Contra Bentham's Bulldog on Moral Realism

Recently, Bentham's Bulldog has started a debate on the EA forum by arguing that morality is objective. For the record, I’m on the fence about whether morality is objective or not. I think there is a plausible case to be made either way. But the arguments that BB gives are not very persuasive to me, and I’ll explain why. (In the process, I’m going to quote from him extensively, since I think it’s hard to understand his arguments without reading them directly.)

BB begins:

Let’s first define moral realism. It’s the idea that there are some stance independent moral truths. Something is stance independent if it doesn’t depend on what anyone thinks or feels about it. So, for instance, that I have arms is stance independently true—it doesn’t depend on what anyone thinks about it. That ice cream is tasty is stance dependently true; it might be tasty to me but not to you, and a person who thinks it’s not tasty isn’t making an error.

[…]

Moral realism says that some moral statements are true and this doesn’t depend on what people think about it. Now, there are only three possible ways any particular moral statement can fail to be stance independently true:

1. It’s neither true nor false.
2. It’s false.
3. It’s true but stance dependently—so it depends on what someone thinks about it.

But lots of moral statements just really don’t seem like any of these. The wrongness of slavery, the holocaust, baby torture, stabbing people in the eye—it seems like all these things really are wrong and this fact doesn’t depend on what people think about it. It seems very weird to think that what makes it wrong to torture people is what someone thinks about it—even weirder that statements like “torture is wrong,” are neither true nor false.

Point 1 is the bone of contention here. I think it’s at least plausibly true that every moral statement is neither true nor false. And sure, it might be “weird” to think that “torture is wrong” is neither true nor false, but we’re not debating weirdness here; we’re debating accuracy. BB goes on:

The view that these statements are neither true nor false has unique linguistic problems. Proponents claim that moral sentences are like commands—they’re not even in the business of expressing propositions. If I say “shut the door,” or “go Dodgers,” that isn’t either true nor false. But because of that, it makes no sense to ask “go Dodgers?” or “is it true that shut the door?” Similarly, it makes no sense to say “if shut the door then shut the door now, shut the door, therefore, shut the door now.” But it does make sense to say things like “is abortion wrong?” or “if murder is wrong, then so is abortion.” This shows that moral statements are, at least in many cases, in the business of expressing propositions—asserting things supposed to be true or false.

I find this kind of linguistic argument to be very unpersuasive. The fact that English treats moral claims as propositions is not necessarily proof of moral realism; it might just be proof that English is a poor language to use to discuss moral philosophy. By analogy, we can note that many languages assign genders to nouns. In Spanish, for instance, the moon (“la luna”) is a feminine object. Is that proof that the moon really is female? No, it’s just proof that Spanish as a language is ill-equipped to describe a world of genderless objects. Similarly, the English language puts moral claims and factual claims in the same grammatical category, but that tells you more about English than it tells you about the inherent nature of moral claims.

BB then makes what is, in my opinion, an even more confused argument:

Denying objective morality is counterintuitive in a second, very different way. If there are stance-independent reasons—reasons to care about things that don’t depend on what you actually care about—then moral realism is almost definitely true. Once that anti-realist admits there are reasons to care independent of your desires, it seems those reasons should give rise to moral reasons. If I have a reason to prevent my own suffering, it seems that suffering is bad, which gives me a moral reason to prevent it.

But this means that moral anti-realists must think that you can never have a reason to care about something independent of what you actually do care about. This is crazy as shown by the following cases:

1. A person wants to eat a car. They know they’d get no enjoyment from it—the whole experience would be quite painful and unpleasant. On moral anti-realism, they’re not being irrational. They have no reason to take a different action.
2. A person desires, at some time, to procrastinate. They know it’s bad for them, but they don’t want to do their tasks. On anti-realism, this is not a rational failing.
3. A person wants to torture themselves. They have this desire—despite getting no joy from it—despite knowing the relevant facts. On anti-realism, they’re not being irrational.
4. A four-year-old wants a cookie to be shaped like a triangle. They are willing to endure great future agony for this. On anti-realism, they’re not being irrational—so long as they’re informed about the relevant facts.
5. A person has a very strong desire to be skinny. This motivates them to starve to death—leaving behind a life of joy and fulfillment. On anti-realism, one has no reason to not to do this. It might be bad, but one can’t claim that they’re acting foolishly.
6. A person is depressed and cuts themself. When they do it, they are fully informed about the long-term consequences. On anti-realism, they are not acting irrationally.

