Abstract
I argue for a realist conception of moral properties in general, and first-order moral properties in particular. Properties are abstract, platonic universals which may or may not be instantiated, or instantiable, in concrete or abstract particulars. The concept of a possible world—an imaginary ordered-set of compossible properties—is used to elucidate a realist conception of moral truth, moral facts, and moral properties. On our view, truth—including first-order moral truth—is truth relative to one very special possible world, viz., the actual world. The chapter ends with an analysis and critique of moral naturalism, and develops a version of moral non-naturalism, which includes a defense of the gradeablity of first-order moral properties.
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- 1.
I have also discussed many of the issues to follow in Ch. 3 of Knowing Moral Truth: A Theory of Metaethics and Moral Knowledge (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).
- 2.
And perhaps we should add relational properties as a third type.
- 3.
There is potential for confusion here. Our distinction between first-order and second-order properties tout court is different than the distinction between first-order and second-order moral properties. The former distinction is that just described, while the latter is, as the reader will recall, the distinction between properties regarding matters within morality (the wrongness of an act, for example), and properties about morality (about its nature, for example). Typically, when I am talking about first-order moral properties , I am also talking about first-order properties tout court.
- 4.
For an excellent discussion of current conceptions of properties, see Alex Oliver, “The Metaphysics of Properties,” Mind, New Series, Vol. 105, No. 417 (January 1996): 1–80.
- 5.
Assuming, that is, that universals are mind-independent. We will consider this shortly.
- 6.
See his Nominalism and Realism: Universals and Scientific Realism, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
- 7.
Armstrong, Nominalism and Realism: Universals and Scientific Realism, Vol. 1.
- 8.
See Oliver, “The Metaphysics of Properties”: 25, n. 23.
- 9.
Armstrong favors the aristotelian account. See, for example, his “Four Disputes About Properties,” Synthese, Vol. 144 (2005): 309–20.
- 10.
Ibid.: 25. See pp. 25ff for detailed discussion of these and other problems for the aristotelian interpretation of universals.
- 11.
This seems obvious regarding material objects. And consider the case of colors: ‘Nothing is red and green all over’ is, as we discussed in Sect. 3.4, a true synthetic a priori proposition.
- 12.
See Oliver, “The Metaphysics of Properties,” Sect. 11, for useful discussion of these and associated matters.
- 13.
The concept of reflective equilibrium gained prominence with John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), and has rightly been influential ever since.
- 14.
- 15.
Implicitly, the reference class here is “naturally-occurring beings on Earth.” Whether this property is or has been instantiated by an extra-terrestrial natural being, I shall not conjecture. (Actually, I shall: I think it is highly likely.)
- 16.
No less an authority on divine powers than St. Thomas Aquinas would agree that even God couldn’t come up with a round-square hammer. Such a thing is not logically possible, and therefore no real limitation God’s omnipotence.
- 17.
Of course, predicating properties of impossible entities—round-squares, for example—will in many cases lead to falsehood due to presupposition failure, because terms purporting to refer to impossible entities do not denote—do not refer successfully.
- 18.
Oliver, “The Metaphysics of Properties,” provides an excellent discussion of ways in which to construe Occam’s razor.
- 19.
Well, perhaps not everyone: Paul Churchland and other eliminative materialists are wont to see “sense experience” and similar discourse as part of a hopelessly flawed and soon-to-be-outmoded “folk psychology,” to be eliminated in favor, one may hope, of the sober declarations of neuro-science. I’m not holding my breath…. See, for example, Paul Churchland, “Some Reductive Strategies in Cognitive Neurobiology,” Mind, Vol. 95 (1986): 270–307; and his Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
- 20.
John Stuart Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy and of the Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in His Writings, Vol. 1 (Boston: William Spencer, 1866): Ch. 11.
- 21.
See Knowing Moral Truth, especially Chs. 4–6. An expanded treatment of these matters is in preparation.
- 22.
Oliver, “The Metaphysics of Properties”: 35.
- 23.
Depending on how one understands the property of “evilness”: some consider it merely the (utter) absence of goodness, in which case we should understand the propositions to assert ‘Chester is both perfectly good and perfectly non-good’, a clear contradiction. The term ‘perfectly’ here and in its prior usage means “completely and in all relevant respects.”
- 24.
W. V. Quine and co. would disapprove: properties are not to be quantified over, and therefore second-order predicate logic is to be rejected. See Quine’s Philosophy of Logic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); and “On What There Is,” reprinted in From a Logical Point of View, 2nd edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961): 1–19.
- 25.
See Plato, Meno, translated by W. C. K. Guthrie, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961): 385–420.
- 26.
See Paul Benaceraff, “Mathematical Truth,” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 70, No. 19 (November 8, 1973): 661–79.
- 27.
Mark Balaguer, “Platonism in Metaphysics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2016 Edition), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/platonism/.
- 28.
See Willard Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” reprinted in From a Logical Point of View, 2nd edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951): 20–46; esp. 44–47; and Mark Steiner, Mathematical Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975): Ch. 4, “Platonism and Mathematical Knowledge.”
- 29.
