Morality is Real, Objections to it Are Bad

A Defense of moral realism, and dissing all the non-moral-realists.

I made a post two days ago about the people who don’t believe consciousness is real. My conclusion is that they’re cowards, and actually believe consciousness is real.

That’s a shame, because I think there’s really good arguments that consciousness is not real, full stop. Like, not real in the sense that nobody is experiencing anything; that everybody is a philosophical zombie without any inner experience. All arguments that consciousness is real rely on the fact that consciousness is real to prove them. Decartes said “I think, therefore I am”? Begging the question, you’re assuming the premise in the result.

Can you agree this is ridiculous? That even without a good, rigorous argument, consciousness is indeed a real thing that you are experiencing right now? That that might be the ONLY THING you can be sure of? Because I agree with you! Consciousness is real, and something is happening to you right now. There is something rather than nothing.

But oh, if I happen to say emotions are real, and that some states of consciousness are preferable to others, then you cross your arms and say “erm, provide me a mathematical proof that pain is bad, please.”

Brother, just like consciousness, you are the proof.

Moral Realism

Other, lesser philosophers have to prove that virtues are real or that actions have weight to prove morality is real, which is why lots of articles defending moral realism are bad. As an enjoyer of the best and correct moral philosophy, I only need to show you that emotions are subjectively real for your conscious perspective to show that my flavor of utilitarianism¹ is morally real.

Seriously! I could say “all I need you to believe is that extreme agony is a thing that happens to a conscious being” but I’m actually making an even easier claim for you to agree with. You only need to agree that different conscious states are preferable to an individual to believe in hedonistic utilitarianism, as that’s all it assumes. You’re already a moral realist by this point, in that you’re already making all the real moral assumptions that I make! There’s nothing else!

If some conscious states are preferable to others from the perspective of a conscious experience in the present, then those are the “moral facts” of the universe. Then, causing those states can be good or bad, and blam, moral realism, you just need to follow the actual state of thing that matters more than all else, consciousness itself — so thinking that consciousness is real is being a moral realist. Torturing babies is bad because experiencing loads of unnecessary pain sucks for the baby. Easy peasy. My first subscriber

Life In The Labyrinth

made this consciousness to morality connection in a more poetic way then this post will, but yes: I think proving emotions are real is not that much of a logical step up from the fact that there’s something rather than nothing, which already assumes time and a perspective.

I want to be clear here: I’m not defending utilitarianism in this post. To get to utilitarianism, you need to then say that you care about the moral facts of other people. It’s totally internally consistent for me to say I only care about my own moral state, and will maximize my own conscious state. To say utilitarianism is the morality of choice from these moral facts, you need to believe that OTHER conscious beings other than yourself matters, and believe that caring about other people is implied in the word “morality”. You can also build morality here in a way that only cares about humans or whatever, too! But this post is about the ASSUMPTIONS needed to build these theories. Defending caring about all other consciousnesses instead of just yourself or a chosen population requires another post.

The best part of this is most forms of moral anti-realism already agree with something like this. Only nihilism and its branches are internally consistent position that make “less assumptions” than I do. The rest make similar assumptions, baked in! Lots of philosophers I respect find it too much of a leap to “prove” morality exists, but it’s really no less of a leap than rejecting nihilism!

Like, that claim I made is the only thing that I need to be true for my morality to in fact be real. I will show this by going through the four main antirealist schools of thought — nihilism, constructivism, expressionism, and subjectivism — and showing why they contradict this, aren’t very good, or are insane.

Nihilism

I’m starting with the big one here because nihilism is internally consistent, unlike the riff raff. Nihilism says there’s no value in the universe, anywhere.

This is not the same as miserablism, thinking everything sucks, which is what edgy people who CALL themselves nihilists should believe. Nihilism, and its offshoots like error theory, say that value in the universe doesn’t exist even in principle; nothing is good, nothing is bad, nothing CAN be good or bad.

Albert Camus, who people think is a nihilist², once famously said “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” While this goes hard as hell, this should’ve betrayed the fact that he isn’t a nihilist, because of course nihilists don’t think suicide is truly important; there’s no value to assign TO ANYTHING.

The statement “I wish that the world was good instead of having no value” is itself a value statement that has no meaning if nihilism is true! If that means anything, the world is ALREADY not nihilist.

