Objectivism, Relativism, and Squatter's Rights in Metaethics (by Guest Blogger Hagop Sarkissian)
Moral objectivism is the view that moral truth (or justification) is independent of tradition, custom, or social acceptance. Put another way, it's the view that there is an objective fact of the matter whether any given action is morally right or wrong, permissible or impermissible. Moral objectivism is often contrasted with moral relativism, the view that moral truths (or justification) is relative to cultures or other such groups.
To me, moral relativism is just obviously true (as I have argued previously in comments on this blog). But many philosophers have argued that moral relativism does not jibe with ordinary moral discourse. Ordinary moral discourse, they claim, assumes moral objectivism. Philospohers making this claim range from moral realists on the one hand, to moral fictionalists (or 'error theorists') on the other.
Consider J.L. Mackie, who argued that ordinary moral claims purport to describe facts about mind-independent, objective moral values. Mackie denies that such values exist. "Although most people in making moral judgments implicitly claim, among other things, to be pointing to something objectively prescriptive, these claims are all false". Mackie thinks this 'error theory' "goes against assumptions ingrained in our thought and built into some of the ways in which language is used"; and "since it conflicts with what is sometimes called common sense, it needs very solid support. It is not something we can accept lightly or casually and then lightly pass on" (35).
Does common sense morality assume objectivity? According to a recent study by Goodwin and Darley, most folk actually don't believe that their moral judgments are objectively true, except for cases involving stock examples such as gunfire, robbery, and cheating. On many other moral issues, most believe their judgments to be opinion and not fact. Goodwin and Darley sum up one of their experiments as follows:
"Participants generally agreed (on a six-point scale) with the goodness of anonymous donations (5.42), the badness of opening gunfire on a crowd (5.79), or of robbing a bank (5.77), and the wrongness of conscious racial discrimination (5.86) or of cheating on a lifeguard exam (5.72). But they varied considerably in how likely they were to regard these statements as true: 36%, 68%, 61%, 54%, and 58%, respectively. Perhaps more strikingly, although participants generally agreed (albeit not as strongly) with the permissibility of abortion (4.12), assisted death (4.36), and stem cell research (4.58) in the way we described them, they were highly reluctant to assign truth to statements expressing this agreement: 2%, 8%, and 2%, respectively."
If these findings are replicated, they suggest that, contrary to what many moral realists and fictionalists claim, people believe that their moral claims are objectively true only in a narrow range of cases that enjoy widespread agreement, the rest of them being no more 'objectively true' than matters such as one's taste in music (4%), film (9%) or art (4%).
This brings me to "squatter's rights". In a recent paper, Eddy Nahmias and colleagues argue that a philosophical theory x has 'squatter's rights' compared to a competing theory y if, all else being equal, theory x accords with our common sense intuitions while theory y doesn't. If objectivism does not turn out to be the common sense view, I find it hard to see how relativism doesn't have squatter's rights in metaethics. It's consistent with common sense morality, does as good a job as any other theory in explaining moral agreement and disagreement, and seems best able to account for the variety of moral traditions existing in the world.