This formulation of the argument is indebted to Balaguer, op. cit.
- 30.
See Knowing Moral Truth, esp. Chs. 4–6, for development of my theory of moral knowledge. I am currently preparing a monograph which offers a still more expansive treatment of possibility, nature, scope, and limits of first-order moral knowledge.
- 31.
I am obviously bypassing disputes in the theory of perception which would call into question my characterization of the perceptual event here.
- 32.
Let’s also not forget that accounting for how, if at all, we come into epistemic contact with the physical world is hardly unproblematic, philosophically speaking. So it simply isn’t the case that my naturalist/physicalist opponents hold all the cards.
- 33.
The symbol ‘< >’ will be used to indicate that the membership of the set at issue is ordered. I do not, however, want to make heavy weather here of the concept of an ordered set in the context of possible worlds. What I mean to get at is that how the constituent properties are related to one another is important in order to fully describe and differentiate between possible worlds. One might therefore argue that the concept of an ordered set is not necessary to express the concept of a possible world that I have in mind—that the inclusion of relational properties in a possible world will do the job; thus, that ‘{PW}’ will do the work of ‘<PW>’. Well, perhaps. But I prefer to employ concept of an ordered set because it keeps before us the fact that the way the set members are related to one another is required for a complete specification of any given possible world.
- 34.
See David K. Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
- 35.
Perhaps I’m moving a little fast here. For if one holds that abstract platonic properties have positive ontic status even if uninstantiated—as I do in Sect. 5.1—then one might argue that a possible world wholly comprised of such properties therefore has positive ontic status. These matters quickly become very complex, and beyond the scope of this book, which is emphatically not a treatise on possible worlds. So, to be (very) brief, I am willing to grant such positive ontic status, but would argue that this is a sort of “diminished” positive ontic status, not on a par with the ontic status of an instantiated platonic property. Call the former “existence*,” and the latter “existence simpliciter.” On the view propounded here, only <AW> has existence simpliciter. Note that spatio-temporal indexicality needs to figure into at least some of the formulations of instantiated properties in <AW>.
- 36.
Were there to be more than one universe, we could regard the “actual world” as the universe that we inhabit. But I scarcely need say that were multiverse theory to be broadly adopted, the implications for how we understand reality would be so far-reaching that one hardly knows where to begin.
- 37.
Unless, of course, that was what the proposition is explicitly about, i.e., ‘That p is true in some possible world or other’.
- 38.
Again, assuming a universe. If multiverse theory is correct, there would be a multitude of actual worlds: <AW1>, <AW2>, <AW3> … <AWn>.
- 39.
The distinction between thin and thick moral concepts goes back to Gilbert Ryle, but it was Bernard Williams who brought wide recognition to it. See Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
- 40.
G. E. Moore thought that goodness was absolutely simple: a simple, unanalyzable non-natural property. See his, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903): Ch. 1.
- 41.
Such an incident occurred on May 22, 2017 in Manchester, England. The terrorist who perpetrated the act, however, does not appear to have been associated with ISIS.
- 42.
For Aristotle’s views on courage and similar moral virtues, see his Nicomachean Ethics, translated by W. D Ross. The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941): 935–1112, Bk. II. Aristotle would be horrified by the actions celebrated by ISIS and other such terrorist groups.
- 43.
This would suggest that moral goodness is either (i) a combination of incompossible simple properties, or (ii) a property that, for reasons unimaginable to me, cannot take a particular as an instantiator.
- 44.
I discuss some of these matters in “The Pre-theoreticality of Moral Intuitions,” Synthese, Vol. 191 (October 2014): 3759–78.
- 45.
See John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Ch. 2. Mill says many things about pleasure of dubious consistency, but I bypass such issues here.
- 46.
Some moral epistemologists hold that we have a special “moral sense”—but I skip over such epistemological matters here.
- 47.
See G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica: Ch. 1.
- 48.
Perhaps I overreach here. What if S were in fact Adolf Hitler in 1942, working on a second edition of Mein Kampf? Now I’m not so sure. But it is hard to come up with an unqualified moral proposition that cannot in principle be overridden. Kant, needless to say, would not agree.
- 49.
See my Knowing Moral Truth, Chs. 5 and 6; “The Pre-theoreticality of Moral Intuitions,” and “Moral Facts and the Centrality of Intuitions,” in The New Intuitionism, edited by Jill Graper Hernandez (New York and London: Continuum, 2011): 48–66; and “Disagreement and the Defensibility of Moral Intuitionism,” International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 4, Issue 224 (December 2016): 487–502.
- 50.
See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965 [1787]): 48. I want to be clear, however, that Kant did not consider first-order moral propositions of this general type to be analytic, but rather synthetic a priori.
- 51.
We certainly speak of their being abused, and do so in moral terms. But that is a different matter entirely.
- 52.
See Knowing Moral Truth, Sect. 5.1.
- 53.
I will take up these mattes in more detail in Sect. 6.6. Note, however, that as discussed in Sect. 3.1, it is dubious at best that even the natural sciences have a strictly empirical ontology. For mathematics, as but one example, is an integral part of the natural sciences, yet an empiricistic conception of mathematics is very problematic.
