Last time we ended on a question, and I promised you where the answer would start. The question was the honest one, the one left standing exactly where your certainty used to stand: is the wrongness actually there, out in the act itself, the way the souring was really in the milk? And if it is, how would we ever tell? I said the first answer would be the one you would be most relieved to hear. So here it is, with no delay. There are serious philosophers — people who have spent careers on this — who say plainly: yes. You were not imagining it. There is a fact there. The wrongness is real, it is out in the world, and you were right to be sure of it. That is the claim. Tonight we examine it.
You have earned the relief, so take it. But two things before you rely on it. The first: this answer comes at a cost, and the cost is higher than you would expect. The second, and this is the part few people mention — when you look closely at the answer that says yes, there is a real fact, it turns out to be two answers, not one. Two different philosophers stand behind that yes, and they mean quite different things by it. They disagree with each other sharply. And most of us have held one of their views all our lives without knowing the other existed.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required. This is the third of eight episodes. Last time we set your certainty beside the woman convinced her neighbour's curse had soured her milk, and checked it point by point — the strength of the conviction, the evidence to hand, a lifetime of the feeling proving reliable — and on every point the two matched. Which meant the one argument you had kept in reserve, I could not be this sure if it were not real, was hers too, and it pointed at nothing. So one way of settling the question failed: we cannot decide whether a wrong is real by pointing at how sure we feel. The conviction itself came through intact. Tonight we go looking for what the wrong is a wrong about — and we open the first of three serious answers, the one that says yes, there's a fact, and we find out, in two different voices, what it costs to hold it.
One thing to keep hold of throughout, because it is easy to lose. This is the first answer of three. By the end of the hour you will have a full, worked-out position that says the wrongness is real and out in the world — and you will have its cost — and you will not yet have heard the other two answers, which come next week and the week after, and which both regard this one as mistaken. So do not let tonight's relief harden into it's settled, it's real, we're done. It is not done. It is one answer, examined and made to pay its way. Keep the relief. Just do not treat it as the last word.
Go back to the question from the first hour, the one that set all this going. Show me the wrong. Not the harm — the harm is easy to find: the broken body, the fear, the damage. The wrong. The extra thing, on top of the plain facts, that makes the act not merely horrifying but forbidden. We went looking for it, confident, because surely it is obvious — and found nothing we could point to. That gap is what this whole series is about.
Now consider the first philosopher who answers. The first thing they do is reject the question as put. You asked to be shown the wrong, the extra thing on top of the facts. They reply: there is no extra thing on top of the facts. There was never going to be. You have been looking for a second item — the harm, and then the wrongness, standing beside it like a label attached to it — and there is no second item, and none is needed. The wrongness is not laid over the suffering. The wrongness is the suffering. The agony, the terror, the deliberate destruction of a child, the ruin of everything a human life needs to go well — that is not the evidence for the wrong, with the real wrong located somewhere else. That is the wrong. You asked to have it shown to you. It has just been shown. You were looking past it, because you had decided in advance it must be something else, something extra, something hidden.
This is the moral realist in a form most people have never met: the naturalist. The argument has a clean shape, so let me set it out plainly. Take water. There is water in the glass, and there is H-2-O in the glass, and these are not two things — a wetness, and beneath it a separate hidden chemistry. There is one thing, and water and H-2-O are two names for it. The chemistry is not the evidence for the water; it is what the water turns out to be. Wrongness, the naturalist says, is like that. Wrong and the destruction of a person are not two items, one of them strange and hard to locate. They are one thing, named twice. And we find out what wrongness is by the same patient, fallible route that told us what water is — not through a special sense, not by looking into some separate moral realm, but by studying the world, getting it wrong, correcting, looking again. A posteriori, philosophers call it, which only means: the long way round, through evidence, like everything else worth knowing.
The relief in this is real, and it is aimed exactly at the fear you came in with. Recall what was disturbing about the woman and the milk. Her curse was supposed to be an extra thing — a property laid over the soured milk, real, out in the world, and yet nowhere anyone could point. That is what made her certainty hollow: the thing she was sure of was the kind of thing that could not be located anywhere. And it prompted the cold thought — what if my "wrong" is like that? An extra property I see resting in the act, that physics has no place for, that is nowhere? The naturalist dissolves the fear. Your wrong is not like her curse, they say, and here is why: the curse was supposed to be an extra thing beyond the natural facts, and there was no such thing — but your wrong does not need to lie beyond the natural facts, because it is one of them. The suffering is as real and as locatable as the soured milk. You wanted something out in the world, solid, public, not merely your feeling. The suffering is out in the world, solid, public, not merely your feeling. You had it all along.
