The Tribunal of Experience

A Question about Moral Disagreements

2004-06-30T20:21:00.000-04:00

Often, when reading discussions of moral disagreements and what we should think about them, I come across a claim like the following: Even if it turns out that quite a few moral disagreements result from disagreements about the non-moral facts, it's clear that some moral disagreements would remain even if people agreed about the non-moral facts.

Now, I assume that, though this is usually how the point is put, something more is being claimed here. It's not just that people would continue to disagree about moral issues while agreeing about all non-moral ones, but that they would continue disagree in these situations even in cases where the parties aren't making an errors in their reasoning. For these moral disagreements wouldn't be so troubling if they resulted from failing to fully understand the facts one know, to grasp their logical implications, etc. So we're also supposed to be imagining cases in which people make no errors in reasoning and fully appreciate the facts they know and so forth. And I suppose we should also rule out things like bias and the like here.

Furthermore, it also seems that the continued existence of such disagreement would be an interesting fact only if we assume that people also have some (or all?) of the information that would be relevant in coming to conclusions about the moral issues they disagree about. Even if two people have all the same beliefs about the non-moral facts, it wouldn't be too surprising that they reached different moral conclusions if their beliefs weren't the ones that were relevant to discovering the moral facts they disagreed about. So maybe we need to make the claim one about the continued disagreement between people who have all the non-moral facts or at least all the relevant non-moral facts. Let's restrict it to people who have all the relevant non-moral facts, as this is somewhat easier to conceive--and maybe we also have real cases of this. (I'm not sure we have any idea whether people would continue to disagree if they had absolutely all non-moral facts--and I'm pretty sure that no one has all those facts.)

I'm probably forgetting some additional qualifications here, but let's get to the point.

All right, so we're supposed to imagine people who agree about all the relevant non-moral facts, who don't make any errors in reasoning, who fully appreciate the relevant facts, and who aren't biased. Will such people still disagree about moral issues? It's supposed to be obvious that, at least in some cases, they will; but I've never found this all that obvious. I'm not sure that it's false--indeed, it has some prima facie plausibility--but it's far from obvious to me.

And I'm wondering what other people think about this. Is it obvious to you? And if so, why?

I can think of a couple arguments for the conclusion that such people would still disagree. I'm not sure what to think of either of them.

The first argument is pretty simple. It claims that we have some actual cases where people have all the relevant non-moral evidence and yet disagree. So this isn't something we have to imagine; it actually exists. Surely, that would be a good argument. But are there such cases? A case people often appeal to is one having to do with abortion. The idea is supposed to be that there are cases in which people with different views about the permissibility of a particular abortion know all there is to know about the development of the fetus and so forth. I don't know what to think about this sort of argument. But it's not obviously compelling. There are a couple of problems here. First, it's not really clear that cases like this are cases in which we have agreement about all the relevant facts. For disputes about abortion often turn on disputes about metaphysical and religious issues, and so it's not clear that there are all that many disagreements in which people agree about all the relevant facts. Now, of course, not all the moral disagreement about abortion reduces to this. There are, for instance, cases of atheists who disagree about abortion, and perhaps there are even such cases where the people agree about all the other relevant facts. Maybe. It's very hard to tell since it's hard to tell just what all the relevant facts are, and this brings us to the second problem here. How are we really supposed to determine whether we've got people who agree about all the relevant facts? This would seem to require appealing to some contentious issues in normative ethics, and so it's not altogether clear that we've actually got the sort of cases we're looking for. OK, enough of that.

The second argument is going to have to be more complex. Rather than pointing to cases in which people have all the relevant non-moral evidence, it appeals to more everyday cases of moral disagreement. The idea here is to argue that ordinary moral argument doesn't proceed in a way that suggests that agreement about all the non-moral facts will lead to agreement about the moral facts. So the main premise here is that moral positions are not responsive to additional non-moral facts in the way we would expect them to be if full non-moral information would lead to convergence of moral opinions. Is this true? I leave it up to the reader to decide.

I'm sure there are other arguments that some moral disagreement will persist even if people possess all the relevant non-moral information. But I'm not sure what they are. Can anybody give me some, or tell me how I've underestimated the plausibility of these other arguments?

Amazon List

2004-06-29T00:19:00.000-04:00

I finished up that amazon list I was talking about a while back. If anyone is interested in looking at it--and you know you've been waiting with bated breath--here's the link.

Thanks to Joe for a couple good suggestions for the list. I have, of course, included both the works he suggested.

If anyone notices any glaring omissions or mind-numbingly idiotic mistakes in my brief comments about the books (and those are always a possibility), please let me know.

Oh, and I'm thinking of writing up a list of anthologies with important papers in meta-ethics. I've come up with around twenty so far, and I could use some help. Naturally, then, I'd appreciate any suggestions anyone could give me.

Slow Posting

2004-06-29T00:07:00.000-04:00

Posting, I'm afraid, is probably going to be pretty slow here over the next couple of weeks. I can't keep up the herculean (for me) pace that I set for myself over those first four or five weeks. So I hereby apologize to (both of) my dedicated readers for not churning out third-rate philosophy at a pace of a couple thousand words a day over the next couple of weeks.

Why the slackening of my pace? Well, I'm trying to write up my dissertation prospectus. It looks like it's going to be on Mackie, if anyone out there was wondering. And if, for whatever reason, you're interested in looking at it, let me know and I'll send it your way here. (I expect to have something worth looking at in a week or so. I don't really expect anyone else to be interested, however.)

So this probably means that there's going to be a lot of discussion of Mackie on this blog. It's likely that whatever posts end up appearing on this blog in the near future will either be cribbed directly from my prospectus or will be questions that occur to me when writing it and that can be answered by someone smarter than me who happens to come across this blog.

Queerness and Reasons for Action

2004-06-25T18:54:00.000-04:00

In my previous post I tried to offer up a version of Mackie's argument from queerness that didn't depend on a lot of metaphysical assumptions. That argument depended on his argument that the existence of objective values would insure the truth of a form of motivational internalism. I'll now offer a second, different argument. This one focuses on what Mackie thinks would be the case with respect to moral reasons if there were objective moral values. It's more or less the same argument.

As I said above, the putative problem with objective moral values to which the argument from queerness appeals is closely connected to their prescriptivity. And it's clear from the argument of the first chapter of Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong that Mackie thinks that prescriptivity involves moral facts providing people with categorical reasons for action. The argument I'm going to outline here is one that suggests there simply can't be categorical reasons for action, and so there can't be objective moral values. So this argument doesn't change the source of the putative queerness of objective moral values; it still resides in some aspect of their normativity. Furthermore, this is a problem for objective moral values that we can understand without relying on some form of metaphysical naturalism. Thus we might be able to understand the putative queerness of objective moral values without appealing to broad metaphysical theses.

The Argument

The argument here is quite simple. It's basic outline is this:

(1) If there were objective moral values, people would have categorical reasons for action.
(2) People do not have categorical reasons for action.
(3) There are no objective moral values. (from 1 and 2)

What are the details here? The truth of the premise (1) is something that Mackie thinks follows from the correct conceptual analysis of ordinary moral language and thought. Part of the normativity of objective moral values is supposed to be summed up in the thesis that if there were objective moral values, they would provide people with categorical reasons for action. The objective moral values would be necessarily reasons-providing, and the reasons they provide would be independent of people's desires.

The defense of premise (2) is where we have to supplement Mackie's explicit statements with some assumptions about his views. The assumption we need is that he thinks the only naturalistically respectable theory of reasons is an instrumentalist one. So he thinks that all of a person's reasons depend on her desires. Ignoring various complications, let's just assume that he thinks a person has a reason to do x just in case doing x would lead to the satisfaction of one of her desires. If this is true, there can't be any categorical reasons for actions.

So, in short, the argument is that the only plausible account of the nature of reasons for action rules out the possibility of people having the sorts of reasons for action that they would have if there were objective moral values. Hence we have good reason to think that there aren't objective moral values.

I don't have much else to say about this. What do you think?

A Possible Strand in Mackie's Argument from Queerness

2004-06-23T13:39:00.000-04:00

All this recent discussion of Mackie has brought me back to the main question I have about his work: What, exactly, is going on in the argument from queerness? It's pretty clear that it has something to do with the fact that objective moral values wouldn't fit very well into a naturalistic worldview, and it's also pretty clear that Mackie thinks this results from the fact that objective moral values, if they existed, would possess what he calls 'intrinsic and categorical prescriptivity.' But it's exceptionally difficult to determine just why Mackie thinks the intrinsic and categorical prescriptivity of objective moral values is supposed to be problematic.*

I've recently been reading Jean Hampton's paper "Naturalism and Moral Reasons",** and she makes this exceptionally clear there. She argues that Mackie must be assuming some form of substantive naturalism in his argument, and he points out that he never makes it clear just what his conception of the natural is. His argument seems to be: objective moral values, if they existed, wouldn't be natural; only natural things are ontologically respectable; objective moral values aren't ontologically respectable. Why wouldn't these things be natural? Because they would have to possess intrinsic and categorical prescriptivity. What Hampton does well is point out that, so far as one can tell by reading Mackie, this rests on some dubious intuitions about naturalness. For Mackie never spells out what criteria a putative entity must meet to be natural, and so it's not clear why things with intrinsic and categorical prescriptivity couldn't be natural. In other words, until we have a plausible account of what makes something natural, we can't really evaluate the plausibility of Mackie's argument.

I don't want to go into the details of this criticism of Mackie. I think there's something to it, and it gets at something that has long troubled me about the argument of that chapter. But rather than go into the details about the nature and plausibility of substantive naturalism, I want to consider whether we can find an interpretation of parts of the argument from queerness that don't appear to assume any broad metaphysical theses of this sort. I think that maybe we can. In an attempt to show how we might do this, I'm going to appeal to the stuff about Mackie's internalism that I was discussing in a previous post to draw out what might be one strand in the argument from queerness.

An Argument against Objective Moral Values

As I said above, the supposed problem with objective moral values is closely connected to their prescriptivity. And it seems clear that Mackie thinks that prescriptivity of objective moral values has something to do with the truth of a form of internalism. So, if we understand the problem as having to do with some form of internalism (as I'll be suggesting we can do), we won't be changing the source of the putative queerness of objective moral values. Now, we might be able to find a problem with internalism without relying on some form of substantive naturalism. Thus we might be able to understand the putative queerness of objective moral values without appealing to broad metaphysical theses.

So that's the strategy. What are the details here?

Here's the basic argument. Following my usage in the previous post, call the following thesis HI2:

Necessarily, if you correctly judge that is objectively wrong for you to x and your judgment is based on detecting or apprehending the facts that make it wrong for you to x, then you are motivated not to x.

The first premise is that HI2 would be true if there were objective moral values. So, if there were objective moral values, correct moral judgments based on detection or apprehension of the moral facts would be necessarily connected to motivation. For objective moral values are supposed to be such that detection or apprehension of them would be necessarily tied to motivation. The second premise is that we find any necessary connection between our actual moral judgments and motivation to act in certain ways. So far as we know, no moral judgment is necessarily tied to motivation in this way.

That's the basic argument. It's really quite simple. Basically, the two premises are that a form of motivational internalism would be true if there were objective moral values, and that the relevant form of motivational internalism is false. The first premise--namely that the existence of objective moral values would make HI2 true--is supposed to be based on Mackie's analysis of ordinary moral language and thought. That analysis is supposed to reveal that the truth of HI2 is part of the prescriptivity of objective moral values. The second premise, I suppose, should be based on empirical facts that suggest that it is never necessarily the case that a person who makes a moral judgment is motivated to act in a certain way.

Now, clearly, this argument doesn't lead directly to the conclusion that there are no objective moral values. If you accept the two premises, two different conclusions seem possible. One conclusion, of course, is that objective moral values don't exist. So the reason that we don't find any necessary tie between moral judgment and motivation is that there aren't any objective moral values to know about. This is Mackie's route.

The other conclusion is that we never make correct judgments about moral values on the basis of accurately detecting or apprehending them. So we can accept that moral values exist, but deny that we have any way to discover what they're like. Or we could claim that they exist we have a way to detect them, but that we never manage to come to correct moral judgments on the basis of detecting them. I don't know what to make of this latter response, and I'm not sure what Mackie would say about it. It's clear that it's something he needs to deal with, though. (And a similar response is possible when we're talking about the epistemological argument from queerness, as the mere fact that we'd need a faculty we lack to know about objective moral values doesn't show that they don't exist. Perhaps they exist, and we simply can't know anything about them.)

But, whichever of these two conclusions we draw, it seems to result in a pretty significant problem for the defender of objective moral values. We should conclude either that they don't exist or that they may exist but we can't know anything about them.

The Plausibility of This Argument

What can we say about the premises of this argument? The first premise is that if there were objective moral values, there would be a necessary connection between correct moral judgments and motivation; the second premise is that there is no such connection. Are these plausible? I'm not going to say anything about the first premise here, but I want to mention three reasons why Mackie might accept the second.***

So we want reasons for thinking that there is no necessary connection between correct moral judgments and motivation. The first way to argue for this would be to argue that we have empirical evidence of actual counterexamples. Perhaps the empirical evidence of the ties between moral judgments and actions doesn't suggest any such necessary tie between making correct moral judgments and being motivated to act in certain ways. We just don't see the close ties between moral judgments and actions that we would expect to find if (HI2) were true. When we look at the judgments we take to be most obviously correct, we don't find any close connection to action--or, at least, we don't find any connection close enough to suggest (HI2) is true.

Now, a second way to argue for this is to appeal to possible, though perhaps non-actual, counterexamples. Given whatever sense of possibility if supposed to be relevant to (HI), we can always describe possible counterexamples; we can always describe amoralists, people who make correct judgments but aren't motivated in this way.

The third way to argue that there is no necessary connection between correct moral judgments and motivation is to appeal to the Humean theory of motivation. Mackie is a cognitivist, and so he thinks moral judgments express beliefs (about objective moral values). If he accepts the Humean theory of motivation, then he thinks that beliefs alone are always motivationally inert. You need a conative state in addition to a belief in order to account for motivation, and beliefs and conative states are 'distinct existences'. So, given any particular belief, it's always possible to simply not care about the content of the belief and so not be motivated in virtue of having that belief. Hence, in general, there is no necessary connection between any belief and motivation to act in a certain way. Hence there is no necessary connection between (correct) moral beliefs and motivation to act in a certain way.

*. Now, some of Mackie's worries here are pretty clear. For instance, he thinks we'd need some special faculty of intuition to detect or apprehend objective moral values, and yet we don't seem to have any such faculty. That's clear enough--though it's not altogether clear why he thinks we'd need such a faculty to detect them.
**. This paper appeared in a supplementary volume #21 of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.
***. In what follows, I'm going to ignore the complication that HI2 explicitly talks about correct moral judgments based on detection or apprehension of objective moral values. Instead, I'll talk about the connection between motivation and correct moral judgments in general. If it turns out that we can't find a necessary connection between motivation and any of our moral judgments, then it's clear that we have enough to establish the second premise.

Lee on the Demandingness of Consequentialism, Part II

2004-06-22T11:29:00.000-04:00

A couple posts ago I tried to sketch how someone might formulate the objection that consequentialism is too demanding and how they might do so in a way that gives the objection some prima facie plausibility. Now I'll say a bit about some ways in which a consequentialist might respond to this objection. The responses here are pretty schematic, but I'm really just trying to lay out the options. (You should also check out Christian Lee's detailed comments on the first post on this issue, as he discusses some of the same issues there.)

And away we go, with some possible consequentialist responses to this supposed problem. I'll talk about responses of two types. I'll begin with responses that go after this sort of reflective equilibrium argument, and then I'll briefly discuss a couple more arguments.

Against the Reflective Equilibrium Argument

The first move here is to admit that a reflective equilibrium argument will show that morality isn't as demanding as consequentialism implies, but to deny it's a problem. As I said, it's not likely that a reflective equilibrium argument of this sort is going to persuade someone who didn't think much of the consequentialism-is-too-demanding objection in the first place. The underlying reason seems to be that a person who doesn't buy this argument is likely to hold views about the issue of how revisionary a plausible moral theory can be that conflict with taking reflective equilibrium arguments very seriously. Now, the (and I hereby coin this word) revisionariness of a normative moral theory is a matter of how many of our considered judgments and mid-level principles we're required to give up in accepting the moral theory. Relying on reflective equilibrium seems to be based on a sort of methodological conservatism: we take our considered judgments quite seriously, and we don't abandon them lightly. So relying on arguments like this seems to be based on a conviction that a moral theory shouldn't be radically revisionary. If, on the other hand, you don't want to take these considered judgments or mid-level principles seriously--if you're happy with a revisionary moral theory--this sort of argument isn't likely to appeal to you. And that seems to be the source of the underlying debate here. So this is one way the defender of consequentialism can avoid the demandingness objection: she can refuse to accept the method of argumentation on which it appears to rely.

