Sharon Hewitt Rawlette is a philosopher who writes for both popular and scholarly audiences on the topics of consciousness, anomalous experience, ethics, and spirituality. Before launching her career as an independent writer and researcher, she earned her PhD in philosophy from New York University and was Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Ethics at Brandeis University.
Transcript
Adam Jacobs: Why don't we just launch right in. I have a bunch of questions for you on a variety of topics, but I'm hoping to focus on this book. I have some questions about Psi phenomena as well and some other things that you work on, but let me start like this. So some of the ideas that you enumerate in the book were sort of new on me, and it was a new way for me to consider the concept of morality in general. And I sort of felt like I was introduced to a whole world, a whole discussion that's been taking place for a long time that I just was unaware of. And I sort of stepped into it and I was like, wow, there's all this terminology and all this thinking has already been done. And so it took me a while to sort of bone up on the lingo that you guys use when you discuss these things.
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: Yeah, I'm sure.
Adam Jacobs: And so I think I made a little progress, but I found it fascinating and I have some clarifying questions. So to start with, actually the back cover, you talk about this inside the book also, but the back cover says, “When we feel pleasure, we are feeling intrinsic goodness itself.” And that idea really hit me and I've been mulling it over for two weeks trying to see if it feels right. And I thought of a couple of examples to try to illustrate a counterpoint to it. And I would love to know what you think of it. So number one is did you see the movie Barbarella by any chance?
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: No.
Adam Jacobs: With Jane Fonda, it's this very campy sci-fi film from the sixties. It doesn't really matter, but there's a bad guy named Duran Duran (where the band takes its name from). And he attempts to kill Barbarella, the Jane Fonda character in something called an “Exsexsive Machine”, which induces fatal sexual pleasure, meaning that he was killing her through pleasurable sensations. So that would be an example, if pleasure is intrinsic goodness, then would we say that what was happening to her was a great good? And then as an opposite sort of example, I was thinking maybe like a field amputation during World War I, which is horrifically painful, but ultimately good. So what do we do with examples like that when we consider this concept?
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: So you definitely want to make a distinction between intrinsic goodness and instrumental goodness. And I spend a lot of time on that and it's so crucial to understanding the point that I'm trying to make about the intrinsic goodness of pleasure. So if we look at the case of the movie and the dying of sexual pleasure case, so first we can look at the intrinsic goodness of what's happening or the intrinsic properties of what's happening, the feeling of this is just ecstatic. This is ecstasy, the height of the pleasure that a person can feel. And so from that interior perspective, from the perspective of just looking at the qualities of the state itself, the goodness is off the charts. But then when you look at the consequences of what this brings about, for whatever reason, this short circuits her brain or fries her nervous system or whatever it is, and so she dies from this….
Adam Jacobs: She doesn't actually, the machine dies. She outlasts it.
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: Well, in the case where somebody might die from this, let's say that's relative to the instrumental goodness or badness of that state, but that's separate from what is intrinsic. So its effects are different from what it is in itself, and that's going to be the same with the person who's being amputated on the battlefield say. So the feeling as it's happening itself is one of the worst things that we might imagine, but the result of it is something that ultimately is going to allow this person to experience life, experience other good things in their life down the line. So it has instrumental goodness despite its intrinsic badness.
Adam Jacobs: That's interesting. And so would you say that there's a hierarchical distinction between levels of goodness? So for instance, it seems to me that in the battlefield case, like the ultimate goodness of the result certainly outweighs whatever negativity or badness happens because of the pain. I think most people would be willing to make that trade. And so it seems like the result weighs more than whatever the experience is. So is there a hierarchy of pleasures? Is there a hierarchy of goodness and badness?
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: Well, there are degrees of pleasure. So you can have more or less pleasure in a particular moment you could say. Or just like we rate our pain in the hospital, on a scale of zero to 10, you can rate how much pain you're feeling, you can rate how much pleasure you're feeling as well. And it actually turns out that people are pretty good at doing this consistently over time. There used to be some doubt about whether people really had a handle on how to give specific numbers to the pleasure and pain that they were feeling.
