Morality is a discipline in philosophy that explores questions like what it means to say whether something is good or bad, what obligations are, whether these duties and values are objective or subjective, or whether claims about values and duties are something even apt to be true. In this series of 4 blog posts, we will aim to accomplish the following tasks:
- Provide a quick introduction to the meta-ethical debate between moral realists and anti-realists.
- Outline the essential teachings of the Catholic Church in her catechism.
- Defend a grammar for moral values.
- Refute the Is-Ought Gap using proper functionalism, Aristotelian teleology, and an indispensability argument.
- Argue that Scotistic Realism better explains how moral obligations exist over Platonism
In this post, I will seek to accomplish my first two aims.
Many questions of ethics are explored and taught in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It teaches:
The natural law is immutable and permanent throughout the variations of history; it subsists under the flux of ideas and customs and supports their progress. The rules that express it remain substantially valid. Even when it is rejected in its very principles, it cannot be destroyed or removed from the heart of man. It always rises again in the life of individuals and societies…
(Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1958)
We read here that the moral law is objective, it is stance independent since it remains regardless of whether or not we reject the moral law. It is also independent of customs and any change of ideas. These laws would also have to consist of true propositions, as we read in paragraph 1954 of the Catechism:
Man participates in the wisdom and goodness of the Creator who gives him mastery over his acts and the ability to govern himself with a view to the true and the good. The natural law expresses the original moral sense which enables man to discern by reason the good and the evil, the truth and the lie…
(CCC, §1954):
To distinguish the truth and the lie of what actions are good and evil, some actions would have to be true for some actions to be good or evil, meaning there are moral truths, in addition to their objectivity.
In ethics, such a theory is considered a form of moral realism. Moral realism is the view that moral claims like ¨you ought not to steal¨ and ¨stealing is bad¨ have the following three properties:
- They are truth-apt
- They can be true or false
- They are not like questions, or demands, or exclamations.
- Rejecting this would make you a moral non-cognitivist.
- Some are true.
- By rejecting this, one would be a moral error theorist and hold all moral claims are false.
- This would mean moral claims are like claims of astrology, and while Karen might claim to be a Leo disposes you more a more social person, such a thing is, unbeknownst to her, a pure fiction.
- They are objective
- meaning they are not true because they depend on anything stance-dependent like attitudes, beliefs, preferences, etc.
By rejecting this, one is a moral subjectivist.
Take the statement “Stealing is wrong”. The non-cognitivist says the statement is more akin to saying “Boo! Stealing!”, or “Don’t Steal!”. The fictionalist says “Stealing is wrong” (as well as “Stealing is right”) are both false, along with every other statement containing a moral term. Lastly, the subjectivist believes “stealing is wrong” is true because of the attitudes, preferences, or desires of a person, society, or even the way human beings are hard-wired to desire their possessions not taken from them for any arbitrary reason.
The Catholic Church teaches us to affirm all these truths, and hold that the natural law, which all men know by reason alone (§1956), is a moral realist understanding and approach to morality. Furthermore, the Catholic understanding of natural law theory holds that the natural law is found in nature since God has placed it “in the heart of man”. This is confirmed in the quote in the catechism from Cicero in his work Republic. Cicero wrote:
For there is a true law: right reason. It is in conformity with nature, is diffused among all men, and is immutable and eternal; its orders summon to duty; its prohibitions turn away from offense …. To replace it with a contrary law is a sacrilege; failure to apply even one of its provisions is forbidden; no one can abrogate it entirely.
Cicero, Republic. III, 22, 33. Cf. CCC, §1956
Notice that rationality points to a law that conforms to something foundational in nature. It is not subjective, but objective. The catechism also reads in paragraph 1955:
…This law is called “natural,” not in reference to the nature of irrational beings, but because reason which decrees it properly belongs to human nature…
CCC, §1955
So, this law is found in our human nature. It is objective, and our capacity for reason points to it. As we progress in this series, I will bring up challenges to Natural law theory, specifically, I will defend it against some objections presented by moral non-naturalists. Moral non-naturalists hold, according to philosopher Michael Ridge:
Moral properties – like wrongness, or rightness – exist and are not identical with or reducible to any natural property or properties in some interesting sense of ‘natural’.
Ridge, “Moral Non-Naturalism”, 2020
One form of moral non-naturalism is moral platonism which holds that truths about morality are abstract objects like mathematical objects. Like how we don’t run into the number 2 on the street, we don’t run into the proposition “stealing is wrong” are transcendent truths that hold no matter how our world itself could have occurred.
As professor Michael Huemer explains:
I understand Platonism as the view that there are some abstract objects (including, especially, universals), which exist necessarily. Universals are that which multiple particular things can have in common—for instance, the sun and lemons are both yellow, so there is a universal, “yellowness,” which is what the sun has in common with lemons. Yellowness as such is not a concrete object; it does not have a particular location, you can not bump into it on the street, and so on. In that sense, it is abstract.
Huemer, “Groundless Morals”, p.155
Moral Platonism is just Platonism applied to moral terms. Huemer goes on:
Realists are often greeted with the question, ‘Where does morality come from?’ But we rarely hear such questions as, ‘Where does arithmetic come from?’ or, ‘Where does the fact that 2 is less than 3 come from?’
How would we answer the last question? I think we would reject the question. 2 just is less than 3; I don’t know what would be meant by that fact ‘coming from’ somewhere. If the question is what caused it to be true, nothing caused it; it is a necessary truth. Maybe the question is just a general demand for explanation: ‘Explain why 2 is less than 3!’ I think there is no explanation. (Or if there is, it would be in terms of some other arithmetical fact that is similarly obvious and itself has no explanation.) But I certainly don’t concede this as a problem. The lack of explanation would only be a problem if 2s being less than 3 were surprising or puzzling for some reason, such that it called for an explanation. It is neither. One who demands explanations of self-evident truths is simply confused about the function of explanation, not philosophically incisive.
Similarly, there is nothing…puzzling that I can see about the fact that pain is bad. So the demand to explain why pain is bad, or to say where the fact that pain is bad ‘comes from’, is simply misguided, and the problem of finding a ‘source’ for this fact is a pseudo-problem.
“Groundless Morals”, p.157
If moral non-naturalism treats moral truths as abstract truths, let moral naturalism treat these truths as truths that depend on something concrete, something with causal power. In my next post, I will show what is wrong with Moore’s open-question argument, and in my final post, explain why platonic ontology fails to act as a sufficient explanation.
Citations
Huemer, Michael. “Groundless Morals.” In A Debate on God and Morality: What is the Best Account of Objective Moral Values and Duties?, edited by Adam Lloyd Johnson, 149-165. New York: Routledge, 2020.
Ridge, Michael. “Moral Non-Naturalism.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Fall 2020. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/moral-non-naturalism/.
Catholic Church. Catechism of the Catholic Church. 2nd ed. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997.Cicero. The Republic. Translated by C. D. Yonge. Accessed June 23, 2024. https://www.attalus.org/cicero/republic3.html.
