Assess the view that there are objective values (i.e. moral facts).
Moral realism is the theory that moral statements have a truth value and there are moral facts to determine said truth values. Moral realists believe moral facts can exist independent of our knowledge of them, therefore moral facts need no proof to exist and we do not necessarily know any moral facts to determine a statements truth value. This theory belongs to cognitivism which is a collection of theories that claim that moral statements have a truth value; however moral realism differs from other cognitivist theories like error theory. Error theory states that while moral statement have a truth value there are no moral facts so all positive moral statements are false. Although both theories state that moral statements have a truth value they disagree on whether or not moral facts exist to determine the truth value of a statement.
The implications of moral realism are that moral statements like “abortion is wrong” can be objectively true and they are not just simple matters of opinion. This means that people can hold false views on morality just as people who believe the earth is flat hold a false view; therefore this implies that moral knowledge and moral ignorance are possibilities. Some people, like Martin Luther King, seem morally knowledgeable which fits in with the idea of moral realism as they believe in moral facts and facts must be able to be learnt. However, we cannot know what the moral facts are to be learnt so although we may think we have moral knowledge we may not have any at all. Moral knowledge is just an assumption and our apparently factual language about morality might just be an error, this is one view from Mackie’s error theory. A moral realist might ask how we would be able to explain the likes of Nelson Mandela and others who do seem to have some special grasp on morality that makes them good. Yet Mandela is not always seen as wholly good, he was considered a terrorist in South Africa, he bombed schools that house white children and the more affluent neighbourhoods. Although Mandela was doing it for the right reasons he was not doing it in a moral way so although we may think of him as morally knowledgeable he may not be.
The way we use ordinary language seems to support moral realism as we talk about moral statements as being factual. For example when we say “euthanasia is wrong” we believe that statement to be either true or false we are saying that euthanasia has the moral property of being wrong. It is the same as saying “my car is blue” that can be either true or false as my car has the property of being blue. We do not use moral statements in a different way to descriptive true or false statements, so if moral statements seem like any other statements then we have reason to believe they are like any other factual statement in that they have facts that determine their truth value. Yet language can be misleading, when we say it’s raining cats and dogs outside it does not mean that it is. We also talk about the mind as if it exists but that does not necessarily mean we have a mind. Just because we talk about moral statements as being either true or false does not necessarily mean that they are. Emotivists believe that moral statements like “euthanasia is wrong” are meaningless in that they are simply a projection of our emotions and although they serve a purpose they cannot be thought of as either true or false.
One issue with moral realism is cultural relativism, different cultures have different beliefs about what is right and wrong, surely if moral statements are objective there would be some moral convergence in the world yet there are still places that believe woman are inferior and homosexuality is wrong. Different cultures and religions treat their dead in different ways, in the western world we burn or bury the dead and preform rituals to help them pass yet in Shinto culture they have not rituals to perform for their dead they simply place the body in nature and walk away. Neither of these two cultures could be considered wrong and although a moral realist might say they are both respecting their dead Shinto culture will not respect the dead as they believe it is unclean and negative.
There are different types of moral realists, utilitarians believe that morality is a factual matter; they believe that the action that maximises happiness is the morally right thing to do. Although it might be difficult to establish which action will maximise happiness there is still a morally correct course of action in any given situation. Utilitarianism is a form of naturalism in that it claims moral properties are, or can be reduced to, natural properties. Happiness is a natural property as it is simply a part of the normal biological processes and psychology of humans and other animals. Moore, a non-naturalist, disagrees with utilitarianisms as he believes we cannot define the word “good”. This means we cannot see moral facts such as “maximising happiness is good” as being equivalent to moral statements such as “making people happy is good” Moore considers the idea of naturalism to be a fallacy. We attempt to reduce “good” to some other property i.e. good means what has survived from evolution but these attempts are illegitimate according to Moore. So he developed the open question argument, it is an open question about what the definition of “goodness” is. An ambidextrous person can use both of their hands with equal measure; this statement is analytic i.e. true by definition. It would be unreasonable to argue that an ambidextrous person cannot use both of their hands with equal measure as this is clearly wrong. Therefore that statement is not open, we cannot argue with its logic. However, some naturalists would say that the statement “maximising happiness is good” is a logically sound statement, and is also true by definition. Moore disagrees saying there are some circumstances where maximising happiness is not always a good thing to do. For example, if we were to kill every convicted criminal that had committed a terrible act, such as rape, murder, etc. then that would maximise happiness as the people left would be safer and hopefully would not experience such hardships as it would be a deterrent to others. However, clearly this is not a “good” thing to do as some of those people might have been innocent. If it is possible to question a statement like this it cannot be a definition therefore it cannot be a natural fact of the physical world.
In conclusion I do not believe there are objective values. The history of morality does appear to be like a graph showing progress form thousands of years ago up until now, instead it appears to me to be a circular motion. We “learn” morality though our environment some people think that eating meat is morally wrong and some think it is okay to do so. We cannot say there is a true value to the statement “eating meat is wrong” as it simply as projection of our emotions.