Why Right and Wrong Seem Real: a Critique of Moral Realism

BY DOUGLAS J. NAVARICK

“…for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” —Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

ON AUGUST 24, 2016, AT 3:36 AM, A 6.2 MAGNITUDE earthquake struck central Italy, devastating centuriesold towns and villages across the mountainous regions of Umbria, Lazio, and Marche. The quake killed 297 people, mostly in the town of Amatrice located near the epicenter. The town’s historic center, with buildings dating to the Middle Ages, was obliterated. In the immediate aftermath, the mayor, Sergio Pirozzi, told a broadcaster, “the town isn’t here any more.”1 To see the scale of death and destruction and its human impact reflected in the dazed and distressed expressions of the survivors naturally evokes feelings of empathy and concern. But it is unlikely that anyone has felt any sense of moral indignation over the processes of nature that caused this catastrophe: the continuous tectonic movement of the African Plate into the Eurasian Plate and the pressure it exerts on the Apennine Mountain region where the quake occurred.

Are Right and Wrong Real?

Now imagine a different scenario. It wasn’t an earthquake that killed nearly 300 people in Italy, but a coordinated attack by teams of terrorists who infiltrated the towns and set off massive explosions, killing dozens of survivors as they crawled out through the rubble. There would be moral outrage everywhere. But in purely materialistic scientific terms, could there be any difference in moral content between the actions of the terrorists and the tectonic movements of plates? They are both processes of nature and presumed to be governed by laws in their respective geological and psychological domains. The brain is a physical system no less than a planet.

In a material universe devoid of any supernatural, willful influence, no human action is right or wrong; it just is. The moral dimension we may see in human behavior is, as Einstein famously said in reference to time, “only a stubbornly persistent illusion,” possibly a construction of the human mind that evolved as a mechanism for promoting cohesion within progressively larger and more diverse and powerful groups of hunter-gatherers.2

Several recent books by Steven Pinker,3 Sam Harris, 4 and Michael Shermer5 have suggested that science has revealed objectivemoral principles that can point the way to true virtue on anyone’s moral compass. In this article I will explain why it is more plausible to view these principles as subjective preferences rather than objective realities that exist “out there” beyond our personal moral perspectives. I will also summarize research that shows how someone with a purely materialistic conceptualization of reality could believe that actions of people are potentially right or wrong, while actions of nature have no moral content. Basically, it is feeling, not thinking, that “makes it so.”