Abstract
The task of justifying moral judgments consists of two parts. First, we need a method for determining which moral principles are sound, and secondly, we need to apply that method to determine what these principles are. In an earlier book, Moral Language, I argued that, contrary to what many philosophers and non-philosophers have maintained, it is possible to discover what moral judgments are true. I outlined a method that should enable us to find basic principles which constitute both the meaning of moral expressions and the most fundamental moral tenets. Here I will only summarize those conclusions, together with a brief discussion of some relevant arguments that have appeared in the literature since the publication of Moral Language in 1982.1
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Notes
What I present here is a modified version of the more detailed argument I put forth in Moral Language (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). Since that book came out in 1982, there have been other works which support moral realism from some different perspectives. I will not discuss these here, but will give a few references for the interested reader. The anthology edited by Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Essays in Moral Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988) includes a good selection of these efforts. See, for example, Richard Boyd, ‘How to be a Moral Realist’ (187–228), Nicholas Sturgeon, ‘Moral Explanations’ (229–255), and Sayre-McCord’s ‘Moral Theory and Explanatory Impotence’ (256–281). Three other interesting works defending the possibility of moral knowledge are those by Bernard Gert, Morality: A New Justification of the Moral Rules (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) David O. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and James Forrester, Why You Should: The Pragmatics of Deontic Speech (Hanover and London: Brown University Press, 1989).
See A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover Publications, 1950), Chapter 4.
Hare’s main exposition of this theory appears in The Language of Morals (New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1964), see especially Chapter 11. Other well known nondescriptivist theories include the following. C. L. Stevenson held that value judgments had both descriptive and emotive components. Words like ‘good,’ ‘wrong,’ etc. primarily express some favorable or unfavorable attitude toward a person, action, or thing; they also suggest certain descriptive characteristics of the item in question (e.g., that Susan is thoughtful of others). Yet different people might ascribe different characteristics to people they call good; what they have in common is the attitude and the attitude is central to the meaning. [Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), esp. Chapters 4, 5, 7, 9 and 10]. Roger Scruton maintains that value judgments are basically expressions of an attitude of commendation or condemnation. In evaluations the attitude is held on the basis of certain characteristics of the evaluated item. One can like a person, but one considers him good only if he has certain characteristics of which one approves [‘Attitudes, Beliefs, and Reasons,’ Morality and Moral Reasoning, John Casey, ed. (London: Methuen & Co., 1972), 25 – 110]. Patrick Nowell-Smith held that evaluations are indications of choice, or having a pro (or con) attitude toward something [Ethics (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1954), Chapters 7 and 8]. But we have these attitudes on the basis of characteristics of the item in question. In all of these theories, moral judgments, as well as judgments of the goodness or badness of things, have two components. First and foremost there is the expression of an attitude (e.g., approval) or an injunction to do something, but secondly there is an implicit or explicit indication of certain characteristics had by the thing, person, or action evaluated. Anything having those same characteristics will, if the evaluator is reasonable and consistent, be evaluated in the same way. The reason behind these judgments is that the evaluator has the requisite attitude toward things with those characteristics.
See Paul Ziff, Semantic Analysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960), 228;
John Searle, ‘Meaning and Speech Acts,’ Philosophical Review, 71 (1962): 423–432;
Hector-Neri Castaneda, ‘Imperatives, Decisions, and Oughts,’ in Morality and the Language of Conduct, Hector-Neri Castaneda & George Nakhnikian, eds. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), 230–239; and
P. T. Geach, ‘Assertion,’ Philosophical Review, 74 (1965): 449–465.
A number of people have attempted to get around the presumption that the use of evaluations in arguments indicates their descriptive nature by proposing a logic of imperatives. See, for example, Alf Ross, ‘Imperatives and Logic,’ Philosophy of Science, 11 (1944): 30 – 46;
R. M. Hare, ‘Some Alleged Differences Between Imperatives and Indicatives,’ Mind, 76 (1967): 309 – 326;
Nicholas Rescher, The Logic of Commands (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966);
Robert P. McArthur and David Welker, ‘Non-assertoric Logic,’ Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 15 (1974): 225 – 244;
André Gombay, ‘Imperative Inferences and Disjunction,’ Analysis, 25 (1965): 58–62; and Hector-Neri Castañeda, Thinking and Doing (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975), Chapters 4 and 5. In Moral Language (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), Chapters 3 and 4, I argued that such efforts to construct logics were dependent for their validity on the validity of assertoric arguments; i.e., those using statements that have truth value, whereas logics using evaluations are not so dependent.