Notice what this does to the heaviest charge against moral facts — the one that has hung over the series since the first night: the worry that a wrong would be something strange, unlike anything else in the universe, needing a special sense to detect. That charge has an author, and we will meet him in full later in the series; for now just hold its shape: the objection says moral facts would have to be peculiar, unlike any other fact, and so probably are not there at all. The naturalist's answer is the flattest, most deflating one available. They say: what strange extra thing? I never proposed one. Wrongness is exactly like other things in the universe — suffering, ruin, the wreck of a life — because it is those things. There is no peculiar entity to detect, because there is no extra entity at all; and no special sense is needed, because you detect it the way you detect any wreckage: you look. The whole demand — that you explain how you sense a strange, immaterial moral property — the naturalist simply refuses, and says: I never claimed there was such a property. That demand is for someone else.
So this is the realist who tells you to stop searching. The extra thing you went looking for in the first hour, the thing you could not find and it unsettled you — they say the reason you could not find it is that it was never there, and you never needed it. Point at the suffering. That is the wrong. You had what you were looking for the whole time; you kept searching past it for something more.
This is a serious position, defended by serious people: Richard Boyd, who built moral realism on the model of science itself, in his 1988 essay "How to Be a Moral Realist"; Peter Railton; David Brink, who gave it its fullest systematic statement in 1989. These are not people merely insisting. They are not saying of course it's real, only a monster asks. They looked at the cold thought that frightened you and said: you frightened yourself with a picture you did not have to hold. So take the position; it is yours. Then I have to tell you something about it that spoils the relief a little, and it is not even the cost yet. It is this: the position they have just handed you is not the one you came in holding. The view this realist defends is not the view you had. You said yes, exactly, it's a real fact — and you were agreeing to something you do not actually believe.
Now look again at the relief just handed to you. You took it. You said yes, exactly, the wrongness is real, it's out there. But listen again to what the naturalist actually said, because you agreed to something you do not believe. They said the wrongness is the suffering — one thing, named twice, no extra item. And that is not what you think. You never thought the wrongness was the agony. You thought the agony was wrong — that there was the suffering, and then, true of it, over and above it, the further fact that it ought not to be. The ought resting on the is. When you went looking in the first hour for the extra thing on top of the facts, you were not confused. You were looking for the thing you really believe in. The naturalist's relief is real, but it was bought by quietly discarding the very item you came in to defend.
So let me give you the other realist, the one whose view is your view, made rigorous. This is the non-naturalist, and they do not flinch from the thing the naturalist dissolved. They say: you are right. The wrongness is not simply the suffering. It is a further fact — that the suffering ought not to be, that it is forbidden — and that fact is real, and mind-independent, and it is not a natural fact, not the kind of thing physics or biology studies. It is exactly the extra thing you were hunting for, and they intend to keep it. And now you will think: but that is the strange one. That is the one with the detection problem, the property that is nowhere to be found. Yes. It is. And these are not fools; they know precisely what they have picked up. So watch how they carry it. They have two arguments, and both are better than anything you had.
The first is David Enoch's, in his 2011 book Taking Morality Seriously, and it works by reversing the charge. You suppose that the person who believes in non-natural moral facts is the one with the awkward, hard-to-defend commitment. Enoch says: no, you already have that commitment, every time you deliberate, and you cannot shed it. Genuinely ask yourself what should I do here — really ask it, about something that matters — and notice what you assume merely by asking. You assume there is an answer. Not an answer you would find comfortable, not an answer your culture would applaud, but a right answer, one you could get wrong, one that is there to be tracked. The moment you take your own deliberation seriously, you have already committed yourself to there being facts about what you ought to do. You cannot even try to reason about how to act while sincerely believing there is nothing there to be right about; the trying assumes the target. So the non-naturalist's facts are not an odd extra you could remove with a good argument. They are what your own practical life has been resting on all along. And Enoch's challenge to the sceptic is sharp: you explain to me how deliberation makes sense, how taking your reasons seriously makes sense, without them. The burden of explanation, he says, is yours, not his.
The second argument is Derek Parfit's, in his 2011 work On What Matters, and it goes at the word strange directly. The worry was that a moral fact would be peculiar — a thing not made of matter, nowhere in space, detected by no instrument. Parfit says: of course it is not made of matter. It never was going to be. But look at what else you already believe that is not made of matter, and notice that none of it alarms you. It is true that there are prime numbers larger than a million. True, plainly, mind-independently — true before anyone counted, true if everyone forgot. And where is the number? Nowhere. What is it made of? Nothing. What instrument detects it? None; you do not run into the number seven. You believe in mathematical truths that are real, mind-independent, and — Parfit's own phrase — not part of the furniture of the universe, and you sleep soundly. The same holds for the rules of reasoning: that certain evidence supports a certain conclusion is a fact about what you ought to believe, and it too is no physical object, and you would be lost without it. So here is Parfit's reply, and it has a name — companions in guilt. If your objection to moral facts is they are not physical, so throw them out, then that same objection, if it is any good, throws out mathematics and logic alongside them. They are peculiar in exactly the same way. And you are not going to give up arithmetic to win an argument about morality. So either drop the objection, or follow it where it truly leads — which is a place you refuse to go.
