The Case for Moral Realism
By: Ryan Hoque
Tags: Philosophy, Ethics, Morality, Existentialism, Moral Relativism

I’m happy to share that after spending a year or so in the existential void, I am no longer a nihilist nor an existentialist, the latter of which I’ve come to view as a glorified nihilist. After accepting the nihilist’s rejection of objective meaning, the existentialist is supposed to create his or her own meaning, but nothing external gives that meaning legitimacy, forcing the existentialist to desperately hope and/or pretend that it has some. Thus the existentialist is typically not spared from recurring existential dread with no real solution.

Do objective moral standards like justice exist? Source: Daredevil (Netflix)

While my fully fleshed out Antidote to Existential Dreadᵀᴹ is still in the works, at the core of it and my discontent with these schools of thought is that I’m a moral realist, which by definition prevents me from being a nihilist or existentialist. It means that I believe that there exist objective moral truths such as “genocide is bad.” Seems pretty obvious, right? I find it a little ridiculous that I have to spell this one out. Yet I find that many of the (nonreligious) people I talk to nowadays are moral relativists, who believe that morality is subjective and there is no objective right and wrong. For a moral relativist, anything regarding ethics is opinion rather than fact. In fact, to be a nihilist or existentialist, you must necessarily be a moral relativist, or at least a moral anti-realist (a more general term that denies the existence of objective moral truth), as objective moral truth is a subset of the objective meaning that these schools of thought reject. Seeing as I haven’t yet found a defense of moral realism on the Internet that’s both accessible to laypeople and of satisfactory quality, I’ve decided to write one myself. While I obviously can’t prove the existence of objective moral truth or what I call ‘moral axioms’ (since axioms can’t be proved), my goal in this article is to give you sufficient reason to accept them as true and thus liberate you from the clutches of nihilism. To be clear, I’m not arguing that a particular moral axiom like “genocide is bad” holds; rather, my focus here is to convince you that at least one such axiom exists, whatever it may be. But first, a brief aside on truth.

How do we know something is true? It’s a more complicated question than it seems — the entire branch of philosophy known as epistemology seeks to answer it. Some argue that what our senses inform us must be true (e.g., “the sky is blue”), while others like René Descartes argue it may all be the work of an Evil Demon deceiving our senses. Meanwhile, Descartes argues that the self is all that can be known to exist for certain (recall his well-known quote cogito ergo sum or “I think therefore I am”), while others like Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons and Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach convincingly argue that the self is merely an illusion. Many people, especially in the West, believe that if any accepted truth is free from scrutiny, it must be in math and science. Who can doubt 1+1=2 or the laws of physics? And yet, Einstein showed us that Newton’s model of physics wasn’t exactly correct, and it may very well be the case that we overturn Einstein’s model in the future. All of science is the result of induction: we take many observations and infer the principle that gave rise to them. Yet the principle we derive isn’t required to be true. For example, if we observe two metal objects being drawn toward each other, we could hypothesize that (1) an invisible magnetic force is pulling them together, (2) some invisible but sentient ghost is pushing them together, or an infinite amount of alternate hypotheses. Sure, we can gather enough evidence to be more confident in our choice of (1), but we can never be 100% sure that it is the true description: however unlikely, perhaps every magnetic force that has ever acted on an object was really a ghost. The difference between our 99.9% confidence and 100% constitutes a small leap of faith. What about math and logic, then, with all those airtight proofs? Surely they are beyond doubt? In math, we can indeed derive truth, but only if certain assumptions hold. When we trace back the chain of assumptions we end up at the dead end of axioms: statements we must accept as true without proof, our starting point for any sort of mathematical system. One famous example of an axiom is Euclid’s fifth postulate, which states that parallel lines never meet. It seems obvious, but it can’t be proved, and in the 19th century mathematician Henri Poincaré found an alternate yet perfectly valid system of geometry in which Euclid’s fifth postulate doesn’t hold. What I’m getting at is that, whether we like it or not, at the core of both math and science is faith. We all put our faith in certain axioms without evidence, and here I am simply attempting to expand your circle of accepted axioms to include those of the moral variety. Science is “value-free” in that it doesn’t really give us directions on ethical matters, but just because science is value-free doesn’t mean everything we accept as true has to be as well.

