Some Thoughts About Morality

Recently I have been caught by the question of Fact/Value Distinction. It seems to me that human beings are moral animals is just a truism, but the real problem here is the matter of justification. How do you know that? How do you know that human beings are different from animals, even thought animals which have high intelligence such as dolphins? MacIntyre claims in his book, Dependent Rational Animals, that even though dolphins are to a great extent similar to human beings in terms of their abilities to communicate with their fellow dolphins, to learn from their human trainers, and to have the feeling of happiness when they are rewarded by successfully fininishing the tasks, human beings are different from animals in an essential way that they can establish and develop such virtues as giving and receiving.

However, what makes me feel unsatisfied is that I don't see any difference between dolphins and human beings, if the sense of giving and receiving, the ability to learn and communicate with others, and the phenomenon of feeling happy or sorrow of human beings are only in a quantitative way superior to those of dolphin. Either dolphins are moral beings as human beings, or human beings are non-moral beings as intelligent dolphins. If not so, at least one reason is needed to show that where the sense of morality comes from to transit animals that are mere animals without sense of morality into the human animals knowing eating their fellow animals are vicious. It might be helpful here to remind people of the question raised by Hume that what makes the facts, that a young tree eats his mother tree for the sake of living and the other fact that a young man eats his mother, morally different, for the same reason for living? What makes cannibalism a moral issue?

My point of view is based on the Humean credo of the distinction between fact and value. Moral judgment is the result of human projection. But there are many moral philosophers objecting to such understanding, for they argue that morality has a realistic foundation, independent of human projections, on which we are able to have a solid and basic moral judgment concerning the vice of killing, lying, cannibalism etc. These philosophers strongly repudiate such interpretation of morality as emotivism which they belive is going to destroy the objectivity of the domain of morality. On the part of the objectivity of morality I agree with these philosophers, but I doubt their belief in the relationship between the moral objectivity and the denial of distinction between fact and value.

It is factually true that human beings have such and such features, emotions, and rational capacities, but it is a mystery that the same fact of cannibalism means differently between humans and trees. If one answers that because human beings are moral animals while trees are not, one can be further asked for a justification: why human beins are moral animals or how do you know that? I imagine one response for him:

He might claim that because cannibalism is intrinsically vicious and human beings know that, But I　can further challenge him by asking how do you know human beings know rightly about the badness of cannibalism? Of course most sane people know that canniblism should be forbidded as vicious, but what matters here is the problem of why. Unless one ends up being a Moore who raises both of his hands as two proofs for the external world, I can keep asking the question: what if all human beings’ knowing some facts as intrinsically morally wrong turns out out to be wrong?

Repudiating my question as insanely skeptical is unfair, because I am not aiming at destroying whatever conclusion offered by anyone, but only curious about the reason and hope that he can give me a more explicit and convincing explanation which is not just an assertion as "self-obvious".

Also, trying to prevent me from investigating by appealing to God, which seems better than by ending up claiming intrinsic goodness as self-explanatory, is not as convincing as he believes to be. However, I can see no better way. Of course there are other ways such as claiming the objectivity of rationality, or the objectivity of human passions such as the sense of sympathy, but they are all liable to be challenged by the question of “HOW do you know that is not ILLUSORY?” It drives me crazy.

Personally speaking, I believe that value becomes value because it is valued as value. Even in the fact that human beings are moral animals we can find something not merely facutal. More precisely, morality becomes morality because it is moralized. But the same question can always emerge: how do you know that?

I just know it．I just believe it. No better way.