The second move is one I won't discuss in detail. It is to accept reflective equilibrium argumentation, at least for the sake of argument, but to deny the reflective equilibrium arguments shows that consequentialism is too demanding. Perhaps, if we adequately understand our considered judgments and mid-level principles, we'll find that it's not so clear that they conflict with a radically demanding moral theory. It may be that, once we fully understand them, we'll see that they do in fact imply that morality is very demanding; or it maybe that, once we fully understand them, we'll see that there are elements that suggest that morality is demanding and elements that suggest it isn't. I won't say much about the plausibility of this response, as doing so would take me too far afield. But I'll just point out that the arguments that morality is very demanding of which I'm aware--and I don't know much about this literature--involve some argument of this sort. In his "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" Peter Singer points to some fairly plausible mid-level principles, and he argues that they imply that we have very demanding moral duties. In Living High and Letting Die Peter Unger focuses more on our considered judgments about certain imaginary cases, and he argues that our considered judgments about such cases provide evidence for the view that we have very demanding moral duties in actual cases.

Against the Demandingness of Consequentialism

Both the sorts of arguments discussed above involve admitting that consequentialism, as defined above, does lead to the conclusion that our moral obligations are very demanding. Of course, one could also go the other way and deny that consequentialism leads to this conclusion. I'll now consider that possibility. One argument focuses in on (1) in the definition of consequentialism in the previous post; the other goes after (2b). I'll begin with the latter.

The way to go here is focus in on the relevant notion of goodness. What the consequentialist has to do is come up with a conception of goodness that gets around these worries about demandingness. I'm not going to claim that I know how to do this, since I don't. But I'll just sketch an example to show how it might work in a particular case that might seem to pose the demandingness problem.

Say you've got $1000, and you're trying to decide whether you should put in your child's college fund or send it to Oxfam. And suppose you take a fairly crude hedonistic conception of the good: what is good is the feeling of pleasure. With this conception of the good, it's pretty easy to figure out what you should do. You just need to ask yourself which course of action will lead to the greatest amount of happiness in the long run. Well, if this is the relevant issue, it seems clear that you could do more good by giving our money to Oxfam. For, though contributing a nice chunk of cash to your child's college fund might make her much happier (and it might make you happier as well), sending the same amount of money to Oxfam would make either a single person much happier (it might save her life and provide her with resources to live on for quite some time) or it would make a group of people happier. So more total pleasure is produced by giving to Oxfam. And it should be clear how this sort of argument can quickly lead to a very demanding conception of morality. For similar arguments are going to work for pretty much any amount of money you're planning on spending on yourself or the people close to you. Quickly, then, we seem to be led to the conclusion that you're obligated to give pretty much all your money away to Oxfam.

Can we avoid this? Sure, we only need to come up with a conception of the good that doesn't allow for this. So we need a conception of the good that tell us it's better to spend $1000 on your child than it is to send the money to Oxfam. Suppose we say that the fact that the state of affairs of your putting the money in the college fund is one involving a special relationship between people, and that this gives it more intrinsic value than the state of affairs in which you give the money to Oxfam. And if we can do something similar in other cases, we may not have to worry about demandingness.

A couple things about this sort of response. First, I don't even know that it can be done. I don't know that we can come up with a conception of the good that will avoid all problems of this sort. Maybe it can be done, and maybe not. Second, there's the obvious problem that the conception of the good suggested above can seem pretty counterintuitive. The money sent to Oxfam could lead to a state of affairs that saves the life of a young child, or that feeds a hungry child for several weeks or months. Yet, according to this conception of the good, it's really better from an impersonal point of view to send your child to college than it would be to send the money to save the life or feed a child you don't know. I'm not sure how plausible a conception of impersonal good this is, and it seems to undermine what's supposed to make consequentialism plausible in the first place. What seems to make consequentialism a plausible moral theory is that it allows us to understand the nature and purpose of morality by appealing to some intuitively plausible conception of the good. If, for instance, we're considering utilitarianism, we're able to understand the nature of happiness, why it's a good thing, and how morality can be understood as a system for promoting happiness. However, if we're going to develop the sort of conception of the good that is needed to avoid this objection, it's not clear that we're going to be able to appreciate its goodness. (Furthermore, you might wonder whether a conception of the good that is tailored to allow consequentialism to be consistent with our ordinary moral thought is really doesn't turn into a moral conception of the good.)

Another possible way to argue that consequentialism doesn't require too much of us could be based on a focusing in on (1) and what a person can do. The move is pretty simple: we try to argue that (many of) these extremely demanding obligations get thrown out as things we can't do. So, for example, we have to argue that giving your money to Oxfam rather than putting it in your child's college fund is something you can't do.

But, of course, there is a sense of 'can' in which you can do this. What sense is that? Well, it would seem to be that, given your actual psychology, it is in your power to act this way. It may be difficult to do so--it may require that you give up things you value most--but it is still an option for you. And this is why it seems that your obligations are demanding--they are can require to give up those things you find most valuable in order to do the right thing.

Now, the way to avoid this objection would be to understand the sense of 'can' in (1) in such a way that it doesn't turn out that you can often ignore those things that you find most valuable. If we could do this, then it couldn't turn out that consequentialism tells us that doing what we ought to do requires a sort of heroic detachment from what we actually care about. Is there any such sense of 'can'? Maybe. It does seem true that there's an ordinary sense of 'can' in which it's true to say that most normal people in normal situations can't give up their most central projects and ignore obligations resulting from their closest relationships in order to do create more good for others. Given their motivational set and how much they care about the things, they can't do this (at least not in the relevant sense of 'can'). And if they come to think their moral obligations require this of then, then you're just going to think, "so much the worse for my being moral" and they're going to act accordingly. It's not just that people would find these obligations too demanding when compared to what they usually think of their moral obligations, but that, in some way, such obligations would be too demanding for them to be able to do it.

Can this be plausibly argued? Maybe, but I'm not sure how to do it. The first and most obvious problem is that there is empirical evidence that some people can do this sort of thing. Now, that in itself isn't a problem for the defending of this sort of response. They could always admit this but argue that most ordinary people can't do this sort of thing, and so the response still works in most cases. But they've got to assume that there's some substantial psychological difference between the people who do give up these things in order to meet such perceived obligations and ordinary people who they're going to claim couldn't do this. Is there such a difference? I don't know. Call in the psychologists.

But, even if we had empirical evidence that there were such psychological differences, there could still be problems with this response. The first, of course, is that it's not clear how much help such a response would be. It might only rule out extremely demanding things--say, giving up your entire life and going off to help the indigent--and not giving the money to Oxfam rather than putting it in your child's college fund. Second, it might seem that taking this route is going to lead to serious problems making sense of moral obligations that we think people actually have. For, even though we think that consequentialism can be too demanding, we still think that morality can be pretty demanding, that it can sometimes require people to give up things they really want and value. But if we're employing some notion of what people can do that closely ties people's abilities to their actual desires, values, aims, etc., we might have trouble making sense of this. Furthermore, a consequentialist who offers this response might have trouble making room for the fact that people with very strange desires, values, aims, etc. can have ordinary moral obligations. We certainly don't want to say that the serial killer isn't under any moral obligation not to kill people just because he really wants to kill them (and so can't, in this sense, not kill them). But if we tie what a person's alternatives are to what they actually want in the way that this response seems to require, it's not clear we can avoid this sort of problem.

(Nearly) Shameless Self-Promotion

2004-06-20T23:40:00.000-04:00

I haven't yet mentioned this here, and so I'll do so now: I've written some reviews and compiled some lists for Amazon. Honestly, most of this stuff isn't very good. But I thought it was worth mentioning, and I think I'll put a link to my stuff on my sidebar.

If you're interested in checking out what I've done, you can look here.

Why am I posting about this? Well, first and most obviously, I'd like to have some people go and look at what I've written. And if you feel that some of my reviews are helpful, then you can give me votes. (I suppose you can also vote if you don't find them very helpful.)

Second, it might be nice to get some constructive criticism about this stuff, and especially about the reviews. My aim in writing the reviews is to get some practice in developing the sorts of skills that I'll need to write academic book reviews in the future. Writing a review also forces me to get straight on the content of the book and to find a clear and brief way to express some of its main ideas. Furthermore, preparing to write a review often provides some impetus to get through the whole of a book. (I can use some help sometimes!)

Now, the format there isn't exactly the format of an academic review. For instance, they only give you approximately 1,000 words to work with; and that usually requires me to do quite a bit of cutting. Consequently, I tend to avoid trying to do much philosophical criticism in the reviews--there's just not enough space for detailed and fair criticism--and instead I focus on letting the reader know what the book is about and giving some of my general impressions about its strengths and weaknesses. So, in some ways, these are quite different from good academic book reviews. But I do find that writing them has been helpful to me, and I think it would be nice to know what people who have some knowledge of these matters think of them. And, of course, it would also be nice to know if I've made some glaring and egregious errors in my descriptions of the views of other philosophers.

Third, you, dear reader, might be able to help me. I'm thinking about compiling another list about contemporary books in meta-ethics that I think people ought to read, and I wouldn't mind getting some suggestions from people. I've already got two lists (this one and this one), and I'm willing to listen to suggestions for the third. Plus, you might suggest something I don't yet know about. (I don't claim to have anything approaching an encyclopedic knowledge of the literature here.) So, if you know of some great but unduly obscure treatises in contemporary meta-ethics, let me know.

Thanks.

Lee on the Demandingness of Consequentialism, Part I

2004-06-20T13:54:00.000-04:00

I'd like to say something about the objection to consequentialism that Christian Lee discusses in this post. I'm going to break up my discussion into two post. The first sets out the problem as I see it; the second briefly discusses some possible consequentialist responses.

The basic objection is that maximizing consequentialism is false since it leads to an account of the nature and extent of our moral obligations on which those obligations are clearly too demanding.

Here's Lee's account of the objection:

Consequentialism: An act A is obligatory for S iff (1) A is an act from amongst S's alternatives that S can perform and (2) If S performed A, then the world would better off than it would have been had S not performed A. In case of ties between alternatives for best act, some act from the tied acts is obligatory.

A consequence of this view of obligations entails that it is possible that someone is obligated to perform a momentous act, e.g. moving to Tanzania to help Aids victims.

But...so the objection goes, that is too demanding! Any moral theory which could require us to put our lives in an upheavel and give up what we want to do with our lives, sacrificing our autonomy to choose our own careers, is false. Dead stop.

I find this objection wanting. To put it crudely, who ever said that morality and its requirements was easy. I would think it is quite the opposite. Morality is very, very hard. This objection presupposes something that just seems wrong to me, that obligations are easy to meet and I can't see why someone should think this.

I'm pretty sympathetic to what he says here. But I have a few things to say about this.

First, a quibble. I think that Lee's being somewhat unsympathetic to this sort of objection when he says that is must rest on an assumption that it's easy to fulfill our obligations. I don't think a defender of this objection needs to say that. She might still be able to say that some obligations can be hard to fulfill. What it seems she needs to say is not that all obligations are easily fulfilled, but that some obligation the consequentialist says we have is too hard to fulfill. In other words, she needs to argue that our actual moral obligations aren't that demanding, though they may well be quite demanding.

Second, a little on Lee's definition of consequentialism. Here it is:

"An act A is obligatory for S iff (1) A is an act from amongst S's alternatives that S can perform and (2) If S performed A, then the world would better off than it would have been had S not performed A."

When I read this, all (2) seems to be saying that A is obligatory if doing A makes the world better than not doing A. But the problem is that there are lots of different ways of not doing A. And A may be such that for some alternatives, doing A would make the world better; for others, doing A wouldn't. So it's not clear how to apply (2) in all cases.

Let me explain what I'm getting at by considering an example. Suppose I have $1000 in disposable income, and I'm trying to decide what to do with it. Well, it seems that one thing I could do is give $50, and only $50, of it to Oxfam. What does consequentialism, defined as it is above, tell me about whether or not I'm obligated to give $50, and only $50, of it to Oxfam? Does this action meet condition (1)? Sure, giving $50, and only $50, is one of the actions that's available to me. Does it meet condition (2)? It seems it's going to depend. If I don't send the $50 to Oxfam, I might just put it in the bank. If that's what I do instead of donating the money, it seems it would have made the world a better place to give it to Oxfam. But if I donated $100 to Oxfam instead of donating $50, then it seems not donating $50, and only $50, would make the world a better place.

So it doesn't look like (1) and (2) together tell us whether it is obligatory for me to donate $50, and only $50, to Oxfam. It depends on what would have happened had I not done so.

To me, then, it seems (2) needs to be something like this:

(2b) If S performed A, then the world would been better than it would have been had S done anything else from the alternatives she could perform.

This, I think, makes clear that we're supposed to compare the results of doing A with the results of all other possible actions open to S. Maybe Lee's original formulation implied this, as it seems clear that he was assuming something of this sort. If it did imply this, though, I must be misreading it.

OK, enough of this preliminary stuff. Is there any way to make this objection to consequentialism seem more plausible?

I suppose the first way to back up the argument that this sort of consequentialism is too demanding is to give a sort of reflective equilibrium argument. We have lots of considered judgments about our particular obligations (e.g. it was wrong of Oswald to kill Kennedy) and lots of mid-level principles (e.g. murder is wrong), and these are evidence for and against moral theories. Some of these considered judgments and mid-level principles may be rejected in the course of developing a moral theory, but we have good reason to be suspicious of any moral theory that requires us to give up lots and lots of them. And, the argument goes, this sort of consequentialism does require us to give up lots and lots of them. It requires us to give up considered judgments and mid-level principles about the stringency of moral obligations: that normal people in normal circumstances don't have moral obligations that require them to give up their most central projects, that normal people in normal circumstances don't have moral obligations that require them to make themselves miserable in order to help others, etc. It also seems to require that we give up considered judgments and mid-level principles about the existence of other obligations: that normal people in normal circumstances have stringent obligations to devote themselves to helping people with whom they have special relationships, that normal people in normal circumstances have stringent obligations not to steal from people or break promises or the like in order to help others, etc. And so on.

Now, admittedly, this is really just a more complicated version of the original objection that our moral obligations simply aren't this demanding. So people who didn't find the original version of the argument very persuasive may be unlikely to find this more elaborate version more persuasive--but at least it gives the defending of the objection more ammunition than a mere assertion that our obligations aren't as stringent as consequentialism says. And this could be very helpful, especially if the defender of this objection can point to some specific considered judgments and mid-level principles that we find very plausible and that seem to conflict with this form of consequentialism. That, certainly, would give her a more to work with than a mere sense that our obligations aren't as demanding as consequentialism tells us they are.

Mackie Question

2004-06-19T13:24:00.000-04:00

I have a question about Mackie's analysis of ordinary moral language and thought in the first chapter of his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. It seems clear that Mackie thinks that, if there were objective moral values, then some version of motivational internalism would be true. But what I'm not sure of is whether he thinks that some version of motivational internalism is in fact true, even though there are no objective moral values.

So far as I can tell, what Mackie explicitly claims about moral motivation is that objective moral values are such that if a person apprehended or detected them, then she would be motivated to act in a certain way. Let's simplify this by focusing on objective wrongness. Mackie, it seems, is committed to the following thesis about moral motivation:

(MM) Necessarily, if you apprehend or detect that it is objectively wrong to x, then you are motivated not to x.

If we suppose that apprehending or detecting that something is objectively wrong involves judging that it is objectively wrong, then (MM) appears to imply what David Brink calls 'hybrid internalism' in the third chapter of his Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics. Take hybrid internalism to imply the following thesis about judgments of moral wrongness:

(HI) Necessarily, if you correctly judge that is objectively wrong for you to x, then you are motivated not to x.

And it is important that this thesis is about correct judgments about objective moral wrongness.* This doesn't tell us whether there will or won't be motivation if a person makes these judgments when there are no correct judgments about objective wrongness. So, if this is the sort of motivational judgment internalism that Mackie accepts, he needn't say that people are in fact motivated when they make judgments about objective rightness and wrongness. Accepting (HI) would, of course, commit him to saying that people are sometimes motivated when they make moral judgments if he thought there were cases in which people made true judgments of this sort. But, since he thinks there are no objective moral values to make correct judgments about, accepting (HI) doesn't require him to say that people are ever motivated when they make moral judgments.

So, if (HI) is all Mackie's analysis of ordinary moral language and thought commits him to, he isn't committed to any thesis about actual moral motivation. But is (HI) all he's committed to? This is what I'm not sure of.

