An exercise on the moral landscape

What should be done with the apple?

David Hume’s is–ought problem presents a significant challenge. No amount of factual description, however exhaustive, appears to lead by itself to a prescriptive conclusion. An all-encompassing description of an apple, down to its atomic coordinates, does not tell us what should be done with the apple.

This has encouraged the assertion that prescriptions, including moral doctrines, must be purely subjective: detached from facts and unavailable to objective verification or falsification. But I want to examine what we are calling an objective fact before accepting that division as final.

An objective fact is often understood through its invariance across frames of reference. A hydrogen atom contains a single proton regardless of the observer or the particular occasion of observation. Yet the categories “hydrogen” and “proton” already participate in the statement. Part of its certainty comes from what those terms mean.

Why are these the boundaries through which we divide reality? A proton is characterized through measurements. Different questions could group protons and neutrons together, or distinguish a proton’s constituents. This would not make the original description useless. It would show that one stable object can enter several different systems of distinction.

The category “object” itself becomes less straightforward when we change the scale at which we look. An apple is an array of fruit cells that remains sufficiently invariant at human-relevant spatial and temporal scales. We can recognize it, pick it up, and pass it to another person. Its objecthood is extraordinarily useful.

Over time, however, this apple belonged to a process that began with a seed. At its surface, material passes between what we call the apple and what we call its surroundings. Change the scale or extend the interval, and a clean boundary becomes an achievement rather than an obvious given.

I raise these difficulties because the objective–subjective division may be less simple than it initially appears. A stable description depends partly on the kind of invariance we are looking for.

A different kind of axis

Consider two statements: “There is an apple,” and “An apple comes from an apple seed.” The first concerns a spatial array, with time largely implicit. The second concerns the dynamics of arrays over time, with space largely implicit. Both can be objective in a useful sense, although they do not ask for the same kind of fact.

Could moral statements involve a further kind of fact? They carry temporal and spatial relations within them, but they ask where an action stands on a right–wrong axis. A prescription claiming to be right would not have to satisfy the same criteria as a measurement of length. It would have to satisfy the criteria relevant to what rightness means.

This is where the difficult work begins. We would have to show that such an axis exists independently of a particular observer, and show how a moral statement could be compared against it. Renaming our intuitions a spectrum does not yet give us a spectrum. But it allows the question to be posed more clearly.

Is a right–wrong spectrum as real as the Cartesian coordinates of space, or the somewhat elusive dimension of time? What would count as evidence that an organism is detecting a feature of its world rather than merely projecting a preference onto it?

The eye and the moral sense

Evolution suggests an analogy. The eye is adapted to light. It detects a narrow range of electromagnetic radiation because that range has proved useful in the lives of the organisms that possess it. The eye does not invent light; it encounters light through a constrained structure.

Could our moral intuitions have a comparable relationship to something outside us? Drawing on Haidt, I have in mind distinctions such as care and harm, fairness and cheating, loyalty and betrayal, authority and subversion, sanctity and degradation. These could be imagined as different “colors” of a moral spectrum—different ways of detecting what matters in conduct.

On this interpretation, a moral intuition would be more than an arbitrary declaration. It would be an adaptation to persistent features of a social world. What those features are, and whether detecting them amounts to detecting moral truth, remain the central questions.

Plato and Kant provide very different ways of thinking about an independence of moral truth from immediate desire. Plato’s Forms place a standard beyond the imperfect instance. Kant seeks an authority in reason that does not depend on what we happen to want. The analogy to perception lets me ask how an embodied, historically formed creature might encounter a standard whose authority exceeds an immediate preference.

The analogy is especially interesting because our physical senses are selective. They do not give us every feature of an object, and two observers need not initially perceive the same thing. Yet these limitations do not force us to abandon the idea of a world that constrains perception.

Perhaps disagreement in morality could be approached with the same question: what is each observer sensitive to, and what is each leaving out? That would invite education, experience, and reflection as ways of refining a moral perception, rather than treating every disagreement as evidence that there is nothing to perceive.

Stories as a way of seeing

Stories offer a possible place to investigate this thought. A listener can extract a moral from a narrative even when no explicit proposition has been supplied. Patterns of action and consequence become intelligible as a whole. What is the listener recognizing?

Recurring story structures interest me for this reason. If some sequences are more memorable and more affecting than rearrangements of the same events, it may be worth asking which relations the mind is detecting. Is it a pattern in motivation? In causality? In the fortunes of an agent moving toward or away from a valued end?

Various moral doctrines have also met social and natural pressures over long periods of cultural history. Some have been transmitted and renewed repeatedly. We can ask whether their persistence preserves information about the conditions of living together, just as a conserved biological structure can preserve the results of a long adaptive history.

Longevity by itself cannot settle the moral question. The inquiry I want to pursue is more specific: what did a surviving story or doctrine allow people to notice, endure, or coordinate? What would it lose if we reduced it to a statement isolated from the life in which it had meaning?

This is also why a future vision matters. A destination supplies criteria: some actions move us toward it, others away. My earlier aphorism was to ask a future self when one cannot tell right from wrong. That future self represents a point of view that present urgency may conceal. The destination still needs to be questioned, but its presence already alters what counts as direction.

The trolley problem and the drama in the details

The trolley problem represents an archetypal analytical thrust into the vast sea of ethics. In its familiar form, a person is asked to choose between Scylla and Charybdis: let a train kill five people tied to a track, or pull a lever that directs it toward one person instead.

It has been useful in shedding light on narrow corners of moral decisions. Variations can make a person’s value hierarchy explicit. Replace a person with an animal, alter an age, or change a relationship, and an apparently stable answer shifts. The analytical sketch exposes something about what its participants count.

But the “situation” exists up in the air. We are told that there is a train, some people, tracks, and a lever. By charity, we imagine a real place at a real time, silently filling in an enormous number of details. The train cannot fly. The people cannot magically disappear. Even these simple expectations supply structure the sketch did not state.

Then many details remain. Is it daytime? Is it cold? Can we hear birds? Is a volcano erupting nearby? One may say those are irrelevant. Perhaps.

What about the personalities of the people tied to the track? Who are they? Who is supposed to pull the lever? How are they related, if at all? What happened earlier that day, or the day before? What do the people know about how they came to be here?

Filling in those details enriches the bare analytical sketch with drama, emotional subtlety, and meaning. In the real world, every participant would have a story. Each story would have been intertwined in the strange act of fate that produced this apparent trolley problem.

It would then be more than a choice between numbers. It would be the drama of people: loyalties and betrayals, courage and fear, good and evil, a history reaching into an uncertain future. The moral compass would have something particular to orient itself within.

My conjecture is that sufficiently rich context can make a direction visible that the stripped-down scenario conceals. I do not think the details merely decorate an answer already supplied by an abstract calculation. Some of the work of moral perception may consist precisely in seeing which details matter.

That returns me to the apple. Its atomic coordinates may be exhaustive for one question and almost silent on another. To decide what should be done with it, we need to understand the world in which it has become an object of concern—and the beings for whom the decision means something.