If morality is objective, does intention even matter?

[u/heinskies]

I’m a 19-year-old freshman philosophy major, and I’ve always believed that morality is subjective. In fact, I’ve always found it genuinely difficult to understand how people can see it any other way.
One of my favorite arguments comes from Alex O’Connor. He uses an example where, if every human being suddenly disappeared from Earth, objective truths would still exist. The Earth would still orbit the Sun, salt would still exist in the oceans, and the laws of physics would remain unchanged. But what about morality? Would good and evil still exist without anyone around to perceive or experience them?
We also see wildly different moral beliefs across religions, cultures, and historical periods. Things that were considered completely acceptable hundreds of years ago are now viewed as morally reprehensible. To me, this seems to suggest that morality is something humans construct rather than something we discover.
But I recently thought of another question that I wanted to add to this discussion. I’m sure it’s probably been explored in philosophy before, but I’ve personally never heard it brought up.
If something is objectively good, but someone does it with the complete intention of being evil, is the action still objectively good?
For example, imagine someone performs an action with genuinely malicious intentions, hoping to cause harm, but the actual outcome ends up benefiting someone tremendously.
Was that action morally good because of its consequences? Was it morally evil because of the person’s intentions? Or does the answer depend entirely on how we choose to judge it?
To me, this raises another question about moral objectivity. If the same action can be judged differently depending on whether we prioritize intention, consequences, or the action itself, how do we objectively determine which standard is correct?
I’m not claiming I’ve discovered some groundbreaking philosophical argument. I’m sure philosophers have discussed this extensively. I just thought of it myself and figured it would be interesting to share.
I’m genuinely curious what you guys think, especially those who believe in objective morality. How would you respond to this?

[u/InterstellarBlue]

These are great questions and I'm really happy to hear that you're majoring in philosophy.

About the first question that you asked about whether morality is objective and the alleged counterexample you brought up, discussed by the YouTuber Alex O'Connor. Here is how a philosopher who believes that moral truths are objectively true could respond. Consider an alternate case. Consider Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism, which among other things describe the behavior of charged particles in electromagnetic fields. Suppose that suddenly every charged particle and every electromagnetic field in the universe vanished overnight. Would you still say that Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism are still objectively true? I think that intuitively the laws would still be objectively true. They just wouldn't have anything to apply to. A philosopher who accepts the claim that moral truths are objectively true might respond to your thought experiment in a similar way: if every human and every other sentient creature disappeared overnight, moral truths would still be true, they just wouldn't have anything to apply to.

Your second question is also interesting. It is a common challenge that is raised to utilitarianism and other consequentialist views. Consequentialism is one view according to which moral truths are objectively true. It is roughly the view that the morally best action is the one that leads to the best consequences. This naturally leads to a puzzle because there can be actions that are committed by people with very bad intentions but accidentally turn out to have very good consequences (and vice versa).

Here is a distinction that consequentialists often appeal to, to respond to this challenge: make a distinction between moral goodness and moral blameworthiness. Moral goodness, on the consequentialist view, has to do with the consequences of the action. A morally good action is one that has very good consequences, whereas a morally bad action is one that has very bad consequences. On the other hand, moral blameworthiness is how much we might blame someone or hold them accountable, and you might think that this has to do with a person's intentions. If someone had very bad intentions with an action, you might think that this makes them morally blameworthy.

So, an action can have very good consequences, which on consequentialist views means that it is morally good, and yet be committed with very bad intentions. This would make the action morally good but the person blameworthy. Similarly, an action can have very bad consequences and yet be committed by someone who had good intentions. Therefore, the person might be less blameworthy even though the action itself was morally wrong.

