The “Rightness” Error
The “Rightness” Error:
An Evaluation of
Normative Ethics in the Absence of Moral Realism
Mathais
Sarrazin
J.L.
Mackie’s Error Theory postulates that all normative claims are false.
It does
this based upon his denial of moral realism. Without objective moral facts
“out
there”, Error theory asserts that any purportedly moral claims are
false
because such statements make the assertion that some subject (a moral
claim)
belongs in the predicate of either “Rightness” or “Wrongness”, neither
of which
exist. As a result the statement “murder is wrong” is false, since the
predicate “wrong” has no extension, and therefore the subject “murder”
could
not possibly be in it. In arguing for Error Theory, Mackie spends a
great deal
of time attempting to refute moral realism; however, this paper’s
primary
concern is with the relationship between moral realism and normative
ethics, so
to facilitate this process I will hereafter labour under the assumption
that
there is no moral realism. I will follow this line of argumentation
through to
its conclusion, in order to asses what impact this would have on the
possibility of making justified normative claims. For the sake of
clarity I
will use throughout this paper the definition of moral realism put
forward by
David Brink in his book Moral Realism and
Moral Inquiry, that is that “Moral realism is roughly the
view that there
are moral facts and true moral claims whose existence and nature are
independent of our beliefs about what is right and wrong” . Normative claims will also
be defined
as they are by Brink, as claims about things which are morally
important (e.g.,
what is right and wrong). Throughout this paper the
primary
focus will be on finding an answer to the question “can justified
normative
claims be made without moral realism?” To this end I will examine
several
contemporary papers addressing this question, as well as asses the
stronger
candidate metaethical positions for how they contribute to an answer.
Furthermore I will postulate the hypothesis that justified normative
claims can
be made without moral realism, in hopes of either finding support for
this
hypothesis, or reason to reject it.
First it is important to note
the implications of abandoning moral realism. This implies that we need
to do
away with all theoretical foundations for the inherence of objective
mind-independent moral facts. As a result, the notion of a metaphysical
ground
from morality will be cast aside; as will, to some smaller extent, the
rational
grounds for a deontology such as Kant’s. These can both be done without
affecting the world as we experience it. First let it be that there are
no
metaphysical postulates known as morals, second, allow that human
rationality
cannot provide an objective ground for moral realism, since
hypothetically this
is too queer and would require psychological corroboration which is not
presently available. So the world without moral realism look very much
the same
as it does now and the phenomenology of making moral judgements stays
exactly
as it would in a world where there were real moral facts. This brings
us to our
first consideration, that is that presumably people would continue to
make
moral judgements.
This superficially would lead us
to a premature conclusion, which is that without moral realism it is
plausible
that people would continue to make claims about what is morally
important, i.e.
right and wrong, and therefore they can in fact make normative claims.
This,
however, hardly answers the larger question with which this paper is
concerned,
that is “can people make justified
normative claims in the absence of moral realism?” The answer to this
bigger
question is ultimately more involved, as questions of justification
often are.
As a guideline to answering this I will outline several fundamental
prerequisites I feel must accompany an affirmative assessment of a
metaethical
position. It is critical that the normative claims being made are
justified in
such a way that they are non-arbitrary, and provide a ground for
establishing
the claims as addressing the subject matter of morality. In other words
the
metaethical position taken must allow for claims to be more than
opinions or
feelings, they must posses a character which identifies them as moral;
in this
sense they cannot contradict some very basic moral intuitions such as
“killing
is wrong”. Furthermore whatever candidate position is adopted, it must
be
consistent within itself, and just as importantly it must offer a
satisfactory
explanation for why people make what appear to be normative claims
without moral
realism to ground them.
Within the field of metaethics,
there is a dichotomy between cognitivist and non-cognitivist
approaches, the
former being the position that moral claims have truth values, and the
latter
that they do not. Because they deny that there can be any truth in
moral
statements, non-cognitivists are traditionally opposed to moral
realism, and
therefore are not affected by the assumption that there is no such
thing. The
non-cognitivists, therefore, are committed to the position that
normative
propositions cannot be made in a way that would satisfy the perquisites
outlined earlier. A brief sketch of the two prominent non-cognitivist
positions
will outline the challenges which must be faced by the candidate
metaethical
position which aspires to give a positive answer to our question about
normative claims. These negative accounts will set the bar for the
quality of
answer which must be expected if an opposing thesis is to provide a
positive
account of normative ethics.
The two non-cognitivist accounts
this paper will discuss will be Emotivism and Prescriptivism.
