Is Morality Even Real? — Philosophy for Us

The question

A few hundred years ago, a woman in my town would have said, with total certainty, that her neighbour had cursed the milk. She'd have meant it the way I mean the earth is round. She'd have staked her life on it — and staked the neighbour's, which is the part that should stop you. She wasn't lying. She wasn't being metaphorical. She looked at the soured milk and the sick child and she saw, plainly, a curse — a real thing, out there, that the neighbour had done. And she was wrong. Not wrong about the milk going off; that happened. Wrong because there is no such thing as a curse. The whole sentence — "she cursed the milk" — doesn't come out false because we measured the curse and it was small. It comes out false because the thing the sentence is about isn't there. There's nothing for the word to point at.

Now. This morning I read about a man who tortured a child, for fun, and filmed it. And everything in me said one word: wrong. Not "I dislike this." Not "my society forbids this." **Wrong** — out there, in the act, a real feature of it, the way the curse was supposed to be a real feature of the milk. I would stake my life on it. I am more sure of it than I am of almost anything.

And then a cold little thought arrived, the kind you can't un-arrive: what makes me so sure I'm not the woman with the milk? She was certain too. She'd have laughed at you for asking. She could point at the soured milk — she had evidence. I point at the act and I see the wrongness sitting right there in it, plain as the curse was plain to her. But where is it? Show me the wrongness. Not the broken body — that's physics, that's just damage, the universe is full of damage and doesn't flinch. Show me the wrong. The extra thing, on top of the facts, that makes it not just horrifying-to-me but **forbidden, full stop.** I cannot find it. I am as certain as I have ever been of anything, and I cannot point at the thing I'm certain about. And I have never, not once, let myself notice that before.

What you practise

You can take any judgement of value — that's wrong, that's beautiful — and say what you are actually claiming. Three answers are live. You may be reporting a fact that holds whatever anyone thinks. You may be saying where you stand, in words shaped like a fact, and still earn the right to call it true. Or you may be reaching for a fact that isn't there. You learn to tell them apart, count what each costs, and stop treating how sure you feel as proof. By the end you can say which one you lean on, and why you shrug when the question is about a song.

The episodes

Each episode builds on the one before, and the finale hands the question back to you sharper, not settled.

01

Show Me the Wrong

You read of a man who tortured a child for fun, and one word arrives with total certainty: wrong. This first episode asks the question almost no one is ever made to answer — where is the wrongness? — and shows that the two easiest replies were ruled out by the listener's own standards.
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02

How Do You Know You're Not the Woman With the Milk?

A few hundred years ago a woman was equally certain her neighbour had cursed the milk — certain enough that her town killed for it, and wrong. This episode tests the felt strength of certainty as evidence and finds it wanting: the woman with the milk had that too. The conviction survives; one way of grounding it does not.
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03

There Really Is a Fact (And Mathematics Stands or Falls With It)

Moral realism at full strength — the naturalist case, associated with Peter Railton, that the wrongness is in the natural facts, and the non-naturalist case of David Enoch and Derek Parfit, that deliberation itself presupposes moral facts and that the "queerness" worry would sink mathematics too. Two versions of yes, each with a cost that is stated plainly.
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04

Everything the Realist Wanted, Minus the Spooky Facts

Simon Blackburn's quasi-realism: moral claims voice attitudes rather than report facts — and yet the right to call them true, mistaken, and binding regardless of upbringing can be earned back. Nearly everything the realist wanted, without the facts; the episode ends by asking what remains to tell the two positions apart.
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05

All of it is false

J. L. Mackie's error theory, from Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong — every moral claim is false, in just the way the curse-claim was, argued from the queerness of moral facts and the diversity of moral belief. The episode makes the view impossible to dismiss without becoming the woman with the milk.
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06

Burn It or Keep It as a Story? (And Where 'Moral Fact' Came From)

If Mackie is right, does one stop speaking morally, or keep it as a useful fiction? And where did "wrong, full stop" come from? Elizabeth Anscombe's answer — a law that outlived its lawgiver — gives the idea of a moral fact a history, with the standing caution that a history is not a refutation.
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07

You've run this test before — on beauty

The same three positions arise for beauty — and there, most of us shrug and call it taste. This episode sets the aesthetic case beside the moral one and asks the question the series has been building to: what entitles morality to be the special case?
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08

Would You Stop?

