Moral Realism and Epistemic
Inaccessibility
An investigation into the relationship between Moral Realism and
Epistemological Moral Scepticism
By
Pieter Fritschy
3390306
pieter_fritschy@hotmail.com
Master’s thesis Research Master Philosophy
June 2014
First supervisor: Prof. Herman Philipse
Abstract
The relationship between epistemological moral scepticism and moral realism is often
presented as a matter of logic: because we cannot draw metaphysical conclusions about the
existence of moral facts on the basis of the question whether we can have epistemic access to
such moral facts, so the argument runs, epistemological moral scepticism and moral realism
are compatible meta-ethical positions. In this thesis, however, I will argue that the relationship
between moral realism and epistemological moral scepticism is a far from trivial one. Indeed,
in this thesis I will argue that the epistemic inaccessibility of moral facts, which should lead
one to endorse epistemological moral scepticism, not only creates an extra burden of proof for
the moral realist, but that it also fatally undermines the most important positive arguments in
favour of moral realism. For these reasons, or so I will argue, moral realism is rendered a
wholly unattractive and unconvincing meta-ethical position if it is coupled with an
acknowledgement of epistemological moral scepticism.
i
Table of contents
Part I: Introduction
p. 1
1.
p. 2
Introduction
Part II: Moral Realism and Moral Anti-Realism
p. 4
2.
Moral Realism
p. 5
Introduction
The intuitive case in favour of moral realism
The analogy with scientific realism
The Frege-Geach Problem
p. 5
p. 6
p. 9
p. 10
Moral Anti-Realism
p. 14
Introduction
G.E. Moore and the open-question argument
Metaphysical and motivational worries
Moral disagreement
Evolutionary debunking arguments
Moral explanations
p. 14
p. 15
p. 18
p. 21
p. 22
p. 24
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
3.
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5
3.6
Part III: Moral Epistemology
p. 27
4.
Anti-Realism and Moral Epistemology
p. 28
Introduction
An analysis of knowledge
Non-cognitivism and epistemology
Moral subjectivism and epistemology
Error theory and epistemology
p. 28
p. 28
p. 30
p. 33
p. 34
Moral Realist Epistemology
p. 36
Introduction
Moral intuitionism
Coherentism
Reflective equilibrium
Two forms of epistemological naturalism
Bridging the is/ought gap
Moral reliabilism
p. 36
p. 36
p. 38
p. 40
p. 42
p. 42
p. 43
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
4.5
5.
5.1
5.2
5.3
5.4
5.5
5.5.1
5.5.2
ii
Part IV: The Relationship between Moral Realism and
Epistemological Moral Scepticism
6.
p. 45
The Meta-Ethical Consequences of Epistemic Inaccessibility p. 46
6.1
6.2
6.3
7.
7.1
7.2
7.3
Introduction
A matter of logic?
Identifying overriding considerations
p. 46
p. 47
p. 48
Epistemic Inaccessibility and Moral Discourse
p. 51
Introduction
Moral discourse and suspension of judgment
Epistemic inaccessibility and the intuitive case in favour
of moral realism
p. 51
p. 51
p. 53
Part V: Conclusion
p. 56
8.
p. 57
Bibliography
Conclusion
p. 58
iii
Part I
Introduction
1
Chapter 1 Introduction
“[R]ealism is a metaphysical thesis about what is real and therefore it might be thought to be
insulated from mundane concerns about whether we puny humans are or are not able to know that
reality.”1
Much of the attention in twentieth-century meta-ethical debate has, in addition to matters of
semantics, metaphysics and ontology, been devoted to issues of epistemology (such as the
question whether a satisfactory moral realist epistemology has been formulated).
Unfortunately, however, very little has been said about the relationship between
epistemological moral scepticism2 (the view that we cannot or do not have knowledge of firstorder moral propositions) on the one hand and moral realism3 (a metaphysical view about the
nature of moral facts) on the other hand. Indeed, the few philosophers that have said
something about this relationship have often characterised it as a matter of logic whether
epistemological moral scepticism and moral realism are compatible meta-ethical positions:
“[S]kepticism about moral truth cannot be based on skepticism about moral knowledge, since lack
of knowledge does not imply lack of truth. For similar reasons, skepticism about moral truth also
cannot be based on skepticism about justified moral belief. Instead, skepticism about moral truth
is usually based on views of moral language or metaphysics.” 4
So most often the discussions about this relationship are concluded with the observation that it
does not seem possible to construct a logically cogent argument (starting from the premise
that no moral knowledge can be had, leading to the conclusion that no moral facts exist)
against moral realism on the basis of epistemological moral scepticism. This in turn means, so
the argument goes, that the two are compatible: one can, in theory, simultaneously be a moral
realist and an epistemological moral sceptic.
This view has far-reaching consequences for the importance of epistemology for the moral
realism/moral anti-realism debate. Indeed, if this view would be correct, this would mean that,
even if the moral realist would be wholly incapable of presenting a convincing moral
epistemology, moral realism could be salvaged on, for example, metaphysical and semantic
grounds. In other words: if epistemological moral scepticism and moral realism are indeed
compatible, this means that epistemological matters will be of less direct importance to the
moral realist. If, on the other hand, the two turn out to be irreconcilable, then the moral realist
task of defending a convincing epistemological theory against the attacks of epistemological
moral scepticism has proved to be central to the moral realism/moral anti-realism debate.
1
K. DeLapp, Moral Realism, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, p. 116.
See chapter 6 for a more detailed discussion of epistemological moral scepticism.
3
See chapter 2 for a more detailed discussion of moral realism.
4
W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Moral Skepticisms, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 11. Emphasis added.
2
2
In this thesis, I will argue that the epistemic inaccessibility5 of moral facts, which should lead
one to endorse epistemological moral scepticism, not only creates an extra burden of proof for
the moral realist, but that it also fatally undermines the most important positive arguments in
favour of moral realism. For this reason, or so I will argue, moral realism is rendered a wholly
unattractive and unconvincing meta-ethical position if it is coupled with an acknowledgement
of epistemological moral scepticism.
In order to be able to make this argument, I will start (in Part II of this thesis, which consists
of chapters 2 and 3) by distinguishing carefully moral realism and moral anti-realism. In this
discussion of the core commitments of (the most important forms of) moral realism and moral
anti-realism I will also examine briefly the main arguments that are usually put forward in
favour of these two meta-ethical views. The discussion of these arguments will be used in part
IV of this thesis in order to assess the overall impact of epistemological moral scepticism on
the moral realist position.
After that, in Part III, I will turn to moral epistemology. More specifically, I will discuss the
epistemological consequences and commitments of both moral realism and moral antirealism. This part of the thesis is necessary to get clear on what epistemological moral
scepticism is and how attractive a position it is in the light of the current debates in moral
epistemology.
Then, in Part IV, the relationship between epistemological moral scepticism and moral
realism will be discussed. It is in this part that I will adduce several arguments for my earlier
claim that a combination of moral realism and epistemological moral scepticism together
forms a wholly unconvincing meta-ethical position.
Finally, in Part V of this thesis, I will end with a brief recapitulation of this thesis and with an
overview of its most important conclusions.
5
See chapter 6 for a more detailed discussion of epistemic inaccessibility.
3
Part II
Moral Realism and Moral AntiRealism
4
Chapter 2 Moral Realism
“The realism/anti-realism debate in ethics has been around ever since people began thinking
critically about their moral convictions. The problem has always been to make sense of these
convictions in a way that does justice to morality’s apparent importance without engaging in
outrageous metaphysical flights of fancy. Some have thought it can’t be done; they’ve held that
the apparent importance of morality is mere appearance. Others have thought it can be done;
they’ve held that whatever metaphysics is necessary is neither outrageous nor fanciful.” 6
2.1
Introduction
The debate between moral realists and moral anti-realists, construed in its broadest form,
concerns the nature of morality. The way this debate should be characterised in more detail is
itself already a source of dispute. Some have argued that moral realism is best to be
understood as analogous to scientific realism, which holds that
“scientific theories should be understood as putative descriptions of real phenomena, that ordinary
scientific methods constitute a reliable procedure for obtaining and improving (approximate)
knowledge of the real phenomena which scientific theories describe, and that the reality described
by scientific theories is largely independent of our theorizing”. 7
Such an account therefore distinguishes, in a manner analogous to scientific realism, (i) the
truth-aptness of moral statements, (ii) the mind-independent truth or falsity of moral
statements, and (iii) the reliability of moral reasoning as a method of attaining moral
knowledge. The first aspect (the acknowledgement of the truth-aptness of moral statements)
concerns semantics and is known as moral cognitivism. Moral non-cognitivism can therefore
be characterised as the anti-realist thesis that moral statements are not descriptive in character:
moral statements are expressions of non-cognitive attitudes (such as desires). As we will see
in chapter 3, one of the main strategies of moral anti-realists has been to attack moral
cognitivism and to argue in favour of moral non-cognitivism. The second aspect concerns the
ontological status of moral facts, and the third aspect is epistemological in nature.
Other philosophers have characterised moral realism as the view that “moral standards, or
specific moral judgments, are correct in a way that does not depend on human endorsement or
on the implications of human commitments”.8 Again others have appealed to the notion of
objectivity in order to define moral realism: “moral questions have correct answers, […]
moral facts are determined by circumstances, and […], by moralizing, we can discover what
these objective moral facts determined by the circumstances are”.9
G. Sayre-McCord, “The Many Moral Realisms,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, Spindel Conference
Supplement, 1986, p. 2-3.
7
R. Boyd, “How to be a moral realist”, in: R. Shafer-Landau (ed.), Metaphysics, vol. II, Routledge, 2008, p. 312.
8
R. Shafer-Landau, Metaphysics, vol. I, Routledge, 2008, p. 8.
9
M. Smith, “Realism”, in: P. Singer (ed.), A Companion to Ethics, Blackwell, 1990, p. 399. Emphasis added.
6
5
It is this diversity in conceptions of moral realism that has led to what can indeed be called
“the many moral realisms”.10 But despite the differences it is possible to formulate a more or
less conventional (yet rather general) version of moral realism. According to such a
conception, which will be the conception of moral realism I will use throughout this thesis, (i)
moral claims purport to report moral facts in virtue of which these moral claims are either true
or false (i.e., moral claims are truth-apt), and (ii) at least some of these moral claims are mindindependently11 true. By accepting moral realism’s commitment to the mind-independent
existence of moral facts, I am restricting my definition of moral realism to what has become
known as robust moral realism. This means that so-called minimal moral realism, which
shares all other characteristics of robust moral realism apart from its metaphysical
commitment to the mind-independent existence of moral facts, will not be included in the
definition of moral realism I will use throughout this thesis. I will rather discuss this view, as
is often done12, as a form of anti-realism called moral subjectivism13.
Finally, it is important to note that my definition of moral realism does not make any
reference to the epistemological aspects of moral realism, like for example Boyd’s definition
does. The reason is that an epistemologically neutral definition of moral realism is needed to
inquire, as I will do in part IV of this thesis, whether moral realism and epistemological moral
scepticism are compatible.
In this chapter, however, I will not yet discuss moral realist epistemology. This chapter will
be concerned with the other grounds on which moral realism has been defended. This chapter
will therefore revolve around the most important14 non-epistemological arguments that are
usually put forward in defence of moral realism. In the following chapter (chapter 3) I will do
the same for the most prominent anti-realist theories. In this way these two chapters, which
together form part II of this thesis, provide a rough outline of both the central theses of the
main meta-ethical theories and of the most important arguments that are employed in current
meta-ethical debates.
2.2
The intuitive case in favour of moral realism
The most important argument in favour of moral realism is founded on the role morality and
moral judgments play in our ordinary, quotidian lives. This argument concerns semantics: it
takes as its starting point the fact that our ordinary moral claims (at least seem to) purport to
report (moral) facts. We do not merely claim that we think that genocide is wrong; we claim
that it is wrong. So moral realism invites us to take claims like “genocide is wrong” at face
value (i.e., as claims that purport to report moral facts). If this declarative form of our moral
G. Sayre-McCord, “The Many Moral Realisms,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, Spindel Conference
Supplement, 1986.
11
See paragraph 3.1 for a more detailed discussion of the concept of “mind-independence”.
12
R. Joyce, “Moral Anti-Realism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 Edition), E.N.
Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/moral-anti-realism/>.
13
Moral subjectivism will be discussed in more detail in sections 3.1 and 4.4.
14
I will of course not aim for a complete overview of all the arguments that have been put forward in favour of
moral realism. I will, therefore, restrict myself to the arguments that are most often used by moral realists, and
that are, to my view, the strongest arguments in favour of moral realism.
10
6
judgments is taken at face value, then the conclusion that in ordinary moral discourse we
purport to report moral facts seems warranted.
Furthermore, we usually engage in debates about moral questions, during which we often feel
as though we can separate moral mistake and moral insight. Such debates are typically meant
to discover, as much as possible, moral truth. This is difficult to reconcile with the moral
subjectivist view that moral facts are constituted by our moral attitudes and moral opinions. In
short: our ordinary sense of morality is one that seems to presuppose the reality of the moral
facts which are at the centre of our moral discourse. But if such moral facts would not exist,
so the moral realist argument runs, all these ordinary moral claims would be false. Our moral
discourse would be fundamentally mistaken and we would be forced to become error
theorists.15
So the fact that moral realism “explains the point and nature of moral inquiry” is therefore
taken to provide it with its “intuitive appeal”.16 In other words:
“[I]t is distinctive of moral practice that we are concerned to get the answers to moral questions
right. But this concern presupposes that there are correct answers to be had. It thus seems to
presuppose that there exists a domain of moral facts about which we can form beliefs and about
which we may be mistaken.”17
So according to the moral realist both of the two core commitments of moral realism
formulated earlier (the truth-aptness of moral claims and the mind-independent truth of at
least some of our moral claims) are reflected in our everyday moral discourse. After all, our
moral discourse is aimed at moral truth and thereby shows a belief in the mind-independent
existence of moral facts. This, so the moral realist often claims, should lead us to accept at
least an argumentative presumption in favour of moral realism:
“We begin as (tacit) cognitivists and realists about ethics. Moral claims make assertions, which
can be true or false; some people are more perceptive than others; and people’s moral views have
not only changed over time but have improved in many cases (e.g., as regards slavery). We are led
to some form of antirealism (if we are) only because we come to regard the moral realist’s
commitments as untenable […]. Moral realism should be our metaethical starting point, and we
should give it up only if it does involve unacceptable metaphysical and epistemological
commitments.”18
So both the phenomenology19 behind and the form and content20 of our moral statements
seem to presuppose a firm belief in objective moral truth. This means that, if we reject moral
realism, we have to take our moral semantics as “misleading and inappropriate”. 21 We would
have to be error theorists or offer an alternative interpretation and explanation of our moral
discourse.
15
Error theory will be discussed in detail in paragraph 3.3.
D. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 8.
17
Ibid., p. 263
18
Ibid., p. 23-24. Emphasis added.
19
J. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Penguin: 1977, chapter 1.
20
D. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 26.
21
Ibid., p. 26.
16
7
But is this, as the proponents of moral realism claim, indeed sufficient to establish something
like an argumentative presumption in favour of moral realism? The first thing to notice about
this question is that, even if one accepts that our moral phenomenology and our moral
discourse are best interpreted as bearing an assumption of cognitivism, one can hold that this
does not single out moral realism as enjoying the privilege of best explaining this
phenomenon. After all, an error theorist likewise acknowledges the fact that moral claims
purport to describe reality. So even if one accepts that the character of our moral discourse
generates a prima facie burden of proof for the non-cognitivist, this does not as such create
such a burden for all forms of anti-realism. Indeed, the error theorist combines an
acknowledgement of cognitivism with the anti-realist claim that all our moral claims are false,
because as it turns out there are no moral facts.
The moral realist can, however, of course argue that this second claim puts the error theorist
in a position similar to the non-cognitivist’s, because it too implies that our moral discourse is
somehow fundamentally misguided. This, so the moral realist argument would run, is a
conclusion which likewise bears the burden of being highly counterintuitive.
But even if we ignore the error theorist for a moment, and rather restrict our focus to the noncognitivist, it seems that he has two ways of answering the question whether the relevant
moral phenomena give moral realism a prima facie advantage. The first option is to accept
such a prima facie advantage, but to argue that there are overriding considerations in other
relevant meta-ethical fields (e.g., moral metaphysics or moral epistemology) which point in
the direction of non-cognitivism. This strategy does not directly challenge our intuitions
concerning our moral judgments, but it rather tries to establish the non-cognitive character of
our moral judgments on other meta-ethical grounds. Most non-cognitivists in fact choose to
accept this argumentative burden.22 However, this strategy is often coupled with a
trivialisation of such a concession. Such non-cognitivists argue that the importance of moral
phenomenology and moral language as intuitive devices should not be overstated. After all,
the inference from these moral appearances to moral realism is one that requires substantial
argumentation. As a result, the non-cognitivist conclusion is that what has merely been
accepted is a defeasible burden of proof in favour of the moral realist.
