Are There Any Moral Facts?

Are there any moral facts?

According to John Mackie there are no moral facts. There is a problem with his argument, however, as he seems to over simplify the nature of what a fact is. The approach with regards to moral facts is, firstly, how you define 'fact', and secondly, to decide how you could make a fact 'moral'. It stands to reason that there must be some moral facts, depending on how motivating the facts are to promote or prevent action, as there are some actions that are universally considered negative.
Alfred Tarski published a paper outlining the considered definition of a fact. This definition can be used in everyday language and suggests that a factual statement is only one that involves a subject that is true. For example 'Water is wet' is true if and only if water is wet. (Tarski, 1986) Mackie, on the other hand, is the main defender of the notion that there are no moral facts. Mackie believes this because, in his account, facts must be an inherent part of the universe, independent of human values. This means that if something only exists because humans exist, then it is not a natural part of the universe so it cannot be part of a fact. An example of this would be the offside rule in football, which is a made up rule for a game that only exists because of humans. If you were to take away humans from the universe, then there would be no such thing as the offside rule, so it would not be possible to have it as part of facts within the universe. The idea here being that man-made concepts, such as blueness, cannot be facts in the same way as logic, maths, physics, etc. which are about the universe independently of people. (Mackie, 1980)
Mackie's idea of what a fact is seems to have issues as involving only things of maths, logic, etc. is too simplistic - it ignores a lot of things that do seem to be facts. It seems to be incorrect that human concepts cannot be facts, because as humans, we use them as facts using a definition closer to Tarski's. For example, it is true someone can be offside in football because we have set a basis for when someone is offside, so if they fit the criteria for being offside, it is a fact that they are offside. Furthermore, by ignoring human values, Mackie seems to get rid of more values than he likely means to. This is because things such as pain, pleasure, good or bad are only given meaning by humans, so to deny human values entirely would deny that certain actions are objectively bad; for example: rape. Rape is a bad thing as it is intentionally bringing pain and misery into the world; it is simply cruel, and is considered so by most cultures around the world, independently of one another. By Mackie's account of facts, pain is a human value, so it could not be a fact that rape is bad and therefore it seems his account is wrong, while Tarski's notion allows for a lot more and seems to be more acceptable.
With the idea of what a fact actually is, it then becomes the question about how facts can be moral. David Hume set the considered idea of what becomes essential to morality with the notion that morals are motivational. (Mackie, 1980) This is to suggest that people are motivated to seek out what is good, and to avoid what seems bad. An example of this would be that we tend to stop before crossing the road because we would want to avoid getting hit by a car, which would cause us pain and therefore be bad. In general, most people seek not to cause misery to others, because of the good it gives both them and ourselves. So, it is considered that all moral evaluations must be motivating and therefore most people do hold their own moral values, most of these values will be subjective and while motivating to some, are morally inert to others. An example of this is allowing your child to have lots of sweets, some parents would not be bothered about this, while others would stop their child having too many sweets because they consider sweets to be bad for you. For, then, there to be moral fact it would have to both be a fact, and be motivating. This would not apply to the sweets example as it is not necessarily considered a fact that lots of sweets are bad for you.
Mackie's argument from queerness is one of his two arguments that give him reason for his claim that there are no moral facts. In the argument from queerness he suggests that morally objective values would be strange concepts or properties if they did exist in the universe. Considering Mackie's earlier claim that only things about the universe can be facts, he is suggesting further that there can be no factual concepts concerning morals as these strange objective moral properties do not exist. He gives this argument substance with the idea that there are no moral properties of a thing – it would be unlike anything else that exists in the world, and for us to understand them would take some epistemic method that we do not have, as we would not be able to feel, see or hear them.
The view that moral facts would be motivating, Mackie claims, would be a queer concept as no other facts do motivate and so he suggests there cannot be moral facts. For example, 'water is wet' or 'Blue Whales are blue and white' are facts, but are not motivating. Evaluative statements, which to Mackie are independent of facts, do motivate but are not facts, such as 'stealing is bad' or 'you should be kind to others'. The argument from queerness is the explanation that 'good' is not a property in the same way as 'wet' is a property, and properties do not motivate. The issue with this idea is that it does seem entirely possible to imagine a fact that motivates: 'The water is boiling', for example, is a factual statement about the property of some water, but should motivate you to avoid the water as it will cause pain. Similarly, 'That metal is sharp' might motivate you to avoid touching it, or 'Strawberries are sweet' might motivate you to eat them if you like sweet things.
A further issue with Mackie's argument is his assumption that evaluative statements and factual statements are separate from one another. Philippa Foot, however, suggests that it does seem possible for a statement to be both factual and evaluative, therefore possible to have moral statements that could be factual. (Foot, 2002) Foot uses the example of 'rudeness', however, it is possible for rudeness to not always be a bad thing, so a better example for this would be ‘this is cruel’. The idea of whether something is cruel or not is factual as the definition of cruelty is intentionally causing unnecessary pain, which means it would be a fact for someone to suggest that 'rape is cruel', because it is. However, not only are we giving a fact of the matter, we are also making an evaluative statement because we are claiming that the action of rape is bad, because cruelty causes pain and pain is bad. This shows that morality is more complicated than Mackie seems to suggest, with the idea that factual statements and evaluative statements aren't necessarily separate from one another.
Mackie's second argument that there are no moral facts is the argument from relativity. The argument from relativity claims that different cultures around the world seem to have different moral values, sometimes even contradicting each other. This suggests that morals are relative to independent groups based on actions within that culture as it is too difficult to assume that if there are objective morals, that some cultures simply fail to address them and even disagree with them. It is to be noted that different cultures do not disagree with facts. The problem with this argument is it assumes that all morals are of the same kind, it doesn't seem to explain certain notions that are shared by all cultures, such as cruelty, which is simply a bad thing as intentionally causing unnecessary pain is always a bad thing. Also, it seems lazy of Mackie to make the assumption that there are no objective moral values simply because it is easier than understanding why cultures vary on moral values.
Overall, it seems that Mackie's claim that there are no moral facts based on his two arguments, relativity and queerness, as well as his notion of facts all seem to be disagreeable points. His argument from relativity and queerness seem to simplify the notion of facts and values, suggesting that they must be separate things because of the way humans approach them from different cultures and our lack of epistemological knowledge of 'strange concepts'. Neither of these arguments explain the notion of cruelty, which seems to be both a fact and evaluative concept that could motivate and be objectively stated. Mackie's definition of facts seems to have problems with itself and doesn't stand up to the more every day usage of fact which is explained by Tarski about the truth of the subject. It does seem to be the case, with use of examples such as cruelty, that there can be facts that motivate and statements that are both factual and evaluative and therefore stands to reason that there are some moral facts, even though most moral statements are not factual.

Refrences
・ J.L. Mackie. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), Viking Press, ISBN 0-14-013558-8.
・ J.L. Mackie. Hume's Moral Theory (1980), Routledge Keegan & Paul, ISBN 0-7100-0525-3.
・ Foot, Philippa. Moral Dilemmas: And Other Topics in Moral Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002.
・ Hodges, Wilfrid. Tarski's Truth Definitions. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta,\url{http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/tarski-truth/. 2013
・ Westacott, Emrys. Moral Relativism. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/moral-re/ May 30, 2012