David Hume said, “Be a philosopher; but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.” The thing is, studying philosophy may or may not have an effect on your life. Even if it does, people usually follow Hume’s advice to compartmentalize. Meta-ethics is typical of philosophy here. Moral skeptics often clarify that they’re motivated by all the right ethical principles, but realists look askance at this claim. It’s not that people think moral skeptics are bad people, but that they apparently lack the courage of their convictions. Or maybe they’re hypocrites. If morality isn’t real, and you advocate to this effect, why turn around and claim to be a moral person in your day-to-day life? I actually don’t see a big problem here, and I’ll try to explain why. This blog post is the third in a series, so I’ll summarize, and then move to the task of defending the ethical beliefs of the moral skeptic (the first two entries are here and here).
Not everyone has the same view on the realism vs. skepticism disagreement in meta-ethics (skepticism is taken here as synonymous with anti-realism). The view this piece endorses is that it’s about trying to preserve all the main characteristics of moral discourse. So if moral discourse presumes ultimately overriding considerations, we should see if we can account for that in our theories. If we can, then realism. If we can’t, some from of skepticism has to be entertained.
It’s unlikely that we’ll find the exact right balance of compartmentalization between philosophy and real life. There should be some healthy separation, but too wide a chasm is psychologically perilous. We’ll probably have to settle for finding the right considerations to weigh against one another. Suffice it to say, any philosophical view that makes a mockery of our everyday experience should be viewed with suspicion. But if we’re sincere in the philosophical endeavor at all, we will expose our most cherished beliefs to scrutiny. Failure to do so will indicate a lack of commitment to the endeavor. It’s in between these warning signs that we should aim to land.
Perhaps some forms of moral skepticism fail here. But in particular, the “categoricity-only” skepticism outlined in the last piece (what François Jaquet calls a “local error theory“) allows the moral skeptic to reject a key component of moral discourse (categoricity) while holding moral beliefs with sincerity in their personal life. And this without enacting too stark or radical a compartmentalization with the skeptic’s meta-ethical views. This is because categoricity-only objections to moral realism leave all other key components of moral discourse in place. One way to capture another main component is through the concept of “irreducibility,” which means, at the very least, that normative and action-guiding considerations (of which morality is a species) have an enduring life of their own, over and above just the sum of their parts. There is no debunking these considerations via reduction or elimination.
Categoricity is the ultimate overriding strength moral imperatives possess. A normativity on steroids. Other forms of action-guidance, for example in intellectual matters, are able to override competing considerations, but not with the super-strong authority moral imperatives carry. Parsimony, simplicity, or Ockham’s Razor should whittle down our overall belief system when gratuitously extravagant theories fail to pass muster. One could use the word “overriding” in this context, but not with nearly the same strength as moral imperatives. The same goes for something simple, often shown in the example “If you want to be a champion chess player, then you should practice chess.” Practicing chess in such a scenario would override scrolling social media.
Action-guidance, then, can override within frames set by motivational characteristics, culture, political movements, intellectual endeavors, etc., etc. Moral reasons claim to override across these or any other framings. Whatever reasons or considerations prevail among diverging goals and interests, morality claims to have the weightiest reasons of all. To put a finer point on it, particularly since we saw in the last piece that intellectual reasons sometimes claim categorical authority (e.g. one ought to form only justified beliefs), categoricity is the strongest form of reason-giving, and its most concentrated cluster is found in moral reason-giving.
This ultra strong overriding power is not necessarily the same as absolute moral guidance. That is, some have gone so far as to say it would be impermissible to lie to the Nazi official at your door, because lying is wrong, so you’d have to admit Anne Frank is in the attic. Many people rightly dismiss this as an insanely narrow kind of moral guidance. What we’re left with is the general and somewhat vague idea of the good or the right, that isn’t explicable in a simple formula and is highly dependent on context.
The fact that there is an element of vagueness to “the right thing,” doesn’t make it any weaker in our moral discourse. Most of us can live simultaneously with “do not lie” and “do not give away a child’s location to a deranged psychopath.” The point is, moral discourse does not treat doing the right thing as optional. It would be strange to say “well yes, that person did the morally wrong thing, but they just live by a different code than we do, one that allows them to do bad things if it feels good.”
The examples we choose in rarefied meta-ethical conversations are instructive, though they may seem too fanciful at first. The selfish hedonist who treats moral rules as completely optional, for example. But we see examples like this, at least in miniature, all the time. The reasons we give in actual moral discourse are made clearer by stark examples in meta-ethical discussion. It’s true that we don’t often encounter someone who openly rejects moral reasoning in favor of whatever feels pleasurable, but we give reasons across boundaries of desire on a regular basis.
Meta-ethics has traditionally tasked itself with finding whether or not reasons can be sensibly given across motivational lines. But judging from how moral realists talk, it often seems like the pressure originally came from skeptics. It’s as if normal people were all minding their own business one day, giving and receiving moral reasons, and some skeptics came along and said “No, no, no. This won’t do. People engaged in moral discourse are only expressing preferences in taste and often driven by prejudice.” If it wasn’t based in taste, moral reasons were a metaphysical error of some sort. Skeptics sometimes say that the pervasiveness and intractability of moral disagreement shows morality to be too indeterminate. The arguments along these lines pile up.
