MORAL REALISM: A NATURALISTIC PERSPECTIVE Michael Devitt

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MORAL REALISM: A NATURALISTIC PERSPECTIVE
Michael Devitt
Croatian Journal of Philosophy 2 (2002): 1-15
I propose to sketch a defense of moral realism from a
naturalistic perspective. My naturalism has two quite distinct
aspects. Its epistemological (and methodological) aspect is the
view that there is only one way of knowing, the empirical way that
is the basis of science. Its metaphysical aspect is that all facts
must ultimately depend on physical facts. I shall say a little
more about this naturalism later.
I start by considering what moral realism is. Next I give
some reasons for believing it. Then I consider four arguments
against it. I conclude with some thoughts on fulfilling the
naturalistic project.
1. WHAT IS MORAL REALISM?
What is moral realism? This question is more difficult and
controversial than one might have expected. My first attempt at an
answer is:
MR1: There are objective moral facts.
This answer has a problem which I will address soon. But many will
think that my answer has another problem: it is entirely
nonsemantic. Compare it with the following, more fashionable,
answer from Geoffrey Sayre-McCord:
Wherever it is found...realism involves embracing just two
theses: (1) the claims in question, when literally construed,
are literally true or false (cognitivism), and (2) some are
literally true. Nothing more. (1988c: 5)
What is it for something to be "literally construed"? To answer
this, Sayre-McCord thinks, we need a theory of meaning (1991:
157). So on his view the realism debate is all about truth and
meaning. Consider, next, the following from Peter Railton:
A chief cause of the changing character of the realism
dispute over time has been changes in philosophical
approaches
to
language
and
meaning...philosophers
increasingly are clear that questions about meaning are
intimately
bound
up
with
questions
of
metaphysics,
epistemology, mind, empirical science, and even rationality
and evaluation. (1996: 49-50)1
Once again, theories of meaning are taken to be central to realism
debates. Sayre-McCord and Railton are particularly concerned with
the debate over moral realism but their remarks are quite general.
Their semantic view of realism debates is typical. Consider, for
example, Jarrett Leplin's editorial introduction to a collection
of papers on scientific realism.
He lists ten "characteristic
realist claims" (1984b: 1-2). Nearly all of these are about the
1See
also: Boyd 1988: 182; Mason 1988: 413; Nagel 1986: 139.
1
truth and reference of theories.
Not one is straightforwardly
metaphysical.2
The popularity of these views of realism debates is
surprising. One would have thought that these debates are
metaphysical, concerned with what the world is like, not with our
talk about the world. John Mackie, another unfashionable
Australian, has it right: he describes his opposition to moral
realism as "an ontological thesis, not a linguistic or conceptual
one" (1988: 95). What he is opposed to is a thesis about moral
reality, along the lines of MR1. The debate over this has almost
nothing to do with any theses about meaning or truth. In Realism
and Truth, (1997: ch. 4 and sec. A.2) I have argued that semantic
issues have almost nothing to do with the debate over realism
about the external world. I shall briefly apply this argument to
the moral realism debate.
On the one hand, MR1 does not entail any theory of truth or
meaning at all, as is obvious at a glance. In particular MR1 does
not entail a correspondence theory of truth for moral statements.
On the other hand, no theory of meaning or truth entails MR1.
Not only is MR1 independent of any doctrine of truth, it does
not even use the truth term (e.g. `true') to state moral realism
(cf. Sayre-McCord).
This is not to say that there is anything
"wrong" with using the truth term for this purpose. We can simply
exploit the "disquotational" property of the term to redefine
moral realism as:
MR1*: There are moral statements that are objectively true.
But
this
exploitation
of
the
disquotational
property
to
"semantically ascend" does not make moral realism semantic (else
every doctrine could be made semantic); it does not change the
subject matter at all.
