MORAL REALISM: A NATURALISTIC PERSPECTIVE Michael Devitt Croatian Journal of Philosophy 2 (2002): 1-15 I propose to sketch a defense of moral realism from a naturalistic perspective. My naturalism has two quite distinct aspects. Its epistemological (and methodological) aspect is the view that there is only one way of knowing, the empirical way that is the basis of science. Its metaphysical aspect is that all facts must ultimately depend on physical facts. I shall say a little more about this naturalism later. I start by considering what moral realism is. Next I give some reasons for believing it. Then I consider four arguments against it. I conclude with some thoughts on fulfilling the naturalistic project. 1. WHAT IS MORAL REALISM? What is moral realism? This question is more difficult and controversial than one might have expected. My first attempt at an answer is: MR1: There are objective moral facts. This answer has a problem which I will address soon. But many will think that my answer has another problem: it is entirely nonsemantic. Compare it with the following, more fashionable, answer from Geoffrey Sayre-McCord: Wherever it is found...realism involves embracing just two theses: (1) the claims in question, when literally construed, are literally true or false (cognitivism), and (2) some are literally true. Nothing more. (1988c: 5) What is it for something to be "literally construed"? To answer this, Sayre-McCord thinks, we need a theory of meaning (1991: 157). So on his view the realism debate is all about truth and meaning. Consider, next, the following from Peter Railton: A chief cause of the changing character of the realism dispute over time has been changes in philosophical approaches to language and meaning...philosophers increasingly are clear that questions about meaning are intimately bound up with questions of metaphysics, epistemology, mind, empirical science, and even rationality and evaluation. (1996: 49-50)1 Once again, theories of meaning are taken to be central to realism debates. Sayre-McCord and Railton are particularly concerned with the debate over moral realism but their remarks are quite general. Their semantic view of realism debates is typical. Consider, for example, Jarrett Leplin's editorial introduction to a collection of papers on scientific realism. He lists ten "characteristic realist claims" (1984b: 1-2). Nearly all of these are about the 1See also: Boyd 1988: 182; Mason 1988: 413; Nagel 1986: 139. 1 truth and reference of theories. Not one is straightforwardly metaphysical.2 The popularity of these views of realism debates is surprising. One would have thought that these debates are metaphysical, concerned with what the world is like, not with our talk about the world. John Mackie, another unfashionable Australian, has it right: he describes his opposition to moral realism as "an ontological thesis, not a linguistic or conceptual one" (1988: 95). What he is opposed to is a thesis about moral reality, along the lines of MR1. The debate over this has almost nothing to do with any theses about meaning or truth. In Realism and Truth, (1997: ch. 4 and sec. A.2) I have argued that semantic issues have almost nothing to do with the debate over realism about the external world. I shall briefly apply this argument to the moral realism debate. On the one hand, MR1 does not entail any theory of truth or meaning at all, as is obvious at a glance. In particular MR1 does not entail a correspondence theory of truth for moral statements. On the other hand, no theory of meaning or truth entails MR1. Not only is MR1 independent of any doctrine of truth, it does not even use the truth term (e.g. `true') to state moral realism (cf. Sayre-McCord). This is not to say that there is anything "wrong" with using the truth term for this purpose. We can simply exploit the "disquotational" property of the term to redefine moral realism as: MR1*: There are moral statements that are objectively true. But this exploitation of the disquotational property to "semantically ascend" does not make moral realism semantic (else every doctrine could be made semantic); it does not change the subject matter at all. It does not involve commitment to the correspondence theory of truth, nor to any other theory. Indeed, it is compatible with a deflationary view of truth according to which, roughly, there is nothing to truth.3 Why has the metaphysical issue been conflated with semantic issues? This is a difficult question but part of the answer is surely the "linguistic turn" in twentieth century philosophy. At its most extreme, this turn treats all philosophical issues as about language. Another part of the answer is the dominence of worries about noncognitivism. For noncognitivism seems to be a doctrine that is both antirealist and primarily semantic. I shall discuss noncognitivism in a moment. Some other examples: Hesse 1967: 407; Hooker 1974: 409; Papineau 1979: 126; Ellis 1979: 28; Boyd 1984: 41-2; Miller 1987; Fales 1988: 253-4; Jennings 1989: 240; Matheson 1989; Kitcher 1993; Brown 1994. 2 3 For a less rough account of deflationary truth, see my 2000a (or 2000b, an expanded version). 