I can’t argue against nihilism because I can’t argue against the belief that consciousness is not real. I believe that logically, proving that time exists may prove a task that I cannot argue easily. My argument against nihilism is that life has texture. A true nihilist wouldn’t argue about nihilism, they would take purely random actions like twitching on the floor. Or maybe they wouldn’t, because doing that would be exactly identical to doing anything else.

Someone once said to me “Error theory makes sense to them, but I hope it isn’t true.” This is a silly belief, because if error theory is true, hope literally, actually, does not exist, in the true sense. If the universe is as he fears, fear and hope are literally not something that exists!

Nobody’s a nihilist. Go back to denying consciousness is real, full stop, in a true way unlike the illusionists who say that an illusion is even real. If there was nothing rather than something in the universe, maybe the nihilists would be right.

Constructivism

Rawls asks us to imagine going “beyond the veil of reality” and imagine that we don’t know which person we’re going to be, and what policies and actions we would endorse. So, if we didn’t know whether we were going to be the torturer or torturee, we would say torture is bad, since the torturer is getting owned for basically no gain. You can then imagine what a perfectly rational person would believe from beyond this veil, and Rawls says you would focus on rights.

Kant, with a different flavor of constructivism, asks us to imagine what a perfectly rational person would endorse without assuming any of their moral beliefs, and finds that they would endorse beliefs that allowed them as a decision-making person to make decisions — otherwise, they’re undermining their own moral beliefs by saying they SHOULDN’T be allowed to make decisions, which they obviously want to do.

First, this “imagine a perfectly rational X” is my least favorite argument in all of philosophy. “Yep, I just imagined a perfectly rational person, and — what’s this? I’m getting something — he agreed my insane philosophical position is correct. Get owned.” This is not the first time I’ve complained about this argument, and this won’t be the last time I complain about it in this very essay.

Rawl’s veil idea is cool, but uh, I think these rational observers would rather endorse a world where utility is maximized then one where everyone’s miserable but has rights. I think these observers would care about their actual conscious experience, not the actions that they may or may not take! Stuff is more important than people! So my shadow realm calculations, surprise surprise, endorse the thing I believe instead of the thing he believes.

Kant’s idea I have mostly the same reaction to. Why, as a hypothetical rational actor with goals, would I respect EVERYONE ELSE’S goals instead of doing the thing I want to do and think is best? With Kant it’s actually worse than Rawls, too, because the set of stuff his logic endorses is a really stupid list of actions, like not being allowed to sacrifice 1 person for a billion. But I have a whole post here, of course, that thoroughly obliterates my boy Kant.

Now it’s worth noting that it’s totally fine for me to be a constructivist AND a hedonistic utilitarian, using this exact logic³ , but the reason I’m not a constructivist is because this is a way weaker way to prove that morality matters. I don’t need a perfectly rational person to have emotions just… be a real thing that happens to us. If these hypothetical rational observers came to my moral position, they might notice “hey, this moral position would have been correct and what we endorsed EVEN IF we didn’t exist!” at which point you’ve basically agreed with moral realism.

Preference utilitarianism, optimizing for people’s stated preferences, relies on something like this to figure out what “true” preferences are (so they don’t have to say that it’s morally good for someone having a psychotic breakdown to eat their shoe or whatever).

Expressivism

Expressivism says that when I say “X is morally wrong” what I mean is “Boo! X sucks!” They’re there to express practical values.

Expressivism might be the weakest moral antirealist position out of all of these four I’m going to talk about. Expressivism says that morality is just an attitude, and it makes how moral something is proportional to the amount that I care about it.

Now, there’s a boring “logical” killer blow called the embedding problem that’s the most talked about annihilation of expressivism, but to be honest let’s just rundown what they’re actually claiming: The phrase “stealing is wrong” isn’t trying to describe anything objective that can be incorrect, it’s just venting an attitude.

Look, fundamentally, expressivism links morality to how much something disgusts you. The only sense of scale they can invoke is how much “Boo!” you can claim. If you care about saving 10 birds instead of 1 bird, but don’t care about saving 10,000,000 birds as much of 1,000,000 birds because your brain can’t instinctively parse the zeroes, I think you’re misdescribing what morality is meant to capture; morality is something that cares about world states, and when I say “I like onions” I’m making a personal expression in a fundamentally way that “I think murder is wrong”.

That previous paragraph covers the most basic versions of expressivism, but there’s another branch that needs addressed called “quasi-realism” that’s about ranking worlds, grounded in what we prioritize, so if you care about birds, you can imagine hypothetical worlds that birds are being tortured in and choosing ones that have fewer. That seems like a bold claim to rest morality on, especially as quasi-realism boasts about reconstructing morality from nothing, based in attitudes.

