Thanks to EHST president Chris Kaman for passing along yesterday the New York Times article “Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts.” Here is a link to it, although the Times has a paywall that imposes a monthly limit, so the link may not work for you.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/02/why-our-children-dont-think-there-are-moral-facts
The author of the article is a philosopher who looked into his son’s second-grade assignments, and the Common Core curriculum, and discovered why so many young people, by the time they arrive in a college ethics course, believe that moral claims are a matter of opinion: that is exactly what they are often taught in grade school. One worksheet he examined classified, for example, “Copying homework assignments is wrong” and other value claims as opinion, not fact. As the author notes, “[i]t should not be a surprise that there is rampant cheating on college campuses.”
This confirms my impression from decades ago when I first began teaching philosophy, as a graduate student at UNC. So many students come to college with their minds already made up about complex questions in the branch of ethics called “metaethics,” and they take it as common sense that, since people disagree about moral claims, they have no right to assert them as pertaining to others, or to other cultures.
Last March I gave a talk to the EHST about metaethics. It is the branch of moral philosophy in which a number of inter-related questions are asked about ethical claims. Among these questions are the following:
(1) Are ethical claims objective, or subjective?
(2) Are they matters of opinion?
(3) Are there moral facts?
The view called “moral realism” – which the author of the article seems to embrace – is the philosophical position that moral claims are objective, and a moral realist would answer “No” to (2) and “Yes” to (3). In my talk I presented a view I am working on called “value prescriptivism,” which is not a realist view. It seems impossible to reconcile moral realism with metaphysical naturalism (which we discussed at Randy Best’s EHST talk on Ethical Humanism on February first). I answer “No” to (3) because I think that the best way to see moral language is as a way of prescribing values. I don’t think of “Murder is wrong” as reporting a moral fact – perhaps one created by God – but as saying “Have a value system that prohibits murder.”
What I, and a lot of other philosophers, are trying to do is to find a third way that avoids the dichotomy between moral realism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the idea that ethics is just like what flavor of ice cream one prefers, or that it is just relative to culture. So, while I answer “No” to (3) I also answer “No” to (2). I share the author’s concern that our schools are teaching relativism, and I agree that it is destructive of ethics in practice. To say that some claim is a “matter of opinion” carries with it permission to have, and thus to act on, whatever values one wants. I certainly don’t think that “Murder is wrong” is a matter of opinion because that is inconsistent with prescribing that everyone have values that prohibit murder.
Often in the discussions and comments at our meetings, it is taken as a given that, since people disagree about ethical issues, they are “merely a matter of opinion.” Or it is assumed that morality is relative to culture. But think about the implications of that assumption. In the antebellum South, most people believed that it was all right to enslave some people of an “inferior” race. Are you really prepared to say that, therefore, in that place and time, it was all right to do that?
