Marc asked:

I recently got into a debate with this fellow on objectivism versus non-objectivism.

My position was that a Platonic reality exists for scientific, mathematical and moral concepts. That is I
want to believe that there is a timeless, universal set of scientific, mathematical and moral principles
that exist external to the human mind and are knowable by it.

My opponent disputed this, claiming that any such objective reality would be unknowable, and
science is simply a calculational device used for making correct predictions. He also strongly disputed
that there could exist a set of universal moral principles.

What does modern philosophy have to say about this? What would be a majority consensus view of
things at present? And what texts should I read to get a good grounding in the basic arguments for
and against?

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Your question about consensus on these questions is extremely difficult to decide. Some time ago
Philosophy Nowmagazine did a survey on what students of philosophy tended to believe regarding
ethical objectivity and what philosophy teachers tended to believe. The result as I recall was that
students tend to be non-objectivists and teachers tend to be objectivists. However, in general there
are likely to be more philosophers who are sceptical about ethical objectivism than mathematical
objectivism or scientific objectivism.

However, we need to get a little clearer on how to couch the debate between objectivism and
non-objectivism as these terms can be a little slippery and through the course of history they have
changed their meaning. Hence the modern debate over these questions tends to be couched in terms
of two positions called

'Response-independence' and 'response-dependence'. The motivation for couching the debate is due
to a general acceptance of a distinction between primary and secondary qualities (derived from John
Locke). Primary qualities were those properties of objects that existed independently of our
responses e.g., shape and secondary qualities were those that were dependent on our responses
e.g., colour, warmth, taste.

This way of setting the debate up offers us sharp distinctions between judgements concerning colours
such as 'The carpet is red,' and taste such as 'Beer tastes bitter' and judgements concerning shape
such as 'The pebbles are round.' The response dependence of the judgement, 'The carpet is red' is
explained by saying that the truth conditions of the judgement are not independent of our responses,
that is they are partly constituted by our responses. The response independence of the judgement,
'The pebbles are round' is explained by saying that the truth conditions of the judgement are
independent of any judgement that we could possibly make about the pebbles. That is to say they
would be round even if we had never come across them, or they are mind independent.

Not everyone accepts the distinction between primary and secondary qualities and you have to have
one foot in the objectivist camp at least for some judgements in order to make the distinction. Some
philosophers do hold a global response dependence view of our judgements but with the distinction in
terms of the truth conditions of the judgement we can see what they are arguing about. The great
difficulty for those who hold the response dependence view of judgements consists in saying exactly
what responses are equivalent to the truth of the judgement i.e., what judgements cannot be false.
Most are elusive on this question and it is a weakness in the theory.

Controversial areas in science concern theoretical posits or unobservable entities — but there is no
need to see these are being response-dependent. Many scientific entities might not be directly
observable without being constructed out of our responses.

With the above in mind we can now turn to maths. A response dependence view of maths looks
initially attractive because we may be suspicious of attributing mathematical sets to a
response-independent reality. However, certain mathematical theorems like Godel's theorem look like
they are either true or false and there is no possible judgement on our behalf that could make it so
because of our limited ability for determining the truth of the judgement. Much of mathematical
breakthroughs only make sense on a response-independence view of the subject matter. The
possibility of our best judgements being false is what the objectivist or response independence
theorist has as his main foil against the non-objectivist or response-dependence theorist.

Turning to Morals the matter is a little trickier. There is a distinction to be made between objective
moral or value facts and objective moral principles. Basically some philosophers like Richard Hare
hold that you can have universal moral principles without objective moral or value facts. The two are
likely to be more successful if they go together though. Moral judgements such as, 'Inflicting wanton
cruelty to animals is morally wrong' look like they have truth conditions that are independent of the
subject who is making the judgement. That is the truth of a moral judgement is not to be decided by
the person making the judgement. This looks like a conceptual truth — it is what differentiates moral
judgements from judgements of taste. However, the truth of the above judgement does not look like it
is going to true independent of all responses — it is not going to be true independent of the capacity
for the animal to feel pain or to suffer. So there is a sense in which moral judgements are both
response independent since they do not concern the speaker's responses, and response dependent
since they concern the responses of the subject of the judgement. (the subject of the judgement in
the above is 'animals' and is not to be confused with the subject making the judgement i.e., the
speaker).

If you see a Platonic reality as an objective reality, and approach objective reality as a reality that
exists independent of our judgements about it, then it seems you have a good case for making it with
regard to maths and science, but with ethics we have to be careful about the scope of this distinction.
All of the above would be regarded as objectivist positions.

I would recommend reading the arguments of some non-objectivist philosophers in order to see what
their motivations are for adopting such a position. That is to say that most philosophers take response
dependence views of subjects because they see a problem with the response independent view.In
this way once you remove the obstacles for your opponent they should fall in line with a form of
objectivism.

J.L. Mackie Ethics Inventing Right and Wrongis a nice little book by someone who challenges
objectivity in morals and distinguishes between objective moral or value facts and objective moral
principles in his opening chapters. Mackie sets out what it would look like for there to be objective
values i.e., everyone's happiness would count equally when making moral decisions but he rejects
this view because of a clash between Platonic or Kantian conceptions of morality entailing reasons for
action and Humean conceptions of reasons for action. This is one of the main debating points in
contemporary meta-ethics so if you can find a good way around it then you will be able to defend your
position form likely critics. Also try David O Brink Moral Realism and the Foundation of Ethicsfor
support.

Julian Bennett