It does not involve commitment to the
correspondence theory of truth, nor to any other theory. Indeed,
it is compatible with a deflationary view of truth according to
which, roughly, there is nothing to truth.3
Why has the metaphysical issue been conflated with semantic
issues? This is a difficult question but part of the answer is
surely the "linguistic turn" in twentieth century philosophy. At
its most extreme, this turn treats all philosophical issues as
about language. Another part of the answer is the dominence of
worries about noncognitivism. For noncognitivism seems to be a
doctrine that is both antirealist and primarily semantic. I shall
discuss noncognitivism in a moment.
Some other examples: Hesse 1967: 407; Hooker 1974: 409;
Papineau 1979: 126; Ellis 1979: 28; Boyd 1984: 41-2; Miller 1987;
Fales 1988: 253-4; Jennings 1989: 240; Matheson 1989; Kitcher
1993; Brown 1994.
2
3 For
a less rough account of deflationary truth, see my 2000a
(or 2000b, an expanded version).
2
I claim that no semantic doctrine is in any way constitutive
of moral realism. This is not to claim that there is no evidential
connection between the two sorts of doctrines.
Indeed, I favor
the Duhem-Quine view that, roughly, everything is evidentially
connected to everything else.
So the possibility remains that
semantic doctrines might be used as evidence against moral
realism. But arguments that proceed in this direction should give
us pause.
Suppose, as I do (section 2), that moral realism is prima
facie plausible. Should we have sufficient confidence in any
semantic doctrine to allow it to undermine moral realism? Perhaps
realism could be undermined in other ways - and we shall soon
consider some possibilities - but could a semantic doctrine alone
do the trick? A Moorean response is appropriate: moral realism is
much more firmly based than any semantic doctrine that is thought
to undermine it. We have started the argument in the wrong place:
rather than using the semantic doctrine as evidence against
realism, we should use realism as evidence against the doctrine.
We should, as I like to say, "put metaphysics first".
Naturalism supports this Moorean response. The semantic
doctrines that feature in arguments against realism are typically
presented as if they were known a priori. But the epistemological
aspect of naturalism rejects a priori knowledge altogether:
philosophy becomes continuous with science. 4
And the troubling
semantic doctrines have no special status: they are simply some
among many empirical hypotheses about the world we live in. As
such, they do not compare in evidential support with moral
realism. Experience has taught us a great deal about what is good
and right, but rather little about the language we use to talk of
the good and the right. So semantics is just the wrong place to
start the argument.5
I have been arguing about what moral realism is not, it is
not a semantic doctrine. It is time to say more about what it is.
4A
particularly important consideration against the a priori,
in my view (1996a: 2.2), is the lack of anything close to a
satisfactory explanation of a nonempirical way of knowing. We are
told what this way of knowing is not - it is not the empirical way
of deriving knowledge from experience - but we are not told what
it is. Rey 1998 and Field 1998 have a more tolerant view of the a
priori. My 1998 is a response.
5 It
follows that the sweeping dismissal of naturalistic moral
realism by Terence Horgan and Mark Timmons (1990/91, 1992a, 1992b)
on the basis of semantic arguments is deeply misguided. We do not
know nearly enough about the semantics of moral terms on Earth,
let alone on their Moral Twin Earth, to put this sort of trust in
such arguments. The objection is not, of course, to semantic
arguments per se, but to ones that are supposed to establish
metaphysical conclusions.
3
This realism, like most others, has two dimensions, an existence
dimension and an independence dimension (1997: ch. 2).
The rough idea of the independence dimension is that moral
reality is mind independent.
MR1 captures this in its talk of
moral facts being "objective". They are objective in that they are
not constituted by our opinions, by our feelings, by our social
conventions, by the synthesizing power of the mind, nor by our
imposition of concepts, theories, or languages. All varieties of
subjectivism and relativism reject the independence dimension of
MR1.
MR1 captures the existence dimension in its commitment to
moral facts.
