Conclusion

Conclusion

10

Moral Realism

This section of the book has been about moral realism and its alternatives. So far we have spent most of our time arguing against those alternatives. In this final chapter, we wish to consolidate a number of our findings. We are especially interested in laying out a cumulative case in favor of strong moral realism—the sort of realism that holds out the hope for something evidentially significant about the nature of reality.

We want to apportion our conclusions to the caliber of the evidence and lay the case out piece by piece. We do not pretend to have one simple, single discursive argument that can do all the necessary work, especially in light of the plethora of objections that get lodged against morality realistically construed. We find the cumulative power of an array of evidential considerations to be quite strong support for robust moral realism. The overall case is still resistible, admittedly, but at a steeper price than we are willing to pay.

A Swinburnian Preliminary

A preliminary before getting started is a quick summary of Richard Swinburne’s distinction between C-inductive and P-inductive arguments. A C-inductive argument makes its conclusion more likely than it was previously. A P-inductive argument makes its conclusion more likely than not. A C-inductive argument makes a conclusion more probable but without rendering the conclusion more likely true than not. Most of the arguments below, taken in isolation, are advanced as examples of C-inductive arguments. Pointing to any one of the arguments in particular and suggesting that it does not make robust moral realism likely true, then, may well be accurate but would be redundant. It is not our aspiration to suggest that any one of the following arguments, in isolation, is enough to make the case. Our intention, though, is to suggest that taking the set of arguments as a whole may well constitute what Swinburne calls a P-inductive argument. The conjunction of the set of arguments, in other words, arguably may well collectively render strong moral realism more likely true than false. Of course, readers will have to come to their own conclusions about how successful the effort is.

So let us consider some of the best reasons to take robust moral realism seriously. Then we will quickly consider reasons why theism should remain a living possible explanation of various moral facts.

A Half Dozen Arguments for Robust Moral Realism

Our hope here is to canvass the field, without any pretense of being exhaustive; and as we do so, it is important to recognize that little to nothing rides on each and every one of these arguments’ proving successful. A successful argument, taken in isolation, for present purposes, need only add some plausibility to moral realism. None of the arguments by itself need to render moral realism likely true; the litmus test will be if enough of them together can do so. Part of that test will involve the need to be attentive to the way in which the various arguments bolster, augment, and strengthen one another. It is not a simple matter of their mechanical conjunction; there is, we will argue, a synergy that emerges in which the power of the overall case is more than mere addition. The resources of some of the arguments can address objections to others, for example; the overall resultant picture is one that we find quite attractive. The list is meant more as a suggestive discussion starter than an effort to say all that needs to be said.

Incomplete Alternatives Argument

To begin with, what we have argued throughout this volume is that the alternatives to moral realism leave too much to be desired. Michael Huemer thinks that this approach does a great deal of the heavy lifting in making the case for ethical objectivity. Moral realism is, on this approach, simply the best among the options on offer. Although we refrain from putting all our proverbial eggs in this basket, we do think it is highly telling that the metaethical rivals to moral realism do indeed seem riddled with intractable problems.

By way of a very brief review, the main gist of error theory is that morality, robustly construed, is irremediably odd ontologically speaking. Belief in stance-independent moral truths is taken to be beyond the pale. The more parsimonious position is to disavow their existence; it is not clear that they do much explanatory work anyway. In a nutshell, our response to this approach is to ask which intuition is the more compelling: that there are no stance-independent moral truths (like detractors of moral realism insist) or, say, that setting fire to babies for fun is wrong. We do not think it is a particularly close call, in truth. The deliverances of morality involve intuitions or apprehensions of the deepest ingression; eschewing them involves a prohibitively steep price.

We are convinced that it would be rational to give up such intuitions only on the basis of a powerful argument indeed, which we do not consider the error theorists to have provided. The appeal to parsimony at the root of what tends to be their largest concern—what Olson calls irreducible normativity—strikes us as an inadequate reason to give up the notion of moral authority. We would echo William James that our bigger fear than superstition on such a matter is fear of desiccation. This point is especially important when we bear in mind that a moral error theory will debunk not just deontic oughtness claims but even such basic value commitments as the essential dignity, equality, and value of human persons. And of course, remember the point that on theism, moral facts robustly construed are not odd in the least!

Regarding expressivism, its earliest version was predicated on logical positivism, which has been debunked as self-referentially incoherent. Its later versions left positivism behind but were still based on scientism. Whether the import of moral sentences is taken to be expressing or evincing emotions, serving the purpose of persuasion, or commanding others, expressivism is bereft of adequate resources to enable us to say all that needs to be said about predation, genocide, and abuse. Prescriptivity without the moral facts on which any genuine moral authority is based is feckless. One’s philosophical default position should not incline in the direction of jettisoning those commitments and convictions on which we have the greatest clarity. As Anscombe or Foot would argue, if one’s metaethical stance does not have enough resources to condemn the Nazis, so much the worse for one’s theory! In fact, we cannot help but wonder why those who think that morality lacks cognitive purchase would consider the wrapping of emotions or efforts at persuasion in the language of morality as warranted unless they, quite simply, recognize that the import of such language is likely to be construed as suggesting something more.

With respect to constructivism, the notion that morality is a function of the preferences, choices, or prerogatives of either individuals or larger groups, actual or hypothetical, may work reasonably well as an account of matters of civil law but seems to fail as a way to undergird moral truth. Ethical relativism is a paradigmatic example, and its problems are legion. Ideal observer theory seems a move in a better direction but remains saddled with Euthyphro-type challenges. Does the ideal observer by his hypothetical determinations determine the content of morality or apprehend it—invent it or discover it? If the former, morality seems objectionably arbitrary; if the latter, moral realism is left unscathed. Our reasons to refrain from frivolously drowning a child do not plausibly come from the nature of inwardly generated mental processes alone but rather because we recognize an objective duty to refrain from such hideous actions.

What we find especially telling, in the face of the challenges posed for each of these perspectives, is that moral realism can be cast in such a way to capture the legitimate strengths that each provides. Robust moral realists share much in common with error theorists, most of all a view of moral prescriptivity that is strong and not watered down. With expressivists they are at liberty to share the notion that to affirm the goodness of something involves, in part, an implicit endorsement of it, leaving open the question of whether there is an external referent. With constructivism strong moral realists can, contra Huemer’s question-begging claim to the contrary, reconcile robust realism with mind-dependence, so long as objectivity, authority, and necessity are not compromised in the process. (Fig. 10.1 can help visualize the landscape of metaethics.)

Cuneo’s Epistemic Parity Argument

Terence Cuneo’s The Normative Web defends moral realism on the grounds of an epistemic parity argument.1 The argument can be put pithily as follows:

1. If moral facts do not exist, then epistemic facts do not exist.

2. Epistemic facts exist.

3. Moral facts exist.

4. If moral facts exist, then moral realism is true.

5. So, moral realism is true.

This argument goes beyond a critique of the alternatives to moral realism. It argues positively in favor of such realism. It is an example of a “partners in guilt” approach. Since epistemic standards—coherence, simplicity, warranted assertibility, and so on—have (nonmoral) normative implications and are sufficiently similar to moral facts (if such there be), belief in the former should soften us up to belief in moral standards that are analogous in certain respects. Objectivity, prescriptivity, and universality all seem to be salient features of epistemic standards, and of mathematical ones for that matter. Moreover, epistemic standards are intractable features of reasoning well; the very notion of reasoning well seems predicated on their existence. Denying epistemic facts results in extreme epistemological skepticism.

