So we’re talking about the status of morality. That is the status of judgments like, genocide is morally abhorrent or polygamy is morally dubious. What are we doing when we make judgments like this? And to think about that question, I've put forward three questions that we can think about. First, are these judgments the sorts of things that can be true or false? Or are they mere opinion? If they are all sort of things that can be true or false, what makes them true? And finally, if they are true, are they objectively true? These three questions are questions about the status of morality. What I want to do next is to consider three theories or broad approaches that philosophers have taken to these questions. So the first theory that I want to talk about is objectivism. So the basic idea in objectivism is that our moral judgements are the sorts of things that can be true or false. And what makes them true or false are facts that are generally independent of who we are or what cultural groups we belong to. They're objective moral facts. That's the basic idea in objectivism. To get a feeling for objectivism, let's consider again our empirical judgements. So remember the example, the earth rotates around the sun. This seems to be a judgement about some objective matter of fact. It was at times a controversial judgement and earlier times in human history people didn't even believe it. But now we've come to think that this is the truth about the relative trajectory of the earth and the sun. Its truth is made true, not by who we are or our cultures, but about by something independent of us, the way the planets rotate in the universe. So that's a kind of paradigm objective judgment. Of course, we should recognize that when it comes to grand scientific theories like Newtonian physics or Darwinian Theory of Evolution, that it just gets much more complicated than thinking about objectivity. But focus just on the single judgment, the Earth rotates around the sun. If someone thought, no, the Earth doesn't rotate around the sun, we're quite happy to say, they're just wrong. We might be able to explain why they think that, but their judgement's wrong. The judgement that the Earth does rotate around the sun is right. And it's made right by the relative trajectory of the Earth and the sun, which are things completely independent of human practice or taste or anything like that. So that's kind of the paradigm example of an objective judgement, objective empirical judgement. It's examples like the first one we've been considering, "Genocide is morally abhorrent", that lead some philosophers to think that moral judgements are just as objective as empirical judgements. This seems like the sort of claim that is possible being true or false and not only was it was possible being true or false, it seems to be objectively true that "Genocide is morally abhorrent". If someone thought genocide's not morally abhorrent, we think they must just be mistaken. We might be able to explain how they got that crazy idea but their idea would be wrong. "Genocide is morally abhorrent". On the other hand, it's examples like our second example, "Polygamy is morally dubious" that have led some philosophers to question objectivism. They think, well I think "Polygamy is morally dubious", but this is widely practiced in many cultures around the world. Is it not some kind of cultural chauvinism to impose the view that "Polygamy is morally dubious" on everybody? Maybe it's not objectively true or false that "Polygamy is morally dubious". So this is the type of case that lean people away from objectivism. So, objectivists, they say, well, we can explain very well how it's possible that people disagree about moral matters. There's some objective matter of fact when one person says it's this way and another person says, no, it's the other way. Then there's something they're objectively disagreeing about. But they have a hard time explaining these kind of cases where we sometimes think, well, maybe there isn't an objective matter of fact. So the two cases, genocide's morally abhorrent and polygamy is morally dubious, provide two kind of good test case on either side of the for and against objectivism. The second view I want to talk about or approach to the status of morality is called relativism. So the basic idea behind relativism is that our moral judgements are indeed the sorts of things that can be true or false. But they are only true or false relative to something that varies from person to person or culture to culture. So to get an idea of what the relativist has in mind, consider a non-moral example. Considered the statement, "One must drive on the left". So if the statement's said in Britain, it's true. It's said in America, it's false. So it looks like it's a sort of statement that can be true or false. But it's not true or false objectively. There's not objective facts about which side of the road to drive on. There's a driving law in Britain that says drive on the left. And there's a driving law in America which says, drive on the right. And these are two non-overlapping jurisdictions. So you could say that the statement, "One must drive on the left" is true relative to British driving customs or law. And false relative to American driving customs or law. So that's the kind of model that the relativist uses. But now go back to our moral examples. So think about the judgement, "Polygamy is morally dubious". What's the relativist going to say about this? They're going to say, yes, this is the sort of thing that can be true or false. But it's not objectively true or false. It might be true, relative to one person or culture and false, relative to another person or culture. What do you think? Do you think "Polygamy is morally dubious"? Or consider a different example. Consider the example of Oedipus sleeping with his mother, Jocasta. So I said, I thought that was morally bad. Of course Oedipus didn't know that that's what he was doing. Are all cases of incest, even if the person doesn't know it's incest, morally dubious or morally bad? You might think, yes. You might think, no. The relativist says this kind of judgement is true or false. But it's only true or false relative to something else. Okay, what sort of thing might it be relative to? Well as another kind of rough analogy, think about the statement, "Okra is yummy". So I like okra, I say, "Okra is yummy". You dislike okra, you say okra is not yummy, okra is gross. What's going on in these two claims? Well you might think the first, when I say, "Okra