- 54.
For a very accessible but nevertheless relatively precise discussion of this position, see Brie Gertler, “In Defense of Mind-Body Dualism,” in Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy, 16th edition, edited by Joel Feinberg and Russ Shafer-Landau (Boston: Wadsworth, 2013): 359–72.
- 55.
For example, the eliminative materialist—Paul Churchland is a case in point—would not countenance as part of “proper scientific discourse” the folk-psychological discourse endorsed by many if not most naturalistic philosophers—Quine and Dewey, for example. (See Churchland, Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind.) These matters, however, are beyond the scope of this discussion.
- 56.
See G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Ch. 1.
- 57.
In fact, I would say that pleasure, for example, is only prima facie good. Take the pleasure that a vindictive and cruel oppressor feels upon wreaking vengeance upon a defenseless and underserving child. Is this pleasure “good” per se? It is far from obvious that it is.
- 58.
Yet another way to put it is to say that an instance of pleasure (or happiness or what have you) need not necessitate an instance of moral goodness.
- 59.
There are of course other uses of the term ‘permissible’ which are not moral uses of the term, e.g., permissible according to the rules of the game (baseball), or permissible given your set of assumptions. These non-moral uses of the term may well be explicated in terms of natural properties. But that is not to the point: the moral sense of the terms at issue is what is relevant here.
- 60.
And it is proper to speak this way. But, see Robert Audi’s important discussion on these matters in his Moral Perception (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). We will return to moral perception in Sect. 6.7.
- 61.
Cf. the “Cornell Realists”—Richard Boyd, David Brink, and Nicholas Sturgeon, on this. See, for example, Sturgeon, “Moral Explanations,” in Ethical Theory 1: The Question of Objectivity, edited by James Rachels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998): Ch. XI.
- 62.
There of course may have been other motivations for Greene’s action—Greene’s emotional stance, for example. In any event, I do not intend to get involved here in issues of motivational internalism (i.e., beliefs have motivational efficacy) vs. motivational externalism (i.e., cognitive states like belief do not motivate: non-cognitive states like emotion are what motivates action). This would take us wide of current concerns.
- 63.
Whether the instantiation of a moral property will be sufficient to cause a physical change in the brain of the observer who apprehends that an act is wrong, for example, is another matter entirely—one that takes us directly to philosophical concerns about the nature of mind. I cannot go into these matters for obvious reasons of complexity.
- 64.
Clearly, many other physical properties than those having to do with rocks or trees would also be present in any such physical state of affairs—some at the macro-level of description, e.g., the density of the rocks and the “woodiness” of the trees, and some at the micro-level, e.g., the properties of the atomic and sub-atomic particles constituting such macro-objects. This level of detail, however, is not relevant to our discussion.
- 65.
I do not assert that all first-order moral properties are gradable. That would require a survey of all known first-order moral properties, which I certainly have not attempted here.
- 66.
The degree of embeddedness, of theory-ladenness, of thick moral concepts will vary from case to case. Thus, some concepts of courageousness may be very “thick,” others less so—some thick moral concepts may be thicker than others. I do not intend a consequence of these observations about thick moral concepts to be that we cannot have moral intuitions regarding or utilizing thick moral concepts , on the grounds that moral intuitions are pre-theoretical. A complex matter I can’t enter here, but see my, “The Pre-theoreticality of Moral Intuitions.”
- 67.
See W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930).
- 68.
This is a major topic of Chs. 4–6 of Knowing Moral Truth.
Works Cited
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, translated by W. D Ross. The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon: 935–1112. New York: Random House, 1941.
Armstrong, D. M. “Four Disputes About Properties,” Synthese, Vol. 144 (2005): 309–20.
———. Nominalism and Realism: Universals and Scientific Realism, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Audi, Robert. Moral Perception. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Balaguer, Mark. “Platonism in Metaphysics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2016 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/platonism/.
Benaceraff, Paul. “Mathematical Truth,” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 70, No. 19 (November 8, 1973): 661–79.
Churchland, Paul. Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
———. “Some Reductive Strategies in Cognitive Neurobiology,” Mind, Vol. 95 (1986): 270–307.
Gertler, Brie. “In Defense of Mind-Body Dualism,” in Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy, 16th edition, edited by Joel Feinberg and Russ Shafer-Landau: 359–72. Boston: Wadsworth, 2013.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965 (1787).
Kulp, Christopher B. “Disagreement and the Defensibility of Moral Intuitionism,” International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 4, Issue 224 (December 2016): 487–502.
———. Knowing Moral Truth: A Theory of Metaethics and Moral Knowledge. Lanham, MD: Lexington/Rowman & Littlefield, 2017.
———. “Moral Facts and the Centrality of Intuitions,” in The New Intuitionism, edited by Jill Graper Hernandez: 48–66. New York and London: Continuum, 2011.
———. “The Pre-theoreticality of Moral Intuitions,” Synthese, Vol. 191 (October 2014): 3759–78.
Lewis, David K. On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
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Kulp, C.B. (2019). Moral Properties. In: Metaphysics of Morality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23410-2_5
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