It is of course subject of debate how strong23 such defeating considerations must be (or, stated
in other words, how strong a presumption in favour of moral realism or cognitivism is created
by the form and content of our ordinary moral discourse). This question, however, is in effect
nothing more than a question about the relative weight of different arguments in meta-ethics.
Moral anti-realists will be inclined to attach less weight to the intuitions that are reflected by
our moral discourse, and more weight to, for example, problems of moral disagreement and
the perceived lack of a satisfactory moral realist metaphysics. So although there is something
to be said for singling out our moral intuitions as giving rise to an argumentative burden of
proof (it is after all not completely arbitrary to take one’s pre-theoretical judgments as the
R. Joyce, “Moral Anti-Realism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 Edition), E.N.
Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/moral-anti-realism/>.
23
Cf. D. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 24: “[…]
only if there are powerful objections to moral realism”.
22
8
starting point of one’s investigation), it is important to realise that the outcome of the moral
realism/moral anti-realism debate depends on “how well realism fares vis-à-vis its
competitors across the whole range of criteria for theoretical adequacy in metaethics”.24 As
useful as our intuitions might be as the starting point of meta-ethical inquiry, it therefore
seems there is no reason to treat them as argumentatively privileged compared to other types
of meta-ethical arguments.
So we have seen that the first option for the non-cognitivist is to accept a prima facie
advantage in favour of the cognitivist, while arguing for non-cognitivism on the basis of other
meta-ethical considerations. The second option is to deny that moral phenomenology and
moral language pose a challenge to the non-cognitivist in the first place. This non-cognitive
line of argument directly challenges our intuitions concerning our moral judgments, by
inviting us to reconsider our meta-ethical intuitions: if, after careful reflection, it turns out that
a non-cognitivist interpretation of our moral discourse somehow makes better sense of our
moral practice, then the non-cognitivist has succeeded in shifting the burden of proof. If one is
to employ this strategy, one has to provide an argument for the claim that, despite
appearances, our moral judgments are not declarative, but are rather, for example, expressions
of (dis)approval or as imperatives.
In chapter 3 I will go deeper into the different varieties of anti-realism and the arguments that
are usually put forward in their defence. For the purposes of this paragraph it is sufficient to
note that the anti-realist (or cognitivist, if one is not persuaded by the moral realist argument
that the error theorist likewise bears an argumentative burden of proof) can either accept or
reject the “intuitive case for moral realism” without having to surrender his anti-realism.
2.3
The analogy with scientific realism
Another important argument in favour of moral realism departs from the fact that most
philosophers nowadays accept scientific realism, i.e. “the doctrine that the methods of science
are capable of providing (partial or approximate) knowledge of unobservable (‘theoretical’)
entities, such as atoms or electromagnetic fields”.25 Scientific realists are, therefore, not only
realists with regard to the observable, external world, but also with regard to unobservable
entities. This scientific realism is usually taken to be the best explanation of the success of the
natural sciences. Indeed, as Boyd claims, scientific methodology is “reliable at producing
further knowledge precisely because, and to the extent that, currently accepted theories are
relevantly approximately true”.26
For this reason moral realists want to draw an analogy between scientific realism and moral
realism. If scientific theory is best explained on the assumption that it approximates the truth,
then could that not, in a similar fashion, apply to moral theory and unobservable moral
entities? Moral anti-realists have often given a negative answer to this question in one of two
ways: they have either stressed the difference between superficial scientific disagreement and
24
R. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 234. Emphasis added.
R. Boyd, “How to be a moral realist”, in: G. Sayre-McCord (ed.), Essays on Moral Realism, Cornell
University Press, 1988, p. 188.
26
Ibid., p. 190.
25
9
(what appears to be) deep, irresolvable moral disagreement, or they have placed emphasis on
the disanalogy between the objective character of the natural sciences and the subjective and
personal nature of moral discourse.
These two challenges, however, have not prevented moral realists from hanging on to the
analogy between scientific realism and moral realism. With regard to the first anti-realist
response, moral realists have sometimes tried to argue that scientific disagreements can also
be of a deep, irresolvable nature, and, more often, they have tried to explain away deep moral
disagreement. In paragraph 3.4 I will discuss these strategies in more detail.
With regard to the second anti-realist claim, moral realists contend that, although moral
discourse can be said to be at least partially based on moral presuppositions, the natural
sciences are also deeply theory-laden, and are therefore “partners in guilt”27:
“In science, agreement in those observational judgments that involve ascriptions of real physical
properties such as mass may depend upon agreement in background theory. In this sense
observations are ‘theory-laden’”.28
So what we take to be objective and “real” scientific knowledge seems to be compatible with
theoretical presuppositions. For this reason moral realists have held that a moral methodology
like the search for reflective equilibrium29 can therefore likewise be defended as a legitimate
way of attaining moral knowledge through the use of theoretical presuppositions.
It is not surprising that both moral realist answers have in turn been challenged by the moral
anti-realist. The question whether these challenges to the moral realist analogy between
scientific and moral realism are successful is beyond the scope of this thesis, but it is
important to note that if the moral anti-realist proves incapable of providing us with good
reasons to place more emphasis on the differences rather than on the similarities between the
natural sciences and moral discourse, the moral realist will have found a strong argument in
favour of moral realism.
2.4
The Frege-Geach Problem
As we have seen in paragraph 2.3, one of the most important arguments for moral realism
derives from the nature of our moral discourse. In this paragraph we will see that the nature of
our moral discourse has also led to the formulation of one of the most important arguments
against non-cognitivism (and therefore, in an indirect way, to an important argument in favour
of moral realism): the Frege-Geach Problem. In this paragraph the Frege-Geach Problem will
be discussed, in order to show why “[m]uch if not all of the recent innovations in noncognitivist theorizing stem from attempts to answer the Frege-Geach objection”30 and why it
D. Brink, “Moral Realism and the Sceptical Arguments from Disagreement and Queerness”, Australasian
Journal of Philosophy, 1984: 62, p. 124.
28
A. Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition, Harvard University Press, 1986, p. 171.
29
Coherentist epistemologies like the search for reflective equilibrium will be discussed in paragraph 5.3.
30
M. van Roojen, “Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter
2013 Edition), E,N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/moral-cognitivism/>.
27
10
is considered one of the most important arguments in favour of cognitivism (and hence, by
significantly diminishing the appeal of one of its main anti-realist rivals, in favour of moral
realism).
A useful starting point for a discussion of the Frege-Geach Problem is a characterisation of
the nature of non-cognitivism. Non-cognitivists usually make three claims concerning the
nature of moral statements:
“The first claim is that moral sentences do not have truth-values. The second claim is that moral
assertions do not describe the world. The third claim is that moral assertions do express emotions
or other non-cognitive states, such as attitudes or desires.” 31
Many different forms of non-cognitivism have been developed over the course of the
twentieth century. One can for example point to emotivism (Ayer), prescriptivism (Carnap,
Hare), expressivism (Stevenson) and quasi-realism (Blackburn, Gibbard). Some of these
varieties of non-cognitivism do not (expressly) endorse the third claim: prescriptivism, for
example, places emphasis on the non-descriptive character of moral statements rather than on
any supposed emotional origin. In chapter 3 more will be said about these different varieties
of non-cognitivism, but for now it is sufficient to note that most forms of non-cognitivism
share the three characteristics formulated above.
Now, the key motivation behind the Frege-Geach Problem is the fact that non-cognitivism has
difficulties to explain how moral terms can function the way they do in moral discourse and
yet be non-descriptive. For example, it seems as though “everything you can do syntactically
with a descriptive predicate like ‘green’, you can do with a moral predicate like ‘wrong’, and
when you do those things, they have the same semantic effects”.32 The non-cognitivist
commitment to the non-descriptive character of moral terms, however, leads to substantial
difficulties when moral terms are being used in semantically complex sentences (sentences in
which moral terms are embedded). For this reason the Frege-Geach Problem is also known as
“the embedding problem”.
The perceived problem is that a sentence like “it is wrong to steal”, understood as a nondescriptive expression of a non-cognitive state, cannot explain the semantic properties of
embedded sentences in which “it is wrong to steal” occurs. For example, how are we to
understand an embedded sentence like “I wonder whether it is wrong to steal” in the
framework of Ayer’s theory of meaning? It seems as though such a sentence cannot be
satisfactorily explained by interpreting “wrong” as the expression of “a special sort of moral
disapproval”33. Similar worries arise for conditionals:
(P1)
(P2)
If tormenting the cat is bad, getting your little brother to do it is bad
Tormenting the cat is bad
31
W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Moral Skepticisms, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 18.
M. Schroeder, “What is the Frege-Geach Problem?”, Philosophy Compass, Vol. 3, July 2008, p. 704.
33
A. J. Ayer, “The Emotive Theory of Ethics”, in: G. Sher (ed.), Moral Philosophy: Selected Readings,
Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1996, p. 124.
32
11
Ergo, getting your little brother to torment the cat is bad34
The reason this modus ponens argument is valid, according to Geach, is that “tormenting the
cat is bad” has a constant meaning in embedded and unembedded contexts. This is the socalled “Frege Point”, due to which the embedding problem is now also known as the FregeGeach Problem:
“A thought may have the just the same content whether you assent to its truth or not; a proposition
may occur in discourse now asserted, now unasserted, and yet be recognizably the same
proposition.”35
The crucial part of the Frege-Geach Problem is the claim that the non-cognitivist cannot hold
that the meaning of “tormenting the cat is bad” is constant in the first and the second premise.
After all, it makes no sense to treat the unasserted use of “tormenting the cat is bad” in the
first premise as an expression of an emotion or as an imperative. If, however, it turns out that
we can make valid arguments on the basis of a combination of asserted and unasserted
components of complex sentences like conditionals, then it seems that, in line with the Frege
Point, we are forced to the conclusion that the meaning of the phrase “tormenting the cat is
bad” has to remain constant in the first and the second premise. But this is exactly what the
non-cognitivist cannot accept: the unasserted antecedent in the first premise cannot be taken
in the same way as the asserted second premise is to be understood (i.e. as the expression of a
non-cognitive state). Therefore, the non-cognitivist cannot explain the validity of the use of
modus ponens in Geach’s example.
The worry can be put more generally in terms of truth-functionality. As we have seen, noncognitivists reject the view that moral statements are truth-apt. In other words, they claim that
moral statements do not carry a truth value.36 The problem, however, is that such truth values
are usually taken to provide the key to explaining the workings of predicate expressions and
logical connectives in complex sentences. The Frege-Geach problem is therefore not just
restricted to the perceived incapability of non-cognitivism to explain validity, but also extends
to “semantic properties” as such:
“The problem is that noncognitivists must provide us with recipes for how to construct the
meanings of any kind of complex sentence from the meanings of their parts, and that these recipes
must ‘get things right’, in the sense that they must allow for an explanation of the features that the
resulting complex sentences have, in virtue of their meaning. These are […] ‘semantic
properties’.”37
Logicians and truth-conditional semanticists have captured these semantic properties in truth
tables. These truth tables are meant to provide a truth function, which in turn specifies how
the truth value of a composite sentence is a function of the truth values of its component
P. Geach, “Assertion”, Philosophical Review, 74, 1965, p. 463.
P. Geach, “Assertion”, Philosophical Review, 74, 1965, p. 449.
36
G. Frege, “Über Sinn und Bedeutung“, Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 1892, p. 25-50.
37
M. Schroeder, Noncognitivism in Ethics, Routledge, 2010, p. 54
34
35
12
sentences. In this way, complicated sentences can be assigned truth conditions by formulating
logical operators like “and”, “or”, “not” and “if…then” in terms of their truth values. These
truth-conditional recipes for the workings of logical operators provide, for example, an
explanation of the internal inconsistency in the sentence “it is wrong to steal and it is not
wrong to steal”. This, so the moral realist claims, is something non-cognitivism is unable to
explain, because of the fact that non-cognitivists refuse to assign truth-values to moral
statements.
The Frege-Geach Problem is an important reason why more and more philosophers have been
tempted to abandon non-cognitivism and accept either moral realism or other (anti-realist)
cognitivist theories like Mackie’s error theory. But although the Frege-Geach Problem has
proved to be a persistent one, many non-cognitivists have tried to supplement their theories
with answers concerning the problem of embedding. One can for example point to the
acceptance of a minimalist (or deflationary) account of truth38, the attempt to formulate a logic
of (higher-order) attitudes39 and the use of possible world semantics in order to explain the
functioning of normative language40. All of these attempts to salvage non-cognitivism are
worth a thesis-length discussion in their own right. For the purposes of this thesis, however, it
is sufficient to note that these attempts have not succeeded in reducing the Frege-Geach
Problem to a peripheral problem for non-cognitivism: it is still widely considered to be one of
the most convincing arguments in favour of cognitivism and moral realism.41
38
See paragraph 4.3 for a discussion of such a deflationary conception of truth.
S. Blackburn, “Attitudes and Contents”, Ethics: 98, 1988, p. 501-517.
40
A. Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. A Theory of Normative Judgement, Clarendon Press, 1990.
41
R. Shafer-Landau , Metaphysics, vol. I, Routledge, 2008, p. 13.
39
13
Chapter 3 Moral Anti-Realism
“But how could it be that a discourse that is familiar to a group of perfectly intelligent people –
one that they employ every day without running into any trouble or confusion – is so mistaken?”42
3.1
Introduction
In the previous chapter I have tried to elucidate the development of moral realism and the
arguments that have been put forward in its defence. This chapter, however, will be concerned
with the meta-ethical negation of moral realism: moral anti-realism. In chapter 2 the three
most important forms of anti-realism have already been discussed briefly. Firstly, there is
non-cognitivism. Non-cognitivists hold that moral judgments do not even aim at moral truth;
they are to be understood as something radically different from descriptive judgments like
“the cat is on the mat”. On this view moral judgments are not to be taken as expressions of
beliefs but rather as “expressive vehicles”.43 Secondly, we have come across Mackie’s error
theory. Error theorists, like moral realists, subscribe to the semantic thesis that our moral
judgments purport to describe real moral facts, but in addition they hold that all such moral
judgments are in fact false, because no such moral facts exist. According to the error theorist,
therefore, our moral judgments are all predicated on the same mistaken ontological
presupposition: that moral facts exist in the first place. Thirdly, and lastly, there is moral
subjectivism, which holds that moral facts exist in a mind-dependent manner. It is important
to note that the notion of “mind-independence”, although frequently used to delineate moral
realism and moral anti-realism, is notoriously ambiguous:
“Something may be mind-independent in one sense and mind-dependent in another. Cars, for
example, are designed and constructed by creatures with minds, and yet in another sense cars are
clearly concrete, non-subjective entities. Much careful disambiguation is needed before we know
how to circumscribe subjectivism, and different philosophers disambiguate differently.” 44
Similar worries arise for non-physical entities like legal systems. Legal systems are likewise
constructed and designed by the (mental) activities of human beings, and can therefore be
taken to be, in one sense, mind-dependent, but they are also objective in the sense that their
existence and their content is not dependent on my attitudes towards or my opinions about
them.
Robust moral realism, as we have seen, is the view that there is no sense in which moral facts
can be taken as mind-dependent. Indeed, one important implication of my definition of moral
realism as robust moral realism is that, pace some forms of moral subjectivism, “an individual
or even an entire culture might be “wrong” about moral matters”.45
42
R. Joyce, The Myth of Morality, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 2.
R. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 18.
44
Ibid., p. 18.
45
K. DeLapp, Moral Realism, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, p. 1.
43
14
In the remainder of this thesis, I will therefore take moral subjectivism to be the view that the
existence of moral facts, at least in some way, depends on our (mental) activity. Moral
subjectivists therefore disagree with the robust moral realist thesis that moral facts are real,
objective facts, which do “not depend on human endorsement or on the implications of human
commitments”.46 On this subjectivist view “moral laws are human laws, made by, and for,
humans”.47
In this chapter I will start by discussing the developments that led to the emergence of moral
anti-realism. After that, in paragraphs 3.3 – 3.6, I will examine the most important arguments
for the three different anti-realist positions I have distinguished here. In this chapter I will not
yet go specifically into epistemological matters, even though the perceived failure of the
proponents of moral realism to provide a satisfactory moral epistemology is often used as an
important argument in favour of anti-realism. The reason I will not yet discuss such
epistemological arguments in this chapter is the same reason I did not touch upon moral
epistemology in the previous chapter: these epistemological matters will be the subject of
detailed, critical scrutiny in later chapters of this thesis.
