Unbelievable? Moral Realism and My Comments

http://cfvod.kaltura.com/pd/p/618072/sp/61807200/serveFlavor/entryId/1_s68pobxk/v/1/flavorId/1_g010t8pa/name/a.mp3

During Mike Rand’s “interrogation” I listened with great interest to your defense of objective morality. You did a very good job of it. As for me, it has been my great pleasure, after intense internet debate with agnostics and atheists over many years, to refine the issues (IMHO) to a simple and succinct presentation.

First, I start with a seemly benign epistemological principle: Things are as they appear to be until shown otherwise. Now it appears that there are universally applicable principles of justice. The excellent example of you gave, killing others in cold-blood, resonates with every sound-minded human being. In Folsom Prison Blues, Johnny Cash artistically invokes this clear injustice when he sings, “Well I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”

In the absence of any valid objection or compelling defeater, belief in moral facts is warranted. But is there such a defeater? The one most commonly proposed, also given by your guest, Mr. Rand, is the variety of moral codes and the shifting of ethical sentiments over time. This objection simply does not work. There is a difference between knowing that a thing exists and knowing what a thing is. For example, when a curious child gets birthday package he knows there is a gift inside, but he can only make an educated guess about what it is by shaking and weighting the package. Clearly, many different moral codes and ethical principles have been proposed and debated for as long as humans have existed. However, a lack of consensus, much less any definitive agreement, about the epistemological status of apparent moral facts does not undermine the ontological claim that there are actual moral facts. Indeed, the very notion that there should (emphasis on should) be norms about right and wrong is itself a generally acknowledged moral fact.

Since this objection, the variety of moral systems and sentiments, is based on conflation of an epistemological claim and an ontological one, it cannot serve as an adequate defeater for the moral argument. Therefore, since no other compelling objection seems to be in the offing, it is right and proper for people to believe that morality is objective, even if, they cannot agree on the specific prohibitions and obligations it would include.

Congratulations on your book. I hope it does well.

And my response to a challenging reply:

The basic objection was that a category can only be know from specific examples...

...I appreciate your reasoned tone and close reading of my post. You make some excellent points.

I’m not certain that the way you apply “ontology following epistemology” directly applies. I am not saying that if there is at least one instance of a moral fact, then people can be assured that moral facts actually exist; but rather, that we have moral experiences, the ever present sense that some things are right and wrong, independent of what we consider moral at any given moment. That gives warrant to the belief that there is a non-empty set, or category, called moral facts…even if no one can identify a specific and unequivocal moral fact.

In this respect moral realism is not different from, say, mathematical realism. Someone can reasonably believe circularity is real, even though no instance of a perfect circle physically exists. I do not see this as particularly problematic for any ethical tradition, Christian or otherwise, that admits some notion of degrees of perfection.