 Believe it or not, my hair actually used to be bigger when I was a kid. Deciding when I was too old and needed to cut it was kind of a youth-frode dilemma. First, a quick disclaimer. This has been a favorite topic of philosophers since the beginning of written philosophy. I'm going to be focusing on a very small slice of a very big and complicated picture. I'm making literal volumes of stuff for time, so please, if you have any interest in any of the subject material, check the description for links. A few weeks ago, there was some controversy surrounding Phil Robertson, who's apparently famous, or maybe his beard is. I don't watch a lot of TV. Robertson hypothesized a scenario where an atheist family is tortured and killed while lamenting that there's no moral code by which they could describe their assailants as being wrong. Although his graphically violent descriptions were disturbing on many levels, Robertson's basic idea about the nature of morality and how it relates to religion is actually fairly common. Many religious people believe that morality can only be justified by some sort of supernatural authority like a deity, and therefore anyone who doesn't believe in such a deity must not believe in right and wrong. The thing is, there's a really complicated network of possible beliefs about what morals are, where they come from, whether or not they actually mean or express anything, just a nightmarishly complex punnett square of possibilities for how the concepts of right and wrong actually work. And these are just general categories for potentially very nuanced ideas about the nature of morality or metaethics. What sort of actions are actually right or wrong is several thousand more cans of worms. However, there is a tentative line that we can carefully draw through this mess between two general positions, moral realism and moral anti-realism. Moral realists believe in moral facts, principles about morality like stealing is bad or charity is good that can be true or false. Moral realists also generally believe that moral facts are both objective and universal, that is they apply to everybody equally and their truth doesn't depend on who's thinking about them, the way that favoritized cream flavor or musical tastes do. Many theistic people are moral realists as they believe that some deity dictates a particular sort of human behavior and that objective moral facts can be known from those dictates. Like the god Ahura Mazda tells Zoroaster that cows are sacred, so protecting cows is a good behavior for everyone everywhere and hurting cows is evil. There's still a question of whether it's good just because Ahura Mazda says it's good or if it's good according to some set of rules which only Ahura Mazda can know, but either way there's this idea that morality is derived from what gods tell you to do. However, believing in a god isn't a necessary prerequisite for moral realism. Someone can believe in objective universal moral truths without necessarily needing them to be granted authority or translated by some sort of deity, transcendent moral principles, transcendent beings, you can believe in either one without the other. In that sense, Robertson's totally wrong. There's no reason an atheist can't be a moral realist and many of them are. Some atheists believe that moral principles are granted the weight of authority by being evolutionarily advantageous or by being logically self-consistent or any number of other things. On the other side of this divide are moral anti-realists who see some sort of problem with the moral realist position. Maybe moral facts don't exist or maybe they're not objective or maybe when people express moral principles they're just saying how they feel. Given the way that most people think and talk about morality, Robertson's bloody criticism of moral anti-realism might seem kind of justified at first. If someone didn't believe in certain facts about good or evil which could be applied to all people everywhere, it might seem like the only other option would be anything goes. But we don't get licensed to dismiss a possibility just because we don't like what it might mean if it were true, like global warming can't exist because I'd have to sell my big truck. So let's look at some arguments supporting the idea that maybe the way that people think and talk about morality is wrong, also known as moral error theory. First, if moral facts do exist, they don't seem to exist in the same way that facts about chairs or geese exist. For one thing, even if moral principles are universal, they don't seem to have any measurable effect on anything besides human feelings and behavior. Like, statistically, natural disasters don't tend to spare innocent people or target evil ones, even though most would agree that they ought to. If moral properties do exist, they exist in some sort of weird way that they're invisible to everything except a supposed moral intuition that only people have, a sort of instinct or ESP about what's right or wrong. There's also a huge problem of inconsistency in which moral principles people think are supposedly universal and which ones are just quite idiosyncrasies of culture. Like, people from different cultures or different time periods frequently disagree vigorously about supposedly indisputable moral facts from polygamy to infanticide. If moral principles were universal and accessible by everyone, you'd expect a general consensus about what's right, what's wrong, and how much, especially on the big stuff. Yes, there are similarities in morality across various cultures, but there's also a whole lot of stuff like slavery, which has enjoyed immense popularity among many civilizations, although we kind of tend to think that it's not cool nowadays. If moral facts are objective, that implies that there's a whole lot of people who aren't in touch with them, or are assigning their personal preferences the title of moral facts to lend them an air of universality. After all, it sounds better to say that thing is universally wrong than, hey, I think that that's wrong. It might be possible that all supposed moral facts are invented that way, that they're simply strong preferences shaped by culture which people decide everyone everywhere ought to obey. Like, maybe murder is wrong in more or less the same way that showing your ankles used to be wrong or wearing socks with sandals is wrong. That might be terrifying for people used to thinking about moral principles as carrying the weight of universal truth, but even if they're not facts of the universe, that doesn't mean that they aren't important, and it doesn't mean that we can't or shouldn't enforce them. We've covered the distinction between universality and importance before. Even if morals aren't universal, that doesn't mean that the only other option is, no raping, that's just like your opinion, man. I value kindness, honesty, all sorts of things. Just because I can't demand that other people value those things in exactly the same way, doesn't make them any less meaningful for me. And if enough people value the same things, like safety or equality, they might come together and use their collective power to enforce those values on others. Creating laws, hiring policemen, punishing criminals, all these actions still make sense even if morality is all in people's heads. Honestly, to me, that kind of seems how the world historically works. A bunch of people have different ideas about right or wrong, which are mostly governed by their culture and upbringing, and if enough of them agree, then they compel others to obey those morals. Most of the discussion about morality makes it sound as though it's woven into the fabric of the universe, but it wouldn't really be the end of the world if it wasn't. Anyways, there are fantastic arguments for both moral realism and moral anti-realism. They're both tenable philosophical positions, and nobody's an idiot for believing in either. But it's clear that Robertson's pretty ignorant about metaethics, even with that beard. Do you think that moral statements express universal facts? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. 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