Knowing Right and Wrong
Is morality a natural phenomenon?

Alex Byrne

8 “Two things,” Immanuel Kant wrote in the late 18th century, “fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we meditate upon them: the starry firmament above and the moral law within.”

The awesome starry firmament inspires plenty of controversy—about the composition of dark matter, for example. But a lot is known: the sun is composed of hydrogen and helium, the Horsehead Nebula is 1,500 light years distant, and so on.

There’s also plenty of controversy about moral law. Should we give much more to charity than we actually do? Is torture permissible under extreme circumstances? Is eating meat wrong? Could it ever be permissible to kill one innocent person in order to save five? But, again we know a lot. Throwing good taste out with the bathwater for the sake of a clear example, everyone knows that boiling babies for fun is wrong. Boiling lobsters is a matter that reasonable people may disagree about, but as far as boiling babies goes, agreement is pretty much universal. Babies suffer when boiled—they are not like the worms that live near undersea vents, who are partial to scalding water. If something goes without saying, it’s this: one ought not to boil babies for fun.

Apart from filling the mind with admiration and awe, the starry firmament and the moral law together fill the mind with a problem, which Kant’s remark obscures. The quotation suggests, misleadingly, that the astronomical and moral realms are wholly separate—the former is “above” and the latter is “within.” But they aren’t: as Moby correctly sings, “We are all made of stars.” The heavens and human beings are composed from the same physical stuff, and are governed by same physical principles. The starry firmament isn’t really “above”—it’s everywhere. We, along with lobsters and the rest, are part of it.

Everything, in short, is a natural phenomenon, an aspect of the universe as revealed by the natural sciences. In particular, morality is a natural phenomenon. Moral facts or truths—that boiling babies is wrong, say—are not additions to the natural world, they are already there in the natural world, even if they are not explicitly mentioned in scientific theories. Fundamental sciences such as particle physics and molecular biology do not speak explicitly speak of sand dunes, or boiling water, or lobsters, but facts about sand dunes and the like are implicitly settled by more fundamental facts: arrange bits of matter a certain way and you have an eroding sand dune, or boiling water, or (here the arrangement needs to be very complicated indeed) a lively lobster. And, presumably, the same goes for the moral facts.

But how can morality be a natural phenomenon? We ought not to boil babies, but the natural world seems not to contain any trace of an “ought,” or an “ought not.” A dropped stone is under no obligation to fall, it just does. Admittedly, I might say, before dropping a stone out of the window, “This stone ought to hit the ground in three seconds,” but here I just mean something like “It is likely that the stone will hit the ground in three seconds.” If the stone doesn’t do that, it has done nothing wrong, and is not to be blamed for anything. In the natural world, nothing ought to happen, or ought not to happen, in the relevant sense of “ought.” Keeping within the confines of nature, there is no space for the fact that we ought not to boil babies. Yet since nature is all there is, there is no place left to go.

This problem is sometimes traced to David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, in which Hume, writing half a century before Kant, complained of an “imperceptible change” from “the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not” to propositions “connected with an ought, or an ought not.” “This change,” Hume said, is “of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.”

The natural world contains plenty of facts concerning what is (or is not) the case: babies suffer in hot water, boiling water is hot, Virginia will drown if no one pulls her from the River Ouse, and the like. But how do we get from these facts to what ought (or ought not) to be the case—facts that are “entirely different”? As the philosopher Simon Blackburn puts it in his Ruling Passions, “the problem is one of finding room for ethics, or of placing ethics within the disenchanted, non-ethical order which we inhabit, and of which we are a part.”

Responding to this problem, Judith Jarvis Thomson observes in Goodness and Advice, “became the central task of Anglo-American moral philosophy in the century just past.” The problem is not one in ethics, like the issue of whether we should give more to charity than we actually do, but rather is about ethics or morality. It accordingly belongs to that branch of philosophy called “meta-ethics,” which started in earnest when G.E. Moore published Principia Ethica in 1903, and which has been flourishing ever since.

Before touching on some of the high notes, as well as looking down a few blind alleys, what about Kant? He did, after all, write numerous very long sentences on both the starry firmament and the moral law. But it is no easy matter to bring Kant’s views to bear on the problem as we have stated it, and in the juggernaut of contemporary meta-ethics he has not been in the driver’s seat.
The task before us is to try to squeeze morality into the “disenchanted” natural world; as Blackburn says, this “is above all to refuse appeal to a supernatural order.” One might object that this is to stack the deck: these ground rules exclude the obvious source of morality, namely God. Although Kant himself did not hold that morality is of divine origin, the view is suggested by his phrase “the moral law.” Human laws (“Thou shalt not smoke in bars”) are made by humans; who else could have made moral laws (“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s ox, nor his ass”) but the Supreme Lawgiver himself?

This “divine command” theory of morality has the rather alarming consequence that—to borrow an aphorism Sartre attributed to Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov—if God is dead, everything is permitted. The more fundamental difficulty, however, was pointed out by Socrates in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro. Do the gods love good things because they are good, or are good things good because the gods love them? Surely the former—if Zeus, Uranus, and the rest started loving pointless suffering that would not make pointless suffering good. No doubt God, if there is one, enjoins us to avoid pointless suffering, but that is not why pointless suffering is bad. It is bad anyway—that is precisely why God enjoins us to avoid it.

Divine-command theory can be watered down in various ways and in recent years has experienced a minor revival; even diluted, it remains a fringe position. A considerably more popular suggestion is that moral facts can be squeezed into the natural world with no effort at all, because moral facts are actually natural facts in disguise. And if this is right, Hume was completely wrong. “Ought” does not express “a new relation or affirmation”: an “ought” turns out to be a kind of “is.”

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