You should see what has just happened, because it is the strangest turn of the hour. You came in thinking your view — the wrongness is a real extra fact I perceive — was the naïve one, the one a clever person would talk you out of. And here are two of the most serious people in the field holding exactly that view, and rather than apologising for it, they hand the embarrassment back to you: you explain deliberation without these facts; you explain why morality is strange but mathematics is not. This is your home position, and it is not naïve. It is formidable. The thing the naturalist quietly dropped to buy you relief, the non-naturalist picks back up and defends to your face.
So now you have your yes — both of them. One realist says the wrongness is the suffering, there is no extra thing, and no account of a strange extra entity is owed. The other says no, the wrongness is the extra thing, it is real, it is not natural, and it keeps good company with the mathematics you would never surrender. Two answers, both saying the fact is out there, meaning opposite things by it. And I promised that each comes at a cost. It does. And the costs are stranger than the answers — because they are not the same cost, and the very thing that makes one answer easy to hold is what makes the other hard.
I said a secure answer comes at a cost. Now I name them — twice, because there are two answers. And here is the part that keeps you honest: the two costs fall on opposite sides. The very thing that costs the naturalist nothing is what puts the non-naturalist in difficulty, and the thing the non-naturalist can supply is the thing the naturalist cannot. Neither answer is free. The two costs are simply of different kinds.
Start with the naturalist, the one who gave the relief — wrongness is the suffering, no extra thing. Here is the cost. Take any natural fact you like about the act in that recording: the nerve signals, the terror, the lasting damage to a person. Lay out every last one, leave nothing off the list. Now ask the question that, on the naturalist's account, ought to be impossible to ask: yes — but is it wrong? On their story that question should be senseless, in the way I grant it's water, but is it H-2-O? is senseless — same thing, named twice, no gap to ask across. But I grant it is all that suffering — but is it wrong, does it forbid me? does not sound senseless. It sounds like a real question. People have asked it. You can hold the whole set of natural facts and the wrong still seems to hang there as a further question, not already settled by them. That is an old objection — G. E. Moore called it the open question, in 1903 — and it is the naturalist's standing difficulty: if wrongness really were just the natural facts, the question but is it wrong? would close the moment they were all named, and it does not.
There is a sharper version, and it is precise. Imagine another community whose use of the word wrong is tied to a slightly different natural property than ours — a moral twin of Earth, near enough to us, different in the smallest degree. On the naturalist's account, wrong just means whatever natural property our usage fixes on. So their wrong and our wrong would be about two different properties; we would simply mean different things, like two people saying bank, one meaning the river, one the money. And when we met them and they praised the very thing we condemn, we would not be disagreeing with them. We would be talking past them. But that is not how it feels. It feels like a real dispute about the same thing, in which one side has it wrong. That feeling — that moral disagreement is genuine disagreement, not two people using a word differently — is the cost. It says wrong is not fixed to a natural property the way water is fixed to H-2-O. The naturalist owes you an account that keeps the disagreement real. That objection is still unanswered. (It is Horgan and Timmons's, from 1992.)
Now the non-naturalist — the one whose view is your view, the real extra fact. Their cost is the one you already sensed coming, the strangeness, and they cannot decline it the way the naturalist could, because they did propose the extra thing. So the old question arrives at full force: how does a physical brain — an organ shaped by evolution to avoid predators and find food — make contact with a fact that is not made of anything, that is nowhere, that reflects no light? You have the fact on one side and the creature on the other and nothing obvious joining them. And we saw, in the first hour, what happens when someone is certain of something they have no way to reach: that was the woman and the milk. So this is a real difficulty, and the non-naturalist has two ways to answer it, and you should weigh how much each one actually covers.
The first is the companions-in-guilt move from before: you have the same problem with mathematics and you do not lose sleep, so it is not a special problem with morality. True. But notice what that does and does not do. It does not remove the difficulty. It shares it out. It says: my difficulty is no worse than your difficulty about arithmetic — so now you owe an account of how a physical creature knows any truth that is not physical, mathematics and logic and morality together, in one lump. Which may be fine. But we are all in the same difficulty is a bet that the difficulty can be met, not a proof that it has been. The non-naturalist has not shown you how the brain makes contact with the fact; they have shown you that the same task is outstanding in three other subjects and you have been ignoring it. The second answer is Enoch's — you cannot deliberate without these facts, so they are there. And a critic states the obvious reply: needing a fact to be there is not the same as reaching it. You can need something to be true very badly. The woman needed her curse to be real; it made her ruined week make sense. Needing a fact to be there is not the same as its being there. That does not show the non-naturalist is wrong — keep that clear, I am not telling you there is no fact — it shows the access problem is still there, and it is a serious one.