3.2
G.E. Moore and the open-question argument
In order to understand the emergence of moral anti-realism, it is instructive to start by looking
at perhaps the most important event in meta-ethical history: the publication of G.E. Moore’s
Principia Ethica. This publication sparked the development of moral anti-realism by
discrediting “moral naturalism”, the view that was then seen as the most attractive form of
moral realism. In this paragraph I will discuss G.E. Moore’s so-called “open-question
argument” and the way it has influenced twentieth-century meta-ethical debate.
In 1903 G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica was published.48 In this book, and especially by
means of his “open-question argument”, Moore propounds a thoroughly non-naturalist metaethical theory. In order to get a grasp on Moore’s open-question argument, it is important to
distinguish firstly naturalism and non-naturalism, both of which are varieties of moral realism.
Now, most often “non-naturalism” denotes “the metaphysical thesis that moral properties
exist and are not identical with or reducible to any natural property or properties in some
interesting sense of ‘natural’”.49 Moral naturalism, on the other hand, holds that such an
identity or reducibility relation does exist between moral and natural properties. So both
views hold that moral properties exist; the difference between the two lies in their answers to
the question whether these moral properties are identical with or reducible to natural
properties. Shafer-Landau, for example, holds that moral properties are best described as
ontologically sui generis: although moral properties are constituted by natural properties, they
are not identical to them.50 This can be compared to the realisability-vocabulary which is
46
R. Shafer-Landau , Metaphysics, vol. I, Routledge, 2008, p. 8.
R. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 1.
48
G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
49
M. Ridge, "Moral Non-Naturalism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), E. N.
Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/moral-non-naturalism/>.
50
R. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 73.
47
15
sometimes used in the philosophy of mind to characterise the relationship between mental and
physical properties.
But even with this difference in metaphysical outlook in mind, it remains unclear what exactly
is meant by “natural”. According to Shafer-Landau, there are two ways to construe the
dichotomy between natural and non-natural:
“The first [path] tries to identify some distinctive feature of the natural, that possessed
intrinsically by all and only natural properties, and the feature in virtue of which they count as
natural. The second is a disciplinary approach, which defines the natural in terms of the subject
matters of various disciplines. I prefer the second path.” 51
So the first path is by attempting to find the necessary and sufficient conditions for a certain
property to be a natural one. For example, the property of being material or of being a feature
of the world. But attempting to find such a property has turned out to be a highly unfruitful
task. Therefore, most philosophers take the disciplinary approach and hold that naturalism is
the view that “all real properties are those that would figure ineliminably in perfected versions
of the natural and social sciences”.52
With this distinction in mind, let us now turn to Moore’s open-question argument. This
argument is meant to show that moral properties cannot be analysed in natural terms. This is
of course in line with his claim that moral naturalists are guilty of a “naturalistic fallacy”,
since they draw conclusions concerning moral properties on the basis of premises concerning
natural properties. The idea here is that “evaluative conclusions require at least one
evaluative premise – purely factual premises about the naturalistic features of things do not
entail or even support evaluative conclusions.”53
Moore’s open-question argument is construed as follows. Taking the hedonist’s account of the
nature of the good as an example (“pleasure is good”), Moore argues that it always remains an
open question whether something pleasant is, indeed, good. In other words: a competent
moral agent can always question whether a certain natural property is really morally good. If
to say that something is pleasant would simply be another way of saying that something is
good, the question would not be an open one. If that would be the case, it would be similar to
asking whether pleasure is pleasant:
“[W]hoever will attentively consider with himself what is actually before his mind when he asks
the question “Is pleasure (or whatever it may be) after all good?” can easily satisfy himself that he
is not merely wondering whether pleasure is pleasant.” 54
So, unlike the question whether pleasure is pleasant, the question whether any proposed
natural property N really is M (a certain moral property) will always remain a conceptually
open question.
51
Ibid., p. 58.
Ibid., p. 59.
53
M. Ridge, "Moral Non-Naturalism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), E. N.
Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/moral-non-naturalism/>.
54
G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, 1971, p. 16.
52
16
Moore therefore concludes that moral properties like “goodness” cannot be captured in
natural terms. In contrast, they are “simple”, unanalysable and non-natural properties:
“If I am asked, “What is good?” my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter.
Or if I am asked “How is good to be defined?” my answer is that it cannot be defined, and that is
all I have to say about it. [...] My point is that good is a simple notion, just as yellow is a simple
notion; that, just as you cannot, by any manner of means, explain to anyone who does not already
know it, what yellow is, so you cannot explain what good is.” 55
Much can be said about this argument and about whether it should be considered persuasive.
Although a detailed discussion of this argument would therefore be beyond the scope of this
thesis, I will make a few brief comments on the strength of the argument.
Firstly, it is clear that the argument can be read as a question-begging one. After all, the
premise that the relevant questions are open questions seems to entail the falsity of moral
naturalism. So what remains of Moore’s argument if the moral naturalist would simply deny
this main premise and hold that such questions would not be open questions?
For this reason, it seems warranted to hold that the open-question argument must be
interpreted as an inference to the best explanation:
“On this interpretation, the main premise of the argument is not that the relevant questions are
conceptually open, but the much more modest premise that they at least seem conceptually open
to competent users of moral terms. The argument then proceeds to claim that the best explanation
of its seeming to competent users of the terms that these questions are open is that they really are
open. [...] This argument does not beg the question insofar as the opponent of non-naturalism can
grant that the relevant questions do seem open without thereby contradicting their position—the
main premise of this argument does not directly entail non-naturalism.”56
This, however, still does not go so far as to establish what Moore claims it does. After all,
Moore implicitly assumes that moral naturalism has to take a conceptually reductionist form.
His attack is therefore limited to such reductionist forms of moral naturalism.57
But besides that, a crucial (and highly contestable) assumption in Moore’s argument is that
the answer to the question whether two terms are synonymous is also an answer to the
question whether the things these terms refer to are identical. In other words: Moore uses
synonymy as a criterion for property identity. After all, his argument is that because the good
cannot be given a naturalistic definition, the good cannot be identical to any natural property.
This means that Moore requires identity relations to be true by definition. But it is not at all
clear whether such an account of property identity should be accepted. If, for example, one is
tempted to accept Kripke’s causal theory of reference, with its account of necessary a
posteriori truths (“water = H2O”), one will be inclined to reject Moore’s synonymy criterion
of property identity.
55
G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, 1971, p. 12-13.
M. Ridge, "Moral Non-Naturalism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), E. N.
Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/moral-non-naturalism/>.
57
For further reading on this point, see S. Ball, “Linguistic Intuitions and Varieties of Ethical Naturalism,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 51, 1991, p. 1-30.
56
17
Unfortunately a more detailed discussion of Moore’s argument against moral naturalism is
beyond the scope of this thesis58, but it should be clear that the success of Moore’s openquestion argument is, to say the very least, highly disputed. Some philosophers even go so far
to claim that it “is nowadays widely regarded as having failed of its ultimate purpose”.59
But although the open-question argument has been subjected to fierce criticism, historically it
has attracted wide support. As the argument that was taken to have discredited moral
naturalism, it is hard to overestimate the influence of Moore’s open-question argument and
his Principia Ethica in general on the development of meta-ethics in the twentieth century.
Indeed, as Thomas Baldwin rightly puts it:
“[A]lthough Moore was taken to have refuted ‘ethical naturalism’, Moore’s own brand of ‘ethical
non-naturalism’ was thought to make unacceptable metaphysical and epistemological demands;
so the only recourse was to abandon belief in an objective moral reality and accept an emotivist,
prescriptivist or otherwise anti-realist, account of ethical values”.60
So the combination of the perceived strength of Moore’s argument against moral naturalism
and the “unacceptable metaphysical and epistemological demands” of moral non-naturalism,
led many philosophers to doubt moral realism altogether:
“In reaction, and in the name of removing mystery, [some] have questioned the idea that our
moral claims are meaningful in the way Moore supposes. We might steer clear of the Naturalistic
Fallacy and avoid a commitment to strange non-natural properties, they point out, by rejecting the
assumption that in calling something good we are describing it. […] On this theory, to say of
something that it is good is (roughly) to recommend it, and to show one’s approval of it, but not to
report any fact about it. It thus neatly eliminates the need to introduce non-natural properties into
our ontology, but it does so by abandoning the notion of moral facts.” 61
3.3
Metaphysical and motivational worries
As we have seen in the previous paragraph, one of the most important motivations behind
moral anti-realism is the perceived metaphysical failure of moral realism. This perceived
failure is due to a moral realist dilemma G.E. Moore unintentionally created: either accept
moral naturalism and find a way to answer (among other things) the open-question argument,
or resort to moral non-naturalism and try to take away the worries about its perceived
mysterious and “metaphysically outrageous”62 character. According to the anti-realist both
these horns of the dilemma ultimately lead to insurmountable obstacles for the moral realist.
Indeed, in the previous paragraph I have already explained why most moral anti-realists
considered Moore’s open-question argument a good reason to abandon naturalist versions of
For such detailed discussions, see W.K. Frankema, “The Naturalistic Fallacy”, Mind, 1939: 48, p. 464-477, F.
Jackson and P. Pettit, “Moral Functionalism and Moral Motivation,” Philosophical Quarterly, 1995: 45, p. 20–
40.
59
R. Shafer-Landau , Metaphysics, vol. I, Routledge, 2008, p. 3.
60
T.Baldwin, G.E. Moore, Routledge, 1990, p. 66.
61
G. Sayre-McCord, “The Many Moral Realisms,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, Spindel Conference
Supplement, 1986, p. 4.
62
Ibid., p. 2-3.
58
18
moral realism. In this paragraph I will – in addition to a general metaphysical worry about
moral realism – also discuss a metaphysical objection which is specifically aimed at moral
non-naturalism.
Now, one of the reasons moral non-naturalism is taken by many to be an unacceptable
position is that the non-naturalist has problems explaining moral supervenience. In order to
elaborate on this argument, it is instructive to firstly get clear on the concept of supervenience.
A supervenience thesis is the thesis that “there could be no difference of one sort without
differences of another sort”.63 Applied to morality, moral supervenience can therefore be
defined as the view that there can be no difference in moral properties without a difference in
natural properties. So if one accepts that moral properties supervene on natural properties (as
indeed most, if not all, philosophers do), one thereby claims that if two properties are identical
in all natural respects, they cannot differ in their non-natural (i.e., moral) respects. The
problem for the non-naturalist is how to explain such a supervenience relation between two
distinct types of properties:
“As Hume might ask, Whence this necessary connection between distinct existences? Moore
himself wrote, “If a thing is good (in my sense), then that it is so follows from the fact that it
possesses certain natural intrinsic properties.” Just what the connection is, and in what sense
moral properties “follow from” natural ones, Moore was never able to explain. The [nonnaturalist], then, seems to be saddled with what Blackburn calls “an opaque, isolated, logical fact,
for which no explanation can be proffered”, an extra law of metaphysics.” 64
So the charge is that non-naturalists cannot meet the explanatory demand that is created by
posing the existence of non-natural properties in the light of the plausibility of moral
supervenience. This explanatory demand consists in the fact that the existence of a
supervenience relation between moral and natural properties seems to be difficult to reconcile
with the non-naturalist insistence on the fundamental distinctness of these properties.
In addition, moral realists in general have been attacked on the grounds of metaphysical and
psychological worries about motivational force. A first version of this attacks starts by
claiming that moral realism posits the existence of “qualities or relations of a very strange
sort, utterly different from anything in the world”.65 This attack has become known as
Mackie’s Argument from Queerness. The argument is that if objective moral properties would
exist, they would be metaphysically queer: their existence would require us to acknowledge
the existence of “objective prescriptions”66, which are to be found nowhere else in the fabric
of the world. Moral properties would be “intrinsically prescriptive entities or features of some
kind”67, which would, by their very nature, carry motivational power. In other words: moral
properties would, necessarily, have the power to “supply both a categorical reason for action
for everyone, and the motivation to pursue such action to anyone who rightly appreciated
63
D. Lewis, On The Plurality of Worlds, Blackwell, 1986, p. 14.
J. Dreier, “The Supervenience Argument Against Moral Realism, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1992:
30, p. 17.
65
J. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Penguin: 1977, p. 38
66
Ibid., p. 29.
67
Ibid., p. 40.
64
19
it”.68 It is this characteristic of moral properties as sui generis entities which is taken by
Mackie to provide a puzzle for the moral realist.
More usually, however, the debate about the supposed mysterious nature of morality’s
motivational force has not revolved around the role of moral properties, but of moral
judgments.69 Moral judgments (e.g. judgments like “giving to charity is a morally virtuous
act”) are taken by many to necessarily carry a certain motivational force. Those who hold that
such a necessary or conceptual connection holds between sincere moral judgment and moral
motivation are called moral judgment internalists.70 Wedgwood, for example, holds that
“there are powerful reasons in favour of […] the view that there is an essential or “internal”
connection between normative judgments and practical reasoning or motivation for action”.71
One such powerful reason is that only moral judgment internalism is taken to provide a
convincing explanation of why changes in moral judgment ordinarily lead to changes in moral
motivation.72 It is, however, a source of dispute between moral judgment internalists how
strong this intrinsic connection is (for example, whether it is an all-things-considered
connection or whether it merely establishes that insofar as someone is rational (i.e. insofar as
the possibility of akrasia is excluded), he is defeasibly motivated to act in accordance with
that moral judgment).
Now, the intrinsic motivational force of moral judgment is usually taken to provide a
powerful argument in favour of anti-realism. After all, it seems that representational
judgments, which aim to describe reality, are in much less good a position to explain moral
motivation than, for example, non-cognitivist theories like expressivism:
“The practical character of morality is often thought to call for an antirealist, especially
noncognitivist, construal of moral claims. If moral judgments merely purported to state facts, it is
claimed, they could not fulfill the action-guiding function they do. To fulfill this function, moral
judgments must concern or express affective, fundamentally noncognitive, features of people’s
psychology.”73
This argument is largely predicated on a Humean theory of motivation. According to Hume,
mere belief (a cognitive state) cannot explain why people are motivated to act. In order to give
such an explanation, what at the very least is needed is, in addition to this belief, a desire or
some other relevant non-cognitive state.74 The anti-realist argument concerning moral
motivation is therefore predicated on a combination of such a Humean account of motivation
with moral judgment internalism.75 So the anti-realist argument concerning moral motivation
– which Shafer-Landau calls “the Non-cognitivist Argument”76 – is the deductive inference
that moral judgments cannot merely be beliefs (as the moral realist claims), since moral
68
R. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 82.
C. Rosati, , “Moral Motivation”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), E.N.
Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/moral-motivation/>.
70
This view is – rather unsurprisingly – to be contrasted with motivational externalism, which is the view that no
such necessary connection between moral judgment and motivation exists.
71
R. Wedgwood, The Nature of Normativity, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 5.
72
M. Smith, The Moral Problem, Blackwell, 1994, p. 71-76.
73
D. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 37.
74
D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739: III, i, p. 457-463.
75
R. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 121.
76
Ibid., p. 121.
69
20
judgments necessarily motivate (moral judgment internalism) and beliefs do not carry
motivational force (motivational Humeanism). The anti-realist conclusion is that therefore
beliefs have to be taken as non-cognitive “expressive vehicles”77 rather than as beliefs.
In the previous paragraph I have already discussed a metaphysical argument directed
specifically at naturalist forms of moral realism. In this paragraph I have discussed a
metaphysical challenge which is aimed specifically at moral non-naturalism: the challenge
that non-naturalists are unable to explain satisfactorily the existence of a supervenience
relation between moral and natural properties. Furthermore, I have discussed the general
metaphysical78 and psychological arguments about motivational force that are usually
employed by anti-realists.
3.4
Moral disagreement
One of the most important arguments in favour of anti-realism, the argument from moral
disagreement or the argument from relativity, “has as its premiss the well-known variation in
moral codes from one society to another and from one period to another, and also the
differences in moral beliefs between different groups and classes within a complex
community”.79 But even if it is accepted that such variation exists to any significant extent,
this obviously does far too little to justify the anti-realist conclusion that moral realism,
therefore, has to be false. What is needed in addition to the empirical premise is an argument
which convincingly shows that the non-existence of objective moral truth is to be considered
the best explanation for the phenomenon of moral disagreement.
