In recent decades, the idea that moral facts are not discovered but constituted by some hypothetical procedure or the attitudes of rational agents has been gaining support inside and outside of religious ethics. Often referred to as constructivism, this metaethical view proposes that moral facts are constituted by the attitudes of agents, i.e., what people would agree under some rational or idealized procedures of construction, not by facts determined by independent moral reality.
Despite its growing popularity, constructivism still has its critics in both philosophical and religious ethics. Many of its critics who identify themselves as moral realists have strongly objected to what they see as the antirealist tendencies of constructivism. In contemporary Christian ethics, different thinkers have proposed various accounts of moral realism in an attempt to preserve the objective nature of moral facts by grounding ethics not in social agreement but in the divine ordering of reality and the structures of natural life in a broad sense. Now the question is whether each realist account is capable of what it promises to do.
This paper examines three accounts of moral realism proposed by prominent contemporary Christian ethicists in order to discuss their distinct contributions to the current debate on constructivism and to call attention to some inherent weaknesses in their accounts. As a way to address these weaknesses, I present what I call the intuitionist account of moralism as an alternative realist model.
Varieties of Moral Realism in Contemporary Christian Ethics
Before discussing various accounts of moral realism in contemporary Christian ethics, it may be worth clarifying, though only briefly, what I mean by “moral realism,” given the number of ways in which the term is used in philosophy. In this paper, the term is used to refer to the position that moral properties such as rightness and wrongness are not merely social constructions or the expressions of agents, but real properties that actually exist independently of the attitudes of individuals and societies. By “real properties,” one need not assume something like Plato's realm of Forms hovering over the physical world. Instead, following Franz Brentano, they can be epistemically understood as the intentional objects of directly evident judgments.Footnote 1
Why then would Christian ethicists be committed to moral realism? There are at least three reasons. First, constructivists tend to attribute moral facts to agents as their origin. They are contrasted with those Christian thinkers who believe that moral facts exist independently of social context. For these Christian thinkers, moral realism appears to be a natural fit, since its emphasis on the independent existence of moral properties seems more consistent with the belief that moral knowledge is objective. Second, many moral realists, Christian or not, are concerned with moral relativism that constructivism is believed to invite. These realists often share the conclusion that constructivism is ultimately philosophically untenable because it leads to moral relativism (with respect to either justification or truth). Third, many Christian moral realists are also inclined to view reality as God's creation that has a certain order and purpose. This would mean that human beings who are a part of God's creation must conform to the divine order and purpose rooted in the created reality. In this sense, the problems with constructivism are both philosophical and theological, since it tends to deny any connection between ontology and ethics. As we will see shortly, this is one reason why most Christian moral realists insist that nature provides important data for ethics, even though they see moral facts as irreducible to natural facts.
However, as will become clear in the subsequent pages, one should be extremely careful in using the term “ethical naturalism”Footnote 2 to indiscriminately refer to all three of the realist accounts here. This is because there is a profound difference between a naturalist claim that moral properties are constituted (i.e., realized) by natural properties and can be knowable by the study of the natural and social sciences and an experientialist (not to be confused with “empirical”) claim that we may use natural properties to explain moral properties that are knowable upon careful reflection on human experience. Technically speaking, the former is a position in ethical naturalism, while the latter is not. This is because nonreductive ethical naturalism still takes morality as the object of the natural sciences, even though it considers moral properties to be analytically or ontologically irreducible to natural properties. For our purposes, the distinction will serve to draw a fine but important line between Robin Lovin's account of moral realism and those by Lisa Cahill and William Schweiker.
Lovin's nonreductive naturalist moral realism
In Lovin's account of moral realism, one may find a strong emphasis on the connection between broadly natural conditions of human flourishing and the moral life. The significance of such an emphasis would be more intelligible when this naturalistic account is seen against the backdrop of some constructivist theories of morality that deny that connection. Lovin presents a nonreductive naturalist account of moral realism, according to which moral properties are not ontologically reducible to natural properties but supervenient upon the latter. In his view, the kind of moral realism that has most plausibility is the one that “ties moral meaning to a reality that exists beyond the subjective feelings of those who use moral terms and beyond the systems of language in which they discuss moral judgments with others.”Footnote 3 It is a version of ethical naturalism that presupposes “objective conditions required for human flourishing.”Footnote 4 Thus, for Lovin, to qualify as a form of moral realism, it must first include the claim that moral properties exist independently of the attitudes and beliefs of the perceiver. He further stipulates that this kind of moral realism requires not only the existence of natural properties, but also the existence of “human beings to know and respond to them.”Footnote 5
Second, moral properties must be related to natural conditions necessary for human flourishing, which is why he calls his moral realism naturalistic. So what natural properties are significant for ethical naturalism? According to Lovin, there is no consensus on this question because various naturalist theories emphasize different natural properties. However, he does relate the moral realism of Christian Realism most closely to the natural law tradition of the Roman Catholic Church, especially the revisions of natural law since Vatican II. The sort of natural properties that the Roman Catholic Church considers to be significant for moral reasoning are not solely biological properties, but also personal and social conditions conducive to physical, psychological, and intellectual development; these latter natural properties are significant because they designate capacities or possibilities for fulfilling human potentials. What moral realism has in common with the natural law tradition is “the conviction that right action is action that conforms to human nature. The good person acts in ways that develop the capacities human beings have, rather than defeating them.”Footnote 6 According to this interpretation of the natural law theory, moral life is good when it conforms to nature, that is, when it helps to envision and realize possibilities for meaningful human life, whether in personal, social, or political life.
