Factuality

Can we claim there exists a universal moral code?

Okay... I'll bite. So what if we can? The primary argument for the utility of a universal moral code is that it would dictate how everyone should act. Okay. But there are already a plethora of ethical, legal and moral codes that people subscribe to, and don't do a particularly good job of getting the community of subscribers to all behave in the same way. Why would one supposedly objective code do any better a job?

Moral facts are basically no different than moral beliefs. The only change is the idea that they are somehow independent of human reason; they are true whether or not anyone believes they are true, in the same way the heliocentric model of the Solar System was accurate even when the conventional wisdom held that the Earth was the center of the Universe. The truth of the heliocentric model however, is not of universal utility; which is part of the reason why it took as long as it did to displace competing theories. While understanding the heliocentric model leads to a number of things, such as the retrograde motion of the superior planets, becoming easier to explain, the number of people for whom the idea is actually important is relatively small. In my day-to-day life, it honestly doesn't matter if the Earth orbits the Sun or the Sun has a remarkably rapid orbit around the Earth. The Sun will still rise in the morning and set in the evening, the seasons will still follow one after the other, I will still have to go to work and bills will continue to come due.

And it is, as I understand it, the same with moral facts. If it is suddenly discovered tomorrow that wearing the color blue violates some universal stricture on how I should live, whether or not I believe in the immorality of blue clothing will have no real effect on my day-to-day life. I understand that the idea that blue should somehow be a violation seems trivial, but that's kind of the point; there's no real reason why moral facts should be any more profound than physical ones. In any event, the question that I have about moral facts is: Whose life would suddenly change? What becomes easier to understand, explain or predict? Understanding that the Sun is at the center of the Solar System makes the motions of the planets easier to understand. Understanding how gravity works makes the communications infrastructure that allows for international communication faster and more resilient through enabling humans to place artificial satellites into orbit and keep them there. What would the transformation of morality from belief to fact do along those lines?

If the world is non-deterministic, moral facts are a lot like historical facts. They may be intensely interesting, but of limited practical utility. Sure, the fact that I owned something yesterday and did not give it away today leads to my ownership of it tomorrow, but that's a matter of social agreement. (And if American history teaches nothing else, it does teach that history is primarily important only as a social agreement.) And even moral facts are only true to the degree that people decide to build such an agreement around them. Again, if one understands that there are moral facts that are yet undiscovered, to the degree that people act in accordance with them, it is through having agreed to do so, in spite of such ignorance. If the world is deterministic, on the other hand, it's unclear of moral facts are as important as historical facts, as a deterministic universe posits that the future is determined by the action of natural laws on the state of the past.

If morality seeks to inform people of the choices they must make, then the point of moral facts would seem to be to eliminate disagreement about those choices. But no fact has shown itself capable of doing that without clear and present effects on the world as we currently know and understand it. And moral facts lack such effects, which is why even if they exist, they have yet to be conclusively discovered. So why not allow people to persist in their beliefs, making them into their own moral facts? Yes, there has been a judgment made that humanity is not particularly moral, but if the facts that they would be judged against are currently unknown, how can that judgment be sustained?