2 I claim that no semantic doctrine is in any way constitutive of moral realism. This is not to claim that there is no evidential connection between the two sorts of doctrines. Indeed, I favor the Duhem-Quine view that, roughly, everything is evidentially connected to everything else. So the possibility remains that semantic doctrines might be used as evidence against moral realism. But arguments that proceed in this direction should give us pause. Suppose, as I do (section 2), that moral realism is prima facie plausible. Should we have sufficient confidence in any semantic doctrine to allow it to undermine moral realism? Perhaps realism could be undermined in other ways - and we shall soon consider some possibilities - but could a semantic doctrine alone do the trick? A Moorean response is appropriate: moral realism is much more firmly based than any semantic doctrine that is thought to undermine it. We have started the argument in the wrong place: rather than using the semantic doctrine as evidence against realism, we should use realism as evidence against the doctrine. We should, as I like to say, "put metaphysics first". Naturalism supports this Moorean response. The semantic doctrines that feature in arguments against realism are typically presented as if they were known a priori. But the epistemological aspect of naturalism rejects a priori knowledge altogether: philosophy becomes continuous with science. 4 And the troubling semantic doctrines have no special status: they are simply some among many empirical hypotheses about the world we live in. As such, they do not compare in evidential support with moral realism. Experience has taught us a great deal about what is good and right, but rather little about the language we use to talk of the good and the right. So semantics is just the wrong place to start the argument.5 I have been arguing about what moral realism is not, it is not a semantic doctrine. It is time to say more about what it is. 4A particularly important consideration against the a priori, in my view (1996a: 2.2), is the lack of anything close to a satisfactory explanation of a nonempirical way of knowing. We are told what this way of knowing is not - it is not the empirical way of deriving knowledge from experience - but we are not told what it is. Rey 1998 and Field 1998 have a more tolerant view of the a priori. My 1998 is a response. 5 It follows that the sweeping dismissal of naturalistic moral realism by Terence Horgan and Mark Timmons (1990/91, 1992a, 1992b) on the basis of semantic arguments is deeply misguided. We do not know nearly enough about the semantics of moral terms on Earth, let alone on their Moral Twin Earth, to put this sort of trust in such arguments. The objection is not, of course, to semantic arguments per se, but to ones that are supposed to establish metaphysical conclusions. 3 This realism, like most others, has two dimensions, an existence dimension and an independence dimension (1997: ch. 2). The rough idea of the independence dimension is that moral reality is mind independent. MR1 captures this in its talk of moral facts being "objective". They are objective in that they are not constituted by our opinions, by our feelings, by our social conventions, by the synthesizing power of the mind, nor by our imposition of concepts, theories, or languages. All varieties of subjectivism and relativism reject the independence dimension of MR1. MR1 captures the existence dimension in its commitment to moral facts. And this is its problem. Must the moral realist really commit herself to facts, what Quine would regard as "creatures of darkness"? Surely not. Surely a person could be a moral realist whatever her position on the controversial matter of the ontological status of facts. Can we then take the talk of facts as a mere manner of speaking, convenient, but to be paraphrased away when the chips are down? We can indeed: MR2: There are people and acts that are objectively morally good, bad, honest, deceitful, kind, unkind etc (virtues and vices); acts that one objectively ought and ought not to perform (duties); people who are objectively morally entitled to privacy, to a say in their lives, etc. (rights). There is no relevant controversy over the existence of people and acts. So MR2 puts the controversy where it belongs: over whether some people are objectively honest, over whether some acts are objectively ones we ought to perform, and so on. Still, MR1's talk of facts yields a very convenient shorthand. So I shall continue to use that talk in the knowledge that it can always be paraphrased away along the lines of MR2 when necessary. Mackie's famous "error theory" rejects the existence dimension of MR1 and MR2. He thinks that there are no moral facts. It would be nice if we could rest with MR2 as our account of moral realism. But we cannot: noncognitivism forces us to say more. I have argued that moral realism is not a semantic issue. This view seems to be threatened by noncognitivism which, as I have already remarked, seems to be both antirealist and semantic. An analogous threat comes from other forms of "nonfactualism", for example, `projectivism', and Simon Blackburn's `quasi-realism' (1984, 1993a, 1993b). Indeed, Sayre-McCord and many others clearly take the apparently semantic nature of noncognitivism as supporting their semantic view of the realism issue. I have discussed this matter at length elsewhere (1996b, 1997: A.3-A.10). I summarize. The usual characterizations of noncognitivism are along the following lines. It is said to be the view that moral predicates do not denote, correspond to, etc., properties. 