It is worth noting, however, that Lovin supports nonreductive ethical naturalism, not the reductive one. This is because he denies the ontological identicalness between moral and natural properties; moral language refers to but is not reducible to natural features of reality. As a nonreductive ethical naturalist, he also rejects ethical nonnaturalism as well as the correspondence theory of truth, arguing that “[m]any contemporary versions of moral realism employ pragmatic or coherentist theories of truth,” to some of which Christian Realism is linked.Footnote 7 He explains,
Just as moral realists are not required to hold a correspondence theory of truth, so they are not committed to the metaphysical claim that “good” and “evil,” or “right” and “wrong” are metaphysical properties that exist apart from the natural, empirical properties of things. A moral realist may hold that moral predicates refer to nonnatural properties, but he or she may also hold that moral properties are supervenient on the natural properties of things. Moral realisms of this latter sort are versions of ethical naturalism. In the example above, the moral realist who is an ethical naturalist could say that poverty is evil just because it has the corrosive effects on human well-being that characterizes its natural features. It is right to act against situations of poverty and wrong to create or to perpetuate them, not because we intuit some nonnatural property of rightness or wrongness in those acts, but because the conditions of poverty have the natural properties which they have. Ethical naturalism explains the appropriate use of moral terms by reference to the natural properties of “good” or “bad” persons, situations, and actions, though the ethical naturalist tries to avoid reductive naturalism, which holds that the moral terms mean nothing but the natural properties.Footnote 8
Why the coherentist theory of truth? Lovin seems to assume that the correspondence theory of truth implies the existence of nonnatural (I think he meant “supersensible”) moral properties. Based on this assumption, he may have thought that the existence of moral properties need not be supersensible, and moral truth can still exist among the users of moral language even without the existence of supersensible moral properties.
Finally, Lovin adds another feature to his account of moral realism: fallibilism.Footnote 9 He writes, “A moral realist need not claim perfect or complete knowledge of the realities on which moral meanings depend. Recognizing that different people have different moral ideas need not culminate in relativism. A moral realist is likely to be ‘fallibilist,’ holding that moral realities can be known, but that any particular claim to moral knowledge may prove to be false, so that all such claims are in constant need of testing and correction.”Footnote 10 Thus, for Lovin, moral realism holds that moral knowledge is possible, but it also recognizes that our claims to moral knowledge may at times be in error.
Assessment
As some constructivist theories of morality conceive moral properties as primarily social inventions, the relationship between moral properties and natural properties is not always clear. This is because it may be up to a particular society whether or not it should take into consideration natural conditions for human well-being and flourishing in constructing moral properties. In this sense, the main strength of Lovin's nonreductive naturalist account lies in its emphasis that natural facts concerning human life must serve as necessary data for moral knowledge. Given the fact that some constructivist theories deny the necessary connection between the biological and social conditions of human life and moral knowledge, his account is noteworthy for its affirmation of this connection.
Having said that, we may point out some issues with Lovin's account. First, Lovin's description of ethical nonnaturalism (or intuitionism) is not quite accurate. Take the idea of supervenience. Though Lovin presents the idea as being a unique or exclusive feature of nonreductive ethical naturalism, this actually is not the case. In fact, the idea of moral supervenience goes all the way back to G. E. Moore, an important ethical intuitionist in the early twentieth century, who defended the idea of nonnaturalistic ethical intuitionism.Footnote 11 What Moore and other intuitionists wanted to capture with this idea is that moral facts are both ontologically and epistemically dependent upon natural facts. But notice how Lovin presents ethical nonnaturalism (or ethical intuitionism).
The principal alternatives to ethical naturalism are suggested by intuitionist accounts of moral knowledge and by voluntarist accounts of moral meaning. For the intuitionist, the fact that so often we “just know” that an act is wrong suggests that these aspects of experience are unique properties of actions and situations, not discerned by examining and drawing conclusions about natural properties.Footnote 12
Though there were some early proponents of ethical intuitionism who thought that ethical intuition did not require careful rational reflection on natural facts, certainly a good number of prominent classical and contemporary ethical intuitionists, including Sidgwick, Moore, Ross, and Audi, do not share this view.Footnote 13
One reason Lovin thinks that ethical nonnaturalism involves no rational reflection might have to do with his assumption that the term “nonnatural” means “metaphysical.” It follows that, if “metaphysical” is synonymous with “supersensible,” nonnatural moral properties must be supersensible properties, which are distinct from sensible, natural properties. However, as I mentioned at the beginning of the paper, moral properties need not be understood as some mysterious supersensible objects. (This is why I prefer to use the term intuitionism instead of nonnaturalism in order to avoid this common misunderstanding.) That moral properties and natural properties are ontologically distinct from each other does not entail that the former are not ontologically dependent on the latter. In short, nonreductive ethical naturalists do not have monopoly on the idea of supervenience.
More importantly, Lovin's use of the term “nonreductive ethical naturalism” may be problematic if it refers to the position of Cornell Realists.Footnote 14 This is because, as I alluded earlier, this term signifies an empirical or scientific approach to moral knowledge. The question that we should be asking is whether moral facts are really constituted by natural facts by way of drawing inferences from empirical data. Assuming that we can draw inferences about the moral goodness or badness of an action from empirical data collected, do these inferences amount to moral knowledge?