The argument is not without its critics and detractors, but we find it telling that a philosopher of no less repute than Hilary Putnam finds such a consideration a quite persuasive argument in favor of moral realism. It certainly should not be dismissed prematurely. As Cuneo argues, the alternative positions come at a prohibitively high theoretical cost, so realism about both epistemic and moral facts is attractive.2

Modal Ontological Argument

This argument takes its inspiration from the modal ontological argument for God’s existence. It has come in different forms—advanced by the likes of Huemer and Coombs—but this is another variant:

1. Some putative objective moral truths are such that, if they are true, they are necessarily true.

2. It is possible that at least one of these putative objective moral truths is true.

3. So at least one of these putative objective moral truths is necessarily true.

4. If at least one of these putative objective moral truths is necessarily true, then at least one of these putative objective moral truths is actually true.

5. At least one of these putative objective moral truths is actually true.

6. So, moral realism is true.3

Motivation for the premises is as follows: After the first two premises, everything follows logically with airtight precision. The premises one might wish to subject to critical scrutiny are the first two, especially the second.

The first premise (that some putative objective moral truths are such that, if they are true, they are necessarily true) is largely based on the widely accepted notion of supervenience. Moral truths are often thought to be, if true, not merely contingently true, but necessarily true. They do not just happen to be true, like your happening to be reading this book right now. Rather, they are such that, if they are true in one world (to use possible-world semantics), they are true in all worlds. This is a function of supervenience. If a moral claim is true in some world or other, then it is arguably true in any other world that’s exactly like it descriptively. Supervenience of the moral is a widely accepted thesis.

This moves our discussion to the second premise. Just as we find with the modal ontological argument for God’s existence in the philosophy of religion, this is the most contested premise. The idea here is that it is metaphysically possible that, say, child torture for fun is wrong, or genocide of a peace-loving society is wrong, or skinning people alive who drive on the wrong side of the road is wrong—at least prima facie wrong. The possibility in question is not mere epistemic possibility—the idea that, for all we know, it is wrong. Rather, it is the idea that it is a genuine metaphysical possibility that some such action is genuinely wrong—in something like a robustly realist sort of way. If this is the case, then at least for some of these moral judgments it is not just true but true in every possible world. And the rest of the argument then goes through to the conclusion that robust moral realism obtains.

How might one wish to resist the idea that some such moral claim is possibly true? Taking a play from the philosophy of religion, we might run a parity argument against it the way Gaunilo tried to do against Anselm. Anselm argued that since God by definition is the greatest possible being and to exist is greater than not existing, therefore God exists. Others, notably Kant, denied that existence is a predicate. Existence is not a property of a thing; rather, a thing must exist in order to have any properties at all.

But arguably such maneuvers do not work as well against the modal ontological argument for moral realism. Why? Because here we are not talking about the greatest conceivable being and its properties. Our argument does not assume that existence is a great-making property. Rather, the claim is simply that some moral judgment is possibly true. We need not make appeal to the notion of perfection or a discussion about existence in the mind versus existence in reality. It is a simpler claim that some moral claim or other is at least possibly true. On the surface of it, this seems like an eminently reasonable claim. Usually people would not hesitate to affirm that child torture is wrong, but to ask if such a claim is at least possibly true is even less ambitious. But granting that premise means the argument is good to go. The fact that it then leads to a conclusion that one might not like is not a good enough reason for one to deny what had earlier seemed obvious.

What if someone were to respond by saying that possibility is cheap? Why not simply say, with respect to any particular moral judgment, that it is possible that it is not true? How might one reply to that challenge? Well, hark back to the discussion of God’s existence. The reason some might wish to argue that God’s existence is not possible is usually rooted in an argument of some sort. For example, one might wish to argue that the alleged great-making properties of God are not consistent or that they lack coherence. But this issue does not arise in the moral context, so such standard arguments against God’s existence (including the problem of evil or hiddenness) do not have the same purchase. And, in truth, it remains quite unclear why it would be impossible for any moral claim to be possibly true. Most arguments against realism—queerness arguments or debunking arguments or moral arguments—usually imply that moral realism is false, not impossible.

As long as some moral claim is possible, this argument would suggest we adjust our credences and argue that moral realism is more plausible than all the arguments against its plausibility, even if taken together. This argument might be taken to boost the credibility of moral realism considerably. The rule from modal logic on which the argument is predicated (that possible necessity entails necessary necessity) is also widely accepted, and rejecting the argument on the basis of resisting this recondite feature of modal logic seems a tenuous basis for denying the force of the argument.

Moorean Argument

Sometimes the phrase is used that “one person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens.” Here is modus ponens (where A and B are propositions):

1. A implies B.

2. A.

3. Therefore, B.

For example: If it is wrong for one to steal, then stealing makes one morally guilty. It is wrong for one to steal. So, stealing renders one morally guilty. That is an instance of modus ponens.

Modus tollens, another valid argument form, effects a switch and looks like this:

1. A implies B.

2. Not B.

3. So, not A.

Using the same example, the argument now looks like this: If it is wrong for one to steal, then stealing makes one morally guilty. Stealing does not make one morally guilty. So, it is not wrong for one to steal.

Both arguments, of course, start with a shared premise (“If it is wrong for one to steal, then stealing makes one morally guilty”). But whereas the “moralist” affirms the wrongness of stealing and infers that stealing results in moral guilt, the “skeptic” denies that stealing results in moral guilt (objective moral guilt, presumably) and then infers that stealing is not wrong. In this way, modus ponens can shift into modus tollens, or vice versa, resulting in quite different results, diametrically opposite ones, in fact. Effecting such a transition is sometimes called a “Moorean shift,” named after G. E. Moore, whom we have had occasion to discuss already.

Earlier there was recurring mention of the Moorean argument for moral realism. In the original version of the argument, Moore was responding to skeptics who deny the existence of the external world. Skeptics might put it like this: If we cannot know that the external world is real, we are not able to show any aspect of that world; we cannot know that the external world is real; so we are unable to show any aspect of it. Moore’s response involves his famous shift: Imagine him showing his hand, then another. Since his hands are part of the external world, he has thereby shown the external world to exist. Modus ponens replaces modus tollens.

Now, on the surface of it, this seems problematic and overly simplistic, but there is a way to capture his logic here that is quite intuitive. In philosophy one finds an array of revisionary views that, if true, would change our understanding of reality in fundamental ways—from nihilism about consciousness, time, motion, meaning, other minds, and more. One way to combat such arguments is via a Moorean argument. This includes answering an argument for moral skepticism, thus providing an argument for moral realism.

Here is how Eric Sampson puts one version of this argument:

1. If it is pro tanto objectively wrong to punch a helpless child, then there is at least one objective moral truth.

2. It is pro tanto objectively wrong to punch a helpless child.

3. So, there is at least one objective moral truth.

4. If there is at least one objective moral truth, then moral realism is true.

5. So, moral realism is true.

The first objection likely to be raised is with premise 2: It is pro tanto objectively wrong to punch a helpless child.4 Doesn’t this beg the question? Sampson suggests that what Moore is doing is offering a meta-argument: an invitation to consider the relative plausibility of different arguments. Arguments for moral skepticism will likely feature highly controversial premises, such as this: There are no stance-independent moral truths, or moral propositions cannot plausibly be thought to possess prescriptively binding authority. In contrast, the Moorean premise is highly uncontroversial, at least aside from moral nihilists. To most everyone, it seems eminently plausible that punching a helpless child is wrong, and this is just what Moore is pointing out. In this way, Moore invites us to compare the two arguments—the argument for moral nihilism, whatever it happens to be, and this argument for moral realism. Determining which one we should accept, if either, becomes a matter of plausibility comparison.

Among better potential objections to such an argument is the evolutionary debunking objection, which posits that evolution fitted us with beliefs like the wrongness of punching helpless children but that such beliefs are not true (or at least not justified to be thought to be true). A theistic account renders such objections less than compelling by allowing for the possibility of evolution’s being a guided process, but secularists can pose a challenge of their own to the debunkers.5 Either we can know some moral truths or not. If so—and we might be wrong about some of them, but we can self-correct as needed with rational reflection—they can then provide an account of how such substantive truths came to be believed reliably. If not, then we know nothing about morality because we do not know the first thing about it. Additionally, whether debunking objections are successful is a highly controversial matter, which should result in a loss of confidence in them to a significant degree. In contrast, virtually everyone agrees we should not punch innocent kids. The Moorean argument therefore comes out on top again.

