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The debate between moral realism and moral anti-realism is one of the foundational questions in meta-ethics. Moral realists contend that moral claims like “murder is wrong” refer to objective facts about morality that are mind-independent - that is, true regardless of what any person or culture believes. Moral anti-realists, on the other hand, deny that moral statements refer to objective facts. Rather, anti-realists argue that morality is in some sense dependent on human minds and/or cultures.
Our current scientific understand of the universe seems to point towards a purely physical, naturalistic [1] universe. In such a universe, I don’t think there are any basis for objective moral facts. The universe simply obeys the laws of physics without any inherent moral judgments or ethical rules built into it. It’s the humans themselves who assign moral meanings and rules, not the natural world itself. Humans often want moral certainty and a definitive grounding for ethics, which motivates moral realism. However, ethics will always involve some uncertainty and that we have to get comfortable with morality being constructed by humans rather than dictated by objective facts.
Unlike scientific claims about the physical world, moral claims don’t seem to be empirically testable or verifiable. We can test whether water boils at 100 degrees Celsius, but there doesn’t seem to be any analogous way to test whether a moral claim like “we should donate to charity” is true or false. Our moral convictions, however deeply held, don’t seem to track any objective moral reality in the way our scientific theories track objective physical reality. This can be seen as the existence of widespread moral disagreement, both between individuals and between cultures. If morality were objective, one would expect much more ethical consensus, in the same way there is consensus about basic facts of chemistry or biology.
The is-ought problem, as articulated by David Hume, points out that there seems to be a significant difference between descriptive statements (about what is) and prescriptive statements (about what ought to be). Just because something is a certain way, that alone does not necessarily tell us how things ought to be. Deriving an “ought” from an “is” requires an additional moral premise or goal that cannot be deduced purely from descriptive facts. Without such a bridge, there appears to be a gap in reasoning between statements of fact and statements of value or obligation. There are other ways to be a moral realist even if you don’t derive ought from is.
So if objective moral facts don’t exist, where does that leave us? I argue that rather than being objectively true or false, moral claims are human constructs. We collectively invent moral principles, like the idea that we should try to reduce suffering, or that all people have human rights. These principles don’t correspond to objective features of reality, but they are extremely important ideas that we have devised to help us cooperatively navigate the social world. This is called moral constructivism [2]. We hash out moral issues through reason, debate, and a process of reflecting on our moral intuitions and sentiments. The goal is to construct ethical frameworks that, even if not objectively true, are rational, consistent and, help create the kind of society we want to live in.
None of this means that morality is arbitrary or that all moral views are equally valid. Even without objective moral truth, we can still meaningfully criticize and argue against ethical frameworks that are inconsistent, impractical or incompatible with core values like compassion and human rights that have stood the test of time. But it does mean acknowledging that ethics is complex, that reasonable people can disagree, and that moral certitude is harder to achieve than we might like.
Moral anti-realism is sometimes caricatured as licensing “anything goes” relativism. But properly understood, it is a philosophically coherent alternative to realism that recognizes the distinctive role morality plays in human life. Morality may not be written into the fabric of the cosmos, but it is a profoundly important human project - perhaps one of the most important project we have. Anti-realism invites us to take responsibility for that project, not as passive recipients of handed-down moral law, but as active participants in the ongoing ethical experiment of human civilization.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)