Consider the thesis of motivational internalism: that is, the thesis that there is some necessary connection between moral judgments and moral motivation. However we formulate motivational internalism, it seems it's going to imply the following these about judgments of moral wrongness:

(MI) Necessarily, if you judge that it is objectively wrong for you to x, then you are motivated not to x.

Notice that this thesis doesn't say anything about whether the relevant judgment is correct or incorrect. So (MI) tells us that there is a connection between moral judgment and motivation, whether or not there are objective moral facts for people to make judgments about. And since Mackie's analysis of ordinary moral language and thought implies that people do actually make judgments of objective rightness and wrongness, then he is committed to making claims about the actual connection between (at least some) moral judgments and motivation if he accepts (MI). Thus, if Mackie accepts (MI), he is committed to the view that people are actually motivated to act in certain ways when they make judgments about objective moral wrongness. Even those their judgments about these things are never correct, their judgments are still motivationally efficacious.

So does Mackie accept (MI) or only something like (HI)? Does he only make a claim about what moral motivation would be like if there were objective values, or is he claiming something about the connection between motivation and moral judgments in worlds where there are no objective values?

*. I realize I'm ignoring a possible difficulty here. (MM) only talks about judgments one makes based on apprehension or detection, whereas (HI) talks about correct judgments. And it seems this might be a problem. For one can imagine a person arriving at a correct moral judgment in some way other than through apprehending or detecting objective moral values, and perhaps Mackie wouldn't way to say that correct moral judgments arrived at in (all) these other ways would be accompanied by moral motivation. So maybe the version of (HI) that make would accept would have to be somewhat more complex. Perhaps he'd only accept something like this:

(HI2) Necessarily, if you correctly judge that is objectively wrong for you to x and your judgment is based on detecting or apprehending the objective moral facts that make it wrong for you to x, then you are motivated not to x.

I'll ignore this complication here.

Philosophy and the Movies

2004-06-17T16:34:00.000-04:00

There's recently been quite a bit of discussion in the philosophy-related blogosphere about philosophy and the movies. (See here and here.) All of this has been prompted by a list of recent English-language movies with philosophical themes that has been compiled by Jason Brennan.

With one notable exception, though, no one weighing in on this issue seems to know much of anything about movies. It may be that Brennan does know more than his list lets on, though. He claims he wants a list focused on recent movies in English, since he takes it that those films are more likely to keep students interested. That may be true, but that doesn't strike me as a good reason to focus on those films as opposed to older, harder, better ones. I don't think I'd be too worried about challenging them with a film that might not be the sort of thing they'd go out and see on their own. After all, I doubt many students are really all that interested in reading philosophy, and yet we're going to force philosophy on them. So why not force some good movies on them too?

I'm going to focus on films that raise philosophically interesting moral and political issues. But, before I go ahead and give my little list, I'd like to point out that I find little serious overlap between philosophy and the cinema. Film, it seems to me, isn't a medium that readily lends itself to the sort of abstraction that's required in philosophical thought. What a good film can do is raise some important philosophical issues in a vivid manner; it's not so good if you're looking for serious investigation of these issues.

That said, there are some films that I find philosophically interesting. First, I've always thought that the films of Fritz Lang resemble analytic philosophy more than any other films of which I am aware. His best films, I think, are models of how one can both raise and investigate intellectual issues within traditional narrative cinema. He pushes for a sort of abstraction by giving his films stripped-down, simplified stories, and consequently his films often seem like good philosophical thought experiments. Moreover, since Lang almost totally avoids sentimentality and usually keeps a healthy distance from the characters, his films call for dispassionate analysis of those characters and the situations in which they find themselves.

Still, these are largely formal matters--they are ways in which his films read like analytic philosophy--and they're unlikely to be things that beginning students of either philosophy or the cinema pick up on. But some of his films also raise philosophical issues. And the best of his films, M, is also the most philosophically interesting. It raises a large number of interesting philosophical issues, including what we should think of the moral status of the death penalty, how we should think various forms of insanity affect moral and legal responsibility, and, most interestingly, how we should weigh individual rights against the interests of the larger community. In M, the focus is largely on the larger community and the ways in which it can be affected by a single destructive individual. On the other hand, in his later Fury, the focus is on the single individual and the ways in which an individual can be unjustly treated by the larger community. In addition, a few more of his films might be interesting to watch in conjunction with discussion of certain philosophical issues: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt raises questions about the death penalty, and both Rancho Notorious and Die Nibelungen have things to say about revenge.

And believe it or not, there are some explicitly philosophical narrative films out there. During his later, world historian period Roberto Rossellini made films about Pascal, Descartes, Socrates, and Augustine. (These films are not documentaries.) I haven't seen any of these films, as they are very hard to find. But I believe they do concern these figures' ideas, and not just the details of their lives.

Of all religious films, I think there's no question that Dreyer's are those that should be most interesting to philosophers. The two that would be most worth seeing and discussing are Ordet and Day of Wrath. The latter raises a number of interesting issues: the importance of religious tolerance, the nature and existence of evil, the different ways in which believers and non-believers see the world. Ordet has something to say about the first and third of those issues along with several others, viz. different types of religious faith, different conceptions of God and His relation to the world, and the nature and possibility of miracles. (Dreyer's Gertrud would also be interesting to watch in conjunction with discussions of what makes for a good human life. But it's an exceptionally demanding film, and one that few students are likely to appreciate or understand.)

Of course, there are many other interesting films with religious themes. Here are a few (with the relevant themes listed in parentheses): Tarkovsky's Stalker (faith vs. reason/science); Bunuel's Nazarin (problem of evil); Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (value of faith, conflict between religious and secular worldviews) and Au hasard balthazar (sin, the problem of evil).

If you can track them down, any number of Frederick Wiseman's documentaries would be valuable. Primate and Meat would be worth seeing in a class discussing the moral status of non-human animals. Near Death would be great to watch when discussing euthanasia. Welfare and Public Housing should be of interest in classes discussing social justice and income redistribution.

There are several interesting films that might be worth watching in connection with discussions of feminism. Any number of Mizoguchi's masterpieces would be relevant here; The Life of Oharu, Sisters of the Gion, and Osaka Elegy would be especially useful. Other films that might be interesting here: Akerman's Jeanne dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 bruxelles; Cassavetes's A Woman under the Influence; Romero's The Season of the Witch (aka Jack's Wife); Pabst's Joyless Street; von Sternberg's The Devil Is a Woman; and a number of Godard's films, including Two or Three Things I Know about Her, Numero Deux, and The Married Woman.

Fassbinder directed several films that raise important issues about sexuality. Some of the most useful here are: Fox and His Friends, In a Year of Thirteen Moons, and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. His early, and unduly obscure, The Niklashausen Journey is also an interesting film about revolution and its possible consequences.

OK, I think I've written enough about this. I'll just list the rest of the films that fall into various categories. In parentheses I'll list additional themes in the movie that might be of philosophical interest.

Immoralism
Bresson's Pickpocket (redemption)
Hitchcock's Rope

Explicit Marxism
Dudov's Kuhle Wampe
Eisenstein's Strike and October
Godard's Tout va bien
Ivens's New Earth
Pudovkin's The End of St. Petersburg

Non-Marxist (or Not Explicitly Marxist) Criticism of Capitalism
Bresson's L'argent
Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (immoralism, deontology vs. consequentialism)
Clair's A nous la liberte
Pasolini's Porcile
Polonsky's Force of Evil
Renoir's The Crime of Monsieur Lang
Romero's Dawn of the Dead
von Stroheim's Greed (greed as a vice)

Suicide
Bresson's The Devil, Probably and Mouchette

Death Penalty
The fifth episode of Kieslowski's Decalogue or his A Short Film about Killing
Oshima's Death by Hanging

Moral Status of Animals
Franju's La sang des betes

Issues of Race and Ethnicity
Cassavetes's Shadows
Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Katzelmacher
Romero's Night of the Living Dead (watch carefully!)

Search Engine Help

2004-06-14T22:37:00.000-04:00

Does anyone know where I can find a good, free search engine for my blog? I've been looking around, and I haven't yet found anything.

If it's possible, I'd prefer to have something very simple. I'm going for a minimalist aesthetic here, as should be obvious by now.

Thanks.

A Second Point about Putnam's Ethics without Ontology

2004-06-14T14:48:00.000-04:00

One more point about Putnam's Ethics without Ontology.

Moral and Non-Moral Value

In a previous post I discussed a concern about Kantian ethics that Matthew Yglesias brought up a long time ago. I didn't buy his particular worry--namely, that Kant can't account for the badness of actions that don't result from free human actions (e.g. a comet's killing a large number of people--but I did think he might be getting at something. What I thought he might be getting at was that Kant can't really account for the importance of non-moral value, of non-moral goodness and badness. In particular, it seems that, for Kant, considerations of moral value always trump considerations of non-moral value, and this it something one might find implausible. Now, I took this interpretation of the problem because I agreed with some of the commenters on Yglesias's original post that Kant was only attempting to provide an account of moral value, and that moral value applies only to the actions of rational beings and the consequences of those actions. The assumption here is that moral issues arise only when we're talking about the actions of rational beings. If we're talking about, say, a comet's killing people, moral issues don't even arise. This may be a bad thing, but it's not a morally bad thing.

But, in his discussion of the diversity of ethical evaluations, Putnam appears to deny that the sphere of moral issues is restricted in this way.

There are many different kinds of ethical judgments. For example, there are ethical judgments which involve praise and blame and ethical judgments which have nothing to do with praise and blame (an example of the latter, which is of historical importance, is the judgment that the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was a very bad thing; this is also a counterexample to the idea that all ethical judgments have the function of "prescribing" conduct); there are ethical judgments which imply "oughts" and ethical judgments which do not imply "oughts"; and there are a host of ethical judgments which are not happily formulated using the moral philosopher's favorite words, ought, must, mustn't, good, bad, right, wrong, duty, obligation--the idea that all ethical issues can be expressed in this meager vocabulary is a form of philosophical blindness. (pp. 72-3)

So Putnam appears to have a wider conception of the breadth of moral value. The judgment that the Lisbon earthquake was a bad thing is an ethical judgment. Hence ethical badness isn't limited to actions of people; we can make sense of moral value being present in cases where we don't have free human actions. If this is right, then perhaps Yglesias's original objection to Kant goes through; perhaps there is some aspect of moral value that Kant doesn't account for.

But what, exactly, is supposed to make these judgments moral judgments? It's not obvious.* If ethical judgments aren't limited to judgments about free actions of rational beings, what do they concern? Why think that a judgment about the Lisbon earthquake should count as an ethical judgment?

Putnam gives an account of what he means by talking about ethics in the first of the four lectures in the first part of the book. He doesn't offer a clear and precise way of distinguishing ethical from non-ethical considerations, and this appears to be intentional. For he thinks ethical thought involves taking seriously a group of different, though interrelated, concerns that can't be brought under any single system. He main considerations he mentions are considerations concerning our obligations to alleviate the suffering of others; considerations concerning Aristotelian ideas of human flourishing and the relation between being virtuous and leading a good and admirable human life; and considerations concerning universality/ethical equality that lead us to thinking that everyone matters ethically. But none of these considerations, he claims, is the central element of ethical thought. They all have a role to play in ethical thought, and none of them plays the central role. So it looks like Putnam's conception of ethics combines elements of consequentialism, deontology, and virtue theory. None of these is types of consideration is supposed to be more basic than the others; there's no reducing all these concerns to any single type. The attempt to reduce all ethical concerns to any of these types, he thinks, is the result of a sort of "moral blindness."

Now, before I go on to discuss the implications of this for the issue I discussed above, I want to consider just what Putnam is claiming about ethics here. When he provides this account of what he means when he talks about ethics, he notes that there are possible "ethics" that take considerations about courage or "manly prowess" to be the chief considerations. But, as he uses the term 'ethics', considerations of this sort don't fall within ethics. The question I want to ask about this but don't know how to answer is: Is Putnam claiming that these systems flout some logical or conceptual requirement on being ethical theories, or is he claiming that they flout some substantive moral requirement? In other words, is the person defending an ethic of manly prowess not thinking ethically at all, or is he simply thinking poorly about ethics?

This, I think, brings up a question about Putnam's account of ethical considerations. Is this account supposed to be making a metaethical point or an ethical one? The metaethical point would be that, if you fail to appreciate Putnam's favored ethical considerations, then, as a logical or conceptual matter, you're no longer thinking ethically. The ethical point would be that, if you fail to appreciate these considerations, then you're thinking ethically but displaying a moral failing; then you're making a moral mistake rather than a logical or conceptual one.

I don't know how to interpret Putnam here. But let's get back to the main issue.

Clearly, Putnam's broad conception of the ethical has some bearing on the Kant issues about moral vs. non-moral value. Putnam's views suggests that there may be another sort of moral value here--the moral value of situations not involving human agency in any direct way. How does this apply to the case of the Lisbon earthquake? Putnam doesn't really explain, but it seems like we can infer something like the following from what he says about ethics. He could argue that considerations of human suffering are ethical concerns even when free human agency doesn't play a role in leading to the suffering. And, clearly, the Lisbon earthquake resulted in considerable human suffering, even though it wasn't caused by free human actions. This, then, is why we can make an ethical judgment that the Lisbon Earthquake and the suffering it caused were bad things.

So the problem for Kant's moral theory is that it doesn't allow us to make sense of this judgment as a moral judgment. Kant's moral theory

It seems, then, that Putnam has a conception of the ethical that will allow him to argue something like I was arguing against Kant. I framed it as Kant not being about to take moral value seriously enough, while Putnam will claim that Kant isn't actually accounting for all types of moral value. But, however we put it, the main point is the same Kant's moral theory only takes a small class of the genuine concerns under consideration, and so he has a one-sided ethical theory. We want to say that the badness of the Lisbon earthquake matters morally, and it's unclear that Kant can say that.

Could Kant save his theory by arguing that he was only aiming to account for a certain sort of ethical consideration that Putnam mentions? Importantly, Putnam talks about ethics, and, with Kant, we're talking about morality. So maybe we can draw a distinction between the moral and the ethical. The moral is one--but only one--part of the ethical; moral considerations are one--but only one--kind of ethical consideration. Kant wants to account for the moral, not for the ethical in general. So here we take Kant to have a Williams-style contrast between the ethical and the moral in mind. Ethical considerations are those that have a broad relevance to what people ought to do, to both what is moral and what is rational, to what sorts of actions will lead to a good--and not just morally good--human life. And while moral considerations are a particular sort of ethical consideration, they aren't the only sort of ethical consideration. All Kant wants to do is offer an account of moral considerations, and not of the ethical in general. So there's really no conflict between Kantian moral theory and Putnam's pluralism about genuine ethical considerations.

Two responses to this:

(1) Putnam doesn't seem like he'd be very sympathetic to a move of this sort, as it doesn't seem to be consistent with the nature of his pluralism about moral considerations. He seems to think these considerations are connected, and that they need to be backed up by one another in important ways. They aren't individual parts of the ethical that can be pulled out and understood in isolation from one another.** But this response on Kant's behalf appears to assume that moral considerations can be understood in this way.

(2) Even if we suppose that we can make sense of the various types of ethical considerations in isolation from one another, I think Putnam still has room to complain about Kant's moral theory. The problem for Kant is that he's still going to have to downplay the other ethical considerations in favor of those that count as moral considerations. The moral considerations will trump the others, and I think it's clear Putnam doesn't want to allow this. For allowing moral considerations to trump other ethical considerations in all cases seems to suggest that ethics is really a system with a single central component consisting of morality and some additional considerations that supplement moral ones. It's pretty clear, though, that this isn't what Putnam has in mind. He thinks there's a genuine plurality of ethical considerations here, and that none is the ruling set of considerations. So it doesn't seem that he'd the moral always trumps the non-moral. Thus the ethical considerations in one's moral thought that arise from the recognition of some natural evil like the Lisbon earthquake may sometimes override one's narrowly moral considerations. In some cases it may be more important to alleviate suffering of this sort than it is to ensure one possesses a good will or acts on principles that can be universally willed by other rational beings. Kant, it seems, can't allow this.

*. Putnam isn't understanding ethical judgments as covering anything evaluative, as he thinks there are evaluative epistemological and methodological judgments that don't count as ethical.
**. Putnam also claims that he accepts the Hegelian criticism that Kant's ethical theory is formal and empty. I'm not sure what his reasons are for this, as he doesn't explain them. But the interrelation between the various ethical considerations could be part of what he thinks is behind this problem. What Putnam thinks Kant's ethics focuses in on is the universality of ethical considerations and the importance of acting on principle. And he may think that, while these are important elements of ethical considerations, focusing on them doesn't get you to a robust moral theory unless you bring in the other ethical considerations on the ground level.