Finally, we can also debunk the debunkers. Maybe morality is onerous and leads to inconvenient obligations, and it is more pleasant for debunkers to think we do not have such obligations. Or some philosophers have an abnormal fear of being duped; others like to wear the black hat and relish taking the iconoclastic position of nihilism. Yet for others, views like moral skepticism are rewarded in their circles for being novel, and they might like the professional or psychological benefits for embracing it. Some might inordinately enjoy the sense of cleverness they think attaches to nihilism, whereas others hold an exaggerated allegiance to science and its association with this view. Positing such possibilities is easy but also of little evidential value. In short, whereas debunking objections does not strike us as particularly lethal for moral realism, Moorean arguments for moral realism do seem to hold water.

Deliberative Indispensability

David Enoch’s book defending moral realism offers an argument from deliberative indispensability that, in broad outline, goes as follows. The notion of deliberative indispensability (DI) can usually be compared and contrasted with explanatory indispensability. The latter is often used in mathematics and science to provide grounds for justified beliefs about, say, electrons, despite the fact that they are unobservable. The warrant for claiming justification for believing in them, despite this, derives from the role they play in providing scientists needed help to explain aspects of the world and various observations. Appealing to a model that includes electrons enhances scientists’ ability to explain what they can observe. The unattractive prospect of efforts to explain the world without appealing to electrons renders it justifiable to posit their existence and, on that basis, to believe in their existence. In this way, explanatory indispensability is thought to provide justification for a variety of existence claims, even of unobservables.

DI is different in key respects but relevantly similar. It can be used to posit the existence and thus ground rational justification for belief in normative truths construed realistically. Like serious scientific efforts to figure out the nature of empirical reality, the project of deliberation in normative and prescriptive matters is an eminently worthwhile and important endeavor. And since it arguably cannot be done well without positing mind-independent normative realities, this likewise justifies the positing of their existence and the belief that they exist.

The argument can be formulated as follows:

1. If something is instrumentally indispensable to an intrinsically indispensable project, then we are epistemically justified for just that reason to believe in it.

2. The deliberative project is instrumentally indispensable.

3. Irreducibly normative truths are indispensable to the deliberative project.

4. So, we are justified to believe that such normative truths exist.

By “deliberative project” is meant the effort to figure out how to live. We cannot live our lives without deliberating how we ought to. We do it virtually every second of every day. We seem unable to avoid it. Such a project is both descriptively nonoptional and rationally nonoptional: the kind of thing that we cannot help but do, and something we should not stop doing. Whereas playing tennis or checkers is the kind of thing we are not forced to do, explanatory and deliberative projects are forced on us.

The project of deliberation, then, is intrinsically indispensable. Moreover, it requires normative truths realistically construed, just as doing science relies on perception, memory, induction, and the like. In all of these cases, something is instrumentally indispensable. Regarding normative truths, though, this claim that they are instrumentally indispensable to the deliberative project is likely the most controversial claim. It seems to possess a fair bit of intuitive support, however. For when deliberating we are involved in trying to figure out what to do, which seems to be about getting at some fact of the matter independent of our minds. It has all the feel of coming to a conclusion about a factual question, but this could be true only if we are thinking that there are mind-independent normative truths. So, on this basis, we are epistemically justified to believe there are mind-independent normative truths, and among such truths would be specifically moral truths realistically construed.

The import of the argument is that belief in robust moral truths is at least as respectable as belief in such realities and faculties as numbers, induction, testimony, memory, perception, or inferences to the best explanation, in light of the parity between moral truths and these others. One objection we wish to consider at this point, however, gets lodged by those who insist that the only legitimate reason to posit the existence of anything is if it does explanatory work. Whereas explanatory indispensability involves a legitimate inference, DI does not, according to the detractors; the comparison, they insist, is predicated on a disanalogy.

By way of reply, it bears repeating that some do wish to argue that generally normative and specifically moral truths can do important explanatory work. We ourselves believe they do. For example, they arguably provide reasons and justifications for why certain actions are considered morally right or wrong; they generate a framework to understand and explain the moral qualities of situations and behaviors; they facilitate people critically evaluating and making sense of ethical dilemmas.

Suppose, though, contrary to fact, that they do not explain anything. If we further accept the notion that such truths, to be justifiably posited, have to explain some observable phenomena, the result would be a rejection of all normative truths. That is quite a bullet to bite and an inordinately high price to pay, and pointing out the prohibitive cost of a view is one way to argue against its plausibility. The very impracticability of denying a proposition arguably provides some amount of evidence in its favor.

The Abolition of Man

C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man defends objective moral values in the face of the subjectivism and emotivism of Lewis’s day. Lewis had fought in the First World War, which had haunted his dreams ever since, and he wrote Abolition during the Second World War as England faced a particularly formidable foe that was not averse to perpetrating the most unspeakable of atrocities. Indeed, it was in the face of moral evil he found a renewed incentive to play his intellectual part in the battle. Earlier we discussed the pivotal role of war in motivating an answer to subjectivists and expressivists, and this is one specific example.

Although Lewis was a theist and a Christian, Abolition makes little mention of his religious faith. He sees the project as prior to religious conviction, in a real way; the book is an argument for something like natural law, what Lewis calls the “Tao.”6 His use of this iconic locution from a non-Western religious tradition is designed to underscore the universality of the natural law. He ends the book with his famous appendix that outlines a vast swath of basic moral agreements throughout history and the world over. Just as we have taken secular moral realists to be mainly allies in this section of the book, Lewis, too, in Abolition, intentionally accentuates connections with moral realists, both secular and religious, “pagans” not the least, who believe in objective right and wrong and an honest humanism.7 Here Lewis is definitely working in the tradition of thinking of the natural law as accessible via reason and rationality, then confirmed, amplified, and refined by further rational reflection and various religious and philosophical traditions.8

Lewis begins by pointing out the view, featuring a rich historical pedigree, that there are such things as just sentiments. That there are false sentiments is true but obvious and not as interesting as the fact that they should be replaced by right sentiments. Some emotional responses to various states of affairs are fitting and congruous, while others are ill-fitting and incongruous. Lewis thinks that those trained in (what Augustine called) “ordinate affections” or “just affections” easily locate the “first principles” of ethics. Moral goodness and the moral law—a conception common to Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental traditions alike—constitute the Tao: “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kinds of things we are.”9

Lewis practically sounds the theme of virtue epistemology in emphasizing that who we are shapes what we are able to see, and he suggests that the Tao is something that we should be able to apprehend. It is less a conclusion we draw from other evidence than a proper starting point, once we have been properly socialized and humanized. When the time is right, we should be able to recognize the demand for a proper response: empathy for one who is suffering, for example, or the propriety of rectifying patent injustices, dehumanization, or casual cruelty. Lewis accords vital importance to sentiment, but not the way that either subjectivists or emotivists do. Rather, he does so more similarly to the way John Hare’s prescriptive realism does: We recognize an objective demand for a sort of volitional endorsement. We recognize in that moment something that bears affinity to us; Lewis would gravitate toward reflective sentimentalism according to which our sensibilities function semiotically, pointing to an external referent. The process is not so much discursive ratiocination as experiential appropriation; it is more holistic than merely intellectual.

Recall how such a picture resonates with moral intuition, a healthy conscience, or direct apprehension. The truths of the Tao are self-evident; in modern parlance we might invoke notions of proper basicality and phenomenal conservatism providing reasons, both internalist and externalist, to take such immediate recognitions and broadly empirical apprehensions as veridical.10 Reid’s common sense and Lewis’s Tao underscore largely the same phenomenon. And like Reid, Lewis makes strides to integrate and effect a rapprochement between the affections and the intellect.

