Are there any moral properties out there?
So, you're suspicious that when I say, for example, that killing is wrong, the fact is that there's no wrongness 'out there' for me to be right or wrong about. Or, when I say that you have a right to assistance in times of need, you're sceptical that there could be anything 'out there' which is the right that I'm talking about.
"After all," you might say, "there's no room in physics for moral wrongness or rights, and physics describes everything that exists. So, moral wrongness and rights and all the rest of it must not exist at all."
I'm not convinced by this. If physics describes everything that exists, then it must describe our minds (I don't mean our brains, but our minds), logical relations, what it's like to have a headache, the rules of the game of football, the reasons to take care when walking near cliff edges. For those things exist. (Come on—you surely admit that some of them do, even if you have doubts about the others.) Yet we don't ordinarily take physics to describe the rules of the game of football, for example.
In reply, you might say that physics does describe those things, but it doesn't do it in those terms—rather, it uses more fundamental terms. In that case, however, I don't see any reason to think that the same isn't true about moral properties and facts.
On the other hand, you might say that physics doesn't describe those things. In that case, however, it seems that physics doesn't describe everything that exists. And then the fact that physics doesn't describe moral facts and properties gives us no more reason to be sceptical about them than we are about the existence of minds, rules, logical relations, pain, and reasons.
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Alternatively, you might just say that there's something weird about supposing there to be moral facts and properties 'out there' in the world.
I agree that it seems a bit weird to imagine moral facts and properties to be something like physical objects, lying around in the world in the way that physical objects do. But that's not the only way to be a realist about moral facts and properties.
For example, you might think that moral facts and properties are like mathematical facts and properties. No one thinks that you could find an object lying around somewhere that had the property of being the sum of two prime numbers. But that doesn't make us sceptical about the existence of the property of being the sum of two primes.
Even if you worry about the word 'existence' in this context, you'll concede that no one is sceptical about the possibility that propositions such as "That number is the sum of two primes" could be true. Of course they could!
If it's possible to think about moral facts and properties more along the lines of mathematical facts and properties (or facts and properties about rationality, to take another example), then you needn't worry that to speak of normative claims as if they can be true or false is to open yourself up to charges of metaphysical weirdness after all.
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I don't accept, then, either of these reasons for scepticism. But even if you do, it may be that there's still nothing objectionable in making the sort of claims that political philosophers make. I'll explain on the next page.