Emotivists take
the position that when someone makes an assertion which aspires to
normative
content, they are actually expressing their own emotive states and
opinions.
The purpose, then, of making such claims for the Emotivist is to sway
the
subjective states of others. Prescriptivism, on the other hand is not
meant to
be factual in content, but rather as Brink explains it, “express
universal
prescriptions or recommendations”.
These both provide a viable explanation for what is
actually happening
when people make normative claims; in this way they serve as opposition
to the
remaining normative positions, by way of providing and alternative
hypothesis
for the reason behind them. It is imperative, therefore, that an
acceptable
cognitivist thesis must succeed in providing an account of normative
claims
which is equally as plausible as its non-cognitivist counterparts.
It should be stated as well that
cognitivist moral philosophy does not unanimously support the thesis
that
justified moral claims can be made. As Geoffrey Sayre-McCord points out
in his
paper The Many Moral Realisms,
cognitivist theories can be divided between error and success theories. The most prominent
cognitivist error
theory is, for obvious reasons, Error Theory, as was discussed in the
introduction of this essay. This is a position that holds that moral
claims do
in fact have truth values; however, they are all false. Accordingly,
this
position will not be helpful in providing a positive answer to our
question
about normative justifiability.
If we are to find a positive
answer regarding the possibility of making normative claims, it will
surely be
within the success theory positions within the cognitivist camp. Once
again
this paper will analyse only the most prominent of these positions, in
this
case I will look at Subjectivism, Intersubjectivism, and Objectivism,
respectively.
Subjectivism, insofar as it is a
cognitivist perspective, asserts that moral claims have truth values,
however
these are not dependent on external metaphysical facts, but on the
subjective
states of individuals. Of the specific version of moral subjectivism
this paper
will discuss, Sayre-McCord says that for it, “…judgements of value make
sense
only relative to the desires, preferences, and goals of the judger, so
that the
claim that ‘x is good’ should be treated as elliptical for ‘x is
good-for-me’. In this case moral
subjectivism
would be relative, however this is not always the case; several
variations of
subjectivism provide an objective account of value. One variation makes
the
claim that any source of subjective value is objectively good; this
however,
does not sufficiently account for moral debate, since all goods are
viewed as
objectively good. The third and most sophisticated version of
subjectivism that
will be considered here encompasses the Ideal Observer theories. These,
as
their name suggests, involves a speculative ‘Ideal Observer’ who is
privy to
all relevant information concerning any given decision or value
judgement. It
is this Ideal Observer’s subjective states which establish the
objective good.
In this way the objective good is informed by what in fact ‘ought’ to
be the
objective good based on the state of the world. Despite providing an
objective
ground for value, this thesis, which I believe to be the strongest
offered by
subjectivism, fails to sufficiently justify normative claims. What the
Ideal
Agent provides are useful suggestions for action based on the given
circumstances,
despite this it (he/she [if it is gendered]) does not actually
articulate moral
value. The only way in which the Ideal Observer could give grounds for
moral
claims, is if there were moral facts which it was informed of, however,
this
violates the original hypothesis of this paper. Without inserting its
own
value, the Ideal Observer could not make the claim that “killing is
wrong”
without the existence of wrongness; as a result, this perspective just
defers
the justifiability of our normative claims to an unjustified Ideal
Observer.
Intersubjectivism, like
subjectivism, relies on the subjective states of people; however,
instead of it
addressing one person’s subjective state at a time, it incorporates an
entire
society’s collective values together. Simple intersubjectivism or
conventionalism, argues that morals are just whatever values are
established by
any society. This, unlike subjectivism, provides an account of what
could be
going on within moral discourse, which is that people are deliberating
over
what morals should be incorporated into the society’s value structure.
Despite
this advantage over subjectivism, conventionalism still is not
acceptable,
since if it claims that morality is determined by a social group,
meaning that
morality is socially relative. If it is not making this claim, but is
saying
that when people engage in moral discourse they are just discussing
conventions, then conventionalism would be non-cognitivist, since what
appear
to be normative claims are just claims about norms. Furthermore, as
Sayre-McCord argues in his paper, moral discovery in conventionalism
reduces to
sociological observation, which does not coincide with our intuitions
about how
the process of understanding morality ought to look. To improve upon
this view he
offers a strengthened variation wherein we “…abstract from actual
practices and
people and treat the truth of moral claims as being determined in
someway by
the hypothetical conventions or practices of hypothetical people”, he
then
claims that the benefit of such a process would be in “…holding that
the truth
of moral claims turns on what appropriately idealised agents would
agree to
under specified conditions”. Though this removes
conventionalism from the concerns of relativism, it runs into much the
same
problems faced by subjectivism, which is that it does not appear to be
discussing what is meant when the term morality is used. Once again an
idealised agent, this time a society, cannot discover morality unless
it
existed “out there”, which in this scenario it doesn’t; when it made
what
appeared to be a normative claim, what it would really be doing is
prescribing
some value. Even if the society in question is infinitely well
informed, a
prescription based on non-moral facts does not constitute a justified
normative
claim.