To avoid this conclusion, Blackburn has suggested that conditional evaluations are themselves expressions of an attitude about the connection between evaluations. Thus ‘If it is wrong to lie, it is wrong to get your little brother to lie,’ should be read as Hooray! (or some other appropriate attitudinal operator)[Boo!(Lying), Boo!(Getting your little brother to lie)]. In other words, what one approves (or disapproves) of is the conjunction of certain attitudes with one another. [Spreading the Word (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 193–196] Blackburn applies this to conditionals where both antecedent and consequent are evaluations. But what does he do when the consequent is not an evaluation, but a declarative sentence, or perhaps an imperative? Are ‘If she ought to keep that promise, she will keep it,’ and ‘If you ought to be in Denver by noon, leave now’ also expressions of attitude about the relations of the components? And if so, what attitude? What about purely declarative conditionals, such as ‘If she makes promises, she keeps them?’ The main problem with this approach, however, is that the attitude one has to a conditional is not the attitude one has to each of its parts, but the attitude toward the relationship between them. This relationship is a logical feature of the sentence, not a moral one. If I approve someone’s holding that if it is wrong to lie then it is wrong to get one’s brother to lie, I’m not approving his moral stance, but the fact that his attitude is consistent. I could approve this, even if I didn’t like his moral beliefs at all. We sometimes say of a person with whom we mightily disagree: “At least he’s consistent!” And there is some approval in that, but it isn’t moral approval. Thus if a conditional evaluation is an expression of attitude, it isn’t an expression of a moral attitude. Conditionals in general, however, are not expressions of attitudes. Rather they assert that if some state of affairs obtains — i.e., some statement is true —, then some other state obtains or some imperative is operative.
Spreading the Word, 168.
See Richard Price, A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, in British Moralists, 2nd ed., Lewis A. Selby-Bigge (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1965), 105–184, especially Sections 587, 605, and 609; G. E. Moors, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), Chapter 1; and R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals, 83–86.
Spreading the Word, 183–189.
See Moral Language, 18–19, Chapter 7, and pp. 151–165.
Chapter 7, especially.
See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 241–242; Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. G. H. Von Wright, R. Rhees, and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, (New York: Macmillan 1956), II, 70; Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. Von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 348 & 351, and Davidson, ‘Belief and the Basis of Meaning,’ Synthese, 27 (1974): 309–323, and ‘Thought and Talk,’ in Mind and Language, Samuel Guttenplan, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 7–23.
My thanks to Ms. Nicola Berridge of Kluwer Academic Publishers for checking this information on tulips for me.
See ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism,’ in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 20–46.
One may well wonder what distinguishes claiming that a sentence is analytic from pigheadedness. If we refuse to accept evidence against the truth of a particular sentence, how does this differentiate us from people who simply will not recognize that some pet belief— e.g., in the faithfulness of one’s lover or in the truth of a theory one has spent one’s life developing — can no longer stand up? The two most important features of analytic beliefs are (1) that agreement upon them is general: i.e., they are widely accepted among speakers of the language, especially among those who are expert in the area of discourse in question; and (2) that anyone who disagrees finds it difficult to make others understand what he or she is talking about.
See Moral Language, primarily Chapter 7 for more extended argument.
The need for seeing how moral arguments play out in free and open discussion, rather than under some restrictive circumstances, is due simply to the fact that — in general — truth is more likely to be reached when those investigating and arguing have broad access to facts and opinions, and when no one is intimidated, so that all are free to say what they think.
John H. Barnsley points out that clashes between cultures forces a reconsideration of previously unquestioned values and rules with a search for sounder foundations for moral judgments. (The Social Reality of Ethics: The Comparative Analysis of Moral Codes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 323–324.