And this is its problem. Must the moral realist
really commit herself to facts, what Quine would regard as
"creatures of darkness"? Surely not. Surely a person could be a
moral realist whatever her position on the controversial matter of
the ontological status of facts. Can we then take the talk of
facts as a mere manner of speaking, convenient, but to be
paraphrased away when the chips are down? We can indeed:
MR2: There are people and acts that are objectively morally
good, bad, honest, deceitful, kind, unkind etc (virtues and
vices); acts that one objectively ought and ought not to
perform (duties); people who are objectively morally entitled
to privacy, to a say in their lives, etc. (rights).
There is no relevant controversy over the existence of people and
acts. So MR2 puts the controversy where it belongs: over whether
some people are objectively honest, over whether some acts are
objectively ones we ought to perform, and so on. Still, MR1's talk
of facts yields a very convenient shorthand. So I shall continue
to use that talk in the knowledge that it can always be
paraphrased away along the lines of MR2 when necessary.
Mackie's famous "error theory" rejects the existence
dimension of MR1 and MR2. He thinks that there are no moral facts.
It would be nice if we could rest with MR2 as our account of
moral realism.
But we cannot: noncognitivism forces us to say
more.
I have argued that moral realism is not a semantic issue.
This view seems to be threatened by noncognitivism which, as I
have already remarked, seems to be both antirealist and semantic.
An analogous threat comes from other forms of "nonfactualism", for
example, `projectivism', and Simon Blackburn's `quasi-realism'
(1984, 1993a, 1993b).
Indeed, Sayre-McCord and many others
clearly take the apparently semantic nature of noncognitivism as
supporting their semantic view of the realism issue. I have
discussed this matter at length elsewhere (1996b, 1997: A.3-A.10).
I summarize.
The usual characterizations of noncognitivism are along the
following lines. It is said to be the view that moral predicates
do not denote, correspond to, etc., properties. 6
Or it is the
6 See,
e.g., Ayer 1952: 89; Sayre-McCord 1988c: 7; Boghossian
4
view that the indicative sentences in moral discourse are not
assertions or statements, 7 are not factual or descriptive, 8 are
not truth-conditional, 9 and do not correspond to facts. 10 Rather,
those sentences have other functions like expressing attitudes or
emotions, or prescribing norms or rules; 11 for example, in the
crudest version, to say "x is good" is to say "Hurrah for x!" and
to say "x is bad" is to say "Boo to x!".
So, at first sight, noncognitivism does seem to be a semantic
doctrine, a doctrine about what sentences mean and predicates
refer to. Yet, when we look a little closer, we see that a certain
metaphysical doctrine is implicit in the answers, the view that
there are no moral properties 12 or facts. 13 Indeed, it would be
surprising if noncognitivism did not have an implicit metaphysics.
For the main motivation for noncognitivism's special treatment of
moral language must come from the view that moral reality is
somehow problematic or defective. Why else would you treat moral
language differently, claiming that moral predicates do not refer
and that what seem to be assertions are not really?
Despite the focus on semantics in describing noncognitivism,
at bottom it must be a metaphysical doctrine. What doctrine?
Unfortunately, the lack of attention to its metaphysics has led to
1990a: 157-161; 166; 1990b: 266.
7See,
e.g., Ayer 1952: 103; Haldane and Wright 1993b: 11; Hale
1993: 337.
See, e.g., Ayer 1952: 107; Wright 1988: 29; Sayre-McCord
1988c: 4; Blackburn 1993a: 3, 60; Haldane and Wright 1993b: 11-12.
8
See, e.g., Ayer 1952: 103, 107; Sayre-McCord 1988c: 5;
Boghossian 1990a: 160-1, 164; 1990b: 266; Blackburn 1993a: 60;
Hale 1993: 337, 340; Haldane and Wright 1993b: 11;
9
See, e.g., Wright 1988: 29; Sayre-McCord 1988b:
Boghossian 1990a: 160; Haldane and Wright 1993b: 12.
