Would It Be Better If Morality Weren’t Real?

There are plenty of things we’d do if only morality didn’t get in the way. So here’s a question worth sitting with: would it be better if morality weren’t real?

Imagine you’re a junior in high school. You’d like to do drugs and have sex, but you feel kind of guilty about it. Then your philosophy teacher tells you that morality is nothing more than a religious construct invented to enslave the strong to the weak. You can go beyond good and evil. Become an Übermensch. Enjoy the world without anxiety.

There may or may not be good reasons to believe this. That’s not what I want to ask about. To a certain kind of person—say, a young California kid in the early 90s—a view like that sounds freeing. It sounds like exactly the kind of thing you’d want to be true. So set aside whether it’s true for a moment and ask the other question instead: what would such a view actually entail? And is that something you’d really want?

What Moral Realism Actually Claims

Moral realism is the view that there are objective, true propositions about what is right and wrong, and that they’re made true by the world rather than by us. Take a statement like:

P: Doing drugs and having premarital sex is wrong.

Moral realism says there’s a fact of the matter about whether P is true or false. We can break the view into two commitments.

First, objectivism. At its most fundamental level, morality is objective—true independent of what anyone thinks. Now, some facts about right and wrong might depend on situation or character. Maybe the truth of P depends on where you were raised or who you are. Fine. But even then, that fact is objective. “Whether P is wrong depends on your upbringing” is itself either objectively true or objectively false, regardless of what anyone believes about it. The objectivity goes all the way down.

Second, obligation. Moral truths carry a “should.” If P is true, then I genuinely should not engage in those activities. It’s not a suggestion. The wrongness binds me whether I like it or not.

To reject moral realism is to deny one or both of these. And that’s the move I want to examine—not to refute it, but to show you what it costs.

Why People Want It to Be False

There are respectable philosophical reasons to reject moral realism. It seems to commit you to non-material entities. There are real puzzles about how we’d ever come to know moral facts. And moral realism plays a role in one of the arguments for God’s existence, which gives anyone who wants to avoid that conclusion a motive to deny the premise.

But I’ll be honest about what I’ve seen as a teacher. The students of mine who reject moral realism are rarely moved by those arguments. They’re moved by something simpler: it would be desirable for moral realism to be false. The philosophical reasons, when they’re even aware of them, tend to show up afterward, as rationalizations for a position they’ve already decided to adopt.

And the desirability is real. It would be nice to avoid conflict about what’s right and wrong, especially across cultures. Some indigenous groups have killed and eaten members of neighboring tribes in the belief that it transfers power. You might feel real trepidation about condemning them—someone could always say, “How dare you impose your imperialistic morality on these people.” It would be so much easier if there were simply no morality to argue about. We could skip the uncomfortable conversations entirely.

It would also be nice to do whatever we wanted. Carrying a system of obligation on your shoulders all day can feel oppressive. I have to go to work and contribute to society and behave myself. I’d rather drop out and do whatever I please. Damn morality. And it would be nice to be rid of guilt. Picture our high schooler giving in at a party. He fails P. Now he feels awful about it. Guilt is a miserable feeling. Wouldn’t it be better if he never had to feel it?

So we might talk ourselves into thinking that rejecting moral realism is a desirable thing. The trouble is that almost no one who rejects it has thought through what they’re actually signing up for. It’s a far gnarlier theory than it looks. Here are three features of it that most people never sit with—and two responses they give that show they’ve missed the point.

The Ring of Gyges

First, an illustration that’s about 2,400 years old.

In Plato’s Republic, a character named Glaucon tries to convince Socrates that morality is a sham. He tells the story of Gyges of Lydia, a shepherd who finds a magic ring that turns him invisible. Gyges uses it to murder the king, seduce the queen, and seize the throne. Then Glaucon turns to his audience: You’d do the same, wouldn’t you? The only reason you’ll say no, he claims, is that you don’t want anyone doing it to you. Morality is just a deal we strike to keep others in line.

