Moral Realism

 

Sterling's Core Stoicism: The Six Philosophical Commitments

Three: Moral Realism

The Commitment

Virtue is genuinely and objectively the only good. Vice is genuinely and objectively the only evil. Externals are genuinely and objectively indifferent. These are not preferences, conventions, cultural agreements, or useful fictions. They are facts about moral reality — features of the world that obtain independently of what any agent thinks or feels about them.

Why Sterling Needs It

The examination at Step Four tests the impression against a standard. That standard must be objective for the test to be a real test rather than a comparison of preferences. If "virtue is the only good" is merely a Stoic preference or cultural convention, the examination produces nothing — it only confirms that the impression conflicts with Stoic taste. The correspondence test requires that there be something to correspond to. Moral realism is what makes that something real.

Moral realism also grounds the discipline of desire. The theorem that if we value only virtue we will both judge truly and be immune to all unhappiness only holds if virtue really is the only good. If it is merely stipulated as such within the Stoic system, the immunity to unhappiness is purchased by arbitrary redefinition rather than by correct alignment with reality.

The source texts state the point directly: "Without this realism, examination would collapse into coherence, comfort, or agreement. It would no longer be testing but harmonizing. Examination is possible only because truth is not negotiable."

Moral realism is also operative at Step One — before the examination begins. The impression arrives claiming to detect real moral properties. "I have been harmed" claims that real harm has occurred — not that harm seems to have occurred, not that the agent dislikes what happened, but that objective harm is present as a feature of the situation. The impression says "This IS bad," not "This seems bad to me." Without moral realism there is no false value — there are only feelings and preferences. The taxonomy of error that makes Stoic practice possible requires it.

The Competing Positions

Moral subjectivism holds that moral judgments express the feelings or attitudes of the agent rather than reporting objective facts. "Virtue is good" means something like "I approve of virtue." There are no moral facts to be right or wrong about.

Moral relativism holds that moral judgments are true or false relative to a cultural framework or set of conventions. What is genuinely good within one framework may be genuinely bad within another. There is no framework-independent moral reality.

Error theory holds that moral judgments purport to report objective moral facts but that there are no such facts. All moral judgments are therefore false. J. L. Mackie is the most prominent defender of this position. On his account the world simply does not contain the kind of objective prescriptive properties that moral realism requires.

Constructivism holds that moral facts are constructed through rational procedures — what rational agents would agree to under ideal conditions — rather than discovered as pre-existing features of reality. Moral truth is the output of a procedure rather than an independent fact.

The Answers

Against subjectivism: if moral judgments express feelings rather than report facts, the examination has no objective criterion. The verdict "this impression is false" means only "I disapprove of this impression." Two agents with different feelings would reach different verdicts with equal validity. More fundamentally — the impression itself claims to report objective moral facts. "I have been harmed" is not a report of a feeling. It is a claim about reality. Subjectivism cannot account for the structure of the impression itself.

Against relativism: if moral truth is framework-relative, the Stoic framework has no more claim to correctness than any other. The examination tests impressions against Stoic standards — but why those standards rather than others? Relativism has no answer. Sterling's framework requires that the standards be correct rather than merely Stoic.

Against error theory: Mackie argues that objective prescriptive properties would be metaphysically strange — unlike anything else in the natural world. Sterling's response is to accept this and ground it in the substance dualist framework. The rational faculty is itself not governed by physical law. A non-physical substance standing in relation to non-physical moral facts is not more mysterious than a physical substance standing in relation to physical facts. The strangeness argument assumes physicalism. Once physicalism is rejected the argument loses its force.

Against constructivism: constructed moral facts depend on the procedure that generates them. They are not discovered but made. This means they cannot serve as the independent standard the examination requires — they are outputs of rational agreement, not features of reality that rational agreement tracks. Sterling needs moral facts that the rational faculty can be right or wrong about, not facts that the rational faculty produces.

The positive case rests on the structure of moral experience and the requirements of the practice. Moral experience presents itself as tracking something real — as being right or wrong about how things are, not merely expressing how one feels. The examination requires a real standard. The correspondence test requires something to correspond to. Moral realism is the only position that provides both.