See Moral Language, 151–173. Others who have argued that morality receives its justification from its fundamental purpose include Kurt Baier, The Moral Point of View (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958), 200–204, 309–310; Stephen Toulmin, The Place of Reason in Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 137; and G.J. Warnock, The Object of Morality (London: Methuen & Company, 1971), Chapter 2.
In The Moral Sense (New York: The Free Press, 1993), 29–117.
See Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), Chapter 4; Fred R. Myers, ‘Always Ask: Resource Use and Land Ownership among Pintupi Aborigines of the Australian Western Desert,’ in Traditional Aboriginal Society, 2nd Edition, W. H. Edwards, ed. (Macmillan Educational Australia PTY Ltd, 1998), 30–46; and James Smith (an account ofhis experiences between 1755–1759), ‘Prisoner of the Caughnawagas,’ in Captured by Indians, Frederick Drimmer, ed., (New York: Dover Publications, 1985), 25–60: “It is seldom that Indians steal anything from one another. They say they never did until the white people came among them and taught some of them to lie, cheat, steal, and swear” (p. 51).
Wilson, The Moral Sense, 191–221. Cross-cultural contact is, of course, not a strictly modern phenomenon. George F. Hourani [Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 95–97] points out that early Christians in tryingto convert pagans, as well as early Muslims trying to convert Christians and Zoroastrians, would appeal to the moral views held by all in common. Amartya Sen, in ‘Will There Be Any Hope for the Poor?’ Time 155 (May 22, 2000): 94–95, discusses the growing craving for democracy throughout the world.
In ‘Off on the Wrong Foot,’ in On The Relevance of Metaethics, J. Couture & K. Nielsen, eds., Canadian Journal of Philosophy, suppl. vol. 21 (1995): 67–77.
See ‘The Meaning of “Meaning”,’ as well as ‘Meaning and Reference,’ The Journal of Philosophy, 70 (1973): 699–711, and ‘Language and Reality,’ Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 271–290.
In ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary vol. 35 (1961): 121–152.
Moral Language, Chapter 2
‘Meaning and Speech Acts’ Philosophical Review, 79 (1970): 3–24.
Others who have made a distinction between these two components of meaning are Erik Stenius, ‘Mood and Language Games,’ Synthese, 17 (1967): 254–274;
S. Schiffer, Meaning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), especially Chapter 4; John Searle, Speech Acts, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), passim; and Michael Dummett, ‘What is a Theory of Meaning?’ Part II, in Truth and Meaning, Gareth Evans and John McDowell, eds., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) 75–76.
William P. Alston (Philosophy of Language, [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964) Chapter 2] argues that meaning is determined by illocutionary act potential. My primary objection to this is the immense complexity of such an analysis, since any given sentence can be used for such a large number of illocutionary acts. Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber [‘Mood and the Analysis of Non-declarative Sentences,’ in Human Agency: Language, Duty, and Value, ed. Jonathan Dancy, J. M. E. Moravcsik, and C.C. W. Taylor (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 77–101] make a sharp distinction between mood and illocutionary force, noting that the former is preserved in non-typical uses such as irony and fiction, whereas the latter is not. They argue that mood and meaning generally are not determined even indirectly by illocutionary act potential. Their case is complex and not one I shall attempt to discuss here.