But various experiments have shown that actually people could rate these pretty consistently. So we have different degrees of pleasure or pain within a specific moment. But then of course, over the course of an entire life, you have many different moments with many different levels of pleasure and pain. And so when you're deciding what you want to do, what you ought to seek out, you have to take into account not only what it's going to feel like in this moment, but what it's going to feel like at all of these other moments for the rest of your life and how it's going to make all of the other people or other conscious beings that you affect how it's going to make them feel.
Adam Jacobs: Right, which is a separate and additionally important question I think, which is how do you know that that's important? And I guess we can get there, but let's take a step back for a second and sort of give the 30,000-foot understanding of this notion, to begin with of moral realism versus anti-realism. Could you explain for the benefit of the audience who may not know those terms, what they mean, and why they're important?
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: Yeah. So moral realism is basically the idea that there is objective truth in morality. So there are either certain actions that are objectively good, others that are objectively bad, or there are certain states of affairs ways that the world can be that are objectively better than other ways the world could be. And that does not depend on what we think about it, the judgments that our culture makes, or what we as individuals make. It's something that is true in virtue of the way those things are on their own.
Moral anti-realism says no, actually there's no objective fact of the matter about whether certain actions are better or worse than others or certain states of affairs or better or worse than others, it is something else is going on. So moral anti-realists disagree about exactly how we should understand the meaning of the moral claims that we make. Some of them will say, well, it's just your subjective opinion. You're just stating your opinion about something or you're expressing what you like and what you don't like about the world
But there are other much more complex systems such as constructivism would say, well, what is right or wrong for you depends on your whole web of beliefs and values that you hold. And so you can actually be wrong in thinking that you ought to do a certain thing because if you really reflected on what your deepest values are, you would see that that's not really aligned with that. So even on moral anti-realism, people can make mistakes about what is good or bad, but they're making mistakes with reference to their own set of values. Whereas in moral realism, you would be making a mistake with respect to something that is completely independent of any of your values or judgments.
Adam Jacobs: Okay, that makes sense. And to quote you, once again from the book, you say you're talking about value and I'm not sure what the difference between, (and maybe you can explain this also the difference between value and morality), but you say “Value, if it is part of the intrinsic nature of the world, it's possibly part of the intrinsic nature of persons, (human beings), we could be connected to the objective value of the world in virtue of being part of that world and embodying some of its value in ourselves.”
All of these approaches seem to posit that there is such a thing as morality, whether it's objective or subjective, whether I've decided or whether it exists somewhere in the world. So my question is why is there some set of behaviors that is discoverable in reality, or are you saying just the very fact that the brute fact of the pleasurableness is the answer to that? That is how we know that it's moral. Because otherwise, I don't think you can test for this in a lab. I don't think you can pour a cup of morality. I don't think it can be measured in Celsius or any measurement that we know of. How else might we know that it exists?
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: Well, that's one of the major questions that confronts any moral realist. And I think that it's one of the reasons that moral, anti-realism has been so popular, at least during a certain period in the last few decades because it's so hard to see how if there is something out there that is the objective rightness or wrongness of actions, how is it that we're learning about it? Okay, maybe there is an objective truth to morality, but it doesn't seem like we can see it with our eyes. Or like you said, you can't pour it into a test tube. You can't measure it in these ways that we normally think of our ability to measure things.
So how is it that we are able to have true beliefs about it if indeed we do have true beliefs? Where are we getting our knowledge about this objective morality? And that's actually the primary question that motivated me and my study of meta-ethics, which is what this whole field is called, this meta-look at what ethics is. I wanted to know, okay, how is it that we could somehow have a connection to the moral structure of the world, the some deep structure of the world that would make some things better than others? And ultimately, I think that where we make that epistemic connection, that knowledge connection is through the actual experience of pleasure or the experience of pain.
When we are experiencing that thing, in a sense, we are, that experience or that experience is part of us at the moment that we are experiencing it, we are acquainted with what its inner nature is in a way that we aren't acquainted with the inner nature of the physical objects outside of us, but that pleasure, what pleasure is, is this experience that we're having and we experience in that moment that this is something good. This is something that the world is better, my life is better because this moment of pleasure is part of it. And if we're experiencing pain, no, if this was all that life was, life would not be worth living. This is the antithesis of goodness and something that would give purpose and meaning to life.