10
ix-x;
11 See,
e.g., Ayer 1952: 103, 107; Sayre-McCord 1988c: 4, 8;
Boghossian 1990a: 160; Blackburn 1993a: 3, 60; 1993b: 365; Hale
1993: 337; Haldane and Wright 1993b: 11. Strictly speaking these
accounts of noncognitivism need qualification because the
sentences in question may be partly assertions, partly truthconditional, and partly factual. We can ignore the qualification.
See, e.g., Ayer 1952: 89; Boghossian 1990a: 157-9, 161-2;
Blackburn 1993a: 3.
12
13 See
particularly Wright 1988: 29-30; Sayre-McCord 1988b: ixx, 4; Blackburn 1993a: 3, 52, 57; Hale 1993: 337; Railton 1993:
280.
5
a very unsatisfactory answer: that there are no moral properties
or facts. Our discussion of MR1 indicates the problem. The general
issue of realism about properties or facts must be independent of
the issue of moral realism. Thus it surely has to be possible for
a nominalist who denies properties and facts altogether to be a
moral realist. We solved this problem with MR2 by taking talk of
facts as convenient shorthand for talk of people and acts. But
this solution does not work here: noncognitivists are likely to
accept MR2, reinterpreting its language so that it involves no
commitment to a moral reality. They are likely to agree, say, that
some people are objectively honest but interpret this as simply an
expression of emotion, or whatever. Noncognitivists seem to talk
like moral realists. MR2 does not take adequate notice of
noncognitivism. We need a characterization of moral realism that
makes the underlying metaphysics of noncognitivism antirealist.
This characterization is not easy to find. We need to (i)
find some language that is not just apparently factual but is
treated by the noncognitivist as really factual; (ii) examine
noncognitivist statements using that language to find ones that
disagree with the statements of moral realists. I argue that we
should see noncognitivists as denying: (1) realist explanations of
the nature of moral reality - for example, in virtue of what Alice
is honest; and (2) realist claims about the causal role of that
reality - for example, that it was because Hitler was depraved
that millions died. This yields my final attempt at characterizing
moral realism:
MR3: There are people and acts that are objectively morally
good, bad, honest, deceitful, kind, unkind etc (virtues and
vices); acts that one objectively ought and ought not to
perform (duties); people who are objectively morally entitled
to privacy, to a say in their lives, etc. (rights). That this
is so is open to explanation and plays a role in causal
explanations.14
14 Sadly,
there is a flaw in this characterization. There are
doubtless some atypical moral realists who reject MR3 because they
join the noncognitivists in denying the need for an explanation of
moral reality and in denying that this reality has any causal
role: moral reality is inexplicable and epiphenomenal. Such a
position is deeply antinaturalist, of course. It is also hard to
motivate: Why believe in a goodness that can do nothing and cannot
be explained? Still, the position is possible. So far as I can see
this atypical moral realism cannot be distinguished from
noncognitivism at the metaphysical level. It differs only at the
semantic level in having a standard semantics for `good'. So it
differs in accepting MR2 without reinterpreting it to remove its
commitment to a moral reality.
The noncognitivist and the atypical moral realist agree that
there is no moral reality with an explicable nature and a causal
role. Despite this failure, the atypical realist holds that there
6
Or, returning to our convenient manner of speaking, we can say
briefly: there are objective moral facts that are open to
explanation and play roles in causal explanations.
2. WHY BELIEVE IT?
Why should we believe moral realism? It is prima facie
plausible.
It is a central part of the folk view of the world
and, until recently (before the postmodernist plague), the social
science view. Moral explanations seem to work: explanations
adverting to moral facts seem to be successful; the cruelty of one
person is as explanatory of behavior as is the cleverness of
another. Moral realism makes sense of moral argument and moral
disagreement. In light of all this, we should give it up only in
the face of powerful arguments.