Charles Taylor has argued, [‘Theories of Meaning,’ Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers, I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 248–292] that propositional content is not the fundamental basis of meaning, as there are many functions of language which are not depictive and many utterances which have no propositional content. For example, a person may, while wiping his brow, say “Whew” to a fellow traveler on a hot day; he is not describing anything or informing the other person of anything she does not already know. Rather he is indicating a desire to start up a conversation. In addition to expressive uses of language there are invocative uses, where a person in a primitive society utters the name of another and thereby all suppose that he has gained power over that person. In addition, one can call upon a god or speak of animals not as they are in nature but as totems or representative of certain qualities or forces. These, Taylor maintains, cannot be viewed as extensions of a depictive use of language and therefore propositional content is not primary. He goes on to say that finding words for abstract notions like ‘equality’ does not so much describe anything as shape the standards of those who use them. Obviously there are many uses of language which are not intended to be descriptive of anything. Understanding verbal expressions presupposes, however, the explicit or implicit demarcation of a state of affairs. Certainly, Pete may say ‘Whew’ while wiping his brow primarily as an entry to conversation with his pretty seat mate. And it is equally certain that he is not telling her anything she doesn’t already know. However his words and gestures convey a belief that it is not only hot, but unpleasantly so, even though stating this belief is by no means his purpose in making the utterance. He is pointing to a state of affairs which both he and his listener are experiencing and finding unpleasant in hopes of generating fellow feeling which might lead to further intimacy. If he had said something like “George Washington was the first president of the United States” — thereby also pointing out a state of affairs that is true and undoubtedly already known to the young lady — this remark would do nothing but make his seat mate think him quite bizarre. In short, it makes a difference what is the state of affairs to which the speaker calls attention. In addition a shaman may pray to a god to bring rain or victory over an enemy, but this presupposes some beliefs about what this deity can do and what effects prayer can have. Invocations are done for a purpose — i.e. in order to accomplish something (bring about a state of affairs) through the exercise of certain powers (something supposedly had by and hence a descriptive property) of the supernatural entity. Of course, it is possible that some words — or perhaps noises would be a better term — like ‘abracadabra’ might be uttered for magical effect. Here we have something which supposedly causes a magical result, but such a causal property is not connected with the meaning of the word. The word itself is meaningless, and its meaninglessness lies in its referring to nothing and indicating no state of affairs about which one can take an attitude. Certainly also what words we use for such abstractions as ‘equality,’ whether in the mathematical or the moral sense, do influence the further development of the standards and disciplines which use them. They nonetheless refer to states, relations, or conditions which may or may not be actually realized; in other words, they have descriptive content. There is no doubt that language has many uses other than describing or representing states of affairs. But without some descriptive content — actual or implied — there seems to be no meaning at all. That the core meaning of sentences includes propositional content is not refuted by any of Taylor’s examples. All sentences are not, of course, descriptions, for they may have other moods than assertoric (e.g., a prayer which has an imperative mood). And even descriptive sentences may be used to perform illocutionary acts that are not assertions (e.g., a statement asserting what one will do in the future under circumstances where it will be taken as a promise), as well as to perform such perlocutionary acts as to get the attention of a young lady.
See my Moral Language, Chapter 3.
Similar views were expressed earlier by Dummett (‘What Is a Theory of Meaning,’ Part II) and Putnam [(‘Reference and Truth,’ in Realism and Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 69–87].
Crispin Wright Realism, Meaning, and Truth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 55.
Ibid., 260–263.
In Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 159
Putnam, Hilary, ‘Reference and Truth,’ in Realism and Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 69–87.
In Truth and Objectivity, 47–48. It is hard, however, to see how, even if a statement were superassertible, we could ever know this. Not knowing what evidence might be out there, how could we be justified in supposing that nothing could be learned which would decrease the warrant we would have for believing it? As Wright quite correctly criticizes Putnam for not recognizing (p. 44), one would have to know everything before knowing that any statement p was superassertible. One way of reading Wright, however, is that when p is superassertible at time t, no further evidence would show that a person S believing p at t would not have been justified in believing p at t. Then even if evidence at t+1 were to disconfirm p and make it unworthy of belief then, S would still have been justified at t in believing that p. If this is what Wright means, then I have no difficulty with his notion of “superassertibility;” however, this notion is as far from the ordinary notion of truth as are any of the other verificationist theories he criticizes.
Realism, Meaning, and Truth, 57–58.
In ‘Values and Secondary Qualities,’ in Ted Honderich, ed. Morality and Objectivity: A Tribute to J. L. Mackie (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 110–129.
This point was suggested to me by James Forrester.
See Moral Differences: Truth, Justice and Conscience in a World of Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), esp. Chapter 5.
