One thing that disturbs me about naturalism is the increasingly frequent contention that there are objective moral “facts” or “truths,” which can somehow be discerned scientifically. I don’t agree with that, since at bottom I think that what one sees as “right” or “wrong” ultimately rests on a set of subjective preferences that can’t be adjudicated scientifically. This is the one major disagreement I have with Sam Harris and Michael Shermer, though I agree with Sam that being “more moral” generally corresponds to “providing more well being.” Like Sam and Michael, I am a consequentialist: I judge actions as “right” or “wrong” based on their consequences to society. The problem is that even if you’re a consequentialist, how do you weigh conflicting consequences—when an action is good for some and bad for others, and in different ways? And others—deontologists—see morality as resting on following rules rather than a utilitarian toting up of consequences, and some philosophers argue for that view.

My view is that there is no objective morality, though reasonable people will generally agree on what is moral. (However, “reason” tends to be bent when the morality is inspired by faith, for religious “morality” is often quite divergent from what most of us would see as our own morality.)  But how do you convince a devout Christian that it’s wrong to prevent gays from marrying, or a devout Muslim that it’s wrong to prevent girls from going to school?

Justin P. McBrayer, however, disagrees in Monday’s “Opinionator” column in the New York Times. His piece, “Why our children don’t think there are moral facts,” argues strongly that there are moral facts, and they’ve been grossly misled by their teachers. He adds that we’d best tell our kids that moral facts are objective lest the world degenerate into immorality.

McBrayer is described as “an associate professor of philosophy at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo., [who] works in ethics and philosophy of religion”, but I don’t know how much, if any, of his views about moral factitude come from faith. Regardless, I think he’s confused, and doesn’t make a good case for objective moral truths.

McBrayer first says that kids are taught that there’s a difference between facts and opinions, which of course is true, but then confuses people with the following dialogue between him and his son to show the supposed lack of distinction.

Me: “I believe that George Washington was the first president. Is that a fact or an opinion?”

Him: “It’s a fact.”

Me: “But I believe it, and you said that what someone believes is an opinion.”

Him: “Yeah, but it’s true.”

Me: “So it’s both a fact and an opinion?”

Then McBrayer gives a list of things that, he says, most people consider opinions but that he clearly believes are “moral facts”:

Here’s a little test devised from questions available on fact vs. opinion worksheets online: are the following facts or opinions?

— Copying homework assignments is wrong.

— Cursing in school is inappropriate behavior.

— All men are created equal.

— It is worth sacrificing some personal liberties to protect our country from terrorism.

— It is wrong for people under the age of 21 to drink alcohol.

— Vegetarians are healthier than people who eat meat.

— Drug dealers belong in prison.

The answer? In each case, the worksheets categorize these claims as opinions. The explanation on offer is that each of these claims is a value claim and value claims are not facts. This is repeated ad nauseum: any claim with good, right, wrong, etc. is not a fact.

In summary, our public schools teach students that all claims are either facts or opinions and that all value and moral claims fall into the latter camp. The punchline: there are no moral facts. And if there are no moral facts, then there are no moral truths.

Well, I can see saying that if you have an opinion, which is your view on an issue, that opinion can also be a fact (i.e., “my opinion is that the speed of light is constant in a vaccuum”), but opinions may not be factual; they are, according to the Oxford English Dictionary

a. What or how one thinks about something; judgement or belief. Esp. in in my opinion: according to my thinking; as it seems to me. a matter of opinion : a matter about which each may have his or her own opinion; a disputable point.

In other words, an opinion is someone’s belief or judgement. Whether that opinion happens to be true (“a fact”) depends on two things: a). it concerns an assertion about reality that can be adjudicated by observation (instead of subjective judgments like “my opinion is that pie is better than cake”), and b). the adjudication shows that the factual belief is true. In none of the cases McBrayer gives above can I see a way to determine whether the “opinions” are “true” in any meaningful sense.  I agree with some of them (but not all), but how do you determine whether it’s a “moral truth” that “drug dealers belong in prison”?

The correct way to teach the difference between fact and opinion is, I think, the way I outlined in the paragraph above, and I don’t see that it should cause any difficulties. When kids are young they must be taught that things are “right” or “wrong”, but I don’t think they should ever be told that those issues are simply factual. That’s no way to have a discussion. If the kid asks, “Why?”, then there’s the opportunity for a fascinating discussion (which will either involve “Because I said so” for the youngest kids or, for older kids, a discussion of what you—or society—see as the basis for morality.

The reason McBrayer thinks that we should tell kids that there are moral facts is because it supposedly makes them behave better than if they just see moral judgments as opinions:

It should not be a surprise that there is rampant cheating on college campuses: If we’ve taught our students for 12 years that there is no fact of the matter as to whether cheating is wrong, we can’t very well blame them for doing so later on.

Indeed, in the world beyond grade school, where adults must exercise their moral knowledge and reasoning to conduct themselves in the society, the stakes are greater. There, consistency demands that we acknowledge the existence of moral facts. If it’s not true that it’s wrong to murder a cartoonist with whom one disagrees, then how can we be outraged? If there are no truths about what is good or valuable or right, how can we prosecute people for crimes against humanity? If it’s not true that all humans are created equal, then why vote for any political system that doesn’t benefit you over others?

What he’s doing, in my view, is distorting the meaning of “fact” simply so that it will have better results for society. But what happens when a kid asks, “what is the basis for judging your moral claims as ‘true’?” You can’t just say “Because I said so”—that’s no way to determine truth, or educate kids. You have to prove it, and you can’t do that without appealing to subjective judgments.  What happens when a kid asks a Christian parent, “Daddy, why is abortion wrong?”  I won’t go on; you can see the problem.

McBrayer winds up reiterating his unsupported assertions:

We can do better. Our children deserve a consistent intellectual foundation. Facts are things that are true. Opinions are things we believe. Some of our beliefs are true. Others are not. Some of our beliefs are backed by evidence. Others are not. Value claims are like any other claims: either true or false, evidenced or not. The hard work lies not in recognizing that at least some moral claims are true but in carefully thinking through our evidence for which of the many competing moral claims is correct. That’s a hard thing to do. But we can’t sidestep the responsibilities that come with being human just because it’s hard.

That would be wrong.

I find it odd that McBrayer is a professor of philosophy, and nevertheless can come out with things like this.  Some value claims simply CANNOT be adjudicated by evidence. Abortion is one. Even if you’re a consequentialist like I am and on those grounds am pro-choice, what do you say to someone who feels otherwise, either because they have the religious notion that embryos have souls or the consequentialist notion that it’s worse for society to allow abortions than if it prohibited them? How can you decide? Even the notion “don’t kill innocent people,” won’t resonate with a Muslim extremist if those innocents are apostates.

Of course facts do come into play in some moral discussions. If you oppose abortion on grounds of fetal viability or fetal pain, those things can be empirically determined (or course the age of viability is going to get smaller in the future!). But at bottom all discussions of right or wrong come down to what result one prefers—what you think moralty is supposed to achieve. That’s not to denigrate it, for without rules we can’t have harmonious societies. But I simply don’t believe that one needs to tell kids that there are moral facts to get them to behave in a desirable way. But that, of course, is my subjective judgment.