I shall look critically at several arguments against moral
realism in the next section. The most worrying argument I shall
consider in the last section. This is the argument that moral
realism cannot be fitted into a naturalistic world view. How do
moral facts relate to facts about people, society and the world in
general? The answer must be that moral facts are part of the
natural world. And this amounts to claiming that these facts must
ultimately depend on the facts of physics, just as do the facts of
chemistry, biology and psychology.
The demand here is not for
some crude reduction. The idea is rather that there is a heirarchy
of "levels" of facts, each to a degree autonomous, and yet each
supervening on a "lower" level until we reach physics.
The naturalistic project is then to show that moral facts
supervene somehow on psychological and social facts, particularly
on the psychological and social facts exemplified in humans and
their societies. There is no need to give a priori naturalistic
"definitions" of moral terms, defining `x is good' as `x is N',
thus committing "the naturalistic fallacy". So there is no worry
with Moore's open question: "Is being N good?". The thesis that a
moral fact supervenes on certain nonmoral facts will not be
knowable a priori; it is an empirical thesis. So, the Naturalistic
Project is not only metaphysically naturalistic but also
epistemologically naturalistic.
Finally, one very good reason for moral realism is the
implausibility of all alternatives. The error theory has the
problem of all eliminativism: denying a commonly accepted reality.
Such a denial is surely sometimes right - for example, atheism but it is usually difficult to support and is in the case of
morals. All versions of subjectivism and relativism have wellknown difficulties in accounting for central features of moral
is a moral reality: it is simply inexplicable and epiphenomenal.
In contrast, the failure motivates the noncognitivist to reject
moral reality altogether by revising the semantics for what would
otherwise be straightforward statements of moral realism.
7
life, moral disagreement and argument. Noncognitivism cannot
account for moral explanations and has not yet succeeded in giving
a convincing semantics for complex sentences with moral parts,
particularly for conditionals ("If breaking promises is wrong then
Fred should have done A") In sum, moral realism is the best theory
in town.
3. ARGUMENTS AGAINST
The Argument from Queerness
Perhaps the most popular argument against naturalistic moral
realism arises from the idea that moral judgments are "partly
prescriptive, or directive or action-guiding" "just knowing [moral
realities] or `seeing' them will not merely tell men what to do
but will ensure that they do it, overruling any contrary
inclinations" (Mackie 1988: 101). Mackie summarizes Plato's view
as follows: "The Form of the Good is such that knowledge of it
provides the knower with both a direction and an overriding
motive" "the end has to-be-pursuedness built into it" (p. 112).
Similar views are to be found in Kant and Sidgwick. The argument
against moral realism is then that any fact tied in this way to
actions is, as Mackie nicely puts it, "queer".
How could this
sort of queer fact be accommodated by naturalism?
In responding we need to distinguish two claims: (i) the
claim that awareness of the fact necessarily gives a reason for
action because the fact is prescriptive and normative; (ii) the
claim that awareness of the fact necessarily motivates action,
causing feelings and desires that are usually overriding, leading
to an intention to act, so that the agent will normally act
morally.
Stephen
Darwell
has
called
this
view
judgment
internalism. Railton describes it as follows: "a moral judgment J
can sincerely be made or asserted only by someone who is (or
believes himself to be) motivated to some extent either to act in
accord with J or or to feel guilty for failing to do so" (1996:
62)
Claim (i) is no problem for naturalism. What it describes is
the categorical nature of moral reasons. "Why ought I to do what I
ought to, do what is right, and advance the good?" is a question
internal to morals, a moral question, and is answered within
morals. Moral facts are intrinsically normative. There is no task
of naturalizing their normativity over and above the task of
naturalizing their nature.
Claim (ii) ties moral facts essentially to moral feelings.
If those facts were so tied, they would indeed be queer. But why
believe they are? There is a correlation - an imperfect one between awareness of a moral fact and having certain desires that
move a person to act. But it is indeed bizarre to think that it is
part of the very nature of the fact that it moves people to act.