The final episode declines to pick among realism, expressivism and error theory, and explains why each way out fails. The question handed back: if it were shown tomorrow that there is no fact beneath the certainty, would you stop? You would not — so what work was the fact ever doing? No verdict is offered.
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Thinkers

The thinkers and traditions this series draws on:

Richard BoydDavid EnochDerek ParfitSimon BlackburnAllan GibbardJohn MackieRichard JoyceElizabeth Anscombe

Related series

Your turn

In 1955 a magistrate in your town sent a man to prison for six months for sleeping with another man. His notes survive. He was no brute. He was careful, fair by the standards of the day, and as sure as you are of anything that the man had done wrong. Decades later the government pardoned everyone convicted under that law. You think the pardon was right. You don't think the magistrate was right for his time. You think he was wrong.

He was as sure as you are. Leave aside how sure you feel: what tells you that you are not him?
Say there is a moral fact here. What did he fail to see, and where was it? Is the wrong just the harm, the prison and the ruined life, or something on top of it?
Say instead that "wrong" says where you stand. Can you still call him mistaken, and not just say you disagree? And if every "wrong" reaches for a fact that isn't there, his verdict and yours are both false. What is left of the pardon?

A good answer names which of the three accounts you are standing on, pays what that account costs, and says what tells you apart from the magistrate — without leaning anywhere on how sure you feel, and without parking him in his own century.

Sources

Written by AI under human direction. This is the reading the series was built from. checked against source means the passage was found in the cited work and a second, independent model checked the episode's use of it; supports in part means that check judged the use a little stronger than the passage alone establishes; passage located means a reader found the passage but it has not had the second check. Unmarked entries are background reading.