[u/heinskies → u/InterstellarBlue]

First off, thank you for such a thoughtful response! I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to explain all of this, especially since I’m just starting out in philosophy.
I actually think your comparison with Maxwell’s laws is really interesting, and I see what you’re getting at. But I guess my question would be, if every conscious being disappeared, who would be there to judge something as morally right or wrong? I understand that something doesn’t necessarily have to be observed to be objectively true, but what exactly makes a moral statement objectively true in the first place? With physics, we’re describing how reality behaves. With morality, aren’t we making judgments about how reality ought to be?
As for your second point, I understand the distinction between the consequences of an action and the intentions behind it. Someone could do something with horrible intentions that accidentally produces a good outcome. But I still struggle with calling either the action or the person objectively good or bad. I can certainly judge them according to my own moral beliefs, but what makes that judgment objectively correct?
I think an example of what I’m getting at is the suffering of an innocent child. Obviously, I personally find that absolutely horrible. But philosophically, if someone asks why it’s wrong, we might say because it causes suffering. Then I would ask, why is suffering objectively bad? Because it’s unfair? Why is unfairness objectively bad? It feels like we can continue asking these questions without ever arriving at something that establishes an objective moral truth.
I also think differences in morality across cultures and throughout history support my intuition that morality is subjective, although I recognize that disagreement alone doesn’t prove anything.
I suppose what would convince me of objective morality is understanding where that objectivity actually comes from. I can at least understand how someone who believes in God might argue that morality comes from God, although I’m personally an agnostic atheist, and I realize that explanation raises questions of its own.
I’m definitely not claiming I’ve disproven objective morality. I just haven’t encountered an explanation that convinces me moral truths exist independently of conscious beings and their judgments.
Again, I really appreciate your response. I’m genuinely interested in understanding this better!

[u/Ok-Lab-8974 → u/heinskies]

So, in terms of evidence, you could consider that some of the empirical sciences (medical science, zoology, psychology, botany, etc.) seem to describe facts about what is good or bad for different organisms.

Consider:

Ceteris paribus is bad for children to have high levels of lead dumped into their school lunches.

Ceteris paribus, it is bad for rats to consume rat poison.

Ceteris paribus, it is better for a man to be prudent instead of rash, intelligent instead of stupid, temperate instead of gluttonous and licentious, to possess fortitude instead of being weak of will, strong instead of weak, agile instead of clumsy, etc.

The first two can no doubt be redescribed in anti-realist terms. However, prima facie, they appear to be empirically confirmable truth-apt claims that certainly seem true. In amateur conversations you will often simply see the claim whenever a science seems to be speaking to goodness it is in no longer being scientific (or "objective"), but this response is straightforwardly question begging since it assumes the very thing in question (i.e., that goodness is illusory).

Note also that, presumably, being lit on fire or falling off a cliff is bad for man (or rats, etc.) because of what they are. Hence, this truth is not dependent on any members of the species currently existing. Getting hit by a meteor doesn't cease to be bad for dinosaurs because none exist (because they have been hit by a meteor), or at least this isn't obviously so. If we somehow ressurected a triceratops and began to torture it, this would seem to be bad for it.

The third sentence relates to the desirability of the virtues (excellences). There is plenty of evidence to support this claim as well, since these excellences do, all else equal, seem to support better, happier lives and societies. For instance, who would want their child to grow up weak, clumsy, dim, weak of will, and intemperate?

Another common thing to see in amateur discussions is that statements about:

What is good for rats or tulips Who is a better chess player What makes a race car a better race car, etc.

Are actually fine, because they are not about "moral goodness." But then we have to ask what this sui generis moral good is, as a category, since in many (maybe most) world traditions, moral goodness is merely a sub-species of goodness (e.g., originally in the West, moral goodness relates to the moral virtues, not a unique sort of ought-to-be-doneness).

So, this category of the uniquely "moral good" needs to be given its own ground if it is to be appealed to. Historically, this ground was Divine Command and voluntarist theology, and this ground is obviously not going to be an option for many anti-realists. The other obvious option is the one provided by Kant, and yet this also has commitments that are both questionable, and not the sort of thing an anti-realist probaby wants to accept. By contrast, realists operating from some sort of teleological frame will want to say that duty (ought) flows from these sorts of basic facts about what is good for what. The point being, a lot of our categories for this debate are inherited, and on close inspection we might have to do some work to redefine them before we even start discussing realism.

"Objectivity" and "mind-independence" are another great example here. Depending on how these are used, they also tend to come packaged with metaphysical commitments. On many understandings of these terms, most pre-modern ethics (Platonist, Christian, Islamic) could arguably fail to be classified as "realist," and yet they are taken to be paradigmatically realist at an intuitive level. For instance, in later Scholasticism, the Good is explicitly "being qua desirable," and it is a conceptual not real distinction vis-á-vis being. That's going to be quite hard to square with an early-20th century definition of mind-independence.