I think that we need to distinguish between explanation and justification, as the latter is traditionally considered to be a necessary condition for knowledge. The idea is that inferred beliefs drawn from empirical data may provide explanations Footnote 15 but do not have the same epistemic status as the justified true beliefs adequately grounded and taken to be intuitively evident. For instance, consider ski trainers who can fully explain how to ski with all the techniques and body movements involved in skiing. But there is one problem: these ski trainers themselves have never skied before. In this case, it would be proper to say that these trainers may infer beliefs about how to ski from a set of empirical data, but in the case of experienced skiers, they already have adequate grounds for believing that they can ski well. In light of this distinction, can we then say that the trainers actually know how to ski? To be able to explain something may help one's learning, but explanation is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of knowledge. If this is correct, what empirical sciences could offer are explanations, not moral knowledge, unless what is explained by them is first taken to be intuitively evident, in which case the evidence in question must receive its justification not from empirical data but the epistemic sources of these data.Footnote 16
However, if what Lovin wants to emphasize through his nonreductive ethical naturalism is the idea that there are natural conditions, whether biological, social, or reflective, that are basic to human well-being and flourishing and that ethical reflection should not ignore these conditions, we may want to consider whether there are other ways to support the idea without becoming a naturalist.
Cahill's critical realism
Like Lovin, Cahill has long emphasized the strong connection between natural conditions for human flourishing and the moral life. This strong connection is a primary reason why she, as a Christian feminist, has been wary of postmodern theories of morality. In particular, she has sometimes chastised other feminists because they decry patriarchal traditions for appealing to “reality” and “moral objectivity” in justifying a bias against women, while these feminists also rely upon “a liberal cultural ethos which idealizes a basic set of human rights centered on civil liberties and freedom of personal conduct, especially among ‘consenting adults.’”Footnote 17 Her point is that these deconstructionist feminists, while calling for the demolition of objective morality and celebrating the idea of difference, smuggle in their own universal moral values, such as individual autonomy, without giving those moral values any explicit theoretical defense. In her view, the postmodern deconstruction of moral foundations “simply leads to cultural relativism which enervates real moral communication, intercultural critique, and cooperation in defining and building just conditions of life for men and women.”Footnote 18
In contrast to these deconstructionists, Cahill argues that we need not give up on objective morality or universal moral values. However, Cahill's strategy is not exactly going back to some foundationalist versions of morality (e.g., Kantian foundationalism) that try to ground “objectivity in a concept of reason as abstract and ‘autonomous.’”Footnote 19 Instead, she contends that we need to approach values not by thinking abstractly about “reality” or “the structures of consciousness” but through an inductive and dialogical reasoning that takes into account the data and facts of human experience. She writes, “The foundations of morality are not best understood as innate structures of consciousness or rationality which are self-evident at an abstract level, but as broad areas of agreement about human needs, goods, and fulfillments which can be reached inductively and dialogically through human experience.”Footnote 20 Cahill believes that “[a]ll humans—as embodied, self-conscious, intersubjective, and social—share common ground for moral obligation, insight, communication, and action.”Footnote 21 To be sure, she readily acknowledges that there are many personal and cultural differences among human beings, yet Cahill also insists that it would be wrong to conclude from this that we cannot generalize about basic needs, well-ordered societies, and human happiness or that we cannot make any normative claims about human action.
Cahill calls her account of moral realism “critical realism.” Her account is said to be modeled on the Aristotelian and Thomistic moral traditions, though she is careful to distinguish her theory from certain forms of those traditions. She notes that some forms of Aristotelianism “fail to provide a convincing account of moral objectivity because they deliberately or inadequately extrapolate conceptions of goods, of flourishing and of virtues and vices, from the preferences of circumscribed historical communities,” while some forms of Thomism fail because they treat “specific historical formulations of goods and obligations as invariant first principles from which almost equally absolute conclusions can be deduced logically.”Footnote 22 Instead, what Cahill finds instructive in the ethics of Aristotle and Aquinas is “an inductive reflection on and generalization from human experiences” that points to the “goods that are constitutive of happiness as well as activities and virtues which realize those goods.”Footnote 23 For instance, Aquinas lists the order of natural inclinations for certain goods shared by all creatures, by animals, and by humans respectively. For Aquinas, since they are universally desired, these goods cannot be reduced to individual or social preferences. As Cahill puts it, “In and through the most basic and widespread forms of our materiality, human beings have ‘common sense’ access to the experience of other human individuals, as well as to a number of cross-cultural social relations, which derive from bodily needs and capacities.”Footnote 24 In this regard, goods pertaining to life, bodily integrity, sex, and sociality are not dispensable goods but real goods that are essential to human flourishing.
Just because some inclinations are natural, however, it does not follow that these inclinations can simply be equated with moral values. Cahill rightly notes that we cannot simply read off values from facts; for while nature provides the necessary raw material for human experience, “knowledge of the natural law requires prudential evaluation of human activities which respond to genuine human needs, realize human goods, and hence are conducive to happiness and excellence.”Footnote 25 Joining Jean Porter and Stephen Pope, Cahill argues that our moral reasoning is both practical and analogical: moral reasoning is practical because we do not test and attain our moral ideas, rules, and virtues through an abstract rational process but by trying them or living them out in concrete life, and analogical because we generalize them from our own experiences and apply them analogically in new situations.Footnote 26
Cahill cautions that we should not view human goods only in terms of physiological functions. While we can appreciate Aquinas's “inductive epistemology and his vision of the human person as embodied and social,” we need not accept his reductionist views on women and sex, whereby women's existence or sexual activity is exclusively explained in terms of their reproductive purpose.Footnote 27 In this regard, Cahill credits contemporary Roman Catholic social ethics as well as feminist and intercultural retrievals of the natural law tradition for understanding diverse forms of human goods that are both deeply social and transcultural.
