Is There Moral High Ground?

Abstract

As a bit of empirical data with which to begin, a recent internet search using the Google search engine on the quoted phrase “moral high ground” yielded links to 27,500 webpages. Undoubtedly, there will not be a single sense of the phrase upon which all completely agree, but the concept of one party’s having “the moral high ground” in a dispute is indisputably a part of commonsense moral discourse and thought. In lieu of a universally univocal definition, it may still be helpful to metaethical debate to try to capture the driving force behind what superficially is merely a metaphor. The thesis to be explored is that the notion of “moral high ground” is a bit of commonsense metaethics: that a belief in moral high ground is best understood as an attempt to capture a naive form of moral realism. I will argue here that the denial of a belief in moral high ground is a particularly undesirable form of moral relativism that I will call “metaethical relativism.” Moreover, I will argue that many forms of moral non-realism (irrealism, prescriptivism, and emotivism) are all tacitly committed to metaethical relativism. The contrast between believing in moral high ground and metaethical relativism can be pursued by way of enriching the original metaphor of “moral high ground.” We may engage in what might be called the “theoretical topology” of normative ethical positions or theories. The question that arises is whether or not the metaphysical underpinnings of morality, at bottom, place all moral positions (or theories) on a “flat two dimensional