Greg Detre
Thursday, 19 April, 2001
Jeremy Watkins, Hertford
Ethics III
In a famous chapter, John Mackie (1977) attacks moral objectivism in all its forms. He views this preliminary discussion of meta-ethics as necessary in firmly establishing his normative views, where normative ethics concerns �judgments about what is good and how we should act� while meta-ethics seeks to understand the framework within with such judgements are made. He points out that moral objectivism is by no means a straw man: Plato and Kant, for instance, offer two particularly strong forms.
I will start by outlining the various forms of moral objectivism and subjectivism, before considering Mackie�s arguments.
The most typical form of moral objectivism states that there is an objective standard of right and wrong against which my actions can be measured, and which I can internalise in order to evaluate future actions, that exists independent of any beliefs or thoughts that we might have about them. What is right is not determined by what I or anybody else thinks is right. Even if there were to be a consensus of opinion, the absolute, external, objective standard of morality would remain, unaffected. Moral objectivism is often simply described as stating that moral values exist independent of any mind being there to conceive or obey them.
Moral realism can be seen as a stronger sort of moral objectivism, in that it makes an ontological claim about moral facts. Analagous to metaphysical realism, it sees moral facts as having an indirect, primary, sui generis existence in the universe, like size or motion. Thus an action is inherently good or bad, independent of my valuation of it, or even of there being anyone around to value it. Distinguishing moral realism and other forms of moral objectivism can be tricky, in much the same way that maths is clearly objective, yet one is not even sure whether it is meaningful to ask questions like, �Are numbers real?� Mackie raises such questions within his �argument from queerness�, which I will discuss below.
Moral subjectivism allows that I can judge an action to be right or wrong, with the same phenomenology as a moral objectivist � the difference can be seen as lying in the scope of my judgement. As a moral subjectivist, I can hold that my action is wrong, but I cannot say that it is objectively wrong, i.e. that others must agree with me, or that it is wrong independent of my particular thoughts and beliefs.
In contrast to both moral subjectivism and objectivism lie the non-cognitive theories, like emotivism and prescriptivism. Here, moral discourse amounts to an expression of feeling related to an action, like disgust or approval, which may seek to influence or dissuade the audience, but such such moral views have no cognitive content and cannot be justified in rational terms.
Mackie employs two arguments in particular to support his position: the argument from relativity and the argument from queerness.
Put simply, the argument from relativity points to all the different, diverse and conflicting moral systems that we see around us, and asks the moral objectivist to explain why, if there is a single objective moral system, it hasn�t filtered through to the majority of humanity.
However, this flies in the face of the way moral discourse is actually practiced. Certainly, we talk about morality as though we are moving towards a better, i.e. truer, understanding of morality. When discussing ethics, we try and convince each other of our position by employing rational arguments to justify normative claims. I may even be persuaded through discussion to change my views. It seems on the face of it that most of us are implicit moral objectivists in some sense, since we appear to basing our judgements of right and wrong on a perceived absolute, external standard.
Moreover, the impact of the argument from relativism can be limited, by noting that just because normative claims vary widely across the globe, they may still be based on certain higher-order principles, like utilitarianism. Such principles are designed to give rise to different moral practices under different circumstances, which might vary according to the absolute level of poverty or cultural values, for instance. It then falls to the moral objectivist like Mill to show that such guiding principles do operate universally in different guises.
The argument from queerness seems rather reminiscent of Hume�s argument against causation, and indeed follows two similar forms (Strawson, �The secret connexion�), the epistemological and the metaphysical.
The
metaphysical argument claims that we cannot make sense of objective value as
being part of the world � for moral properties to exist, they would have to be
so �queer� that their existence should be doubted. The �is/ought� distinction blocks
traditional forms of naturalism (the doctrine that what exists in nature is
necessarily morally good) as an option for the realist. One promising form that
remains in which moral properties could exist is as supervenient properties.
A-properties supervene on B-properties iff: two situations that have exactly
the same B-properties have exactly the same A-properties. (corollary: there is
a change in A-prop.s only if the B-prop.s change).
Alternatively, Brink argues simply that the same difficulties in finding
synonymy between moral and natural properties apply in finding synonymy
between, for example, water and H2O or pain and C-fibre firing. Thus,
ontologically independent moral properties are no �queerer� than the facts and
properties of all other disciplines.
Second, the epistemological part argues that even if there is objective value in the world, we could never have any knowledge of it. This is one of the most difficult anti-realist arguments to answer. Different systems have employed reason in different ways. Part of the beauty of the Kantian enterprise is its applicability to all rational beings, of whatever physiology or culture, while admitting that the notion of duty alters correspondingly.