Rather, the correlation between awareness and desire to act is an
independent psychological fact that we explain scientifically:
presumably, this response to moral facts is partly innate, partly
a result of education. Given the obvious advantages to the human
8
species of this response it would not be surprising if it were
partly an adaptation.
And we are all familiar with the effort
that good parents put into bringing up their children to be
morally sensitive. So genetically normal well-brought up people
tend to respond in the appropriate way to moral facts.
This
independence of moral facts from moral feelings yields a much more
plausible view of the phenomena of (a) immorality, (b) amorality,
and (c) ordinary human moral fallibility, than the alternative
view.
Consider how the alternative view that awareness of moral
facts is essentially motivating - call this "the queer view" must deal with these phenomena? (a) It could say that the immoral
are simply unaware of the facts that would motivate moral
behavior. But the evidence of what immoral people say shows that
this is not generally the case; think of many cases of dishonesty
and theft. Where the immoral person is clearly aware of the moral
facts, the queer view must hold that the person is emotionally
torn, with an impulse to do good overwhelmed by some other desire.
But this is not psychologically plausible as a generalization:
much immorality is not accompanied by guilt or shame, for example.
(b) The queer view does not have the option of seeing the amoral
as emotionally torn, for the very essence of amorality is to be
unconcerned with morals. So the view must be that the amoral are
simply unaware of the moral facts. But again, the evidence of what
people say goes against this. The main failing of the amoral is
not that they are unaware of the moral but that they are unmoved
by it. (c) Finally, the phenomena of the immoral and amoral are
simple extreme examples of the phenomena of human beings, aside
from a few saints perhaps. Every now and then, most of us
recognize something we ought to do whilst remaining sadly unmoved
to do it: "I know I ought to...but..."
In contrast, the independence view can handle these cases
with ease, looking to nature and nurture for psychological
explanations of these various moral failings: "he was born evil";
"she wasn't properly brought up"; and so on. Richard Boyd has
suggested, plausibly, that these failings are tied to a lack of
sympathy (1988: 215). I would prefer to talk of empathy. A person
who is unable to "put himself in another's shoes" is likely to
lack moral feelings. Empathy makes "moral facts motivationally
relevant" (p. 216). Some people, for whatever reason, lack this
empathy and hence lack a moral sensibility.
The argument from relativity
Another popular argument against moral realism attends to
moral diversity and disagreement. Mackie talks of the "well-known
variation in moral codes from one society to another and from one
period to another"; we think of slavery, cannibalism, and
infanticide. There are differences within contemporary societies
over sex, abortion, capital punishment, and vegetarianism. Mackie
claims that these differences do not seem to come from
"speculative inferences or explanatory hypotheses based on
inadequate evidence"; rather they come from "adherence to and
9
participation in different ways of life" (1988: 109)
Before defending realism from this criticism, let me take the
attack to its rivals. A question that has been insufficiently
addressed is: How does antirealism explain the similarity in moral
codes: think of the agreement about murder, theft, honesty,
kindness, trustworthiness, incest, etc.? The realist thinks that
this similarlity arises from our responding to the objective moral
facts. Antirealism must dismiss this. (a) It is tempting for the
antirealist to appeal to the social efficaciousness of these
codes. But this appeal is in danger of collapsing into realism.
(b) Presumably the antirealist will appeal to a common human
nature, in particular, common moral feelings, leading to similar
but not identical moral codes.
That moral nature, not moral
reality, is the cause of what is common in the codes. And the
cause of differences are culturally explained differences in moral
feelings.
But this raises a deep question: How do we get from the
feelings to the codes, from having certain feelings when observing
theft to believing that theft is wrong? Why don't we just express
our moral feelings by saying "Boo!" or "Hoorah!"? Or perhaps state
our feelings: "I feel pleased with you" or "What you are doing
disgusts me"? Antirealists respond to this, drawing on Hume, by
talking of "the projection or objectification of moral attitudes"
(Mackie 1988: 114).
But how convincing is this psychological
story?
