24.230 Paper 1: Can moral facts be an explanation?

24.230 Prof. Khoo Can moral facts be an explanation? An important question that has played a role in the debate between moral naturalism and non-naturalism is whether or not there are any moral explanations of non-moral facts. In this paper, I aim to describe two major positions in the debate and give reasons why I think that, if moral facts exist and are objective, moral explanations are possible. I will also argue that the answer to our main question is affected by whether or not the moral norms we accept are objective or relativistic. In his paper “Ethics and Observation”, Gilbert Harman argues that there are no moral explanations of non-moral facts. Harman’s view, however, should not be considered just as a version of skepticism (that is, certain knowledge is impossible so observations cannot be used as evidence in general); as a matter of fact, he argues that observations can provide evidence to scientific theories whenever they are “relevant to a reasonable explanation of why the observation was made” (Harman, p. 33). The same, however, does not hold for observations of the moral kind, whose truth or falsity he considers “completely irrelevant to any reasonable explanation” of why the observation was made (Harman, p. 33). As a consequence of that, the claim about observations providing evidence for scientific theories just does not hold when we are talking about moral observations. In Harman’s view, then, whenever we see something that makes us make a moral judgment of any sort, we can explain our reaction by referring only to the non-moral aspects of our observation. This is made clear by an example that Harman makes: suppose that a