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Meta-Ethics Naturalized

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

David Zimmerman
David Zimmerman*
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University
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Extract

Meta-ethics without normative ethics is empty. In the current climate this hardly needs emphasis: since 1960 or so philosophers in the English-speaking world have put away their earlier reluctance to think about substantive moral issues. For a while, in fact, it seemed that normative ethics would completely dominate the scene in the way metaethics once did, but, happily, this situation has begun to change with the appearance of a stimulating and illuminating body of work on the rational basis of morality. Even those philosophers most intent on solving first-order moral problems have begun to realize that, in the last analysis, normative ethics without meta-ethics is blind.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , December 1980 , pp. 637 - 662
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1980

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References

1 This body of work is rapidly growing. Notable entries include: Daniels, Norman “Wide Reflective Equilibrium and Theory Acceptance in Ethics,” Journal of Philosophy, 76 (1979), pp. 256–282CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “Reflective Equilibrium and Archimedean Points,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 10 (1980), pp. 83-103; Brandt, R. B. A Theory of the Right and the Good, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979);Google Scholar Mackie, J. L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Penguin: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1977),Google Scholar Part I; Harman, Gilbert “Moral Relativism Defended,” Philosophical Review, 84 (1975), pp. 3–22;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and essays by Daniels, Harman, Brandt, Kurt Baier, David Gauthier, Kai Nielsen, Jan Narveson, Nicholas Sturgeon, Ronald de Sousa and others in Reason in Ethics: New Essays on the Rational Basis of Morality, edited by David Copp and David Zimmerman, (forthcoming, 1981).

2 Moore, G. E. Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1903), p. 7.Google Scholar

3 Quine, W. V. O. ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, The Philosophical Review, 60 (1951). pp. 20–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 See, for example, Harman, Gilbert The Nature of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Preess, 1977). p. viii;Google Scholar and Rawls, John A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 578.Google Scholar

5 Putnam, Hilary “The Analytic and the Synthetic”, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. III, ed. by Feigl, H. and Maxwell, G. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), pp. 358–397.Google Scholar

6 ibid., p. 393.

7 I discuss this feature of moral Justification in “Are Moral Theories Underdetermined?” presented to the Western Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association, Cincinnati, April, 1978, and to the Canadian Philosophical Association, London, Ontario, May, 1978.

8 On clause (a). see Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19'3).Google Scholar pp. 12, 20; on clause (b) see ibid., pp. 9. 15, 20. Condition (a) is simply a demand for consistency, and as such holds of virtually any expression, not Just those governed by essentially universal criteria of application, and not Just “ought”. When critics have complained of the trivializability of the universalizability constraint this is the condition they have had in mind, for condition (b) is not trivial at all. An essentially universal term is one which (logically) can have more than one instance. Condition (b) thus excludes any ultimate principle which must be specified by use of a singular term.

9 Ibid., pp. 30, 33, 156 and 30, respectively.

10 Ibid., p. 32.

11 The phrase is Rawls'. He too insists that the formal constraints are themselves substantive principles. See, op. cit., section 23.

12 A Quinean explanation for the intuitive force of open-question arguments may be of interest. Moore argued that “X is good” cannot be equivalent to “X is R” (where “R” designates some non-moral property) on the grounds that a competent speaker is always in a position to doubt the truth “If X is R, then it is good”, but not to doubt the truth of the tautologous “If X is good, then it is good”. Stripping away the often criticized claims Moore makes about how one gets a proposition “before the mind”, the argument involves a bare appeal to linguistic intuitions. In itself this is no objection to the open-question technique, but it does vitiate claims about the simplicity and complexity of concepts which pass or fail the test. Simplicity and complexity are slippery notions, but it would have to be acknowledged, I think, that “molecule” and “triangle” and “mass” are complex (in Moorean terms, analyzable) concepts. But surely it is “intelligible” for a competent speaker to ask of some theoretical entity “X is a molecule but is it indivisible?” or of some geometrical figure “X is (a very large) triangle inscribed in physical space but do its angles sum to more than 180°?” or of some extensive magnitude. “The mass of X is n but is this reckoned relative to some inertial frame?” These are open-questions because the concepts involved are so complex, so ladened with theory. Contrary to Moore's assumption that some kind of absolute conceptual simplicity keeps a question open, it would appear that relative complexity does.

13 Some neo-naturalists root moral truth, not in rules of natural language, but in some kind of meta-physical necessity. That, at least, is how I take Alan Gewirth's response to criticism somewhat like that in the text. In attempting to work out an argument for the necessity of an egalitarian-universalist moral principle (which he calls the “Principle of Categorial Consistency”) Gewirth draws on certain allegedly analytic connections (e.g. between an action and the agent's claim to have a right to perform it). But he insists that “this analyticity depends not on my idiosyncratic decisions or even on conventional linguistic usage alone, but rather on the properties of the relevant agents and actions, as signified by the respective concepts. Some analytic truths arise because man can conceptually understand extra-linguistic properties and make linguistic classifications based on that understanding.” (“Moral Rationality”, in Freedom and Morality: The Lindley Lectures [Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1976], p. 141). How are we to understand this? Perhaps Gewirth means that there are certain relationships between concepts (taken here as extra-linguistic entities), these relationships can be discovered in some manner, and statements about them have a kind of extra-linguistic necessity. This interpretation takes us right back to Moorean intuitionism: one gets concepts “before the mind” to determine relationships of containment, identity, and so on. Problems with this idea are familiar enough not to need stressing.

