Moral Facts: Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Any

[C C]

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...ore-156061

EXCERPT: What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised?

I was. As a philosopher, I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts. While there are no national surveys quantifying this phenomenon, philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.

What I didn’t know was where this attitude came from. Given the presence of moral relativism in some academic circles, some people might naturally assume that philosophers themselves are to blame. But they aren’t. There are historical examples of philosophers who endorse a kind of moral relativism, dating back at least to Protagoras who declared that “man is the measure of all things,” and several who deny that there are any moral facts whatsoever. But such creatures are rare. Besides, if students are already showing up to college with this view of morality, it’s very unlikely that it’s the result of what professional philosophers are teaching. So where is the view coming from?

A few weeks ago, I learned that students are exposed to this sort of thinking well before crossing the threshold of higher education....

[Magical Realist]

I've never even heard of a moral fact. To my knowledge, and this may just be my gradeschool brainwashing talking, facts are value free. A value on the other hand is something we project onto facts. The fact exists objectively. The value exists subjectively. A moral value isn't a fact. It's a judgment, one based on reason or feeling or culture, or all three. But moral facts? Not imo. That smacks of some covert absolutist moralism. Another attempt to legislate your own values on others. Another totalitarian worldview.

[C C]

I've never even heard of a moral fact. To my knowledge, and this may just be my gradeschool brainwashing talking, facts are value free. A value on the other hand is something we project onto facts. The fact exists objectively. The value exists subjectively.

There's a kind of irony in "fact" being derived from Latin factura, facere, etc -- which have to do with make, a making, a thing made (artificial creations). Contrasted with today's usage.

A moral value isn't a fact. It's a judgment, one based on reason or feeling or culture, or all three. But moral facts? Not imo. That smacks of some covert absolutist moralism. Another attempt to legislate your own values on others. Another totalitarian worldview.

Some basic moral tenets (do not murder, steal, etc) and human rights seem to require being universal objects in order to trump local customs that sacrifice children to gods, lack personal property ownership, deny trial to the accused, etc. The moral tenets could probably be subsumed under or deemed as falling out of "human rights" (since murder, stealing, abuse do not respect such). Which then reduces our tangle of ethics issues to a matter of whether or not a human is born with any intrinsic significance at all or entirely has to earn a status of personhood.

Accordingly, the belief in human rights (and that such is a general, global / transcendent object rather than another concrete, empirical fact or contingent tradition [relativism]) can hinder the development or reach of a tyrannical authority that simply conquers by immediate force and terror rather than appealing to drawn-out ideology alone. Or that which seeks to reduce individuals to slaves, puppets, recreational resources -- humans merely an expendable means to facilitating its goals.

Even when a local culture is won over by convincing them that their lives would improve by abandoning barbaric practices that seem immoral to the West, this seemingly "practical" justification wouldn't carry weight unless it did universally lead to better conditions. Any way one goes about it, there seems to be an intermittent necessity for a realm of principle -- of what can only be realized by description and conformity to it rather than it being instantiated as an empirical, haphazard, spatiotemporal object. Whether such a metaphysic truly "exists" or not.