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[Lagayascienza]

Philosopher, John L. Mackie, begins the first chapter of his book, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, with a bald assertion:

“There are no objective values.”

He then sets about showing why he believes this must be so.

When I first read this book, I was discomforted, to say the least. At that stage, I had been an atheist for some years but had remained a staunch moral realist. Of course it was true that murder and rape were morally wrong! How could they not be wrong? If they weren’t wrong, then what were they? I just couldn’t take on board the idea that the only thing wrong with murder and rape was that I didn’t like them. I put Mackie’s book aside and it sat gathering dust for some years.

I only read Mackie’s book again after I had read Dawkins’, The Selfish Gene, (and all his other books published before 2003), Michael Ruse’s books, Biology and the Foundation of Ethics and Darwinism and its Discontents and Richard Joyce’s books, The Evolution of Morality and The Myth of Morality.

Around the time I first read Mackie and started reading the others mentioned above, I had been reading quite a bit of Ken Wilbur’s philosophical mysterianism. Wilbur writes well and is quite poetic, but I just couldn’t take his work seriously as either philosophy or science. I really needed clarity at this time and not more mystery.

I’d always believed evolution was true, but after reading Dawkins, Ruse and Joyce, the evolutionary penny in respect of morality began to drop. And the good thing was that it wasn’t all bad news. There were evolutionary reasons for being nice.

So I went back to Mackie. Only then could I read Mackie and properly hear what he was saying, and only then did I feel that I had a more or less complete and believable picture of where our morality came from and what we are doing when we moralize.

To my mind, Mackie’s philosophical argument merged seamlessly with the evolutionary arguments of the evolutionary scientists and with the evolutionary ethicists mentioned above, even though Mackie used the word “evolution” only a couple of times throughout his entire book. For him, evolution was obviously true, but he hadn’t joined the dots and so he said only that evolutionary science may shed more light on ethics. And so it has.

I had the big picture now. The metaethical problem that had tormented me for years had a solution. And, best of all, there was no cause for alarm. I was now not only an atheist but a moral antirealist. But not a despairing nihilist. Things could still matter to me. I could carry on being a decent and stable person. I wasn’t going to run amok and turn into a depraved, cannibalistic serial killer just because I had leaned that there were no objective moral values and that there were evolutionary explanations for why we were mostly nice to family, friends and our community (in that order) and often nasty to outsiders.

Evolution came up with morality which helped us cooperate in groups which is what got us through the Pleistocene and launched our genes into the future. And here we are. All this without objective moral values, which don’t exist because they are impossible. But evolution did a marvellous job of making us think that our evolved moral sentiments actually tracked moral truth. Most of us don’t yet realise all this, or like me a while back, refuse to believe it.

There are two parts to Mackie’s thesis, the first demolished moral universalism and the second, objective moral values. These are his Argument from Disagreement and his Argument from Queerness, respectively, neither of which I will try to summarize here. But Mackie’s book was pivotal for me. It is moral philosophy at its lucid best. And the writing of the evolutionary scientists, and the reasoning and writing of the philosophers who took up evolutionary ethics, whose work I mentioned above, were each a model of reason, rationality and literary clarity.

The facts of evolution revealed by science, the arguments of Mackie, and of philosophers working in evolutionary ethics, form a unified whole - a satisfying synthesis that will, of course, be refined as more work is done, but which together form an edifice as solid as Einstein’s theories of relativity. And this evolutionary and philosophical synthesis is a demonstration of what can be achieved when philosophy, and her daughter, science, work in tandem.

Of course many will disagree. I know that atheists and moral anti-realists are still a minority in the population at large and that there is still a significant minority of philosophers (if few scientists) who still argue for moral realism. And some of those philosophers are no doubt here on this forum. So, if you are one of them, if you disagree with moral anti-realism (in particular with Mackie’s error theory) and with evolutionary ethics, it might make for an interesting thread if we can discuss your thoughts on why you disagree.

