Abstract
Non-naturalist realists are committed to the belief, famously voiced by Parfit, that if there are no non-natural facts then nothing matters. But it is morally objectionable to conditionalise all our moral commitments on the question of whether there are non-natural facts. Non-natural facts are causally inefficacious, and so make no difference to the world of our experience. And to be a realist about such facts is to hold that they are mind-independent. It is compatible with our experiences that there are no non-natural facts, or that they are very different from what we think. As Nagel says, realism makes scepticism intelligible. So the non-naturalist must hold that you might be wrong that your partner (for example) matters, even if you are correct about every natural, causal fact about your history and relationship. But to hold that conditional attitude to your partner would be a moral betrayal. So believing non-naturalist realism involves doing something immoral.
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Notes
Some philosophers use “mind-independence” to characterise realism. But this gives the unfortunate suggestion that the realist cannot identify constituents of minds—such as pleasures and pains—of being the fundamental objects of normative significance. Better terms include “judgment-independence”, “stance-independence” or “response-independence,” although selecting between these terms would take further argument. Certainly, realists will want to say that at least some moral truths are independent of all of these things—the judgments, stances and responses of humans. For convenience, I will talk mainly of “judgment-independence.”
The problem of giving an epistemological story for knowledge of non-causal facts is a major theme in much of the “debunking” literature, such as Benacerraf (1973), Field (1989), Street (2006) and Clarke-Doane (2012). Notable responses are given in Parfit (2011, Vol. II Ch. 32), Scanlon (2014, Ch. 4), Enoch (2011) and Clarke-Doane (2016).
James appears to have had such a view:
Whether a God exist, or whether no God exist, in yon blue heaven above us bent, we form at any rate an ethical republic here below. And the first reflection which this leads to is that ethics have as genuine and real a foothold in a universe where the highest consciousness is human, as in a universe where there is a God as well. “The religion of humanity” affords a basis for ethics as well as theism does. (James 1956, p. 198)
For James, God, if he exists, has a moral standing, but it is not different in kind from that of any human person - the response to God is simply that of “Life answering to life.” James’ ethics does not conditionalise moral commitment on anything that I object to.
I thank Matt Bedke and Veronique Muñoz-Darde for pointing out to me the possibility of responses along these lines. Bedke draws a parallel with Camus, who famously argued that life could still be worth living, even though it is meaningless. But Camus recognised that denying meaning to life had wide-ranging practical implications. Life could still be worth living, but only a very particular kind of life - many otherwise attractive forms of life would indeed be undermined by the denial of meaning (Camus 1955/1942).
Rosati (2016, §3.2) contains an excellent overview of the debate on this point.
Fine (2002) and Rosen (MS) are exceptions—they argue that normative necessity is distinct from metaphysical necessity. For a criticism of this view, see Lange (2018). For an important argument against the idea that metaphysical modality deserves a privileged or “absolute” status, see Clarke-Doane (forthcoming).
Cutter (2018 makes a similar claim).
This is a major point of divergence from the approach adopted by Bedke (forthcoming).
Such an argument answers “a wish that the knaves of the world can not only be confined and confounded; but refuted-refuted as well by standards that they have to acknowledge…it is still, tantalizingly, there as a goal or ideal, the Holy Grail of moral philosophy, and many suppose that all right-thinking people must join the pilgrimage to find it. We sentimentalists do not like our good behaviour to be hostage to such a search. We don't altogether approve of Holy Grails. We do not see the need for them.” (Blackburn 2010, pp. 127–128).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Philip Kitcher, Justin Clarke-Doane, Christopher Peacocke, Simon Blackburn, Sharon Street, Robbie Kubala, Max Barkhausen, Christian Coons, Pekka Väyrynen, Shamik Dasgupta, Matt Bedke, Stephen Findlay, Aaron Zimmerman and audiences at Columbia University, Bowling Green State University, Temple University, University College London, McGill University, the University of Leeds, and the 2018 American Philosophical Association, The University of Edinburgh, Pacific Division for their helpful comments.
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Hayward, M.K. Immoral realism. Philos Stud 176, 897–914 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1218-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1218-0