J. L. Mackie — Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977) The book that argues every moral claim is, strictly, false, because it reports a kind of fact that does not exist. The link is a free borrowable copy in the Internet Archive's lending library (a free account is needed). supports in part
Richard Boyd — How to Be a Moral Realist (1988) The essay that models moral facts on scientific ones: wrongness is a natural fact, found out the slow way, through evidence. The link is a catalogue record, not the essay. supports in part
Peter Railton — Moral Realism (1986) Railton's paper gives a naturalist account in which moral facts are facts about what is good for people, open to ordinary inquiry. The link is the journal's catalogue page; reading it may need library access. checked against source
David Owen Brink — Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (1989) The fullest book-length case that moral facts are natural facts we can come to know like any others. The link is the publisher's page. supports in part
Matthew Lutz — Moral Naturalism (2024) An encyclopedia overview of the view that moral facts are ordinary natural facts, and the main objections to it. A summary, not a primary text.
G. E. Moore — Principia Ethica (1903) Moore's book argues that whatever natural property you name, it stays a real question whether that property is good. The episode uses this as the main objection to the naturalist. The link is the full free text. supports in part
Terence Horgan and Mark Timmons — Troubles for New Wave Moral Semantics: The 'Open Question Argument' Revived (1992) The paper that imagines a twin Earth whose moral words pick out slightly different natural properties, to show that naturalism makes real moral disagreement disappear. The link is the journal record.
David Enoch — Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (2011) Enoch argues that real deliberation — asking yourself what you should do — assumes there's a right answer to find, not invent. That's why he thinks moral facts are real. This links to the publisher's record; a review gives a plainer summary. checked against source
Enoch's Defense of Robust Meta-Ethical Realism A readable paper setting out Enoch's argument that deliberating commits you to real facts about what you ought to do. It is a commentary on Enoch, not his book.
Derek Parfit — On What Matters, Volumes One and Two (2011) Parfit argues that moral truths, like mathematical ones, can be true without being things in the physical world, so the charge that they are too strange would condemn arithmetic as well. The link is the publisher's record for the first volume. supports in part
Geoff Sayre-McCord — Moral Realism (2026) An encyclopedia overview of the view that there are moral facts, covering both its natural-fact and its non-natural-fact versions. A summary, not a primary text.
David Bourget and David J. Chalmers — Philosophers on Philosophy: The 2020 PhilPapers Survey (2023) The largest survey of what working philosophers believe, including whether moral facts exist. The series draws on it twice: correctly, for how realists split; and, in one place, to claim the three main views are held equally — a reading the survey's own numbers don't support. supports in part
Richard Joyce — Moral Anti-Realism (2026) An encyclopedia overview that sorts the views denying moral facts into their main families, including the split between those who keep moral truth and those who say moral claims are false. A summary, not a primary text.
Richard Joyce — Moral Anti-Realism, supplement: Projectivism and Quasi-realism (2026) An encyclopedia section on the view that moral talk voices attitudes projected onto the world, and on how its defenders try to win back moral truth. A summary, not Blackburn's own writing.
Simon Blackburn — Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language (1984) The book where Blackburn sets out projection — the idea that we spread our attitudes onto the world, then speak as if we'd found them there. This link is a free copy to borrow from the Internet Archive.
Simon Blackburn — Essays in Quasi-Realism (1993) Blackburn's collected case that you can deny moral facts and still say, and mean, that a moral claim is true or mistaken. The link is the publisher's record. checked against source
Simon Blackburn — Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (1998) Blackburn's full case that feelings alone can do everything morality needs — truth, mistakes, right and wrong — without any moral fact behind them. The link is the publisher's record, not a summary of the book.
Allan Gibbard — Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment (1990) Gibbard's account of moral judgment as accepting norms for how to act and what to feel. The link is the publisher's record.
Allan Gibbard — Thinking How to Live (2003) Gibbard's later book treating moral judgments as plans for living, and his main attempt to show how such judgments can still work inside ordinary logical reasoning. The link is the publisher's page. checked against source
P. T. Geach — Assertion (1965) Geach's paper makes the point that a word must mean the same inside an "if" as when said outright, which is the main objection to the view that moral words only voice attitudes. The link is the journal's catalogue page. checked against source
Moral Error Theory (2025) A short, plain introduction to the view that all moral claims are false and to the two halves of the strangeness argument. It is a summary, not Mackie's book.
Fuszard — Error Theory After J. L. Mackie: Contemporary Error Theorists' Arguments (2022) A master's thesis surveying the error theorists who came after Mackie and how they defend the view against the charge that it would also sink mathematics. Useful as a map of the later debate; it is student work, not a published book.
Richard Joyce — The Myth of Morality (2001) Joyce argues that moral claims are false but that we may be wise to keep making them, knowingly, as a fiction that helps us live together. The link is the publisher's record.
Richard Joyce — Moral Fictionalism (2005) A shorter statement of Joyce's case for keeping moral talk as a fiction we see through but still use. The link is a catalogue record.
G. E. M. Anscombe — Modern Moral Philosophy (1958) Anscombe's essay argues that our strongest moral words, like "ought" and "obligation," are leftovers from a time when ethics was understood as God's law, kept after the lawgiver was dropped. The link is a readable copy of the essay. supports in part
Daniel Weltman — G. E. M. Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (2022) A short, plain summary of Anscombe's essay and its claim that modern moral words are leftovers of a law with no lawgiver. A summary, not the essay.
Elizabeth Anscombe: Morality Is a Useless Concept — We Have Better Terms to Guide Us A popular article explaining Anscombe's case that the modern moral "ought" is a leftover, and what she thought should replace it. A summary, not the essay.

Where to start

J. L. Mackie — Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977) The series' case that 'wrong' reaches for a fact that isn't there comes from this book, and its first chapter, 'The Subjectivity of Values', makes that case in about thirty plain pages. Read the argument from queerness and see whether you can answer it better than you could before episode one.
Russ Shafer-Landau — Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? (2004) A short book of short chapters, written for readers with no background, on the series' exact question: are there moral facts, and if so how could we know them? Shafer-Landau argues that there are, so read it alongside Mackie and judge which of them answers your certainty better.
Simon Blackburn — Being Good: An Introduction to Ethics (2001) Blackburn gives the series' third answer: 'wrong' voices an attitude that can still earn the right to be called true. Here he puts it in the plainest English of anyone in the debate. Start with the chapter on relativism and the book's closing chapters, which ask how we can stay confident in our values with no fact beneath them.