Without further ado, here are four reasons why I’m a moral realist and why I think you should be one too.

The Semantic Argument. Let a value statement be a statement of the form “x is right” or “x is wrong.” When someone states that a certain action, event, individual, etc. is “bad” or “wrong” (e.g. “killing is wrong”), what does that mean? The moral realist has an easy answer for that: if something is “wrong,” it is violating some objective standard of “rightness.” The moral anti-realist, however, doesn’t believe that such objective standards exist. When the anti-realist says something is wrong, it is violating his or her subjective standard of wrongness, or what he or she thinks is wrong. In fact, a true moral anti-realist can’t even say statements of the form “x is wrong,” as when people say things like that, they usually mean “x is objectively wrong.” In the anti-realist’s world, such statements are nonsense. By definition, he or she has lost the ability to make value statements. Now, as if that weren’t already bad enough, I would argue the anti-realist would have trouble with value opinions too, where I define a value opinion as a statement of the form “I think x is right/wrong.” Since the anti-realist is unable to make a value statement, any time he or she says “x is wrong,” he or she must actually mean “x is subjectively wrong,” or, equivalently, “I think x is wrong.” An anti-realist’s value statement reduces to a value opinion. This is already problematic, as a valid response to “I think x is wrong” would be “…Who cares what you think?” (Sure, you could give scientific reasons to support the opinion, but for any moral argument you’re almost certainly going to eventually end up with another value opinion. For example, “I think we should fight climate change because I think killing off an endangered species is wrong.” Eventually you’d end up with something irreducible. Science is value-free, remember?) Now, recall that for an anti-realist, “wrong” just means what he or she thinks is wrong. It’s a label he or she has come up with in order to categorize the world into highly personalized bins of “right” and “wrong.” Since it’s subjective, this categorization doesn’t hold for anyone else. To anyone else, “wrong” can (and often does) mean something else entirely. So, since it’s a label that only has meaning for the person who says it, it’s meaningless to whoever he’s saying it to. He might as well be saying total nonsense like “x is a Kikimora¹,” as both “Kikimora” and “wrong” are labels the anti-realist has made up for himself that don’t apply to anyone else. Thus, the moral anti-realist is stripped of the ability to make value statements or even value opinions. Indeed, for the anti-realist, any disagreement on a moral issue is a total waste of time, since there is no actual truth of the matter. Here’s my argument in one sentence: If you’ve ever said “that’s messed up” and meant something by it, you’re a moral realist. Because in doing so, you’re implying that whatever you’re referring to is inherently, objectively messed up by its very nature. It’s the difference between saying “genocide is wrong” and “genocide is a Kikimora.” One can lead to fruitful discussion and/or courses of action (e.g. stopping a genocide) while the other can only lead to a confused “…Okay?”



[1] If you get this reference, toss a coin to your Witcher. The Practical Argument. This one’s sort of a proof by contradiction, in which assuming the opposite of the statement to be proved leads to a nonsensical outcome. Let’s say that you’re not a moral realist, and you don’t believe in objective right or wrong. Moreover, you make an effort to be consistent with your beliefs in your day-to-day life, i.e. you put your theory into practice and behave accordingly to your belief that right and wrong don’t exist. (Otherwise, if you say one thing but do another, you’re being hypocritical and undermining your own position.) I would argue that no one can actually live like that without becoming a psychopath. If you genuinely embody your beliefs, you lose the ability to have any meaningful discussion about morality, as shown with the semantic argument. You can no longer condemn or even resent the actions of a heinous criminal — after all, perhaps his individual sense of right and wrong allows for murder and rape. The entire rich philosophical field of ethics might as well be meaningless scribbles. Justice, freedom, peace, and any other value-based ideal dissolve away. You would genuinely believe that there is no injustice being perpetrated in any capacity, anywhere in the world because justice wouldn’t exist. Just like a psychopath, you can lie, cheat, steal, kill, etc. without an inkling of remorse, because morality is all relative anyway. You would go your entire life believing you and everyone else in the history of the universe never did anything wrong because there is no “wrong.” Slavery, the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Rwandan genocide, the Nanjing Massacre, terrorism — morally speaking, there’s no difference between these events and your morning commute. Truly aligning your thoughts and actions with moral anti-realism forces you to throw away the very thing that is often cited as what makes us human: our empathy and our conscience. If matching your lifestyle to a belief causes that much cognitive dissonance between the resulting lifestyle and the fundamental human experience, perhaps it’s time to reconsider the belief. As a simple exercise to see if it’s possible to be a moral anti-realist in practice, try going as long as you can without making any value statements. That includes expression of agreement or disagreement with other people’s value statements. Good luck with that. The Game-Theoretic Argument. This one’s a bit contrived but I threw it in for fun; feel free to skip it if you’re not familiar with basic probability and decision theory. In the aside on truth earlier in the article, we’ve mentioned that science doesn’t give a whole lot of answers when it comes to values, but that’s okay because it’s not necessarily the only avenue to truth. Even if science is value-free, is it possible to derive morality from a scientific perspective? Famous philosopher David Hume didn’t think so, claiming you can’t get an “ought” from an “is.” Author Sam Harris, however, seeks to do just that in his book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Moral Values. While it isn’t taken super seriously by many philosophers, the TL;DR is the following:



(1) A world where every conscious being is maximally suffering is morally bad. (I’m ok with this; it appeals to intuition like my Argument 4.)

(2) Therefore the moral thing to do is to maximize the total well-being of all conscious beings in a utilitarian fashion. (This is the main flaw in the argument — it’s a pretty big leap from (1).)

(3) Science can determine values because we have tools in neuroscience to approximate well-being in conscious beings. (This step is fine with me too.)



Whether or not you buy his argument, in the spirit of trying to derive values from science and being somewhat inspired by my background in computer science, I’ve come up with a game theory derivation of the Golden Rule, or “Treat others as you would like to be treated.” As simple and obvious as it is, it’s remarkably comprehensive and useful in prescribing actions toward other conscious beings. The problem setting is as follows:



Consider two agents, X and Y. Both are rational agents that seek to maximize their own expected utility (i.e. they maximize individual well-being, which is pretty much what evolution and society have hard-wired us to do and what any reinforcement learning agent aims to do). X can take the following actions toward Y:



Action 1: Harm, which lowers Y’s utility by 1 but increases X’s utility by 1.

Action 2: Help, which increases Y’s utility by 1 but does nothing for X.

Action 3: Inaction, which does nothing for either agent.



Y can take the same actions towards X. (This is structurally very similar to the Prisoner’s Dilemma.) Right away we can see that although at first it seems Harm would be the best action for each individual agent, if both agents use Harm, the result (utility = 0 for both) is worse than if both agents had used Help (utility = 1 for both). To mitigate this confusion, let’s add some additional rules. First, a key characteristic of this world is that the “soul” of each agent is randomly assigned to one of two bodies, which we will call A and B. This is designed to mirror reality in that the unique circumstances of your birth are out of your control, meaning that your body is in a sense randomly chosen for you. Imagine a queue of souls waiting in heaven to be dispatched to various bodies at the moment of birth. Although I doubt it’s what’s actually going on, it’s consistent with the phenomenon we see with life, in which you can be born anywhere to anyone. Furthermore, the agent is required to choose his action before the random assignment: X chooses for Body A, Y chooses for Body B. While this doesn’t precisely mirror reality (we can choose our actions after being born), I’m adding this requirement to force our agents to incorporate this “random assignment” rule into their decision-making processes. The real life analogue is simply reminding people that they could just as easily have been in anyone else’s shoes. For this reason, it instills an “Empathy Bonus” of sorts—instead of the agents being purely selfish, they now have to consider that they could be on the receiving end of their own actions. Now, given this 50% chance to be in either body, let’s use the Total Probability Rule to see what the expected utility U(·) of each action is for X.



