If moral facts exist independently of moral agents, who or what are they facts about?
This question reveals one of philosophy’s strangest puzzles. We want to believe that some things are truly right or wrong regardless of what anyone thinks about them—that torturing innocents for fun would be wrong even if every human believed otherwise. But facts need subjects. Mathematical facts are about numbers. Scientific facts are about physical reality. So what are moral facts about if not the agents who might act on them?
Consider this: In a universe with no conscious beings, could it still be true that “causing unnecessary suffering is wrong”? The statement seems to hang in logical space with nothing to anchor it to. It’s like having a law against speeding on a planet with no roads, no cars, and no drivers.
Most moral realists argue that moral facts are indeed universal truths, as objective as mathematical theorems. They exist in some abstract realm, waiting to be discovered rather than created by moral agents. On this view, we don’t make murder wrong by disapproving of it—we discover that murder was always wrong and align our attitudes accordingly.
But this creates a profound mystery. What makes “murder is wrong” true in the absence of murderers, victims, or anyone to be wronged? The fact seems to float free of any actual moral reality.
One traditional answer points to God. Moral facts are facts about God’s commands or nature—they describe what an eternal, perfect being wills or approves. Murder is wrong because it violates God’s character or commands, and these divine facts exist whether humans exist or not. The moral law has a divine lawgiver, making it as real and independent as any other aspect of God’s nature.
But this raises new puzzles. If moral facts are really facts about God, then moral discovery becomes theological discovery. To know right from wrong, we’d need to know God’s mind. And if God’s will makes things right or wrong, then morality seems arbitrary—couldn’t God command torture and make it virtuous?
Another approach suggests moral facts are about abstract moral properties or relations that exist necessarily. Just as mathematical relations like “seven is greater than five” exist whether anyone counts or not, moral relations like “causing gratuitous harm is worse than preventing it” exist as eternal truths about value itself.
This view treats moral facts as structural features of logical space. They describe relationships between possible actions, outcomes, and values that hold across all possible worlds. Murder is wrong not because it affects actual people, but because it instantiates a pattern—intentional harm to innocents—that stands in eternal logical opposition to goodness itself.
But what are these abstract moral properties properties of? Numbers have properties because mathematical structures exist. Physical objects have properties because matter and energy exist. What exists for moral properties to be properties of?
Perhaps the deepest answer is that moral facts are facts about the nature of consciousness and agency itself. They describe not what particular agents do, but what agency means. To be a moral agent is to be subject to certain logical constraints—you cannot coherently will universal harm while maintaining genuine care for value.
On this view, moral facts exist independently of particular agents but not independently of agency as such. They’re facts about what it means to be a conscious, choosing being. “Torture for fun is wrong” is true because consciousness and value are logically related in ways that make sadistic pleasure incoherent with genuine appreciation of conscious experience.
The moral law might be the deep grammar of consciousness itself—the rules that govern how awareness, choice, and value can coherently relate. These rules exist timelessly, not as external commands but as internal logical necessities of what it means to be conscious at all.
This suggests something beautiful and strange: moral facts don’t float free of agents but are facts about agency itself. They describe the eternal structure of what consciousness and choice mean, making them as objective as logic while remaining essentially connected to the reality of moral agents.
We discover moral truths not by detecting mysterious abstract entities, but by understanding more clearly what we already are—conscious beings whose very nature involves certain value commitments and logical constraints.
Moral facts might be facts about us in the deepest sense—not about what particular humans happen to believe, but about what consciousness and choice essentially involve. They exist independently of our opinions but not independently of our nature as moral agents.
In the end, we might be the facts that moral facts are about.