But not all forms of moral skepticism lodge these complaints. If people in conversation are sufficiently motivated to engage in moral discourse, there’s nothing suspect about that practice, at least not from the perspective of categoricity-only error theory. Moral statements make objective observations about the world. It’s just that they do not successfully state why a person without the right desires should have done otherwise, and this is whether someone lacks the right desires in a global sense (the selfish hedonist) or in a more everyday sense, which manifests itself more case-by-case.
Error theory is sometimes accused of setting too a high a bar for moral realists to meet. The fact that people disregard moral reasons can’t be enough to reject their status as real, because people reject reality all the time. What’s left is how to talk about those who flout moral reasons. Realists are often satisfied with simply describing moral scofflaws as immoral. But moral discourse presumes that moral scofflaws have missed something, or breached some pre-existing contract, or have failed to behave rationally – something to that effect. There is a weight of judgement on them. It is not that the immoral have earned the name only by choosing some other action-guiding sales-pitch.
The problem is, the rewards of immorality are often obvious. The bad guys sometimes win. There’s no obvious failure of rationality there. When we complain with moral indignation about the scammer who took off with grandma’s retirement funds, we are at least saying they made a mistake about some consideration that applied to them, regardless of their desires.
This is the real-life situation in which the categoricity-only moral skeptic has to operate. Rejecting categoricity while maintaining a sincere folk practice of moral communication can seem tricky at first. Non-cognitivists have an initial advantage. They can simply say they feel all the indignation other people do, while characterizing it as ultimately about expressing a preference rather than a fact. This doesn’t have to trivialize moral reactions because repugnance is an emotional response. That moral reactions can be about expressing preference or taste rather than fact is consistent with the reactions being intense.
A global error theory creates trouble for adherents by denying too much. Non-cognitivist solutions to the problem of everyday morality aren’t available to error theory because as a form of cognitivism, its stance on moral statements is that they purport to state objective facts (which can still allow for the possibility of moral statements coming through with emotion). The way the error theorist can retain the normativity of action guidance, intellectual values, and moral beliefs is to concede everything necessary to retain real reference to those kinds of factors.
Another possible solution is to be a cognitivist about all of the aforementioned considerations, but a non-cognitivist about categoricity. But it would odd if all action-guiding judgements and statements purported to objectivity, except for the strongest form of those judgments and statements.
The non-cognitivist is partially right that a key function of moral statements is making one’s own feelings known about a situation. To openly admit skepticism in the midst of a situation with moral valence, an anti-realism with the view that “murder is wrong” is false, would be to signal that one approves or at the very least doesn’t disapprove of murder. That would be a misleading signal, all to accommodate some highly academic position. Realists sometimes take moral anti-realism to mean “it’s fine to murder” but “fine” is another morally evaluative term, so it would be equally false, from the high altitude of the meta-ethical. So disclosing moral skepticism in everyday conversation appears to be no more honest than simply adhering to normal moral discourse, provided that one sincerely holds the moral view, and can employ moral terms as referring to real considerations.
Another meta-ethical option is to map moral imperatives onto the dictates of rationality. Irrationality involves real mistakes. Failures of rationality often lead to disordered lives and inefficient actions. If immorality is irrational by definition, then realism comes easy. But as people have gradually realized that immorality isn’t necessarily irrational, the move to make it a failure of meeting the essential characteristics of the human being has arisen (or re-arisen, from a historical lens).
But from the point of view of the categoricity-only moral skeptic, the problem isn’t in describing or referring to something real. Morality is not flawed internally from this perspective. The problem is that morality makes universal claims that purport to ultimate overriding strength, and not just internally. So what can the categoricity-only moral skeptic do to adhere to the common practices of moral discourse?
Moving to the realm of the personal, the possibility outlined here is not in becoming non-cognitivist about categorical statements or tip-toeing around when people speak in ways that invoke the concept of the categorical. One should participate in moral discourse much like before the disorienting influence of philosophy. In other words, the advice is to be a human being rather than a philosopher. There may be some uncomfortable compartmentalization that follows, but it’s minimized because moral statements still have a kind of reality in terms of reference and meaning.
The categoricity-only moral skeptic should feel at liberty to view the tension between their regular and philosophical life as a kind of tragedy. The fact that philosophical scrutiny has taken the luster off a common moral intuition can feel regrettable. Skepticism doesn’t have to be a smug position. In this and other ways, moral skepticism isn’t necessarily as cold as it’s often taken to be. It doesn’t usually occur to people, for example, that one might be a moral skeptic out of respect for moral discourse, unwilling to accept a watered down version of realism that doesn’t even attempt to account for categoricity.
