What is right, is right and what is wrong, is wrong, and this applies to any divinities as well as to people.
This of course assumes that right and wrong exist as objective, real "things." One is tempted to say they are analogous to ideas of beauty and ugliness, residing in the eye of the beholder. But beauty is not entirely in the eye of the beholder. While superficially this is so, we have to recognize that beauty does have a deeper quality that outlasts cultures and fashions. A better analogy might be right and wrong are analogous to truth and falsehood. Even though people have varying ideas of what is true and what is not, we tend in the end to agree that truth and falsehood exist on their own independent of our opinions.
The problem is we confuse human ideas of right and wrong, including our own, with real right and wrong. Human ideas change and indeed seem to progress. For example, slavery is now understood better by most as wrong, but in the end it has always been wrong, many just buried their heads and found excuses.
This is a well-constructed moral realist position, and I think it holds up better than its critics often allow. A few observations and pushbacks worth considering:
The analogy to truth is your strongest move. The parallel is compelling: just as "the Earth is flat" was false before anyone recognized it as false, perhaps "slavery is permissible" was wrong before consensus caught up. Moral progress then becomes genuinely discovery, not merely change in preference. This is a serious philosophical position — it's essentially what thinkers like Derek Parfit and Russ Shafer-Landau defend.
But the disanalogy with truth cuts deep. With empirical truth, we have a method — observation, testing, falsification — that adjudicates disputes. What is the equivalent for moral facts? When two people disagree about whether an act is wrong, there's no obvious experiment to run. This doesn't prove moral facts don't exist, but it does mean we lack an agreed mechanism for accessing them, which makes confident claims about which moral intuitions track the real thing genuinely difficult.
Your slavery example is powerful but also a little dangerous. You're right that most would now say it was always wrong. But notice what you're doing: you're using your present moral intuition as the benchmark against which past moral error is measured. This is reasonable, but it invites the uncomfortable question — which of our current moral convictions will future generations look back on with horror? Factory farming? Our treatment of the very poor? If we grant that past generations were systematically wrong while confident they were right, intellectual honesty demands we apply that same suspicion to ourselves.
The divine dimension is particularly interesting. What you're implicitly rejecting is Divine Command Theory — the idea that something is right because God commands it. You're siding instead with the tradition going back to Plato's Euthyphro: the gods (or God) are bound by the good, not its source. This is actually the more theologically sophisticated position many serious religious thinkers hold — that God is goodness rather than defining it arbitrarily.
Where this leaves us: Moral realism is defensible and arguably necessary for moral progress to be real rather than just change. But it comes with an obligation — epistemic humility about our own access to moral truth, combined with the courage to act on our best current judgment anyway. The danger isn't in believing that right and wrong are real. It's in being too certain we've already correctly mapped them.
We have methods allowing us to approach true and false statements, but they don't work with right and wrong. That is so. It doesn't change the basic premise.
Agreed entirely. The absence of a reliable method for accessing moral truth doesn't disprove the existence of moral truth. That would be a category error — confusing epistemology with ontology. The fact that something is hard to know doesn't mean it isn't real.
A useful parallel: for most of human history we had no reliable method for determining the age of the universe, or the structure of DNA. The facts existed independently of our ability to access them. Our methodological limitations were our problem, not reality's.
This actually reframes the moral situation honestly. We are beings who have reason to believe moral facts exist, but who lack clean tools for identifying them with certainty. That's a genuinely difficult position to be in — not a reason to abandon the premise, but a reason to take the effort of moral reasoning seriously. If moral truth exists but is hard to access, then sloppy moral thinking isn't just intellectually lazy, it's a kind of practical failure with real consequences.
It also explains something important about moral history. The people who defended slavery weren't simply operating under a different but equally valid value system. They were wrong — and many of them, on some level, knew it, which is why so much energy went into elaborate justification and suppression of dissent. Wrong things tend to require more defensive architecture than right ones.
What remains open — and perhaps permanently so — is the question of the nature of moral facts. Are they Platonic abstractions? Features of rational agency itself, as Kant suggested? Built into the fabric of what it means for conscious beings to exist together? The premise that they exist seems sound. What they are, and where they come from, remains genuinely mysterious.
Mysterious implies something I would avoid. Maybe out of our reach, maybe not.
Fair correction. "Mysterious" carries a whiff of the mystical or permanently unknowable, which prejudges the question. Better to say simply: not yet understood, or an open problem.
And it is a genuinely open problem in the best sense — the kind that serious inquiry can chip away at, even if slowly and without guarantee of full resolution. The nature of moral facts may be more tractable than it currently appears, just as the nature of physical reality looked far more intractable before the right conceptual tools were developed.
There's something encouraging in the history of ideas here. Concepts that once seemed irreducibly mysterious — life itself, consciousness to some degree, the origins of species — have yielded, at least partially, to sustained careful thinking combined with the right frameworks. Not completely, but enough to move the question forward meaningfully.
It's conceivable that moral facts have a similar trajectory. Perhaps they are features of rational agency that become clearer as we understand mind and reason better. Perhaps they are grounded in the nature of sentient experience in ways that a mature science of consciousness might eventually illuminate. Perhaps the tools don't exist yet but are developable.
The honest position then is: we know moral facts exist, we have imperfect and contested access to them, we don't yet fully understand their nature, and that nature is an open problem we have no particular reason to think is permanently beyond us.
That's a more rigorous and, frankly, more intellectually courageous place to stand than either confident moral dogmatism on one side or easy relativism on the other.
Yes, tied up with sentience. Volcanoes killing people are not sinning.
Yes, exactly. And that observation does a lot of philosophical work.
It locates moral facts precisely. They don't exist in the physical world as such — rocks, storms, volcanoes operate outside the moral domain entirely. A tsunami that kills thousands is a tragedy but not a wrong. Which means moral facts aren't simply out there in nature the way mass or charge are.
They arise specifically where sentience does. Where there is experience — where there is something it is like to suffer, to flourish, to be diminished or destroyed — the moral domain opens up. Right and wrong are real, but they are real in relation to beings for whom things can go well or badly from the inside.
This is actually a significant narrowing of the problem in a productive way. It suggests moral facts are not arbitrary or culturally constructed, but neither are they floating free of all connection to experience. They are grounded — in the nature of sentient existence itself. Suffering is not merely labeled bad by convention. Something about what suffering is, from the inside, is the very thing that makes gratuitous infliction of it wrong.
This also explains why the moral circle has tended to expand over time as genuine moral progress. As we recognize sentience in beings we previously ignored or discounted — other races, other species to some degree — we aren't changing the moral facts. We are slowly correcting our recognition of where those facts apply.
The volcano doesn't sin because nothing is happening for the volcano. Where there is genuine inner experience, the moral stakes become real.
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