Moral Realism
On Objectivity, Normativity, and the Structure of Reality
This essay is a substantially revised and expanded version of an essay originally published on July 19, 2021.
Introduction
In a previous essay, I argued that if we take seriously the idea that some things matter, we will find ourselves pushed toward a form of
Value Realism: there exist stance-independent evaluative truths — truths about what is valuable that obtain independently of anyone’s beliefs, preferences, desires, emotions, or attitudes.
Here I want to explore a closely related, but distinct, claim: namely, that if we take morality seriously, we will likewise find ourselves pushed toward
Moral Realism: there exist stance-independent moral truths — truths about what one morally ought and ought not to do that obtain independently of anyone’s beliefs, preferences, desires, emotions, or attitudes.
If moral realism is true, then morality is not something invented by human beings, negotiated into existence by societies, or constructed out of our attitudes. Moral truths are not made true by the fact that we approve of them. Rather, morality presents itself as something to which we are answerable. The moral domain appears, at least pre-theoretically, to involve standards that we discover rather than create.
I begin by examining the way morality presents itself in ordinary experience. I then consider several pressures against moral realism — especially relativism, naturalism, and the famous “queerness” objection associated with J. L. Mackie. Finally, I suggest that the reality of morality may itself point beyond a fundamentally mindless conception of reality.
1. Moral Experience and Objectivity
To say that morality is objective in this sense is not to posit mysterious moral particles floating somewhere in space. Nor need the moral realist imagine moral truths as strange entities hovering over the natural world. The claim is simply that at least some moral judgments are true independently of what anyone happens to think about them.
If it is wrong to torture conscious beings merely for amusement, then it would remain wrong even if every human being on Earth came to approve of such behavior. If compassion is genuinely better than cruelty, then this is not merely a reflection of our contingent emotional dispositions or cultural practices. It is instead a truth about how one ought to relate to other conscious creatures.
And this, I think, captures the way morality ordinarily seems to us. We do not generally experience morality as a system of arbitrary conventions, akin to etiquette or fashion. We experience moral demands as possessing a peculiar authority. Morality seems to place genuine constraints upon us, such that it is up to us to conform ourselves to it, rather than up to morality to conform itself to us.
Yes, appearances can be misleading. But: if we abandon the principle that things are generally as they appear absent a defeater, skepticism threatens to spread very far indeed. We trust perception, memory, rational intuition, and inference because these faculties present themselves as truth-conducive. Likewise, moral experience presents itself as disclosing a realm of normative truths — truths about what ought to be done, valued, admired, condemned, pursued, and avoided.
To deny this altogether is not merely to reject a philosophical theory: it is to radically reinterpret one of the central dimensions of human experience.
2. Beyond Crude Anti-Realism
Many philosophers reject moral realism without embracing anything so crude as the view that morality is “just subjective.” Some, such as Christine Korsgaard, attempt to ground morality in a kind of hypothetical contract between rational agents, rather than in stance-independent moral facts (Korsgaard 1996). Others defend varieties of expressivism according to which moral judgments function primarily as expressions of evaluative attitudes rather than descriptions of objective reality.
Still, anti-realist views face a persistent difficulty: namely, that they seem unable fully to capture the authority morality appears to possess. If moral judgments ultimately reduce to preferences, emotional reactions, social practices, or practical endorsements, then it is difficult to understand why morality should bind us in the robust way it seems to do. Ordinary moral phenomenology does not merely register that one happens to dislike cruelty or approve of compassion. It presents certain actions as genuinely worthy of condemnation, admiration, guilt, resentment, praise, or blame.
This point becomes especially clear in cases involving profound moral disagreement. Suppose an entire society were to endorse the torture of innocent conscious beings for amusement. The ordinary moral consciousness does not conclude that torture thereby becomes permissible. Rather, it concludes that the society is morally mistaken. And this is very difficult to make sense of if morality is ultimately constituted by attitudes or conventions.
Moreover, moral anti-realism often proves unstable upon reflection. Many who officially endorse it nevertheless continue to speak and act as if at least some moral claims possess universal authority. Tolerance, equality, justice, and human rights are frequently defended not merely as local preferences, but as norms that others genuinely ought to recognize. But once morality is reduced to cultural attitudes or individual preferences, it is difficult to explain why anyone outside those frameworks should be bound by them (or even care about them).
3. Naturalism and the Normative Domain
One important source of resistance to moral realism is the thought that the view sits uneasily within a broadly naturalistic worldview. If reality consists exclusively of the sorts of entities and properties described by the natural sciences, then it can seem mysterious where irreducibly normative truths would fit into our ontology. But if irreducible normativity cannot be accommodated within a naturalistic framework, that may constitute a problem not for morality, but for naturalism.
For one thing, naturalism itself appears committed to forms of normativity that are not straightforwardly captured by the language of physics or chemistry. Rational inquiry presupposes epistemic norms governing what one ought to believe, what counts as evidence, what follows from what, and which inferential practices are truth-conducive. The naturalist who insists that one ought to proportion belief to the evidence has already entered the normative domain.
And once this much is granted, a natural question arises: if epistemic normativity can be accommodated within a naturalistic framework, why think moral normativity uniquely problematic?