I think that BB is failing to distinguish between two conditions:

• Condition A: Whether a person is acting rationally
• Condition B: Whether a person should be acting rationally

Condition A is a factual condition. You can objectively determine whether a person is acting rationally by asking, “Are this person’s actions in line with their desires?” Condition B, however, is a matter of opinion. Moral realists and moral anti-realists can agree that the car-eater, the self-torturer, and the anorexic are acting irrationally. They merely disagree on whether there is an objective reason not to act irrationally. So no, moral anti-realists are not obligated to endorse crazy statements like, “Torturing yourself for no reason is rational.” Torturing yourself for no reason might be either good or evil — that is a subjective judgement — but it is objectively irrational behavior from the perspective of a creature who wants to minimize their own suffering.

In short, moral anti-realists can still believe in rationality; there is no contradiction there.

Finally, BB offers what I think is his strongest argument for moral realism: It is intuitive, and barring a good reason not to, we should believe in intuitive things.

The way we know these things is by relying on appearances. We think about the subject and it appears that, say, a thing can’t both be a way and not be that way at the same time in the same sense. Our foundational beliefs are justified on the basis of them seeming right.

Visual experience is a good analogy here. When I see a table, I think there really is a table. Because it appears that there’s a table, I think I’m justified in believing there to be one unless given a strong reason to doubt it. Could I be hallucinating? Sure! But unless given a reason to think that I am, I shouldn’t think so.

But just as there are visual appearances, there are intellectual appearances. Just as it appears to me that there’s a table in front of me, it appears to me that it’s wrong to torture babies. Just as I should think there’s a table absent a good reason to doubt it, I should think it’s wrong to torture babies. In fact, I should be more confident in the wrongness of torturing babies, because that seems less likely to be the result of error. It seems more likely I’m hallucinating a table than that I’m wrong about the wrongness of baby torture.

People often object to relying on intuitions. But I’m curious how they get their foundational beliefs. One’s most basic beliefs always seem justified by the fact that they seem right. Such people should explain how they know that the physical world exists, the laws of non-contradiction and identity are true, the greater is greater than the lesser, something can’t have a color without a shape, and that the cumulative case for either atheism or theism is better than the other without relying at all on how things seem.

Now, people point out that our intuitions conflict and are historically contingent. But intuitionists don’t say that intuitions are infallible or that we should never revise them in light of evidence. We say that intuitions are the starting point on which you build your beliefs, but that upon learning new things, you should still obviously update your beliefs. Showing intuitions go wrong in various cases tells us nothing about their general reliability. It would be like saying you can’t trust that there’s a table in front of you because people sometimes hallucinate.

I think that some of our natural intuitions as humans (like our visual intuitions and basic numerical intuitions) are true, while some of our natural intuitions (especially our moral / spiritual intuitions) are not. This is because only some of our intuitions can be empirically tested, whereas others cannot.

Our intuitions are most obviously testable when they concern physical facts — e.g. “There is a table in front of me.” If I think there is a table in front of me, I can easily check if I’m right by reaching out and grabbing it, or by trying to place something on top of it. I know my intuition that “If I see a table, there really is a table and I’m not hallucinating,” is reliable because 99.99% of the time that I’ve seen tables, there really have been tables. And even if I can’t directly test whether a table is there (e.g. because it’s out of my reach or behind a pane of glass), I can still be confident that my eyes aren’t deceiving me because my eyes did not deceive me in any of the testable cases.

Even many of our non-physical intuitions are testable. For instance, mathematical intuitions can be tested. If I believe that 8 - 3 = 5, then one way I can test that is to stuff a bag with 8 apples, take 3 apples out, and then open the bag again to count how many apples are left. If I am correct, then I should see 5 apples. Or take logical facts. If I believe that “if P, then Q” is a true statement, then I can check its truthfulness by assessing situations where P is true. If I find a situation where P is true but not Q, then I know that the statement is wrong; if, in every situation I check where P is true, Q is also true, then I have a strong reason to believe that my statement is true. Or take epistemic facts like “it’s irrational to believe what’s opposed by the evidence”. I can test this by considering two groups of people: Group A believes things that are opposed by evidence, and Group B does not. I can then ask both groups to make predictions about the world, and compare which group is more correct. If my epistemic fact is correct, then Group B should be right more often than Group A. In short, even if an intuition concerns non-physical things like math and logic, it might still have implications for the physical world; these implications can then be tested empirically, and their truthfulness can provide strong evidence either for or against the underlying intuition.

