Previously, I made the case that there is no universal morality; there are only a variety of particular moralities. Furthermore, I argued that any claim to objective moral truth must logically be based in some kind of transcendent reality. Here, I will flesh out these ideas a bit further, analyzing how different moralities interact as people with different metaethical beliefs have ethical discussions in their daily lives.
Facts and Judgments
Many people equate truth with facts; if something is not a fact, then it is not true. However, such a reductionistic idea of truth is impoverished and false. All facts are true, but not all truth consists of facts. There are other kinds of truths, namely, judgments.
By “judgments,” I mean evaluations about a person’s actions along the lines of “You should do this.” Sometimes, when people make such judgments, they are merely expressing their own desires; when they say, “You should do this,” what they really mean is, “I want you to do this.” Such judgments are purely subjective and say nothing about what is actually true. If by saying, “You should do this,” a person really means, “I want you to do this,” then they should say, “I want you to do this” (Saying, “I want you to do this” is actually a statement of fact, not a judgment). If a person then wants to claim that, “You should do what I want,” they then need to provide some good reason for why the person they are talking to should do what they want. Only if they do this can their judgment be considered objectively true.
Judgments have to do with goals. When someone says, “You should do this,” this is shorthand for, “You should do this if you want to accomplish such and such a goal.” In order to be a true judgment, this judgment must be based on an accurate understanding of the facts and a careful evaluation of what the best course of action is for accomplishing a goal in light of these facts. Of course, people often have differing goals, so even a true judgment that “You should do this if you want to accomplish such and such a goal” does not establish that it is true that that person should do this unless they intend to accomplish that same goal.
Moral judgments are a special category of judgments. The moral claims, “It is moral for you to do this” or “It is immoral for you to do this,” by their very nature are truth claims not only about what the best course of action for achieving a goal is, but also about what goals someone should have in the first place. If someone makes a judgment that an action is immoral, they are claiming, “Regardless of what goals you have, regardless of what you value, regardless of what you believe to be good, you should not do that.” Moral judgments thus go beyond evaluating what the best means for achieving particular goals are; moral judgments make claims about what goals should be valued in the first place, and these claims about what should be valued are based on beliefs about what is objectively good. In order for a moral judgment to be meaningful and true, it must be based on the facts about what is objectively good.
Because of the ambiguity of the statement, “You should do this,” there is often confusion about that nature of moral truth claims and what is happening when people engage in moral debate. Sometimes people express moral judgments simply by saying, “You should (or should not) do this,” but this must be understood as shorthand for, “You should (or should not) do this if you want to accomplish such and such a goal, and it is objectively true that you should want to accomplish that goal.” Only these sorts of truth claims are moral judgments in any meaningful sense.
Pluralism and the Intersection of Moralities
Thus, we see that implicit behind any claim about objective moral truth is a claim about what is objectively good according to some transcendent or metaphysical reality. People with different worldviews, religions, or metaethical theories consider different actions to be moral or immoral, depending on what actions are consistent with pursuing what is objectively valuable according to those different worldviews. By “moral,” a Muslim might mean, “This action is consistent with submitting to the will of Allah,” a Buddhist might mean, “This action is consistent with the path that leads to enlightenment,” and a Platonist might mean, “This action is a participation in the Form of the Good.”
The fact that different people actually mean different things when they talk about morality is often obscured by the fact that they use the same terms like “moral,” “ethical,” and “You should do this.” However, these terms should be understood as shorthand for implicit claims about a transcendent or metaphysical reality. When different people say that something is “moral,” or “immoral,” they do not necessarily mean the same thing by saying this.
People with different worldviews often will agree to a significant extent about what actions they consider “moral” or “immoral.” This leads many to the conclusion that there is a set of universal moral truths which every rational person agrees on. If someone disagrees with this set of moral truths, then they are simply “unreasonable.” If they have additional moral beliefs beyond this set of moral truths, then those moral beliefs, and those moral beliefs alone, are a result of their “personal religious beliefs.”
However, this is an erroneous conclusion. The fact that people with different worldviews sometimes agree in making a moral judgment that certain actions are “moral” or “immoral” is not because there is a set of universal moral truths which every rational person holds, regardless of their particular worldview. Rather, when people with different worldviews agree in judging an action to be “moral” or “immoral”, this is a result of their differing moral frameworks sometimes intersecting at the practical level. Note that they still do not actually agree on what it means to say that something is “moral.” They merely are able to agree, at the practical level, that “You should do this,” even though they may have very different understandings of why the person should act in this way and what it is that makes this action morally good.
To illustrate this, consider a non-moral example. Let’s say two people both say, “You should eat garlic.” One of them is a nutritionist who believes you should eat garlic because it is healthy. The other is a superstitious person who believes you should eat garlic because it will help keep vampires at bay. Though they both recommend the same course of action at the practical level, they are not making the same judgment, since they actually mean two different things when they say, “You should eat garlic.” In the same way, just because two people recommend the same course of action at the practical level, judging it to be “moral,” does not mean that they are making the same moral judgment.
Sometimes, people with different worldviews or metaethical theories agree in making similar moral judgments at the practical level. However, they also often sharply disagree about what they consider to be “moral”. People with different beliefs about transcendent reality and what is objectively good will often end up having serious disagreements at the practical level about what is moral or immoral. It is rare for these moral disagreements to consist of black and white contrasting responses to simple moral questions. More often than not, moral disagreements are the result of different moralities being at cross purposes, due to their differing basic assumptions about what “morality” means in the first place.
Dealing with Moral Conflicts
Much confusion results from the fact that people with different worldviews often use the same language to talk about morality. We assume that everyone agrees that “murder” is “immoral,” and then are surprised when, for example, serious moral disagreement erupts over the morality of abortion. In reality, such eruptions of moral disagreement are merely the tip of the iceberg that demonstrate that people with different worldviews all along meant different things by “murder” and even “morality.” Their moral judgments about acts of violence happened to intersect in most cases at the practical level, giving the illusion that they meant the same thing when they said, “Murder is immoral.” But in fact, what they meant by saying this were actually two very different things all along, and this is revealed when their moral judgments on the issue of abortion conflict. Just because the moral judgments of different people often intersect at the practical level, this does not mean that they truly agree about what is moral.
If we want to be able to understand moral disagreements and to deal with them in our daily lives, it is important to understand this. When we have a moral disagreement with another person, it is important that we move beyond the surface level disagreement to ask why this person disagrees with us morally. Once we understand how the source of our moral disagreement lies in our differing worldviews, we will be better able to deal with these disagreements. We can attempt to convince them that their moral beliefs are wrong because their worldview is false, or we can agree to disagree for the time being. This is far better than simply reacting to a moral disagreement with the assumption that the other person is “unreasonable” and “evil.”