The last of the cognitivist
positions discussed by Sayre-McCord, objectivism, is only worth
mentioning here
in passing. In short objectivists assert that morality exists outside
of
subjective or intersubjective value, which means that it exists “out
there”,
Sayre-McCord provides a quote from Ross which articulates his
intuitions that
goodness does not arise from are appreciation of something, but that we
appreciate its goodness. This postulation of external
goodness obviously violates the anti-realist nature of this paper, and
therefore requires no further discussion here.
The preceding discussion of
competing moral theories was not intended to be an exhaustive
examination of
all or even any metaethical and normative positions. The purpose was to
evaluate the quality of answers which were available amongst the
prominent
divisions in moral thought. With the survey roughly completed, it is
now
possible to evaluate its results, in order to support or weaken the
hypothesis
that it is possible to make justified normative claims without moral
realism.
The most significant trend throughout all the theories looked at is
that none
met the prerequisites which were set out for an affirmative response.
Accordingly, since a substantial fraction of the moral landscape has
been
assessed, and not one perspective yielded an acceptable basis for a
positive
response to our question, it can be said that the hypothesis has been
weakened.
Of course, since the survey was not exhaustive, there is no reason to
abandon
our hypothesis yet.
Given these findings, it is now
possible to asses the likelihood of a moral theory proving that it is
possible
make normative claims in the way that has been outlined. It is our
assumption
that metaphysical and psychological claims to moral realism must be
abandoned.
Since normative claims would be impossible in a non-cognitivist
framework,
cognitivism must be where a positive answer would lie. Objectivism
failed by
default. Subjectivism, when simple was relativistic, when sophisticated
postulated a hypothetical entity which could not provide an objective
ground
for normative claims. Intersubjectivism paralleled subjectivism, just
on a
larger scale, at first relativistic, then non-moral. The question which
remains, then, is what a positive answer would look like, and if it
would be
possible.
An anti-realist argument for
justified normative assertions would first require a ground for
justification.
Since this cannot be external, or “real”, it must be internal. Since
normative
claims are universally prescriptive, their foundation must be
universally
accessible. This, however, would require that there be some faculty
which a)
everybody has b) provides consistent and universally prescriptive moral
insight
c) and qualifies that insight as moral in a non-arbitrary sense. Now
assuming
there is some such faculty (a), given that there are variations between
subjective and intersubjective moral value, it is doubtful that it
satisfies
(b). This, however, is a surmountable challenge, if one is willing to
grant
that not everyone can access their moral faculty, due to an
uncultivated soul
or some such explanation. Granting this, it would still have to meet
prerequisite (c), which is impossible without reference to some variety
of
moral realism. If there is nothing in the universe which is a moral
fact
outside of us, then this special moral faculty, which we have by
assumption, is
free to prescribe anything whatsoever. Since no objective ground for
justification could ever be provided (without moral realism), the
decisions
made by the moral faculty must be morally arbitrary. It could be
pragmatic in
its prescription, or even follow a consistent set of “normativesque”
imperatives; however, there can never be an objective non-arbitrary
foundation
for these. Unless one were willing to grant that non-moral facts are
relevant
to normative claims, then the latter could never come to be in a
non-arbitrary
way. Allowing non-moral facts to influence moral deliberation
presupposes some
understanding of the subject matter of morality. Since we are
attempting to
isolate what the process of achieving real moral understanding would
look like,
we cannot assume what is or is not permissible as a foundation for
morality. As
a result it is impossible to know what would be a sufficiently
non-arbitrary
basis for justified normative claims. At very best, then, it may be
possible to
make justified normative statements without moral realism, however, we
could
never know if they were justified. With this in mind, it is then
possible to
assert that we cannot be justified in making normative claims in the
absence of
moral realism, even if we might make justified normative claims despite
this.
University of Victoria
Victoria, BC,
Canada
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