A Point about Putnam's Ethics without Ontology

2004-06-14T11:40:00.000-04:00

I've been reading the first part of Putnam's Ethics without Ontology, and, while I don't have a whole lot to say about the general issues there, Putnam does say a couple minor things that I wanted to mention and briefly discuss. [I'll discuss one point here and another in a later post. And I may, in an event later post, come back to the general issues raised in the book--but, then again, I may not.]

Abortion and Personhood

In discussing the persistence of moral disagreement as an argument that morality isn't subjective, he considers the case of disagreement about abortion. And he says:

Disagreements about the morality of abortion are usually also disagreements about the question of just when a fetus becomes a person--sometimes this is put in metaphysical terms, as "When does the fetus acquire a soul?" To assume that the irresolvability--if it is irresolvable--of the question of the legitimacy of abortion is simply an example of the "irresolvability" of ethical disputes, and not, for example, an example of the irresolvability of metaphysical disputes is, on the face of it, unwarranted. (pp 75-6)

I think this passage makes a pretty good, if somewhat well-worn, point about moral disagreements--namely that they often depend, at least in part, on what are contentious non-moral issues. Nevertheless, I'm not so sure that the point applies in this particular case. The issue here is what the relevant sort of personhood is when we're concerned with the abortion debate, and it's not clear to me that we're concerned with a metaphysical and non-moral sort of personhood. If the question is, as one of Putnam's formulations suggests, one about the fetus and whether or not it has a soul, then it does seem to be a straightforwardly metaphysical question. But this question seems too narrow to be what he's concerned with.

There seem to be two types of persons (or senses of "person") that might be relevant here: a moral type (or sense) and a non-moral metaphysical type (or sense). The moral type of person is, I think, a being with the moral status that we accord to normal adult human beings.* The non-moral metaphysical type of person is what we're trying to accurately describe in offering a theory of personal identity through time. And what the passage above suggests is that Putnam thinks it's the latter, metaphysical type of personhood that matters when we're talking about the abortion debate. However, I usually take the relevant type of personhood to be the moral type. What we want to know about abortion is whether we ought to accord to the same moral status to fetuses that we accord to ordinary adult human beings, and not whether fetuses are metaphysical persons.

Of course, one might think that there isn't any clear distinction between these two types of personhood. Perhaps metaphysical persons, and only metaphysical persons, are the ones with the status of moral persons. If you offer some psychological continuity account of metaphysical personhood, this strikes me as having some prima facie plausibility. Indeed, the following then stikes me as prima facie plausible: a being has moral personhood if and only if it is a metaphysical person. Why does this seem plausible? Because it seems that the psychological characteristics that are going to go into making someone a metaphysical person seem to be closely connected with the psychological characteristics that go into making someone a being with the moral status of a normal adult human being.

What if you have a physical continuity view of metaphysical persons? Well, whatever physical characteristics it takes to be a person, they don't look to me like they're going to be a necessary condition for moral personhood. (Admittedly, if the physical criteria have to do with the continued existence and activity of physical processes underlying a being's mental life, this might not be the case.) We can imagine physically quite different beings we'd want to say have moral personhood. But having those physical characteristics might be sufficient for moral personhood.

Does any of this seem right to people?

*. Of course, it needn't be limited to normal adult human beings. But normal adult human beings are those beings who most people would agree are persons.

Some More on Hedonism

2004-06-13T15:00:00.000-04:00

What I was after in the previous post was the claim that a hedonist can't recognize qualitative distinctions in pleasures and pains; here I'm concerned with another, not unconnected, objection to hedonism. I'm after the objection that hedonists have to count any pleasure, however disgustingly obtained, as an intrinsic good of some kind. I'm not hedonist, but that's not the reason why. It's not that I think all pleasures are intrinsically good; I don't. It is, rather, that I don't think the hedonist has to claim this.

Hedonism, as I'll be understanding it here, is the thesis that pleasure, and pleasure alone, is intrinsically good, and that pain, and pain alone, is intrinsically bad.

In the previous post I argued that the hedonist can make qualitative distinctions in kinds of pleasures. The move I suggested there was that the hedonist should be careful not to identify intrinsic goodness with pleasantness: that is, not to identity the property of being intrinsically good with the property of being pleasant. And I argued that, if the hedonist is careful not to do this, it seems she can argue that the cause of a pleasure (or pain) partially determines how intrinsically good (or bad) that pleasure (or pain) is. So pleasures (or pains) that feel the same to the people experiencing them can have a different amount of intrinsic goodness (or badness) depending on how they're caused; one can be better (or worse) than the other even if the persons experiencing them couldn't tell the difference simply through introspection. This, I think, gives the hedonist a way to have qualitatively differences of the sort she needs to claim that, for instance, we can distinguish pleasures obtained from playing pushpin from those obtained from reading poetry.

First Problem: Non-Good (and Maybe Bad) Pleasures

But this alone isn't enough to get us around the objection that the hedonist still has to count all pleasures as intrinsic good experiences and all pains as intrinsically bad ones. Does she still have to say that all pleasures are good in some way? If so, this may seem counterintuitive. Consider, for example, a case in which someone gets pleasure from torturing a small child just for the hell of it. What is supposed to be counterintuitive here is that the hedonist has to say there is some intrinsic good here, at least insofar as the torturer gets pleasure from it. It may be very slight since the cause is torture, but there's still some intrinsic good here. But this looks preposterous, since the torturer's pleasure is worthless. Indeed, one might want to say that this is a case in which the pleasure is intrinsically bad; it is a case in which the situation is worse by the presence of the torturer's pleasure, inasmuch as the pleasure derives from someone enjoying torturing another human being. So there's not some, perhaps minor, good in this situation that derives from the torturer's pleasure. That pleasure, as a matter of fact, makes the entire situation worse than it would otherwise be. And since a hedonist can't account for this--for either pleasure not being intrinsically good at all or for its being intrinsically bad--hedonism is false.

Now, admittedly, not everyone has these intuitions. Some people have the intuition that there is in fact some intrinsic goodness to the torturer's pleasure, but that it is overridden by the pain caused to the child and other factors. I don't want to get into this issue here. All I want to do is suppose we have the intuition that the torturer's pleasure isn't intrinsically good at all and see whether the hedonist can make sense of this.

I don't see why the hedonist can't. If, as I have suggested, the hedonist doesn't identify being pleasurable with being good, then I think there's really no problem here. For she could then argue that there are pleasures that are caused in such a way that they lack the property of intrinsic goodness. So it's not just that different causes of pleasures can affect the degree to which they are intrinsically good, but pleasures caused in certain ways need not be good at all. Still, though, pleasures and pains are the only things that have intrinsic value. It's just that, depending on their causes, pleasures can be intrinsically bad and pains can be intrinsically good.* Thus the hedonist can account for the intuition that the pleasure of the torturer isn't any good at all. Moreover, it appears she can account for the intuition that the torturer's pleasure is actually intrinsically bad.

Interlude: A Worry about This Response

But does this take too much away from the intuitive idea behind hedonism, the idea that pleasure is good and that pain is bad? This, it seems, is supposed to give hedonism whatever intuitive plausibility it has: that pleasure definitely feels good and that pain definitely feels bad, and so maybe those feelings determine what is good and what bad. Furthermore, it's clear that people want pleasure, and they want to avoid pain. This doesn't reduce the case for hedonism to psychological hedonism, but it does appeal to the common-sense idea that, in general, people like pleasure and dislike pain. These sorts of considerations are what gives hedonism whatever initial plausibility it has, and it should be clear why they might lead us to want to identify the property of feeling pleasurable with the property of being intrinsically good.

But if we expand our conception of what hedonists can and cannot say about pleasure and pains in the ways I've been suggesting, do we have to give up these sorts of considerations that might give hedonism its plausibility? That is, do we have to give up the case for hedonism?

I don't know what to say about this at the moment.

Second Problem: Overall States of Affairs and Not Pleasures and Pains?

The second worry is that this way of responding to the worries about qualitative distinctions and about bad pleasures is really a way of abandoning the view that pleasures and pains have intrinsic values. If the hedonist accepts this sort of view, she has instead taken to attributing intrinsic value to states of affairs that aren't simply states of affairs of people having pleasures and pains. She's attributing intrinsic value to the entire state of affairs that includes both the person's having a pleasurable or painful experience and the events that led up to that pleasurable or painful experiences. What's intrinsically bad in torturer case, then, isn't the torturer's pleasure, but the overall state of affairs including both the torturer's pleasure and the activity of torturing a small child that leads to that pleasure. And that isn't hedonism, for no longer can the hedonist say that pleasures and pains, and pleasures and pains alone, have intrinsic goodness and badness.

I'm not sure that this is the right way to describe what the view is. I'm not sure that accepting this amounts to attributing intrinsic value to something other than pleasures and pains.

Perhaps an analogy would help draw out the intuitions here. Consider two killings, both of which result from a person being shot. The number of shots is the same in both cases, the person killed is shot in the same place in both cases, the person suffers the same amount of pain in both cases, the killing leads to the same amount of grief among the killed person's family and friends in both cases, etc. However, the one killing was an intentional murder by a contract killer and the other was an accidental shooting.

Now, it strikes me that the former case is worse--much worse, in fact--than the latter. But it seems to me that there are two ways to describe what's worse here, and I'm not sure which is the correct description. One way to describe the difference would be to say that the killing is worse in the former case, since, in that case, the killing was the result of a murder, whereas the first killing was only an accident. So here the difference is in the killings, and it's based on their causes. The other way to describe the difference would be to say that the killings, qua killings, are equally bad, but that the overall situation in which the person is killed in a murder is worse than overall situation in which the person is killed in an accident. So here the difference isn't one of the badness of the killings, but one of the badness of the overall situations of which the killings are a part.

I hope it's clear how this is analogous to the issue concerning hedonism. Saying that the one killing is worse than the other is like saying that the pleasures and pains have different intrinsic value, whereas saying that the one overall situation is worse than the other is like saying that overall states of affairs that include pleasures and pains have different intrinsic values. So, if we knew which was the right way to describe the differences in the killing case, we might know which was the right way to describe the differences in the case of pleasures and pains.

But, unfortunately, I don't know which is the right way to describe things in either case. So let's just suppose we go with the overall situation/overall state of affairs version. Is this a problem for hedonism?

Well, the hedonist then can't say that pleasures and pains, and only pleasures and pains, have intrinsic value. But perhaps the hedonist could alter her view to account for this way of looking at things. It's not the pleasures and pains themselves that are good and bad, but the overall state of affairs including both the subjective mental state of feeling pleasure or pain and the series of events that leads up to it. What has intrinsic value (intrinsic goodness and badness), then, is an overall state of affairs, and not merely the subjective mental state. And the intrinsic value of these states of affairs will depend on both the subjective mental state involved and the other events included in this state of affairs. But neither the mental state alone nor the other events have any intrinsic value on their own. These are Moorean organic wholes; they have intrinsic value, though none of their parts have intrinsic value in isolation from the others.**

Is this still hedonism, though? Why think it wouldn't be? I guess because it gives up the key hedonist thesis that pleasure and pains, and pleasures and pains alone, have intrinsic value. (Indeed, this is how I defined hedonism above.) For now we deny this and instead claim that intrinsic goodness and badness are possessed by these overall states of affairs that include both these mental states and the events leading up to them.

Still, though, intrinsic goodness and badness is restricted to states of affairs in which sentient beings experience pleasure or pain. Pleasure and pain are still requisite for intrinsic value of any sort. And this seems closely related to hedonism. But is it hedonism? I don't know deciding whether to call this hedonism or not is anything more than a terminological matter, but it seems to me that this is close enough to what I originally defined hedonism to be that I'd say this is a form of hedonism.

*. Of course, accepting my move of refusing to identify pleasurableness and goodness doesn't require the hedonist to say this. She can still say that all pleasures are good to some extent, and that all pains are bad to some extent. She isn't required to claim that some pleasures are bad and some pains good.
**. And, of course, this account of intrinsic goodness allows us to avoid a bad pleasure-style objection. For a hedonist of this stripe doesn't have to say that all states of affairs involving the feeling of pleasure are good. Whether a particular state of affairs involving a feeling of pleasure is good will depend not just on the subjective mental states involved, but also on the other parts of the overall state of affairs. And this leaves the hedonist will room to argue that some overall states of affairs involving pleasure have no intrinsic goodness, and that some such states of affairs even have intrinsic badness.

Ewing on Hedonism

2004-06-12T23:37:00.000-04:00

[I hereby warn the reader that what I'm not sure of the truth of anything that I say in this post. Actually, I'm not sure of what I say in any of the posts here. So if you're one of those types who can't stand to read something false (and perhaps obviously false), proceed no further. I doubt anyone who's come across this site is of that type, though. It is a blog likely to appeal to readers of philosophy, after all.]

I've been reading through A. C. Ewing's short book Ethics, and I've come across something there that I want to talk about. In the third chapter Ewing presents several objections to hedonistic utilitarianism; I want to talk about one of them. The objection is that the hedonistic utilitarian can't account for the fact that some pleasures are of greater value than others. For the hedonistic utilitarian, the only thing that is good in itself is pleasure, and all pleasures have to be considered to be of equal (qualitative) value. Like Bentham, the hedonistic utilitarian par excellence, we can discriminate between pleasures based on their intensity, duration, proximity, certainty, etc., but we can't make qualitative distinctions between pleasures.

And Ewing takes Mill to task for trying to deny this and yet remain a utilitarian.

Mill tried indeed to reconcile his utilitarianism with the admission that a lesser pleasure might rationally be preferred to a greater on the ground of the superior quality of the former, but it is generally, and I think rightly, agreed among philosophers that he failed to escape inconsistency. To say that pleasure is the only good and yet admit that a lesser pleasure may be preferable to a greater is like saying that money is the only thing which counts and then adding that money earned by public work is better than the same amount of money earned by business. If pleasure is the only good, the more pleasure always the better.

The analogy there, I admit, is pretty clever. But I don't buy the underlying argument, and it's an argument that a lot of people make. For instance, in his Morality: An Introduction to Ethics, Bernard Williams quips that Mill honorably contradicted himself by drawing qualitative distinctions in his account of human happiness, even though this was clearly inconsistent with his hedonism. Honestly, I don't think there are good reasons to think there is some contradiction here. In the latter part of this post I'll consider some reasons to think that there is one, and I'll reject them. But, first, I want to suggest why it seems to me that there's no obvious reason to think there's a contradiction here and why I think we can appeal to Ewing's own example to show this.

Pleasures and Quality

Suppose we respond to Ewing that he's misunderstood the lesson he should draw from his own analogy. The hedonist who thinks there are qualitative differences between pleasure could say that Ewing's way of thinking is like saying that money is the only valuable thing and then thinking that whoever has the greatest number of bills has the most of most value. That is, it's like thinking that if you have 100 $1 bills and I have ten $100 bills, you have money that is of more value than I the money I have. For, if you don't know how money gets its value, you might confuse having a lesser number of bills with having money that is of less value. And once you take into consideration how money gets its value, you'll realize that sometimes a group of fewer bills is more valuable than a group of more bills.

Similarly, the hedonist could argue, if you don't know how pleasures get their value, you could confuse having more pleasure (i.e. pleasures that are of greater intensity, that are of longer duration, that are more pure, etc.), with having pleasure that is of greater value. And once you take into consideration how pleasures get their value, you'll realize that sometimes a less intense, long-lasting, pure, etc. pleasure can be of more value than a more intense, long-lasting, pure, etc. one.

So the problem with Ewing's objection is that he's got an overly crude conception of the value of pleasures. He's taking their value to be wholly determined by their quantitative characteristics: that is, by their intensity, duration, purity, etc. And while it's the case that the value of pleasures is partially determined by intensity, duration, purity, etc., their value is not wholly so determined. For, the hedonist could argue, the quality of your pleasures also partially determines their value. Again, compare this with the case of the money. The value of the money you have is partially determined by the number of bills you have, but it's not wholly so determined. The type of bills that you have also matters.

The value of a pleasure, then, is a function of its quantity and its quality, and sometimes a pleasure whose quantity is less than that of another can still be of more value due to its greater quality. So, in this way, it can be rational to prefer a lesser pleasure to a greater one. Pleasures and pains are still the only things with intrinsic value, but some types of pleasures are more valuable than others. And it's not clear to me why this is inconsistent with the spirit of hedonism.

Two Putative Problems for Qualitative Distinctions

Why might someone think that drawing qualitative distinctions between the values of pleasures is inconsistent with the spirit of hedonism?

