Question Is the statement "it is wrong to torture innocent people for fun", logically necessary in the same sense as "2+4=6"? Or could there (in principle) be a universe that functions according to completely different moral laws?

Accepted:
September 18, 2008

Comments

I don't have expert knowledge about the epistemic status of mathematical truths, but I can report on my intuition that it is perfectly clear that there could exist a society that genuinely believed that it was morally acceptable to torture innocents for pleasure but not at all clear that there could exist a society that genuinely believed that two plus four was equal to five. So, my sense is that the two claims you present have different statuses.

Your question, however, is not about whether a society could treat that statement about the immorality of torture as false. And, likewise, your question is not about whether or not there exist specific moral beliefs or systems that endorse the truth of that statement. Instead, the heart of your question is the thought that there might exist "moral laws" that demonstrate that the statement condemning torture is necessarily true.

About the notion that the universe functions according to moral laws, I would draw your attention to a recent discussion by the social philosopher Charles Taylor about the “moral order" that he believes is dominant in our society. One of the lessons Taylor draws is that societies are influenced by a "moral background" that, in turn, is determined, in part, by underlying "picture of society" or "social image" that can vary over time and across different cultures. If Taylor is right, it wrong to assume that the "universe functions" according to invariant moral laws and so the thought that it does function in that way could not ground the necessary truth of your statement about torture.

(To say a bit more about Taylor's fascinating historical account: He believes that the “modern moral order” centers on the ideas that "Human beings are rational, sociable agents who are meant to collaborate in peace to their mutual benefit" and dominates modern political thought because it conforms to a specific "social imaginary" that developed in our culture contingently and through an extremely complicated historical process. See his A Secular Age, pp. 159 and following.)

I'd like to suggest a rather different take. Your question makes most sense on the assumption that there can be objective moral truths; if there can't, then no universe "functions" in accord with any moral laws. So let's assume, at least for the moment, that there are such things as objective moral truths. And now let's make a bit of a distinction. Let's agree that as things stand, it's wrong to use taser guns on babies. Could there be a universe where it was perfectly acceptable to taser a baby? If we suppose that babies are wired differently in that universe, the answer could well be yes. Perhaps the nervous systems of babies in this distant universe are set up so that applying the taser provides some sort of painless and beneficial stimulation. And so somthing that's wrong in our circumstances would be right in that far-off world, but only because some background non-moral facts differ.

Now it may be that background facts about our social arrangements and our ways of understanding our own actions are among the background facts that make a moral difference. A trivial example: in a culture where belching is a way to compliment one's host, it's just fine to belch after a good meal. It's a merely contingent fact that as our society developed (or mine, in any case), belching at the dinner table would be a way to insult one's host. What we actually happen to care about, value and abhor is a complicated matter of fact, and on the view I'm interested in, non-moral facts of all sorts can be relevant to right and wrong.

That said, however, could there be two universes that were alike in all these non-moral ways and yet differed on what's right and wrong? Could the moral facts vary independently of all else? I'll confess that I can't see how. And so I'd say: if there are objective moral facts, the most plausible view is that they "supervene" on other sorts of facts. What that means is that there can't be a difference at the level of moral truth without there being a difference in the non-moral facts. Putting it another way, once all the non-moral facts are fixed, it's plausible that all the moral facts are fixed as well.

Of course, if there are no objective moral facts, none of this is so. But then, if there are no objective moral facts, the answer to your question is no because the universe doesn't function according to any moral laws in the first place.

A footnote, however: I'm a little uncomfortable with the phrase "function according to moral laws," because it suggests that moral truths are like physical laws, and that seems to me not to be the right picture. But that's another story, and a long one at that.

Question Is the statement "it is wrong to torture innocent people for fun", logically necessary in the same sense as "2+4=6"? Or could there (in principle) be a universe that functions according to completely different moral laws? Accepted:September 18, 2008

Question Is the statement "it is wrong to torture innocent people for fun", logically necessary in the same sense as "2+4=6"? Or could there (in principle) be a universe that functions according to completely different moral laws?

Accepted:
September 18, 2008