How can moral realism be defended against the fact that morals and values change over history?

Question

Moral realism or moral objectivism is a the view that moral values and statements are facts that are independent of the person who is uttering them.

For example the statement "Killing is bad" is True regardless of who is saying it, and even if nobody believes it. Similarly the statement "Rape is acceptable" is False regardless of who says it or who believes or doesn't believe it.

Now lets assume that one wants to defend the objectivity of morals without resorting to a religious argument, i.e. one wants to consider statements like "Killing is bad" objectively true without having to say "because God said so" or "because it is bad Karma", etc...

It seems to me that any secular argument that can be provided for the objectivity or morals can be immediately refuted by the fact that morals seem to change over time. Slavery was considered acceptable for most of human history, but now it is almost universally rejected. Pre marital sex was considered bad in most western societies for along time but is now accepted by many people in the West.

If someone is trying to prove that "Killing is bad" is an objectively True statement, another can respond "how do you know that in the future people won't find gratuitous killing acceptable? After all, a man and a woman living together without being married would have been just as horrifying to a person from 16th century as murder is now".

How can any argument for the objectivity of moral statements be defended against such a historical argument?

Answer 1

Moral realism is defended against the fact that morals and values change, by the fact that those are independent things that coexist complementarily. Those are better explained by the philosophical concepts of objectivity vs subjectivity.

Objective vs. Subjective Reality:

Imagine an object that is being looked at. We place that object in the water, what you perceive of the object is your (you the Subject) perception of the (Object). The objective reality means reality as object, a thing of its own.

The subject that perceives the object, obtains a mental image of the object, this mental image is subjective, limited to the subjects ability to perceive the Object. That is the concept of subjective reality.

When we apply this concept of objective/subjective to morality, it means that while subjective understanding of morality changes, what is objectively moral remains the same. Just like reality remains the same no matter what is our understanding of it.

Now, how do we know a moral truth is objectively moral and not merely subjective? We don't really... we assume that the subjective morals we hold as truths are the objective ones based on a feeling of empathy. WE tend to identify as immoral the things or situations that we would not want to be subjected to, and Consent the key that makes an action or situation moral.

Answer 2

By sheer evasion. Moral realism does not demand that derived moral facts are correct, stable, or universal, only that there really are basic moral facts that are real.

Utilitarians are still moral realists. They have a moral value, and they consider it real. Likewise Kantians are moral realists, mutual respect for autonomy is a moral value they consider real. The relativism of different individual pictures of the world cannot address their moral arguments. They are based in a real theory of human nature (or the nature of all intelligent beings, including humans).

How can their basic principles be attacked, when it is always possible that the reasoning of individuals unconsciously relies upon some similar principle, but is always wrong because of psychological or political manipulations? You have a more material repetition of the noumenon/phenomenon problem. If there is enough noise, you can't be sure there wasn't a signal.

I would fall back, as usual on pyschoanalysis and the philosophical traditions related to it (e.g. Schopenhauer's Will to Live and related consequents) We do seem to be able to take a composite of moralities, factor out local influences, and find things that are real guiding principles behind human actions.

(To my mind, obviously 'killing is bad' is not one of those, or war would get less common, not more common, over time. If we could clearly see a basic moral fact, we would observe some kind of convergence toward it, the same way sciences converge toward precision with regard to actual applications, even as their theories do not become more similar at root. We need to look for universals that are much less direct, and are purposely obscured, rather than focused by culture, politics and psychology. Welcome to the era of the conspiracy theory.)

Those principles do lead people to construct moralities, even if those moralities themselves have an ongoing evolution. If that is the case, you can't get past that 'noise' to address the underlying issue of moral realism directly. But it may all be wishful thinking.

Answer 3

"Moral disagreement" figures in a few arguments, e.g. for moral skepticism.

Moral disagreements that are resolvable do not support moral skepticism, so any argument for moral skepticism from moral disagreement must show that moral disagreements are unresolvable on every issue. That will require a separate argument. (For further discussions, see Bergmann & Kain 2014, Besong 2014, and Vavova 2014.)

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It also features in arguments against moral realism

The mere fact of disagreement does not raise a challenge for moral realism. Disagreement is to be found in virtually any area, even where no one doubts that the claims at stake purport to report facts and everyone grants that some claims are true.

But disagreements differ and many believe that the sort of disagreements one finds when it comes to morality are best explained by supposing... the supposition that moral realism is false

In response, we can

offer some other explanation of the disagreements. They point out, for example, that many of the disagreements can be traced to the distorting effects of the emotions, attitudes, and interests that are inevitably bound up with moral issues

or explained by

disagreements about the nonmoral facts

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Disagreement against the backdrop of history, which I think is what you're asking about in the question, seems easier to explain than present disagreement.

Answer 4

You don't need ethic if there are no societies. Ethics is in place to enable reciprocal values to make sure that humanity not going to annihilate each other.

Despite criticism from scholars on Milgram experiment, all later variance of Milgram experiments shown that human being under authority pressure is not hesitated to harm a stranger.

Nevertheless, historical events show us that lack of fundamental ethics and banality will do more harms to human society than strengthen it.