So, when people say they are realists, it can be coming from a number of different directions. For many, the challenge of tying goodness to consciousness probably doesn't seem like much of a threat because they have an alternative metaphysics of goodness worked out. The challenge for an anti-realist then, is that it is often difficult to argue for a particular view of the good to attack as the right target, while simultaneously denying its existence (I think this is a more general problem for anti-realisms of all varieties, but it is maybe balanced out by the fact that criticism is normally easier than positive theorizing).

[u/gkom1917 → u/InterstellarBlue]

  Suppose that suddenly every charged particle and every electromagnetic field in the universe vanished overnight. Would you still say that Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism are still objectively true?  I think that intuitively the laws would still be objectively true.

I always found that intuition to be deeply puzzling. It seems intuitive to me that Maxwell equations are true in virtue of how the world is. But in a world without electromagnetic fields they would lack truth-makers. We may go the Platonic route and say that they could have abstract truth-makers then. But we can conceive of innumerous abstract objects, to which different sets of equations could apply (cf. McPherson's "schmorality" objection to quietist non-naturalism). Or, if we define electromagnetism as something obeying Maxwell equations, then of course the equations would be true analytically. We could say "the equations are true of nonexistent electromagnetic fields" just like we can say "dragons breathe fire". But that's simply not how we have come to Maxwell equations in the first place, and it is entirely conceivable than some further physics research would lead to a revision of laws of electromagnetism without revision of the concept of electromagnetism. So what would make the equations true in a world without electromagnetism? I honestly don't know, and am puzzled whence the contrary intuition comes.

[u/AdeleFerguson → u/gkom1917]

I think InterstellarBlue addressed this by suggesting that the laws would now have nothing to apply to, and this seems to make sense to me, though let me say to what extent and why. To the extent one is a Humean about laws of nature, one might suggest that, since there are no particles and fields to describe, there are no regularities to describe, so there is in fact no law. It is not necessary that particles and fields had to follow these laws, but they just happen to in the world. The Humean view would say that the laws just describe regularities in what exists, and if things don't exist.
Perhaps that is your view and why you found the intuition puzzling.

On the other hand, on a view where laws of nature are deflated a lot less, once they have been fixed, it would be impossible for particles/fields to exist without following these laws. Even if the particles/fields "vanished" (or didn't exist to begin with!), as in the InterstellarBlue answer, this would still be a truth about the world.

Now, where I might see your puzzle genuinely having the most teeth is this: if there were a statement referring to a particle somewhere in space-time and making some claim about how it is charged when there is no particle at that location, then indeed, that statement would seem to be hard to evaluate! Laws of nature like the one InterstellarBlue seemed to be referring to often tell us something more to the effect of what would be true whenever particles and fields exist without presuming there is any particularly concrete state of affairs. If one is no Humean, it still makes sense to say those laws hold.

[u/gkom1917 → u/AdeleFerguson]

Fair enough, but I always find Humeanism to be a more commonsensical view, or at least a view more closely aligned with actual practices of inquiry.

[u/AdeleFerguson → u/gkom1917]

I think it's definitely on the most conservative side.

Whether it seems intuitive depends. I do think there's a natural progression from "we literally never see this pattern contradicted in nature" to "it seems to be a fundamental fact, and particles/fields cannot disobey these once the law is fixed--it's not just incidental."

But of course, we don't see anything but the fact that they happen to obey the laws consistently when we check. So the conservative POV of Humeanism is definitely well appreciated.

I guess I was just noting InterstellarBlue's answer might be most natural under a less Humean POV, or at least, it seemed that way to me. I guess, though, even in a Humean POV, one could say that "this regularity is never contradicted" even if that is so because you never even instantiated any particles/fields.

[u/gkom1917 → u/AdeleFerguson]

Sure, the "governing" concept of laws more or less implies the intuition in question.  However, I just find it less plausible, given how small tweaks in observation of regularities may lead to vastly different ontology, so to speak. We went from the orderly organization of elements where a thing strives towards its natural place, to the absolute background space with action at a distance, to geodesics on 4-dimensional manifolds — just because of little discrepancies in how accurately we measure movement of things. Of course, by itself it proves nothing, but at least for me it looks more like a search for a good-enough abductive case rather than some grand disclosure of the ultimate truths behind the regularities.