In any case, several things can be said in defense of moral
realism from the relativity argument. (i) Since moral facts
supervene on other facts, a difference of moral opinion between
two cultures may be explicable by a difference in those other
facts; for example, by the difference between a hunter-gatherer
society and a capitalist one. (ii) Even where there are no
differences in the facts on which morals supervenes, there are
several reasons why people might differ in their moral opinions.
(a) The supervention is complicated and so moral facts may often
be hard to discern. Discerning them is aided by education in
theory and the arts, an education that may differ greatly between
individuals and cultures. Thus it is helpful to be aware of social
"experiments" with utopianism, communism, fascism, democracy,
etc., which throw light on the human potential for good and evil.
And it is helpful to be educated about the psychology of slaves,
women, babies, workers, foreigners, animals, etc. (b) There may be
socially induced distortions in views about the moral facts and
the facts on which they supervene: ruling groups often have an
interest in instilling false moral views about, for example, a
neighboring culture. (c) Similarly, a person may have an interest
in not acknowledging a moral fact leading to what Judith Thomson
calls "walling off" (Harman and Thomson 1996: 205). (iii) There
may be indeterminacy arising from clashes between morally relevant
facts. Similarly, there may be indeterminacy in epistemology
arising from clashes between epistemically relevant facts. This
sort of indeterminacy yields "hard cases".
10
The argument from explanation
Gilbert Harman has pointed out that "you need to make
assumptions about certain physical facts to explain the occurrence
of the observations that support a scientific theory" (1988: 121).
He claims that the situation is different in ethics: there is no
"obvious reason to assume anything about `moral facts'"; "the
truth or falsity of the moral observation seems to be completely
irrelevant to any reasonable explanation of why that observation
was made"; there is no way the "actual rightness or wrongness of a
given situation can have any effect on your perceptual apparatus"
(p. 122).
Nicholas Sturgeon has responded that, on the contrary,
"Hitler's moral depravity...forms part of a reasonable explanation
of why we believe he was depraved" (1988: 234). Unless you assume
for some other reason that there are no moral facts, this seems to
be a plausible and acceptable explanation. And moral facts explain
things other than our moral beliefs: history and biography are
full of explanations in terms of moral character. Consider
Harman's own example: the wrongness of the hoodlums setting fire
to the cat is not irrelevant to the explanation of your judgment.
If, as the naturalist thinks, wrongness supervenes on some more
basic nonmoral properties and the act had not been wrong, then the
more basic properties would have been absent and you might well
not have made your judgment.
Of course, one could deny the supervention, but that is
different objection. It is important to see that Harman is not
entitled to assume that there is no supervention. He does seem to
assume that there is none in the following contrast with science:
"the physicist thinks he understands how the passage of a proton
through the apparatus might explain a vapor trial" (1986: 64); we
do not have the analogous understanding in moral case. I take his
point to be that we understand the mechanisms by which the proton
acts on the observer, but not the mechanisms by which the moral
facts do. But if moral properties supervene on more basic nonmoral
ones, then those ones will supply the mechanisms.
Epistemological Arguments
1. Harman starts his book with the question: "Can moral
principles be tested and confirmed in the way scientific
principles can?" (1988: 119). He thinks not.
2. A little later he asks: "Can you ever perceive the
rightness or wrongness of what he does?" (p. 120); for example,
setting light to a cat. Again he thinks not. Related to this,
Mackie claims that our awareness of moral facts "would have to be
by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition". This
view was embraced, of course, by the intuitionists who are now
rather unfashionable. Mackie goes on: "intuitionism makes
unpalatably plain what other forms of objectivism wrap up: (1988:
111)
Sturgeon's response to point 1 is good. He appeals to the
Duhem-Quine thesis: scientific principles cannot be tested in
isolation either.
In both cases we can derive empirical
11
consequences if we include background assumptions (1988: 231).