But here’s the pressure point. What if you could actually get away with it? If there’s nothing inherently evil about the act, then refusing the ring would just be foolish. Hold that thought. It’s the engine behind all three of the problems below.

#1: No Protection

Start with a principle almost everyone accepts:

A person should avoid an action if and only if either (a) the action is wrong, or (b) the repercussions outweigh what the person wants.

Now add the anti-realist’s premise: moral realism is false, so no action is ever wrong in the objective sense. Strike option (a). You’re left with:

A person should avoid an action if and only if the repercussions outweigh what they want.

That’s the whole of practical reasoning once wrongness is gone. And notice what it means for you: other people should harm you, deceive you, and use you whenever doing so gets them what they want and the repercussions don’t catch up with them. Not “might.” Should. It would be irrational of them not to.

The usual reply is to invoke something like the Prisoner’s Dilemma. If everyone behaved this way, life would be miserable, so we should all agree not to. But this gets the situation exactly backward. The agreement only protects you if people are caught defecting. And the case we’re considering—the whole point of the ring—is the case where you won’t get caught. So the anti-realist faces a dilemma. Either you’re assuming people get caught, in which case you’ve changed the subject; or you admit they won’t, in which case there’s nothing wrong with quietly breaking the agreement, since on your own view nothing is wrong at all.

And it works in real life. I once watched Air Force commanders run their squadrons into the ground for a two-year tour—throwing subordinates under the bus whenever anything went wrong, leaving morale shattered and people scrambling to transfer out. Was the Air Force worse off? Absolutely. Was the commander? Not at all. He’d already made rank and moved on, while his successor inherited the wreckage and looked incompetent cleaning it up. The system suffered. The defector won.

If you find yourself answering this with “well, I guess I just believe in people,” you haven’t met the objection. The objection is that, on your view, the people who exploit you are the ones behaving rationally.

#2: No Value

Now imagine you spend your whole life trying to do good. You work to solve hunger, to fight injustice, to leave the world better than you found it.

One day you meet two other men. One is a serial predator who lured and assaulted hundreds of children and filmed it. The other is a revolutionary leader responsible, by the most serious estimates, for the deaths of tens of millions.

What’s the difference between the three of you?

If moral realism is false, the answer is: nothing. There is no fact that makes your life better than theirs, because “better” would have to refer to something objective, and you’ve denied there’s any such thing. You can prefer your life. You can’t say it was better. Yet the pull to say it was better—that what you did mattered in a way that what they did did not—is about as strong as any conviction a human being has. That pull only makes sense if there’s such a thing as better and worse in the first place.

#3: No Motivation

Suppose you’re a professional ethicist who rejects moral realism. What’s your job, exactly? Roughly two things. First, describe what people are actually doing when they mistakenly believe they’re engaged in moral reasoning. Second, maybe offer a set of rules worth living by.

The descriptive part deflates fast. When you say “rape is bad,” you don’t mean it’s bad—you mean you dislike it. You’re saying something closer to “boo for rape.” The prescriptive part sounds better but doesn’t hold. Sure, you can say: You’re free to do that, but it would be irrational, where rationality is some ideal we might aspire to. Or: you’re free to do that, but it cuts against the behaviors evolution selected for, where living in line with our evolutionary history is the goal.

Here’s the catch. The moment we don’t want to aspire to those goals, there’s no reason to. On moral realism, it might genuinely be the case that being rational is good—and that entails we should be rational. But once you’ve rejected moral realism, there’s no such thing as a good thing. So we might try to be rational, but the only sense in which we “should” is that we happen to want to. And what about the moment we don’t want to? Then we shouldn’t.