I can see two reasons one might think this. The first is pretty straightforward; it aims to explain away the thought that pleasures can have qualitative differences as based on something that is clearly inconsistent with hedonism. Consider Bentham's famous example of the pleasure one gets from pushpin and the pleasure one gets from poetry. One might claim that the reason why we might mistakenly think that the pleasure of reading poetry is qualitatively superior to the pleasure of playing pushpin is that we think reading poetry is superior to playing pushpin. In other words, the reason that the pleasure we get from appreciating art is of greater value than the pleasure we get from playing pushpin is that appreciating art is an activity of greater intrinsic value than the activity of playing a game of pushpin. The problem, of course, is that this is clearly inconsistent with hedonism, since this attributes intrinsic value to something other than pleasure (viz. the actions of playing pushpin and reading poetry). So the hedonist can't distinguish the intrinsic value of pleasures by relying on the intrinsic value of their causes, since, according the hedonist, those causes don't have intrinsic value.

But I don't see why the hedonist has to make this mistake. The hedonist can claim that pleasure, and pleasure alone, has intrinsic value, while holding that the intrinsic value of particular pleasures can depend on more than their quantitative characteristics. She can attribute the qualitative differences between pleasures to differences in their causes, but she needn't attribute the qualitative differences to differences in the intrinsic value of their causes. So she can argue that two pleasures with identical quantitative qualities, one caused by reading poetry and one caused by playing pushpin, have different intrinsic value. The pleasure from reading poetry is of greater intrinsic value, because it is pleasure caused by reading poetry as opposed to playing pushing. But it's not the case that the activity of reading poetry itself has any intrinsic value.

So the first objection to qualitative distinctions between pleasures makes clear one thing the hedonist can't argue, but it seems it doesn't rule out any possible explanation she can give of the qualitative differences between pleasures. So why think she can't make distinctions of quality? Here's what I take to be the intuitive argument against making such distinctions. Pleasure is a particular subjective mental state, and what is of value in pleasure are the subjective qualities of this mental state. In other words, what is of intrinsic value is how pleasure feels. And if there were any qualitative differences in the values of the pleasures, they would have to be qualitative differences revealed by how the pleasures feel. If there were qualitative differences between pleasures, they would have to be felt differences. But there are no qualitative differences in pleasures that one can discover by introspection. To the person who gets pleasure from playing pushpin, the pleasure may feel exactly the same as the pleasure of the person who gets pleasure from reading poetry. There needn't be any distinction in how the two pleasures feel to the people who have them, and so there can't be any qualitative differences between them.

Does this argument work? I don't think so. The key assumption is that if there were any qualitative differences in the values of the pleasures, they would have to felt differences. And I don't think that the hedonist needs to accept this assumption. But to see why someone might think they do accept this assumption we need to look at how one might interpret Ewing's claim that the hedonist thinks "pleasure is the only good."

I think it only looks like she does have to accept the assumption I mentioned above if you understand the hedonist to be making the following claim in claiming that pleasure is the only good: that the property of being pleasurable is identical to the property of being intrinsically good. Now, presumably, you can discover everything there is to discover about the pleasurableness of some experience through introspection. So, if the intrinsic goodness of an experience were identical to its pleasurableness, you would be able to discover everything there is to discover about the intrinsic goodness of an experience through introspection. Thus, if there were qualitative differences in the intrinsic goodness of experiences, you would be able to discover them through introspection, i.e., through the way the experiences felt.

This, it seems to me, is what's ultimately behind this objection: the assumption that the hedonist identifies intrinsic goodness with pleasure. And I don't think that the hedonist needs to argue for such an identification. So we need to be careful about what we take the hedonist to mean by claiming that pleasure is the only good.

What the hedonist should argue is that in claiming pleasure is the only good she is claiming that being intrinsically good is a property that pleasurable mental states, and pleasurable mental states alone, have, but that she is not claiming that the property of being intrinsically good is identical to the property of being pleasurable. Pleasure, then, is not intrinsic goodness--though all, and only, pleasures have the property of being intrinsically good. How, then, do we get qualitative differences in value? Different pleasurable mental states have the property of being intrinsically valuable in different ways. While all pleasures have the property of being intrinsically good (and so being valuable), some have it more than others (and so are more valuable than others). And the extent to which a particular pleasure has this property depends on both its quantitative characteristics (i.e. its intensity, duration, purity, etc.) and on the causes of the pleasure.

Furthermore, the degree to which a particular pleasure has the property of intrinsic goodness is not something that one obviously should be able to know by introspection. (Perhaps Mill could say that his competent judges are better able to determine which pleasures have this property than non-competent judges are. I don't want to defend Mill's views here, but that might help him out.) And so there is no reason to find it problematic that there need not be a qualitative difference in the experiences of people experiencing pleasures of different levels of intrinsic goodness. There is, therefore, no reason to find it problematic that the person who gets pleasure from playing pushpin may have a feeling that is qualitatively indistinguishable from the feeling of the person who gets pleasure from reading poetry.

Ethics Group Blog?

2004-06-12T16:44:00.000-04:00

I posted about this a while ago, but I thought I should do so again since I now have (a few) readers.

I think it would be interesting to have a graduate student group blog on topics in ethics and cognate areas of philosophy. What areas am I thinking of? I guess normative ethics, applied ethics, meta-ethics, and political philosophy. (I realize meta-ethics may not fit in there all that well.) And if I didn't mention something you think belongs, go ahead and let me know.

When I originally announced that I'd like to do this, I was unaware of any group blogs devoted a single area of philosophy. But, with the arrival of summer and people finally getting some free time, several have popped up and I'm sure even more will appear in the near future. (Who knows, maybe there are already plans for a group ethics blog. I really wouldn't know.) So why not one on ethics and cognate areas?

In any case, if you're a philosophy graduate student and you'd like to contribute to a group blog on ethics and related areas, contact me and we'll see if we can get to work on something. (You can find an email address in my user profile.) I'm willing to listen to pretty much any suggestion about how the blog should be organized, where it should be hosted, what program we should use to write it, what it should be named, and so on.

Cullison on the Doctrine of Double Effect

2004-06-11T16:07:00.000-04:00

In this post over at the Rochester Group Blog, Andrew Cullison raises a problem for the Doctrine of Double Effect (hereafter "DDE"). DDE says something like the following:

One may never intend to do evil, but one may, in some cases, intend to do something that one knows to have evil effects.

Basically, Cullison denies that it's clear the proponent of DDE can have the distinction between intended effects of an action and known but unintended effects of an action. Here's the case he thinks results in a problem for this distinction.

Suppose someone told you to pick up a the first piece of glass you see. You see a pint glass. You run over and pick up the mug. The glass also happened to have Chris's beer in it. Suppose you knew that the glass contained Chris's beer. Did you intentionally pick up Chris's beer?

(This isn't a trick)

The answer is 'yes'.

And if we say yes here, it seems we have to say yes in the following analogous case that Cullison discusses. A bomber pilot intends to blow up a munitions plant. He knows that there are going to be at least ten civilians killed in the bombing. Does he also intend to kill the civilians? If we say you intended to pick up Chris's beer in the previous example, it seems we have to say that the bomber pilot intended to kill the civilians in this example.

But proponents of DDE usually want to say that their principle can help us to understand why we think the pilot may, in some cases, kill the innocent civilians in the bombing raid. With the distinction between intending to do evil and intending to do something with known but unintended evil effects, she could argue that, in the bombing case, the bomber may not intend to kill the civilians (as this is a great evil), but he may drop the bomb(s) with the intention of blowing up the munitions plant while knowing it will have the evil effect of killing ten civilians. For the bomber wouldn't be intending to do evil here; he'd simply be doing something, namely blowing up the munitions plant, that he knew to have these unintended evil effects. The problem Cullison thinks DDE faces is that his other case appears to undermine the needed distinction between intending evil and doing something with known but unintended evil effects.

Let's go back to his example in which you pick up the beer mug. What he asks is whether you intentionally pick up Chris's beer, and he says yes. And I'm tempted to agree, but I think this question is somewhat ill-formed. I think I'm tempted to agree to this question because I'm thinking of it like this: Do you intentionally do something that can be correctly described as picking up Chris's beer? I'm tempted to say yes to this, and, similarly, I'd be tempted to say that the bomber intentionally does something that can be correctly described as killing civilians. But I'm not similarly tempted to say yes to the following question: Do you intend to pick up Chris's beer? Similarly, I'm not sure I'd say that the bomber intended to kill the civilians.

But let's put these intuitions to one side.

Here's what I'm tempted to say in order to draw a distinction between what one intends in one's action and what is a known but unintended effect of one's action. It's an explanatory matter. Intention is closely connected to what explains one's action. What explains your going and picking up the mug is that it's the first piece of glass you see, and not that it contains Chris's beer. What explains the bomber's dropping the bombs is that it will blow up the munitions plant, and not that it will kill ten civilians. This is why it's your intention to pick up the mug and why it's the bomber's intention to blow up the munitions plant, and it's why it's not your intention to pick up Chris's beer and why it's not the bomber's intention to kill ten civilians.

How do we draw the distinction? How do we know what does the explaining and what doesn't? I'd say that part of what we need to do is look at counterfactual situations. If your intention was to x, then you wouldn't do the action if you couldn't x by doing it. This is part of why appealing to your intention to x does explanatory work here. If you would have done the action whether doing the action would be doing x or not, then the fact that your action was an action of x-ing doesn't seem to explain your doing that action.

This, perhaps, is somewhat unclear. Let's formalize what I'm getting at here:

(I) If you intended to do x in doing action a, then in the closest possible worlds in which you know that doing a doesn't lead to x, you don't do a.

(I) gives us a necessary condition for your intending to do x in doing a. I'm not going to claim it's sufficient; I doubt it is.

And, of course, (I) gives us a test for what you intend in doing some action. If the putative intention fails to meet the condition set out in (I), then it's not an intention. Let's apply our test in these cases. If you intended to pick up Chris's beer in picking up the mug, then in the closest possible worlds in which you know that picking up the mug isn't picking up Chris's beer, you don't pick up the mug. This what we get in applying (I) to this case. So what do you do in these possible worlds? Do you still go and pick up the mug? Yep. It's still the first glass you see, and you were still told to pick up the first glass you see. So it can't have been your intention to pick up Chris's beer; otherwise, in the possible worlds where you know that picking up the mug isn't picking up Chris's beer, you don't go and pick up the mug.

Now, go back to the killing of civilians case. What is the intention here? If the bomber pilot intended to kill ten civilians in dropping the bombs, then in the closest possible worlds in which the bomber pilot knows that dropping the bombs doesn't kill the civilians, the bomber pilot doesn't drop the bombs. This is what we get in applying (I). What does the bomber pilot do in these possible worlds? Does he still drop the bombs? Yes, he does. He still wants to blow up the munitions plant, and he still knows that dropping the bombs is the way to do this. So the bomber pilot didn't intend to kill the civilians in the bombing. If he had intended to do so, then he wouldn't have dropped the bombs in counterfactual situations where he knew the bombing wouldn't lead to civilian deaths. But he still drops the bombs in those situations.

And notice that the intention we want to say that the bomber had, namely the intention to blow up the munitions plant, does pass our test. For, in the nearest possible worlds in which the bomber pilots knows that dropping the bombs won't blow up the munitions plant, he doesn't drop the bombs.

So any intention needs to meet the test we've given here, but a known but unintended effect doesn't need to meet it. This allows us to draw the distinction the proponent of DDE needs in the cases above. Picking up Chris's beer and killing civilians both fail to pass the test, and so neither is an intention in the relevant actions. [I may consider some problems with this solution in a later post.]

DCT and Moral Epistemology, Part I: The Problem

2004-06-11T10:49:00.000-04:00

[I've decided to break these large posts up into a few smaller ones. I think this will make things easier to read, and it'll make it look like I'm posting more than I am. So it's all to the good.]

Here's a problem that DCT may run into with respect to moral epistemology. DCT tells us that our moral obligations depend on the commands and prohibitions of God, and this, I think, may result in a problem for moral epistemology.

We think we can know our moral obligations in at least many ordinary cases, and any adequate moral theory should allow us to understand how this be the case. The possible problem is that, if DCT is true, it's not clear that we can know our moral obligations in most cases. (The argument I'll be giving here is largely based on an argument Mark Johnston develops against what he calls the "bare-locus view" of personal identity in his "Human Beings." It's a very interesting paper, and I hereby recommend it.)

The First Argument

The general form of this style of argument is this: We know that p; if theory T were true, we wouldn't know that p; therefore, T isn't true. In this case, the argument is: we know moral proposition p; if DCT were true, we wouldn't know that p; therefore, DCT isn't true.

Let's consider a real-world scenario in which it seems clear that you know some moral proposition. Take a case that gets brought up in the God-could-command-awful-things objection to DCT: the case of someone torturing a small child for fun. Suppose you come across some person doing this, and it's clear from the information you possess that this is what's going on. You see the person torturing the child in an especially painful way, you know this person had a history of abusing children, you have no reason to think that someone's putting on an act to trick you into thinking this is what's happening, etc. It seems that you know that the torturer is doing something wrong if you come to the situation with this information and end up believing that the torturer is doing something wrong. Add whatever details of this sort you feel you need to add to be sure that you know.

So here's our argument: We know that the torturer is doing something wrong; if DCT were true, we wouldn't know that the torturer is doing something wrong; therefore, DCT is false. But why wouldn't you know that this if DCT were true? The simplest argument is that you wouldn't know DCT because you'd have to be able to know about God's commands, and you simply can't know about them.* Why can't we know about God's commands? Some possible reasons: (i) the idea of God and of His commanding something is straightforwardly unintelligible; (ii) we can make sense of this, but we have no way of acquiring evidence about what God has and has not commanded; (iii) we have a way to acquire evidence (e.g. revelation), but the evidence is never sufficient to provide us with adequate warrant for knowledge; (iv) we sometimes have adequate warrant for knowledge here, but not in enough cases to account for a large enough number of the moral claims we think we know (several conflicting claims about what God's commands are here, and none of them is clearly better than the others); etc. If any of these reasons is a good one, it seems to preclude our having moral knowledge in this case if DCT is true. Yet it seems clear we do have such knowledge.

Of course, the plausibility of this particular argument depends on the plausibility of these reasons for thinking we don't know enough about God's commands. But someone might deny that these reasons are goods one. Suppose someone does. Can we formulate a different argument of the same sort, an argument that is immune to this particular response?

The Second, and Better, Argument

I think we may be able to. (And there is where I'm drawing pretty heavily on Johnston's paper.) Let's try an alternative type of argument: We know that p without relying on evidence for q; if theory T were true, we wouldn't be able to know that p without relying on evidence for q; therefore, T isn't true. And our particular argument: We know that the torturer is doing something wrong without relying on evidence that God commands that people not torture small children for fun; if DCT were true, we wouldn't know that the torturer is doing something wrong without relying on evidence that God commands that people not torture small children for fun; therefore, DCT is false.

So the problem here isn't that we can't know about God's commands. For, even if we can know about them, the problem here is that it doesn't seem we need to in order to know about our moral obligations. Yet, if DCT were true, then we'd have to know these sorts of things about God in order to know what our moral obligations are.** Now, we just need to argue that you don't need to know anything of this sort to know that the torturer is doing something wrong. And this strikes me as plausible. Even if you've never given a thought to God and His commands, you can know that what the torturer is doing is wrong. Provided you see what the torturer is doing and know enough about the circumstances, you know this is wrong--regardless of whether you know anything about God and His commands. If DCT were true, this wouldn't be enough to know the torturer is doing something wrong. So DCT is false.

We might make this clearer by appealing to what one might think is a particular necessary condition for knowing something: that one rule out the relevant alternatives. (Here, again, I'm following Johnston's argument pretty closely.) If one thinks the moral status of some action depends on God's commands, then the relevant alternatives one has to rule out are the possibilities that God has commanded something else in this situation. If DCT is true, then, when you come upon the torturer doing his thing, you'd have to rule out the alternative that God willed that the young child be tortured (and thus made this action right) in order to know that the torturer was doing something wrong. This would be a relevant alternative, and it would be one that your evidence would need to rule out.

But it doesn't seem that your evidence needs to rule this out. All the evidence you need is that the torturer is torturing a small child for fun, and that evidence doesn't appear to rule out the alternative that God had commanded the torturer to do so. Hence you know that what the torturer is doing is wrong, and you know this without ruling out that God commanded the torturer to do so. Hence you don't need to rule out this alternative to know that what the torturer is doing is wrong. Hence DCT is false. And, of course, this particular case is supposed to make the general point that you can know the moral facts without ruling out alternatives that you'd have to rule out if DCT were true. Hence DCT gives us an inaccurate picture of moral epistemology. Hence DCT is false.

