Notes � Ethics, moral facts

Within cognitive relativism, there are those who believe that there is no single true morality because more than one morality is true, and those who believe that there is no single true morality because all are false. J.L. Mackie (1977) represents the latter camp, on the ground that while morality actually arises out of custom and convention, the meanings of moral terms presuppose a mistaken reference to sui generis properties that provide everyone with a reason for acting according to morality (see Value, ontological status of). Other cognitive relativists see no need to construe moral terms as containing a reference to nonexistent properties and instead tie their cognitive content to certain standards and rules.

J. L. Mackie, from Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Chapter One

Mackie was influenced by the British empiricists, and wrote books on Hume and Locke. Much of his work can be seen as developing themes present in those philosopher's works. His view of ethics is reminiscent of that of Hume. Mackie's final book, published posthumously, was The Miracle of Theism, in which he argued that all religious belief is irrational.

1. p. 89. Mackie says there are no objective values. Note that he is not denying (or affirming) that there are any values at all. I.e., he is leaving it a possibility that there are subjective values. He is not saying that we should reject morality altogether; he is just denying that moral values are part of the world.

2. p. 90. Mackie distinguishes his view from the one that says that "This action is right" means "I approve of this action." This is not his view, since he thinks that "This action is right," insofar as it tries to express an objective truth, is always false, while "I approve of this action" is clearly going to be true in some cases. Mackie is not trying to give a reductive account of the meaning of "This action is right."

7. p.91. Mackie explains that he is not attacking a straw position: not only have many philosophers, such as Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, held that there are objective values, but he also claims that this is a part of ordinary thought.

p. 92. Mackie refers to the debate about the meaning of moral terms engaged in by Moore.

"Noncognitivist" theories say that moral terms have no descriptive meaning, i.e., they say nothing about the world as distinct from the agent. Such theories may allow that moral terms express attitudes of the agent, such as approval or disapproval. In this sense, Hume seems to count as a noncognitivist.

"Naturalist" accounts of moral terms are those such as Bentham's, which say, for example that "X is good" simply means that X has some natural property, such as maximizing the general happiness.

Confusingly, Hume might also count as a naturalist in this sense, even though noncognitivism and naturalism are incompatible. (The confusion probably arises from the fact that Hume wasn't really trying to give an account of the meaning of moral terms, and so fitting his view into either category is anachronistic and distorting.) Tellingly, Mackie, who is in sympathy with Hume's view, thinks that there is some truth to both views, but also some falsity.

p. 93. Mackie says that the problem with these views is that moral judgements do seem to express claims about the nature of the world (and so are cognitive) that are meant to have normative implications ("a call for action") whatever desires we might have (and so are non-natural). Mackie points out that for naturalists a moral judgment only have normative claim on a person if that person has prior desires.

Mackie points out, in support of his analysis of moral terms, that people are inclined to suppose (falsely) that objective values are the only kind there could be, so that if there are no objective values, then there can be no reason to care about anything. (God is dead, everything is permitted.)

8. p. 94. Having claimed that our moral judgments are based on a mistaken belief in objective value, Mackie has to justify his claim that this belief is false. He first gives the argument from relativity.

If there were objective moral truths, then people would live according to one moral code.

But people across the world live according to many different incompatible moral codes.

So there are no objective moral truths.

Addendum: people's moral behavior should be explained by sociology and anthropology, not in terms of their ethical knowledge.

p. 95. Rebuttal. There are shared elements to all people's moral behavior, and it is this common core that is part of objective moral knowledge. These are the basic moral principles.

Mackie says that this rebuttal could be only partially successful at best. It would only justify a small part of conventional morality (the common core). Many other moral rules would be left unjustified. So Mackie seems to endorse the argument from relativity.

9. However, he places much more weight on the argument from queerness. There are two parts to this. First, metaphysical, based on the idea that we cannot make sense of objective value as being part of the world. Second, epistemological, based on the idea that even if there is objective value in the world, we could never have any knowledge of it.

p. 96. "Intuitionism" is the view that we have a special faculty of moral intuition that tells us what is morally right and wrong. Mackie says that any defender of moral objectivism must assume the truth of some version of moral intuitionism.