In Lewis’s case, the image he prefers is not head and heart, but head, belly, and chest. The head represents the intellect, the belly the sensations, and the chest the integration of the rational and the sensuous, producing stable sentiments and discovering ourselves as human beings in the process. Expressivism and subjectivism are dehumanizing, Lewis maintains, “because it makes ‘men without chests,’ people who have heads and bellies but no capacity to unite their cerebral self and their visceral self in their thorax, which is the definitively human faculty.”11 By one’s intellect one is mere spirit, and by appetite mere animal; it is by the middle element, the chest—the seat of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments—that “man is man.”12 In such ways, Lewis does not think we can do ethics without a proper anthropology, the right sense of who and what we are as human beings.

Lewis chooses for his paradigmatic example of the Tao the virtue of supreme self-sacrifice, likely because of at least three reasons: the biblical elevation of there being no greater love than laying down one’s life for one’s friends (John 15:13); the daily reminder of the loss of his wartime friend Paddy Moore; and “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” a famous line from the Roman lyric poet Horace that translates, “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.”13 That the notion of a noble death plays a diminished role in society today, Lewis might suggest, is an indication of the sort of trajectory that downplaying the Tao produces: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”14

Lewis thinks there is a kind of logical tension if not real incoherence associated with arguing against the Tao. The task is inherently self-defeating. Presumably one wishes to argue against moral first principles or the natural law because one thinks it is objectively valuable to avoid error and to obtain the truth. Truth acquisition, or at the very least error avoidance, in other words, is an intrinsic good. But to deny the Tao is precisely to deny that there are any such things as intrinsic goods.

Dangers of abandoning the Tao multiply. “In closing the coffin-lid on objective value,” Ward writes, “humanity has opened Pandora’s box.”15 Lewis presciently predicts a sort of inexorable moral devolution: starting with critics casually debunking value, to idealogues offering a hollow epistemological basis for moral judgment, to Nietzschean voluntarists asserting their will to power. Lewis’s book is a warning as much as a philosophical treatise, but we consider many of his points well worth careful pondering and chock-full of philosophical perspicacity. Much was, and is, at stake—including the dangers of dehumanization.

Echoing James’s greater concern about desiccation and emaciation than about superstition, Lewis concludes his treatment of the Tao by warning of the dangers of deflation:

But you cannot go on “explaining away” forever: you will find that you have explained explanation away. You cannot go on “seeing through” things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.16

As we wrap up this section, recall that our suggestion is that it is the conjunction of some or all of these arguments, collectively and cumulatively construed, that potentially constitutes reason to think moral realism is likely. Let us now add a few general observations.

Takeaways

The first observation to make about this list of evidential considerations is the sheer diversity of considerations. The points range over aesthetics and ethics, metaphysics and epistemology, theory and praxis, reason and emotion, discursive argument and more direct apprehension. They encompass philosophical methodology, Moorean shifts, and axioms from modal logic, not to mention parities between morality and epistemic and other value assertions.

The second takeaway is practically entailed: to note the operative epistemological assumptions in our approach. In part this is a reiteration of a recurring point throughout our analysis. We retain great openness to the potentially instructive nature of morality. We consider it to be not a relatively small matter but something that may well have much to teach us about the nature of reality and the human condition. It is not only moral duties that are of concern to us; that is but one part of the moral landscape. It is also inextirpable human rights, issues of human dignity, the dangers of dehumanization, and the wickedness of degradation and predation. Our agenda is not a defense of legalism or vindication of moralism but rather an exploration of the depth of love, the sweetness of mercy, the heartfelt need for justice, and the importance of grace.

The tools to use in delving into such rich topics should include the whole panoply of those at our disposal. This should include discursive philosophical argument, to be sure, but not predicated on an abstemious epistemology. Our preference is for a wide empiricism and expansive rationality. We do not undertake the task by eschewing religious or moral experience a priori; nor do we necessarily take such experiences as flawlessly veridical. They require investigation, critical scrutiny, and careful analysis; we encourage taking such experiences seriously and exploring their relevance with care. This requires taking a close look at the logic, language, and phenomenology of moral experience, for example, which accounts for why we have such great appreciation for insights from the likes of John Henry Newman, William James, and others about the complex and multiform ways a variety of factors—moral, religious, social, psychological, philosophical, aesthetic, relational, affective—can and do play a critical role in persuasion.

So much of the historical debate about ethics has revolved around issues of the head versus the heart. Rationalists have stressed the role of the intellect and mind; expressivists and sensibility theorists have emphasized the primacy of the affections and sensibilities. There is something ineliminably experiential and existential about morality. In an almost unique way, it involves elements from both the top down and the bottom up, and it seems to point both outward to external realities and inward toward something deeply personal and interior to our experience. In that spirit, we tend to gravitate toward analyses of ethics and moral epistemology that seek a rapprochement between the discursive and the experiential, the head and the heart, passion and reason, the intellect and the imagination. It seems to us that nothing less than this is required if we are going to come to a fuller appreciation of what moral truths there may be to discover. Likewise with our commitment to the value of a cumulative case, a topic as rich as ethics robustly construed should not be conducted as if a single piece of evidence or line of inquiry is enough to get the job done.

Most of part 2 has put the greater emphasis on philosophical, semantic, and logical deliverances, but in the conclusion we hope to extend the discussion a bit beyond those parameters into topics richer with imaginative significance. We wanted to begin with the philosophical, but we will not rest our case on those considerations alone. Philosophers often employ thought experiments to elicit intuitions and test out various ideas, but as some philosophers have noted, something like great literature provides thought experiments of their own—often quite thick, colorful, and powerful ones. We hope in the conclusion to show some ways in which literature can add to our discussion of moral realism by appealing not just to the workings of ratiocination but also to insights from narrative and deliverances from the imagination.

The third and perhaps most substantive takeaway from our investigation is this: If we do not assume naturalism as our default position, then a panoply of significant results becomes possible. We need not be committed to and stultified by the naturalistic and scientistic assumptions that tend to drive expressivism; we can reject human mind-dependence where morality is concerned without closing ourselves off to stance-dependent metaethical accounts that do not compromise objectivity, prescriptivity, and necessity—in short, moral authority. We need not assume that a Humean bottom-up take on morality is sufficient, and we can embrace a sensibility account entirely compatible with both robust moral realism and theistic ethics. And we need not assume an unguided evolutionary process by inserting theological add-ons to the scientific account; this helps address debunking concerns in an effective manner.

What About Supernaturalism?

Up until now, we have largely treated secular ethical realists as allies. We have great appreciation for their work, and we have learned a great deal from their labors. There is a large swath of agreements we share with them. But as our earlier chart illustrates, there is one final fork in the road where we potentially part ways even with nonnatural moral Platonists, for we retain openness to the wisdom of moving in a more theistic direction instead at that point. We have not ourselves made that case yet, but in this last section of this last chapter of part 2, we wish to suggest some reasons why a supernaturalistic ethic should remain on the table as a viable option worthy of careful consideration. This brief foray, then, goes beyond a mere defense of sturdy moral realism, but recall that, from the start, it was our intent eventually to arrive here, assuming a good enough defense of robust moral realism could be provided. This will set the stage for part 3.

In what follows, ten connections will be briefly noted between metaethics and theism. The list is not meant to be comprehensive; in part it consolidates points made earlier at various junctures, and on some occasions it makes fresh ones. By “supernaturalism” we refer to God in a fairly straightforward sense: God as the possessor of the “omni” qualities and such. Here and there we dip into the great monotheistic traditions to showcase the potential power of standard pieces of theology, such as humans as divine image bearers. We are not pressing these points altogether; the list is at this point meant to be at least suggestive and at most a promissory note, fodder for additional reflection. The brief discussion will also furnish an opportunity to bring a few points full circle or to a tentative measure of closure.