Adam Jacobs: So what you said there is very interesting. I think most people, and when we talk about ethics and morality, we're generally talking about interactions between people and maybe between people and animals, but I think that there are moments that human beings have that they label as good, even though there is no moral decision-making taking place. So for instance, someone's walking through the park and sees the sunlight coming through the leaves and they stop and they say, somehow some part of them says, this is good, I've had that. This feels right, this feels good. And I've wondered why should that be anything? It's just some photons coming through these plants and why should that matter at all or a sunset or any, the natural world seems to have a lot of that for people, but there are other experiences. But what would you do with someone like the Marquis de Sade for instance, who took stadistic pleasure in what we would normatively call hurting other people?
I don't think he was insane to the best of my knowledge. So we can't just pin it on that. It seems to me that he took the anti-realist position to its logical conclusion. Maybe it's just like, well, there is no objective morality and I enjoy this personally and therefore it's good for me. What would a moral realist be able to say to someone like that or to a culture that collectively holds that hurting people of a certain category is perfectly fine? I dunno, the Taliban comes to mind. Nazis come to mind. This whole order of people we deem them as worthless or actually cancerous, and therefore to attack them is good. How do we make sense of that? That was a lot. Sorry.
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: Yeah. No, no. So from my own perspective, I think that what's going wrong there is that those people who are torturing people for the pleasure that they get out of it or that their society somehow reaps from that they are focused solely on their own pleasure. They're not focused on the pleasure for all of the beings who are involved in their activity.
And so what is wrong with what they're doing is all of the pain that it's causing to others. So that's wrong with it. Now whether you can reason with those people and show them that it's wrong and convince them to behave differently, I don't know if that's always possible. I don't know. I think there are some people that you can, but I think there are also, there are individuals and situations that maybe you can't reason people out of them. They're very myopic in the way that they're perceiving the world and they're not going to be swayed to care about others. But that doesn't mean that those others aren't worth being cared about.
And because in order for a torturer to think that what they're doing is okay, they have to be screening themselves off from the perspective of the other person or animal that is involved in what's going on. So there's some sense of course in which they're aware of the pain because that's what they're getting off on. But at the same time, they are aware of that pain as being the pain of someone else. It is not their own pain. They're leaving this epistemic distance, this distance of knowledge. They're not taking the perspective of the others. They aren't capturing in their own mind what the pain is actually like for the other individual involved. And if they were truly representing that to themselves as it is, then I think they would understand why that is wrong. But for whatever reason, they're not truly representing the pain that the other person is feeling.
Adam Jacobs: Right. Not representing, not caring, or having justified it in some way that it's for an ultimate good in the same way that they might say that eradicating cancer, even though cancer is living cells, is ultimately good. I guess you can't perfectly analogize it. I don't know if the cancer doesn't want to be killed.
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: Well, it probably doesn't. I'm certainly not arguing that we shouldn't ever cause pain because we were talking about the amputation on the battlefield. There are cases where we all agree, yes, that pain should be allowed in this case because it's for the person's long-term good or it's for the long-term good of the group or the society.
Adam Jacobs: Right. Okay, good. So actually it's a good segue into my next question, which is about the appearance of bad. So let's talk just emotionally, not in terms of horrific physical pain, but those situations where something occurs and you say, I can't believe this happened. This is the worst possible timing. This is the worst thing that could have happened. And you feel very, very horrific about it, and you brood about it. And we've all had that experience where in the moment, or it could even last for years and later it gets reframed by circumstances.
And then we might say to ourselves, you know what? That was the best thing that could possibly have happened to me, and I just couldn't see it from my perspective then, but I had to make a change and this forced me to do it, and now my life is great because of this terrible thing that happened. So the emotional pain that someone experiences during that period of time, would you say that that's an actual bad, or is it some kind of masked good that we just don't yet understand?