U(Harm) = Pr(Body A) * U(Harm | Body A) + Pr(Body B) * U(Harm | Body B) = 0.5 * 1 + 0.5 * -1 = 0



U(Help) = Pr(Body A) * U(Help | Body A) + Pr(Body B) * U(Help | Body B) = 0.5 * 0 + 0.5 * 1 = 0.5



U(Inaction) = Pr(Body A) * U(Inaction | Body A) + Pr(Body B) * U(Inaction | Body B) = 0.5 * 0 + 0.5 * 0 = 0



By symmetry, Y has the exact same expected utilities. We conclude that the optimal action is to Help, even from an entirely rational and selfish perspective. In choosing this, our agents have discovered the Golden Rule: I’d rather be Helped, so I’ll Help you too. The Common Sense Argument. For this one I appeal to that same inner voice hopefully ringing the alarm bells as you read the implications of the Practical Argument, which you perhaps tried to silence with intellectual force. This argument is for the right brain as much as, if not more than, it is for the left brain. If there’s a society that tortures defenseless children for fun, is there something objectively wrong about that, or is it okay just because that society believes it’s okay? Is there something inherently problematic about executing an innocent man? Some moral truths are so obvious that they don’t have to be proved — it’s knowledge that comes through the avenue of intuition rather than experience (or, in the parlance of epistemology, a priori knowledge instead of a posteriori knowledge). It’s what the Founding Fathers meant when they said “we hold these truths to be self-evident” — a moral axiom doesn’t need to be proved because it’s self-evident, and usually obvious to anyone with a pulse. That isn’t to say that the axioms are all simple, black-and-white statements of the form “x is bad,” as they’re often much more nuanced and context-dependent than that, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist at all. It should take quite a low p-value (metaphorically speaking) to reject the null hypothesis our intuition offers us — if we’re going to reject a core component of our reality, we better have good reason for doing so. Sure, we could believe our sense information is actually the work of the Evil Demon, but hardly anyone has reason to believe that. The most prominent counterargument to this Common Sense Argument cites evolutionary biology, psychology, etc. as an explanation for our innate moral compass — our innermost sense of right and wrong is simply an artifact of the random process of evolution within humanity’s complex social structure, and the rest of our values come from the society we’re raised in. This counterargument is certainly compelling, and perhaps it does indeed explain where our moral sentiment comes from. However it overlooks a subtle but crucial step: in order to cite evolutionary biology, psychology, etc. as the cause of morality itself, one must reduce morality to moral sentiment. In other words, one must show that morality just boils down to feelings about morality and nothing more. I would argue that this is not the case. Moral axioms could, for example, be laws of nature like gravity and the conservation of energy, independent of our feelings about them. Recall the society that tortures children for fun: is there something intrinsically off about that, or is it just in our imagination? To further illustrate what I mean, consider the following thought experiment. Say you are presented with a button, and if you press said button, you can stop a genocide from occurring with no side effects whatsoever. Press it and you save countless lives and prevent an enormous amount of suffering. Neglect it and the genocide occurs as planned. It’s like the trolley problem with no tradeoff — let it kill the person on the tracks or move it safely to another track with no one on it. The question is, in this scenario, do you have an obligation to press the button, or do you just feel obligated to press the button (due to societal norms, etc.)? I would say the former, and in fact, most modern philosophers agree with me. 56% of modern philosophers are moral realists while only 28% are anti-realists.

If these arguments don’t convince you and you insist on being a psychopath (kidding!), that’s okay. Realism versus anti-realism has been and continues to be hotly debated in metaethics (philosophy about the nature of morality), and I’m certainly not an authority on modern metaethics. Nevertheless, hopefully the article gives you food for thought and a glimpse into my thought process on the subject. In a sense, all I’ve done for myself here is a “one-step backup” for what I believe in. I went from the Existentialist/Absurdist viewpoint of “I believe in certain moral truths and values because I get to decide them myself” to “I believe in certain moral truths and values because I believe they are based on some objective moral truths.” While initially this may not seem like much, I still consider it a valuable step to take. Under the former system, I’m often plagued by doubt as to whether the subjective truths hold, as it seems totally arbitrary. Who am I to decide moral truth itself? I feel that I have to constantly delude myself into believing the truths hold, playing the “distraction game” I reference in my previous article. Under the new system, however, I place my faith in a stable source of legitimacy external to myself and can comfortably derive my personal value system from that.

So, the question remains, if we accept that moral axioms exist, what are they and where do they come from? For people who don’t believe in a deity, what external source could possibly exist to give them legitimacy? My answer to that is complicated and controversial but it provides an answer to questions of meaning, morality and everything in between. Stay tuned!