Motivational Internalism and Tolerance, Part III: Some Final Issues

2004-06-10T17:37:00.000-04:00

In two previous posts (found here and here), I discussed a possible tension between accepting motivational internalism and accepting tolerance of people's moral opinions. I want to return to this issue now and finish up my discussion of it. (I'm not so certain that there's a real issue here anymore, but I leave it up to the reader to determine whether I've simply been wasting my time thinking about this.)

In the second post I considered responses to this possible tension that one could make by denying that reasonable people should tolerate moral opinions. Here I want to consider the second way in which one might argue that there is no tension here--by arguing that one could argue allow that we should, or at least some reasonable people could, think that we should tolerate people's moral opinions, and that this is perfectly consistent with accepting motivational internalism. Here's how I see this strategy being used. We show that our reasons--or the reasons any reasonable people would have--for accepting such a form of toleration simply aren't threatened by the truth of motivational internalism. The justification for tolerance needn't rest on there being a disconnect between moral judgment and action of the sort that the motivational internalist denies, and so there is no need for the internalist to worry about justifying intolerance of moral opinions.

Strategy II

Argument A. The first possible reason to be tolerant in this way is that not being tolerant of people's moral opinions would place a great imposition on people. It would require an unacceptable amount of interference in people's lives to monitor whether people have unacceptable moral opinions and to punish all those who turn out to have unacceptable ones. So whatever bad we could avoid by not allowing people to have the wrong moral opinions is outweighed by the bad we would cause by not being tolerant of people having these opinions. This, clearly, is a consequentialist defense of toleration: it claims that the consequences of intolerance would be worse than those of tolerance, and so we ought to be tolerant.

Argument B. We can also offer a rights-based defense of this sort of tolerance. Even if we think that the consequences of being intolerant of such opinions would be better than the consequences of being tolerant of them, we could argue that people nevertheless have a right to hold whatever moral opinions they hold. And, indeed, we could argue that the right to hold one's moral opinions, even objectionable ones, trumps the bad that is likely to come from tolerating such opinions. There would be two ways to argue this. First, one could argue that, while some bad is going to come of tolerating such opinions, it won't be enough bad to justify interfering with this right. Second, one could argue in a more absolutist vein that, irrespective of how much bad comes form tolerating objectionable moral opinions, a person's moral opinions deserve toleration.

I'm sure there are other particular moral justifications for tolerance for which someone could argue, and I don't want to go into all of them here. But I hope this gives one a sense of how the argument might go. Instead, I want to focus on a consideration that might be used to supplement any of these particular moral arguments (and its broader implications for this issue).

Tolerance, Moral Motivation, and Action

The possible tension here is supposed to arise because the motivational internalist thinks there is a very close connection between moral opinion and moral action. In particular, she thinks that it's a necessary truth that if a person believes he ought to do something, then he is motivated to do it. And this suggests that the motivational internalist thinks there is a close connection between having objectionable moral opinions and acting in objectionable ways. (Consider the racist example I discussed in the previous posts.) But this seems to be a problem, as one way of justifying tolerance of people's opinions is to point to the fact that they're only beliefs. Sure, we might think, this person thinks some terrible things, but that doesn't mean she's going to act on them. And until she acts on them, it's none of our business. It's surely unfortunate that she's so bigoted or cruel or unsympathetic, but we shouldn't interfere with her unless there's a good reason to think her being this way is likely to result in her injuring someone else. The problem for the motivational internalist is supposed to be that, because she holds that there's an especially close connection between opinion and motivation, it's not clear she can defend our thinking in this way.

But here we're assuming there's a close connection between motivation and action, and the motivational internalist may deny this. What she affirms is that necessarily, if a person believes she ought to do something, then she has some motivation to do that thing. And, importantly, this needn't be overriding motivation--in fact, it needn't even be very strong motivation. It may be, then, that this special moral motivation is, in many cases, likely to be overridden by other motivations a person may have. And if this is the case, there need be no close connection between moral opinion and action. The point here is that a close connection between moral opinion and action, which is what the internalist defends, isn't obviously the same as a close connection between moral opinion and action. But the tension arises only if the internalist affirms that this latter connection exist. She needn't affirm this, and so she needn't face such a tension.

So, what is the connection between moral motivation and action? And what do internalists (and externalists) think the connection is? I think this is where the interesting action is here. And, as a matter of fact, this is where the interesting action is in the other strategy for responding to this problem. The move in that strategy was to argue that an externalist should also think there is a close connection between moral opinion and action, and so this isn't a special problem for the internalists. The move, that is, was to point to a close connection between moral opinion and action, which is supposed to be a special problem for the internalist, and to claim that it's a datum with which any plausible meta-ethical theory must deal. And if that's true, whatever problem there is for toleration of moral opinions is a problem for any plausible meta-ethical theory. The move here is in the opposite direction: it is to deny that there is any very close connection between moral opinion and action, since the motivation that necessarily accompanies a moral opinion needn't be very strong.

Let's look at this second move first. The move is to sever the close connection between moral opinions and action while allowing a necessary connection between having a moral opinion and having some motivation to act in a certain way, and this is supposed to allow the internalist to avoid some tension with allowing for tolerance of other people's moral opinions. I think there are a couple of problems with this response. First, it appears to turn motivational internalism into an uninteresting claim. Motivational internalism, it seems, isn't an interesting thesis unless it's the thesis that moral judgment often involves a sort of motivation that has a pretty close connection to how people in fact act.* Second, it appears that this response raises issues about why we should believe motivational internalism is true in the first place. Suppose you accept that there is isn't any very close connection between moral opinion and action, since the motivation that necessarily accompanies a moral opinion needn't be very strong. What, if you accept this, is your evidence that's leading you to internalism as opposed to externalism? If the motivation that is present isn't one that has much effect in many cases, why think it's even there in those cases? It seems the usual evidence for motivational internalism is taken to be the close connection between a person's sincere moral opinions and her actions. If someone really believes it's wrong to do X, then it's unlikely that they're going to do X. And if they think it's their duty to do Y, then they're likely to do Y. It is this putative empirical data about the connection between moral opinion and action that is supposed to support motivational internalism. But if the motivational internalist ends up saying that there's only some, perhaps not very strong, motivation that accompanies moral opinions in many cases, aren't they admitting that the evidence of a close connection between moral opinion and action isn't all that strong? And if the internalist admits this, why do they still think there is a necessary connection between moral opinions and motivation at all?

How about the first move? The move is arguing that there is a close connection between moral opinion and action, which is supposed to be a special problem for the internalist, and that it's a datum with which any plausible meta-ethical theory, whether it's internalist or externalist, must deal with. Consequently, there's no special problem for internalism when it comes to tolerance and the connection between moral opinions and actions. Both internalists and externalists have to allow that there is a close connection of this sort, and so the implications for tolerance of moral opinions, if there are any, are going to be implications for both groups.

But is this really true? Doesn't the internalist want to claim there is a closer connection between moral opinion and action than the externalist? If there were no real difference, what's the debate about? And if there is a real difference, then internalists may not allow as broad a tolerance as we want. They are likely to find a stronger connection between morality and action than non-internalists, and this is likely to lead them to argue that we should restrict tolerance more than reasonable people might want to. Or, at least, it's likely to lead them to reject certain arguments a person might give for intolerance--arguments appealing to the fact that moral opinions needn't be closely connected to action.

Again, though, all of this is going to depend on the details of the views being defended. The real differences between externalists and internalists about this issue may be quite minor. For the plausibility of motivational internalism turns on whether having a moral opinion without being motivated is a possibility, not whether it is an actuality. So the debate may be about merely hypothetical cases, and internalists and externalists may agree about the presence of motivation in all actual cases. Furthermore, whether someone is an internalist or externalist doesn't say much of anything about the strength of motivation that they think accompanies moral opinions in actual cases, and so it would be possible for an externalist to think that having a moral opinion usually is accompanied by a stronger motivation than an internalist thinks.**

Minimally, all an externalist has to allow is that there are some possible cases in which a person makes a moral judgment but has no motivation to act on it. They needn't allow that this is usual the case, or indeed that it is ever the case in the actual world. So the question we need to ask is: Just how odd are these cases supposed to be? Is it just a rare, and perhaps imaginary, sort of person who makes moral judgments and is not motivated? And does this person have an exceptionally odd psychology? If the answer to this last question is yes, then it's not clear that this alone is going to make any practical difference (and we may think we have no good reason to tolerate these sorts of immoralists at all--perhaps they're psychopaths). However, if the externalist thinks that, in some cases, any normal person (or quite a few normal people) can be this way, it will make some practical difference. That is, if she thinks that even ordinary people can sometimes make moral judgments and yet have no motivation to act on them, then there might be some practical implications here. Accepting this amounts to moving towards a view that severs action from moral opinion, and this allows an externalist of this sort of accept a certain reason to tolerate the moral opinions of others: that having those opinions needn't be closely connected to motivation to act. Of course, it is exactly this sort of move that this response is intended to avoid. The move here is to argue that even an externalist can't sever moral opinion from action in the way suggested here, and that this shows there isn't any special problem for internalism.

But is this in fact an implausible externalist position about the connection between moral motivation and action? Does the externalist still need to allow for a very close connection between moral opinion and motivation in real-world cases? I'm not sure. I admit that I'm not very sympathetic to motivation internalism, but it seems hard to deny that there is some close connection between moral judgment and motivation in many cases. But how close, and in how many cases? Honestly, I don't know.

*. Now, of course, I admit that the interestingness of the thesis being defended will depend on just how much the defender of motivational internalism will be distancing moral opinions from action in this response. It's going to depend on the number of cases in which the motivational internalist is going to have to appeal to the "not very much motivation" response to avoid a problem of a conflict with tolerance of moral opinions. (A similar issue may come up for the next problem for this move.) If the number of cases isn't very large, then there may not be a big problem here. If it is large, then it seems to rob the thesis of being anything of much interest.
**. So, clearly, if the relevant issue here is the strength of the ordinary motivation accompanying a moral opinion and not the mere existence of that motivation, the debate between internalists and externalists may not be relevant here.

Divine Command Theory and Alienation from Morality

2004-06-10T10:48:00.000-04:00

Remember when I promised this series about objections to the Divine Command Theory? Of course you don't, since you weren't then reading my blog. Well, I did make such a promise, and I'm now going to begin making good on it. I'm not really concerned about the objections to Divine Command Theory that everybody knows about--that it faces the Euthyphro problem, that God could command us to do horrible things, that it implies nothing is right or wrong if there is no God, etc. I may say something about them eventually, but they're not going to be the focus here. Instead, I want to focus on some, as far as I know, not-much-discussed lines of objection. (But I really don't know the literature here, so maybe everybody working in this area is already aware of these objections.) I don't think that they're all good objections, or that any of them are decisive (are there decisive objections in philosophy?). I'm really more interested in just thinking through some possible lines of objection that have occurred to me, lines of objection that I think at least raise an important issue. And I begin that task now.

I want to say something about how the Divine Command Theory (hereafter "DCT") may lead to a sort of alienation from morality. (I admit I'm not going to offer an clear definition of alienation from morality here, but I hope it becomes clear what I'm talking about as I go alon.) Before I get into the details, though, I need to sketch DCT. I think the following principles are all we really need:

An action-token a is morally obligatory for a person P if and only if God commands P to a; and it is God's commanding P to a that makes it the case that a is obligatory for P.
An action-token a is morally impermissible for a person P if and only if God forbids P to a; and it is God's forbidding P to a that makes it the case that a is morally impermissible for P.

This is pretty skeletal, but I hope it gets the point across. (From here on, I'll simply use the word "command" to cover both God's what God commands and what He forbids.) I don't think the details of how one chooses to reformulate DCT really affect this objection, and so I won't say anything more about how I'm understanding DCT.

The Problem concerning DCT and Alienation from Morality

DCT seems to encounter another problem that tends to befall theories in which moral values are rooted in a transcendent source: these theories tend to alienate us from our own morality. On such theories, moral duties look to be burdens on us that are imposed from without; these duties are not ones that we're willing to accept of our own accord since they may, in some way, be in conflict with our deepest aspirations, desires, goals, etc.

It seems that we would prefer to think that morality is, in an important sense, ours. It is not that we simply want the chance to choose what is right and wrong, nor is it that it should always be easy for us to do the right thing. But we do not want our moral duties to seem alien, inexplicable, and imposed from without. We want to think that moral action, as it is so important, is something that meets our needs, that reflects and embodies our deepest aspirations, that enables us to be the sort of people we want and/or need to be and to live in the sort of communities that we want and/or need to live in. Morality, it seems, needs some connection to human flourishing, to the good life for beings like us. In short, we want to see some connection between moral action and something that we can recognize as valuable to ourselves and others.

Quite simply, it's not clear that DCT can give us this. For, if DCT is true, it's possible that we may not know exactly what underlies our moral duties (God's ways may be inscrutable to us), and that we may not identify with what lies behind our moral duties (God's ways may not be our ways). So it may be that DCT, along with other theories which locate the source of morality beyond human affairs, leads to a conception of morality in which it is more or less imposed on us, irrespective of our aims, desires, goals, etc. And thus morality, to the extent that it influences our actions, may come to seem like a foreign influence on our own life. This allows a person to see moral as shackles, as prohibitions and demands that do more to constrain us than to enable us to flourish and to live the sorts of lives we find valuable and satisfying. Moral rules can come to seem unfair and arbitrary and stultifying, and this seems to lead to problems for morality. Not only may it come to seem manifestly irrational to be moral, but we may feel that we have to sacrifice our aspirations, our goals, and our projects in order to be moral. In short, acceptance of transcendent metaethical theories may come to alienate us from our own morality.

There are, it seems, two (not necessarily exclusive) ways to interpret just why this alienation might be problematic. First, one might think it flouts something that's clearly true about morality--namely that acting morality is intimately connected to our deepest goals, aspirations, aims, etc. If you think there is some logical or conceptual connection between being moral and human good and harm, this might seem a straightforward argument against DCT. If you accept some such connection, then DCT, like any other moral theory, must account for the connection between moral action and human flourishing. Thus any theory that leads to a deep alienation from morality isn't an unacceptable account of morality; it doesn't respect this requirement that any plausible moral theory must meet.

Second, one might think that this may be true, but that it leads to practical problems if it is true. For if it's true that moral demands needn't have anything to do with our deepest goals, aspirations, aims, etc., then we're going to have quite a bit of trouble getting people to act morally. Unless people are able to recognize that behaving morally will realize some good--and a good that they can understand and acknowledge--they are unlikely to do what is moral. So recognition of alienation from morality of this sort is likely to lead to a deterioration of motivation to act morally. Why, people will (and perhaps should) ask themselves, care about morality if it conflicts with your own desires, aspirations, goals, etc. in this way? And it's not clear we're going to be ready with a good answer to this question. Indeed, it is arguable that it's irrational for some, and maybe most, people to act morally in many situations if they are alienated from morality in this way.

And there's another way in which this may lead to practical problem, a way Hume mentions in Section XI of his The Natural History of Religion. There he argues that, if one thinks the value and purpose is removed from ordinary human concerns (as it is if we're alienated from our morality), then people are likely to see not only the source but also the value and purpose of moral action as removed from the welfare and ordinary concerns of human beings in everyday life. And he thinks this is how we should understand the origin of various ascetic moral codes. Ordinary human life, for ascetics, isn't morally valuable. And since the value achieved through moral action isn't a matter of improving their own lives or the lives of others, these people come to see helping others and themselves as not closely connected to living a moral life. Instead, they come to think that apparently worthless rites and apparently pointless practices come to be the the essence of moral behavior, and they direct their energies to engaging in these rites and practices rather than improving human life in the here and now.

Solutions

I don't think we need to defend either, or both, of the interpretations of what the problem is for it to be clear that there's something significant going on here. It is not clear that the defender of DCT is obviously saddled with this unfortunate problem. I can imagine three ways she might avoid it.

(1) She could argue that morality is needed to get into heaven on DCT, and so moral action is in fact line with our deepest aspirations and greatest needs. This, though, strikes me as rather crude, as it devalues life, including moral actions, in the here and now by making them a mere means for achieving the end of getting into heaven. If this the best response on DCT, then morality may be little more than a particularly onerous way of achieving something of value; and this seems to debase being moral to a troubling extent. Fortunately for the defender of DCT, there is a deeper way to argue that her theory does not lead to moral alienation.