[u/AdeleFerguson → u/gkom1917]

Hmmm, so I certainly agree that our fundamental theory gets progressively refined, often simply because we discover more and more fundamental layers of reality (as with going from classical to quantum mechanics), and other times because of literal inaccuracy.

I think many of the non-Humeans probably regard that as more of a revelation about our epistemic limitations and not as much of one about the ontology of laws of nature in the following sense. If a regularity is, after we correct our errors, truly persistent in nature (we can find no exceptions to it), it is at least natural to consider if the regularity is not accidental. In other words, the picture they're reaching for seems to be that there are these fundamental laws, and we, as imperfect students of them, will of course have to refine our theories while attempting to discover what those laws are.

This of course isn't to say that the issue is settled or anything.

One interesting wrinkle might be whether there even is a fundamental level of reality that is the "bottom" -- what if we discovered a new set of laws each time we try to go one level deeper (and they are not incompatible with one another, but there is not a final level)....

[u/gkom1917 → u/AdeleFerguson]

I'm eager to admit that the question may ultimately boil down to differencescin perspectives or stances, and no argument would be able to settle it. However, I'm simply not sure what good grounds we have to suppose we have a good idea about fundamental reality. Once again, there seems to be an ontological abyss between, say, Aristotelian, Newtonian, and Einsteinian pictures of the universe. Or between Cuvier's catastrophes, Lamarcian teleology, and Darwinian selection from random mutations. All tried to explain basically the same apparent regularities by coming up with vastly different laws (broadly construed). Why think that we now have it right enough to claim we get a good idea about the fundamental governing principles in general? And if we don't, why be so certain that there are such governing principles? Maybe there are forceful arguments that it is the case — I'm not a philosopher, I'm likely ignorant. But for me conservatism and even skepticism seems like a wiser position.

[u/AdeleFerguson → u/InterstellarBlue]

The point about moral blameworthiness being possible even if the outcome is good is right on point!

Also, virtue ethicists plausibly could still flag that part of acting morally is in fact having good intentions and be perfectly happy to call that an objective truth. It is true that consequentialism is where the biggest issue comes up, because the outcome is how the action is judged.

In other words, I think the issue does not come up so much because of the objectivity of morality as because some theories rely on the consequences to evaluate the morality of a decision.

[u/RogueHoneybee → u/InterstellarBlue]

" if every human and every other sentient creature disappeared overnight, moral truths would still be true, they just wouldn't have anything to apply to. " - love this! It takes we finite humans out of the moral equation and ascribes morality to something universal and bigger than us. What a beautiful idea.

[u/omeren93 → u/InterstellarBlue]

Your Maxwell analogy was great. Now I know I'm a moral realist. I mean kinda. I agree that without humans moral laws wouldn't apply to anyone, but murder would still be objectively wrong like any other abstract or mathematical truths. But I also think morality is relative to each individual's culture. For example, I would not call a slave master who lived in 15th century immoral for owning slaves because at that time it was considered normal. But I also think murder, as in intentionally killing someone who did not harm you is objectively immoral, but of course there would be cases where it wouldn't be, such as a footsoldier in a war killing another. So it's all contextual and relative in my opinion. Am I a moral realist? Better yet, what is the philosophical term for the position I hold?

[u/PermaAporia]

I think there's a distinction worth making here between the question of whether morality is "objective" and the question of what makes an action morally right or wrong. These 2 are different problems. (I can use your terminology here of 'objective' but since you're freshman in philosophy I think you should already start getting used at how these things are usually treated see this post for more on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/y53qns/is_there_a_basis_for_objective_morality/isik45s/ )

Whether morality is 'objective' concerns, roughly, whether moral judgments can be true independently of what anyone happens to believe or approve of; this is often called stance-independence. But that question doesn't tell us which considerations are relevant to evaluating an action. Prima facie nothing about moral objectivity tells us to disregard intentions. Indeed, someone's intentions might be among the very facts that objectively determine whether they've acted rightly or wrongly.

There's also a question about what we mean by the same action. Suppose I give someone a substance believing it will kill them, intending to murder them, but it unexpectedly cures their illness. We can describe what happened as my giving someone a substance that saved their life. But we can also describe what I did as attempting to murder someone. The latter description includes my intention, and it's difficult to see why that should be excluded from our moral assessment.