Attempts to ground moral reason-giving have included envisioning the human being as having essential characteristics built in. Phillipa Foot was a revolutionary exponent of this approach. She resuscitated Aristotle’s virtue ethics and applied it to the most consequential meta-ethical debates of the 20th-century. This was not without some distancing on Foot’s part from the most pre-modern and essentialist features of Aristotle’s philosophy of science. Foot did not want to say that human beings have a preset telos, or a purpose in any remotely divine sense, but a function built into what it means to understand what human beings are.
If successful, this approach would sail right in between the icebergs of metaphysical fancy on one end, and nihilist scientism on the other. It calls upon the concept of the fitness of a species, which allows us to judge as defective an oak tree’s shallow roots or a gull who could not distinguish the cries of its own chick. Foot tells us that no extravagant sense of cosmic purpose is invoked in the position that to understand a species is to understand it functionally. This approach enables a proper grounding of discussions of flourishing and defect, which will then map onto evaluating human beings in moral terms.
One problem that presents itself, though, is that deviations arise (in the form of immorality in individuals and societies) from the way humans are hoped to be at a high-level of social organization. These deviations must then be characterized as lacking fitness, or short of that (and the effort will fall short), the deviations must then be seen as artificial impositions on otherwise natural human affairs. Sifting through and ranking human phenomena in this way will eventually prove to be tendentious and circular, assuming what it has to prove.
In an earlier phase of scholarship, Foot emphasized what we now think of as “thick” moral concepts, picked up later and coined by Bernard Williams. Thick moral terms, like courage, treachery, etc. have both evaluative and descriptive content (Foot would later merge her account of flourishing with the resources gained in thick moral evaluation). There is then, some factual grounds for moral evaluation. One couldn’t say, as Hilary Putnam pointed out, that someone is a very cruel and good person.
Though Foot’s work was insightful and highly influential in both these phases, there are those of us who think she had it right in her middle phase, with the essay “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives.” There, Foot advised “we are not conscripts in the army of virtue, but volunteers.” A universal and strong categoricity was set aside in this account.
So we might wonder what we would do if we discovered that morality isn’t real in any universal or overriding sense. Would we rape and pillage, free from any feeling of right and wrong? A dispute between theists and atheists is instructive here. Theists sometimes assert that without God, morality would make no sense. A world lacking in divine guidance or retribution would mean “everything is permitted.” The atheist then flips the assertion back on the theist with something like “are you saying if you found out God isn’t real, you would just be a bad person with no hesitation?” This is a fair question, and illustrates for the theist that people are already morally motivated aside from their beliefs about cosmic meaning and punishment.
There might be some socially disruptive results from humanity at scale losing a sense of cosmic purpose, (from my seat, it’s an open question), but at the very least, the moral instinct would remain in some form. So the question that once drove Foot is, why be moral? From the perspective of adherents to categoricity-only moral skepticism, the answer should be organic and spontaneous; because we love our children, we feel for the grief-stricken, we feel a common stewardship with our neighbors, we believe in social justice. Whether or not God watches over us, or if the universe is constituted such and such a way for morality to be anchored in the fundamentals, hopefully our love, empathy and sense of responsibility aren’t propped up by the views we hold on these questions.
The field is now open for the categoricity-only moral skeptic to take self-ownership of the life they choose. The choice they’ll make will tell us what kind of person they are. This is an “existentialist ish” view of the moral world, in that the agent cannot persuasively appeal to pre-existing categorical reasons as an overriding justification. This is not to say that moral reasons cannot have a lure of their own. Indeed just about any kind of reason can have a pull. The view here is only directionally existentialist because existentialism, at least in the hands of Jean-Paul Sartre, is too insistent that essence is preceded by something as empty as mere existence. Sartre denies himself the resources to evaluate a choice in any terms, so long as the choice is decisive, because no reasons exist apart from the choice.
But the moral skepticism defended here acknowledges the reality and irreducibility of reasons for belief, action, and life orientation. It’s not a form of moral realism because it acknowledges that “bad” reasons are reasons too. Still, the moral life has a call if people want to listen. Truly moral people, even if they find that morality is ultimately only one item among many on an existential menu, will volunteer anyway. The fact that this choice feels so contingent, that it’s not rooted in anything inevitable or universal, is disturbing to some.
When faced with pressing human affairs, though, these worries tend to fall by the wayside. Again, as the middle phase-Phillipa Foot counseled, “it did not strike the citizens of Leningrad that their devotion to the city and its people during the terrible years of the siege was contingent.” It would be odd, though, in everyday life, to characterize such matters as “contingent,” because from our perspective, they are of ultimate importance. It’s only in deep and somewhat forced philosophical reflection that we see the reality of the universal contingency of choice.
Speaking for this particular brand of moral skepticism, once we regain our footing from any initial disorientation from its core revelations, we realize that we’re now free to claim the moral life with a greater organic spontaneity than before. We might wince at a cold world that shows no preference for the kind of life we choose, but we choose the moral life all the same. When others are lured by the call of immoral reasons, we are heartbroken and frustrated, just as the morally principled are sometimes looked upon with contempt and bemusement. At the level of human life, this interchange goes on indefinitely with no resolution in sight.
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