Moral realism
Hello Rabbi
I had some doubts about moral realism.
I argued in favor of moral realism from the analogy of slavery. It’s a good thing I didn’t live in the 18th century, because then I would have thought that slavery was moral, and we relate to morality when it has objective truth. When we were once wrong and today we are right. And if it were subjective like taste and smell, we wouldn’t see a difference in moral views of the past and today. And since we see a difference, that we were once wrong in our moral approaches means that morality is objective.
As far as I understand, this is the argument. I hope I didn’t distort or miss the point.
My question is, just because we think this way, what is this supposed to tell us about a factual claim about the world (the world was here before us, it owes us nothing)? It is more reasonable to say that the concept of morality is a product of evolution, that there is a survival value in not killing or harming anyone, and evidence that only Homo sapiens in the advanced world behave relatively morally, and all other animals do not. Why, if morality is objective, can it apply to us and not to them?
And there is another epistemic question: How are we supposed to arrive at the knowledge of what is moral and what is not? If it is by intuition, people have different intuitions, and if it is by logical argument, people come to different assumptions.
And I also think that moral realism should explain why, for example, billions of years of evolution of biological creatures, we did not behave morally and had no way of arriving at what is right and what is wrong.
In conclusion, I wanted to say that I greatly appreciate the Rabbi’s thought and I think that your teachings are an ironclad asset to modern Judaism.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding regarding the argument. This argument is “theological” (i.e. revealing), not “philosophical” (i.e. proving). The argument comes to show a person where he himself stands and not to show what the truth is. Just as Migo does not prove that this is the truth, but only that I do not lie (and I do not lie). What this says about truth, whether morality is an evolutionary product, is a completely different question. When I have a conclusion, I tend to accept it as truth until proven otherwise. If you are a skeptic who doubts your own conclusions, I have nothing to say to you.
Contrary to your claim, morality is pretty much agreed upon among people. The debates are on the margins. But even if not, the judge has only what his eyes see.
I didn’t understand what moral realism had to explain about evolution. In my opinion, nothing.
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