Michael Huemer

Michael Huemer is a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Colorado and one of the leading proponents of moral realism: the thesis that there are true, objective moral facts.

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Michael Huemer explains his full argument for objective morality | Seeing Clearly Episode 8 with Christian Gonzalez.

Ethics is right and wrong. An evaluative statement is something like "murder is wrong." Metaethics is why we think things could be right or wrong. Five metaethical theories

• Moral Realists, there are objective evaluative truths
  • Reductionist/Naturalists: says that there is a reason that something is right/wrong without needing any person's feeling to be involved. You can explain what is wrong with an act in objective terms. Explained without evaluative arguments. Empirical or scientific explanations give us epistemic knowledge.
  • Not Reducible/Intuitionists: Can not reduce to evaluative truths. And so you must use evaluative language to define right and wrong. Intuition just IS what there is. Believe there are facts about things beyond the descriptive facts, and there is no epistemic knowledge. Standard religious dualists fall in this category along with divine command theory.
• Antirealists, there are no objective evaluative truths
  • Expressivists / Non-cognitivists: Statements are neither true nor false. Such statements are not making assertions, they are just expressions of your feelings about things. "booo murder".
  • Nihilist / Error Theorists: Evaluative statement are always false. There is no good/bad right/wrong. You apply a property to something that can have no such property. Positive statements false.
  • Subjectivists: there are evaluative truths, but it depends on observer. Something is true because our culture believes it is good/bad.

Two issues: epistemological issue about "how we know about moral truths" and the metaphysical issue "whether they are reducible".

Dualism vs Monism: Monism is one kind of facts, Dualism is two kinds of facts.

• Prescriptivism - when you make moral statements you are commanding people. It is about influencing behavior
• Emotivism - moral claims are expressions of attitudes, not beliefs. "booo murder" Expressing theorisms.

Students get confused between subjectivism (describing your feelings) and emotivism (expressing your feelings). "I wonder whether murder is wrong" makes no sense for emotivist.

Moral statements ACT like propositions.

The Frege-Geach problem is a challenge for non-cognitivist theories in ethics, which argue that moral statements do not express beliefs that can be true or false. It highlights difficulties in using moral judgments in logical arguments and conditional statements while maintaining their meaning and validity.

Quasi-Realism: you explain how you can make statements as if moral statements were expressing propositions even though they are not. "It is true that P" just means P (not the truth of P).

Inconsistent beliefs are guaranteed to be false. (Parfit's argument)

Why are ethical naturalists wrong? Evaluative language stating something is good or bad. Naturalist says you can explain moral truth using non evaluative language. Assume some kind of empirical knowledge of evaluative facts -- he feels this is a confusion. e.g. goodness and pleasure are the same thing. Problem: what experiment can be run to demonstrate the goodness of an evaluative statement? Take the explanation and see if it can be explained by someone with a different view of goodness. Has to be something that is NOT explained by having a different view. What can be explained by proposing that pleasure is bad.

Rebuttal: What about setting up two tribes with differing rules and see who survives?

Moore's open question argument is a philosophical argument that challenges the idea that moral properties, like "goodness," can be equated with natural properties, such as pleasure. It asserts that the question "Is X good?" remains meaningful, indicating that moral properties cannot be reduced to natural ones. The Open Question Argument, G.E. Moore's challenge to ethical naturalism, claims moral terms like 'good' cannot be analytically reduced to natural properties. Take a question about pleasure, and substitute good for pleasure, and notice the meaning changes.

Rebuttal: Pleasure is unrelated to good, but comes along for the ride.

Rejecting naturalism rejects the is/ought gap. (@32:00)

Supervenience: why adding additional facts to the world?

Difference between what the right thing to do, and what you actually do. Maybe you do the wrong thing. We try to figure out what is right. Not what you want to do. We don't act as if anti-realism was true.

Subjectivism: it is true that something is good, but it depends on someone's evaluation.

Ideal Observer Theory: they think they are reporting what some ideal observer might report, and they might make mistakes if they are misinformed. If these are hypothetical observers, then it looks like naturalism.

It is hard to subjectivism to explain someone who does what they know is wrong. Say you know that eating ice cream is bad, but you decide to do it anyway, does that make it good? Isn't the subjective opinion to eat it this time just as valid as the opinion it is bad? If desires are neither correct nor incorrect, then why wouldn't that final desire count for making the act good.

What about separating judgement from desire? Subjectivist only has desires as the source of motivation. This is not "belief about desires". Should the student study or party? Siren's dilemma: your desires change over time. It was not irrational for Odysseus to be tied to the mast. Young and old have different desires. Subjectivists have no real solution to explain this.

Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism: things are the way they seem, unless there is some reason to think otherwise.

Ethical Nihilism: there is no good or bad. the theory that Hitler never did anything wrong is nonsense. They claim: if there were evaluative truths they would motivate you to act against your desires, but there are none, so there are no evaluative truths. There do appear to be moral facts, and so we would need a good reason to propose that there are no such facts.

What case do we have that "torturing children" is wrong? How would you test for that? If you live in a society that supports torturing babies, should you torture babies? This refutes cultural relativism.

