatic assumption they bring to their study of ethics. And often theistic ethicists are theists prior to their ethical studies, and they naturally tend to read ethics in a way amenable to their worldview. In both cases, what then happens is that proponents of naturalism and supernaturalism can claim to find in ethics reasons for their ideological commitments to be bolstered. But what is often happening, I suspect, is that they are simply looking at it through the lens of their prior commitments. It’s hard not to, admittedly.
I’m not suggesting that this is always regrettable, nor that it’s very easy to avoid. It’s quite hard to avoid, in fact. What I’m suggesting, though, is that it would perhaps do us some good to realize we’re doing it more than we know. Doing so won’t stop us from doing it, but it might enable us to grasp better the way others see it differently.
Morality in a sense provides us something of a Rorschach test. What we see is often a function of what we already believe.
In his “Will to Believe,” William James had this insight too when it came to morality:
The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having them is decided by our will. Are our moral preferences true or false, or are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or bad for us, but in themselves indifferent? How can your pure intellect decide? If your heart does not want a world of moral reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one…. Moral skepticism can no more be refuted or proved by logic than intellectual skepticism can. When we stick to it that there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The skeptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows.
Blaise Pascal echoed a similar point when he talked about divine hiddenness: “There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.”
Having made this point, allow me now to say just a brief word why, rather than being averse to the transcendent, I remain eminently open to it. I know parsimony is all the rage for some—and I’m in principle open to not “multiplying entities unnecessarily”—but I don’t see a rabid commitment to desacralize as a virtue, intellectual or otherwise. Honestly, it just doesn’t ring with truth for me.
Recently I’ve been reading Os Guinness’s Signals of Transcendence, and it’s reminded me of why my predilections run in a quite different direction. Acts of selfless altruism, sunsets so beautiful as to melt the heart, a mother’s love for her child, a deep assurance that good will defeat evil in the end and the scales of justice balanced, and a thousand other moral, aesthetic, and existential moments that fire my imagination and captivate my heart convince me there’s more to life than meets the eye. Not less.
Is this a knock down argument in favor of something like robust realism? By no means. We’re none of us mere logic choppers; for each of these potential signals of transcendence, a reductionist analysis is on ready offer. But cultivating ears to hear and heed such signals is a helpful prerequisite to at least retain openness to their potential evidential significance.
— David Baggett is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Christian University. He is the author or editor of about fifteen books, most recently Telling Tales: Intimations of the Sacred in Popular Culture written with Marybeth Baggett.
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