More broadly, an epistemic worldview can be tested by asking, “What are its believers able to accomplish?” Accurate epistemic worldviews will generally enable their believers to accomplish a bunch of impressive things, while inaccurate epistemic worldviews will generally stymie their believers and prohibit them from accomplishing their goals. For instance, modern physics has enabled its adherents to build rockets that reach the moon, a feat previously unheard of in all of human history. This provides strong evidence for the truthfulness of modern physics.

However, moral claims are not empirically testable. There is no way to test whether it’s wrong to torture people. There is no way to test whether it’s wrong to smash a baby in the head with a hammer. There is no way to test whether it’s wrong to club seals. Let’s say I believe that the pinnacle of morality involves me going up to the Arctic Circle and clubbing as many seals to death as possible, and let’s say you disagree with me. There is no way for a neutral third party to objectively determine which of us is correct.^[1]

The relevant divide for me is not whether an intuition concerns physical facts or not; BB correctly argues that humans have many accurate non-physical intuitions. Rather, the relevant divide for me is whether an intuition is testable or not. You might object: Why testability? Isn’t that a totally arbitrary condition? I don’t think so! Testability is a necessary prerequisite for natural (or artificial) selection to occur. So it makes sense that evolution would optimize humans to have very accurate testable intuitions, but not to have accurate non-testable intuitions.

Historically, any creature with poor visual abilities (failing to see things that are there, or frequently hallucinating things that aren’t there) would have trouble surviving. So, humans developed accurate visual abilities. Historically, any human with poor logical abilities would have a hard time planning for the future, and would therefore be outcompeted by a human with better logical abilities. Therefore, humans developed (generally) accurate logical intuitions.

But what is the mechanism by which humans would develop accurate moral intuitions? A believer in false moral statements may be just as reproductively successful as a believer in true moral statements. If anything, people afflicted by social-desirability bias may be more reproductively successful than people not afflicted by SDB. So it’s totally possible that humans’ most widely and strongly held moral intuitions are false, because there is no way for false moral intuition-havers to be weeded out of the population.

Unlike most other human intuitions, moral intuitions cannot be tested. Therefore, evolution would not have selected us to be good at moral intuition-making. Therefore, I do not view the fact that humans have strong moral intuitions as evidence for moral realism.

So to summarize Bentham’s Bulldog’s arguments and my counters to them:

1. BB claims that moral anti-realism is “weird”. I agree, but as BB himself has argued in the past, weird things can still be true.
2. BB claims that because moral claims and factual claims are linguistically the same (they’re both propositions), therefore moral claims must be objective. I claim that this linguistic similarity might just be a weird quirk of English, without any deeper significance than that.
3. BB claims that moral anti-realists are forced to accept crazy statements like, “Torturing yourself for no reason is rational.” I claim that he is wrong because he misunderstands what moral anti-realists actually believe.
4. BB claims that moral realism is intuitive, and barring a good reason not to, we should believe in intuitive things. I claim that this is wrong because unlike most other human intuitions, moral intuitions are not testable.

Since none of BB’s arguments are convincing to me, I am not convinced that morality is objective.

That being said, I’m also not convinced that morality isn’t objective. Here’s the most plausible account, in my mind, for how moral realism could be true: There exists a God, and this God decided to establish a system of morality. As BB says, “If God exists and wants us to know the truth about morality, it makes sense that we’d have true moral beliefs and set up the world such that the evolutionary process produces us with true moral beliefs.” I’m not sure whether God exists or not. And even if God does exist, it does not necessarily follow that God would be moral, or that God would want us to have accurate moral intuitions. But conditional on theism being true, I think that moral realism is plausible.

Conditional on atheism being true, I think that moral realism is very implausible. Without any kind of higher being to decide between right and wrong, I think it is very hard for atheists to claim that anything is morally correct or incorrect in any objective sense.

1. ^{^}

   That’s not to say that there is no way at all to objectively compare different moral systems. For instance, we can answer the question “Is System A or System B better at promoting social harmony?” by looking at societies where System A is widely believed, and societies where System B is widely believed, and comparing which of those societies has less civil strife. But then we’d still have to answer the question, “Is promoting social harmony actually a good thing?” And that question is still not testable.