(2) It may be that a religious morality can overcome the possibility of moral alienation by claiming that people have the ultimate aspiration to be God-like (although not in a blasphemous way). It may be that our ultimate goal ought to be to be like God, in that God serves as a sort of ideal for human beings. God's moral commands flow from his nature, and so a human being must be moral, as God is, in order to achieve this sort of ultimate goal. This, I think, is a more plausible response, but there are problems here. I'll note just one. Obviously, this is going to require that God is person-like in some important sense; otherwise, it is unclear how being God-like could be an ideal for beings like us. Such views also run into problems if combined with views according to which God is deeply incomprehensible in certain ways. But perhaps these problems aren't so profound that God cannot serve as an ideal for normal human persons.

(3) God has set up the moral rules, human nature, and the conditions of human life in such a way that acting morally will, at least in general, benefit people in the here and now. He knows what we what our deepest aspirations and goals are like; He knows what human life is like; and He's taken these facts into account in before making his moral commands. Gods wants us to live well, and we can be sure He wouldn't command that we do things unless they were, at least usually, for our own good. So a complete understanding of God's commands, the nature of morality, and our situation would reveal that acting morally is consistent with, and perhaps required for, achieving our goals, satisfying our deepest aspirations, etc. This, it seems to me, is the best of the three responses. But there's an obvious way to raise questions about it: Does the empirical evidence concerning what human life is like, and especially concerning what life is like for those who live morally, show that moral people end up living better lives than immoral people? Or, if we're concerned with something more general, does the relevant empirical evidence show that, in general, people who live morally are better off than those who don't? If the empirical evidence doesn't bear out that being morally does tend to lead to having a better human life--and, honestly, I don't know what to think about this--then this response doesn't really get off the ground.

I've noted a particular problem with each of these responses. Now I want to note a couple of general problems with which the defender of any of these responses needs to deal. The first such problem is the inscrutability of God and His intentions. This, I think, is a problem for all three responses, though probably a less serious problem for (1). The general problem here is that DCT seems to undermine moral action's leading to goods with which we can identity--that we can understand as closely connected to our own good, to our own flourishing, to the things we care most about. And inscrutability, if we appeal to it, will seemingly make this problem even worse. If God is inscrutable, it's not just that we can't accept this morality, but that we can't even understand where it's coming from, what it's based on, and what its point is. If God is largely inscrutable, then it's going to be difficult to understand what being God-like entails, and so it may be difficult to see what is of value in being God-like. If God's intentions are largely inscrutable, it's going to be difficult to understand the ways in which he has ordered the moral rules and the conditions of human life to ensure that moral action provides us with a way of satisfying our deepest aspirations, achieving our goals, etc.

Now, clearly, the extent to which this is a problem is going to depend on just how inscrutable God and His intentions are. The less inscrutable they are, the less problematic this worry is going to be. (I should note, though, that I think God's going to have to be pretty inscrutable to deal with the problem of evil. I won't develop any argument for that position now, however.) So there are two important questions here: How much do we need to understand about God and his intentions to understand, appreciate, and identify with the God's plan here, and do we have good reason to think we understand God this much? These are big questions that I won't even try to answer here, but I think it's important to realize that they're relevant here.

The second general problem is that it seems there are going to be people who simply don't care about the various types of goods to which these response claim moral action leads. This is especially pressing for (1) and (2) since they give us a specific account of what the good resulting from moral action is here: we know some people may not care about getting into heaven, and we know some people may not care about being God-like. (This is less problematic for (3) since it's so vague in just what the goods are.) We can imagine people who simply don't care about these things, or who don't care about them anywhere near as much as they care about other things. These people, then, will still be alienated from morality, even if we grant the defender of these responses what she argues about God, His intentions, and the aims that underlie His moral commands.

Is this a real worry? Well, you might think not because you can't expect a moral theory to work for everyone. Any moral theory, one might think, is bound to run into this problem at some point. Whatever it is about moral action that is supposed to connect it to our deepest aspirations, desires, goals, etc., it may not apply to every single case. Some people have odd aspirations, desires, goals, etc., and so we can't expect everyone to acknowledge and appreciate the good that comes from moral action. This is somewhat plausible, I think. Its plausibility will, of course, depend on the empirical facts about just how many people's deepest aspirations, desires, goals, etc. are inconsistent with the DCT theorist's account of the moral demands God has placed on us. The more people who are like this, the less plausible this response seems.

Is Alienation Unimportant?

I'll end this post by discussing one possible way of responding to this last worry may reveal that we've been on the long track all along in that alienation from morality may not be all that important. The preceding worry about DCT and alienation stems from the fact that people may simply not care about the goods to which moral action is supposed to lead. But maybe we should be more concerned with what constitutes a good life rather than what it is that people actually care for. Maybe we've been assuming a sort of subjectivism about the good life that the defender of DCT may want to reject. Suppose we accept some sort of objectivist conception of the good, a conception in which the good life doesn't depend on what people actually desire. If we do, then the defender of DCT could argue that, while acting morally may be inconsistent with a person's conception of her own good (i.e. with her deepest aspirations, desire, goals, etc.), it may not be inconsistent with the correct objective conception of the good. And perhaps this is all we need. If acting morally is in line with living a good life, why should we care about its not being in line with the deepest aspirations, desires, goals, etc. of people who don't aspire to lead good lives? The people who aspire to lead good lives won't be alienated from morality, and isn't that enough?

The basic idea here is that the alienation of some, and maybe even all, people from morality may not be so problematic if acting morally is consistent with what really is the good life. Those people for whom moral action is inconsistent with their deepest aspirations, desires, goals, etc. are people who've got the wrong conception of the good life, who are living the wrong way. This doesn't show that moral action isn't alienating, but that alienation from morality might not be all that problematic. The problem of alienation from morality is that some people's aims, desires, goals, etc. will not be satisfied by living morally. So, for these people, we couldn't say that the morality wasn't burdensome, as being moral would conflict with their satisfying their aims, desires, aspirations, etc. And if we accept a subjective conception of the good life, we can then say that being moral would have a harmful influence on their lives. (It might, in fact, be irrational for them to be moral in these circumstances.)

But, if we accept an objectivist account of the good life (i.e. a conception on which standards for a good life aren't set by a person's aims, goals, aspirations, desires, etc.), then we can't move from alienation from morality to acting morally actually harming one, to its actually leading to their living a worse life. So, provided that we accept an objectivist conception of the good life and claim that God has made moral commands that, if followed, would lead to people have good lives, we can still argue that acting morally would lead the person to having a better life. Morality, then, may be alienating, but it's not burdensome to people who are alienated from morality. And if alienation isn't burdensome in this way, then perhaps it's not a big problem.

I think this is a pretty powerful response to the worry about alienation from morality. Clearly, though, it's going to depend on the plausibility of an objective conception of the good life. This isn't something I have space to cover here. Instead, I want to briefly question whether this response really does show that alienation from morality doesn't matter. Why might things not be so simple? Because it strikes me that any plausible objectivist account of the good life is going to have to include some subjective elements. It seems that any plausible objectivist account of the good life is going to make it a necessary condition for living a good life that a person achieves many of her most important goals, satisfies many of her most important aspirations and desires, and so on. If this is the case, then alienation from morality is still a problem. So it's not all that clear that alienation from morality is going to be consistent with living a good life, even if we adopt an objectivist conception of the good life.

Brayton on Popper and Laudan on the Demarcation Problem

2004-06-09T13:15:00.000-04:00

Via Brian Leiter, I've come across this post by Ed Brayton on Popperian philosophy of science. In particular, Brayton is concerned with certain objections to Popper's falsificationist criterion as a response to the demarcation problem (i.e. the problem of explaining what distinguishes science from pseudo-science). I'm not expert on philosophy of science, but I think I know just enough to say something about the issues Brayton raises.

First, a little about Popper's views. According to Popper, a theory is scientific if and only if it is falsifiable. And, on a simple version of what it is to be falsifiable, a theory is falsifiable if and only if there is some observation that would entail the falsity of the theory. So, according to the simple version of Popper's criterion, a theory is scientific if and only if there is some observation that would entail the falsity of the theory.

Brayton quotes the following passage from Laudan's "The Demise of the Demarcation Problem" in which he criticizes this criterion:

A second familiar approach from the same period is Karl Popper's "falsificationist" criterion, which fares no better. Apart from the fact that it leaves ambiguous the scientific status of virtually every singular existential statement, however well supported (e.g., the claim that there are atoms, that there is a planet closer to the sun than the Earth, that there is a missing link), it has the untoward consequence of countenancing as "scientific" every crank claim which makes ascertainably false assertions. Thus flat Earthers, biblical creationists, proponents of laetrile or orgone boxes, Uri Geller devotees, Bermuda Triangulators, circle squarers, Lysenkoists, charioteers of the gods, perpetuum mobile builders, Big Foot searchers, Loch Nessians, faith healers, polywater dabblers, Rosicrucians, the-world-is-about-to-enders, primal screamers, water diviners, magicians, and astrologers all turn out to be scientific on Popper's criterion - just so long as they are prepared to indicate some observation, however improbable, which (if it came to pass) would cause them to change their minds.

Brayton finds two arguments here:

A. Some "singular existential statements" are not falsifiable, yet they are a part of science; and,

B. Many "crank claims" can be made falsifiable, so Popper's criteria would allow many pseudo-scientific ideas to be considered scientific ideas.

He then criticizes both of these arguments. I'm not sure what I think about these arguments, but I don't find his criticisms all that compelling. I want to explain why.

Here's his criticism of argument A:

I think he misunderstands how falsification is applied by Popper. Popper is not arguing that "existential statements" - by which I assume he means observations or potential observations - must be falsifiable. Using one of his examples, we know that there is a planet closer to the sun than the Earth because we can observe that there is one. In Popper's view it is not observations that must be falsifiable, it is explanations. Theories - explanations for observed phenomena - must be falsifiable.

First, as far as I can tell, Brayton isn't disputing Laudan's suggestion that these claims can't obviously be falsified. So I'll ignore that issue, though I think it's true that they can't be--at least not in the sense that is relevant here. Second, I'm pretty sure that what Laudan calls an "existential statement" isn't supposed to be an observation; it seems it's just supposed to be a claim that a particular thing, or type of thing, exists. Third, I don't think I buy the distinction between existential statements and theories that Brayton is drawing--though, of course, he frames it as a distinction between theoretical claims and observations since he takes an existential statement to be an observation statement. For instance, I really don't see any reason to think that the singular existential claim that Brayton discusses can't be taken to be theories (on his account of what a theory is). The claim that there is a planet closer to the sun is supposed to explain some of our observations: it explains certain things we see when we look up at the night sky, it explains certain things we see when we look through a telescope, it may explain certain things we see when we look at the orbits of other planets, etc. So it is, in some sense, an explanation of observed phenomena, and it is then, in some sense, a theoretical claim. Consequently, if we accept the falsificationist criterion and we're going to take this claim to be scientific, it had better turn out that this claim is falsifiable. I don't think it is.

Now Brayton's response to argument B:

I think that Laudan is correct that in a Popperian view, most of that laundry list of pseudo-scientific ideas could be formulated in ways that are testable and falsifiable. In fact, I'd say many of them have been formulated in those ways and have been falsified, regardless of whether their proponents will admit it or not. But this doesn't strike me as a compelling criticism of Popper. Of course it's true that the falsification criterion would allow for ideas to be admitted as science that ultimately are falsified. The demarcation question is not concerned with determining, a priori, which ideas are true and which are false, it is concerned with determining which ideas are capable of being answered using the tools of science. Falsification isn't the end of the process. If an idea is testable and falsifiable, then it still must be tested, by attempting to falsify it in most cases.

I guess the idea behind Laudan's criticism is supposed to be that Popper counts far too much as science. If we take the simple falsifiability criterion (i.e. a theory is scientific if and only if it is falsifiable), then we're committed to counting as science everything that can be falsified by observation. But you might think that this is too broad a conception of science. Suppose, for instance, that we falsify religious views about the deluge by doing scientific inquiry. Does it then turn out that those views about then deluge were a scientific theory (albeit a false one)? If we think a theory is scientific if and only if it is falsifiable, then it seems we have to say yes. But that seems odd, and so there's something wrong with the falsifiability criterion. And, in motivating this problem, we don't have to draw on any worries about claims that might be taken to be pseudo-scientific. Suppose I claim that it's raining right now in New York City. That's not a pseudo-scientific theory and it's a claim that can be falsified, but am I doing science when I say this? It seems prima facie odd to say I am.

So the worry isn't just that Popper claims that pseudo-science is science, but that he counts absolutely anything that's falsifiable as scientific. Is there something to this worry? Brayton doesn't seem to think so, for he appears to have a pretty liberal attitude about what should and shouldn't count as science.

Is there something wrong with a liberal attitude of this sort? Maybe, and maybe not. You might think that all that's really going on if we find a problem with this attitude is that we don't want to give just any old claim that can be refuted the title of a scientific theory. Perhaps we use "scientific" as a sort of honorific, and we only want to give it to theories of a certain sort. We don't want to claim that any old astrologer or creation scientist or whatever is doing science simply because they manage to say something that we can falsify. And if being falsifiable is a sufficient condition for being scientific, we'd have to say this. That, I think, isn't a very compelling reason to think there's something wrong with the falsificationist criterion.

Is there more to it than this? Well, you might think that it's problematic that Popper's account of what is and isn't science is purely logical. And you might think that there are more stringent restrictions on subject matter or methodology that determine what does and does not count as science. Perhaps scientific theories can't appeal to supernatural entities, or perhaps there is some scientific method that we have to arrive at scientific theories by employing, or something like this. If anything like this is true, then a theory's being falsifiable won't be sufficient for its being scientific. For it seems that there are going to be lots of falsifiable theories that appeal to supernatural entities and that aren't arrived at through the scientific method, whatever that is.

Honestly, I don't know what to think about this. But it does seem that there may be some reason for not wanting to call any old falsifiable theory scientific.

Blogging Issues

2004-06-09T09:58:00.000-04:00

It's probably a little premature for me to be doing some meta-blogging, but here goes. Some points about blogging, and about this blog.

1. I'm not sure that my comments are working. I suspect that they are, but no one yet has left a comment. I suppose that isn't too surprising, as I've only had about twenty visitors (roughly ten of the hits on my counter are from me, since it adds hits when I work on my blog from a different computer). So I'd be grateful to anyone who came by and left a comment of some sort. It could be anything really--I just want to be sure they're actually working for other people.

2. I'm having a formatting problem, and I'm wondering if anyone knows how to fix it. Whenever I use a blockquote tag, it messes up the rest of the text in my post. After the blockquote, the remainder of the text in my message is more bunched up than the text before the tag. (I notice the effect isn't as prominent when I view my blog with Internet Explorer instead of Mozilla.) Does anyone know what's causing this and how, if at all, I can fix it?

3. I'm aware that I'm not very good at keeping a consistent pace in my posting. The problem is that I have notes for several posts that I'm working on at any given time, and I want to publish what I write as soon as I finish it. So, on days when I spend some time here, I end up posting several different things; and then I go days with nothing. Is this a problem? I figure that by keeping up a steady pace, you keep people coming back. But I'm not sure about that, and I suppose that, with my low traffic, it's not something I should be too worried about.

4. I realize I don't yet have the ability to write pithy blog posts, and I'm working on it. (This is a general problem for me--a common complaint about the papers I write is that they're too wordy.) I doubt many people are actually going to read a 2,000-word blog post. But maybe anyone who's actually interested in the material I'm discussing would; I don't really know.

5. And when I did a Google search for "the tribunal of experience" today, I was the 21st entry. Not too bad.

6. Oh, and does anyone know how I can place only the start of my post on the main page and link to the rest of it on the permanent link for the post? I haven't been able to figure this out, and maybe somebody can tell me. Please. It can be quite a hassle to go down the length of my main page since I have a penchant for the inordinately long blog post, and I figure most people are too lazy to scroll all the way down and see everything I have to offer on the main page when they notice the length of the first few entries.

Kant's Categorical Imperative and Rules of Etiquette

2004-06-09T09:56:00.000-04:00

I want to raise a question about the way in which Kant applies the categorical imperative in the Groundwork. I think there's a problem here, though I'm not sure that it's one to which Kant isn't able to provide an answer. Indeed, it's possible that there's an obvious answer to the problem I'm going to develop here. But I don't know what it is.

The problem is that it's not clear to me that there aren't maxims that fail to meet the requirements of the categorical imperative, but that it wouldn't be morally wrong to act on. That is, the problem is that there seem to be maxims that we can't universalize in the right way, but that it wouldn't be immoral to act on.

A Test for Moral Impermissibility

I first want to talk about how I'm going to understand the general issues here. I'm going to be concerned with the following formulation of the categorical imperative:

Formula of Universal Law: always act in ways such that you could will that the maxim of your action become a universal law.