[Count Lucanor]

I don’t believe there is objective morality, so I guess that makes me a moral antirealist. I believe there’s objective compliance of moral laws defined by social convention.

I’m not convinced there are evolutionary (biological) adaptations specific for morality. It would be interesting to get your insights on these theories.

[Lagayascienza]

I don’t believe there is objective morality, so I guess that makes me a moral antirealist. I believe there’s objective compliance of moral laws defined by social convention.

I’m not convinced there are evolutionary (biological) adaptations specific for morality. It would be interesting to get your insights on these theories.

Thanks for your response Count Lucanor.

All of biology is the result of evolution by natural selection. We are part of biology. There are no parts of us that are not biological. I look for naturalistic explanations to explain the natural world. It would be difficult to explain how, other than by evolution, we would have got morality. Among the evidence in support of an evolutionary explanation is the fact that cooperation and proto-morality is also found in other animals - particularly in those closely related to us.

Believers in the supernatural do not have to contend with this type of explanatory problem. God did it all. But that explanation doesn't work for me. It explains everything and nothing.

[Count Lucanor]

I don’t believe there is objective morality, so I guess that makes me a moral antirealist. I believe there’s objective compliance of moral laws defined by social convention.

I’m not convinced there are evolutionary (biological) adaptations specific for morality. It would be interesting to get your insights on these theories.

Thanks for your response Count Lucanor.

All of biology is the result of evolution by natural selection. We are part of biology. There are no parts of us that are not biological. I look for naturalistic explanations to explain the natural world. It would be difficult to explain how, other than by evolution, we would have got morality. Among the evidence in support of an evolutionary explanation is the fact that cooperation and proto-morality is also found in other animals - particularly in those closely related to us.

Believers in the supernatural do not have to contend with this type of explanatory problem. God did it all. But that explanation doesn't work for me. It explains everything and nothing.

I endorse the down-to-earth view that we are biological organisms, nothing else. However, there are disputes on whether some of the biological adaptations of humans are general purpose adaptations or function-specific adaptations, especially when it comes to cognitive abilities and psychological traits. Evolutionary psychologists are prone to postulate function-specific adaptations of the human brain called modules, but this has been heavily disputed by neuroscientists (BTW, I just learned that John Tooby, a famous evolutionary psychologist, recently passed away). So, when you appear to be suggesting that morality is a function-specific biological adaptation, my alarms go off. Although I can't say the debate has been settled, I tend to favor the view that there's no such function-specific adaptation, but at the level of psychology, humans are general-purpose beings. We have likes and dislikes, pleasure or displeasure, and since human behavior tends to be practical, goal-oriented, it is more likely that we create right and wrong distinctions to negotiate the benefits between short-term and long-term satisfactions.

[Lagayascienza]

Yes, our morality has practical value. If it didn't, evolution would not have selected for it. After Hume and Mackie there was not much philosophy could do in ethics. I think that, in terms of explaining where our morality came from and what we are doing when we moralize, we must leave it to science, to evolutionary science, neuroscience, psychology ...

I haven't read of evolutionary psychologists positing "moral modules" in our brains. I think that idea is crazy.

If a philosopher understands and accepts science, but still wants to be a moral realist, then the only option seems to be to concoct some dualist system that science cannot touch. They need some realm of value that is separate from the physical universe we ordinarily interact with. And they then need to explain how we have epistemic access with this other realm. We don't do it in the way we interreact with mathematics or logic and in those disciplines we have proofs that are not available in ethics.

Philosophers have been at ethics for millennia and nothing they have said made much sense until Hume and Mackie came along. The deontologists, the consequentialists, the virtue ethicists - it's all nonsense. Morality only starts to make sense once we accept that there are no objective moral values and that our subjective moral sentiments are part of our evolutionary heritage. Once we accept this the metaethical puzzle is solved.

