Moral Realism and the Incompletability of Morality

I will group ethical and moral matters together in this essay, even though there is a common way of distinguishing the former from the latter by saying that ethical questions involve how we should live our lives in general, whereas moral questions involve more specifically what we owe to other human beings.

More recently, some realists such as Ronald Dworkin and T. M. Scanlon insist that they can keep the core realist claim of the independence of moral truths without making any metaphysical postulations. See [1], and [8].

See [5], p. 29 and [2], pp. 32-33 for examples of realists motivating realism in this manner.

One of the classic formulations of this fundamental problem with realism is [6]. For a more recent general objection to moral realism, see [9]. For a different, substantive moral objection to moral realism, see [3].

The following “correct” answers are just illustrative.

A less fantastical version of this thought experiment is a scenario in which there is a few fundamental moral principles from which all other moral truths can be derived, (given the non-moral facts pertaining to the relevant circumstances,) and those fundamental principles are somehow revealed to us. We may imagine for the sake of illustration, for instance, that the only moral principle is that you are morally obligated to do something only if it is necessary for your immediate survival. In such a case, from a substantive moral point of view, there would really be nothing left to figure out – there would only be the determination of the relevant (non-moral) facts (in this case, concerning what is necessary for your immediate survival), and the straightforward application of the principle to the facts at hand. To be sure, this example is an implausible over-simplification of what a true moral principle would really be like. However, my general point stands irrespective of the simplicity or complexity of moral truths: realism assumes that there are determinate true answers to our substantive moral questions; and I am inviting the reader to imagine the case in which, whatever those moral truths are, we automatically obtain them.

[7], p. 87.

Again, these justifications are merely illustrative.

Or, as Wittgenstein has put it, “Somewhere we must be finished with justification” [10], p. 29e.

This is, in effect, Hume’s Law. See [4].

We may even wonder if this sort of moral alertness and openness is not only an essential component of moral/ethical success, but identical to it.

See, for instance, the definitions of moral realism provided by [1, 2, 5].

I am grateful to an anonymous referee of the Journal of Value Inquiry for pushing me on this point.

By the same token, my argument does not apply to Platonic views across the board. What I am offering is only a moral objection to regarding moral truths as things that could in principle be acquired all at once. Thus, in so far as my argument is concerned, there is no (moral) problem with “realism” about other, non-moral domains, whether they are empirical or a priori. I am grateful to the anonymous referee of the Journal of Value Inquiry for helping me clarify this point.

Except for some trivial, morally insignificant facts about moral discourse, such as the number of positive moral words (like ‘good’, ‘right’, ‘virtuous’) in English etc. For a more comprehensive defense of this denial of morally neutral meta-ethics, see [1]. Dworkin himself is a moral realist, of course, but he argues that realism is a substantive moral position, and therefore the only case that can be made for or against it is moral. He provides a case for realism (which is what I have described as the motivation for being a realist), whereas I have provided a case against realism. Shortly, I will also suggest a non-realist way to capture what is compelling in realist accounts.