People push back: Some moral systems are attractive. We’d want to follow them. But we’re under no obligation to be consistent. Say you persuade me that the world would be better if we all lived as utilitarians, and I start doing it. Then one afternoon I just don’t feel like it. I pass a man working in front of a furnace pit, realize I could push him in and never be caught, feel a thrill, and do it. Then I go back to being a utilitarian. Was I inconsistent? Sure. Oh well—inconsistency isn’t good or evil either. And if there’s no reason to apply a moral code consistently, then it isn’t really a moral code. A code only becomes a code at the exact moment you want to break it but hold yourself to it anyway.

People also accuse me of arguing that everyone would become a monster. Two things. First, if moral realism is false, there’s no such thing as a monster—there’s no real difference between the sadist and the humanitarian—so there’s nothing to be insulted by. Second, that’s not my claim. I’m not saying anti-realists will do terrible things. I’m saying that on their view they’d have no reason not to. And notice: I’m the moral realist here. I think a person who did these things would be evil. I can say that. The anti-realist is the one who can’t.

Two Responses That Miss the Point

When I lay all this out, two reactions come up again and again, and both reveal the misunderstanding.

The Yuck Response. Students will say, “Well, I guess if that’s how you really want to live…”, looking at me as though I’d be abhorrent if I actually did any of it. What’s happening, I think, is that they want to shut the possibility down but no longer have the philosophical resources to do it—so they reach for shame instead. But the abhorrence they feel is just the yuck response you’d feel watching someone from another country eat something you don’t eat. In some places people eat cockroaches. I find it gross; I’d get used to it if I had to. The yuck factor is nothing more than inexperience. Worse, on their own view, you secretly want to do the same things and have merely been conditioned not to—so it’s irrational not to overcome the conditioning.

The Veiled Morality Response. Others swap in a different word for “good”: “They can do that, but it won’t be helpful.” Watch the substitution. “Helpful” has quietly taken the place of “good”—an attempt to smuggle morality back into the evaluation. So ask the next question: why would being helpful be relevant? If moral realism is false, helpfulness is neither good nor bad. Whenever you catch one of these substitutions, the test is simple: So? Why would that matter?

The Hardest Part: Moral Emotion

One last consideration. There are two kinds of evil. Natural evils—earthquakes, disease, famine. And moral evils—someone commits an injustice, someone molests a child, someone grows rich off others’ suffering, someone makes a YouTube video about the horrors of rejecting moral realism.

It’s natural to react emotionally to both. You’re sad about an earthquake; you’re angry that a pandemic wrecked your year. But moral evil comes with something extra: indignation. When someone commits a cruel act, we’re angry in a different way than we are at cancer. And the anger has a target. In a natural disaster we’re upset that something happened; in a moral evil our reaction is aimed at the person.

If moral realism is false, there’s no reason for that. A human being harming another, on this view, is no different in kind from a falling rock. So, reasoning it through, the anti-realist should meet moral evils with a strange detachment—upset that it occurred, maybe, but in no way indignant, and certainly not angry at anyone.

Now go try to live that. Watch what happens when someone you love is assaulted. Can you really stand there thinking, Damn, I’m so bummed that happened? Can you keep from being angry at the person who did it? Can you avoid the sense that a wrong was done? That’s an enormous thing to ask of yourself. But that’s exactly what rejecting moral realism asks.

Where This Leaves Us

My goal here hasn’t been to prove that moral realism is true. There are arguments for that, and they’re worth their own conversation. My goal has been narrower: to help you feel the austerity of the alternative.

Rejecting moral realism leaves you with no protection from those who would use you, no way to say your life of service was better than a life of cruelty, no reason to keep any moral commitment the moment you’d rather not, and no grounds for the indignation you feel when someone you love is harmed. That’s the actual shape of the view. It’s a great deal gnarlier than “freedom from guilt.”

So when it seems freeing to believe morality isn’t real, it’s worth asking the second question, the one the high schooler never gets around to: Is it really desirable? Once you see what it entails, I think the answer is a lot less obvious than it first appeared.