More fundamentally, the moral realist is free to challenge the implicit prioritization often granted to scientific explanation over moral explanation. Why assume in advance that physics occupies a more fundamental explanatory position than morality? Why not instead regard the normative domain as itself a fundamental aspect of reality — one no less indispensable than consciousness, rationality, or mathematics? Indeed, a worldview that leaves morality entirely out of the picture may reasonably be regarded as radically incomplete.
Some philosophers have attempted to reconcile moral realism with naturalism by arguing that moral properties are reducible to, identical with, or supervenient upon natural properties. Others have defended forms of non-natural moral realism according to which moral truths constitute an irreducible domain of reality (Enoch 2011; Parfit 2011).
For my part, I find the latter approach considerably more plausible. Moral truths do not seem reducible to descriptive features of the world in the way that, say, chemical facts reduce to physical ones. The moral domain appears irreducibly normative.
4. The Queerness of Morality
At this point, however, the moral realist encounters a difficulty famously pressed by J. L. Mackie. Mackie argued that objective moral truths would be metaphysically queer — unlike anything else in the universe (Mackie 1977). Objective values would apparently possess an intrinsically action-guiding or authoritative character not easily assimilated to the kinds of facts studied by the natural sciences. And there is, I think, a real point here — if not the one Mackie imagines.
The normative domain is strange. It is strange that reality should contain facts not merely about what is, but about what ought to be done. It is strange that some conscious creatures should find themselves subject to rational and moral demands that seem to transcend individual desire and cultural consensus. And it is strange that some actions should be genuinely admirable or contemptible independently of human approval.
But it is not clear why strangeness should count decisively against reality. Contemporary physics posits entities and structures that would have seemed utterly incomprehensible to common sense not long ago. Consciousness remains deeply mysterious. Mathematical truth is philosophically puzzling. Rational inference is philosophically puzzling. The mere fact that something occupies an unusual ontological category is not, by itself, a reason to deny its existence.
Moreover, the denial of moral reality carries its own enormous costs. A world entirely devoid of objective normativity — a world in which nothing is genuinely admirable or contemptible, nothing truly just or unjust, nothing objectively worthy of love or condemnation — seems, to my mind at least, extraordinarily difficult to believe in.
5. Theism and the Deeper Explanatory Problem
We can reasonably wonder, even allowing that the basic moral truths are necessary (such that they could not have been otherwise), why reality contains morality at all. The mind rebels, at least to some extent, at the idea of brute normative necessities. One naturally wishes to know why there exists a moral domain in the first place. Why should reality contain truths not merely about particles and forces and biological organisms, but also about what ought to be valued, pursued, admired, or avoided? Why should conscious beings find themselves embedded within an intrinsically normative order?
Some recent moral philosophers, such as Derek Parfit and David Enoch, have argued in different ways that irreducible normative truths simply belong to the fundamental structure of reality (Enoch 2011; Parfit 2011). Perhaps this is correct, but I confess that I find the view unsatisfying. The existence of objective moral truth seems to me less like the endpoint of inquiry than a signpost pointing to a deeper explanatory problem.
On a purely mechanistic picture of reality, irreducible moral truths can appear oddly disconnected from the rest of the universe — brute normative facts suspended within an otherwise non-normative order. By contrast, if reality is fundamentally grounded in mind, rationality, and purposiveness, the existence of objective moral truths begins to look considerably less surprising.
If reality is ultimately grounded in something like an infinite intellect, then the existence of rational, normative, and teleological structure may no longer seem accidental or inexplicable. Moral obligation, epistemic normativity, and value may seem to fit more naturally within a fundamentally rational order than within one consisting exclusively of mindless particles and forces.
I do not pretend that such considerations amount to a decisive argument for theism, but they do, I think, exert a kind of explanatory pressure — pressure toward the conclusion that normativity is more at home in a reality grounded in mind than in one grounded solely in mechanism.
Conclusion
Morality presents itself as objective, authoritative, and irreducibly normative. We experience ourselves not merely as creatures with preferences, but as beings answerable to standards that we discover rather than invent. While moral realism undoubtedly raises difficult metaphysical questions, the denial of moral reality seems to raise deeper ones still.
Indeed, once one takes seriously the existence of objective normativity, a further explanatory question naturally emerges: why should reality contain such a domain at all? Why should a universe composed fundamentally of mindless particles and forces give rise to truths concerning what ought to be believed, valued, admired, condemned, pursued, or avoided?
I have suggested that theism may possess a significant explanatory advantage here. If reality is ultimately grounded in mind, rationality, and purposiveness, then the existence of irreducible normativity begins to look considerably less surprising than it does on a purely mechanistic picture of the world.
At the very least, morality seems difficult to regard as a mere useful fiction generated by evolutionary and cultural forces. It presents itself as disclosing something real. And if morality is indeed real, then reality itself may be far stranger, and far richer, than a purely naturalistic worldview would lead us to expect.
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
~Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason
References
Enoch, David. 2011. Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Korsgaard, Christine M. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mackie, J. L. 1977. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. New York: Penguin Books.
Nagel, Thomas. 2012. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Parfit, Derek. 2011. On What Matters. Vols. 1–3. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scanlon, T. M. 1998. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.