Such an inference to the best explanation is usually supported by comparing moral inquiry to
scientific investigation. In the sciences there too exists disagreement (although the degree of
consensus can surely be claimed to be much higher in scientific than in moral matters), but
those disagreements do not seem to be intractable: at the very least “we have some way of
determining when theories fail to match up with the reality they are intended to describe”. 80
This seems to be different for moral inquiry. Whereas phlogiston theory has been refuted
decisively by consistent empirical evidence against it, it seems that similar progress is not to
be expected for moral investigation, since it is unclear how refutation of a certain moral view
could ever take place. Is, therefore, the conclusion not warranted that “unlike successful
scientists, moral interlocutors are simply registering their personal opinions, unfettered by an
external moral reality that might check them”?81
Moral realists have tried to resist this line of argument at several points. Some moral realists
deny the empirical premise that there is in fact a “well-known variation in moral codes”82. A
first way to deny this premise is to marginalise, on empirical grounds, the extent to which
77
See footnote 1.
Mackie’s Argument from Queerness is predicated on the “queer” character of moral properties as carrying
objective prescriptions.
79
. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Penguin: 1977, p. 36.
80
R. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 216.
81
Ibid., p. 216.
82
See footnote 33.
78
21
moral disagreement can be found in the world.83 A second strategy is to hold that what we
take to be genuine moral disagreement is merely a consequence of “procedurally irrational
thinking” or of a lack of clarity about the relevant non-moral facts.84
Other realists, however, have accepted the empirical claim that genuine moral disagreement is
indeed disanalogous to scientific disagreements. These realists do not deny the premise, but
they resist the conclusion that such moral disagreement is best explained by “the truth of
nihilism and the falsity of moral realism”.85 Brink provides us with a good example of such an
argumentative strategy:
“Some interlocutors may be so systematically mistaken that although our dispute with them
concerns a matter of objective fact, we cannot, and should not be expected to be able to, convince
them of true claims. […] [Furthermore] even a moral realist can maintain that some genuine
moral disputes have no uniquely correct answers. Moral ties are possible, and considerations, each
of which is objectively valuable, may be incommensurable.” 86
These two claims both try to resist the conclusion that moral disagreement is best interpreted
as evidence in favour of anti-realism. It is important to note that Brink’s first argument, which
concerns the possibility of people having such a fundamentally different (and mistaken) moral
outlook that it is impossible “to convince them of true moral claims”87, is different from
Wedgwood’s account of “procedurally irrational thinking”, which invokes the possibility of
fallacious reasoning in order to explain away what we take to be moral disagreement. In
contrast to such explaining away of moral disagreement, both Brink’s first and his second
argument are meant to secure the conclusion that we can perfectly well explain the occurrence
of genuine moral disagreement on moral realist assumptions.
Even though in recent years the argument from disagreement “has been widely rejected” 88, it
is still considered to be one of the most fundamental and one of the most intuitively appealing
arguments against moral realism. It is therefore not surprising that the argument is “perhaps
the longest standing argument”89 in the realism/anti-realism debate. Especially in the light of
the work of philosophers who use recent developments in analytic philosophy to strengthen
the force of the argument from disagreement90, there seems to be very little reason to assume
that the debate concerning moral disagreement has been decided definitively in favour of the
moral realist.
3.5
Evolutionary debunking arguments
D. Loeb, “Moral Realism and the Argument from Disagreement”, Philosophical Studies, 1998:90, p. 283.
R. Wedgwood, The Nature of Normativity, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 259.
85
D. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 197.
86
Ibid., p. 202.
87
Ibid., p. 199.
88
D. Loeb, “Moral Realism and the Argument from Disagreement”, Philosophical Studies, 1998:90, p. 283.
89
G. Sayre-McCord, “Moral Realism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), E. N.
Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/moral-realism/>.
90
Cf. D. Loeb, “Moral Realism and the Argument from Disagreement”, Philosophical Studies, 1998:90.
83
84
22
In recent years anti-realists have often employed so-called “evolutionary debunking
arguments” (EDA’s) against robust moral realism. EDA’s can be defined as arguments “that
appeal to the evolutionary origins of certain evaluative beliefs to undermine their
justification”.91 It is, however, important to differentiate between different types of EDA’s:
some EDA’s are global in the sense that they try to show that all our moral intuitions are best
explained by a form of anti-realism (such as error theory or constructivism), and some EDA’s
are local because they attempt to debunk certain first-order moral intuitions on evolutionary
grounds (for example, by showing that our intuitions concerning the “trolley-scenario” are
based on our “evolutionary and cultural history”92 rather than on “a rational basis”93).
So EDA’s are founded on the view “that descriptive knowledge of the genealogy of morals (in
combination with some philosophizing) should undermine our confidence in moral
judgments.”94 Now, how does the genealogy of morals lead to such anti-realist meta-ethical
consequences?
EDA’s usually depart from the empirical observation that it is clear that the contents of our
most fundamental moral beliefs (such as the belief that we have an obligation to care for our
children), which can be found in all cultures, enhance human evolutionary fitness. If,
however, evolutionary biology teaches us that the causal origins95 of the contents of our
moral beliefs are evolutionary in nature, then it becomes difficult for the moral realist to
explain the relationship between these evolutionary causal origins of our moral beliefs and
independent moral truths. This problem is captured adequately by the so-called “Darwinian
Dilemma”96:
“(S1)
The robust realist has to hold either (A) that there is no relation between evolutionary
influences on the contents of our moral beliefs and the independent moral truths, or (B) that there
is a relation, because the evolution of our moral beliefs is truth-tracking.
(S2)
Horn (A) implies either the sceptical conclusion that probably most of our moral beliefs
are off-track, due to the distorting pressure of Darwinian forces, which seems to be absurd, or that
a detailed coincidence took place, which is extremely unlikely.
(S3)
Horn (B) is implausible as well, because with regard to our moral beliefs an adaptive
link account is scientifically superior to a truth-tracking account, if at least the truth of moral
beliefs is construed on the independence model.
(S4)
Hence, robust meta-ethical realism cannot accommodate the fact that Darwinian forces
have influenced deeply the content of our moral convictions. As a consequence, we should
conclude that robust meta-ethical realism is false.”97
So if the moral realist refuses to acknowledge a relationship between evolutionary influences
and independent moral truths, then these evolutionary influences will “have nothing
G. Kahane, “Evolutionary Debunking Arguments”, Nous, 2011: 45, p. 103.
P. Singer, “Ethics and Intuitions”, The Journal of Ethics, 2005: 9.3-4: p. 349.
93
Ibid.
94
R. Joyce, The Evolution of Morality, MIT Press, 2006, p. 223.
95
G. Kahane, “Evolutionary Debunking Arguments”, Nous: 45, p. 106.
96
S. Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value”, Philosophical Studies, 127, p. 109.
97
H. Philipse, “God, Ethics, and Evolution”. In: H. A. Harris (ed.), God,
Goodness and Philosophy, Ashgate, 2011, p. 154-159. Cf: S. Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist
Theories of Value”, Philosophical Studies, 127, p. 109.
91
92
23
whatsoever to do with the evaluative truth”98, or they will have to accord in a purely
coincidental manner. But if there is a relation between the two, then the moral realist will
have to come up with arguments to show that the evolutionary causal origins of our moral
beliefs are to be understood as truth-tracking than as “off-track”.99
It is, however, difficult to see how such a truth-tracking account could explain why truth
would be needed to enhance human fitness. The adaptive link account100 of course perfectly
explains the link between past evolutionary, selective processes and the content of our moral
beliefs: on such an account our current moral beliefs are explained by their fitness-enhancing
nature. In contrast, the truth-tracking account does not seem to offer any explanation as to
how and why moral truth would be needed to account for the evolutionary success of our
moral beliefs. Furthermore, one could apply a “principle of parsimony”101 in favour of the
adaptive link account by showing that the truth-tracking account needs to posit something
extra (i.e. independent evaluative truths) compared to the adaptive link account. It is for these
reasons that moral realism seems to be facing an account “distinctly superior to the tracking
account”.102
3.6
Moral explanations
The last argument in favour of anti-realism I will discuss is concerned with the supposed
explanatorily superfluous nature of moral facts. The argument, which was formulated for the
first time by Gilbert Harman103, consists of two claims. The first claim is that we only have
reason to believe in some claim if “the truth of that claim is necessary for the best explanation
of some independent fact”.104 This is the requirement that, for us to be justified in believing
some claim, it is needed that this claim plays a certain explanatory role. This “Explanatory
Criterion” therefore consists of the claim that “the only hypotheses we are justified in
believing are those that figure in the best explanations we have of our making the
observations that we do”.105 The second claim is that putative moral facts never play such an
explanatory role. Indeed, Harman claims, moral facts are never included in the best
explanation of a certain independent fact. This is what distinguishes supposed moral facts
from physical facts:
“The difference is that you need to make assumptions about certain physical facts to explain the
occurrence of the observations that support a scientific theory, but you do not seem to need to
make assumptions about any moral facts to explain the occurrence of […] so-called moral
observations […]. In the moral case, it would seem that you need only make assumptions about
S. Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value”, Philosophical Studies, 127, p. 108.
G. Kahane, “Evolutionary Debunking Arguments”, Nous, 2011: 45, p. 104.
100
S. Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value”, Philosophical Studies, 127, p. 121.
101
R. Joyce, “The Evolutionary Debunking of Morality”, in: Reason and Responsibility, J. Feinberg and R.
Shafer-Landau (eds.), Cengage, 2013, chapter 16.
102
S. Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value”, Philosophical Studies, 127, par. 6.
103
G. Harman, The Nature of Morality, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 5-9.
104
W. Sinnott-Armstrong, “Moral Skepticism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition),
E.N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/skepticism-moral/>.
105
G.Sayre-McCord, “Moral Theory and Explanatory Impotence”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1988:12, p.
442.
98
99
24
the psychology or moral sensibility of the person making the moral observation. In the scientific
case, theory is tested against the world.” 106
So the difference, according to Harman, between scientific facts and moral facts is that the
former are needed to explain scientific observations, whereas the latter are redundant when it
comes to explaining our “moral observations”: such moral observations are perfectly well
explained by “assumptions about the psychology or moral sensibility of the person making the
moral observation”107 alone.
Both steps in Harman’s argument can be, and have been, challenged. One can question, for
example, whether the Explanatory Criterion really is as self-evident as Harman seems to
suppose. After all, it is not at all clear whether “beliefs about mathematics or colors are or
must be grounded in this way, although such beliefs still seem justified”.108 Alternatively, one
can question Harman’s first step by arguing that “an a posteriori defense of moral realism
does not obviously require that moral facts explain nonmoral facts in order for them to be
explanatory”.109 It does, however, seem that this second strategy misses the point Harman is
trying to make: the problem with supposed moral facts is that they do not help to explain any
of our observations. Even if Harman therefore concedes that (supposed) moral facts explain
other (supposed) moral facts, it seems that Harman’s point about the “psychology or moral
sensibility of the person making the moral observation” would remain valid.
But secondly, and this is the road most realist philosophers have in fact taken, one can
question whether moral facts are indeed explanatorily impotent. The most important defender
of the view that moral facts are necessary for the best explanations of non-moral facts is
Nicholas Sturgeon. In his “Moral Explanations”110 Sturgeon argues in favour of exactly this
point. Indeed, in attempting to explain the atrocities committed by Hitler, Sturgeon claims that
“if Hitler hadn’t been morally depraved, he wouldn’t have done those things, and hence the
fact of his moral depravity is relevant to an explanation of what he did”.111 So, according to
Sturgeon, Hitler’s morally depraved character is central to rather than superfluous for a
successful explanation of the atrocities Hitler committed.
This reply of course invites the moral anti-realist to enter into a debate about the relationship
between explanatory relevance and moral supervenience. After all, Sturgeon’s argument
raises the question whether the fact that Hitler was morally depraved, which surely
supervenes on certain natural properties, can, for explanatory purposes, be wholly replaced by
non-moral, natural descriptions. If it can, and if our best explanations never suffer an
explanatory loss if we replace the supervenient moral facts by the subvenient natural
properties, then it seems that moral facts are explanatorily superfluous after all. So why, the
106
G. Harman, The Nature of Morality, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 5.
See footnote 77.
108
W. Sinnott-Armstrong, “Moral Skepticism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition),
E.N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/skepticism-moral/>.
109
D. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 183.
110
N. Sturgeon, “Moral Explanations”, in: R. Shafer-Landau (ed.), Metaphysics, vol. II, Routledge, 2008, p. 312.
110
R. Shafer-Landau, Metaphysics, vol. I, Routledge, 2008, p. 270-294.
111
N. Sturgeon, “Moral Explanations”, p. 288.
107
25
anti-realist asks, would we talk about the explanatory role of South Africa’s racial injustice
rather than about its specific social, political and legal institutions if “it is just such social,
political and legal arrangements that constitute South Africa’s racial injustice?”.112
Harman indeed contends that such injustice adds nothing to the explanation that is available
by means of the natural facts which constitute the injustice.113 Moral realists, however, have
argued that the higher-order, moral explanations are in fact irreducible to lower-order, natural
explanations.114 Such accounts argue, on the basis of the difference between identity and
constitution, that “constituted facts are (after all) something over and above their bases”.115
I will, however, not go deeper into this debate about the explanatory power of higher-order,
supervenient facts vis-à-vis the lower-order properties by which they are constituted. For the
purposes of this chapter it is sufficient to show that the perceived explanatory impotence of
moral facts is one of the main continuing anti-realist impetuses.
112
D. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 191. Emphasis
added.
113
G. Harman, “Moral Explanations of Natural Facts – Can Moral Claims Be Tested Against Moral Reality?”,
The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1986:24, p. 62-64.
114
D. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 193.
115
Ibid., p. 193-194. See also, for an analogy between explanations in ethics and in the special sciences: B.
Majors, “Moral Explanation and the Special Sciences”, Philosophical Studies, 2003: 113, p. 121-152.
26
Part III
Moral Epistemology
27
Chapter 4 Anti-Realism and Moral Epistemology
“If we were aware of [objective values], it would have to be by some special faculty of moral
perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else.” 116
4.1
Introduction
In part II of this thesis I have tried to characterise moral realism and (the various forms of)
anti-realism, and discuss the most important arguments that have been put forward in their
defence. In this part I will turn to moral epistemology. I will take moral epistemology, in its
broadest form, to be concerned with the question whether, and if so, how, moral knowledge,
or epistemic moral justification, is ever possible. It is important to note that, at least for the
purposes of this part of the thesis, the conception of “moral knowledge” I employ is neutral
between moral particularism (the view that “moral knowledge […] is incapable of being
formulated in universal propositions or moral rules”117) and moral generalism (the opposite
view that moral knowledge is only concerned with (more or less) universal principles and
standards).
This part of the thesis will consist of two chapters. In this chapter I will look at the
relationship between anti-realism and moral epistemology. After that, in chapter 5, I will
discuss four different attempts to construct a satisfactory moral realist epistemology. These
discussions about the central epistemological question formulated above will be used as the
framework for my discussion about the relationship between epistemological moral
scepticism and moral realism in part IV.
Now, this chapter will be concerned with anti-realism. But before I will turn to anti-realism
and its relation to moral knowledge, it is necessary to start with a discussion about the nature
of knowledge itself. The nature of knowledge will therefore be the subject of paragraph 4.2.
After that, I will look at the most important anti-realist responses to the central
epistemological question formulated earlier. Indeed, in paragraphs 4.3 – 4.5 the
epistemological aspects of non-cognitivism, moral subjectivism and error theory will be
subjected to detailed scrutiny.
4.2
An analysis of knowledge
In order to discuss the relationship between anti-realism and questions of epistemology, it is
necessary to ask firstly how we are to understand the concept of “knowledge”. After all, if we
want to ascertain how the anti-realist usually answers the question whether, and if so, how,
moral knowledge is possible, we need to be able to give an account of what knowledge is in
the first place.
116
117
J. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Penguin: 1977, p. 38.
R.L. Arrington, Rationalism, Realism, and Relativism, Cornell University Press, 1989, p. 161.