One important way in which Cahill clarifies her realist position is through her insistence that moral truth is objective and its intelligibility is not confined to a particular community of believers. For this reason, she disagrees with some Catholic thinkersFootnote 28 who argue that “Aquinas's ethics belongs ultimately in the context of faith, rather than placing the emphasis on the inherent reasonableness of obligation, and hence on the inclusive and potential public character of moral discourse.”Footnote 29 These Catholic thinkers, joining some Protestants, present an “anti-foundationalist, anti-secularist, and anti-deconstructionist” argument for Christian morality, which “rests objectivity of morals in a revelation to a particular faith community” in order to “preserve truth while escaping the attacks aimed at Kantian foundationalism.”Footnote 30 To these thinkers Cahill responds,
It is no real solution to the truth question to locate truth and its criteria within the believing community in such a way that external or “objective” criteria become irrelevant to its own confidence in the message it bears forward out of its internally coherent traditions. This is not to say that faith in God can be justified or produced on rational grounds, but only that the morality that goes with Christian faith is intelligible on reasonable as well as religious grounds. Affirming the self-sufficiency and final incommunicability for ethics of communal revelation is itself an essentially “postmodern” move, and as far as public moral discourse is concerned, has strongly relativist consequences.Footnote 31
What is clear from this is that Cahill distinguishes the justification of moral beliefs from that of theological beliefs, a distinction that some Christian thinkers fail to note.Footnote 32 In fact, Cahill alleges that these thinkers are susceptible to “moral sectarianism,” a concept which I consider to be akin to “epistemic relativism.”Footnote 33 This allegation may have to do with her judgment that moral sectarians take justification-conferring authority to be exclusively communal in nature. In contrast, Cahill believes that it is not impossible for people in a particular community, despite their inability to escape their historical context, to have access to at least some moral truths. In describing Martha Nussbaum's notion of truth, Cahill appears to support the idea of moral universals, albeit through an inductive, historical approach to human experiences: “Truth claims can be asserted from within an inductive, historical approach to the universals or essentials in moral experience, even though our perception and articulation of these is subject to constant cross-cultural revision.”Footnote 34
Assessment
As noted above, one of the distinct features of Cahill's critical realism lies in the idea that there is a way to defend the objectivity of moral judgments by engaging in moral reasoning that is inductive and dialogical. With careful reflection on concrete experiences of individuals and communities, she contends that it is possible to talk about genuine human goods that are central to human flourishing despite individual and cultural differences. Yet, these human goods are not merely the objects of brute natural desires. They are rather the conditions for human flourishing and the ends of human activities that are intrinsically valuable. In this sense, Cahill's account of moral realism has broad naturalistic concerns without being committed to ethical naturalism. It would deny that natural facts alone constitute moral facts. Nor is scientific knowledge sufficient for moral knowledge. Rather, moral knowledge requires a critical and dialogical engagement with the living experiences of others. The upshot of this claim is that it is premature to declare that the truth of moral claims is relative to the attitudes or beliefs of a particular community.
Notwithstanding this important insight, Cahill's critical realism falls short of making a distinction between the inductive/dialogical process of moral reasoning and the nature of justification. Though we can engage in an inductive moral reasoning, starting with concrete experiences, our moral beliefs are not justified by the inductive process, but by the intuitively evident nature of the propositions we believe.
Consider “Comfort Women” (to be exact, sex slaves), a case of mass rape perpetrated by the Japanese military during World War II. Many women from China, Korea, the Philippines, and other countries were taken from their homes against their will and forced to serve as prostitutes for Japanese soldiers. From the descriptive details about this practice given by the victims and others, one can form a (propositional) belief that the practice was morally wrong and should be condemned; but this judgment is justified not so much by the inductive method used by the moral agent, but by the fact that the practice appears evidently wrong to anyone who has carefully reflected on the descriptive details. The inductive method, gathering descriptive facts from the victims, is necessary for the process of moral reasoning and for making a proper moral judgment, but what justifies the specific moral judgment is that this practice of forced prostitution appears intuitively wrong to the agent at the end of her rational reflection. In other words, we need to distinguish the process or activity of justification from the grounds of its justification.Footnote 35 Thus, Cahill may be correct to say that the process of moral reasoning should be inductive, but it would still be necessary to distinguish it from the epistemic grounds of justification.
Schweiker's hermeneutical realism
In Responsibility and Christian Ethics, Schweiker develops what he calls hermeneutical realism.Footnote 36 He explains that Christian ethics is “realistic in that moral values are rooted in the nature of human beings as created by God, and furthermore, the source of morality is God who exists prior to our understanding of the divine will and purposes.”Footnote 37 In opposing emotivism and social constructivism, he submits that moral judgments “cannot overlook the simple fact that human beings depend on social, natural, historical, and biological conditions which foster and limit our creativity. We are created beings interdependent with the rest of reality.”Footnote 38 In other words, moral judgments should not be so indifferent to those natural and other conditions that sustain and fulfill human life qua human.