Drawing on this formulation of the categorical imperative, we can derive a sort of test for the moral status of various actions. We being by isolating the maxim or motive on which the agent acts. Let's take the maxims to have the following form:

I ought to do action x in circumstances C in order to bring about result r.

So there are three relevant parts here: the action, the circumstances, and aim. Since we're using the formula of universal law here, what we need to know about the relevant maxim is whether it's one that we can universalize. The second step in our test, then, is to universalize the maxim. Here's the form of a universalized maxim:

Everyone ought to do action x in circumstances C in order to bring about r.

Now we just need to ask ourselves whether we can consistently will this. And the particular question we'll need to ask for the cases I'm going to be concerned with is: Is it possible to conceive a world where this maxim is universalized? If it isn't, then acting on this maxim would be morally wrong.

Let's see how this works in one of the cases Kant discusses--namely the case of a person making a false promise. (I won't follow the details of Kant's example exactly, but I'll use the same general type of example.) Suppose you want to know whether it's morally permissible to make a promise while knowing that you aren't going to be able to keep your end of the bargain. Suppose you're thinking of promising to give someone $100 within two weeks if she loans you $50 now, even though you know you won't have that money soon enough to pay her back then.

Is this permissible? We need to begin by isolating the maxim on which you're planning to act. Let's take the maxim to be:

I ought to make a false promise in circumstances where I need money in order to get the money I need.

Again, since we're using the formula of universal law here, what we need to know about the relevant maxim is whether it's one that we can universalize. The second step in our test, then, is to universalize this maxim. Here's the form of a universalized maxim:

Everyone ought to make a false promise in circumstances where they need money in order to get the money they need.

Now we just need to ask ourselves whether we can consistently will this. And the particular question we'll need to ask for the cases I'm going to be concerned with is: Is it possible to conceive a world where this maxim is universalized? Is it possible to conceive a world in which everyone makes a false promise in order to get money whenever they need some?

Kant says no, and so he says that this is morally impermissible. Making a false promise is a good way to get what you want only because there are certain conventions in place, conventions that assure people that a person making a promise will do as she promises to do. So making a promise is a good way to get what you want only because there is a general institution of promising in place. But a world in which this maxim is universalized is a world in which there is no such general institution in place. If people didn't keep their promises even when they'd benefit from not doing so, there wouldn't be any general institution of promising. For the relevant conventions of people keeping promises wouldn't be in place. So you cannot imagine a world in which this maxim is universalized; such a world would be a world without promising.

There's a straightforward contradiction in what you're willing if you will that this maxim be universalized: you will that the convention of promising be in place (this is required to make a false promise), and you will that it be undermined (this is what would result from this maxim being universalized). The universalization of the maxim undermines the relevant conventions, and yet those very conventions are assumed in willing in accordance with this maxim. This is enough to show that the action is morally impermissible.

A Problem for the Test

Let's grant Kant this test. If a maxim fails to be universalizable in this way, then acting on it is morally impermissible. So it's a sufficient condition, though it need not be a necessary one.

The problem here is that it seems there are maxims that will fail to be universalizable in this way but that it seems pretty counterintuitive to think it would be morally impermissible to act on. Let me give an example.

Suppose you want to know whether it's morally permissible to make a joke by flouting some rule out etiquette. Suppose, for example, that you're considering making a joke by using the wrong fork to eat your salad in front of a rather stuffy group of people.* (This, I admit, would make a lousy joke, but bear with me.)

Is this permissible? Let's use Kant's test here. We need to begin by isolating the maxim on which you're planning to act. Let's take the maxim to be:

I ought to use the wrong fork in circumstances where I'm surrounded by stuffy people in order to make a joke.

Since we're using the formula of universal law here, what we need to know about the relevant maxim is whether it's one that we can universalize. The second step in our test, then, is to universalize this maxim. Here's the universalized maxim:

Everyone ought to use the wrong fork in circumstances where they're surrounded by stuffy people in order to make a joke.

Now we just need to ask ourselves whether we can consistently will this. Is it possible to conceive a world where this maxim is universalized? Is it possible to conceive a world in which everyone uses the wrong fork to make a joke in this way?

I think it turns out that you can't, for what are very close to the same reasons that you can't will that everyone makes a false promise when they need to get some money. Using the wrong fork allows you to make a joke only because there are certain conventions in place, conventions that assure people that a person will be using a fork of a particular sort to eat a particular course of her meal. So using the wrong fork is a good way to make a joke only because there are certain general conventions of etiquette in place. The joke, of course, comes from openly and surprisingly flouting these conventions. But a world in which this maxim is universalized is a world in which there are no such general conventions of etiquette in place. If people didn't normally use the 'right' fork in these sorts of situations, there wouldn't be any conventions of etiquette of this sort in place. So you cannot imagine a world in which this maxim is universalized; such a world would be a world without the conventions needed to make a joke in this way.

Again, if we focus on what you'd be willing in willing in accordance with this universalized maxim, we find a straightforward contradiction: you will that the convention of using the right fork be in place (this is required to make a joke by using the other fork), and you will that the convention not be in place (this is what would result from this maxim being universalized). The universalization of the maxim undermines the relevant conventions of etiquette, and yet those very conventions are assumed in willing in accordance with this maxim. This, if we're granting Kant this test, should be enough to show that the action is morally impermissible.

But, I take it, it's clear that acting in this way isn't morally wrong action--at least if we don't suppose that there's something very odd about the circumstances. It's simply not morally wrong to use the wrong fork and thereby make a joke. So there's a problem with this test: it tells us that actions are morally impermissible even though they aren't.

What's Going on Here?

I think the upshot--the point we should draw--is that this problem arises from interpreting Kant as having a purely formal requirement for moral duties. The formal requirement is that the maxim of one's action have the form of a universal law. If it lacks that form, it's an impermissible action. So acting on any maxims that one could not consistently will to be universal laws is immoral action. And there is no constraint on the content of the relevant maxims; there is no requirement that they pertain to some sort of subject-matter. Thus one needn't draw any distinction between moral and non-moral maxims before applying this test. And this, it seems, leads to the problem, as we don't have grounds to limit the relevant maxims to those whose content is of moral relevance; we don't have a way to rule out the maxims concerning, say, etiquette as opposed to morality.**

*. I'm too unrefined to know what the relevant rule about salad forks is, but I believe there is some such rule. And if there isn't, just imagine I'd been appealing to a similar sort of rule.
**. I think Hare's purely formal account of moral judgments runs into a similar problem, and Foot's arguments that he runs into such a problem have influenced my worries about Kant.

Even More Mackie Stuff

2004-06-08T14:09:00.000-04:00

One more response to this post.

More about how the epistemological argument from queerness is supposed to work.

Mackie should suspend judgment about the special epistemic capacity with which we acquaint ourselves with objective values. He denies that we have the epistemic capacity to know of objective values. In denying that we have the epistemic capacity, however, he must know what the epistemic capacity is. Knowing what the epistemic capacity is permits Mackie to deny that we have it. If he has denied the existence of the epistemic capacity without knowing what it is, then he risks making the same error. He has called on some unusual faculty of mind that allows him to intuit what epistemic capacity does and does not exist. If he is doing this, then he commits the same error as the person who accepts the existence of objective values.

This, I think, rests on a misunderstanding of the nature of Mackie's argument. I'm pretty sure Mackie doesn't think he has, or needs, any special epistemic capacity to discern which epistemic capacities do and do not exist. All he seems to think he needs to know this is the account of human psychology that ordinary empirical inquiry gives us. But doesn't he need to know something about what a faculty for intuiting objective moral facts would be like? Doesn't he need to know something about the faculty of moral intuition? Sure, but he doesn't seem to think he needs to know a great deal. He seems to think he only needs to know that it would have to provide us with some sort of access to objective moral values. He's already told us what objective values are like, and we're already supposed to know that they'd be awfully strange--so strange, in fact, that they don't seem to have a place within the natural world. Thus, given what objective moral values would have to be like and what empirical inquiry tells us about our intellectual capacities, it's not clear how beings with psychologies like ours could be in contact with such things. Where's the causal influence going to come from? How are objective moral values going to have some impact on us that allows us to detect or apprehend them? It's hard to see how they could, and so it's hard to see how we could have a faculty of moral intuition.

Can we expand our picture of how we arrive at knowledge of objective moral facts?

Second, the real question for Mackie is how we arrive at our moral beliefs. There may be alternative ways of arriving at moral beliefs than through our intuition. For instance, I am reminded of the way Aristotle proposes one becomes virtuous. According to Aristotle, acting virtuously is a matter of habit. We learn how to behave appropriately and we habituate this sort of activity. We can learn what the moral principles, and we have the capacity for moral sentiments. We have to dedicate ourselves to constantly revising the way we act and how to act so that it is in accord with the moral principles.

But I wonder if this really helps. For it seems to me that, if you interpret Aristotle in this way, you're really denying that Aristotle thinks we can arrive at moral knowledge of the sort that Mackie thinks we ordinarily believe we have (or could have). On this interpretation of Aristotle, it looks like he thinks moral knowledge is a matter of knowing how to act, and not of knowing some special objective moral facts. Moral knowledge, then, isn't knowledge of objective moral facts, as it isn't knowledge of facts at all. So knowing the moral thing to do in some situation is a matter of knowing-how rather than know-that. There aren't, if this view is correct, moral states of affairs 'out there' in the world to be discovered by us.

However, Mackie clearly doesn't think that this is what we ordinarily think of morality. He thinks it does involve knowing objective moral facts, and that these are special facts that are practical (i.e. that have a necessary connection to action). He thinks that we ordinarily think that there are moral states of affairs 'out there' to be discovered by us. Indeed, it is the fact that these putative objective moral facts essentially practical that makes them moral, and that makes them queer.

So it doesn't seem that Aristotle's views gives us a picture of a non-intuitive way of arriving at the sort of moral knowledge that Mackie denies we have. Of course, one might think that Aristotle's picture of how we arrive at moral knowledge is very plausible, and this, one might think, shows that Mackie fails to understand what moral knowledge is like. Moral knowledge isn't a matter of knowing some peculiar moral facts; it is, rather, a matter of knowing how one ought to act in various types of situations. So Mackie is wrong about what objective moral knowledge would consist in. It wouldn't consist in knowing that some objective moral states of affairs obtain; it would consist in there being objective moral reasons to act in certain ways in certain situations. And some people (e.g. Thomas Nagel) think this is the best way to respond to Mackie.*

I think that the author is getting at something similar when he says

The underlying problem here is how we arrive at our moral beliefs and that they are justified moral beliefs. The way that I want to explain away the underlying problem is that moral beliefs do not guide our action, but it is our judgment that guides our action. So, it doesn't really matter whether we have moral beliefs that correspond to something but it does matter whether we judge that there are moral beliefs.

I guess it's not clear to me what is meant by 'judgment' here, but he seems to be making a similar point. Having the correct moral beliefs isn't a matter of one's beliefs corresponding to reality, but a matter of having good moral judgment, where having good moral judgment isn't a matter of having beliefs that correspond to moral reality. I don't see what role moral beliefs then need to play, though, and it seems that we should just give them up. There may be beliefs that are relevant to how one makes moral judgments, but they aren't moral beliefs.

So the real dispute here is with Mackie's conceptual analysis of ordinary moral language and thought. Mackie believes that the best conceptual analysis reveals that moral language purports to describe objective moral facts, and that moral thought involves having beliefs that attempt to mirror these moral facts. This conceptual analysis underlies his conception of what moral objectivity would consist in--it would consist in there being objective moral facts to accurately describe in our moral language and to accurately represent in our moral thought. If moral language is a discussion of how to behave rather than a discussion of what is the case, and if moral thought is thinking through how act rather than thinking through what's the case, then Mackie's conceptual analysis is confused and he's got a faulty conception of what moral objectivity would consist in.

But it's not clear that this is of any help to defenders of moral intuition, unless they have a conception of intuition on which we can intuit something other than facts. They'd have to present a conception of intuition as a faculty revealing how we ought to act, and not as revealing certain moral facts. I don't think I've seen a conception of intuition of this sort. The intuitionists of whom I'm aware always treat intuition as revealing certain moral states of affairs.

Finally, the last point:

Third, the emotivist or prescriptivist may come to the rescue of the objectivist. Mackie's argument depends upon the truth of the premises guaranteeing the truth of the conclusion. He writes that we cannot be aware of the truth of these ethical premises without some special sort of intuition. The objective emotivist may claim that Mackie has not considered that statements like, "lying is wrong" fails to be a proposition with a truth-condition. This sentence may only express the sentiments of the speaker. If the statement is merely an expression of the speaker's commitments, then it fails to concern the truth or falsity of the premises. The clear-headed objectivist then need not resort to a special sort of intuition. Objectivism turns out true.

This looks similar to what I was suggesting above. Noncognitivists can argue that Mackie's arguments rely on an unacceptable account of what moral objectivity would amount to, since Mackie is assuming that some form of cognitivism is true. Cognitivism is false, and so Mackie has an unacceptable account of moral objectivity.

But how, exactly, is this supposed to help an objectivist about morality? If you're going to concede this much to the noncognitvist, how are you going to end up with an objective account of morality? Sure, you may no longer need to appeal to some faculty of intuition that allows us to have access to the moral facts, but it's not clear that you can still offer an objective account of morality. What is the objectivity supposed to consist in? Perhaps you can give an account of objectively good or bad, right or wrong, correct or incorrect commitments for the speaker to have. But how is that supposed to work?

*. I believe Hare also thought something like this. He thought that Mackie's argument really revealed that there was a sort of conceptual confusion in thinking that moral objectivity would consist in there being objective moral facts we could know, as he thought it was clear that moral language didn't purport to describe facts at all. Mackie thought he was making an empirical argument that morality wasn't objective, whereas he was simply showing that a particular conception of moral objectivity was incoherent. Moral language doesn't purport to describe moral facts at all, and so it couldn't describe objective moral facts.

More on Mackie

2004-06-08T11:20:00.000-04:00

Here's some more stuff about Mackie and Mackie-related topics in response to this post.

First question: Can we just hold fast to the assertion that we have moral intuitions?

Perhaps the easiest objection to Mackie's argument is that he begs the question. For instance, we can deny that we do not have a special sort of intuition which enables us to discern different objective values. We have this intuition, and nothing that Mackie or any of his cohorts says will convince us otherwise.

I guess I don't see this as very plausible. I can imagine two things that might be going on here, and neither of them seems to work against Mackie.

First, one might have in mind some conception of intuition according to which there is a phenomenological difference between intuiting something and coming to know it in some other way. Then you can assert that, through careful introspection, one can figure out that moral thought has the phenomenological qualities that are distinctive of intuitive thought. That is, one could argue that there is a special phenomenology to intuiting some moral fact, and that we recognize in our own experience that we sometimes arrive at moral beliefs through such thought.* The problem with this response, though, is that it just doesn't seem that there is anything distinctive of moral thinking in this way. It's not clear to me that there is any special phenomenology that is involved in intuiting that something is the case as opposed to simply believing it to be the case.

So let's not suppose there is any distinctive phenomenology to moral intuitions. They're just intuitions like we have in other areas of philosophy; they're immediate reactions to a case that is presented to us. And if this is all an intuition is, then I don't see that Mackie is really denying that we have them. He can agree that we have intuitions of this sort, and yet he can deny that they provide us with access to anything like objective moral values. So the issue isn't about whether we have intuitions in this sense, about whether we arrive at some moral beliefs in an immediate way. It's instead about the following thesis: that at least some of our moral intuitions are arrived at in a way that gives us immediate access to the objective moral values.

It seems, then, that the debate here is going to be about the origin of these intuitions. And we know Mackie has a theory about their origin--we have the moral intuitions we have because we have been socialized into various groups. He thinks, moreover, that this isn't an explanation of our having the moral intuitions we have that provides us with good reason to think that those intuitions provide us with access to objective moral values.

It should now be clear that simply asserting that one has intuitions isn't going to be enough to deal with Mackie's argument. The defender of the view that intuition gives us access to objective moral values is either going to have to directly rebut Mackie's suggestion about the origin of our intuitions or provide reasons for thinking that our intuitions best explained as involving access to objective moral values. Either of these options, it seems, is going to require telling us something about just how we get these intuitions. Mackie assumes this is going to require attributing some special mental faculty to us; others, like Price and Ross, think moral facts are intuited reason in the same way that other truths (e.g. mathematical facts) are arrived at through reason. Regardless of which tactic is chosen, though, we're going to need a good deal more than the flat assertion that we have moral intuitions.

*. Of course, there's going to be the additional question of why we should think that thought with these phenomenological characteristics does in fact sometimes reveal the facts to us. It would seem possible for intuition to be misleading in all cases. But we needn't worry about this here.