I am trying to come up with some examples of natural moral law. For example, when someone says, “All morality is relative,” I want to be able to give them examples of situations that are–obviously and unassailably–wrong (or right) regardless of one’s opinion about them. So far, I have come up with two.
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As some have pointed out, there are some good exmaples of moral assertions that pretty much no would would disagree with such as the truth of the assertion “slavery is evil.” There are of course others that are hard to get agreement about. The amount of disagreement on moral questions explains many people’s skepticism about the possibility of being justified in believing that even such assertions as “slavery is evil” are true, but there is a practical limit to how much disagreement there can be on morals. Philospher of religion Jeffrey Stout says that disagreement on morals can never be total. “If somebody’s criteria of goodness were said to be completely different from ours, we would then lack any good reason for concluding that we were in fact disagreeing about goodness.” At some point, people’s disagreements become so deep that neither party would even recognize what they are disagreeing about as morals. So “disagreement in fact only makes sense against a background of agreements to which disputants can appeal.”
This limit on disagreement is also a practical limit for the notion of relativism which says that justification of ethical assertions and moral truth itself can apply only with respect to a particular group that shares a set of fundamental beliefs. Relativism says that what may be wrong for one group based on its fundamental assumptions may not be wrong for another group whose moral reasoning is based on different assumptions. Stout’s limit on disagreement says that if everything that is said to be evil for one group is said to be good by another, perhaps the word “good” has been mistranslated as “evil.” Two groups that disagree on all the basic assumptions their moral reasoning follows could not even be said to be disagreeing about morals, so there must be at least some common ground that we can appeal to in comparing the morality of two cultures. Relativism can’t go all the way down.
Though he argues that our situation can not be quite as hopelessly relativistic as some claim, he would admit that the above argument is not saying very much. In his book, Ethics After Babel, Stout does not try to argue that nihilism, relativism, and skepticism are false. Instead he takes on the more modest task of arguing that we are not forced to be moral nihilists, moral relativists, or moral skeptics. He denies being a moral nihilist early on when he claims the he believes that there are moral truths that can be known. He said “I hold that slavery—understood as the coercive practice of buying, selling, and exercising complete control over other human beings against their will—is evil. This proposition hasn’t always been believed to be true, of course, just as it hasn’t always been held that the earth is roundish, but the truth of the matter is that the earth is roundish.” He says this to make a point about moral propositions—that moral propositions can be true or false and that believing them or not is independent of their truth-value.
Stout also denies being a moral skeptic. This is to say that he not only believes that there is such a thing as moral truth, he also believes that it is possible to be justified in believing some moral assertions to be true. In other words, it is possible to know at least some moral truths to whatever extent we can know scientific truths. We go about trying to discern moral truths and scientific truths in very different ways, and we justify our beliefs about moral and scientific truths in very different ways, but there is nothing very different about how we use the word “true” when we apply it to moral assertions or scientific assertions. Though the assertions “it is true that slavery is evil” and “it is true that the earth is roundish” are very different sorts of assertions, the word “true” functions in the same way in both sentences.
But why is it that there seems to be so much agreement on science and so much disagreement on morals? Is our epistemic situation when it comes to so-called “subjective” moral assertions any worse off than our epistemic situation is when it comes to scientific “objective” assertions? Part of the issue that makes these situations seem so different to us is probably that our conversations about morals tend to be about our disagreements while our conversations about science focus on explaining what has been agreed to within the scientific community. However, within that community, we would find that the conversations are more likely to revolve around scientist’s disagreements, especially during times of scientific revolution, since it is in such areas where the interesting most scientific work will be done.
Professional scientists at these times are like the political pundits, seeming to disagree on just about everything, but their disagreements only make sense within a context where they share enough beliefs in common that they can agree that they are in fact disagreeing. Likewise, the interesting conversations that we want to have about morality will not be mostly about whether we should be honest, whether murder is wrong, or whether it is good to be lazy, but about, say, how our value of personal freedom should be balanced with the value of human solidarity. If we didn’t already largely agree on the good of such values, we wouldn’t be able to have a conversation about how to balance them. We should compare the disagreement on issues like abortion to scientificly unsettled issues like the origin of the universe rather than to the shape of the earth.