However, Schweiker adds that moral claims cannot be made intelligible without the interpretation of a moral situation in which moral truth is sought, since our perception of value can begin only with the experience of reality, and because moral truth does not simply appear to us without due consideration of the moral situation. He cautions that interpretation “is guided by orienting values and norms which are not simply read off a moral situation.”Footnote 39 We do not “just ‘see’ goodness or the source of moral value, the divine, like other forms of sensibility.”Footnote 40 Rather, “we invent moral ideas based upon our experience of value, our perception of others and goodness in order to discover our moral lot.”Footnote 41
The word “invent” here, however, should not be understood in the constructivist sense of seeing morality as the product of a social agreement or invention. This is because Schweiker is opposed to what he calls antirealist and internal realist positions in moral ontology.Footnote 42 He provides several reasons for this. First, antirealist theories deny that “values are ontologically real with respect to the ‘world’” and tend to regard morality as kind of a fiction or projection that has no ontological basis.Footnote 43 In contrast, Schweiker has a value theory, according to which there is a diversity of goods, many of which are considered to be ontologically real. Consider four kinds of goods that he identifies: premoral, social, and reflective goods as well as ethical good. These goods are believed to be central to human life because they are critical to human fulfillment, biological and beyond. For instance, premoral goods, which consist of the fulfillment of basic human needs such as “sexual fulfillment, bodily comfort, food and shelter, and profound music,” signifies that “human behavior is motivated by various biological, affective, and other vitalities, needs, and interests.”Footnote 44 Premoral goods are significant for moral life to the extent that we cannot conceive of a moral life without the fulfillment of the biological, psychological, and other basic needs that are not only an important natural basis of human life but also a necessary “background for human choices.”Footnote 45 For this reason, Schweiker contends that “[p]re-moral goods place constraints on human choice, since choices are directed to preserving and enhancing these goods when possible.”Footnote 46
Likewise, social goods (i.e., goods that are significant for social life) and reflective goods (i.e., goods necessary for moral understanding) play an important role in human life. Social goods such as friendship and economic and political institutions can enhance human life, while reflective goods, which are “the whole domain of symbolic, linguistic, and practical meaning-systems,” can help us assess moral beliefs and norms.Footnote 47 It is important to note that Schweiker's value theory is realist in that all of the goods posited by his value theory, premoral, social, and reflective, are not thought to be fictional but real goods, grounded in human nature.
Second, antirealist theories tend to attribute moral truth to the desires or needs of an individual or a linguistic community, or to a conceptual scheme internal to a community. Schweiker, however, denies such a view and instead insists that our ethical task is “to discover the truth about moral values.”Footnote 48 As he writes,
all human understanding is dependent on some conceptual scheme or framework of belief and still holds that perceiving the good is morally central. It is this type of realism that seems basic to Christian ethics. The Christian is always trying to perceive the divine reality and purposes in the world. From the perspective of this form of realism, moral beliefs and cognitive schemes are empty without the experience that funds them. Ethics tests and revises moral concepts and beliefs by what are taken to be basic moral experiences.Footnote 49
As Schweiker sees it, internal realism takes the truth of moral beliefs to be relative to a conceptual framework and thus independent of the basic experiences of external reality, so that for the internal realist “truth is a statement about beliefs internal to a moral framework.”Footnote 50 In contrast, Schweiker holds that basic moral experiences cannot be reduced to a linguistic or conceptual framework, even if one requires the latter for moral understanding: “Like anti-realism and internal realism, this position grants that moral understanding is dependent on, and relative to, some cognitive framework. Yet, with phenomenological forms of realism, I contend that perceiving, or experiencing, the good is morally basic.”Footnote 51 Here Schweiker seems to take seriously a standard phenomenological tenet, the belief that we need to accept things as they appear to our consciousness.
But, Schweiker qualifies this phenomenological principle by saying that there is a reflexive connection between commitment and perception. Such a reflexive connection is accounted by the fact that “values do not appear to us as other things in the world appear.”Footnote 52 He writes,
To put it differently, we all live by some faith, some identity-conferring commitment, and this commitment factors in our perception of the world. The answer to skepticism entails a moral commitment that forms the context for the perception needed to apprehend the depth of value in being. And it is precisely by insisting upon the reflexive relation of perception and commitment that this position diverges from internal and critical realism. Narratives and metaphors shape but do not determine perception; perception can demand radical revision in our conceptual schemes. Hermeneutical realism, as I call it, focuses on commitments and forms of understanding and not on linguistic forms (narrative) or cognitive acts (imaginative construction). And this means that the connection between perception and commitment is more complex in hermeneutical realism than in rival forms of theological ethics.Footnote 53
On this account, moral perception does not occur in our dealings with reality without the help of certain illuminating moral commitments. To use my own example, we may compare this relationship between moral commitment and moral perception with a lamp (analogous to Schweiker's notion of moral commitment informed by narratives and metaphors) and an eye (analogous to moral perception). The lamp casts lights on the room, and the eye can see what is in the room wherever the lamp illumines; the eye cannot manufacture what appears in the room, yet needs the help of the lamp to see what is there. However helpful the lamp may be, it cannot determine what the eye finds in the room. If such a reading is correct, Schweiker is trying to maintain what he sees as an inseparable relationship between moral commitment and moral perception.
Assessment
As with Lovin's and Cahill's conceptions of moral realism, Schweiker's hermeneutical realism takes natural conditions of life in the broad sense to be essential not only to the possibility of what is distinctively human life but also to the intelligibility of the moral life. If Cahill's critical realism stresses the inductive and dialogical nature of moral reasoning, Schweiker's hermeneutical realism points to the role of imagination and interpretation in understanding moral meaning. In his view, we do not have direct, unmediated access to the meanings of various forms of communicative acts, for “these meanings are presented through, but not reducible to, images, concepts, and theories embedded in cultural worlds.”Footnote 54 As “meaning-makers,” human beings try “to discover the truth of their existence” by constantly imitating the world they experience and designating a space of significance that is real to them.Footnote 55 What this suggests is that one cannot simply perceive moral values directly from nature or apprehend moral truths a priori. We obtain moral knowledge by way of imagination and interpretation, not simply by empirical observation or rational cognition.
