Moral Truths Seem To Be More Primary Than Physical Truths

 

Not everyone realises this, but most ethical debates are debates about facts and knowledge. When you listen to people having ethical debates, if you pay close attention, you’ll notice that they are mostly arguing about propositions related to facts (when a foetus becomes a human, whether homosexual inclination is genetically driven, the impact of drugs on society, that sort of thing). Emotions and feelings dominate our ethical propositions. When you say “x is immoral”, you are expressing a feeling or emotion based on an interpretation of facts. But here’s where things take a strange turn.

In a previous essay, and also in my book on morality, I talked about the level of confidence we have in certain beliefs, and how, when it comes to propositions about good and evil, we seem more certain of those than we do physical facts (even comprehensive ones) about reality. Any scientific statement regarding "Physical property x is governed by physical rule y" that turned out to be wrong, or even a little misjudged with the arrival of new evidence, wouldn't confound us as much as the proposition that we were wrong about some kind of consensually agreed moral proposition like "It is wrong to torture a pensioner as an act of indulgent sadism".

This is one of the profound things about our moral intuition; we develop moral theories similarly to how we develop theories of physical reality, but our intuition about morality, based on our evolved conscience, is so much stronger and more certain than anything we distil from our discoveries of the physical world.

Moral facts and physical facts both come from our knowledge acquired by observing reality through our sense data. Our five physical senses (five for simplicity) enable us to formulate propositions about the physical world, and our moral sense (a bit like a sixth sense) enables us to formulate a sense of right and wrong under various conditions. We develop scientific theories (x reacts to y on the basis of z) based on what our sense data tells us, and we develop moral theories (It is wrong to do x to y) based on what our sixth sense tells us.

But we don't merely derive a list of normative propositions (that which we ought to do) from our list of positive propositions (that which we know about the physical world) - they seem to belong in different categories of intuition. We seem to have a much stronger sense of our moral convictions than we do our physical convictions - not least because:

1) We are more likely to be shown to be wrong about our physical convictions than we are our moral convictions (as per the above examples)

2) We feel ultimately surer about or moral convictions than our physical convictions.

3) We depend on our sense of value to formulate any observations about physical reality.

We trust the five senses because of consistency of experience over a long percentage game. My sight tells me I have a cup of tea on my desk; my touch tells me it is hot and wet; and my nose tells me what it smells like. If I drink it, I'll sense what it tastes like, and if I drop the cup, I'll hear what hear what it sounds like as it hits the floor. Sometimes our senses deceive us, yet we can come to learn why that has happened.

We trust our sixth sense of moral intuition because of a similar consistency with other sense data, but at the fundamental level it never ultimately deceives us (in terms of truth propositions, I mean, not temporary misjudgements), and it has a stronger fundamental bootstrapping than anything to do with our other five senses. We may have committed an evil when we should have committed an act of good, and maybe we should have developed our thinking on moral propositions - but we've never changed or been caused to question the fundamental value structure that tells us good is superior and preferable to evil. We intuit it with such an overarching conviction that it seems to operate on a level above our other experiential interactions.

My overall conclusion on this is that moral truths exist in a more primary way to how physical reality exists, which means that those who believe we simply acquired our morality from adapted physical experiential legacies are making a similar mistake to those who claim that we acquired mathematics purely from our observations about physical reality. Just as mathematics has an ontology over and above physical reality, so too, I think, does morality. It is too axiomatic and too fundamentally inhered in cognition to have been a just by-product of physical evolution - although it is that too, of course, as is mathematical symbolism. 

The best explanation, I think, for the explanatory and conceptual power of both mathematics and morality is that both exist because they have their provenance in the mind of God. The best reason I have for believing this is that both mathematics and morality have such fixed fundamental truths (the laws of numbers and the laws of good and evil) that we do not know of any way that they could be believed differently, and our minds have no capacity to undermine that fixity with a superior level of cogency or rationality.