Part Three · Series 38

Is Morality Even Real?

I know some things are just wrong — but where is the wrongness?

Forthcoming EthicsMetaphilosophy

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.

The episodes

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

8 of 8 transcripts are readable now — audio is coming.

1

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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2

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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3

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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4

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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5

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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6

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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7

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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8

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:

J. L. MackieG. E. M. Anscombe

The question

The episodes

Thinkers

Where it connects