Central to Schweiker's hermeneutical realism then is the idea that moral understanding cannot ignore the complex forms of moral meaning, through which the nature of moral reality must be interpreted by and for us via imagination and questioning. However, we are told that imagination and interpretation do not happen in a vacuum as they need to draw upon “the ambiguous, open-ended resources of traditions, linguistic forms, symbols, and images in order to discover the meaning and direction of life.”Footnote 56 Thus, in his view, in order to grasp moral norms and values, we need to constantly question, critique, and interpret the resources that shape our own understanding of life.
Implied here, I think, is the premise that perception of reality, including moral properties, cannot occur without being mediated by linguistic forms of meaning, and all concepts or various forms of meaning try to imitate reality by recreating it on a level of discourse.Footnote 57 This is why Schweiker believes that some concepts, when rightly interpreted, may help us to discover the nature of reality, and that we therefore cannot perceive reality directly but only through the images, symbols, and languages that purport to represent it. In this sense, reality cannot be perceived without the interpretation of various forms of bearers of meaning (or signifiers).
While the role of moral imagination and interpretation in moral understanding should not be ignored, it may not be sufficient to explain the phenomenon of moral perception. At issue is whether Schweiker collapses moral understanding and moral perception. On the one hand, it may be necessary to point out that understanding has to do with grasping meaning, and grasping meaning involves the use of concepts. On the other hand, it seems that moral perception may be possible sometimes without the aid of concepts. Put otherwise, we can ask whether all moral perception requires the linguistic mastery of concepts. Certainly, one need not deny that we can use concepts to articulate or interpret what is being perceived, but this is different from saying that all perceptions require the mastery of concepts in the first place. Take sound, for instance. Do concepts enable us to perceive different sounds of various objects? Or, is it our sensory systems that cause us to perceive and differentiate various sounds, enabling us to develop concepts of sound? One may try to teach a deaf man to acquire musical concepts, but it is doubtful that he can really understand the differences among various sounds if perception is always dependent upon conception.
Another issue with Schweiker's hermeneutical realism may be found in the claim that there is a “reflexive connection between commitment and perception” whereby the commitment “forms the context for the perception needed to apprehend the depth of value in being.”Footnote 58 There are two possible interpretations of this alleged connection: on the one hand, we may construe this as saying that moral commitments enable moral perception by illumining moral properties that exist independently of our attitudes and beliefs. This was the interpretation I provided earlier. However, if this interpretation is correct, Schweiker's view appears to collapse into a form of the sensibility theories (i.e., those that emphasize the mutual dependence of moral property and sensibility), to which I will return in the next section. Suppose that one does not have a proper moral commitment (or sensibility) that could illuminate one's perception; does this imply that one will not be able to perceive those moral properties? If one cannot, then isn't the perception of moral values left to the mercy of such a commitment?
We find some serious difficulty when we are to ask further questions about the source of moral commitments. Where do these moral commitments come from? Are they not related in some way to personally or socially acquired moral concepts and habits of mind? If so, can hermeneutical realism really sustain its stated opposition to antirealism and internal realism?
I have thus far explored three representative accounts of moral realism in contemporary Christian ethics. In the next section, I will introduce my own account as an alternative response to constructivist challenges.
Moral Realism: An Alternative Intuitionist Account
Contemporary philosophical literature is replete with so many competing versions of moral realism that it is easy to get lost in the matrix of theories without understanding how they are different from each other.Footnote 59 In this limited space, I shall be concerned only to expound my version of moral realism, using latest theories in moral philosophy. This will help us to locate subtle yet important differences among various positions on moral realism and help identify some areas of disagreement with the three versions of moral realism explored earlier.
First, let me briefly outline the main features of my intuitionist account of moral realism before I explicate them. These features may be summarized as following:
(1) Moral properties (e.g., rightness, wrongness, kindness, or cruelty) are properties of human dispositions and actions, and they exist whether or not particular individuals or societies affirm their existence.
(2) Moral properties are not merely psychological projections or reactions based on hard-wired biological inclinations. Properly understood, they are the objects of moral judgments which have truth-value.
(3) One does not simply discover or intuit moral properties in a vacuum. One needs to gather all necessary and relevant natural facts about the human act in question and reflect on them. In this sense, moral properties are supervenient upon natural facts.
(4) Moral properties, however, are not reducible to natural facts; they are not analytically or ontologically identical to natural facts. Nor are moral properties simply inferred from natural properties. Empirical data may be used to explain moral beliefs, but they do not constitute moral knowledge.
Ontologically speaking, I take “moral realism” as the view that there are moral properties, and that, although moral properties cannot exist apart from human beings, their existence is neither constituted by nor dependent upon our conceptual schemes or conative states of mind.Footnote 60 That there exist moral properties in the world should not be understood as the claim that they exist independently of human beings and human experience.Footnote 61
Now allow me to further clarify my intuitionist version of moral realism by comparing it with some other conceptions of moral properties. One common conception is called “expressivist” because it holds that the existence and the nature of moral properties are dependent upon the possibility of evoking or eliciting a certain response in moral agents.Footnote 62 Expressivist theories maintain that a moral property is real in the sense that it has a disposition to cause or elicit a certain effect or response in us. Proponents of this conception of moral realism often view moral properties as secondary qualities in the Lockean sense.Footnote 63 For Locke, an object has powers or what he calls secondary qualities to produce ideas such as color or taste in us, as these ideas are a result of the causal interaction between our particular conative states and the primary qualities of the object, i.e., properties that the object possesses independently of a human perceptual apparatus. The main difference between ideas of primary qualities and those of secondary qualities then is that the latter do not actually represent the object that evokes them.