Humans are biological, every bit of us - our hearts, our livers, our brains, our minds and our subjective moral sentiments - they are all grounded in biology and, as Dobzhansky said, nothing in biology makes sense accept in light of evolution.

[Good_Egg]

In our everyday experience, if a proposition is true, and we have a way of perceiving or knowing its truth, then that is sufficient reason for believing it.

You believe that the sky is blue because you are equipped to perceive that the sky is blue and have reason to trust your perception. Or, if you've lived all your life in a windowless hospital room, you believe it is true because someone that it is reasonable to trust has told you it is blue. Either is sufficient reason for belief.

The converse is not the case. That you have insufficient reason (your vision or your informant is unreliable) does not mean that the sky is not blue.

If you have a vision defect that makes things look blue when they're not, or an informant with an ulterior motive for asserting the blueness of the sky, then that casts doubt on the certainty of your knowledge. But is not in any way evidence that the sky is not blue.

You seem to be saying that the existence of an evolutionary explanation for moral sense is sufficient reason for believing that there is no moral reality to perceive. That argument is false.

The evolutionary explanation says that you have a reason for thinking that rape is wrong, other than an accurate "moral perception" that it is wrong. That isn't any positive evidence that rape isn't wrong; it's only a cause for doubting your moral sense. It tells you that could think "rape is wrong" for a reason other than the evident truth of that proposition.

[Count Lucanor]

Yes, our morality has practical value. If it didn't, evolution would not have selected for it. After Hume and Mackie there was not much philosophy could do in ethics. I think that, in terms of explaining where our morality came from and what we are doing when we moralize, we must leave it to science, to evolutionary science, neuroscience, psychology ...

…and social sciences.

I haven't read of evolutionary psychologists positing "moral modules" in our brains. I think that idea is crazy.

Modularity is a central claim of evolutionary psychology.

[Lagayascienza]

I'll have to read up on the modularity idea. It's possible, just as there are parts of the brain that light up when we use language or feel fear etc, their may be areas involved in moral decision making. But they will not be isolated compartments - the brain operates as a unified whole.

[Lagayascienza]

You seem to be saying that the existence of an evolutionary explanation for moral sense is sufficient reason for believing that there is no moral reality to perceive. That argument is false.

The evolutionary explanation says that you have a reason for thinking that rape is wrong, other than an accurate "moral perception" that it is wrong. That isn't any positive evidence that rape isn't wrong; it's only a cause for doubting your moral sense. It tells you that could think "rape is wrong" for a reason other than the evident truth of that proposition.

I do not say that there is no moral reality to perceive. I say that that reality is based in our evolved moral sentiments. We feel subjectively that rape, murder, theft etcetera are tainted with the moral value BAD. Our moral sentiments were cobbled together (metaphorically speaking) by evolution as an aid to launching our genes into the future. And that strategy worked. Moral realists have no evidence for objective moral values other than our feeling that there must be more to it than our subjective sentiments. But our subjective sentiments are all we need. They don't need tp be objective and cannot be so. As Hume says:

In these sentiments then, not in a discovery of relations of any kind, do all moral determinations consist. . . .
… we must at last acknowledge, that the crime or immorality is no particular fact or relation, which can be the object of the understanding, but arises entirely from the sentiment of disapprobation, which, by the structure of human nature, we unavoidably feel on the apprehension of barbarity or treachery.

But people still feel they need objective status for moral judgements; they want objective backing for what they themselves feel subjectively to be morally right or wrong. But it is not to be had.

What they don't realise is that the fact that their being subjective does not devalue our moral sentiments, it does not make them unimportant or disposable. Things will continue to matter to us. And we can still rank people's ethics. We just cannot do so objectively. But we don't need to. We can still say that certain actions seem right or wrong to us. Morality always has been and always will be all about human feelings.

[LuckyR]

One only has to reflect on the fact that 2.5% of all people are sociopaths and/or psychopaths to realize that 200 million people don't have a problem with rape and murder, to grasp that morality is subjective.

