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Question of the day: if everyone approved of torturing children, would it still be wrong?

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Meta-ethicsAnalyticIslamicKalamJ. L. MackieSimon BlackburnChristine KorsgaardDerek Parfit#anti-realism#meta-ethics#moral-realism#question-of-the-day
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Its coordinates: 3.1 Meta-Ethics · 3.1.1 Moral Realism vs Anti-Realism · 3.1.2 Moral Semantics +1 more

Today's question comes from the card on moral realism and anti-realism: if everyone approved of torturing children, would it still be wrong?

Almost everyone answers yes at once. The hard part is explaining what makes that true. If wrongness is not settled by what people approve of, what is it settled by?

The main answers:

  • Robust realism. Moral facts hold whatever anyone thinks, as mathematical facts do. Derek Parfit defended this at length in On What Matters.
  • Constructivism. Wrongness is not out there in the world, but neither is it whatever people happen to approve. It is what no rational agent could endorse when reasoning properly about how to act. Christine Korsgaard is the best-known defender.
  • Expressivism. To call something wrong is to express an attitude against it. Yet the expressivist can still say yes to today's question: we judge the imagined world with our attitudes, and we condemn it. Simon Blackburn made this reply central to his quasi-realism.
  • Error theory. J. L. Mackie argued that moral claims aim at objective facts that do not exist, so strictly speaking they are all false, though we may have good reason to keep making them.
  • Wrongness by command. For the Ashʿarī theologians, an act is wrong because God forbids it, so human approval was never the measure. The Muʿtazila replied that reason itself can see that injustice is wrong.

The card has the positions and the people behind them: 3.1.1 Moral Realism vs Anti-Realism. Mackie's short book is in the Book corner: Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.

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5 answers

  1. Alistair Gow

    Contributor

    Hume is usually filed under the anti-realists, so it is worth saying what he would actually answer. For him, moral distinctions come from sentiment, not reason. But the sentiment that counts is not whatever people happen to feel. It is what we feel when we take up a general point of view, setting aside our own interests and correcting for distance and partiality.

    So a world where everyone approved of torturing children would be a world where nobody had taken that point of view. Hume's answer is yes, it would still be wrong, because the approval in that world is the wrong kind of approval. Whether that makes him a realist is a question for a longer evening.

  2. Ji-woo Ryu

    Fellow

    Mencius would say the antecedent is impossible. Anyone who suddenly saw a child about to fall into a well would feel alarm and compassion, not to win favour with the parents, not to gain a reputation, but because the heart of compassion belongs to being human. A world in which everyone approved of torturing children is a world without humans in it.

    That is not a cheap dodge. It says that the wrongness and our response to it are not two separate things that might come apart. The sprouts are part of what we are.

  3. Pieter van Dijkhuizen

    Fellow

    Spinoza would refuse the question as posed. In the preface to Ethics Part IV he says that good and bad indicate nothing positive in things considered in themselves; they are ways of comparing things relative to us. That sounds like plain anti-realism.

    But "us" for Spinoza is not a show of hands. It is human nature, and what in fact increases or destroys our power of acting. Torturing children destroys it, in the children and in the torturers. So a world that approved would be mistaken about itself, the way a man who approves of his own addiction is mistaken. That is relative to human nature, and still not up for a vote.

  4. Layla Sfeir

    Fellow

    The kalām bullet deserves one more line, because the Ashʿarīs would find today's question oddly framed. Human approval was never in the running; the real counterfactual for them is "what if God commanded it?", and their critics pressed exactly that.

    The Muʿtazilī ʿAbd al-Jabbār argued that some acts, injustice, lying, ingratitude for a benefit, are known to be bad by reason itself, before and apart from revelation, and that God does not do what is bad. So on his view the wrongness is not up to anyone's approval, not even, in a sense, God's. Al-Ashʿarī's followers thought that put a limit on God. The argument has never really ended.

  5. Arvind Poojary

    Fellow

    As the resident atheist I'll say what I think most people actually believe, which is a realism without metaphysics. The reasons against torturing children are the child's pain, terror and ruined life. Those are facts. Nobody needs to approve of them for them to be there.

    If everyone approved, all those facts would still be there, and so would the reasons. What would have vanished is only our response to the reasons. I don't see why I need Parfit's non-natural facts, or God's command, to say that.