Real Obligations

In The Principles of Human Knowledge, George Berkeley argues that everything we perceive is simply sense data: an object Q is actually a collection of information in our minds. Furthermore, to say that Q exists is only to say that someone can perceive Q. Not only does this throw doubt on objective reality, it means that to talk of an object existing is nonsense because we are only talking about the sense data in our head!

We may spend a sleepless night thinking about this, but in the morning we see that the sun has risen as usual, our sheets are the same color as yesterday (unless we wet the bed), and our dresser hasn’t disappeared simply because we stopped thinking about it. In other words, what we perceive is consistent, so even if saying that something exists is inseparable from perceiving it, we know that there is more going on than mere sense data. It appears that there is an objective reality.

So far we have two qualifications for something being real: it must be perceived and it must be consistent. In this same way I can say that obligations are real. To say that I have an obligation is to say that I perceive that I ought to do something, and it doesn’t go away if I try to forget about it (it is consistent). If I feel that I ought to be kind to people around me, as long as I feel the same way I have a real obligation to be kind.

Obligations and objects are both perceivable and consistent, and they act in similar ways. Say you are standing outside in the street, holding an apple. A friend comes up to you and says “This apple isn’t real! Come on, are you stupid? Look,” he says as he snatches it from you and swallows it in three bites, “it doesn’t exist!” You know that the apple was real: you felt in in your hands, tasted its juice, saw the sunlight glint on its green surface; you felt your friend rudely grab it from your hand and watched as he devoured it whole. Similarly, a friend comes up to you and says “Hey dude, skip work today, don’t go to school, you don’t need to do it. Besides, you only do these things because society taught you to.” This wouldn’t change your mind about your obligations! Your friend tried to convince you that your obligations weren’t real, but you know better.

An objection may be raised: your friend didn’t argue that your obligations weren’t real, but simply that you don’t have to fulfill your obligations. Philosophers are notorious for doing this. They say you can’t derive an ought from an is. In other words, just because it is true that you have an obligation, it doesn’t logically follow that you ought to fulfill it. Philosophers will further say that Nature isn’t teleological, God is dead, morality can’t be grounded in Reason, right and wrong are relative, and so on. You can ignore all of this because we have already grounded morality in objective reality. We have seen that obligations are real, that they can be perceived and that they are consistent. No one can prescribe you what to do; you get to choose that for yourself.