Moral argument against morality. Let us begin with a moral argument against morality, which asks us to suppose that it turns out that, metaphysically speaking, the content of objective morality flies in the face of our deepest moral intuitions. Suppose, for example, that morality were to dictate that it is right to torture children for fun after all. The idea is that we would be altogether justified to reject such objective morality, and to do so on moral grounds!

As it happens, there is a specifically theistic variant of this concern, rooted in the arbitrariness problems associated with radical voluntarism. If God were able to command us to do just anything, and his commands are morally authoritative, it would render morality arbitrary. This is surely a grave concern for, say, the gods of the Greek pantheon, but as we saw Evans argue, in taking on Darwall’s secular ethical theory, the theology of a perfectly good God arguably provides the needed resources to circumvent arbitrariness objections while saving the appearances of morality. We have also traversed quite a bit of ground to show that a radically voluntarist depiction of theistic ethics does not begin to do justice to the complexities of any theistic story a thoroughgoing Anselmian would provide.

Dualism of practical reason. What Sidgwick called the “dualism of practical reason” pertains to the tension between doing what is in one’s own self-interest and doing what is best for the groups of which we are a part. Sidgwick thought the problem resides at the heart of the whole ethical enterprise and that, lacking a solution, it is intractable. He did, however, see a potential way out, as did J. L. Mackie—namely, a theistic one. If the world were ordered by a loving and sovereign deity, the dualism of practical reason could be resolved. Both Sidgwick and Mackie saw this, admitting as much, but neither saw it as providing enough evidence for the truth of the theistic hypothesis. In the name of building a potential cumulative case for a theistic ethic, however, we think it should be part of the picture, especially if nothing less is at stake than the very rationality of morality.

Queerness. Recall the various concerns about ontological queerness broached by J. L. Mackie and the way that, by his own admission, supernaturalism would resolve each one of them. In his seminal article “Religion and the Queerness of Morality,” George Mavrodes made this very point, pointing to a theistic explanation of morality as arguably the best on offer.17 Whereas morality might well prove intractably odd in a naturalistic world, it seems to reside altogether comfortably in a supernaturalistic one, vitiating any need to water down or domesticate robust moral categories. At the root of queerness concerns is the issue of moral authority, which we have noted a theistic story seems impeccably equipped to provide.

Mind-dependence. Contra the notion that there is no relevant difference between human mind-dependence and divine mind-dependence, we have noted ways in which divine-mind dependence may well prove no threat whatsoever to objectivity, necessity, and prescriptive authority. Capturing the (divine) mind-dependent elements of morality can help explain its personalist features, and this offers, as we have seen before, a way to integrate great traditions heretofore thought to be at odds. Recall Tom Morris’s words to this effect. Arguing that key elements of Platonism and theism can be reconciled, the result, he says, is “a view which both retains the commitments of realism concerning the objective existence and status of abstract entities and modal truths, while at the same time capturing the conviction of anti-realists and conventionalists that such items must be in some sense mind-dependent. And this in itself is quite significant.”18

Laws and lawgivers. Closely related to that point is this one. Whether the laws at issue in need of explanation be nomological, logical, epistemic, or moral, thinkers from Leibniz to Plantinga to Adams have argued that divine mind-dependence, far from threatening the stability or reality of such laws, may well be their prerequisite and best explanation. Indeed, if something in the vicinity of constant creation is operative, everything apart from God depends on God for its reality. This makes understandable Berkeley’s insistence that idealism is true; he was attempting to do justice to the notion that everything radically depends on God, motivated by the fear of worshiping nature once it is thought to be able to exist on its own.19 We need not be idealists in any problematic sense, though, by more simply pointing to the possibility of the divine mind-dependence of everything there is—from mountains to morals. However radical it sounds, it is, quite simply, a garden-variety entailment of classical monotheism and is one more reason to resist Huemer’s downplaying of the human mind-dependence and divine mind-dependence distinction.

Confirmation by special revelation. The sort of story we have pursued here has been driven from the first by philosophical reflection. For a variety of evidential reasons, we have seen as eminently reasonable that there are axiomatic moral starting points and rational deliverances about values, moral and otherwise. We have not appealed to special revelation to get the ball rolling but have tried to see how far philosophical reflection alone might get us. The story, though, does not end there, and what we find as illuminating as it is heartwarming is the variety of ways that theistic teachings and special revelation can confirm and even extend these deliverances of reason. Teachings held in common by the great monotheistic traditions—for example, about human beings having been made in God’s image—arguably provide a finer-grained account of the general revelation that human beings possess great intrinsic value, and, as Kant put it, no mere price. Such theological insights perhaps make unsurprising the historical examples of people—from William Wilberforce to Martin Luther King Jr. to Mother Teresa—expending themselves in service of humanity in visceral recognition of its great inherent dignity, equality, and value.

Nonnaturalism. We find it tremendously telling that the sort of story we have told defending moral realism puts us in league with leading secular metaethicists. Overlapping with their analyses on a great many scores—from cognitivism to nihilism, from expressivism to constructivism, from moral objectivity to nonnaturalism—we resonate with much of their excellent analysis. It is only at the final fork in the road, as it were, the divide between moral Platonism and theistic ethics, where we are inclined to demur and depart from their company. Though this point of divergence is of course no small disagreement, our present point is different: It is easy to overlook all the terrain shared in common.

Telos. Ed Feser has lamented the loss of teleology in much contemporary ethics. Aristotle, of course, by contrast, made issues of teleology central to his ethical analysis. On this score, his approach deeply resonated with, say, Hebraic construals of human teleology that paint the human condition as most satisfied and fulfilled in relation to the divine. Indeed, on classic monotheistic models, we are meant, ultimately, for loving relationships with God and neighbor. This carves out room in theistic ethics not just for efficient and material causes but also for formal and final ones; a shared primacy of teleology forges an important connection and point of resonance between Hellenistic and Hebraic traditions. Such a shared commitment potentially also sheds great light on those issues of anthropology of such concern to a thinker like Lewis. Almost all of this is in direct contrast to stories of twentieth-century naturalistic metaethics.

The moral gap. Invoking a Kantian notion of the moral gap that obtains between what morality realistically construed requires and the best we can morally perform on our own, John Hare argues that various secular efforts to close the gap fall short. Rather than exaggerating human capacities, lowering the moral demand, or generating a secular solution, the best way to close the gap, he thinks, is something like divine grace. Plausibly, this is a good way in which to motivate, on such performative grounds, a variant of the moral argument that points not just to theism per se but to Christianity in particular. Among deep existential moral needs seem to be forgiveness for wrongdoing, deliverance from shame, moral change and transformation, and principled hope for such a process to reach its culmination. In such Christian doctrines as justification, sanctification, and glorification are found precise parallels, conferring plausibility to such tenets of religious faith.

Explanatory gap. Another gap in the vicinity of ethics is explanatory. Secularists can generate potential solutions of their own to debunking objections to moral knowledge, but theists have good reasons not to add to the evolutionary mix such philosophical add-ons as the notion that the evolutionary process is essentially unguided. By retaining openness to the possibility of a guided process, the theistic ethicist has considerably more and arguably better resources for arguing that theism defeats debunking concerns.

With that, we will draw the discussion of this chapter to a close. We have provided our cumulative case for moral realism, at least in broad outline. We have also provided an assortment of reasons why we think, if such moral realism obtains and is even self-evident, questions of its ultimate explanation remain open. Finally, among living options for such an explanation, we have tentatively suggested, is a theistic account that deserves an important place at the table for the several ways in which it holds promise of answering important and interesting philosophical challenges that organically arise along the way.