28
Now, epistemology in twentieth-century analytic philosophy has directed a lot if its attention
on formulating an adequate analysis of propositional knowledge (knowledge of the form “S
knows that p”). According to the traditional analysis of knowledge, there are three
individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for knowledge. This has become
known as the “Tripartite Analysis of Knowledge”:
S knows that p iff
i.
ii.
iii.
p is true;
S believes that p;
S is justified in believing that p.118
So on this view, knowledge requires justified true belief. It is largely uncontroversial to hold
that knowledge requires truth. Most philosophers also hold that the requirements of belief119
and justification are in fact necessary for an adequate analysis of knowledge. They do,
however, strongly disagree on the nature of epistemic justification. The debate between
proponents of internalist and externalist conceptions of epistemic justification is an example
of a fundamental debate about the very nature of such justification. According to internalists,
epistemic justification is determined by factors “that are internal to the believer’s conscious
states of mind, where these states are at least in principle accessible to conscious
reflection”.120 On the other hand, externalists maintain that a belief is epistemically warranted
if and only if it is produced by a type of process which makes it probable that it is true, “even
though the subject is not, or cannot be, aware of whether the belief has been produced by such
a process”.121 The best-known example of an externalist conception of epistemic justification
is process reliabilism, according to which a belief is epistemically justified if it is produced by
a reliable type of process.
But apart from this intramural debate which takes place within the Tripartite Analysis of
Knowledge, the analysis itself has also been put to an extremely influential challenge. This
challenge was formulated by Edmund Gettier in his 1963 paper “Is Justified True Belief
Knowledge?”. Gettier asks us to suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the proposition
“Jones owns a Ford”. He infers from this the truth of the two disjunctive propositions “Either
Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Boston” (proposition (g)) and “Either Jones owns a Ford,
or Brown is in Barcelona” (proposition (h)).122 Since Smith is justified in believing that Jones
owns a Ford, he is justified in believing the two disjunctive propositions.
“But imagine now that two further conditions hold. First Jones does not own a Ford, but is at
present driving a rented car. And secondly, by the sheerest coincidence, and entirely unknown to
Smith, the place mentioned in proposition (h) happens really to be the place where Brown is. If
J. J. Ichikawa and M. Steup, “The Analysis of Knowledge”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, E.N.
Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/knowledge-analysis/>.
119
The expression “I can’t believe they won the cup” is of course not to be taken literally: in such cases one does
believe they won the cup.
120
R. Feldman, “Bonjour and Sosa on Internalism, Externalism and Basic Beliefs”, Philosophical Studies, 2006,
p. 713.
121
H. Philipse, God in the Age of Science, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 68-69.
122
E. Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”, Analysis, 1963: 23, p. 121-123.
118
29
these two conditions hold, then Smith does not know that (h) is true, even though (i) (h) is true,
(ii) Smith does believe that (h) is true, and (iii) Smith is justified in believing that (h) is true.” 123
So Gettier invites us to have the intuition that Smith does not know proposition (h), although
the three elements of the Tripartite Analysis of Knowledge are all in place. Most philosophers
indeed share Gettier’s intuition on this point, which has led to the acceptance of the “Gettier
problem”. As a result, the Tripartite Analysis of Knowledge is nowadays usually taken to be
defective.
Different philosophers have, in response, attempted to modify the Tripartite Analysis of
Knowledge by adding to it a fourth condition, which is meant to somehow secure a proper
kind of relation between the justification and the truth of the relevant belief. After all, the
reason we feel Smith does not know proposition (h) is that his justification (his evidence for
the proposition that Jones owns a Ford and his grasp of the logical relation between this
proposition and the disjunctive proposition (h)) does not stand in the right relation to the truth
of proposition (h). Proposition (h) is true in virtue of the – accidental – fact that Brown is in
Barcelona, while Smith’s epistemic justification is in no way related to this fact. It is this
problem that the search for a fourth, so-called “Gettier-condition” tries to remedy.
In the remainder of this thesis I will take this analysis of knowledge (justified true belief plus
the Gettier-condition) to be the correct one. It is with this conception of knowledge in mind
that we can turn to anti-realist answers to the central epistemological question formulated at
the start of this chapter.
4.3
Non-cognitivism and epistemology
In the previous section we have seen that (moral) knowledge at least requires justified true
belief. It would appear that on this view non-cognitivism, which asserts both that moral
judgments are not truth-apt and are not, properly speaking, beliefs, is incompatible with the
existence of moral knowledge and epistemic justification in the moral domain. After all, if
moral judgments are nothing but non-cognitive expressions of feelings or imperatives, then
our moral discourse is not even in the business of attempting to attain propositional
knowledge by representing reality. But this conclusion sits rather uncomfortably with our
everyday moral judgments and moral sentences. Indeed, if “we have in ethics nothing but the
clash of desires, attitudes, and emotions then there is something misleading about the way
ethical demands present themselves to us”.124 For this reason there have been non-cognitivist
attempts to soften this counterintuitive conclusion.
A first strategy has been to invoke a deflationary conception of truth, which is meant to
provide a justification for talking about “true” moral beliefs in some sense of the word.
Indeed, “recent versions [of non-cognitivism] often allow some minimal kind of moral truth
while denying that moral beliefs can be true or false in the same robust way as factual
123
124
E. Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”, Analysis, 1963: 23, p. 122.
S. Blackburn, Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning, Clarendon Press, 1998, p. 280.
30
beliefs”.125 Such a conception of truth therefore rejects the view that truth is captured by, for
example, correspondence to objective facts, or by coherence with a given set of beliefs, or by
whatever other theory about the nature of truth. According to Alfred Tarski’s semantic
conception of truth, “S” is true if and only if S.126 In other words: there is nothing more to be
said about the claim “the cat is on the mat” than that it is true if and only if the cat is on the
mat. In the past Gottlob Frege has also hinted at such a minimalist conception of truth:
“It is worthy of notice that the sentence ‘I smell the scent of violets’ has the same content as the
sentence ‘it is true that I smell the scent of violets’. So it seems, then, that nothing is added to the
thought by my ascribing to it the property of truth.” 127
Some non-cognitivists therefore accept, by embracing a semantic, deflationary conception of
truth, that moral sentences can be (in a non-metaphysical, non-realist way) minimally true,
which subsequently opens up a realm in which the non-cognitivist can talk about moral
knowledge in some (minimal) sense of the word.
It is of course the question to what extent it is possible for the non-cognitivist to acknowledge
the existence of minimal moral truth without surrendering his position to the cognitivist and
the moral realist. In other words: it is unclear in what sense one can speak of moral truth on
such a non-cognitivist account. Indeed, any acknowledgement of moral truth seems to be
difficult to reconcile with “the distinctive negative semantic claim that moral judgements are
never true and not the kind of thing that can be true or false”128, which, as we have seen, lies
at the very heart of non-cognitivism. It is therefore not surprising that doubts have raised
about the possibility of combining non-cognitivism and a minimalist conception of truth:
“The [non-cognitivist] program to vindicate as much of ordinary moral practice might [...]
endanger non-cognitivism when carried to this extreme. Success would leave us with no way to
distinguish plausible non-cognitivism from cognitivism.” 129
If, for this reason, the non-cognitivist does not feel tempted to accept a deflationary
conception of truth, he can choose another strategy to capture some aspects of our ordinary
moral discourse. This strategy consists of the attempt to develop a non-cognitivist conception
of moral justification. This strategy, therefore, does not attempt to open up a realm of moral
truth by invoking a deflationary conception of truth, but it rather attempts to say something
more about the justificatory differences that follow from perceived qualitative differences in
moral expressions, feelings and projections.
Simon Blackburn, for example, attempts to steer a middle position between the relativist “that
is just your opinion” and the realist claim that “our opinion conforms to the independent order
W. Sinnott-Armstrong, “Moral Skepticism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), E.
N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/skepticism-moral/>.
126
A. Tarski, “The Semantic Conception of Truth”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1944, 4:341375.
127
G. Frege, “Thoughts”, in: Logical Investigations, Blackwell, 1977.
128
M. van Roojen, “Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, E. N.
Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2014/entries/moral-cognitivism/>.
129
Ibid.
125
31
of reason”.130 Indeed, according to Blackburn, there are qualitative differences between
different moral views (pace the relativist), although these differences do not correspond to “an
independent order of reason” (pace the realist). These differences are, according to Blackburn,
to be taken as invitations to engage in moral argumentation:
“Our actual practices of argument and persuasion require only the hope that there is nothing else
for decent people to think. […] To try to show that something must be thought is no more, but no
less, than to try to show that it is the right thing, or the best thing, to think. […] What we hope to
show, as we persevere with analyses of social phenomena, deploying analogies, turning the values
involved around in our minds, is that there is nothing else for good, decent people to think.” 131
Although the moral arguments by which we defend our moral views may not be “well
directed at the objective truth”132, they can show, according to Blackburn, that “there is
nothing else for good, decent people to think”. This is not, however, to be taken epistemically.
Indeed, although Blackburn intends this claim as a claim about “what must be thought
ethically, […] the necessity is itself ethical”.133 In moral discourse, there are no meta-ethical
epistemological questions to be asked about the powers of reflective ethical thought.
Blackburn’s non-cognitivist model of the justificatory role of moral deliberation is therefore
ethical rather than epistemic in nature.
Another example of such a strategy can be found in the work of Allan Gibbard. Gibbard too
tries to supplement his non-cognitivist (expressivist) meta-ethical theory with an account of
normative authority, which he phrases in terms of rationality. The starting point for his
analysis of rationality is wholly expressivistic in nature: to call a thing rational, according to
Gibbard, is not to state a matter of fact, but it is rather a way to “express one’s acceptance of
norms that permit it”.134
This acceptance, however, is open to challenges of consistency and challenges about what it
makes sense to do as a human being. According to Gibbard, such challenges at the very least
get us some way toward a conception of normative authority:
“My own hopes are that hard inquiry can bring us toward a resolution of our broadly moral
impulses, a resolution that adds to the richness of life. If we think both deeply and broadly about
what can be had from morality, and about what really matters in life and to whom, we should find
devices of thought that get us somewhere.”135
So Gibbard, like Blackburn, attempts to formulate ways in which his non-cognitivist theory
can be reconciled with our intuitions that there are good and bad moral feelings and moral
arguments. Both these philosophers, therefore, attempt to construct something like an account
of moral justification. It is important to note, however, that these accounts are not concerned
with epistemic moral justification. After all, both their meta-ethical theories revolve around
130
S. Blackburn, Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning, Clarendon Press, 1998, p. 305.
Ibid., p. 304.
132
Ibid., p. 300.
133
Ibid., p. 304.
134
A. Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment, Clarendon Press, 1990, p. 7.
135
Ibid., p. 326.
131
32
feelings and projections rather than proper beliefs. Their models of justification are therefore
not epistemic, but ethical in nature.
4.4
Moral subjectivism and epistemology
In this paragraph I will look at the relationship between the form of anti-realism called moral
subjectivism and questions of moral epistemology. As was explained in part II of this thesis,
moral subjectivism is the view that although there are moral facts, they do not exist
independently of our (hypothetical) moral stances. On this view, moral facts are nothing more
than products of our own making. So this view is called moral subjectivism because it accepts
the mind-dependence rather than the mind-independence of moral facts.
This does not, however, mean that the moral subjectivist has to be a relativist136. After all,
relativism holds that “moral claims contain an essential indexical element, such that the truth
of any such claim requires relativization to some indexical or group”. 137 The subjectivist,
however, can – and in fact often does – hold that, although moral facts are determined solely
by human moral activity, they do apply equally to all of us in virtue of us all possessing some
same morally relevant characteristic. Examples of such absolutistic forms of subjectivism are
Roderick Firth’s ideal observer theory138 and Christine Korsgaard’s Kantian meta-ethical
theory139.
So there are many different forms of moral subjectivism. Some hold that moral facts are
constituted by the moral attitudes of actual moral agents, which often leads to a relativistic
form of subjectivism140, whereas other, more absolutistic forms of moral subjectivism often
hold that idealised human attitudes in fact determine which moral facts exist. In short:
“[T]he subjectivism vs. objectivism and the relativism vs. absolutism polarities are orthogonal to
each other, and it is the former pair that matters when it comes to characterizing anti-realism.”141
What all forms of moral subjectivism have in common, however, is that they all seem to be in
an epistemologically more attractive position than the moral realist. After all, the moral realist
faces the task of explaining how we can ever attain knowledge of mind-independent moral
facts. This means that the moral realist has to give an account of the relationship between
these mind-independent facts and our cognitive faculties. As we will see in the next chapter, it
has proven to be a difficult task to provide a satisfactory, non-mysterious account of this
relationship. The moral subjectivist, however, has the much simpler task of explaining how
we can attain knowledge of moral facts that we ourselves in some way have produced. It
136
There are of course many types of relativism. One can for example point to individualistic relativism and
cultural relativism. What is important here is that it is possible for the moral subjectivist not to be a relativist in
any of these senses.
137
R. Joyce, “Moral Anti-Realism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, E. N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/moral-anti-realism/>.
138
R. Firth, “Ethical absolutism and the ideal observer”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 12, p.
317-345.
139
C.M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
140
Cf. G. Harman, “Moral Relativism Defended”, The Philosophical Review, 1975: 85, p. 3-22.
141
R. Joyce, “Moral Anti-Realism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , E. N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/moral-anti-realism/>.
33
seems that the moral subjectivist position, much like the idealist position in the historically
important debate about the reality of the external world, is in a better position to explain
epistemic access than its realist opponent:
“Realists about the external world claim that things such as mountains and fish exist in a robustly
objective sense, according to which they do not owe their existence or nature to human cognitive
activity. Antirealists about these things often respond by pointing out that if entities such as
mountains and fish were to exist in this sense, then, for one or another reason, it would be
impossible to gain epistemic access to them. According to the antirealists, realism engenders
skepticism about the external world.”142
So whereas Kant argues that “if we treat outer objects as things as themselves, it is quite
impossible to understand how we could arrive at a knowledge of their reality outside us”143,
the moral subjectivist can hold that, similarly, the moral realist faces the arduous task of
explaining how knowledge of mind-independent moral facts could ever be possible.
This is different for the moral subjectivist. If moral facts are, as the subjectivist claims, human
products, then it seems rather clear that we can have epistemic access to these moral facts. If,
for example, one believes that moral facts are determined by the actual moral attitudes in a
given community, then one should be able to ascertain empirically (“this is how we do it”144)
which (mind-dependent) moral facts exist in any given community. Or if, alternatively, moral
facts are taken as products of evolutionary, Darwinian forces, it seems one will be able to
grasp these truths by inquiring into the fitness-enhancing nature of certain of our moral
beliefs.145
So it seems that whatever form of moral subjectivism one proposes, the moral subjectivist will
be able to give an account of moral knowledge and epistemic moral justification. This is
something that indeed comes naturally to those who hold that moral facts are human products.
In contrast, and as we will see in the subsequent chapter, the moral realist has much more
difficulty explaining how epistemic access to moral facts could ever be possible.
4.5
Error theory and epistemology
Error theory is the final important form of anti-realism to be discussed in this chapter. Unlike
non-cognitivism, however, the relationship between error theory and questions of moral
epistemology is rather straightforward. As we have seen, Mackie’s error theory takes our
everyday moral discourse at face value and therefore concludes that our moral judgments are
cognitive in character: in making moral judgments we literally aim at a robust form
(correspondence with objective moral facts) of moral truth. However, on metaphysical (the
Argument from Queerness) and epistemological (the Argument from Disagreement) grounds
T. Cuneo, “Moral Realism, Quasi Realism, and Skepticism”, in: The Oxford Handbook of Skepticism, Oxford
University Press, 2009, p. 176.
143
I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 378.
144
S. Blackburn, Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning, Clarendon Press, 1998, p. 279.
145
See paragraph 3.5 for a discussion of evolutionary debunking arguments (EDA’s).
142
34
we are forced to the conclusion that no such moral truth exists: all our moral judgments are
simply false.
Because of the fact that knowledge at the very least requires truth, it follows that on this
account there is no such thing as moral knowledge either. Furthermore, because we can know
that moral facts do not exist on the basis of philosophical (i.e. metaphysical and
epistemological) arguments, it seems we cannot be epistemically justified in believing moral
propositions either. On this picture, then, all we can do is give an explanation as to why we
make moral judgments and why we believe in objective moral facts. Indeed, Mackie believes
that an evolutionary, Darwinian explanation of these phenomena is largely correct. 146 But the
epistemological question I formulated at the start of this chapter is of no concern to the error
theorist, because it has already been answered by Mackie’s metaphysical thesis that there is
nothing to attain knowledge of in the first place.
146
J. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Penguin, 1977, p. 113.
