To have an objective basis for our sense of right and wrong is to have moral
foundations that exist independently from human reactions and subjectivity. This is
what is a called a definitive right and wrong, such that, with such foundations, ethical
judgments can be made instantaneously by simply measuring their proximity to
these absolute moral boundaries. The question therefore makes two separate yet
related claims: that such an objective moral property exists, and that it guides our
senses of right and wrong universally. I will first establish that our own moral
intuitions are the only objective and evaluative property of moral knowledge, and
then prove that intuitions in fact should be our standard of ethical truths with a
pragmatist justification, due to its counter-intuitive objectivity.
Perhaps at first glance we are inclined to believe that the only way for an objective
moral standard to exist is that it belongs to the natural world free from the
contamination of human reactions. This is the view of moral naturalism that simply
posits morality is a natural property we are born with. However, G. E. Moore’s Open
Question Argument already defeats the central assumption of moral naturalism, the
idea that “good” can be reduced to non-evaluative facts about the world. The
statement “good is pleasure” does not carry the same meaning as “good is good”,
and therefore, there must be another evaluative property of “good” that prevents it
from being equated to pleasure. Furthermore, the fact-value distinction that haunts
moral naturalism has been something the theory is unable to account for. What is a
“fact” of the natural world is definitively different from a “value” that we assign to it on
our own human volition. To deny this would be to deny basic human free will such
that we are enslaved by the external world we live in, rendering the question
irrelevant. Moral naturalism is thus an unconvincing account for if “good” exists.
A.J. Ayer’s emotivism aims to wholly deny the existence of an objective evaluative
property such as ethical truths on the basis that any moral claims are not empirically
verifiable, and as a result, are not meaningful at all. After all, a proposition is only
measured by its truth value. Saying that water is H2O instead of H3O can be verified
by the constituent properties of water containing one oxygen atom and two hydrogen
atoms. However, a statement like "Stalin did nothing wrong” is as empirically
verifiable as “Stalin did nothing right”, given the previously discussed fact-value
distinction that makes “wrongness” and “rightness” absent from the world, different
from the way in which water exists in the world. Thus saying “Stalin did nothing
wrong” has as much truth value as “Stalin did nothing”, which is not helpful to our
ethical understandings. The issue with the non-cognitivist approach, however, is that
the claim “every proposition is only meaningful if it is empirically verifiable” is itself a
proposition that is inherently unverifiable due to the nature of its ubiquity. Moreover,
to the extent that we accept the fact-value distinction, it calls into question that ethics
exist in a realm that has verification systems distinct from the way we verify if water
exists. It is after all possible for us to verify if an action has been consistent with our
moral memories.
At this point, I have shown that moral naturalism has been unconvincing, and that
the statement “If adultery is bad then Clinton should be punished”, after a noncognitivist deconstruction, makes no sense as “if don’t adultery, boo Clinton!” to our
sense of right and wrong. But the fact that we do not accept the above two claims as
sufficient ethical claims shows that there is an external evaluative property of
morality somewhere out there, perhaps our own intuition. Even with the morally
subjectivist outlook of relativism, broad similarities exist across different moral
cultures despite conflicting auxiliary ideals. This suggests that at least on some level
there is a universal pattern of things we deem moral regardless of each other’s
differences in environment, society, and upbringing. Recognising that no metaethical theory is objective in nature either because its objectivity makes it not an
ethical theory (naturalism), its objectivity does not address the existence of ethics at
all (emotivism), or it is not objective (relativism), intuition becomes the one option
that preserves ethical inquiries through our abject gut reactions at the disappointing
lack of moral evidence for the above theories, and at the same time, the most
commonly adopted, such as how most societies deem killing bad. To say that it is
the most objective basis for our sense of right and wrong, however, requires us to
rework the definition of an objective truth to begin with, since the “most” in “most
objective” already implies subjective comparison.
The reality is that consideration for a universal, necessary, and objective definition of
a basic truth is tenuous at best. We cannot be certain if an external world exists in a
way that allows ethics to guide our behaviour in the real world. Hume posits three
theories of justification: an individual proposition about a particular case is justified by
a single instance of observation; a general analytic proposition is justified by mere
thought and the law of non-contradiction; a general synthetic proposition is justified
by past instances of observation and induction. The presence of the external world is
not an individual proposition by definition, and it is not a general analytic proposition
because its refutation is not self-contradictory. To justify the external world’s
existence through induction, is however, circular and thus illogical. Furthermore,
even if the external world exists for sure, there is no way to guarantee truth in it: we
either detect truth using an instrument that has been successful at detecting other
truths in the past, or we do not. To go with the former once again makes us the
victim of the problem of induction; to go with the latter, however, makes the
possibilities of truths and non-truths 50% and 50% each, since it has no track record
of truth production. There is thus no method again to guarantee truth.
This of course does not mean that we should renounce all knowledge claims about
the world and specifically an objective basis of truth that guides our moral behaviour.
After all, this can be one of the many synthetic a priori conditions Kant posited for us
to experience the world in any meaningful way, just like the concepts of space-time
and causality. What this does achieve, however, is an expansion of what we deem
objective enough to determine our sense of right and wrong: given that a universal
and objective ethical truth is largely unattainable, it makes more sense for our
concept of truth to be guided by what is the most useful and accurate at representing
the world and its associated moral behaviours. “Good” thus becomes a concept
grounded in its instrumentality to produce the best outcomes for everyone, and
ethical truths, whose purpose is to facilitate these outcomes, become pragmatist in
nature.
This immediately causes us to then weigh the use of our ethical intuitions as a
normative ethical theory against the obvious utilitarianism, since both are about
ensuring good outcomes. I posit that ethical intuitions are an improvement to
utilitarianism’s problematic consequences. While utilitarians proposed benchmarks
such as intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, and purity, it remains
that these values are tremendously difficult to aggregate representatively such that
even utilitarian decisions may be miscalculated to deplete one’s overall happiness,
and worse, produce morally counter-intuitive outcomes. Even though the problem of
killing one healthy patient to harvest his organs to save five people is in principle (of
utilitarianism) no different from pulling the lever to kill one instead of five people,
even utilitarians irk at the first problem in a way that they would not for the second
problem. This shows that intuition still plays an unsustitutable role in ascertaining our
moral behaviours, and more importantly, offers more moral fluidity to more effectively
navigate around nuanced ethical problems that do not have a clear right and wrong.
Given that our intuitions can also be affected to a degree by our circumstances,
superimposing our own ethical intuitions onto a situation-dependent pragmatist
theory of truth then guides our sense of right and wrong in a way no normative
ethical theory can mimic: it creates the best outcomes for us with a minimised
degree of miscalculation and counter-intuitive consequences. Laws, which explicitly
refer to what is right and wrong, are in fact exemplar of this combination. Laws
against murder are in fact the result of our own collective intuition that abhors killing
and us superimposing it on a real world setting that more people including ourselves
can live longer and happier lives if we are not at risk of being indiscriminately killed.
The basis for our sense of right and wrong is objective in the sense that our intuition
is the most commonly adopted, recognised, and respected as a species, the
benchmark for what our ethical behaviours by virtue of its objective should aspire to.
Given that we cannot have an objective, universal, and necessary truth for the
external world and ethical truths that guide our interactions with it, we either retreat
to the purposelessness of moral nihilism, or embrace a broader definition of
objectivity. This reworked definition of objectivity for right and wrong is best fulfilled
by our ethical intuitions that align with our version of ethical truths.
Zhao Yinglun Alan 18A14, 12+9+5=26
1574 words