Conclusion

Arguing for the truth of moral realism involves unique challenges. Perhaps the biggest of all is that some moral truths, if such there be, are simply axiomatic. Such first principles, as Lewis calls them, by definition are those on the basis of which we are likely to draw other inferences. Usually the axioms are taken for granted; that is, they are more likely to function as premises than conclusions. A nearly insuperable obstacle to arguing in favor of the most basic moral truths is that there is little to appeal to in order to generate the argument. What can be more obvious than the objective wrongness of torturing children?20 This of course provides much of the incentive to think of such truths as self-evident or intuitive, commonsensical or properly basic. In the face of one who, with furrowed brow, solemnly insists that he simply does not see it, incredulous stares are altogether understandable.

Still, we have attempted to have this conversation and offer various evidences for such truths. Yet other philosophical arguments for moral realism could be discussed—default arguments, folk arguments, primacy of value arguments—but we have decided to stop where we did. Providing such arguments has its point but also its limitations. For those inclined to resist the arguments, there are surely junctures at which questions can be asked and doubts raised.

We would like to do something a little different in this conclusion in order to extend the discussion in a new direction or two. We want to take off our philosophy hats for a few moments and reflect more generally about moral reality and some compelling reasons to take it seriously. Often the sorts of appeals we wish to make here are not exactly the stock in trade among philosophers, but they possess their own persuasive power and, in some cases, evidential force. We have intentionally waited until now to broach these additional considerations in the last stage of our cumulative case for moral realism. We are not casting them as sufficient in themselves to make the case or even as the proper place to begin. Their placement here at the end is a strategic decision designed to round out our overall analysis.

Ideally, we would like to persuade the not-yet-convinced to take moral realism with great seriousness and to feel the force of a cumulative case in its favor. Since persuasion, on the basis of good reasons and evidence, is our goal, Aristotle’s great Rhetoric naturally comes to mind. In this classic treatment, Aristotle discussed logos, ethos, and pathos—sometimes called the rhetorical triangle—as the best ways to change someone’s mind. Logos pertains to the issue of logical and rational arguments, adducing evidence, anticipating objections, and the like. Most typical philosophical arguments most readily fall into such a category, and most of this book is an example. This is occasionally thought to be the only sort of legitimate way to persuade anyone of anything, but it is not.

Aristotle knew that persuasion is a more complicated affair. To this end, he also saw the need for ethos and pathos. Ethos pertains to the character of the one doing the persuading. The persuasive work done in the ethos mode refers to establishing authority, credibility, and trust through character and integrity. Appealing to an essentially moral dimension of the very act of arguing for the propriety of assuming the moral stance can seem problematically circular, but there are two points we wish to emphasize here. First, ironically enough, the decision one makes about whether to take morality with sober seriousness does unavoidably appear to be a moral decision. Treating the moral stance as merely optional, for example, involves making a choice about its relative importance and authority. The same could be said about issues of civil legality; if the speed limit is treated as a mere suggestion (as most drivers in Houston do), that very decision will likely yield legal repercussions or something even worse.

Second, there is something existentially compelling about witnessing moral exemplars, as Linda Zagzebski emphasizes in her work on exemplarism. Seeing their love of neighbor, their altruism, and their compassion moves us and inspires us. It helps us see what humanity at its best can be; it makes goodness attractive. Sometimes it is said that evil characters in fiction are the most captivating and compelling, but perhaps thinking so is a failure of imagination. Some years ago, a documentary came out about Fred Rogers, and we remember seeing grown men cry at the beautiful example of this kind, gentle man devoting himself to caring for the intellectual and emotional needs of children. Such a documentary is obviously not a discursive argument but rather an experience of the sort that tugs at the heartstrings, expands one’s moral vision, and moves one to action, fortifying certain convictions in the process.

Pathos touches on our emotions and sentiments. Emotional appeals are often thought to be evidential cheats, circumventing issues of truth and settling for sophistry, and they certainly can be. But not always. Arguably, on occasion, emotional appeals are altogether apposite. Recall Lewis’s insistence that some emotional responses are more appropriate than others. This is, by the estimation of most, moral common sense. If someone were to witness 9/11 and burst out laughing hysterically seeing people jump to their deaths rather than be burned alive, it would viscerally grate against our deepest sensibilities. We recognize something about such a jaded and inexplicable response that is broken, dysfunctional, and, indeed, culpable. This is just why we are able to apprehend the bad moral fit of casual cruelty or, in wonderful contrast, the beauty of a father’s selfless love for his child. These experiential and phenomenological features of moral experience are not without significance. Elizabeth Anscombe noted that while we can study the life of turnips and cats objectively from the outside, the life of humans, for humans, must be studied from within.21 The lived experience of morality may not entail moral realism, but it is part of a great mosaic; moral realism certainly makes excellent sense of its existence and texture.

The image of a mosaic is apt, as it is something to ponder and relish and study, as is moral experience itself. To make this point, consider a few analogies. Some years ago, my wife and I (Dave) were planning a trip to Europe, which included a foray to France. By happy coincidence, just before the trip I read C. S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism. Among the advice he doles out is, when reading a novel or looking at a painting, to allow it to speak to you in its own voice. Do not prematurely impose on it what you want to hear or examine it through a lens that obscures. Get out of the way and take it in, allowing its voice to do its work. It was great advice, and I applied it when visiting the Louvre soon thereafter, finding the experience to be far richer for it.

Something similar can be said of poetry. One’s attitude going into a poem will dictate what one gets from it. There is wisdom, when interpreting a text, in exegeting rather than eisegeting—reading out of the text what is there rather than reading into it what is not. Similarly, there is wisdom, when reading a novel or poem, or looking at a painting, in allowing it to speak. Likewise with the mosaic of morality, where something analogous can easily happen, and the lens through which we look at it obfuscates more than illumines. Rather, there is wisdom in cultivating ears to hear what it has to say.

Moral goodness, like beauty, carries with it something ineliminably experiential, and recognition of this fact makes it all the more appropriate that any argument for robust moral realism should include elements that go beyond the purely logical and abstract. Fidelity to one’s wife construed as an abstract moral principle alone can carry some conviction, but remembering the distinctly personalist features of morality adds an extra layer of reality and conviction. To cheat is not merely to violate a principle but to violate a personal trust, a real person to whom one has pledged fidelity. Morality is, we have argued, a cognitive matter, but it is not merely intellectual. It is phenomenal, personalist, existential, and affective.22 Philosopher Eleonore Stump writes extensively about nonpropositional knowledge, another sort of knowing, more Franciscan and second person than Dominican, more experiential than mere knowing-that.23 Personal acquaintance is one example, but meaningful moral experiences, too, arguably carry additional significance beyond mere acquisition of true propositional beliefs. There is often a depth to such experiences that goes beyond the merely propositional.

What makes this more expansive and imaginative approach all the more needed is that philosophy often still operates in the wake of the linguistic turn of the twentieth century that had a dampening effect on exploration of the big questions that occupied classical philosophers: questions about God’s existence, the meaning of life, truth, goodness, and beauty. These are replaced with narrow questions about linguistic and semantic analysis, a thin approach to philosophy divested of poetry, mystery, transcendence, metaphysics, or even morality. There is wisdom in conjoining the technical machinery of twentieth-century analytic philosophy with the enduring concerns of philosophy that we can find among, say, the realists and idealists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and among a great many thinkers before that. This is how we can connect “seemingly abstract and esoteric enquiries with the urgent and real, practical, and spiritual questions that confront each of us in our day-to-day lives.”24

Blaise Pascal was someone who took arguments seriously, both in mathematics and in philosophy, but he also recognized that reason has its limitations. Part of reason is recognition of its limits, he wrote. Famously he put it like this: “The heart itself has its own reason that reason itself cannot understand.”25 He understood better than most that the process of coming to various conclusions in this life involves a risk. We are not just logic-chopping machines dispassionately following the evidence where it leads. We are affective, conative, relational beings continually adjusting our credences, weighing evidences of all sorts, assigning primacy to certain felt reasons more than others, taking as veridical what we assume are direct apprehensions, allowing ourselves to be persuaded by nondiscursive arguments, discerning what is likely true. The same epistemic boat in which we all find ourselves calls on each of us to play the prophet and take our chances. Some do it better than others, no doubt, but it is not at all clear, at least to us, that the safest way forward is never to risk error for the sake of finding truth.