For instance, the blueness of the sky is not its intrinsic objective feature but rather a visual effect produced by the sun and molecules in the air. Similarly, expressivists claim that something has a moral property when it elicits a response of a certain type in us rather than the appearance of the property being attributed to some intrinsic qualities of the object. According to this view, an action's being evil is explained by its disposition to elicit certain responses from us in normal or ideal circumstances rather than by its intrinsic qualities. This conception of moral realism disclaims that moral value is part of the fabric of the world—the view that moral properties are intrinsic features of objects.Footnote 64
According to one version of expressivism, the sentimentalist theory, moral properties are neither states of affairs that exist in the natural world nor merely instruments for human use. Rather, they have nonrepresentative and conative functions for the human mind that “pressure on choice and action,” as these “pressures need to exist if human beings are to meet their competing needs in a social, cooperative setting.”Footnote 65 Moral properties, on this variant of expressivism, are psychological “attitudes” or “projections” grounded in our evolutionary biology, a result of a long evolutionary process of human survival.Footnote 66 On this view, we believe that cruelty is wrong not because of the way we think about it, say that our reason apprehends it as a vice, but because of the way our sentiments put pressure on choice and action.Footnote 67
Another version of expressivism, which is called the sensibility theory, suggests that moral properties and sensibilities (or responses) are mutually dependent.Footnote 68 An idea central to these theories is that “refinement of response leads to refinement of perception and vice versa.”Footnote 69 Thus, the sensibility theorist would say that we can perceive certain moral properties only because our society has already developed certain sensibilities towards a particular issue (e.g., racism or sexism). Conversely, it is also said that the perception of certain moral properties also further refines certain sensibilities. To the extent that the ability to evoke particular moral sentiments is dependent upon certain social practices or conceptual schemes, sensibility theory versions of moral realism take moral properties to be dependent upon our conceptual or theoretical schemes.
There have been many objections to the two versions of expressivism introduced here. I will not undertake a full review of these versions except to note a major difference between these versions of moral realism and my own. First, if moral properties, in the strict sense, do not actually exist but are merely expressions of our conative states or social attitudes, what makes our moral beliefs ultimately true or false? Those who take moral truth to be a matter of social agreement, under idealized conditions or not, can argue that the notion of moral truth itself is essentially social. Whether or not this is sufficient for securing the objectivity of moral truth is, however, debatable.Footnote 70
Second, my intuitionist version of moral realism also insists that moral properties exist independently of the interests and responses of particular individuals and societies. This claim stands in contrast with expressivism's view that an action's having certain moral properties is explained by its disposition to elicit certain responses from us in normal or ideal circumstances. This is what Jonathan Dancy calls the strong conception of moral realism, according to which “real properties are those which are not constituted by the availability or possibility of a characteristic human response.”Footnote 71
For this kind of moral realism, moral properties are real because their existence and nature are found in the objects (e.g., human dispositions and actions) to which those properties are referred; moral properties are response-independent. Thus, the statement “cruelty is wrong” does not depend on the availability of certain responses or sensibilities in a given society. We can hold that cruelty knows no national border, generational gap, race, and gender. For the moral realist, moral properties are not dependent upon the perceiver's particular beliefs or sentiments but actually are intrinsic features of objects, and thus our perception of them has cognitive status, i.e., our moral perception is capable of being true or false (or correct or incorrect). Moral properties are neither a projection of our conative mental statesFootnote 72 nor bona fide beliefs with no representative content.Footnote 73
Furthermore, while my version denies that all moral properties are dependent upon our conceptual schemes, it does not countenance the contrary of this claim, namely, that no moral properties are dependent upon our conceptual schemes. I certainly hold that some moral properties may be unique products of historical societies and their conceptual schemes; for instance, there is good reason to believe that honor killings in isolated Muslim communities are the result of the cultural and religious beliefs of those communities. In this case, perceiving moral properties such as honor and purity could be dependent upon their patriarchal and authoritarian belief systems. What moral realists repudiate then is not the impossibility of the dependence of morality on conceptual schemes but the necessity of such dependence. My version of moral realism agrees with William Alston's description of metaphysical realism that large stretches of moral reality do not depend on our conceptual and theoretical schemes for existing and being what they are.Footnote 74
Third, it is necessary to clarify the relationship between moral properties and natural properties. If what makes things morally right or wrong does not depend upon the attitudes or sentiments of the perceiver, where are moral properties to be found? How would the answer of intuitionists be different from that of ethical naturalists who are also realists? Intuitionists deny that moral and natural properties are ontologically identical without also denying their close relationship. As they see it, moral properties are ontologically and epistemically supervenient upon natural properties. What does this mean? Moral properties are ontologically grounded in but not reducible to (some sets of) natural properties. This means that no moral properties could exist without natural properties. Moral properties (e.g., wrongness) require (or supervene upon) natural properties (e.g., physical injury) in that it is the existence of some natural properties that necessitates the existence of some moral properties. Yet, there can be no identification of moral properties with natural properties since they are not the same thing. Consider, for instance, an act of killing in self-defense and an act of indiscriminate killing. Certainly, we cannot come to a proper moral judgment about either act if there exist no natural facts about the acts. In addition, even if both acts involve the same physical injury to a person, they are morally different in nature – no identification of moral properties with natural properties.
