In the context of the moral realism vs. moral subjectivism and theism vs. atheism debates the question of moral semantics is often raised: How do we define goodness? Some are under the mistaken impression that if we cannot define goodness (a question of moral semantics) then we cannot claim to know goodness exists (a question of moral ontology) or identify what is good (a question of moral epistemology).
I do not want to focus on whether it is possible to provide an adequate account of moral semantics, but rather to point out that even if we are unable to do so, it does not follow that there are no objective moral goods or that we are incapable of knowing them. Greg Koukl illustrates this point beautifully. He notes how our experience of goodness is similar to our experience of color. We recognize color as color when we see it. If someone were to ask us how we know what green is, we would respond, “I just see it.” We don’t need to define green to know it when we encounter it. Similarly, we do not need to define goodness to know that we have encountered it. God has given us moral intuitions to recognize good and discern between good and evil.
All of us have a basic moral intuition that recognizes the existence of a realm of objective moral values, just as we have sensory intuitions that apprehend a realm of physical objects. As atheistic philosopher Louise Anthony said in her debate with William Craig, “Any argument for moral skepticism will based upon premises which are less obvious than the existence of objective moral values themselves.” When we behold good and evil, we simply recognize them for what they are.
The way we “see” goodness is not the way we see a giraffe, but the way we see the truth of a syllogism. If Socrates is a man, and all men are mortal, then it follows that Socrates is mortal. You don’t see the truth of that conclusion with your physical senses, but with your logical intuitions. Similarly, we recognize what is good through our moral intuitions. No definition is required.
August 8, 2012 at 10:35 am
I think the “color” analogy is absolutely perfect, but for precisely the opposite reason.
When you have a few free minutes, take a listen to the following story, “Why isn’t the sky blue?” from the “Colors” episode of Radiolab.
http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/sky-isnt-blue/
Do so, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.
August 8, 2012 at 10:48 am
Stan,
Free minutes aren’t in my vocabulary. Can you summarize it for me?
Jason
August 8, 2012 at 11:15 am
Haha, sure!
Quick summary:
The story starts out with a mystery: ancient works, fiction and non-, describe various objects having the same color, when we know that they don’t have the same color. After further investigation, a pattern emerges: “Across all colors, words for colors appear in stages. And blue always comes last.”
The exception? Egypt.
The story floats several hypotheses, eventually arriving at the following: A culture doesn’t really “see” a color as distinct until it is able to manufacture it. Essentially, we have to be taught, from a young age, about the distinctiveness of various colors. We may have the rods and cones to see that the sky is blue, but we don’t actually SEE the sky as a distinct color unless we’ve been instructed to do so from a young age. (This may explain why human tetrachromats can’t reliably “see more colors” than the rest of us.)
It concludes with a story from a neuropsychology professor, Jules Davidoff, who experimented on his own young daughter when she was just starting to learn colors. He deliberately did not teach her that the sky was blue. The result was that, shockingly, she could not recognize the sky as having a distinct color.
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In other words, when someone asks us how we know what green is, we say, “I just see it.” But the actual answer is that we were taught to see it. We just don’t remember that process or have an intuitive, resonant understanding of what it would be like NOT to see green and gradually coming to see green distinctly.
It’s counterintuitive. It’s bizarre. It can’t be explained in terms of anything with which we can viscerally relate. But it’s true, and it demands that we alter our folk notions of what we inherit and how, no matter how innate those things feel. Sometimes “inherited” is mistaken as “inherent.”
August 8, 2012 at 3:22 pm
Perhaps I’m missing something, but I don’t see how this can be the case. We can see that the color of the sky is distinct from the color of the grass. We may not be able to attach labels to each of these different colors until we are provided them by our culture, but we see the difference before any labels are given. No one would say that the color of grass is the same color as the sky.
Jason
August 8, 2012 at 5:15 pm
But that’s exactly what the ancients did.
From the summary: “What is the color of honey, and ‘faces pale with fear’? If you’re Homer–one of the most influential poets in human history–that color is green. And the sea is ‘wine-dark,’ just like oxen.”
The only way we know that they didn’t see these colors as distinct is because they tell us that various things are the same color when, today, we know that they’re not the same color at all. The ocean is not the color of wine.
Without being instilled with the distinctiveness of green and blue from a young age, an ancient writer might indeed say that the sky and grass are indeed the same color! His visual palette would simply lean more monochromatic. When I try to imagine it, I think of recent movies wherein certain scenes are palettized, and you don’t really notice that certain colors are “missing” (Lord of the Rings, Transformers, and Cowboys & Aliens are three that immediately come to mind).
August 13, 2012 at 11:32 am
Stan,
I’m not buying it. Poetic metaphors should not be our source for these conclusions. But the ocean-wine metaphor may be accurate. We would need to know what their wine looked like. It would be a mistake to think their wine was the same color as our wines today. I could see how the darkness of wine would be a fitting metaphor for the darkness of the water.
But that’s beside the point. Anybody can see that blue and green are not the same color. They may not care to distinguish the two by name, but they can see the distinction nonetheless. This is similar to how we can distinguish between various shades of blue, and while women like to label one as “navy” and another as “indigo,” us men call both blue. That doesn’t mean we can’t see a difference between the two. It just means we don’t care to lable the differences. But that’s when we are talking shades of a color. No one is going to look at red and think it is the same as blue, and very few would fail to come up with distinct labels for the two.
If I could boil my point down to a single sentence I would say that there is a difference between seeing different colors and labeling what we see with different words. Even if we choose not to label the differences, we still see them. Ok, that was two sentences.
Jason
August 13, 2012 at 11:55 am
I’m not doing a sufficient job conveying the content of the program, I think. It wasn’t just base on isolated, single metaphors in single ancient works. And the thesis is that “Anybody can see that blue and green are not the same color” is false; an ancient person might not be able to make the distinction between the two. The whole point is that this assumption we have about humans “by default” seeing the colors we see (given trichromacy) is not a valid assumption. The thesis is that we’re actually taught, artificially by others or via natural learning processes (where pattern recognition is motivated by functional, meaningful impactfulness), the differences between various colors, and if that learning doesn’t occur, we don’t see those differences at all.
Let’s put this on pause unless and until you can find time to listen to the last segment (to which I referred) of the linked-to program.
January 7, 2013 at 3:36 pm
This ethical realist says, thanks Jason. However, I don’t see intuition as usefull, I instead see our evolved moral sense, and how we view consequences for the flourishing of sentient beings.