Topics Ethics

Question I have a question regarding the notion of "objective moral truth." A friend of mine maintains that because everyone agrees that killing and eating babies is wrong, thus it is demonstrated that there are objective moral truths. I disagree. It seems to me there is no such thing as a moral truth absent a moral agent, and we (moral agents) decide what is good and what is not. So his argument seems to support the notion of some sort of consensus rather than an objective truth. What am I missing? Thanks!

Accepted:
June 6, 2016

Comments

I'm going to leave aside your

I'm going to leave aside your own suggestion that there are no moral truths absent moral agents, etc -- that raises some intricate questions in metaethics -- so as to focus on the dispute between you and your friend.

On the one hand, your friend tries to demonstrate the existence of 'objective' moral truth by appeal to what is usually seen as a fallacious pattern of argument, so-called 'appeal to the crowd.' It does not follow deductively from 'everyone agrees that killing and eating babies is wrong' that 'it is objectively wrong to kill and eat babies' You seem to have cottoned on to that: as you note, your friend's argument indicates that there is a consensus that it's wrong to kill and eat babies but does not prove that it's objectively wrong to kill and eat babies.

On the other hand, what you may be missing is that consensus opinion may not prove some claim true, but it might nevertheless be evidence for its truth. For instance, suppose that some scientific claim is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community. That would, I take it, be evidence for its truth, even if it falls short of proving the claim true. And we might buttress this by pointing out that the claim has been vindicated through recognized experimental methods, etc. -- that, in other words, its acceptance reflects an informed and legitimate consensus of the scientific community.

Matters are no doubt more complicated when it comes to moral claims, but many philosophers have tried to make sense of objective moral truth in a similar fashion, by appealing to what unbiased, disinterested, fully informed individuals would say about a moral claim. In other words, a moral claim is objectively true only if ideal observers would believe it true. This sort of view has a long history: We can see traces of it in Aristotelian virtue theory, the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, and twentieth century figures such as Roderick Firth. If these 'ideal observer' theories are correct, then there could be objective moral truths which we discover via rational consensus. (This isn't to say that such theories are unproblematic -- my point is only that they illustrate how we might suppose consensus about morality could provide evidence of, and for, objective moral truth.)