Harman himself shows how we could test, "It is wrong to cause
unnecessary pain to animals":
For Alfred to hit his cat with stick would be for Alfred to
cause unnecessary pain to an animal;
Alfred will not do anything wrong (1986: 59).
So we predict we will not observe Alfred hitting the cat with a
stick. If we do, some assumption will have to go. Consider also
how "We live in a morally decent neighborhood" is tested by
observing Harman's hoodlums burning the cat. Consider the many
falsifications of "Hitler is morally admirable".
Consider the
standard procedure in applied ethics where principles are tested
with examples.
Concerning 2, there is no special problem about observing
moral facts unless one assumes that they do not supervene on more
basic facts, an assumption that would beg the question against the
realist. We may straightforwardly observe the basic facts (people
dying, living in squalor, etc), or we may observe the symptoms of
the more basic facts (of pain, of intentions, of character etc).
We have a rough idea of the way moral facts supervene on these;
for example, on the pain of the burning cat, on the intentions of
the hoodlums. In these respects the situation is similar to many
case of supervening facts. Thus, we feel entitled to talk of
observing social facts on the strength of observing more basic
facts on which they supervene.
Of course the observations of moral facts are theory-laden.
But so are the observations of any fact. Any observation we make
is influenced by background theory and opinion to some degree or
other; for example, by the opinion that we are not under the
influence of an hallucinary drug. This theory-ladenness is
thoroughly established in philosophy of science and psychology. As
Boyd says, moral intuitions are just like the "theory-determined
intuitions in science, which the scientific realist takes to be
examples of epistemically reliable trained judgments" (1988: 200).
FULFILLING THE NATURALISTIC PROJECT
I will conclude with some brief and inadequate suggestions
for the naturalistic project, drawing on Boyd and Railton. These
suggestions do not amount to much more than gestures at the start
of the project. But, first, how worried should the moral realist
be about the incomplete state of the project? Is this a sufficient
reason for withholding belief in moral realism? As the
circumstances stand, I think not.
Of course were circumstances
different, it might well be rational to withhold belief:
(i) If there were other persuasive reasons against moral
realism. But I have just argued that there are not.
(ii) If moral attributions were not a success, if moral
explanations did not work. But the explanations are a success.
(iii) If there were persuasive alternatives to moral realism.
But I have claimed that there are not.
(iv) Finally, and most pertinent, if we had no idea how the
12
naturalistic project might be fulfilled or, worse, good reason to
think it could not be. But this is very far from the case. We
already have a good idea of the psychological and social facts
that are salient for morality. We know where to look for the facts
that underlie morality.
Withholding belief in moral realism whilst awaiting its
naturalization would be no more appropriate than would have been
withholding belief in Mendelian genetics whilst awaiting molecular
genetics.
All this having been said, it is worrying that we have made
so little progress on the naturalistic project. Still, we do have
some interesting ideas for advancing the project. Consider Boyd's
views.
Boyd sets out to explain moral goodness. He roughly
identifies a number of "human goods".
He sees these goods as
"homeostatically clustered" in that they are united by causal
mechanisms. Something is good to the extent that it fosters them
(1988: 203).
Railton starts by appealing to people's interests to explain
an instrumental rationality from an individual's point of view:
rational behavior furthers those interests. Then he develops this
to yield a theory of moral norms: "rationality not from the point
of view of any particular individual, but from what might be
called a social point of view" (1986: 190). So he offers "an
explanatory theory that uses the notion of what is more or less
rational from a social point of view" (p. 196): "what is morally
best...[is] what is instrumentally rational from a social point of
view" (p. 200).
In brief, Boyd appeals to human goods and Railton to human
interests.
These approaches are naturalistically acceptable and
seem promising.
I have argued for a nonsemantic, purely metaphysical, view of
the nature of moral realism.
I have given some reasons for
believing it. I have rejected four arguments against it. Finally,
I have offered some brief thoughts on fulfilling the naturalistic
project.15
The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
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15 This
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