35
Chapter 5 Moral Realist Epistemology
“[A]ttempts to justify moral beliefs merely by “commonsense” will risk begging the question,
resulting in an uninformative circularity where one is justified in believing something simply
because one believes that thing.”147
5.1
Introduction
As we have seen in the previous chapter, knowledge at least requires justified true belief. It is
therefore not surprising that much of the twentieth-century debates in epistemology have been
concerned with the nature of epistemic justification. These debates have centered around the
question under which circumstances one is justified in holding a certain proposition to be true.
Two fundamentally different accounts of epistemic justification have dominated these
epistemological debates. On the one hand, there is foundationalism, which holds that “one’s
belief p is justified just in case p is either (a) foundational (i.e., noninferentially justified or
self-justifying) or (b) based on the appropriate kind of inference from foundational beliefs”. 148
So the distinguishing feature of foundationalism is the view that some beliefs are basic beliefs
which carry independent justificatory force. On the other hand, there is coherentism, which
holds that epistemic justification consists in the way our beliefs hang together (or cohere) so
as to produce a mutually supportive, coherent set of beliefs. So, on this view, “nothing can
count as a reason for a belief except another belief”.149 As a third alternative, the method of
reflective equilibrium has gained popularity over the last decades. I will discuss this method in
paragraph 5.4. Finally, in paragraph 5.5, I will discuss a fourth approach to moral
epistemology, which has become known as (epistemological) naturalism. It is important to
note that my (often critical) discussions of these different attempts to provide a moral realist
epistemology are not meant to be conclusive. These discussions are rather meant to provide
the relevant background knowledge for the next part of this thesis, which is concerned
primarily with epistemological moral scepticism.
5.2
Moral intuitionism
It has long seemed axiomatic to hold that justified moral beliefs cannot be based solely on
non-moral premises. As we have seen in chapter 3, such beliefs were held to run afoul of the
so-called naturalistic fallacy. This means, however, that the justification of moral beliefs has
to start from moral premises. But how is this possible without being guilty of either circularity
or of an infinite regress? As we have seen in the previous paragraph, foundationalism
provides one possible answer to this question: some beliefs are warranted in a non-inferential
manner. In the moral domain, moral intuitionism is usually taken to be the most attractive
147
K. DeLapp, Moral Realism, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, p. 130.
D. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 101.
149
D. Davidson, “A Coherence Theory of Knowledge and Truth,” in Truth and Interpretation, E. LePore (ed.),
Blackwell, 1986, p. 307–319.
148
36
form of foundationalism. Indeed, almost every moral foundationalist has been an
intuitionist.150
Now, moral intuitionism aims to resolve the sceptical regress by focusing on the noninferential justification of certain moral beliefs:
“If we can work back to some moral claim that we are justified in believing without depending on
any inference from any other belief (normative or non-normative, moral or non-moral), then there
is no new premise to justify, and the regress goes no further.” 151
So moral intuitionism proposes that there are certain basic moral beliefs which are directly
warranted. There are of course many variants of moral intuitionism. Some moral intuitionists
appeal to the self-justifying character of moral beliefs, whereas other intuitionists choose to
centralise the self-evidence or even the indubitable nature of certain moral beliefs. But despite
these differences, two traditional arguments have consistently been put forward against all
forms of intuitionism.
Firstly, there is the charge that intuitionists appeal to a mysterious faculty of moral intuition.
The appeal to this mysterious faculty, so the arguments runs, raises sceptical questions about
the nature and the reliability of this faculty of moral intuition.152 And even if the intuitionist
refuses to recognise a faculty for moral perception153, the appeal to moral “intuitions” itself
remains mysterious in the sense that it is unclear why trust should be placed in such intuitions.
Secondly, and related to this first concern, is the worry that the existence of persistent moral
disagreement at the very least seems to raise serious doubts about the reliability of our moral
intuitions. After all, if human beings frequently disagree on matters of morality, then it seems
we have little reason to assume the existence of a well-functioning faculty of moral intuition.
These problems can be seen clearly in attempts to ground the justification of moral beliefs on
their supposed self-evident nature. Shafer-Landau, for example, argues that we can know
moral principles on the basis of them being self-evident.154 A proposition p is self-evident if
“p is such that adequately understanding and attentively considering just p is sufficient to
justify believing that p”.155 Now, according to Shafer-Landau, there are multiple self-evident
moral propositions:
“It seems to me self-evident that, other things equal, it is wrong to take pleasure in another’s pain,
to taunt and threaten the vulnerable, to prosecute and punish those known to be innocent, and to
sell another’s secrets solely for personal gain. When I say such things, I mean that once one really
understands these principles […], one doesn’t need to infer them from one’s other beliefs in order
to be justified in thinking them true.” 156
150
D. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 102.
W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Moral Skepticisms, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 184.
152
As we have seen earlier, Mackie in fact uses a version of this argument to argue in favour of his error theory.
153
As indeed R. Price has done in 1787 in A Review of the Principle Questions in Morals.
154
The appeal to self-evidence is a “paradigmatic form of internalism” (R. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A
Defence, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 278). I will go deeper into the epistemic internalism/externalism
dichotomy later on in this thesis.
155
R. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 247.
156
Ibid., p. 248.
151
37
The problem for such an account, however, is that it has difficulties in dealing with conflicting
intuitions. Indeed, as Shafer-Landau himself points out, “I don’t believe that it is possible to
prove or demonstrate the existence of [self-evident moral] propositions”.157 But if this is
indeed impossible, then how is the proponent of an epistemological theory based on selfevidence supposed to answer someone who disagrees with the suggested instances of alleged
self-evident moral propositions?
Taking the example of the sadist as someone who disagrees, Shafer-Landau answers in the
following way:
“[T]he friend of self-justification must insist that if p really is self-evident, then the sadist does
have an epistemic reason to believe it. A proposition may be self-evident even if one’s other
beliefs conspire to defeat its justification. Though the weight of tradition leans in the other
direction, self-evident beliefs may be defeasible.”158
The obvious problem, however, is that what the sadist is questioning is exactly whether p is
self-evident! So the conditional “if p really is self-evident, then the sadist does have an
epistemic reason to believe it” can be accepted by the sadist, as long as he insists that p is, in
fact, not self-evident. Here the argumentative bleakness of the appeal to self-evidence comes
to the fore: since Shafer-Landau admits that he “[doesn’t] know how to argue for the selfevidence of these (or other) propositions”159, there is no way to face this sadist challenge. All
one can do is simply insist that p is self-evident, and that, self-evidence being a normative
rather than a psychological notion, everyone has a strong epistemic reason to believe p. Even
if one’s opponent goes so far as to claim that “not p” is self-evident, one does not have an
argumentative strategy to counter his appeal to self-evidence.
But this can hardly be called a satisfactory moral epistemology. If an appeal to self-evidence
cannot be defended in any way, then the invocation itself becomes vacuous. Argumentative
strategies such as Shafer-Landau’s invocation of self-evident moral principles, therefore, do
not seem to help the moral realist in establishing the existence of moral knowledge.
5.3
Coherentism
Coherentism is an influential and popular position in moral epistemology. As we have seen in
paragraph 5.1, coherentists argue that epistemic justification is conferred on a belief in virtue
of it cohering with other beliefs. So the coherentist answer to the sceptical regress argument is
that one can avoid a regress by accepting circularity. This circularity, according to the
coherentist, need not be vicious: if a certain belief fits into a certain web of beliefs, and if the
size of the web is large enough, then the holistic nature of the web can confer justification on
the belief. So “the fact that our beliefs cohere can establish their truth, even though each
individual belief may lack justification entirely if considered in splendid isolation”.160 C.I.
Lewis, for example, compares this to the way agreeing testimonies can take away all
157
R. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 247.
Ibid., p. 258.
159
Ibid., p. 248.
160
E. Olsson, “Coherentist Theories of Epistemic Justification”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, E. N.
Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/justep-coherence/>.
158
38
reasonable doubt, even though any single testimony to that effect would have been
insufficient.161
Now, what constitutes coherence? Under which circumstances does a belief sufficiently hang
together which other beliefs in order for it to be called a justified belief? According to SayreMcCord, this requires consistency, connectedness and comprehensiveness.162 Consistency at
the very least requires the absence of logical incompatibilities. One cannot hold two beliefs
which cannot simultaneously be true. The element of connectedness is meant to secure that
the different beliefs stand in a relation of relevance with each other. Although the beliefs that
grass is green and that the capital of Uruguay is Montevideo are consistent, they do nothing to
reinforce each other because the one (at least appears to be) irrelevant for the other. Finally,
there is the requirement of comprehensiveness, which is concerned with the number of beliefs
(or, put differently, with the size of the web of beliefs) which together are meant to carry
justificatory force.
There are many objections to coherentism as a theory of epistemic justification, but one seems
particularly pressing for the moral coherentist. The perceived problem is that the moral
coherentist, in taking our everyday moral beliefs as the coherent set which is meant to confer
a justified status on any belief coherent with that set, is begging the question against some
forms of strong anti-realism:
“Even maximal coherence cannot rule out moral nihilism or other extreme alternatives because
the moral assumptions in the coherent system beg the question against such extreme opponents,
and moral nihilism can be as coherent as its denial.” 163
The worry is that, in a sense, coherentism is simply an exercise in self-congratulation. If we
add more and more beliefs with the same background assumptions into our set of coherent
beliefs, then surely we will end up with consistent, connected and comprehensive beliefs. But
the debate about epistemic justification is concerned with the question how we can justify our
firmly held beliefs when they are challenged by others who happen not to share these beliefs.
If, however, such challenges (such as moral nihilism) can be captured by equally coherent sets
of beliefs, then that does seem to raise the question on what grounds the moral coherentist can
hold that his set of beliefs carries justificatory force. If, on the other hand, he holds that both
coherent sets are justified, then both justified sets can function as each other’s epistemic
defeaters, which leaves them, paradoxically, both without justification.
Coherentists have responded to this challenge by pointing to the distinction between
systematic and contextualist justification. Whereas systematic justification requires all
justifying beliefs to be themselves justified, contextualist justification is content with treating
some background beliefs as if they were systematically justified.164 And indeed, “in normal
contexts of justification, we do not consistently apply the epistemological requirement that
161
C.I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, LaSalle: Open Court, 1946.
G. Sayre-McCord, “Coherence and Models for Moral Theorizing”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 1985: 66,
170-190.
163
W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Moral Skepticisms, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 250.
164
D. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 123.
162
39
justifying beliefs be justified”.165 It is important to note, however, that resorting to a
contextualist form of justification entails the acceptance of a form of weak foundationalism,
since it holds that some basic, justifying beliefs do not stand in need of justification. The
difference with full-blooded foundationalism is of course that the coherentist does not hold
that such justifying beliefs itself are justified, but nevertheless it is committed to holding that
somehow these justifying beliefs “already have some initial, perhaps miniscule, degree of
warrant”.166 If not, the coherentist faces the challenge that the relevant set of beliefs is
incapable of justifying beliefs “from nothing”167, since it begs the question against radically
different sets of coherent beliefs. But if the coherentist does hold that some justifying beliefs
from his coherent set “already have some initial, perhaps miniscule, degree of warrant”, such
as for example Rescher168 and BonJour169 do, he thereby faces the problematic consequence
of both having to explain why some beliefs are assigned such a special role, and why the
foundationalist problems diagnosed in paragraph 5.3 do not apply to his proposal.
5.4
Reflective equilibrium
The concept of “reflective equilibrium”170, applied to the moral realm, refers to a harmonious
end-point of a deliberative process which revolves around our considered judgments, general
moral principles and (non-moral) background theory. The method of reflective equilibrium
(MRE), on the other hand, can be characterised as a type of moral epistemology, which
“consists in working back and forth among our considered judgments (some say our
“intuitions”) about particular instances or cases, the principles or rules that we believe govern
them, and the theoretical considerations that we believe bear on accepting these considered
judgments, principles, or rules, revising any of these elements wherever necessary in order to
achieve an acceptable coherence among them”.171
The first thing to notice about this characterisation of MRE is that the possibility of revising
of our moral beliefs (our considered moral judgments, our moral principles and any other
relevant (non-moral) theoretical background belief) plays an important role in MRE. Indeed,
MRE requires one to engage in “trading-off between these various categories of moral belief
in order to achieve a harmonious “equilibrium””.172 This means that there are no beliefs which
are principally privileged in the sense that they are immune to revision.
165
Ibid.
E. Olsson, “Coherentist Theories of Epistemic Justification”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, E. N.
Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/justep-coherence/>.
167
W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Moral Skepticisms, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 245.
168
N. Rescher, The Coherence Theory of Truth, Oxford University Press, 1973.
169
L. BonJour, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. Harvard University Press, 1985.
170
J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, 2nd edition 1999, p. 20. For the purposes of this
paragraph I will take “reflective equilibrium” in the wide rather than the narrow sense, which means that I will
take the method of reflective equilibrium as a broad process which is concerned with all the relevant moral and
non-moral (theoretical) background beliefs as well as considered judgments and moral principles. Cf. Rawls, p.
43.
171
N. Daniels, “Reflective Equilibrium”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, E. N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/reflective-equilibrium/>.
172
R. Boyd, “How to be a moral realist”, in: R. Shafer-Landau (ed.), Metaphysics, vol. II, Routledge, 2008, par.
2.2. Emphasis added.
166
40
Secondly, and this is a related point, MRE is usually considered to be a coherentist moral
epistemology173:
“Because we are expected to revise our beliefs at all levels as we work back and forth among
them and subject them to various criticisms, this coherence view contrasts sharply with a variety
of foundationalist approaches to justification. Some foundationalists at least claim that some
subset of our moral beliefs are immediately or directly justified (perhaps even “self-evident”) or
warranted […]. Reflective equilibrium […] singles out no group of privileged or directly justified
beliefs, distinguishing itself from all these forms of foundationalism.” 174
But this is a rather one-sided way to look at MRE. Indeed, an important aspect of MRE is that
our considered judgments (our moral intuitions), although they are, in the end, liable to
revision, are given a privileged position as “initially credible”175 starting-points in the search
for equilibrium. As Rawls himself puts it, “we take [these considered judgments]
provisionally as fixed points”.176 It is this privileged position of our considered judgments, as
the defeasible foundations of MRE, which is underestimated by those who regard MRE
simply as a form of coherentism. Indeed, MRE can be said to be predicated partly on this
special status of our considered moral judgments.
This is not to say that MRE is to be treated as a form of moral intuitionism. After all, because
of the fact that MRE allows considered judgments to be revised, and because these considered
judgments are used to select and modify other moral and non-moral beliefs (which, in turn,
are then used to select and modify the total set of our considered moral judgments), MRE
should be regarded as a partly coherentist epistemological strategy as well. But what at the
very least should be clear is that, much like the weak foundationalist forms of moral
coherentism discussed in paragraph 5.3, the proponent of MRE needs to address the issue how
our considered judgments can “already have some initial, perhaps miniscule, degree of
warrant”.177
It is for exactly this reason that Hare178 and Brandt have argued rightly that MRE faces a
similar challenge as moral intuitionism, because it too treats considered judgments as having
pre-theoretical “evidential force”.179 Indeed, it is unclear how the “mutual adjustment”180 of
considered judgments and moral principles can produce warrant if one lacks a proper
justification for treating our considered judgments as the “fixed points”181 which constitute
the foundation of MRE. If, however, the advocates of MRE insist that considered judgments
173
Cf. D. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 303:
“Rawls has advocated a coherentist moral epistemology according to which moral and political theories are
justified on the basis of their coherence with our other beliefs, both moral and nonmoral.”
174
N. Daniels, “Reflective Equilibrium”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, E. N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/reflective-equilibrium/>.
175
N. Daniels, “Wide Reflective Equilibirium and Theory Acceptance in Ethics”, The Journal of Philosophy,
May 1979, p. 272.
176
J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, 2nd edition 1999, p. 18. Emphasis added.
177
E. Olsson, “Coherentist Theories of Epistemic Justification”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, E. N.
Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/justep-coherence/>.
178
R.M. Hare, “Rawls’ Theory of Justice”, Philosophical Quarterly, 23, p. 144-155.
179
R. Brandt, “The Science of Man and Wide Reflective Equilibrium”, Ethics, 100, p. 271.
180
J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, 2nd edition 1999, p. 18.
181
See footnote 61.
41
do not play any sort of special or foundational role in its search for equilibrium, then they are
faced with the (anti-coherentist) challenge how “simply making “coherent” a set of beliefs
that have no “initial credibility” [can] produce justification”182.
5.5
Two forms of epistemological naturalism
Another epistemological option is to accept what has become known as naturalism.183 As
with so many philosophical terms, it is not immediate clear what is meant with
epistemological naturalism. In this paragraph I will therefore discuss two different approaches
to the question of moral epistemology, both of which have been defended as forms of
(epistemological) naturalism.