6 Or it is the 6 See, e.g., Ayer 1952: 89; Sayre-McCord 1988c: 7; Boghossian 4 view that the indicative sentences in moral discourse are not assertions or statements, 7 are not factual or descriptive, 8 are not truth-conditional, 9 and do not correspond to facts. 10 Rather, those sentences have other functions like expressing attitudes or emotions, or prescribing norms or rules; 11 for example, in the crudest version, to say "x is good" is to say "Hurrah for x!" and to say "x is bad" is to say "Boo to x!". So, at first sight, noncognitivism does seem to be a semantic doctrine, a doctrine about what sentences mean and predicates refer to. Yet, when we look a little closer, we see that a certain metaphysical doctrine is implicit in the answers, the view that there are no moral properties 12 or facts. 13 Indeed, it would be surprising if noncognitivism did not have an implicit metaphysics. For the main motivation for noncognitivism's special treatment of moral language must come from the view that moral reality is somehow problematic or defective. Why else would you treat moral language differently, claiming that moral predicates do not refer and that what seem to be assertions are not really? Despite the focus on semantics in describing noncognitivism, at bottom it must be a metaphysical doctrine. What doctrine? Unfortunately, the lack of attention to its metaphysics has led to 1990a: 157-161; 166; 1990b: 266. 7See, e.g., Ayer 1952: 103; Haldane and Wright 1993b: 11; Hale 1993: 337. See, e.g., Ayer 1952: 107; Wright 1988: 29; Sayre-McCord 1988c: 4; Blackburn 1993a: 3, 60; Haldane and Wright 1993b: 11-12. 8 See, e.g., Ayer 1952: 103, 107; Sayre-McCord 1988c: 5; Boghossian 1990a: 160-1, 164; 1990b: 266; Blackburn 1993a: 60; Hale 1993: 337, 340; Haldane and Wright 1993b: 11; 9 See, e.g., Wright 1988: 29; Sayre-McCord 1988b: Boghossian 1990a: 160; Haldane and Wright 1993b: 12. 10 ix-x; 11 See, e.g., Ayer 1952: 103, 107; Sayre-McCord 1988c: 4, 8; Boghossian 1990a: 160; Blackburn 1993a: 3, 60; 1993b: 365; Hale 1993: 337; Haldane and Wright 1993b: 11. Strictly speaking these accounts of noncognitivism need qualification because the sentences in question may be partly assertions, partly truthconditional, and partly factual. We can ignore the qualification. See, e.g., Ayer 1952: 89; Boghossian 1990a: 157-9, 161-2; Blackburn 1993a: 3. 12 13 See particularly Wright 1988: 29-30; Sayre-McCord 1988b: ixx, 4; Blackburn 1993a: 3, 52, 57; Hale 1993: 337; Railton 1993: 280. 5 a very unsatisfactory answer: that there are no moral properties or facts. Our discussion of MR1 indicates the problem. The general issue of realism about properties or facts must be independent of the issue of moral realism. Thus it surely has to be possible for a nominalist who denies properties and facts altogether to be a moral realist. We solved this problem with MR2 by taking talk of facts as convenient shorthand for talk of people and acts. But this solution does not work here: noncognitivists are likely to accept MR2, reinterpreting its language so that it involves no commitment to a moral reality. They are likely to agree, say, that some people are objectively honest but interpret this as simply an expression of emotion, or whatever. Noncognitivists seem to talk like moral realists. MR2 does not take adequate notice of noncognitivism. We need a characterization of moral realism that makes the underlying metaphysics of noncognitivism antirealist. This characterization is not easy to find. We need to (i) find some language that is not just apparently factual but is treated by the noncognitivist as really factual; (ii) examine noncognitivist statements using that language to find ones that disagree with the statements of moral realists. I argue that we should see noncognitivists as denying: (1) realist explanations of the nature of moral reality - for example, in virtue of what Alice is honest; and (2) realist claims about the causal role of that reality - for example, that it was because Hitler was depraved that millions died. This yields my final attempt at characterizing moral realism: MR3: There are people and acts that are objectively morally good, bad, honest, deceitful, kind, unkind etc (virtues and vices); acts that one objectively ought and ought not to perform (duties); people who are objectively morally entitled to privacy, to a say in their lives, etc. (rights). That this is so is open to explanation and plays a role in causal explanations.14 14 Sadly, there is a flaw in this characterization. There are doubtless some atypical