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Werner's Ethical Realism

Richard Werner presents a bold and exciting new theory of the foundation of morality in the lead article of a recent issue of this journal.' Attractive as Werner's theory is, however, it suffers from some fatal flaws. My purpose here is to demonstrate those flaws. First I shall sketch his theory. The context of Werner's ethical theory is his view that it is misguided to look for independent facts anywhere, including science and morals. Our observations must always be the result not purely of the way the world is but additionally of our previous experience, our concepts, et cetera. There are, Werner tells us, no "immaculate perceptions" (p. 679). For example, we do not observe pure sense data and then infer that we have seen trees. Rather, we see trees (or we see what we see as trees). Our previous experience and our concepts shape our observations. But this is not to say that objective facts and knowledge do not exist. On the contrary, our observations are partially determined by the way the world is, and our observations may be disconfirmed by other observations. To say that something exists, in Werner's view, is to say that it is posited by the best theory. "As Quine argues, swelling ontology to simplify theory is a natural extension of common sense" (p. 667, n. 10). Moral wrongs exist as much as protons do (p. 679). This is because a theory which uses moral wrongs as theoretical constructs is superior in terms of theoretical virtues to alternative metaethical theories which eschew talk of real wrongs. Before reviewing Werner's argument for the theoretical superiority of ethical realism, let us look at the central tenets of that theory. We do not intuit or directly perceive moral facts or qualities such as wrongness, according to Werner. Instead, "we experience moral facts in the same way that we experience other unperceived phenomena" (p. 667). We see wrong things or see things as wrong in the same way that we see trees or see things as trees and as numbered, odd, in motion, the same or different from other trees, et cetera (p. 667). It is irrelevant whether the explanation of our thus experiencing things lies in "socialization, an inherited nervous system or . . . inborn latent structures of the human