5.5.1 Bridging the is/ought gap
Naturalism is sometimes defined as the view that moral conclusions can be derived from nonmoral premises.184 As such, it rejects the Humean view that it “seems altogether
inconceivable, how this new relation [ought or ought not] can be a deduction from the others
[is and is not], which are entirely different from it”.185 According to Hume, moral conclusions
can only be derived from premises which contain at least one moral premise.
Mark Nelson, however, has argued that we can derive moral conclusions, and therefore attain
moral knowledge, from entirely non-moral premises:
“My argument is as follows:
N1.
N2.
N3.
‘Bertie (morally) ought to marry Madeline’ is one of Aunt Dahlia’s beliefs.
All of Aunt Dahlia’s beliefs are true.
Therefore, Bertie (morally) ought to marry Madeline.” 186
According to Nelson, N1 and N2 are both examples of “is-premises”, which together lead to a
logically valid moral conclusion. Although N1 contains a moral term, “that is not enough to
make it a normative premise, since the word is mentioned in a report of someone’s belief, and
is not in a normative proposition as such”.187 For this reason, Nelson claims, the is/ought gap
has been bridged, and the possibility of deriving moral conclusions from entirely factual
premises has been established.
N. Daniels, “Reflective Equilibrium”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , E. N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/reflective-equilibrium/>.
183
This view is not to confused with naturalism about the nature of moral properties, which has been discussed
in chapter 3.
184
W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Moral Skepticisms, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 135.
185
D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 469.
186
M. Nelson, “Is it always fallacious to derive values from facts?”, Argumentation, 1995: 9, p. 555.
187
Ibid.
182
42
The first thing to notice about this argument is that non-cognitivists will reject N1 out of hand.
But, as Nelson rightly says, he can still aim his argument “at cognitivists who believe in the
Is/Ought gap, such as Prichard, Harman, Mackie, and […] Pigden”.188
Secondly, however, it should be clear that this example fails as a method for attaining moral
knowledge. Indeed, even if one accepts the validity of the argument189, the premises
themselves obviously still stand in need of justification. This means, however, that even if it is
conceded that Nelson has succeeded in providing us with a successful example of how the
is/ought gap can be bridged (after all, the is/ought gap is concerned with validity only), it falls
far short of a successful naturalistic example of how to attain moral knowledge. Indeed, in
order to show that N2 is justified, one would need to show, exactly because of N1, that we
have reason to believe that Bertie morally ought to marry Madeline. This, however, would
require moral assumptions or moral argumentation, something which would, surely, violate
“the self-imposed limits of naturalism in moral epistemology”.190
5.5.2 Moral reliabilism
Another form of moral epistemology draws its inspiration from a broader development in
modern epistemology, which aims to somehow connect epistemology to the methodology of
the natural sciences. In the previous chapter I have already briefly discussed one of the most
important forms of epistemological naturalism: process reliabilism. According to process
reliabilists, a belief is epistemically justified if and only if it is produced by a type of process
which makes it probable that it is true, “even though the subject is not, or cannot be, aware of
whether the belief has been produced by such a process”. 191 Reliabilism therefore only
invokes “naturalistically respectable terms”.192
The advantage of such an epistemological account for the moral realist is the fact that a
“moral belief needn’t be traced back to some other belief, itself in need of justification, but
instead might terminate in a citation of the reliable process through which the belief was
formed”.193 This means that reliabilism, as an externalistic account of epistemic justification,
has to make no reference to (the adequacy of) the grounds for having the relevant belief. All
that reliabilism requires for epistemic justification is that a certain belief is produced by a
generally reliable (i.e. truth-tracking) process of belief-formation.
The advantages and disadvantages of reliabilism are subject of a fierce debate between
internalists and externalists. The most persistent and, indeed, most convincing criticism that
has been leveled against reliabilism is that any given process can be described on various
levels of generality. This worry has therefore become known as the “generality problem”.
188
Ibid.
Something which can, and indeed has been, disputed. Cf. W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Moral Skepticisms, Oxford
University Press, 2006, p. 142-152.
190
W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Moral Skepticisms, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 151-152.
191
H. Philipse, God in the Age of Science, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 68-69.
192
R. Feldman, “Naturalized Epistemology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2012/entries/epistemology-naturalized/>.
193
R. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 274.
189
43
The generality problem starts from the observation that we can always find reliable and
unreliable descriptions of the same belief-producing process. So, to take a famous example of
Laurence BonJour194, even if one stipulates that a process is reliable under the description of
the process of clairvoyance, the actual belief-producing process might be unreliable under
certain other descriptions, such as the process of sudden felt belief for which I have no
evidence and which does not cohere with my other beliefs.
So it seems that the reliabilists has to provide an argument which shows why it is nonarbitrary to pick out exactly a certain description as the relevant one. To offer such an
argument would, however, be to do what externalists over time have proved incapable of
doing. It seems that the only principled, non-arbitrary way to designate one belief-producing
process as the single relevant one is to select the lowest, least abstract kind of beliefgenerating process.195 This least abstract kind of process, however, is exactly the actual beliefproducing process of which there is only one token. The consequence is that justification
collapses into truth: the belief-producing process will be reliable only if the belief is true, and
will be unreliable if it is false.196 This result is of course unsatisfactory for a theory of
epistemic justification.
194
L. BonJour, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. Harvard University Press, 1985, p. 41.
H. Philipse, God in the Age of Science, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 45.
196
Ibid.
195
44
Part IV
The Relationship between Moral
Realism and Epistemological Moral
Scepticism
45
Chapter 6 The Meta-Ethical Consequences of Epistemic Inaccessibility
“[E]ven if we suppose that there are sceptical arguments that have special force against moral
realism, the argumentative burden this places on realism depends on holistic considerations.” 197
6.1
Introduction
In the previous chapter we have seen that it is not at all uncontroversial whether something
like a satisfactory moral realist epistemology has been developed over the years. For this
reason, the epistemological doctrine of scepticism (the view that we can198 or do199 not have
knowledge about either a certain class of propositions (local scepticism), or about any given
proposition (global scepticism)) has become more popular in the moral domain. Indeed, the
global epistemological sceptic, who raises doubts about our ability to attain knowledge of any
given proposition about the world, is no longer the only type of sceptic who refuses to accept
that we can attain moral knowledge. The perceived failure of moral realism to present a
convincing moral epistemology has led to the emergence of a local rather than a global form
of scepticism: epistemological moral scepticism. Epistemological moral scepticism can,
therefore, be defined as the view that we cannot or do not have moral knowledge. In the
remainder of this thesis I will refer to epistemological moral scepticism simply as “moral
scepticism”.
The emergence of this epistemological doctrine of moral scepticism naturally raises the
question how this doctrine relates to the moral realism/moral anti-realism debate we have
discussed in the previous parts of this thesis. In this thesis I will, therefore, look at the
question whether moral scepticism and moral realism are compatible with one another. In
other words: can the moral realist simultaneously be a moral sceptic or is moral scepticism
incompatible with moral realism? This question is of course an important one: if they prove to
be incompatible, then the moral realist will have to show why we should reject moral
scepticism. If, however, moral scepticism is compatible with moral realism, this means that
epistemological matters will be of less direct importance to the moral realist.
So in a sense examining the relationship between moral scepticism and moral realism is an
investigation into the importance of epistemology for the moral realism/moral anti-realism
debate. Indeed, if it turns out that the moral realist cannot resort to accepting moral
scepticism, then it will have been shown that a lack of a successful moral realist epistemology
is a central problem for the moral realist.
In the remainder of this chapter I will therefore look more closely at the relationship between
moral realism and what is usually referred to as the “epistemic inaccessibility”- the view that
we are unable to acquire justified moral belief and knowledge”200 – of alleged moral facts. In
197
R. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 234.
This view is known as so-called Academic scepticism.
199
This can be seen as a form of Pyrrhonian scepticism.
200
Ibid., p. 232.
198
46
paragraph 6.2 I will start with discussing a common moral realist response to the question
what the relationship between these two is. After that, in paragraph 6.3, I will look at different
ways in which the moral realist might try to defend his commitment to moral realism in the
face of an acknowledgement of the epistemic inaccessibility of the moral facts he stipulates.
6.2
A matter of logic?
In this paragraph I will present and examine the usual moral realist response to the question
whether moral scepticism and moral realism are compatible. Before I turn to this response,
however, it is important to note that, in paragraph 2.1, I defined moral realism as the view that
(i) moral claims purport to report moral facts in virtue of which these moral claims are either
true or false (i.e., moral claims are truth-apt), and (ii) at least some of these moral claims are
mind-independently true. The reason matters of definition are important here is that
“epistemic access is sometimes built into the very definition of realism”201, such as in Boyd’s
definition of moral realism.202 In such cases, the answer to the question whether moral
scepticism and moral realism are compatible is of course a straightforward one: they are not.
It was for this reason that I chose to define moral realism in an epistemologically neutral
fashion.
Now, if we take this epistemologically neutral definition of moral realism, we can turn to the
question of its compatibility with moral scepticism. Most moral realists consider the answer to
this question to be a matter of logic:
“[S]kepticism about moral truth cannot be based on skepticism about moral knowledge, since lack
of knowledge does not imply lack of truth. For similar reasons, skepticism about moral truth also
cannot be based on skepticism about justified moral belief. Instead, skepticism about moral truth
is usually based on views of moral language or metaphysics.”203
So the moral realist argues that, since metaphysical reality does not require our knowledge of
this reality, even our established incapability204 of attaining moral knowledge (i.e. the
Academic205 sceptic’s view that we are in principle unable to know moral propositions) would
be logically insufficient to by itself lead us to reject moral realism.206 Or, in the words of
David Brink: “we may just have no cognitive access to moral facts”. 207 In a similar vein, Russ
Shafer-Landau argues that “epistemic inaccessibility” itself does not refute moral realism.
Indeed, he rejects the view that “if, on moral realistic assumptions, we are unable to acquire
D. Loeb, “Moral Realism and the Argument from Disagreement”, Philosophical Studies, 1998:90, p. 285.
R. Boyd, “How to be a moral realist”, in: G. Sayre-McCord (ed.), Essays on Moral Realism, Cornell
University Press, 1988, p. 181.
203
W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Moral Skepticisms, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 11. Emphasis added.
204
This is to be contrasted with the view that at the moment we are unable to acquire moral knowledge. This
view allows room for the possibility that in the future we will find a satisfactory moral epistemology.
205
See note 2.
206
Cf. K. DeLapp, Moral Realism, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, p. 116: “[R]ealism is a metaphysical thesis
about what is real and therefore it might be thought to be insulated from mundane concerns about whether we
puny humans are or are not able to know that reality.”
207
D. Brink, “Moral Realism and the Sceptical Arguments from Disagreement and Queerness”, Australasian
Journal of Philosophy, 1984: 62, p. 111.
201
202
47
justified moral belief and knowledge, then moral realism is (probably) false”.208 Instead,
Shafer-Landau argues, we should base our choice for either moral realism or moral antirealism on “holistic considerations”, i.e. on how well “realism fares vis-à-vis its competitors
across the whole range of criteria for theoretical adequacy in metaethics”.209 This would mean
that, even if the moral realist would be wholly incapable of presenting a convincing moral
epistemology, moral realism could be salvaged on, for example, metaphysical and
psychological grounds.
Now, it is clear that moral realist responses which merely point to the logical gap between a
“lack of knowledge” and a “lack of truth” are going too fast. While it is of course true that
such a gap exists, much more can be said about the meta-ethical consequences of epistemic
inaccessibility. After all, if one considers epistemic inaccessibility in isolation, it seems to be
beyond doubt that the best explanation of such inaccessibility is non-existence. Indeed, in the
absence of overriding considerations to the contrary (on which I will say more below), it
should be wholly uncontroversial to treat a lack of cognitive access as something which is
best explained by the hypothesis that there simply is nothing to attain knowledge of in the first
place.
So even though a logically cogent argument (starting from the fact that no moral knowledge
can be had, leading to the conclusion that no moral facts exist) would indeed require “a
premise that we would be able to know moral facts if there were any” 210, it seems that an
inference to the best explanation strongly suggests that we abandon belief in real, inaccessible
moral facts if we accept their epistemic inaccessibility. Indeed, as Brink (himself a moral
realist) says, “while moral realism and moral scepticism are compatible […], the standard and
most plausible reason for claiming that we have no moral knowledge is the belief that there
are no moral facts.”211 Or, in the words of Loeb, “morality could be real but inaccessible, of
course, but if so then we would lack the best sort of evidence for believing in it.”212
6.3
Identifying overriding considerations
In the previous paragraph it has been observed that, in the absence of strong evidence to the
contrary, it seems unobjectionable to say that epistemic inaccessibility is best treated as an
indication of irreality or non-existence. So what kind of overriding, “holistic”213
considerations could lead us to abandon this natural stance towards epistemic inaccessibility?
In other words: what would be required for us to acknowledge the reality of unknowable
moral entities?
The moral realist could, for example, try to establish the truth of moral realism on
metaphysical grounds. This would require the moral realist to show somehow that we have
208
R. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 232.
Ibid., p. 234.
210
W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Moral Skepticisms, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 46.
211
D. Brink, “Moral Realism and the Sceptical Arguments from Disagreement and Queerness”, Australasian
Journal of Philosophy, 1984: 62, p. 124. Emphasis added.
212
D. Loeb, “Moral Realism and the Argument from Disagreement”, Philosophical Studies, 1998:90, p. 285.
213
See note 11.
209
48
better metaphysical reasons to believe in moral realism than in its anti-realist
“competitors”.214 The problem for the moral realist, however, is that it is not sufficient to
present merely a plausible moral realist metaphysics. Indeed, in order to establish overriding
metaphysical considerations in favour of moral realism, the task at hand is to have us prefer
moral realism over moral anti-realism on metaphysical grounds. So even if the moral realist
would succeed in taking away the concerns we might have about moral realism’s account of
moral supervenience215, he has not provided anything like an overriding metaphysical
consideration in favour of moral realism. In order to do so, he would have to provide a better
metaphysical account of morality than his anti-realist competitor. It is, however, difficult to
see how the moral realist could succeed in doing so, since the anti-realist seems to have a
perfectly plausible and natural metaphysical answer to the epistemic inaccessibility of alleged
moral facts: there simply are none.
It therefore seems that, in order to provide overriding metaphysical considerations in favour
of moral realism, the moral realist would have to do much more than simply show how moral
realism could be metaphysically possible: the moral realist would have to show why we
cannot but believe in the existence of real moral facts. As was said before, it is, however,
difficult to conceive how any such metaphysical argument would have to run.
A similar argument applies to considerations about moral motivation or morality’s
normativity. Indeed, as with moral metaphysics, moral realism is usually taken to suffer
special difficulties in accounting for the intrinsic (or at least strong) connection between
sincere moral judgment and moral motivation. This means that, even if the moral realist were
to “develop a suitable account of morality’s normativity”216, he will have given us very little
reason to ignore the moral realist “embarrassment of lacking a plausible moral
epistemology”217 and to convert to moral realism despite the epistemic inaccessibility of the
moral facts it stipulates.
If this worry is formulated more generally, one can say that it is not enough for the moral
realist to remedy the perceived defects moral realism has in, for example, presenting a
plausible metaphysics and in accounting for moral motivation. What is needed in addition to
this, are strong, positive arguments in favour of moral realism. It seems that only then the
moral realist can be said to have good grounds to believe in real moral facts despite their
cognitive inaccessibility. In other words: only if such arguments exist the moral realist will
have reason to hold on to his realism even after the truth of moral scepticism has been
established.
Now, can such positive arguments be found? In paragraph 2.3 we have already encountered
an argument in favour of moral realism which relies on an analogy between moral and
scientific realism. Can the moral realist perhaps employ a version of this argument to tip the
scale of our holistic considerations in favour of moral realism, despite the inaccessibility of
moral facts?
214
See note 11.
See paragraph 3.3
216
R. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 234.
217
Ibid., p. 234.
215
49
Unfortunately, the moral realist cannot. As was said in paragraph 2.3, scientific realism is
usually defined as “the doctrine that the methods of science are capable of providing (partial
or approximate) knowledge of unobservable (‘theoretical’) entities, such as atoms or
electromagnetic fields”.218 Indeed, the whole idea behind scientific realism (and therefore
behind the analogy between moral and scientific realism) is that the reliability of our scientific
methodology is best explained by the truth-approximation of our scientific theories. In other
words: the fact that we seem to be successful in improving “our knowledge of the world”219
and in modifying and improving our existing scientific methodology, is best explained on the
assumption that our current theories are relevantly approximately true.