Mackie points out that the best defense for the moral objectivist to the argument from queerness is to say that although it is hard to say how we know the moral truth or what kind of thing it is, it is no stranger than many other things that we have no trouble believing in, such as "essence, number, identity, diversity, solidity, inertia, substance, the necessary existence and infinite extension of time and space, necessity and possibility in general, power and causation." Mackie gives a promissory note saying that it should be possible to explain all these things in empirical terms. That is to say, he thinks that we should be able to give a scientific explanation of all these things, and an explanation of how we know about them. But he is also ready to bite the bullet and say that if we can't give an empirical account of one of them, then we should conclude that it is illusory.

[It is especially hard to imagine how we might give an empirical account of logic and mathematics. We have a great deal of confidence in the truth of these and of our knowledge of those truths, but how are we to explain that knowledge? Is it truth independent of humans, or would there be no logical or mathematical truths if there were no human minds?]

p. 97. Part of the queerness of objective values is that they are not meant to be just there in the world, but they are also meant to be action-directing. They tell us what to do. But our ordinary senses don't provide us with any information about such entities.

How are objective values related to natural properties? A piece of needless cruelty is thought to be objectively wrong. But the wrongness is neither logically nor causally related to the cruelty. What other kind of relation is left?

Mackie doesn't go so far as to claim that the idea of objective values is incoherent. Rather, he says it is much more plausible to suppose that there are no such things because we can explain everything we see in the world without resorting to such mysterious entities. The alternative explanation would presumably be in terms of our subjective responses to the world. Using Ockham's razor, we should conclude that the simpler explanation is correct.

10. p. 98. Mackie still needs to explain why people make the mistake of believing in objective value. He does this by pointing out that we have a tendency to project our feelings about the world onto the world, as if they were part of the world. If a fungus disgusts us, we call it disgusting.

Furthermore, there are social pressures to justify moral claims. We want to control the behavior of other people, and when they ask "why shouldn't I do this," we reply "because it is wrong." On Mackie's view, this is just a rationalization, in the sense that we construct a false justification to make our lives easier.

p. 100. The "Euthyphro dilemma": Is X good because the Gods find it pleasing, or do they find it pleasing because it is good?

The first horn of the dilemma: if X is only good because the Gods find it pleasing, then why should we agree with the Gods? Is it only the fear that they will be displeased with us if we don't do what they want? On this horn of the dilemma, there is no intrinsic goodness to X, and so the fact that the Gods find it pleasing is just a contingent fact about them. It does not show why X should be pleasing to us.

The second horn of the dilemma: The Gods find X because it is good. This makes the Gods rational and shows why we should agree with them. But it leaves us with absolutely no explanation of why X is good.

This dilemma highlights the difficulty of providing an account of the objectivity of value.

12. Summary.

John McDowell: "Values and Secondary Qualities"

I find McDowell's prose style dense and convoluted. It takes persistence to understand his ideas. McDowell argues that values are analogous to secondary qualities, enough so for us to acknowledge their reality, as colors are mind-dependent yet real. In order to understand this and evaluate the claim, we will need to spend some time on our knowledge of secondary qualities. This involves metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. He argument works, at a fundamental level, by reconceiving how we relate to the world and understand it, and thus what ways in which we can legitimately talk about reality. His point is that we can legitimately talk about reality in way which includes values.

1. p. 201. McDowell sets out his own view by discussing that of Mackie. He says make that ordinary evaluative thought has a phenomenology of being a sensitivity to aspects of the world. He is thinking especially of �7: The claim to objectivity of Chapter One of Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. McDowell thinks it is important to pay attention to the "lived character of evaluative thought or discourse." [He is of course making the questionable assumption that there is some common factor in all such experience for all people.] The idea is that the world, when we consider it evaluatively, presents itself to us as morally loaded. It is not, as non-cognitivists would suggest, that we look at the neutral world and then experience internal feelings or reactions to the world. Actions and events in the world present themselves to us as being good or bad in themselves. Mackie thinks that this experience of the world is an illusion. However, McDowell wants to say that our moral experience can indeed provide us with moral knowledge.