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: So we talked before about intrinsic goodness, and instrumental goodness, but there's also a term that I use in my book, which is Goodness, All Things Considered, which is generally I think what we mean when we say that something is good or in the big picture, it's something that's good because it's all things considered goodness. We're considering the intrinsic qualities, we're considering all the effects that it has forever into the future. And once we've taken into consideration all of those things, the sum of all of that is positive. Then we say all things considered it's good. It has all things considered goodness. And it could be intrinsically bad, it could feel really terrible in the moment, like you're saying, or it could feel really bad for four or five years, a long time. But then there's all of this other goodness that it produces that comes to outweigh that. And so all things considered it was a good
Adam Jacobs: Okay, we're on the same page with that. Okay. Yeah, that's how I would see it. Let's ask an even potentially deeper question, a deeper philosophical question about all this, which is do you identify any type of purpose to the intrinsic bad? Is there any meta-purpose to it? Some people could argue what was a learning experience or something that I had to go through for my own development or whatever it is. How do you feel about it? Is badness just random? It's like something that occurs because it occurs, or could there be some overarching value by itself to it?
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: So this isn't something that I deal with in that book, the Feeling of Value, but it is a question that I have wrestled with a lot. It's actually something that I'm writing about in my current book, which is a sequel to The Feeling of Value. So it's definitely something that I have thought about a lot, and I think it is definitely possible that suffering always has a purpose. There are a lot of people who've had near-death experiences, which you've talked a lot about on this show.
There are a lot of people who've had these experiences who say, well, when I was on the other side, while I was temporarily dead, I knew so much more about the world. It was just like my consciousness completely expanded and I understood all these things about how the world worked. It works. And one of the things I understood is that all of the suffering that we go through, there is a purpose to it.
It all makes sense from the other side. And I remember specifically a young Jewish woman who was talking about, how she had been an atheist for almost her whole life. As soon as she had learned about the Holocaust, she was like, I just can't believe that there is a God. I can't believe that there is a meaning and purpose behind this. And then when she had this her near-death experience, she was like, oh, she had always been, she'd been thinking that if there was an afterlife, that when she got there, she was going to berate God and be like, how could you do all of these things? But when she actually did have this experience of meeting this divine being of some kind, she was engulfed with this knowledge and understanding. Oh, that it totally does make sense. There was another case I remember of a woman who had been molested for years as a child, and she had the same feeling.
She was like, there's no way that this could be part of any kind of good plan. But when she had her near-death experience, at least while she was there on the other side, she's like, I understood it. I knew that this is the way that it had to be. I knew that this was serving a purpose. But she says when she came back, she's like, I can't understand it from here anymore. I still can't explain to a parent who's lost a child. I can't tell them why this happened. It's so terrible. She says all I can remember is that from the other side, I did know that there was a reason. And so I'm open to the possibility that it might all make sense from some larger perspective. At the same time, from our perspective here, it feels sometimes telling somebody who's going through a terrible, terrible experience, oh, well, it's all for the best. That's not going to be very helpful to them.
Adam Jacobs: No, it's like the worst thing to say
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: No. So we have to understand our current perspective as well and adjust for that and not think that, well, if it's true that ultimately everything serves a good purpose, that we are in a state to understand and know that here is often just really hard. You're going through a lot of pain, we're going through a lot of suffering. And sometimes it is easier and maybe even better in the long term to just say, it just seems random. It just seems terrible. I don't know why this is happening, but I just have to get through it.
Adam Jacobs: Yes, I think it's a pivotal thing that you're saying here because whether or not you can understand the ultimate reason for the suffering that one is going through in the here and now, the simple belief that it is for some ultimate purpose is the difference to me between a satisfying, sane existence and one that is just a slog and a very, very cognitively miserable period of time to go through this life. And that's why I feel that it's just extremely valuable for people just to be introduced to the concept as you just did.
And a lot of people are citing near-death experience now, which personally makes me happy as evidence for the possibility, let's say, of a much bigger picture to reality than most people have considered or many people. But I think that simple knowledge would improve people's lives tremendously because you can endure, I forget who the famous quote of you can endure any what, as long as you have a why, but if you don't, it's just all meaningless activity day in and day out, and you have no idea why some people prosper and some people suffer. Life is hard. It is tremendously hard.
And I appreciate that you brought that up. I wanted to pivot into more of the, (I mean, I think that we were discussing a transcendental matter to begin with), which is morality, but I appreciate the fact that you brought up that kind of example of near-death experience to illustrate it. And you also explore what's called Psi phenomena, paranormal research, which I also am fascinated by. And I did a little looking online into some of what you've done, and I know you've published other books, which I recommend that people go check out on this topic.