moral realists who reject MR3 because they join the noncognitivists in denying the need for an explanation of moral reality and in denying that this reality has any causal role: moral reality is inexplicable and epiphenomenal. Such a position is deeply antinaturalist, of course. It is also hard to motivate: Why believe in a goodness that can do nothing and cannot be explained? Still, the position is possible. So far as I can see this atypical moral realism cannot be distinguished from noncognitivism at the metaphysical level. It differs only at the semantic level in having a standard semantics for `good'. So it differs in accepting MR2 without reinterpreting it to remove its commitment to a moral reality. The noncognitivist and the atypical moral realist agree that there is no moral reality with an explicable nature and a causal role. Despite this failure, the atypical realist holds that there 6 Or, returning to our convenient manner of speaking, we can say briefly: there are objective moral facts that are open to explanation and play roles in causal explanations. 2. WHY BELIEVE IT? Why should we believe moral realism? It is prima facie plausible. It is a central part of the folk view of the world and, until recently (before the postmodernist plague), the social science view. Moral explanations seem to work: explanations adverting to moral facts seem to be successful; the cruelty of one person is as explanatory of behavior as is the cleverness of another. Moral realism makes sense of moral argument and moral disagreement. In light of all this, we should give it up only in the face of powerful arguments. I shall look critically at several arguments against moral realism in the next section. The most worrying argument I shall consider in the last section. This is the argument that moral realism cannot be fitted into a naturalistic world view. How do moral facts relate to facts about people, society and the world in general? The answer must be that moral facts are part of the natural world. And this amounts to claiming that these facts must ultimately depend on the facts of physics, just as do the facts of chemistry, biology and psychology. The demand here is not for some crude reduction. The idea is rather that there is a heirarchy of "levels" of facts, each to a degree autonomous, and yet each supervening on a "lower" level until we reach physics. The naturalistic project is then to show that moral facts supervene somehow on psychological and social facts, particularly on the psychological and social facts exemplified in humans and their societies. There is no need to give a priori naturalistic "definitions" of moral terms, defining `x is good' as `x is N', thus committing "the naturalistic fallacy". So there is no worry with Moore's open question: "Is being N good?". The thesis that a moral fact supervenes on certain nonmoral facts will not be knowable a priori; it is an empirical thesis. So, the Naturalistic Project is not only metaphysically naturalistic but also epistemologically naturalistic. Finally, one very good reason for moral realism is the implausibility of all alternatives. The error theory has the problem of all eliminativism: denying a commonly accepted reality. Such a denial is surely sometimes right - for example, atheism but it is usually difficult to support and is in the case of morals. All versions of subjectivism and relativism have wellknown difficulties in accounting for central features of moral is a moral reality: it is simply inexplicable and epiphenomenal. In contrast, the failure motivates the noncognitivist to reject moral reality altogether by revising the semantics for what would otherwise be straightforward statements of moral realism. 7 life, moral disagreement and argument. Noncognitivism cannot account for moral explanations and has not yet succeeded in giving a convincing semantics for complex sentences with moral parts, particularly for conditionals ("If breaking promises is wrong then Fred should have done A") In sum, moral realism is the best theory in town. 3. ARGUMENTS AGAINST The Argument from Queerness Perhaps the most popular argument against naturalistic moral realism arises from the idea that moral judgments are "partly prescriptive, or directive or action-guiding" "just knowing [moral realities] or `seeing' them will not merely tell men what to do but will ensure that they do it, overruling any contrary inclinations" (Mackie 1988: 101). Mackie summarizes Plato's view as follows: "The Form of the Good is such that knowledge of it provides the knower with both a direction and an overriding motive" "the end has to-be-pursuedness built into it" (p. 112). Similar views are to be found in Kant and Sidgwick. The argument against moral realism is then that any fact tied in this way to actions is, as Mackie nicely puts it, "queer". How could this sort of queer fact be accommodated by naturalism? In responding we need to distinguish two claims: (i) the claim that awareness of the fact necessarily gives a reason for action because the fact is prescriptive and normative; (ii) the claim that awareness of the