Miller also espouses here a variant of the Open Question Argument, by saying that any characterization of a moral principle which is specific enough to generate answers to moral questions and resolve moral disagreements will not find universal acceptance. Principles vague and general enough to be accepted by all will be too vague to help anyone settle a moral dispute. These arguments are also made by Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), Chapter 8, and James Wallace, Moral Relevance and Moral Conflict (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), Chapter 2. The answer to this objection, like that to the one just discussed, depends on the development of a moral theory which can both resolve disagreements and find wide acceptance.
See The Object of Morality, 159–162.
Here I am not discussing theories which are merely unconventional, such as those of Nietzsche or Ayn Rand. In these cases, as I shall indicate below, there is still agreement with more standard theories on some basic issues. James Forrester has suggested that a person with a radically different moral view could demonstrate his theory not by argument but by vividly illustrating it with examples or by oracular speech. No doubt this is true, but for a person even to understand what such an individual might be trying to convey, there would need to be some agreement in attitudes (which I shall argue below includes value beliefs). Thus Ayn Rand’s characters who insist on fairness and charity are depicted in a most unpleasant light See for example the repulsive characters Wesley Mouch and Bertram Scudder in Atlas Shrugged (New York: Dutton Books, 1957). But for a reader to see that they are villains he must have some points of agreement with Rand on what constitutes a bad person, e.g., laziness and deceitfiilness Her heroes and heroines — who share her views — have characteristics which most of us admire, such as strength, courage and commitment; otherwise we would have no sympathy for them.
Such as those described by Miller in Moral Differences, 82–87
This issue was raised by an anonymous reviewer of this manuscript.
In Gilbert Harman & Judith Jarvis Thomson, Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), esp. Chapter 2.
Of course, many engage in bargaining with the hope that they will get everything they want or to gain time or reduce ill-will in such a way as to improve their chances of prevailing. My point here is that any agreement reached is not one which all parties are likely to accept as morally best, only that it is the best that they can get. My remarks do not apply at all to those in which talks break off because of an inability to reach agreement at all.
See especially Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 92–93, 144–146, 168–201, 196–197, and ‘Truth in Ethics,’ in Brad Hooker, ed., Truth in Ethics, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 1–8.
See similar objections by Wiggins, ‘Objective and Subjective in Ethics, with Two Postscripts about Truth’ in Brad Hooker, ed., Truth in Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 35–68.
Truth and Objectivity, 146.
‘Relativism,’ in P. Singer, A Companion to Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 442–450.
We shall see a number of examples of this in what follows. Edward O. Wilson points out that in different circumstances people may change their emphasis on group values as opposed to individual values. He presents several examples of members of minority ethnic groups who behaved differently with regard to the group, depending upon their opportunities for acceptance by the majority or the elite. When it was to their advantage to enhance the interests of the group over their own aspirations, they did so, but when they had more scope for entering the mainstream, their individual goals and interests took precedence. (On Human Nature, Chapter 7) This suggests that people in general want to promote their own goals, and how they behave with regard to a community depends in part upon whether their primary goals are best realized through subordinating lesser interests to those of a group or by acting on their own.
See for example, George Nakhnikian, ‘On the Naturalistic Fallacy,’ in Morality and the Language of Conduct, eds. H.-N. Castaneda and G. Nakhnikian (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), 145–158, and Hare, Moral Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 13 and 71–75.
For a fuller discussion of this issue see my Moral Language, 151–165.
See especially Hare, The Language of Morals, 83–86 & passim.
J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 97–102.
In Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton, ‘Toward Fin de siècle Ethics: Some Trends,’ Philosophical Review, 101 (1992): 115–189.
Although Railton is not in full agreement with that view; see ‘Noncognitivism about Rationality: Benefits, Costs, and an Alternative,’ Philosophical Issues, 4 (1993): 36–51. Issue on ‘Naturalism and Normativity,’ E. Villanueva, ed., and ‘What the Non-Cognitivist Helps Us to See the Naturalist Must Help Us to Explain’ in Reality, Representation, and Projection, John Haldane and Crispin Wright eds., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 279–300, and also his reply to Wiggins, 315–328 in the same volume.