In addition, moral properties are epistemically dependent upon natural properties in that “our knowledge and justification of moral properties regarding the application of moral properties depends on our knowledge and justification concerning their natural base properties.”Footnote 75 Just as a good judge would consider all relevant evidence concerning a legal case to render a proper judgment, moral judgments require knowledge of relevant natural facts. It is, however, extremely important to note that, for the intuitionist kind of moral realism that I defend, we do not obtain moral knowledge in the same way we obtain empirical knowledge. Whereas much of empirical knowledge is possible through scientific explanations (inferences from observational data), moral knowledge is acquired in a different way. For example, the judgment that racism is wrong is not an inference from some verifiable observation – the case of synthetic reduction—but a belief known to be true a priori through a due rational reflection on natural facts—the case of synthetic a priori knowledge. It bears mentioning that nonreductive ethical naturalism is only nonreductive about analytic reduction; it still accepts synthetic reduction.Footnote 76
This is a crucial point of difference that distinguishes moral realism of nonreductive ethical naturalism from my intuitionist version of moral realism. Though nonreductive ethical naturalism refuses to reduce the moral to the natural, it nevertheless accepts empirical facts as the only basis of moral facts. On this view, moral facts play a causal role in the explanation of natural facts.Footnote 77 In contrast, intuitionist moral realism sees moral knowledge to be grounded in natural facts but considers the nature of moral knowledge wholly different from that of empirical knowledge. Here natural facts are taken as necessary information for moral facts, but there is no causal interaction between them.
Now that I have given a brief overview of the intuitionist account of moral realism, let me discuss its significance.
Intuitionist Moral Realism: Why Does It Matter?
One might ask why my intuitionist account of moral realism should matter at all. Again, it is important to remember that the endorsement of this intuitionist account does not entail the wholesale dismissal of other realist accounts. Nevertheless, there seem to be some advantages with the intuitionist account. Let's consider these advantages.
First, if moral realists want to ground moral properties in natural properties without claiming their ontological identicalness and if they do not think that natural sciences are better equipped to answer moral questions than ethics, the intuitionist account can be an attractive choice.
Though nonreductive ethical naturalism has the benefit of accentuating the importance of the natural life for ethics without identifying the moral with the natural, it is still a form of naturalism. That is to say, it seeks only a naturalistic explanation of morality. The main issue is not so much that nonreductive ethical naturalism seeks naturalistic moral explanations but that it equates such explanations with justification, as my earlier example of the ski trainer illustrates. This is not to suggest, of course, that we cannot give a naturalistic explanation of morality. Rather, the point is that a naturalistic explanation does not constitute moral knowledge.
Second, the intuitionist account can render support for the inductive and dialogical paths to moral knowledge without taking the paths to be a foundation of knowledge. Moral realists in general are deeply concerned about universal moral obligations. Yet, if there is anything we have learned in the past century it is that one should not presume to know what these obligations are without first listening to the voice of others. If this is right, moral realists must be attentive to the ethical implications of human experience in its shared and diverse expressions. On this note, Cahill is certainly on to something when she insists that moral reasoning must be inductive and dialogical. We should not form proper moral judgment in the absence of careful moral reflection on morally relevant human experiences. Given the fact that we human beings often suffer from limitations due to our historical, geographical, and ideological locations, there is all the more reason why we need to engage not only in self-critical but also dialogical reflection.
However, the intuitionist account of moral realism would add that we must distinguish the process of moral reasoning from the justification of moral beliefs. The former is an activity, but the latter is a property of epistemic certitude. There is no denying that a good process of moral reasoning can help one to form a true moral belief, but the process itself cannot replace the grounds of true beliefs. Carefully produced coffee beans with the help of a good espresso machine can brew a fine cup of espresso, but we know it is a fine cup of espresso only because our perception tells us so.Footnote 78
The intuitionist account can also support the view that the importance of moral imagination and interpretation should not be underestimated in ethics. As I take it, a central point of hermeneutical realism is that there can be a disclosure of meaning, which is the object of understanding. One can do so by connecting concepts, ideas, and images to one's experience as a biological, social, moral, and religious creature and by testing the moral claims thereof through a critical and continuous work of moral imagination.Footnote 79 For Schweiker, meaning is not reducible to cognitive or empirical “sense” but rather is an “event” that happens as a result of connecting an idea or a concept to an experience.Footnote 80
While I am in general agreement with Schweiker's claim that hermeneutics can give rise to such an event that discloses a new meaning, I argue that perception is more fundamental to the order of knowing. This is because connecting an idea or a concept to a particular experience entails that there is some intellectual cognition of how this experience appears to us. Analogously speaking, one may come to a better understanding of music when one is able to connect various musical concepts (e.g., beat, chords, tonality, and modulation) to one's experience of sound through a work of interpretation and imagination.
In this regard, intuitionists would argue that such a connection is possible only because nonconceptual mental content is possible in one's perceptual experience in the first place. Thus musical concepts like tonality and motive can be intelligible because one can first perceive particular properties in sound. Likewise, I tend to think that moral perception is more basic than moral conception and interpretation in the order of knowing to the extent that it is our basic capacity for moral perception that leads to the possibility of understanding. Thus, if I am correct about this, the intuitionist account of moralism can be made not only compatible with hermeneutical realism, but they can also be complementary to each other.
Conclusion
In this essay, I have tried to bring some conceptual clarity to the meaning and conditions of moral realism, as the term is often used variably in contemporary Christian ethics. In so doing, I have presented an intuitionist version of moral realism. According to this version, we can defend the universality and objectivity of moral truths without being anti-scientific, ahistorical, and anti-religious. I maintain that the Christian moral realist can be fully open to scientific inquiry into conditions of human well-being and flourishing; she can engage in an inductive and dialogical process of moral knowledge; and she can seek to reconstitute her moral identity through the expanded horizon of moral meaning by way of hermeneutical moral inquiry. Finally, the Christian moral realist can insist on the primacy of moral perception as a foundation of moral knowledge, while being open to various ways of refining and enhancing our moral perception.