Some people feel moral realism is implausible. But that is not necessarily intuition. Seemings are all we have. Not saying moral realism is intuitive.

Psychopaths don't actually understand morality. Does that give us reason to doubt morality. Colorblind people don't lead us to the conclusion that colors don't exist.

Think about certain things, and some seem right, and some seem wrong. That is all there is to it.

How do we "know" the moral truth.

Evolution: it is adaptive to have empathy. Can be used to explain a lot of things. Certainly evolution is not predicting our beliefs. This is underdetermined - you can't figure out the story.

Epistemic access problem: Weird - this is just your emotional reaction, counter-intuitive, but being weird does not mean they don't exist. Where do they come from? How do we know moral facts? Logical intuition: you think about things and come to a decision. Most people know the answer to the trolly problem. And to the organ doner problem. Most people can not explain why they know this. The sense of right and wrong is intuitive.

All observation is theory laden. It would be weird if our intuition is completely agnostic of our beliefs.

Says that being confused about a moral would rarely effect your reproductive success. What evidence? Suggests in some cases reproductive success might go up.

Objective morality: when we say that a mug existence is true, there are measurable fact. But how can we ever say that a moral rule is true?

Moral Nautralist example: Say "pain is bad" if that is true, what does that correspond to? (But pain is not bad)

Believes that numbers exist independent of the physical world. Blueness exists without blue things. Abstract truths like 2 + 3 = 5. Platonic realm. Talks about the property of "two-ness".

Desire attractor state: forms of the moral claims. A kind of equilibrium that moral things converge on.

Do souls exist? Yes, because I am immediately aware of my consciousness. Thoughts can't be physical. If you had a complete description of what is going on in someone's brain when they saw blue, would you know what it is like to see blue? What is it like, to see blue is beyond the physical facts about the brain. Non-physical properties of the brain. Soul is seat of consciousness, and determines the identity of a person. If soul could move, you would move. Intuitions of person can only be met by soul. There isn't a physicalist account that answers all of this.

Buddhists say there is no self. No soul. Mike does not understand that. All we can say is "there is existence". But against Mike does not accept that there is an experience going on by nobody is having it.

My responses

• "Naturalist says you can explain moral truth using non evaluative language." That is correct: behaviors that lead to survival are good. Take two tribes, each take a position on a moral issue, and find out which one lives the longest.
• "Seemings are all we have." Disagree. Survival is a hard fact. If we can point to a behavior that increases the chance of survival, that is invariably an ethically good thing to do. Similarly something that decreases survival is bad.
• "Intuitionism is unable to account for how we know what it moral." - however survival of the fittest will select for those people who "know" these things, and eliminate those who do not. That explains it.
• "Maybe maximizing reproduction is good, but nobody believes that." Not your own personal reproduction but instead maximizing total size of tribe and ability to propagate to a new generation.
• How do we "know" the moral truth. Existence and knowledge is not the same thing. Moral truths might exist without anyone knowing them.
• "Super hard to explain how evolution can do this." Not really, either people are wired to know a particular moral intuition, or they don't survive.
• "Take a question about pleasure, and substitute good for pleasure, and notice the meaning changes." Pleasure is unrelated to good. Good is things that increase survival. The pleasure is simply something that evolution generated when doing the right things, so that those people service more often, and this trait is inherited. But the act is not good because it is pleasurable, it is pleasurable because that pleasure led people to doing the good thing.
• Epistemic access: we don't know most of the real moral rules.
• "Actual moral facts don't effect your reproductive success." Disagree. Morals exist specifically to increase reproductive success. Being greedy might seem like a benefit, but in the long term it isn't, so averaging over everyone, more people survive in a sharing environment.
• "pain is bad can't be justified on moral naturalism." It is not the pain that is bad. The pain just comes along for the ride. Almost all things that are painful are things that correlate strongly to things that endanger you.

Questions

• It seems that people expect morality to be phrased like "XXXXX is good" where XXXXX is a description of an action. This evaluative statement is then assumed to be true for all times, all contexts, all people.
• What is the justification for the assumption that such a moral rule will apply to all people equally? Isn't it possible that some action is good for one person, but bad for another.
• What justification can be given for this evaluation to be static over time? Can't something be moral today, but immoral tomorrow?
• To make any statement about a moral action, you need to define the action. A short description of a few words can't possibly define it well enough. "lying" or "telling a falsehood" is a broad range of occasions many of which are not only acceptable, but in cases absolutely required. "Tact" is the name for lying when it is appropriate. If the definition of the action is fuzzy, how then can you reliably associate a moral valence? Shooting someone in self defense is different than shooting a premeditated intentional kill for material gain.
• Is the morality in the act, or in the statement about the act. So much of this discussion seem to focus on whether evaluative statements are "true" but isn't that besides the point? We want to know if a particular act was moral, such as, say, the killing of Louis XVI. How can we say any particular statement about morality would apply to that situation?
• how specific should a moral statement be? There is some desire to make them succinct: "lying is evil" or something like that. There are all sorts of exceptions that are part of common sense that are not included in the statement.