But let's talk for a minute about apparitions, something that I think a lot of people would be disinclined to accept as a possibility. Although I know a lot of, (I mean, just people I know myself), I hear a lot of reports about it, whether or not they brush it aside as soon as possible and never bring it up again. But I personally know half a dozen people who have told me very weird stories that I don't think they ever fully processed. But there is a very interesting case that you call the Sarah Clark case, and would you be able to explain just a minute about that story? And I guess given the prevalence of reports like this, why is it that they're so easily dismissed?
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: Okay, so lemme make sure I've got the right case. The Sarah Clark case, this is the maid?
Adam Jacobs: Yeah.
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: Okay. Alright. So this is a case from the late 1800s if I'm or no, mid-1800s. Actually, I think this is from Robert Dale Owen's book, which this is just an aside, but I used to teach a course on utopian communities when I was teaching at your alma mater Brandeis University. And we studied Robert Dale Owen as a founder of the utopian community. So when I later learned that he had written this book about apparitions and death-related phenomena, it was just very interesting to see, well, here was another guy who was interested in both of these other people. I was interested in both of these things. In any case, so this particular case, there was this young woman who was, I think she was visiting an aunt in upstate New York. Her aunt had this big house that had been in the family for a while, I think.
And there was one of the rooms in the house, one of the bedrooms was considered to be haunted. I guess people had reported seeing something there. And one night when this young woman was staying with her aunt, she ended up having to sleep in that particular bedroom for whatever reason. And she woke up in the middle of the night, and even though her bedroom door was locked from the inside, so she had locked it, I guess, so nobody could come in the room. She saw someone in the room with her. There was this figure that I think she said was dressed like a servant of some kind, a female servant who was coming and was kind of bending over the bed toward her trying to say something and nothing was coming out or she couldn't hear anything. So I think she just threw the covers over her head and something that it would go away, I guess that it did.
But then sometime later she was hanging out with a friend in another location and they decided to do some spirit communication. This was all the rage back then. So they're using, I think a planche, which is sort of like an Ouija board, but kind of rolls over things. And they ended up getting this message from somebody that nobody knew. But this message from somebody who identified herself as Sarah Clark and said that she had been a maid in her aunt's home and that when she had been a maid there, she had stolen something. I think she said she had stolen a silver bowl or a silver sugar bowl, I think. And she said that she had been coming back and trying to apologize and get forgiveness for having done this.
Of course, this young woman after that, she has to go back to her aunt and say, look, there's this communication, did you ever have a maid named Sarah Clark? And the aunt said that, yes, in fact, some years ago her family had had a maid by that name. And in fact, some objects had gone missing while that maid was there including a silver sugar bowl. But they had never suspected this woman of stealing anything because apparently she was just very well regarded by the family. They'd never suspected that. And the aunt, even after hearing what the spirit message said, still felt like this was not true. She said, but if it is true, she said, then I forgive her and she can go in peace. She doesn't need to worry about this anymore. And apparently, after that time, the bedroom was no longer haunted. Nobody ever saw an apparition in that bedroom again.
Adam Jacobs: So that would seem to be impossible for that person to know that information any other way. And so, therefore, part two of that question, which is why is it considered so national inquirer? Why is it so laughed at when so many people seem to have reports like this?
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: It's a very good question. I think the main reason is that it doesn't fit with the primary conception of reality that our society holds to, it doesn't fit with the scientific values of our society, with the hierarchy of knowledge that we have that says things that we can study in a laboratory. Those are the real of real things. And anything that doesn't show up there, well, that's not really real. That's just a figment of your imagination. So it doesn't fit that picture. It doesn't. So anybody who reports something like that has to be considered to be not quite right in the head or superstitious. They're just inclined to believe silly things. Yeah. Our society, the whole structure of knowledge in our society would be threatened by allowing that. Things like that really happen because it brings into question everything else that we as a society acknowledge as being true.
Adam Jacobs: But isn't it a scientific principle to be open to changing your point of view based on new evidence?