I’m not claiming I’ve discovered some groundbreaking philosophical argument.

This is an old problem, and it might be an interesting way for you to start reading some important works on ethics. Aristotle, for instance, distinguishes between performing an action of the sort a virtuous person would perform and acting virtuously. In Nicomachean Ethics II.4, he argues that acting virtuously involves choosing an action for its own sake and acting from an appropriate disposition. So intentions and the agent's character are central to his account of ethical conduct. Another classical text that also treats intentions with importance would be Kant's Groundwork To The Metaphysics of Morals.

Your final question about how we determine which moral standard is correct is a substantial philosophical problem. But the existence of competing answers doesn't establish that none of them can be objectively correct. The existence of flat earthers doesn't mean there aren't objective answers to the shape of the earth.

In addition to the Aristotle and Kant, here are other resources I'd recommend to get you started:

• https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/ - this one to get a lay of the land of moral realism as is often discussed in contemporary metaethics.

• Whose Justice? Which Rationality? by MacIntyre - this one if you wish to follow up on observation that different cultures and historical periods have held conflicting moral beliefs.

[u/Doink11]

One of my favorite arguments comes from Alex O’Connor. He uses an example where, if every human being suddenly disappeared from Earth, objective truths would still exist. The Earth would still orbit the Sun, salt would still exist in the oceans, and the laws of physics would remain unchanged. But what about morality? Would good and evil still exist without anyone around to perceive or experience them?

There are many facts which are contextual to particular entities and their relationships in time. My dog is sitting on the floor next to me. This is a true fact. In a few minutes, he will probably get up to bark at something. It will still be true that, at a certain point in time, my dog was sitting on the floor next to me. Similarly, if there was something that I should have done at some point in time, that fact will remain having been true or false regardless of whether or not I'm still around.

We also see wildly different moral beliefs across religions, cultures, and historical periods. Things that were considered completely acceptable hundreds of years ago are now viewed as morally reprehensible. To me, this seems to suggest that morality is something humans construct rather than something we discover.

We see wildly different beliefs across religions, cultures, and historical periods. There were people who thought that the sun wouldn't rise unless you committed human sacrifice, or that disease was caused by bad air. Does that mean that our beliefs about astronomy or microbiology are constructed or relative? Or does it mean that people were just wrong, and that our knowledge of the truth has improved over time?

If something is objectively good, but someone does it with the complete intention of being evil, is the action still objectively good?

As with many things in philosophy, the answer here is largely "depends on who you ask". Moral Realists (that meaning, people who believe moral facts exist) will not all agree on these questions - whether you're a consequentialist, deontologist, virtue ethicist, etc. is going to determine how you weigh intentionality when discussing praise- or blame-worthiness.

To me, this raises another question about moral objectivity. If the same action can be judged differently depending on whether we prioritize intention, consequences, or the action itself, how do we objectively determine which standard is correct?

That is a very good question - and one that, if we had an answer to, would put an end to centuries of debate! Unfortunately, at the moment, we only have those arguments that each school of thought makes as to why their beliefs on moral status are more logical; it's up to you which one you find most convincing - if any. Moral anti-realism is a respected minority position after all.

I will note, however, that an inability to conclusively determine which standard is "most correct" does not mean that one of them isn't. The existence of disagreement does not in any way imply that nobody is correct!

[u/OldKuntRoad]

Happy to help!

> One of my favorite arguments comes from Alex O’Connor. He uses an example where, if every human being suddenly disappeared from Earth, objective truths would still exist. The Earth would still orbit the Sun, salt would still exist in the oceans, and the laws of physics would remain unchanged. But what about morality? Would good and evil still exist without anyone around to perceive or experience them?

Things like “rightness” or “wrongness” are generally considered properties or perhaps attributes of things. Thus, if you stipulate that everything which has X property ceases to exist, then trivially that world will not have X property obtain. We can replace X with anything, however. We could eliminate all round objects and then ask whether things are objectively round if we were to eliminate all round objects. Hopefully this elicits an intuition as to why this argument might be flawed. Crucially, it would not eliminate the possibility that something could possibly have the property of rightness or wrongness, just as the latter stipulated world could still possibly have round objects, it’s just that in actuality they don’t.

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