See also David Wiggins(‘Cognitivism, Naturalism, and Normativity: a Reply to Peter Railton,’ in Reality, Representation, and Projection, John Haldane and Crispin Wright, eds., Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993, 301–313, and also his second reply to Railton, 329 – 336 in the same volume) and W. Fenske (‘Non-Cognitivism: a New Defense,’ Journal of Value Inquiry 31 (1997): 301 – 309), who make this point.
Wiggins (‘Cognitivism, Naturalism, and Normativity’) maintains that the fact that a moral demand constitutes a reason to act (apart from the agent’s inclination) cannot be explained by any naturalistic theory. Railton (‘What the Non-Cognitivist Helps Us to See the Naturalist Must Help Us to Explain’ in Reality, Representation, and Projection, John Haldane and Crispin Wright eds., Oxford University Press, 1993, 279–300, and also his reply to Wiggins, 315–328 in the same volume) replies that we have many good reasons to promote aggregate well-being; we all have a stake in it. I think, moreover, that we consider moral reasons to override personal goals and interests because if we do not, social cohesion will be impossible, and without this cohesion the benefits of belonging to a society will be lost. Cohesion often requires that we set aside our own concerns at times in order to maintain institutions that benefit all. I will consider these matters further in the following chapters.
In Impartial Reason (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), esp. Ch. 5, 11, and 14.
See The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), Ch 5 & 6.
Smith himself acknowledges all of this in ‘Internalism’s Wheel,’in BradHooker, ed., Truth inEthics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 69–94, proposing that what is a coherent and rational attitude and what is morally obligatory are mutually interdefinable and what we come up with about what we ought to do is done through a process of reflective equilibrium. To me, however, this seems to abandon the search for what moral judgments mean. All Smith has done is to tie their meaning to that of another expression which is equally ill-defined. This move does nothing to answer the question of whether there are moral facts or just what the connection of moral beliefs and attitudes may be.
An anonymous reader of this manuscript made this observation.
See Morality, Normativity, and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), esp. Chapter 2.
In Ethics, 60–63.
Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 141–142.
See ‘Attitudes and Contents,’ Ethics, 98 (1988): 501–517.
‘A Note on Commendation and Approval,’ Ethics, 85 (1975): 148–150.
Judith Jarvis Thomson [Harman & Thomson, Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), Chapter 6] has also made a similar point.
There are, of course, performatives of approving and condemning (e.g., approving the minutes of a meeting or condemning a criminal to death), which are official acts and do not necessarily express evaluative (or for that matter any other) beliefs about the item approved or the person condemned. But expressing approval or condemnation is a different matter, as I argue below. To suppose that all evaluations where approval or condemnation are indicated are performatives, even in those informal situations where a person expresses how he values a thing, event, or person, is to beg the question of whether or not evaluations are descriptions.
Blackburn (‘Attitudes and Contents’) rather cavalierly dismisses as quibbles these difficulties with negation. He seems to allow that commitment’ has a very broad scope, which includes belief in the truth of an assertion as well as a pro attitude toward the realization of the indicated state of affairs. Certainly, we can provide an abstract notion of some commitment which is the absence of commitment to p (as opposed to commitment to not-p), but unless this notion can be interpreted, it is of no use in a practical discipline like ethics. If what ‘A is not wrong’ means is nothing that an ordinary person can grasp — as opposed to something only a logician can comprehend — then few people know what they are talking about. The only interpretation that fits, as I have argued, is that a negation of an imperative, commitment, or attitude is the (assertoric) denial that there is such an imperative, commitment, or attitude. And thus the denial is a description.
‘Attitudes and Contents.’
B. Hale, ‘Can There Be a Logic of Attitudes?’ in Reality, Representation, and Projection, J. Haldane and C. Wright, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 337–363.
See Wright, Realism, Meaning, and Truth, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 241–246 and Susan Hurley, Natural Reasons, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), Chapter 9.
In ‘Attitudes and Contents.’
‘Securing the Nots: Moral Epistemology for the Quasi-Realist,’ in Moral Knowledge ?, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong & Mark Timmons, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)
See, for example, Hare, Freedom and Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), and Darwall, Impartial Reason (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1983), esp. Chapter 7.
