Here is a very odd question that occurred to me: Is it good for there to be moral norms?
Imagine a world just like this one, except that there are no moral norms for its intelligent denizens—but nonetheless they behave as we do. They feel repelled by the idea of murder and torture, and find the life of a Mother Teresa attractive, but there are no moral truths behind these things.
Such a world would have one great advantage over ours: there would be no moral evil. That world’s Hitler and Stalin would cause just as much pain and suffering, but they wouldn’t be wicked in so doing. Given the Socratic insight that it is worse to do than to suffer evil, a vast amount of evil would disappear in such a world. At least a third of the evil in the world would be gone. Our world has three categories of evil:
I. Undergoing of natural evils
Undergoing of moral evils, and
Performance of moral evils.
The third category would be gone, and it is probably the biggest of the three. Wouldn’t that be worth it?
Here is one answer. For cooperative intelligent social animals, a belief in morality is very useful. But to live one’s life by a belief that is false seems a significant harm. Cooperative intelligent social animals in the alternative world would be constantly deceived by their belief in morality. That is a great evil. But is it as great an evil as all Category III evils taken together? I suspect it is but a small fraction of the sum of all Category III evils.
Here is a second answer. In removing moral norms, one would admittedly remove a vast category of evils, but also a vast category of goods: the performance of moral good. If we have the intuition that having moral norms is a good thing—that it would be a disappointment to learn that moral norms were an illusion—then we have to think that the performances of moral good are a very great thing indeed, one comparable to the sum of all Category III evils.
I am attracted to a combination of the two answers. But I can also see someone saying: “It doesn’t matter whether it’s worth having moral norms or not, but it is simply impossible to have cooperative intelligent social animals that believe in morality without their being under moral norms.” A Platonist may say that on the grounds that moral norms are necessary. A theist may say it on the grounds that it is contrary to the character of a perfect God to manufacture the vast deceit that would be involved in us thinking there are moral norms if there were no moral norms. These aren’t bad answers. But I still feel it’s good that there really are moral norms.
4 comments:
Dr. Pruss, what are your thoughts on moral antirealisms in general, which basically deny that there are any stance independent moral oughts, and that morality actually starts with the human species in general having certain preferences that they seek to fulfill, and that all we can do is try to find out what the best ways are to fulfill the goals one has or desires, not what goals or preferences one SHOULD have?
I think that the reality is something close to that. Perhaps moral norms are actually reflections of God's character, and not just rules layered onto reality as dictates. In that case, then what we call moral norms are: 1) metaphysically necessary and baked into reality in the same way that logic and math are, and 2) are best known by seeing how the members of the trinity treat each other. From this perspective, we can see that morality wouldn't have moral norms as a series of rules, but as whether or not our actions and motivations reflect the structure of the trinity and, therefore, of reality itself. So moral norms wouldn't be a series of rules per se. God is not bound by morality but in whose nature morality is expressed. The Father loves the Son, the Son is humble to the Father not because there are rules that they follow, but because that is how they are. Reality reflects their relationships because they *made reality*. Moral norms are no more rules laid down than the Law of Identity, Causality, or the Fibonacci Sequence. What sets it apart is that, as free-willed contingent beings, we can opt out of moral action. However, in doing so, we are not breaking any rules. We are striving against the structure of reality. Moral norms then, are nothing more and nothing less than our categorization of what reality actually is. So moral norms *are* good but not because having rules is good or because God's edicts are good because God is good. They are good because they express the internal relationality of God.
Wesley:
I don't see why it's worth trying to fulfill the goals you have, unless you think it's likely to be good to fulfill the goals you have.
I think a nonrealist would respond that their goals are good, but non stance-independently. That is, humans evolved in such a way as to naturally strongly prefer some goals which also happen to lead to human fluorishing. But the nonrealist would say there is no reason to say we humans SHOULD desire human fluorishing independently of us having the inbuilt preference for that. All we can do is start with a given preference for a certain goal, and then ask how to best achieve the goal. What we CANNOT do, in the nonrealist view, is say that we SHOULD desire human fluorishing REGARDLESS of if its actually our preference or not, or that we SHOULD have a preference for achieving human fluorishing rather than lack it or prefer harming others.
Non-realism is essentially the idea that there are no moral SHOULDS as to what we SHOULD prefer or do, only strongly ingrained preferences. There is no such thing as it being the case that we SHOULD prefer honesty or charity etc regardless of what we actually happen to prefer, independently of our actual stances.
No stance independent moral norms basically, or really any normative norms really.
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