Is morality objective? · Quiz question 3/35
Slavery and Mind-Independent Moral Facts
In a society where nearly everyone accepted slavery, was it already wrong back then? Where moral realism and relativism part ways.
200 years ago, most people in some societies took slavery for granted, and the law allowed it.
Slavery was already wrong in that society, back then.
This isn't one paper's thought experiment so much as an old test case in metaethics. In "Moral Explanations" (1985), Nicholas Sturgeon argued that to explain why the abolition movement arose when it did, we need the moral fact that slavery really was wrong. On the other side, Gilbert Harman defended moral relativism in 1975: moral judgments are relative to agreed-upon practices.
If you agreed, you think moral truth doesn't depend on a society's beliefs or laws — the heart of moral realism. Realists point out that saying "it was fine back then" commits you to the idea that the suffering of enslaved people was justified by what the majority thought at the time.
Anti-realists and relativists can still criticize slavery. They just ground the criticism not in society-independent moral facts but in our values, in inconsistencies with principles that society already held ("all men are created equal"), or in idealized agreement. J. L. Mackie argued that objective values, if they existed, would be very "queer" entities in the universe.
Moral facts are true whether anyone believes them or not. Slavery was always wrong.
Key names: Plato, G. E. Moore, Derek Parfit, SturgeonBy principles any rational agent could accept, slavery couldn't be justified even then.
Key names: John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Christine KorsgaardThere are no objective moral facts. We can criticize slavery from within our own value system.
Key names: Harman, J. L. Mackie, NietzscheIn the 2020 PhilPapers Survey, about 62% of philosophers chose moral realism on the metaethics question.