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: It is indeed. And there are a lot of scientists who actually are very interested in this sort of thing. Some of them are openly interested in it, but most of them are interested in it behind closed doors. They're not, for all of these reasons we just discussed, they're not going to say this in a public setting, but if you get them alone and you say, these weird things have happened to me, have you ever had anything weird like that happen to you?
Oh, yeah. I think there's a lot that we don't understand about the world, but it threatens your status as a scientist or as a scholar to admit that publicly. And also it puts you in a position where you have to acknowledge, there's just so much that we don't know if this stuff is real, if these apparitions are real communications from a personality that's somehow continuing in some way, then what we have understood about the physical world through our last few hundred years of scientific research, it's like this tiny little speck compared to everything that's real in the universe, which I mean, I think even physicalist, materialist scientists would say, well, yeah, that's true.
There's way more to the universe than what we recognize, and we're going to continue making all of these huge scientific leaps in the next hundred years. But when it comes to an actual paradigm shift, when it comes to the specific evidence, this new evidence that threatens, it threatens not just a particular conception of the world, but really it threatens the whole way that we do science. If you can influence the mind, it can influence things at a distance, then it threatens all of the controlled laboratory experiments that we do, because it means the people doing the experiments might be influencing what's happening, not in any material way, but just with their mind.
They might be influencing the outcomes. And that how do you control anything? There's all of this connectedness once we start to accept that consciousness might be more integral to the nature of the world than we've realized. So it upsets a lot of things. So I understand why a lot of people are very nervous about opening. That can of worms.
Adam Jacobs: Me too. But I hope that they do open it. And I have time for one more question only, unfortunately, but 45 minutes already went by. So really just to follow up on what you were just saying, I was really a very, I think, thorough and very excellent explanation of that phenomenon. Do you personally envision a time when Psi phenomena will be mainstream, where the scientific and philosophical communities will take it as a matter of course, that this is the way, this is part of the nature of reality? And if so, how long do you think that might be till we get there?
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: Yeah. So I think that it is possible. It is not like it's impossible for us to get there because most of the societies on the planet actually take this very seriously. I mean, societies that have existed historically, and really the majority of societies today on our planet take this very seriously. So I can see how we could integrate those beliefs with our more scientific approach to the world. How long it will take, I don't know, because what's so seductive about the physicalist materialist science is the technologies that it produces. Its repeatability, the way that it allows us to control physical processes.
And I think that's why it's become so powerful in the world, and I think that that's going to continue to drive a lot of its power within the scientific and scholarly communities. The thing with S is that, and with various extraordinary spiritual phenomena, they're not repeatable in that way, partly I think because they are aimed at all things considered good, they're aimed at a much bigger purpose for individuals. They seem to be aimed at helping those individuals get through really difficult situations in their lives and helping them develop into more whole, more loving, more people who feel more pleasure. I was trying to think of an adjective for somebody who lives a pleasure-filled life. I don't know if we have a good word for that, but…
Adam Jacobs: Hedonistic, but that's a pejorative.
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: But yeah, so pejorative. So anyway, I think these side phenomena are really, they're working in this very holistic way to improve individual lives and help the planet as a whole, I think evolve in a more positive direction. But for that reason, you can't manipulate them the same way that you can manipulate physical things.
And so they're not going to lend themselves to the kind of technologies or even scientific advances because they really, because of their holism and their spirituality, they have to be approached in a very personal way. You can't just study them with some sort of scientific objective distance to really experience them in their true power. You have to involve yourself, and you have to be implicated in what it is you're studying. And that's a really risky thing to do as well. So I think it's going to take a while longer, but we might get there. We might get there, we might get there, especially if with everything that's happening with climate change, all of the global emergencies that we are starting to live through, maybe that will open more of us up to approaching the world in this more holistic, spiritual way and be less worried about control and more about opening our spirits.
Adam Jacobs: Great answer. And Dr. Rawlette, I wanted to thank you so much for joining me today. I really learned a lot from you and really enjoyed this conversation. So I really appreciate you taking the time to be here. And for everybody else, please take one moment to subscribe to our YouTube channel and to go to Beyond Belief Blog and sign up for our newsletter, and stay on top of all the great things that we have happening here at Beyond Belief. And thank you for being here.
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: Thank you so much.
Does Morality Actually Exist?