So set the two side by side, because this is the whole shape of tonight's argument. The naturalist has no strange entity to account for — but owes you the open question, the but is it wrong that will not go quiet once the natural facts are all in. The non-naturalist keeps the forbidding built into the fact — but owes you access, the how could you ever know it. Each one's relief is the other one's cost. The naturalist asks little of your metaphysics but cannot explain the ought; the non-naturalist explains the ought but asks a great deal of your metaphysics. And I am not going to tell you which to hold — and this time that is not evasion, it is a report on the state of the field. The people who do this for a living are, right now, divided between these two positions, and neither has met its cost in full. Both are standing. Both are serious. There is a fact turned out to be a serious answer and nowhere near a finished one — because the moment you say it, you have to say which fact, and the two versions cost you opposite things.
Run it on something of your own, so it is not just two names on a page. Take a wrong you are sure of — a real one. Someone you know was betrayed by a person who had promised to protect them, coldly, for gain, and left to suffer for it. You know it was wrong. Now point at the natural facts: the broken trust, the harm done, the fear, the wreck of a life that was going well. All real, all there. Now ask the two questions and watch where each one leads. First: is the wrongness one of those facts — and if it is, then why, once you have named every one of them, is there still something unanswered in but was it wrong? If that question stays open after the facts are all in, you have just met the naturalist's cost, in your own case, in your own mouth. Second: or is the wrongness the extra thing, true of the facts but not one of them — and if it is, how do you know it is there? What in you reaches it? And if your honest answer is I just see it, it's obvious — then look behind you, because the woman with the milk is standing there, saying the same words. That is the non-naturalist's cost. Both of them, on a case you actually care about, owed by you, tonight.
So let me close as I have been closing — by saying plainly what moved tonight and what did not.
What did not move, again, is the conviction. That belongs on the record for the third week running, because the deeper we go the more it can feel as though your certainty is being taken apart, and it is not. Torturing a child for pleasure is wrong. Nothing tonight touched that. If anything, you spent the hour with two serious people who agree with you outright that the wrongness is real and out in the world — they simply divide, hard, over what kind of real. The certainty is exactly where it was.
What moved is the account underneath it. You came in with one account and took it for the obvious one: it is a plain fact, and I plainly see it. And you found out two things about it. First, it was never the only realism, nor even the cheaper one. There is a realist who says the wrongness is the suffering itself — point at the agony, that is the wrong, no strange extra entity, no special sense to account for. Second, and this is the stranger finding: the account you actually walked in holding — the wrong as a real extra fact, true of the suffering but not made of it — is a serious, defended, formidable position, and it is the expensive one, not the obvious one. Your own view had two versions in it. You had only ever stood in one, and did not know it had a name, and did not know it carried a cost.
That is what you carry out tonight: an answer that says yes, there's a fact — held open, in two voices — and each voice's cost. The naturalist, with no strange entity to account for, owes the open question: how does a plain fact ever forbid you? The non-naturalist, keeping the forbidding, owes access: how would a physical brain ever make contact with a fact like that? Both still standing. Neither has met its cost in full. That is far more than you came in with, which was a firm conviction with no account beneath it.
This was the first of three answers, and three of the eight episodes are now behind us. So do not treat the relief as settled — I keep saying it because nothing is easier. Both these realists could be wrong. And next week you meet the person who says they are — not by stamping a foot, not by shouting that nothing is wrong, but with a move you will not see coming. They say: there is no moral fact out there at all. None. Not the natural kind, not the non-natural kind. The whole search was a mistake. And — notice — you can still be wrong about right and wrong. You can still reason about it. You can still call one moral claim true and another false. No fact out there, and yet nothing you cared about lost. Almost everything these two realists wanted, without the cost either of them is paying. You will say that cannot be done — that you cannot have the truth without the fact. That is exactly the position we open next.
For tonight, hold on to the two realists and their two costs, and to the odd new fact that your own settled view had a version in it you had never considered. And before next week, run the realist's own question on a wrong of your own — not mine, yours. Point at everything that happened, all of it, every natural fact. And then ask the one question this hour leaves you: when you have pointed at all of it, is the wrong one more fact among them, or something over and above them? Because the people who say yes, it's real cannot agree on the answer. And the answer you give is the version of realism you have been holding all your life, without ever knowing its name.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.