The allure of moral objectivism

Originally posted by bbarr
What do you mean by 'institutional facts'? Do you mean that they would function like specifications of the rules of a collective agreement?

Suppose that the truth-conditions of paradigmatic FO moral claims are determined with reference to subjective facts which are doxastic states. So if their content includes things like 'must be/not be done' or 'is always right/wrong', or 'is always the most important consideration', then it would seem that what makes the proposition expressed by 'X is wrong' true is that humans by their nature believe that X must not be done, and so on.

Institutional facts share this feature. An example would be that this piece of paper is worth five dollars. This is true in virtue of a kind of collective agreement.

Originally posted by Lord Shark
Suppose that the truth-conditions of paradigmatic FO moral claims are determined with reference to subjective facts which are doxastic states. So if their content includes things like 'must be/not be done' or 'is always right/wrong', or 'is always the most important consideration', then it would seem that what makes the proposition expressed by 'X is wro ...[text shortened]... f paper is worth five dollars. This is true in virtue of a kind of collective agreement.

O.K., I've given this some thought. Employing doxastic states as the subvenient base of moral facts may work in principle, but seems to face a Euthyphro-type dilemma, with the associated objections. On this version of subjectivism, moral facts are, at bottom, facts about what humans must believe on account of their nature. The FO claim "it is wrong to kill A" is made true by the fact that humans, as such, believe that it is wrong to A. But we might ask about the direction of explanatory priority between our believing that it is wrong to A and the wrongness of A-ing. If this version of subjectivism is true, then our beliefs explain the wrongness. So, if our nature was different, and hence if we believed different things, then the truth of various FO claims would be different. So, morality is both categorical, in that it follows from our nature, and deeply contingent (arbitrary?) in that our nature is hostage to profoundly contingent facts about our gerrymandered history. I'm not sure I find any of this especially problematic, because I think morality is for us and by us. In any case, much of this is applies equally to using conative/emotive states as the subvenient base. Do you find any of this troubling?

Originally posted by bbarr
O.K., I've given this some thought. Employing doxastic states as the subvenient base of moral facts may work in principle, but seems to face a Euthyphro-type dilemma, with the associated objections. On this version of subjectivism, moral facts are, at bottom, facts about what humans must believe on account of their nature. The FO claim "it is wrong to kill ...[text shortened]... to using conative/emotive states as the subvenient base. Do you find any of this troubling?

No, none of that is problematic, in fact you captured and articulated well my initial unease about doxastic states as the subvenient base. I came to the same conclusion that other conative states face similar arguments.

I think some objectivists do make the move from the contingency of our nature to the arbitrariness of moral judgements to attempt to show that subjectivism debunks moral concepts. For such an objectivist if torture is wrong in the actual world, then it is wrong in all possible worlds, even ones in which the nature of any human-like organisms is radically different.

In my view, when argued to the endgame, subjectivist views fare no worse than objectivist ones in terms of accounting for normativity and moral reasoning.

Originally posted by Lord Shark
No, none of that is problematic, in fact you captured and articulated well my initial unease about doxastic states as the subvenient base. I came to the same conclusion that other conative states face similar arguments.

I think some objectivists do make the move from the contingency of our nature to the arbitrariness of moral judgements to attempt to s ...[text shortened]... fare no worse than objectivist ones in terms of accounting for normativity and moral reasoning.

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 about the project, and he began by asking me "what will you take as your free normative premise?". This was an important question. Subjectivism equates moral facts with facts about what humans, as such, believe or desire or feel. We might as well say that subjectivism is based on facts about our natural evaluative judgments, or our natural dispositions to deploy certain moral concepts. But, although such judgments or concepts contain normative content, facts of the sort 'we judge that P' or 'we deploy concept C in situations like these', are still natural and descriptive facts about us. There is no clear inferential relationship between these facts and claims about the correctness of our judgments or the appropriateness of our deployment of moral concepts. To get from 'we judge that P' to 'It is normative that P' requires a supplementary premise; presumably your free normative premise. But it is unclear, to me at least, just what this premise would be. It can't be something like 'our natural evaluative judgments are correct', or else we run straight into a naturalistic fallacy with the looming and obvious counter-examples. Further, this seems to make a hash of what we are inclined to say about the possibility moral progress (as opposed to mere change in outlook). So, some special subset of our natural evaluative judgments must be identified. But then it seems like cherry-picking; as though, methodologically, we are employing our moral standards post hoc to select those special foundational judgments.

You began by claiming that subjectivism and objectivism fair similarly with regard to the deontic. Now, I am inclined to say that the deontic is simply incoherent, so it really doesn't matter whether a meta-ethical view, or a normative ethical theory or evaluative framework allows for it. But suppose I'm wrong about this. Is it true that subjectivism fairs as well as, say, a neo-Kantian view? There is an affinity between these two views, as both are constructivist about the normative. Of course, the neo-Kantian view is an example of procedural construcivism, whereas subjectivism is an example of practical constructivism. The promise of the neo-Kantian view (as well as some social contract views), is that it bases the normativity of the moral on the normativity of the rational; the thought being that anybody who is minimally rational can be brought to see how hewing to moral constraints is rationally required, and everybody thinks they should be rational. The free normative premise here regards the reason-giving force of considerations of rationality (either consistency, in the neo-Kantian program, or instrumental efficacy, on the other views). The hope is that any agent, just by being an agent, can be brought to see themselves as subject to moral considerations. On the subjectivist view, however, there is no grounding in the normativity of basic rational constraints. It is weird for an agent to say "why should I care about practical or instrumental rationality" (more for the latter than the former, alas for the neo-Kantian). But is it weird for an agent to say "I know that humans generally, and by their nature judge that P, but I simply disagree about P", or "I know that humans generally, and by their nature deploy the moral concept C in these situations, but I don't see that C provides me with any practical reasons"? It may be abnormal, in a statistical sense. Hell, we may even say that such an agent is defective, or inhuman. But these evaluations must strike such an agent as oppressive, or brow-beating, as though we were insisting on something like the protocols of a foreign etiquette.

What do you think?

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 mething like the protocols of a foreign etiquette.

What do you think?

Huh?😕

Damn your posts are dense with information. I have to study your stuff, not just read it. It's like reading a scientific journal article.

No disrespect intended! I'm impressed.

Originally posted by Lord Shark
No, I don't think that is more interesting. Still, each to their own.

😀

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?

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?

I think you should try to emulate the clarity of expression exemplified in the published works of philosophers like Karl Popper and Anthony Quinton, and thereby train yourself to stop writing the sort of pretentious gobbledegook you have posted here.

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
Huh?😕

Damn your posts are dense with information. I have to study your stuff, not just read it. It's like reading a scientific journal article.

No disrespect intended! I'm impressed.

You would be.

Originally posted by Sartor Resartus
I think you should try to emulate the clarity of expression exemplified in the published works of philosophers like Karl Popper and Anthony Quinton, and thereby train yourself to stop writing the sort of pretentious gobbledegook you have posted here.

Jargon is part of any specialized field of study. We chessplayers speak of space advantages, outposts, pawn majorities, winning the exchange, a minority attack, alekhine's gun, zugzwang, zwischenzug, etc. etc.

"Gobbledygook" is not necessarily a bad thing if it reduces the windyness/word count of a sentence. Trivial example: Shall I say,

Black would prefer to 'pass' the move to white. Anything he does damages his position in some way.

OR

Black is in Zugzwang.