If you imagine a world with only Ted Bundy and his victim, you can’t condemn his actions until there’s a crowd to boo him — this strikes me as not really making sense.

All versions of expressivism are latching onto the thinker’s positive and negative impressions of an event, where my moral theory latches onto the actual subject we’re talking about. If you get very angry about torture, I think the thing that grounds what morality I personally am talking about is the torture, not the anger, so expressivism is using the existence of emotions to show what morality is in an incorrect way.

Subjectivism

Subjectivism is the belief that when you say “X is morally wrong” what you’re really saying is “I disapprove of X.” Subjectivism has a lot of the same issues as expressionism, but I’m not going to cover them again.

Travis Talks

gives a very good defense of subjectivism in this post⁴, because some of the arguments against subjectivism are really bad and don’t understand it.

To be clear, subjectivists aren’t saying that you have to accept that someone who says “torturing babies is good” is something you must respect or agree with. What they’re claiming is morality is a preference, in the same way that if someone says “onions are good” they’re expressing their personal preferences. It’s reasonable to say that someone who thinks that torturing babies is good has a personal preference in favor of torturing babies!

The issue with subjectivism is actually that there are things you don’t know. If there’s some atrocity you don’t know about, you can’t disapprove of it, so if you disapprove of humans suffering, and there were aliens on another planet you don’t know about, or some other moral atrocity, they have no moral weight. That seems dumb.

Travis addresses this complaint in his article by invoking idealized subjectivism. Imagine that you were a hypothetical observer who knew… all relevant facts… wait a second…

A hypothetical observer who knew all relevant facts? Not again! How do we define “relevant” well? Which relevant facts? Ones about the situation, or the effects of it on people? How do you rigorously decide what facts this ideal observer gets to know instead of saying “all facts”? Dang nabbit, like with constructivism, because I’m a moral realist, an observer who knew all facts would agree with me! If you’re invoking informed observers to judge morality, and saying their preferences don’t count if they don’t know all the facts to make “suffering is wrong” come out true, doesn’t it feel like some moral statements can be true regardless of whose attitudes are currently switched on?

I feel like the claim “morality is like other preferences, but unlike other preferences there’s ‘ideal information’ that must be given to an observer before he decides if his preferences are true” is just a strong claim to make in general, and would amount to this preference being somewhat divorced from the observer actually making the claim. Meanwhile, my flavor of moral realism only requires emotions to be real. And a non-idealized form of subjectivism is hopeless.

Like expressivism, we’re admitting that preferences are real, but instead of pointing at the people being tortured and saying “hey! maybe that’s bad for them because they don’t want to be tortured!” we’re pointing at the guy standing on the sidelines ant going “hm, morality is a pointer about him, really.” You’re assuming the same things I am, but just denying that the subject is what we’re trying to talk about!

Fin

I’m a moral antirealist for deontology and virtue ethics. I agree you can’t prove their moralities are real, good luck brother, actions don’t have inherent moral weight, only stuff that happens to humans and that we can feel matters. Luckily, my morality is the best and the sickest and the coolest, and it requires an extremely small leap to reach, less of a leap than most antirealist positions, in fact! I think suffering is bad, and suffering is a real thing that exists that some people experience through things called “emotions.” Utilitarianism bing bang boom.

Consciousness has good states and bad states. States being different from one another in a way that matters to the subject imply things matter. Things mattering means moral realism.

So don’t feel like you’re making some grand claim when you claim to be a moral realist. You’re just following the river of the universe, and came to the conclusion that the simplest explanation is the one you see with your own eyes.

1. I’m talking about hedonistic utilitarianism in this post. I think you CAN argue this works for preference utilitarianism, especially when I use the word “preferences” a lot in the post, but I think the line between them is thinner than one may think, and the arguments for hedonistic are stronger. This requires another post.

2. He is not but his vibe was so cool and sick that everybody thought he was a nihilist

3. Constructivism is a metaethical theory, hedonistic utilitarianism is a normative one. They’re two separate categories, the thing I’m defending here is moral realism but luckily my moral realism can be barebones given how little realism hedonistic utilitarianism requires. People act like the metaethical theory is TOTALLY INDEPENDENT of the normative theory, but that obviously isn’t true given where we claim “moral realism” comes from.

4. MORE PHILOSOPHERS ON SUBSTACK RAAAAAAAAAAA