Is Anything Actually Wrong?

The drawing shows three ways to judge an act. This lesson steps back from all three and asks the question every one of them takes for granted: when you call something wrong, are you saying something that could be true?

Before you start. Ethics & the Good Life gave you three ways to judge an act (by its outcome, by the duty it keeps, by the character of the person acting) and Hume’s point that no pile of facts on its own forces a “you ought”. That lesson argued about which acts are wrong. This one asks what “wrong” even means, and whether the whole argument is just opinion.

The idea in 30 seconds

People in different cultures can feel the same horror pointed in opposite directions, and the question is what that disagreement proves about right and wrong.
Cultural relativism says moral claims are true only relative to a culture; it makes every reformer wrong by definition, and its call for tolerance is itself a claim meant to bind every culture.
Moral realism says some moral claims are true whatever anyone thinks; its hard question is what kind of fact a moral fact would be, and how anyone detects it.
Error theory says moral claims aim at objective facts but there are none, so they are all false; the same reasoning threatens facts about what evidence you ought to believe.
Expressivism says a moral claim states nothing and expresses an attitude, like “boo to stealing”; its hard problem is explaining why moral arguments with “if” in them still work.

Read the story · Skip to the numbers