2. If the world presents itself to us as morally loaded, then we need to give an account of how we get this impression. If the experience is correct, then it would seem that we have some kind of perception of the moral. Mackie said that we know that none of the primary qualities of objects are moral, and he assumed that such moral perception would have to be of primary qualities.

p. 202. Such a moral sense would be very mysterious, and it would hard to prove that it gave us knowledge. But why couldn't moral perception be awareness of secondary qualities. Mackie would say that this is of no help to the moral cognitivist, because our knowledge of secondary qualities is illusory as well. There are not really any colors in the world; we just think there are because our minds make it looks as if the world is colored. We project color onto the world, but science tells us that colors are not really intrinsic properties of physical objects. McDowell thinks Mackie is mistaken about our knowledge of secondary qualities.

3. Red is a secondary quality. An object is red if it looks red under certain circumstances. Red objects may not look red under certain sorts of light, or in the dark. "Red" does not mean having certain microscopic properties, although it may be that an object is red in virtue of having such properties. Redness refers to how an object looks to us. Red objects look as if they genuinely possess the property of being red. When we look at a tomato, we do not normally think of the experience as if we are looking at a colorless object that is causing us to have red experiences. We think of the tomato as red, independently of our experience of it. McDowell wants to say our normal way of thinking is correct here: a tomato really is red, it is not just a matter of looking red.

p. 203. Mackie thinks that tomatoes are not really red, although they really are round. He takes from Locke the idea that our experience of the roundness of the tomato resembles the actual roundness of the tomato (roundness is a primary quality that can be described by science), but our experience of the redness does not resemble any actual redness of the tomato (because science tells us that the tomato really has no color). McDowell suggests that the idea that our experience of redness could resemble the actual redness of the tomato is incoherent. (The argument will be that Mackie is wrong in saying that our experience of redness fails to resemble the actual redness of the tomato, because we can't even make sense of what this would be. It is not like saying that a portrait fails to resemble the actual person depicted.) To be coherent, it would require

i) that we could conceive of color as we can conceive of shape, as making sense independently of how things look. Objects have a certain shape which is independent of how they look to people. Colors are not like that.

ii) that we could make sense of the idea of a primary quality of an object resembling our experience of it, e.g., the redness of the tomato resembling our experience of its redness.

McDowell does not think that (ii) is possible. It would require us to conceive of redness independently of how red things look. We have no idea how else we might conceive of redness.

McDowell agrees that secondary qualities are subjective in the sense that we cannot understand the concept of them without reference to our own subjective experience. But he says that they are not subjective in these sense that they are figments of our experience.

p. 204. We cannot think of the relation between our experience and the world as parallel between that of a picture and what it depicts. In understanding our experience, we need to focus on its content, "intentional object". Then, if an experience is veridical, the intentional object of the experience does not resemble the thing in the world; it simply is the thing in the world. The relation is identity. So if I have an experience of a red tomato, and the experience is veridical, then the content of my experience is the thing in the world. This is part of a more general view that we actually manage to think about things in the world, and not just our ideas of them. If the content of an experience could only be an idea, then we could never think about anything except ideas (as Berkeley and later phenomenologists thought we are). This is another Wittgensteinian theme relating to the private language argument: our thoughts do not get their content from their intrinsic mental features.

We could give up the primary/secondary quality distinction, and say that there is no epistemological difference between colors and shapes. But then we would have no idea how the scientific nature of objects related to our experience of the world. The perceived shape of an object would be no related to its actual shape than the perceived color of an object would be related to its surface texture. McDowell does not want to give up distinguishing between primary and secondary qualities, but he cannot distinguish between then on the basis of the resemblance (or lack of it) between a quality and our idea of that quality.