fact necessarily motivates action, causing feelings and desires that are usually overriding, leading to an intention to act, so that the agent will normally act morally. Stephen Darwell has called this view judgment internalism. Railton describes it as follows: "a moral judgment J can sincerely be made or asserted only by someone who is (or believes himself to be) motivated to some extent either to act in accord with J or or to feel guilty for failing to do so" (1996: 62) Claim (i) is no problem for naturalism. What it describes is the categorical nature of moral reasons. "Why ought I to do what I ought to, do what is right, and advance the good?" is a question internal to morals, a moral question, and is answered within morals. Moral facts are intrinsically normative. There is no task of naturalizing their normativity over and above the task of naturalizing their nature. Claim (ii) ties moral facts essentially to moral feelings. If those facts were so tied, they would indeed be queer. But why believe they are? There is a correlation - an imperfect one between awareness of a moral fact and having certain desires that move a person to act. But it is indeed bizarre to think that it is part of the very nature of the fact that it moves people to act. Rather, the correlation between awareness and desire to act is an independent psychological fact that we explain scientifically: presumably, this response to moral facts is partly innate, partly a result of education. Given the obvious advantages to the human 8 species of this response it would not be surprising if it were partly an adaptation. And we are all familiar with the effort that good parents put into bringing up their children to be morally sensitive. So genetically normal well-brought up people tend to respond in the appropriate way to moral facts. This independence of moral facts from moral feelings yields a much more plausible view of the phenomena of (a) immorality, (b) amorality, and (c) ordinary human moral fallibility, than the alternative view. Consider how the alternative view that awareness of moral facts is essentially motivating - call this "the queer view" must deal with these phenomena? (a) It could say that the immoral are simply unaware of the facts that would motivate moral behavior. But the evidence of what immoral people say shows that this is not generally the case; think of many cases of dishonesty and theft. Where the immoral person is clearly aware of the moral facts, the queer view must hold that the person is emotionally torn, with an impulse to do good overwhelmed by some other desire. But this is not psychologically plausible as a generalization: much immorality is not accompanied by guilt or shame, for example. (b) The queer view does not have the option of seeing the amoral as emotionally torn, for the very essence of amorality is to be unconcerned with morals. So the view must be that the amoral are simply unaware of the moral facts. But again, the evidence of what people say goes against this. The main failing of the amoral is not that they are unaware of the moral but that they are unmoved by it. (c) Finally, the phenomena of the immoral and amoral are simple extreme examples of the phenomena of human beings, aside from a few saints perhaps. Every now and then, most of us recognize something we ought to do whilst remaining sadly unmoved to do it: "I know I ought to...but..." In contrast, the independence view can handle these cases with ease, looking to nature and nurture for psychological explanations of these various moral failings: "he was born evil"; "she wasn't properly brought up"; and so on. Richard Boyd has suggested, plausibly, that these failings are tied to a lack of sympathy (1988: 215). I would prefer to talk of empathy. A person who is unable to "put himself in another's shoes" is likely to lack moral feelings. Empathy makes "moral facts motivationally relevant" (p. 216). Some people, for whatever reason, lack this empathy and hence lack a moral sensibility. The argument from relativity Another popular argument against moral realism attends to moral diversity and disagreement. Mackie talks of the "well-known variation in moral codes from one society to another and from one period to another"; we think of slavery, cannibalism, and infanticide. There are differences within contemporary societies over sex, abortion, capital punishment, and vegetarianism. Mackie claims that these differences do not seem to come from "speculative inferences or explanatory hypotheses based on inadequate evidence"; rather they come from "adherence to and 9 participation in different ways of life" (1988: 109) Before defending realism from this criticism, let me take the attack to its rivals. A question that has been insufficiently addressed is: How does antirealism explain the similarity in moral codes: think of the agreement about murder, theft, honesty, kindness, trustworthiness, incest, etc.? The realist thinks that this similarlity arises from our responding to the objective moral facts. Antirealism must dismiss this. (a) It is tempting for the antirealist to appeal to the social efficaciousness of these codes. But this appeal is in danger of collapsing into realism. (b) Presumably the antirealist will appeal to a common human nature, in particular, common moral feelings, leading to similar but not identical moral codes. That moral nature, not moral reality, is the cause of what is common in the codes. And the cause of differences are culturally explained differences in moral feelings. But this raises a deep question: How do we get from the feelings to the codes, from having certain feelings when observing theft to believing that theft is wrong? Why don't we just express our moral feelings by saying "Boo!" or "Hoorah!"