Response Paper Moral Objectivism through Lens of Russ Shafer-Landau

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Moral Objectivism through the Lens of Russ Shafer-Landau
Shafer-Landau addresses the concept of moral skepticism by holding four major positions within moral skepticism. This essay provides a summary of the four positions while analyzing Shafer-Landau’s effectiveness in supporting his position.
Shafer-Landau’s first position is that moral standards are naturally occurring and universally existing. He points out that good and evil have always been present amongst us, but we wrongly thought they stopped existing (Shafer-Landau 6). As such, we cannot refute the existence of moral standards or truths based on such a premise. In his view, the universal existence of morals implies that moral laws apply to all people, notwithstanding what is acceptable to them (41). This view, however, is not persuasive enough to support his position. If moral rules are universal and objective, then there should be no disagreements between people concerning moral standards and objectivity. If moral laws applied to everyone, then there should be no extreme views on morality. For instance, Shafer-Landau points out to the disagreements that arise among people when trying to determine whether killing can be morally justifiable (43). If the moral rule against killing was universal, there would be no need to justify killing, whatever the situation. This does not help his case because it raises contradicting views that have already been used in support of moral skepticism.
Also, Shafer-Landau posits that moral truths are independent of personal opinions, just like the truths in other disciplines such as mathematics and chemistry. He explains that the belief that “moral truth is in the eye of the beholder…” is far from the truth (13). This is because if that was the case, then those who seek pleasure in the suffering of others would be termed as morally right. In their personal opinions, whatever they are doing is morally right, and they should not be held accountable for their actions. Personal opinions often result in disagreements between individuals and moral skeptics have used this concept to refute objective morality. As Shafer-Landau reveals, some moral skepticisms are based on the premise that “if well-informed, open-minded people intractably disagree about some subject matter X, then there are no objective truths in X.” (90) This premise is truly opposite of Shafer-Landau position of independence of moral truths. He posits that moral disagreements are persistently present for as long as the determination of right or wrong is one-sided (28). This means that ...