McDowell wants to keep hold of the view that primary qualities are distinctive in being both objective and perceptible. In order to do this, he says we need to give up a view about what it is for a quality to figure in experience. It cannot be for the experience to have a certain intrinsic feature. Colors and shapes figure in experience simply as properties that objects are represented as having, distinctively phenomenal in the one case, and not so in the other. Then colors and shapes are equally real, although colors are intrinsically phenomenal qualities.

p. 205. McDowell says that his position does not have to reject the idea that an experience intrinsic features, but that there are good reasons to reject the idea anyway. He seems to be saying that the only features of an experience are its representational features. [This view is hardest to defend for experiences that do not seem to contain representations of anything, such as pains, itches, and the colors you see when you press your eyeballs.]

McDowell summarizes his argument so far. Mackie divided our understanding of the world into what might be called the "Scientific Image" and the "Manifest Image." Mackie thought that in fact only the Scientific Image is true, and the Manifest Image contains a great deal of illusion. Objects and events in the world appear to us to be colored, beautiful, disgusting, bad or praiseworthy. These qualities are part of our Manifest Image. McDowell argues that this picture of our relation to reality makes it hard to explain how we have any subjective or phenomenal knowledge of scientific properties. On McDowell's view, there is an essential subjectivity to our experience, but at the same time, our experience is not (intrinsically) misleading or inaccurate.

4. p. 206. Mackie defended his view that there is no good reason to think that objective reality contains colors by arguing that we can explain all our experience without supposing that colors objectively exist. This was generalized to skepticism about any objective properties which resemble our ideas of secondary qualities. McDowell has already argued that it is not a contingent fact about the world that there are no objective properties which resemble our ideas of secondary qualities, but that the very idea is incoherent.

This leaves the question for McDowell whether irreducibly subjective features can be a part of the world. His argument is not that we need these features to explain our experience, but that someone explaining our experience cannot consistently deny the existence of irreducible subjectivity. He concedes that it would be implausible to suggest that values have a causal influence on the world. Furthermore, there is a crucial disanalogy between values and secondary qualities. We see something as red if it is disposed to look red to us. We see something as good if it tends to look virtuous to us. But there is more to virtue than that: A virtue does not just cause our approval of it: it deserves our approval.

p. 207. McDowell elaborates this point with the example of danger. We fear something if it is dangerous. Our fear is not just caused by the dangerous thing, it is justified by it. The explanation of our color experience is different from our explanation of our fear. We want to make sense of the fear. The best way of doing this is to say that the object feared is objectively (in the sense of really, not as an opposite to subjectively) dangerous (or fearful, as McDowell says).

Similarly, we can best explain some of our other beliefs and behavior by saying that some things really have value. If we try to do without values in our explanations of our responses to the world, our explanations will be less intelligible. [Why? Presumably a lot of weight rests on the analogy with secondary qualities such as color. It is less easy to make sense of our experience if we suppose the objects in the world have no color. We can talk about what color an object really is, and of people being more or less able to tell what color it is. Similarly, it is harder to explain our behavior if we don't allow that some things are really dangerous, and of some people's ability to discern danger.] We try to understand ourselves and improve our behavior, and these two projects are connected. We improve ourselves through better understanding of ourselves and the world. It makes sense to suppose that some of our responses to the world are reasonable. Just as we can talk of the real color of an object, we can talk of the real value of an action, and of the variation in different people's ability to understand that value. There will of course be disagreement about values, but that does not invalidate the argument. In a footnote, McDowell says that the contentiousness of values may be ineliminable.

5. p. 208. McDowell is ready to concede that values depend on us as much as colors do, but insists that this does not impugn their reality. But colors, danger, and values all help to explain our experience and responses to the world. They are mind-dependent but still real.

McDowell considers how his view differs from projectivism, which says that values are not real, but that we can explain our behavior because we think that they are real.

p. 209. He says that projectivism relies on a thin conception of reality, with no justification for doing so. Furthermore, the justification of value-responses depends on their functionality. Whether something is functional depends on a value judgment, and according to the projectivist, this is a projection of internal approval. The projectivist mechanism must contemplate itself. This tends towards a systematic theoretical approach to value. But McDowell thinks that some cases will forever remain contentious, not capturable in a theory. His approach to value allows for more of a patchwork of values.