It is clear that the moral realist who accepts moral scepticism cannot invoke this analogy to
support his moral realism. Indeed, if one accepts moral scepticism then ex hypothesi there is
no knowledge or epistemological success which is best explained on realist assumptions. This
means, however, that if the moral realist chooses to accept moral scepticism, he not only faces
the challenge that epistemic inaccessibility, considered in isolation, seems to be best
explained by non-existence, but he thereby also fatally undermines the moral realist argument
which relies on an analogy with scientific realism.
In this paragraph I have not yet considered “the intuitive case for moral realism”220 as a
possible overriding consideration in favour of moral realism. The reason is that, as it is (one
of) the strongest and intuitively plausible arguments in favour of moral realism, I will devote
the entire chapter 7 to the question whether the perceived intuitive advantage moral realism
enjoys can help the moral realist to salvage moral realism in the face of epistemic
inaccessibility.
R. Boyd, “How to be a moral realist”, in: G. Sayre-McCord (ed.), Essays on Moral Realism, Cornell
University Press, 1988, p. 188. Emphasis added.
219
Ibid., p. 190.
220
See paragraph 2.2.
218
50
Chapter 7 Epistemic Inaccessibility and Moral Discourse
“[W]e should not believe in facts that we cannot know.”221
7.1
Introduction
In the previous chapter the meta-ethical consequences of epistemic inaccessibility have been
discussed in a general manner. In that chapter I have tried to show that there is more to be said
about the relationship between moral realism and moral scepticism than that they are logically
compatible. Indeed, I have argued that, in the absence of overriding considerations to the
contrary, moral scepticism is best explained by a denial of moral realism.
In this chapter I will look at “the intuitive case in favour of moral realism”, which I
characterised in paragraph 2.2 as “the most important argument in favour of moral realism”. If
this argument can be upheld in the face of epistemic inaccessibility, then those who are
convinced by this argument can perhaps claim to have found an overriding consideration in
favour of moral realism. This, then, could render moral realism an attractive position “vis-àvis its competitors across the whole range of criteria for theoretical adequacy in
metaethics”.222 If, however, it turns out that accepting moral scepticism makes the intuitive
case in favour of moral realism lose its appeal, then there seems to be very little reason left to
uphold moral realism in the face of epistemic inaccessibility.
In paragraph 7.2 I will start by looking at the consequences epistemic inaccessibility has for
our first-order moral discourse. Then, in paragraph 7.3, I will relate this discussion to the
“intuitive case in favour of moral realism”. I will argue that an acknowledgement of the
epistemic inaccessibility of moral facts should lead us to suspend judgment on substantive,
first-order moral questions and that our moral discourse, which is predicated on the
assumption that such first-order questions are epistemically accessible, is fundamentally
misguided. For this reason, or so I will argue, the intuitive case in favour of moral realism
loses its appeal if the moral realist acknowledges the epistemic inaccessibility of moral facts.
7.2
Moral discourse and suspension of judgment
Before I will specifically go into the relationship between epistemic inaccessibility and the
intuitive case in favour of moral realism, I will discuss the general consequences epistemic
inaccessibility has for our first-order moral discourse.
As we have seen in the previous chapter, “epistemic inaccessibility” is a term for saying that
“we are unable to acquire justified moral belief and knowledge”223. For the purposes of this
chapter it is not important whether such inaccessibility is taken as established inaccessibility
(i.e. the Academic sceptic’s claim that we can never acquire knowledge) or simply as the view
that at the moment we are unable to acquire knowledge (due to the fact that up until now no
221
W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Moral Skepticisms, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 46.
R. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 234.
223
Ibid., p. 232.
222
51
satisfactory epistemology has been put forward). Indeed, for the purposes of this chapter it is
not needed to take a position as to whether we know that moral facts are principally
inaccessible or whether we only know that at the moment we lack a method of attaining moral
knowledge: it is sufficient to hold that accepting epistemic inaccessibility entails accepting
that (at the very least) we are currently unable to acquire justified moral belief and
knowledge.
An important starting point for a discussion about the consequences of epistemic
inaccessibility for our first-order moral discourse is the (Ancient sceptical) observation that
“if we cannot confidently claim knowledge, we should hold back from any kind of truthclaim”224. So if we have no reason to favour one belief over another, it seems rational to
suspend belief (epochê225) rather than to embrace one of the two without a proper epistemic
justification. This epistemological maxim is nowadays still widely accepted. Richard
Feldman, for example, holds that in situations of epistemic parity, in which there is no more
reason to favour one’s own view over the opposite view that is equally firmly held by one’s
epistemic peer226, we should suspend judgment because we cannot confidently claim
knowledge.227
Let us now turn to the moral realist’s acceptance of the epistemic inaccessibility of moral
facts. It would appear this acceptance has far-reaching consequences for our moral discourse.
Indeed, the truth of moral scepticism affects our first-order moral beliefs in a rather
fundamental way: because of the fact that moral scepticism establishes the inaccessibility of
moral truths, it seems reasonable to suspend belief on such matters. It is important to note that
I do not mean that we should suspend belief on (second-order) meta-ethical matters. Rather to
the contrary: epistemic inaccessibility should be regarded as an important factor in deciding
which second-order view about morality we should embrace. But in fact, up until now I
explicitly left open the possibility that there might be strong meta-ethical reasons to accept
moral realism, even in the face of epistemic inaccessibility.
So when I say that it seems reasonable to suspend belief “on such matters”, I do not mean that
we should suspend judgment on the question whether moral facts exist. Indeed, even if we
cannot know (the content of) first-order moral facts, we can in theory be justified228 in having
the second-order meta-ethical belief that such moral facts exist on the grounds of, for
example, metaphysical arguments. The point is rather that our first-order moral discourse (our
substantive moral beliefs and moral judgments) cannot be upheld rationally in the face of
epistemic inaccessibility: we should suspend judgment on the content of moral facts, which is
the subject of first-order moral judgments and moral argumentation.
K. Vogt, “Ancient Skepticism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition), E.N.
Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/skepticism-ancient/>.
225
Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, tr. J. Annas and J. Barnes, I 6-7.
226
Epistemic peers “literally share all evidence and are equal with respect to their abilities and dispositions
relevant to interpreting that evidence”. See R. Feldman and T.A. Warfield, Disagreement, Oxford University
Press, 2010, p. 2.
227
R. Feldman, “Reasonable Religious Disagreements”, in L. Antony (ed.): Philosophers without God:
Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life , Oxford University Press, 2007.
228
Whether we can in fact justifiedly believe in moral facts in the light of epistemic inaccessibility is something
that depends on the existence of the “overriding considerations” I discussed in the previous chapter. I will again
turn to this issue in paragraph 7.3.
224
52
The important epistemic consequence of epistemic inaccessibility is therefore that rationally
one no longer can hold first-order moral beliefs. It is of course possible to, as a person or as a
community, take certain things as moral facts for pragmatic reasons, but epistemic
inaccessibility does make it impossible to hold first-order moral beliefs in a rational manner.
This, however, means that epistemic inaccessibility demands that our first-order moral
discourse be radically altered, if not abandoned altogether. After all, if epistemic
inaccessibility rationally requires us to suspend judgment on first-order questions of morality,
then it seems we should hold back from the usual truth-claims in our substantive moral
discourse.
7.3
Epistemic inaccessibility and the intuitive case in favour of moral realism
In the previous paragraph I have looked at the consequences epistemic inaccessibility has for
our ordinary moral discourse. In this paragraph I will relate this to “the intuitive case in favour
of moral realism”, which I discussed in some detail in paragraph 2.2.
Now, in order to be able to discuss the relationship between moral scepticism and moral
realism’s intuitive appeal, it is instructive to begin with a brief re-formulation of this intuitive
argument in favour of moral realism:
“Moral judgments are typically expressed in language employing the declarative mood; we
engage in moral argument and deliberation; we regard people as capable both of making moral
mistakes and of correcting their moral views; we often feel constrained by what we take to be
moral requirements that are in some sense imposed from without and independent of us. These
phenomena are held to demonstrate the realist or cognitivist character of commonsense morality;
morality seems to concern matters of fact that people can and sometimes do recognize and debate
about.”229
So, as I already said in paragraph 2.2, both the phenomenology and the form and content of
our moral judgments seem to presuppose a firm belief in objective moral truth. In other
words: our moral discourse is usually taken by the moral realist to provide a strong indication
of our moral realist presuppositions.
The problem, however, is that even if our moral discourse shows a firm belief in objective
moral truth, that belief is predicated completely on our assumed ability to access these moral
truths. Indeed, all the phenomena that are meant to provide the moral realist with an
argumentative advantage (“we engage in moral argument and deliberation”, “we regard
people as capable both of making moral mistakes and of correcting their moral views”) share
a deep commitment to the cognitive accessibility of moral facts. This, however, means that, if
one accepts moral scepticism, one is thereby forced to conclude that our moral discourse (e.g.
our moral judgments which aim at moral truth and our feelings of moral mistake and moral
accuracy) is somehow fundamentally misguided. After all, and as we have seen in the
229
D. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 24.
53
previous paragraph, it is clear that the only rational thing to do with regard to epistemically
inaccessible facts is suspend judgment on their content230 altogether.
It should by now be clear why the intuitive case in favour of moral realism loses all its appeal
if it is coupled with an admission of the epistemic inaccessibility of moral facts. The intuitive
case in favour of moral realism takes our moral discourse as an indication of the truth of
moral realism, because of the fact that this moral discourse seems to be characterised by a
deep commitment to the objective reality of moral facts. This discourse, so the moral realist
claims, should be taken seriously and should therefore be considered an important argument
in favour of moral realism. But the problem is that whereas the moral realist claims that the
anti-realist is problematically forced to consider our ordinary moral judgments as false (and,
hence, to embrace a sort of weak error theory with regard to our moral discourse), it seems
the moral realist who accepts epistemic inaccessibility is likewise forced to consider our
moral discourse as fundamentally misguided. After all, our ordinary moral judgments aim at
correctly representing epistemically inaccessible facts, which should be seen as a sign of deep
confusion rather than as something indicative of the truth of moral realism.
So an acknowledgement of the epistemic inaccessibility of moral facts makes it impossible to
take our moral discourse “at face value”, since this discourse exactly consists of (ex hypothesi
misguided) attempts to report real moral facts. Indeed, if we cannot attain knowledge of moral
propositions because “we are unable to acquire justified moral belief and knowledge”231, then
it becomes unclear why for example the declarative form of our moral judgments (“genocide
is wrong”) would be something to take seriously as an argument in favour of moral realism. In
other words: how can a fundamentally misguided social practice, which revolves around
employing certain notions of moral truth and access to moral facts, function as an argument in
favour of moral realism? It is this question moral realists face if they acknowledge the
epistemic inaccessibility of moral facts.
In this paragraph I have attempted to relate the moral realist’s acknowledgement of moral
scepticism to the “intuitive case in favour of moral realism”. I have argued that, since an
acknowledgement of moral scepticism commits the moral realist to the conclusion that our
moral discourse is fundamentally misguided in that it tries to describe and attain knowledge of
epistemically inaccessible moral facts, the moral realist cannot accept moral scepticism
without surrendering his intuitive argument in favour of moral realism. After all, one cannot
consistently claim that our moral discourse reveals valuable insights for the moral
realism/moral anti-realism debate if one acknowledges (by acknowledging moral scepticism)
that one of the fundamental assumptions of this moral discourse (i.e. the assumption that we
can sensibly make moral judgments and moral arguments because we have access to moral
facts) is mistaken.
This means that, much like the moral realist argument which relies on an analogy with
scientific realism232, the intuitive case in favour of moral realism is fatally undermined by an
acknowledgement of moral scepticism. Indeed, both of these arguments, which I characterised
230
As opposed to their existence, which is, as I have argued in the previous paragraph, something which is the
subject of second-order meta-ethical investigation.
231
R. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 232.
232
See paragraph 6.3.
54
in chapter 2 as two of the most important arguments in favour of moral realism, rely on an
assumption that we can attain justified moral belief or moral knowledge. For this reason the
moral realist acknowledgement of moral scepticism has far-reaching consequences: it not only
leads to the moral realist facing the challenge of providing overriding considerations in favour
of moral realism to remedy the prima facie explanatory disadvantage in accounting for
epistemic inaccessibility, but it also undermines two of the most powerful positive arguments
the moral realist usually puts forward in favour of his position. This combination is of course
a highly uncomfortable one for the moral realist, since these two positive arguments are of
crucial importance to the moral realist in formulating possible “overriding considerations”.
So even if we take moral realism and moral scepticism as logically compatible, and if we base
our choice for either moral realism or moral anti-realism on “holistic considerations”, i.e. on
how well “realism fares vis-à-vis its competitors across the whole range of criteria for
theoretical adequacy in metaethics”233, the epistemic inaccessibility of moral facts not only
creates an extra burden of proof for the moral realist, but it also fatally undermines the most
important positive arguments in favour of moral realism.
Indeed, even the Frege-Geach Problem (the third important argument in favour of moral
realism I discussed in chapter 2) can be said to lose some of its force if the moral realist
endorses moral scepticism: if it turns out we should suspend judgment on substantive, firstorder questions of morality, then the perceived incapability of non-cognitivist forms of antirealism to account for some aspects of our moral discourse (e.g. the validity of moral
argumentation) becomes less234 problematic. After all, if epistemic inaccessibility leads to the
conclusion that our moral discourse is somehow fundamentally misguided, then it is very
much the question whether the perceived incapability to make sense of this discourse can still
function as an important argument against non-cognitivist forms of anti-realism.
The conclusion is therefore that although moral realism and moral scepticism are logically
compatible, they can in fact only be combined at the cost of rendering moral realism a wholly
unattractive and unconvincing meta-ethical position.
233
R. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 234.
There are of course still difficulties left for the non-cognitivist in this regard. After all, it is a perfectly
sensible thing to say, in the light of epistemic inaccessibility, “I wonder whether it is wrong to steal”. And, as we
have seen in paragraph 2.5, the moral realist can argue that the non-cognitivist has difficulties in accounting for
the semantic effects of moral predicates in such embedded contexts. In appears, then, that not all (perceived)
difficulties with regard to the Frege-Geach Problem are undermined by a moral realist acknowledgement of
epistemic inaccessibility.
234
55
Part V
Conclusion
56
Chapter 8 Conclusion
In this thesis I have examined the relationship between moral realism and epistemological
moral scepticism. This relationship is usually portrayed as a rather straightforward one:
because we cannot draw metaphysical conclusions about the existence of moral facts on the
basis of the question whether we can have epistemic access to such moral facts, so the
argument goes, epistemological moral scepticism and moral realism can be endorsed
simultaneously.
In this thesis I have, however, tried to say a bit more about this relationship. More
specifically, I have argued that (i) in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, epistemic
inaccessibility is best regarded as an indication of irreality or non-existence, and (ii) that such
“strong evidence to the contrary” is not available to the moral realist, since the most important
positive arguments in favour of moral realism are undermined fatally by an acknowledgement
of epistemic inaccessibility. In order to bolster this second claim, it was necessary both to
formulate the most important arguments that are usually put forward in favour of moral
realism235 and to examine whether these arguments hold up in the face of epistemic
inaccessibility. Chapters 6 and 7 of this thesis were to a large extent designed to fulfill this
latter task.
Indeed, in these two chapters I have argued (i) that the moral realist argument which relies on
an analogy between scientific realism and moral realism cannot be maintained if one accepts
the epistemic inaccessibility of moral facts, because accepting epistemic inaccessibility
implies ex hypothesi that there is no knowledge or epistemological success which is best
explained on realist assumptions, and (ii) that, because an acknowledgement of moral
scepticism commits the moral realist to the conclusion that our moral discourse is somehow
fundamentally misguided, the moral realist cannot accept moral scepticism without
surrendering his intuitive argument in favour of moral realism. Furthermore, as I have argued
in paragraph 7.3, even the Frege-Geach Problem can be said to lose some of its force if the
moral realist endorses moral scepticism.
So, in conclusion, it appears that the epistemic inaccessibility of moral facts, which should
lead one to endorse epistemological moral scepticism, not only creates an extra burden of
proof for the moral realist, but it also undermines fatally the most important positive
arguments in favour of moral realism. For this reason, moral realism is rendered a wholly
unattractive and unconvincing meta-ethical position if it is coupled with an acknowledgement
of epistemological moral scepticism.
235
See chapter 2.
57
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