is yummy", I'm just describing my taste, something I like. And when you say, okra's not yummy or okra's gross, you're describing your taste. So the first statement's true for me and the second statement's true for you. This kind of idea is the idea behind an extreme form of relativism called subjectivism. The subjectivist idea, the basic idea behind subjectivism is that our moral judgements are indeed true or false. But they're only true or false relative to the subjective feelings of a particular person, the person who makes them. So it's almost like when I say, "X is bad" I'm saying I morally disapprove of X. That's the subjectivist idea. There's a nice feature of subjectivism that I can explain the way our moral judgements are intimately tied up with how we are motivated to act. So if I dislike something, I'll be motivated to avoid it or to not promote it. Or if I like something or approve of something, I'll be motivated to promote it or drawn towards it. So the subjectivist has that nice explanation of the connection between morality and our motivations. On the other hand, subjectivism has a hard time of explaining disagreement. So go back to the case of "Polygamy is morally dubious". There it doesn't seems like it's merely a description of different people's taste when two cultures come into contact, one of which practices polygamy and the other one doesn't. There seems to be real issue, a disagreement, between those who think it is morally dubious and those who think it's not. And the subjectivist has a hard time explaining that. This is what leads to a less aggressive form of relativism, called cultural relativism. So the basic idea behind cultural relativism is that "Our moral judgements are indeed true or false, but they're only true or false relative to the cultural of the person who makes them". So a judgement like "X is bad," morally bad, morally wrong might be thought of as almost like I'm saying, X is disapproved of or forbidden by my culture. And so you can see how one person saying, polygamy's morally dubious, it can be true for him because in his culture it is morally dubious. Whereas another person saying, polygamy is morally dubious, it's false for him because it's not morally dubious in his culture. So that's the basic idea behind culture relativism, which is a less aggressive or less strong form of relativism. But subjectivism and culture relativism are both forms of relativism. And the basic idea behind relativism is that like the objectivist, the relativist thinks our moral judgements are the sorts of things that can be true or false. But unlike the objectivist, the relativist thinks that the truth or falsity of our moral judgments is only relative to something that can vary from person to person. The third approach to these questions about the status of morality that I want to discuss is called emotivism. So the basic idea in emotivism is that our moral judgments are not the sorts of things that can be true or false, either objectively true or false, nor true or false relative to some person's feelings or some culture. They're the direct expression of our emotive reactions to the world. So to get the basic idea of why somebody might endorse emotivism, remember our example of okra. Someone says, "Okra is gross", you might think well, they're not actually describing their feelings, they're just expressing their feelings. So the emotivist thinks something similar about moral judgments quite generally, but for example, "Polygamy is morally dubious". So they think when I say, "Polygamy is morally dubious", I'm expressing my negative feelings towards polygamy. It's almost as if I said, boo for polygamy. Or someone said charity is morally good. It's as if they're saying, hooray for charity. So in these direct expressions of our emotions, we're not describing some objective matter of fact or describing some feeling or cultural practice. We're directly expressing our emotions. That's the idea behind emotivism. Now, the emotivist like subjectivist can explain the tight connection between some moral judgements and our motivations to action because we're often motivated to act based on the way we feel about things. But the subjectives have a problem of it not being able to explain very well disagreements. If when I say, "Polygamy is morally dubious", it's just describing my feelings. And when you say, it's not morally dubious, you're just describing your feelings. It's not clear that there's any disagreement. The emotivist also thinks there's no factual disagreement. There's no belief that we both disagree about. But there could be disagreement in attitudes. We are expressing disagreeing attitudes is the emotivist's idea. Of course we might worry that we often called moral judgements true or false. So I say, "Polygamy is morally dubious". And you might agree with my by saying, what Matthew said was true, now the emotivist doesn't deny that we do this. But they'll have to say that this is a loose sense of true or false. And in strictly speaking, moral judgements aren't the sort of thing that can be true or false because they're the direct expression of emotions. That's the emotivist's idea. So we've been talking about the status of morality and in particular, three questions. The first question is are our moral judgments the sorts of things that can be true or false? Or are they mere opinions? The second question is if they are the sorts of things that can be true or false, what makes them true or false? And the third question is if they are true, are they objectively true? We've discussed three views about these questions or about the status of morality. The first view is objectivism, so the objectivist says, yes. Moral judgements of the sorts of things that can be true or false. And indeed, they're objectively true because they're made true by objective moral facts, by the wrongness of genocide or the goodness of charity. The second view I've discussed is relativism. The relativist idea is that our moral judgements are the sorts of things that can be true or false, but they're only true or false relative to something like somebody's subjective feelings or some culture practice. The final view I've discussed is emotivism. The idea behind emotivism is that no, our moral judgements are not the sorts of things that can be true or false. They're the direct expressions of our emotions or our mode of reactions to the way we take the world to be. So those are the three views or three broad approaches to the status of morality that I wanted to introduce.