See detailed discussions of this in Moral Language, Chapter 6 & Persons, Animals and Fetuses (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), Chapter 2, and Railton, ‘What the Non-Cognitivist Helps Us to See the Naturalist Must Help Us to Explain.’
See ‘Errors and the Phenomenology of Value,’ in Ted Honderich, ed. Morality and Objectivity: A Tribute to J. L. Mackie,, pp. 1–22, and ‘How to be an Ethical Antirealist,’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 12 (1988):361–375.
e.g., John McDowell, ‘Values and Secondary Qualities’.
I do not plan here to deal with the issue of how secondary qualities may differ from primary qualities.
That these properties belong to the first class doesn’t mean that how we perceive them is unaffected by our bodies and brains. No perceived property could be so independent. Rather, we consider such properties to be what they are (e.g. dispositions) independently of human institutions and conventions.
Frank Jackson [From Metaphysics to Ethics: a Defense of Conceptual Analysis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), Chapters 1 & 5] notes that many properties are complex, especially those that supervene on basic physical properties, so that such complexity and difficulty in being analyzed is not solely a characteristic of moral properties. Since we have no reason to suppose that these non-moral properties cannot be known to apply to things or that sentences containing them do not have truth value, this type of complexity should not be taken to show that moral judgments are not descriptions or cannot be known to be true.
An interesting suggestion has been made by Panayot Butchvarov [‘Realism in Ethics,’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 12 (1988): 395–412]: namely, that moral properties are a kind of generic property. As such, we do not perceive goodness or lightness and their contraries directly, but rather infer them from other characteristics. Just as we cannot directly see the coloredness of a flower, but infer that it is colored from the fact that it is pink, we can infer the goodness of an act by noting its good-making characteristics (e.g., that it helped someone out of a serious difficulty), even though we do not see its goodness directly.
See McDowell, ‘Values and Secondary Qualities’
See the debate between Harman (‘Ethics and Observation’) and Sturgeon (‘Moral Explanations’), both in Essays on Moral Realism, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 119–124 and 229–155, respectively.
In ‘Moral Theory and Explanatory Impotence,’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 12 (1988): 433–457.
See Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 196–197; and ‘Truth in Ethics,’ in Brad Hooker, ed., Truth in Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 1–18.
I am, of course, indebted to Bernard Williams (Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, and his contribution to Moral Knowledge?, 1996) for the distinction between thick and thin moral concepts. Williams argues that thin concepts, although apt to be widely accepted, are so empty that they cannot be used to solve moral problems. While thick concepts can be used to generate answers to moral questions, they are heavily dependent on culture and unlikely to be agreed upon by everyone. I certainly agree that many thick concepts are culturally determined and not universally accepted. For example, the notion of what acts are honorable is very much a function of the ideals of a particular society. Consider the differences between what has been thought honorable for a Victorian gentleman and for an Afghan tribesman. This, however, does not show that agreement cannot be reached concerning the moral value of such differing conceptions of honor. In the following chapters I shall discuss the notion of ideals and where they fit into a moral theory, as well as attempting to show that the so-called thin concepts are by no means empty and unsuited to resolving moral dilemmas.
And as Thomson points out (Harman & Thomson, Chapter 6), not all explanation is causal; we can also explain why an X is F by pointing out the characteristics of X that make it an F. This type of explanation is more what I would call classification.
James Forrester points out that a person could know what wrongness is and what lying is, but still not know that lying is wrong. Certainly. A person can also know the circumference of an object and its diameter, but still not know that c = πd. It is less likely that anyone would not know that causing pain or obtaining a good at the cost of someone else’s losing a greater good is wrong, just as it is unlikely that anyone would not know that 2 + 2 = 4. As noted above, even analytic statements may not be known by those whose education or intelligence is insufficient, and that a statement’s truth may be obvious to most does not entail that it is obvious to all. A well-established moral principle is not necessarily known to all people, for some have failed to be educated in the accepted moral principles of their societies (e.g., small children, mental defectives, and those who have never been able to form attachments and hence understanding of the needs of others).
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Forrester, M.G. (2002). Metaethical Background. In: Moral Beliefs and Moral Theory. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9994-8_1
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