? Or perhaps state our feelings: "I feel pleased with you" or "What you are doing disgusts me"? Antirealists respond to this, drawing on Hume, by talking of "the projection or objectification of moral attitudes" (Mackie 1988: 114). But how convincing is this psychological story? In any case, several things can be said in defense of moral realism from the relativity argument. (i) Since moral facts supervene on other facts, a difference of moral opinion between two cultures may be explicable by a difference in those other facts; for example, by the difference between a hunter-gatherer society and a capitalist one. (ii) Even where there are no differences in the facts on which morals supervenes, there are several reasons why people might differ in their moral opinions. (a) The supervention is complicated and so moral facts may often be hard to discern. Discerning them is aided by education in theory and the arts, an education that may differ greatly between individuals and cultures. Thus it is helpful to be aware of social "experiments" with utopianism, communism, fascism, democracy, etc., which throw light on the human potential for good and evil. And it is helpful to be educated about the psychology of slaves, women, babies, workers, foreigners, animals, etc. (b) There may be socially induced distortions in views about the moral facts and the facts on which they supervene: ruling groups often have an interest in instilling false moral views about, for example, a neighboring culture. (c) Similarly, a person may have an interest in not acknowledging a moral fact leading to what Judith Thomson calls "walling off" (Harman and Thomson 1996: 205). (iii) There may be indeterminacy arising from clashes between morally relevant facts. Similarly, there may be indeterminacy in epistemology arising from clashes between epistemically relevant facts. This sort of indeterminacy yields "hard cases". 10 The argument from explanation Gilbert Harman has pointed out that "you need to make assumptions about certain physical facts to explain the occurrence of the observations that support a scientific theory" (1988: 121). He claims that the situation is different in ethics: there is no "obvious reason to assume anything about `moral facts'"; "the truth or falsity of the moral observation seems to be completely irrelevant to any reasonable explanation of why that observation was made"; there is no way the "actual rightness or wrongness of a given situation can have any effect on your perceptual apparatus" (p. 122). Nicholas Sturgeon has responded that, on the contrary, "Hitler's moral depravity...forms part of a reasonable explanation of why we believe he was depraved" (1988: 234). Unless you assume for some other reason that there are no moral facts, this seems to be a plausible and acceptable explanation. And moral facts explain things other than our moral beliefs: history and biography are full of explanations in terms of moral character. Consider Harman's own example: the wrongness of the hoodlums setting fire to the cat is not irrelevant to the explanation of your judgment. If, as the naturalist thinks, wrongness supervenes on some more basic nonmoral properties and the act had not been wrong, then the more basic properties would have been absent and you might well not have made your judgment. Of course, one could deny the supervention, but that is different objection. It is important to see that Harman is not entitled to assume that there is no supervention. He does seem to assume that there is none in the following contrast with science: "the physicist thinks he understands how the passage of a proton through the apparatus might explain a vapor trial" (1986: 64); we do not have the analogous understanding in moral case. I take his point to be that we understand the mechanisms by which the proton acts on the observer, but not the mechanisms by which the moral facts do. But if moral properties supervene on more basic nonmoral ones, then those ones will supply the mechanisms. Epistemological Arguments 1. Harman starts his book with the question: "Can moral principles be tested and confirmed in the way scientific principles can?" (1988: 119). He thinks not. 2. A little later he asks: "Can you ever perceive the rightness or wrongness of what he does?" (p. 120); for example, setting light to a cat. Again he thinks not. Related to this, Mackie claims that our awareness of moral facts "would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition". This view was embraced, of course, by the intuitionists who are now rather unfashionable. Mackie goes on: "intuitionism makes unpalatably plain what other forms of objectivism wrap up: (1988: 111) Sturgeon's response to point 1 is good. He appeals to the Duhem-Quine thesis: scientific principles cannot be tested in isolation either. In both cases we can derive empirical 11 consequences if we include background assumptions (1988: 231). Harman himself shows how we could test, "It is wrong to cause unnecessary pain to animals": For Alfred to hit his cat with stick would be for Alfred to cause unnecessary pain to an animal; Alfred will not do anything wrong (1986: 59). So we predict we will not observe Alfred hitting the cat with a stick. If we do, some assumption will have to go. Consider also how "We live in a morally decent neighborhood" is tested by observing Harman's hoodlums burning the cat. Consider the many falsifications of "Hitler is morally admirable". Consider the standard procedure in applied ethics where principles are tested with examples. Concerning 2, there is no special problem about observing moral facts unless one assumes that they do not supervene on more basic facts, an assumption that would beg the question against the realist. We may straightforwardly observe the basic facts (people dying, living in squalor, etc), or we may observe the symptoms of the more basic facts (of pain, of intentions, of character etc). We have a rough idea of the way moral facts supervene on these; for example, on the pain of the burning cat, on the intentions of the hoodlums. In these respects the situation is similar to many case of supervening facts. Thus, we feel entitled to talk of observing social facts on the strength of observing more basic facts on which they supervene. Of course the observations of moral facts are theory-laden. But so are the observations of any fact. Any observation we make is influenced by background theory and opinion to some degree or other; for example, by the opinion that we are not under the influence of an hallucinary drug. This theory-ladenness is thoroughly established in philosophy of science and psychology. As Boyd says, moral intuitions are just like the "theory-determined intuitions in science, which the scientific realist takes to be examples of epistemically reliable trained judgments" (1988: 200). FULFILLING THE NATURALISTIC PROJECT I will conclude with some brief and inadequate suggestions for the naturalistic project, drawing on Boyd and Railton. These suggestions do not amount to much more than gestures at the start of the project. But, first, how worried should the moral realist be about the incomplete state of the project? Is this a sufficient reason for withholding belief in moral realism? As the circumstances stand, I think not. Of course were circumstances different, it might well be rational to withhold belief: (i) If there were other persuasive reasons against moral realism. But I have just argued that there are not. (ii) If moral attributions were not a success, if moral explanations did not work. But the explanations are a success. (iii) If there were persuasive alternatives to moral realism. But I have claimed that there are not. (iv) Finally, and most pertinent, if we had no idea how the 12 naturalistic project might be fulfilled or, worse, good reason to think it could not be. But this is very far from the case. We already have a good idea of the psychological and social facts that are salient for morality. We know where to look for the facts that underlie morality. Withholding belief in moral realism whilst awaiting its naturalization would be no more appropriate than would have been withholding belief in Mendelian genetics whilst awaiting molecular genetics. All this having been said, it is worrying that we have made so little progress on the naturalistic project. Still, we do have some interesting ideas for advancing the project. Consider Boyd's views. Boyd sets out to explain moral goodness. He roughly identifies a number of "human goods". He sees these goods as "homeostatically clustered" in that they are united by causal mechanisms. Something is good to the extent that it fosters them (1988: 203). Railton starts by appealing to people's interests to explain an instrumental rationality from an individual's point of view: rational behavior furthers those interests. Then he develops this to yield a theory of moral norms: "rationality not from the point of view of any particular individual, but from what might be called a social point of view" (1986: 190). So he offers "an explanatory theory that uses the notion of what is more or less rational from a social point of view" (p. 196): "what is morally best...[is] what is instrumentally rational from a social point of view" (p. 200). In brief, Boyd appeals to human goods and Railton to human interests. These approaches are naturalistically acceptable and seem promising. I have argued for a nonsemantic, purely metaphysical, view of the nature of moral realism. 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