Regarding belief in God, Pascal, in his Pensées, is famous for saying that there is enough evidence for those inclined to believe and enough darkness for those who do not wish to believe. Whatever the merits of such a claim, we might suggest something analogous about moral realism. There is enough evidence for those who want to believe and enough doubt that can be raised for the skeptic to disbelieve. William James once said it is an irrational rule that prevents one from finding truths that are really there to be found. Suppose for a moment that the widespread conviction is true that there are some objective moral truths that are essentially axiomatic and self-justified instances of moral common sense. A feature of just such first principles would be that there is a real limitation in how far reason can go to argue for their existence. It remains, then, the prerogative to say that this very limitation of reason goes to show that the argument(s) for such robust moral realities is (are) weak and that, on pain of irrationality, one should refrain from believing them. But that very decision procedure itself involves epistemic guesswork, not without risk, and a guess that, in the minds of many if not most, both flies in the face of what seems obvious and carries an inordinately steep price.

This is no knockdown argument for moral realism, nor an effort to cast moral skeptics as either irrational or perverse. Much of the import of this conclusion, in fact, is a disavowal of any effort to provide any such argument or even to say there is such an argument. Still, we consider there to be ample principled reasons for taking moral realism seriously, while admitting that there may well be an element of volition involved. Volitional questions where our beliefs are concerned are, of course, a vexed matter; most of the time, in truth, we do not exert direct volitional control over them. When we see a chair in front of us, we typically do not choose to believe there is a chair there. We simply find ourselves believing it (a vivid dream is one of the rare exceptions). Similarly, the thesis of robust moral realism is one we tend to find ourselves either believing or doubting. Still, though, it seems at least likely that we can and do exert indirect volitional control over our beliefs. Whether, for example, we choose to privilege avoiding error or acquiring the truth will invariably shape our perspective, over time, on all sorts of important philosophical questions.

It is unsurprising that William James recognized the important role volition plays in decisions about morality. In the context of discussing the propriety of making “passional decisions” when certain conditions obtain—a forced question, indecisive evidence, and a momentous question—he broached the matter of morality as a paradigmatic example:

The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having them is decided by our will. Are our moral preferences true or false, or are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or bad for us, but in themselves indifferent? How can your pure intellect decide? If your heart does not want a world of moral reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one. . . . Moral skepticism can no more be refuted or proved by logic than intellectual skepticism can. When we stick to it that there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The skeptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude, but which of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows.26

Supposing that the evidence for moral realism is indeed indecisive—which is consistent with the preponderance of evidence in its favor, depending on the stringency of the burden of proof—and the decision to endorse it or not is forced, the question of its momentous nature is little in dispute. Whether we take morality seriously has significant existential repercussions. There is nothing merely academic about this decision, as one tragic chapter of history after another amply shows. Recall the impact that seeing the Holocaust play out in real time had on such philosophers as Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe. It quite redirected their philosophical work to combat those metaethical theories that are inadequate to the task of saying what is wrong with such horrific atrocities and unspeakable dehumanization as the Nazis perpetrated.

If, however, there is no Tao, no objective axiomatic moral truths, then there is no real ascription of objective moral guilt; indeed, arguably there is nothing deeply wrong with such dehumanization. Unless human value is real, people are bereft of their basic human moral rights, and the sorts of atrocities that turn our stomachs instantiate no property of objective moral wrongness at all: from the slaughter of Jews and Poles and homosexuals during the Holocaust to the killing of counterrevolutionaries under communist China to the rape, torture, maiming, and murder of hundreds of thousands of Chinese in Nanking by the Japanese army in 1937, and plenty more besides. Dehumanization, predation, and torture seem to cry out for denunciation in the strongest of moral terms, but if moral realism is false, such appearances are deceptive. Drafters of documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights assumed otherwise, aiming to safeguard human dignity, condemn patent injustice, and make clear that certain cruel, inhuman, degrading behaviors are beyond the moral pale and should always be legally proscribed.

Not only is history replete with powerful tales of moral heroism and villainy; so also is literature, which leads some philosophers to tap into great fictional narratives for thick, full-blooded moral language, illustrations, and thought experiments that elicit the right sorts of viscerally affective responses. Martha Nussbaum is one example, but Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, among others, were avid storytellers. Eleonore Stump sees poetic prefaces in her chapters of Wandering in Darkness as ineliminable parts of her philosophical argument, contributing above and beyond what discursive argument can. Christina Hoff Sommers is another example, using literary stories in her philosophy classes as a countervailing influence to what she calls “dilemma ethics” that subtly reinforce the thought that all ethics is colored gray.27 Stories of beautiful virtue or ugly vice have, she thinks, a salutary effect on the character of readers who are not left wondering what lesson to take from morally ambiguous thought experiments and dilemma case studies.

Incidentally, by pointing to the importance of literature, we are not suggesting a simplistic use of literature to look for the “morals” of the stories. Mark Twain himself wrote about Huckleberry Finn that those who try to find a motive in the narrative will be prosecuted, those who try to find a moral in it will be banished, and those who try to find a plot in it will be shot.28 The delicate offering of literature to the investigation of ethics is subtler than that. A. E. Taylor captured such an insight in his classic Faith of a Moralist:

We all attach great weight to Shakespeare’s interpretations of human life, or Dante’s, or Pascal’s, or Wordsworth’s; even when we reject their testimony, we at least do not reject it lightly. I believe it would be safe to say that Plato is the only metaphysician whose verdicts on things human we ascribe anything like this significance, and the reason is manifest. It is that Plato was so much more than the author of a philosophical theory; he was one of the world’s supreme dramatists, with the great dramatist’s insight into a vast range of human character and experience, an insight only possible to a nature itself quickly and richly responsive to a world of suggestion which narrower natures of the specialist type miss. If I am found in the sequel appealing to the testimony of “moralists,” I trust it will be understood that by moralists I do not mean primarily men who have devoted themselves to the elaboration of ethical systems, the Aristotles, or even the Kants, but men who have lived richly and deeply and thought as well as lived, the Platos, Augustines, Dostoevskys, and their fellows.29

Hoff Sommers suggests that to understand King Lear, Oliver Twist, or Huckleberry Finn requires that the reader have some understanding of (and sympathy with) what the author is saying about the moral ties that bind the characters and that hold in place the social fabric in which they play their roles. “Literary figures can thus provide students with the moral paradigms that Aristotle thought were essential to moral education.” She asks, “Have we not learned a thing or two over the past several thousand years of civilization? To pretend we know nothing about basic decency, about human rights, about vice and virtue, is fatuous and disingenuous. Of course we know that gratuitous cruelty and political repression are wrong, that kindness and political freedom are right and good. Why should we be the first society in history that finds itself hamstrung in the vital task of passing along its moral tradition to the next generation?”30

One more literary example will suffice. Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” is a remarkable short story. It features Hulga, an embittered young woman who had studied philosophy and become a complete moral (and religious) skeptic. Cocooned within her shell, she is closed off to other people until a young Bible salesman comes along and treats her kindly. Gradually she opens herself up to him, until a climactic scene in which she makes herself completely vulnerable. At just that moment he horribly betrays her confidence and reveals who he really is: a swindler and a knave. Hulga is apoplectic, her face nearly purple. She, the alleged skeptic, blurts out, “You’re a fine Christian! You’re just like them all—say one thing and do another. You’re a perfect Christian, you’re . . .”

