Originally posted by bbarr
This is good. Here are a couple related worries:
When I started writing my dissertation I thought I was going to defend a neo-Aristotelian version of virtue ethics against some contemporary objections and try to shore up the normative foundations of such a view (it ended up being about meta-ethics and moral psychology). I went to one of my advisors to talk ...[text shortened]... mething like the protocols of a foreign etiquette.
What do you think?
On the first point, I agree that there is no clear way to derive norms of the form 'we ought to P' from facts about our dispositions or conative attitudes, but I am not convinced that the objectivist doesn't face a similar problem. I just think they hide it in a different place.
Let's take a non-naturalist objectivist (following Moore) who holds that moral facts are irreducible mind-independent and non-natural. There is one problem with which they must deal straight away, namely that this seems to warrant the possibility that a good thing and a bad thing could be identical apart from non natural properties. To get around this seeming absurdity, they might hold that the non-natural supervenes on the natural
However, the same point can be made here, that there is no clear way to derive norms of the form 'we ought to P' from facts, even if they are supervenient non-natural ones. To me, the objectivist attempts a kind of black box solution: it is constitutive of being a moral fact that it entails ought statements and since these facts are irreducible, we have our normativity without having to explain a derivation at all. The objectivist of this sort can give no satisfactory epistemological or ontological account of moral facts (or properties) and hides their own vulnerability to the looming naturalistic fallacy.
Perhaps the value subjectivist can say something like this. To value something is to have a certain emotional response to it. At the fundamental level there are things we as humans value according to our nature, and we disapprove of things that threaten or destroy what we value. (It might be possible to make a case that we are predisposed to disvalue suffering in ourselves or others). So moral discourse is concerned primarily with instrumental oughts, it is a cooperative conversation designed to bring a group to one mind about what we
ought to do where this is an
instrumental ought. What is presupposed is that we share fundamental values at a base level. It is assumed that we hold that suffering is bad and so on.
It can be replied that a pleonexic, let's call them Jones The Sane Strangler, doesn't mind suffering in other people, doesn't value people in themselves, and so on. Then Jones is not subject to the instrumental oughts which provide a reason to avoid inflicting suffering. The subjectivist has relied on instrumental oughts all the way down to essentially brute facts about what humans value as an end in themselves. The critic is right, Jones can skip about squeezing necks and will not be persuaded by the subjectivist case. They might be tempted to edge toward the objectivist camp a little and talk to Jones about the consistent application of moral terms.
But can the objectivist do any better with Jones? It seems to me unlikely that the objectivist scetched above would be any more persuasive. What about a neo-Kantian approach? Leaving aside whether we want the appeal to be specifically deontic, my view has been that a subjectivist account of normative theories fares no worse than an objectivist one. It seems to me that neo-Kantian views as you say, want to rely on the normativity of the rational. Leaving aside problems with formulating categorical imperatives that seem to do the job, it seems to me they leave the question of the normativity of rationality unaccounted for, so this is our free normative premise.
In other words, we rely on Jones being rational and hence being committed to certain categorical imperatives. We might want to find an inroad via consistency or somesuch. Consistency is constitutive of rationality we might argue, and we can demonstrate that Jones is already committed to rationality, what with all those elaborate and effective escape plans. But Jones can reply that although consistency is a useful tool of reasoning, and hence good for escape plans, it is easy to show we cannot posses it as a global attribute.
So the neo-Kantian approach needs to convincingly answer questions such as are norms like consistency instrumental norms, grounded in contingent ends that we set for ourselves? Why can't Jones say 'I'm consistent when I devise my escape plans because I want to escape, but I'm not wedded to consistency for its own sake, so even if you convince me that strangling people is inconsistent with the set of values I appear to uphold in other walks of life, I'll just shrug and say that consistency is overrated.'
In summary, I think on close examination, it is no more weird to say 'why sould I care about the norms of rationality beyond the point at which I can't get done what I want to do' than to say 'I know humans generally by their nature have an aversion to inflicting suffering, but I don't.'
I think one hazard with these debates is that it can always seem legitimate to ask 'yes, but why does that mean I
ought to P?' The question seems to have more intuitive appeal when directed to the subjectivist rather than the objectivist but I think this is an illusion brought about by lack of clarity about the 'ought' term. Anscombe makes a good point in the paper you cited and I think MacIntyre follows this up in After Virtue, and that is that it makes no sense to employ a term in such a way as to presuppose a frame of reference which you have yourself abandoned.
Also, the subjectivist might give an account of a complex moral situation, say the statement 'abortion is wrong'. There will be arguments on the level of non moral facts and instrumental oughts as to whether the fetus is a person, whether it will suffer and whether the mother will suffer if the abortion is not done, and so on. Sooner or later, the instrumental 'ought' in the 'ought we to abort' question, which is answered by reference to whether this will avoid suffering and so on, must refer to questions of fundamental value, we value persons, we share an aversion to suffering. But then there is the seemingly legitimate question 'but why ought we to value persons or have an aversion to suffering?' The subjectivist cannot offer anything more ex hypothesi. They have attempted to describe what 'ought' actually consists in and cashes out moral terms ultimately in terms of contingent facts about human nature. But as Hare put it 'To describe such decisions as arbitrary or unfounded, because ex hypothesi everything which could be used to justify them has already been included in the decision, would be like saying that a complete description of the universe was unfounded, because no further fact could be called upon in corroboration of it.'
Finally, I have to wonder whether meta-ethics is fit for purpose. Anscombe makes the point that we lack a sufficiently developed psychology of morality and that is still true half a century later. The trollyologists tell us that our justifications for individual moral decisions can seem like post hoc rationalisations that are in fact inconsistent with the normative theory we espouse. What hope is there that the meta-ethical level is any better? Could it be that morality is just one of those areas that as yet, humans are not so good at reasoning about?
The allure of moral objectivism
20 Jun '10 23:48
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