[Lagayascienza]

Exactly. And even discounting psychopaths, the fact that our moral sentiments, although broadly similar across our species, do indeed vary somewhat, is evidence against the idea that our moral sentiments track any objective moral truth or tap into some mysterious ideal realm of moral value. Our morality is entirely human.

[Good_Egg]

Our moral sentiments were cobbled together (metaphorically speaking) by evolution as an aid to launching our genes into the future.

Not disputing that we evolved and that everything we are is subject to evolutionary pressure.

Moral realists have no evidence for objective moral values other than our feeling that there must be more to it than our subjective sentiments.

My point was just that evolution isn't evidence of the non-existence of such values.

If I responded to your every utterance by saying "You only think that because you evolved to feel that way" you'd get fed up with me pretty quickly.

They don't need tp be objective and cannot be so.

That they are not is a valid opinion; that they cannot be is false.

One only has to reflect on the fact that 2.5% of all people are sociopaths and/or psychopaths to realize that 200 million people don't have a problem with rape and murder, to grasp that morality is subjective.

Some of us believe that there is something wrong with psychopaths. That it is objectively a defect.

You may hold the philosophy that there are no defects, that every disease, disorder and disability is an equally-good way of being human, that the medical profession is an act of majority prejudice. But it is not self-evident.

[Sculptor1]

Philosopher, John L. Mackie, begins the first chapter of his book, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, with a bald assertion:

“There are no objective values.”

People find this hard to accept for some reason. But it's like saying there is no dry water. Values imply a judgement and a judgement implies a subject. You cannot judge else from a POV.

In my long experience on these sorts of Forums those making the error find it difficult to distinguish from the physical objectivity of the world of science to the realm of the ideal.

On the other Forum (PN) one slightly crazy person thinks that realists and the one responsible for the moral bakrupsy of relativism and sujbective moral views. Which, to my mind, is ever more untenable.

Despite the long history of discussions about the moral objectivity. Not a single person has managed to sustain one morally objective postition. They state literal laws, and make suggestions about what has to be, morally right in all circumstances but always fail to find a universal truth which is not mired in their personal or cultural assumptions and preconceptions.]
Stating laws such as "murder is wrong" does not satisfy, since it is nothing more than a circular argument, defining types of killing that the legal system has decided is wrong. This is not "objective" but culturally specific since different cultures have different criteria for murder.
Doubling down they go to "killing babies", but not even that is universal. and whilst we all might think it terrible in other posts they continue to support Isreali aggression which, they say, is an exception.

[Sculptor1]

I don’t believe there is objective morality, so I guess that makes me a moral antirealist. I believe there’s objective compliance of moral laws defined by social convention.

I’m not convinced there are evolutionary (biological) adaptations specific for morality. It would be interesting to get your insights on these theories.

There is no doubt that there are what we can call moral traits coded into behaviour. When you see a baboon nurturing a lost baby leopard, or a domestic dog bitch nursing a piglet, you realise that care for other creatures is part of our nature and notjust restricted to the female of the species.
If you have not been affected by a puppy dog looking into your eyes then Maybe you cannot understand this but such behaviours are not learned.
The difficulty comes when trying to pretend that such innate tendancies can be a measure of objectiveness when it comes to moral rules. We also have an urge to kill and to enjoy seeing the suffering of others, especially when it comes to "others" we have deemed by culture as "animals".

But there are adaptations which encourage such behaviours that protect the young against predation and deprivation; and others which ensure violence to protect the group.

[Pattern-chaser]

Some of us believe that there is something wrong with psychopaths. That it is objectively a defect.

Interesting. I do not believe that. But, I do believe that psychopathic behaviour cannot and should not be tolerated in a community or society, and should be prevented or otherwise contained. I see no wrongness or defect, but only behaviour that is unacceptable. [In accordance with the topic,] I wonder if that makes me a better or a worse person than someone who believes as you describe in your comment?

[No accusations or criticisms here. I'm just musing...]