The boy’s mouth was set angrily. “I hope you don’t think,” he said in a lofty indignant tone, “that I believe in that crap! I may sell Bibles but I know which end is up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m going!”31

Hulga’s skepticism about right and wrong, good and evil, vice and virtue, was safe in the abstract, but its implications were more hideous than words when encountered in reality. In just such vivid ways, good literature can fire the imagination and help readers more clearly apprehend the import and implications of ideas. “The thought of great makers of literature who have been also great readers of the human heart may be much more important than the speculations of the professed metaphysician or psychologist.”32 If our quest is not just for analytic rigor and technical machinery but for genuine wisdom and true understanding, alongside philosophical discourses lining our shelves should be short stories and novels, folktales and poems and allegories. Philosophy, truth be told, can use more diversity, its deserts occasionally needing better irrigation. On this point, Mary Midgley argued that the solipsism, skepticism, and individualism so characteristic of the philosophical tradition would not feature in a world written by people who had shared intimate friendships with spouses and lovers, been pregnant, raised children, and enjoyed rich and full and varied lives.33

We are all on a journey of exploration in this haunted dream of life, and the choice of whether to do our best to gain understanding and acquire wisdom is up to us. Is moral realism true? We modestly submit that to answer such a question requires a long, patient look at the evidence, carefully attending to its various manifestations, giving it the chance to accumulate and coalesce and have its say. Logical and philosophical arguments and evidences are a great place to begin, to be sure, but one should not stop there. Be content with nothing less than an expansive rationality and generous empiricism. Be open as well to nondiscursive evidence and Franciscan knowledge, axiomatic intuitions and direct apprehensions, moral common sense, self-evidence, and visceral reasons of the heart and imagination. Be eclectic and virtuous in your epistemology, privileging both the abstract and the concrete, theory and praxis, the head and the heart. Heed the inspiration derived from moral heroes and exemplars and a guiding love of wisdom and quest for understanding, reading great literature along the way. Become reconciled to the risks involved in acquiring truth, not content to avoid error alone and ending up following irrational rules in the process. Notice the dynamic element of volition that invariably plays its role, and feel the intractable tensions involved in rejecting the Tao. Sensitize rather than inure yourself to the dangers of dehumanization, not to mention its long and tragic track record in history. Cultivate a profound sense of intrinsic human value and relish the unspeakable, ineffable beauty of goodness that transcends words.

1 Terence Cuneo, The Normative Web: An Argument for Moral Realism (Oxford University Press, 2010).

2 Cuneo has written another book-length treatment titled Speech and Morality about a different argument for moral realism. Terence Cuneo, Speech and Morality: On the Metaethical Implications of Speaking (Oxford University Press, 2014). His argument hinges on the normative theory of speech, according to which speech acts come from an agent’s altering his normative position with regard to his audience, thereby gaining rights, responsibilities, and obligations of certain kinds, some of which are moral. If so, a necessary condition of being able to speak is that there are moral rights, responsibilities, and obligations of a broadly realist sort. We leave further reflection on this innovative argument to the reader. Cuneo, Russ Shafer-Landau, and John Bengson are currently finishing a trilogy in which they argue for nonnatural moral realism following a careful methodological approach. We won’t delve into it here, unable to do it justice, but the completed project is bound to be a major advance in the discussion. See John Bengson, Terence Cuneo, and Russ Shafer-Landau, Philosophical Methodology: From Data to Theory (Oxford University Press, 2022); and The Moral University (Oxford University Press, 2024).

3 Thanks to Eric Sampson for offering this version of the argument. A number of his works have been of benefit to us, including Eric Sampson, “The Self-Undermining Arguments from Disagreement,” Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 14, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau (Oxford University Press, 2019), 23–46. See also “A Positive Case for Objective Morality (Dr. Eric Sampson),” interview by Jordan Hampton, posted February 25, 2021, by The Analytic Christian, YouTube, 1 hour, 19 min., 2 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KICGOHpz7A.

4 A pro tanto moral principle is a moral principle that applies to a certain extent.

5 To see this argument fleshed out, see David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, The Good, the Right, and the Real: Is Value a Fact? (Oxford University Press, 2025).

6 Natural law in the Thomistic tradition appeals to both Plato and Aristotle—both the notion of absolute good and what is good for something. The latter, to our thinking, is incomplete without being predicated on the former. As Steve Evans wrote in personal correspondence to us in January 2025,

Many contemporary Thomists think we need only Aristotle. But Thomas Aquinas did not think that. He followed Augustine (and Plato) as well as Aristotle. Aristotle speaks of goodness as only goodness of a kind. Plato thinks that goodness is absolute. I think Christians should agree with Plato. We can agree with Aristotle that a thing can be a good thing of its kind. However, there is also goodness that is independent of a kind. It is good that humans exist. They have intrinsic value. Plato can make sense of that. Aristotle cannot. So I think Aristotelean views of value need to be rooted in a Platonic theory of value. I think that is Aquinas’s view. So a good Thomist should also be a Platonist.

7 As Ward puts it, “Such lights bear witness to ‘common grace’ and therefore to the value of natural theology.” See Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s “The Abolition of Man” (Word on Fire, 2021), 19.

8 This is clearly also in the tradition of John Henry Newman’s construal of special revelation as performing an ampliative function after the provision of general revelation.

9 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man: Or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools (HarperOne, 2001), 18.

10 A properly basic belief is both noninferential and properly justified or warranted. “Phenomenal conservatism” is the view that if it seems to someone S that p is true, then S is prima facie justified in believing that p. Part 3 will discuss both of these more.

11 Ward, After Humanity, 14.

12 Lewis, Abolition, 24–25.

13 Horace’s line was quoted in the title of a poem by Wilfred Owen called “Dulce et Decorum Est,” published in 1921, describing soldiers’ horrific experiences in World War I. Owen’s poem, which calls Horace’s line “the old Lie,” ended the line’s straightforward uncritical use. Some evidence suggests that Lewis never read Owen’s poem. For interesting commentary here, see Malcolm Guite, “The Abolition of Man: From Literary Criticism to Prophetic Resistance,” in C. S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner, ed. Michael Ward and Peter S. Williams (Wipf & Stock, 2016), 161–63.

14 Lewis, Abolition, 26.

15 Ward, After Humanity, 16.

16 Lewis, Abolition, 81.

17 George Mavrodes, “Religion and the Queerness of Morality,” in Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment: New Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright (Cornell University Press, 1986).

18 Thomas V. Morris, Anselmian Explorations (University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 178.

19 The attribution to the natural world by some of qualities traditionally associated with God somewhat vindicates Berkeley’s theologically driven concern.

20 Thus Moorean arguments.

21 Thanks to Clare MacCumhaill and Rachael Wiseman for their perspicacious book Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life (Doubleday, 2022), xiii.

22 A book we just became aware of, too late to interact with, focuses on phenomenology and underscores limitations in a naturalistic perspective: Sharon Hewitt Rawlette’s The Feeling of Value: Moral Realism Grounded in Phenomenal Consciousness (Dudley & White, 2016).

23 Knowing various true propositions about a person is not the same as knowing the person himself. See Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford University Press, 2012), for her distinction between Dominican and Franciscan knowledge.

24 MacCumhaill and Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals, xiv.

25 Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings (Oxford University Press, 1995), 158.

26 William James, “The Will to Believe,” in Essays in Pragmatism (Collier Macmillan, 1948), 103–4.

27 This is not to suggest that moral dilemmas cannot in their own way serve a purpose and prove instructive, but perhaps they should not be the primary means of ethics instruction. See Christina Hoff Sommers, “How to Teach Right and Wrong,” Christianity Today, December 13, 1993, 33–37.

28 See Twain’s preface to Huckleberry Finn.

29 A. E. Taylor, Faith of a Moralist (Macmillan, 1930), 17.

30 Hoff Sommers, “How to Teach Right and Wrong.”

31 Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Short Stories (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1976), 204.

32 Taylor, Faith of a Moralist, 16.

33 MacCumhaill and Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals, ix.

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