14 For a similar view, see Singer, Peter “The Triviality of the Debate over ‘Is-Ought’ and the Definition of ‘Moral’”, American Philosophical Quarterly, 10 (1973), pp. 51–56.Google Scholar Many of the essays collected in The Definition of Morality, ed. by Walker, A. D. M. and Wallace, G. (London: Methuen, 1970),Google Scholar are taken up with the question of whether universalizability is analytically tied to “moral”. If the Quinean argument in the text is correct, this dispute is futile. At the very least, parties to the dispute should make a greater effort to show why it is important to fight out this largely taxonomic issue.

15 Here again, moral and scientific theories bear comparison. Radical multi– vocalism logically implies incommensurability. Compare the argument in the text with arguments against incommensurability claims made in the philosophy of science. See, for example. Scheffler, Israel Science and Subjectivity (Indianapolis: Bobbs–Merrill, 1967), esp. chapters 3 and 4.Google Scholar

16 This second brand of meaning-holism is close to Putnam's account of the meaning of natural kind terms. (See, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’”, in Language, Mind and Knowledge, edited by Gunderson, K. [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota], pp. 131–193Google Scholar). In both theories meaning is importantly constituted by actual extension. To accommodate speaker-meaning, a meaning-holism of this type would have to incorporate something like Putnam's notion of a “stereotype”. (op. cit. 166f).

17 There may well be more than a mere analogy between moral and modal concepts. There is considerable evidence for a modal reading of some normative terms. “Ought”, for example, functions as a modal auxiliary in many grammatical constructions, like “Agent-NP ought to VP”. And there are good grammatical grounds for thinking that auxiliary verbs are derived from main verbs plus sentential complements. (For the grammatical arguments, see, Ross, J. R. “Auxiliaries as Main Verbs, in Studies in Philosophical Linguistics, edited by Todd, William [Evanston: Great Expectations]. pp. 77–102.Google Scholar) If so, then “ought“ functions in deep structure as a sentential operator.

“Right”, by contrast, would appear to be an ordinary predicate, as in: “Nominalized-VP is the right thing to do” or “It would be right for NP to VP”. But this is not incompatible with a modal reading, for consider the equivalence between certain “right”-sentences and explicitly modal “ought”-sentences, for example, “It is right for NP to VP” and “It is not the case that NP ought not to VP”. If “ought” is modal, and if the equivalence hold, then it is plausible to take “right” as modal.

What of evaluative terms like “good”? H-N Castañeda has argued that goodness is basically a property of propositions and states of affairs in “On the Ultimate Subjects of Value Predication”, (in Value and Valuation, edited by Davis, J. W. [Knoxville: University of Tennessee. 1971]. pp. 21–36Google Scholar). lf his argument is sound. the way is open to a unified modal account of the logical form of both normative and evaluative language.

18 Searle makes his claim in “How to Derive ‘Ought’ from ‘Is’”, reprinted in The Is-Ought Question, ed. by W. D. Hudson (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 241; Warnock, makes his in The Object of Morality (London: Methuen, 1971), p. 123;Google Scholar and Foot hers in “Morality and Art”, Proceedings of the British Academy, 56 (1970), p. 132. Hare develops this account of “secondary descriptive meaning” in Freedom and Reason, pp. 9, 15, 30. The quote is from “Some Confusions about Subjectivity” (in Freedom and Morality, pp. 196-7).

19 This interpretation of sophisticated non-cognitivism must be qualified in one respect. In line with his view that ethical terms have only “secondary descriptive meaning”, Hare suggests that the law-like statements which confer it are “only analogous” to a descriptive meaning-rule”. (Freedom and Reason p. 21). The consequence of this qualification is odd: it follows that even if a moral term and a non-moral term have the same descriptive meaning, the meaning-rule underlying the first is indeed analytic, but the one underlying the second is somehow synthetic. The explanation offered for this strange state of affairs is that ethical terms have another crucial logical property, namely prescriptive force. One might well wonder, however, Just how prescriptiveness is able to bring about this sort of logical alchemy. Surfacing here is the pivotal non-cognitivist assumption that analyticity and nonassertive speech act potential are incompatible. I discuss this assumption and the important non-cognitivist argument it generates in “Open Questions, Speech Acts and Analyticity”, Philosophical Studies, 37 (1980), pp. 151-163.

20 We might call meta-ethical theories with this structure “rational motivation theories”. Examples of the genre include Firth, Roderick “Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 12 (1952), pp. 317–345;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Brandt, R. B. A Theory of the Right and The Good; and perhaps Rawls, John A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1971).Google Scholar Needless.to say, I offer the merest sketch of a rational motivation theory in the text.

21 Quine discusses the naturalization of ontological questions in “Carnap's Views on Ontology”, reprinted in The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), pp. 126-134.

22 Geach, P. T. “Ascriptivism”, reprinted in Ethics, ed. by Thomson, J. J. and Dworkin, G. (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 22–26.Google Scholar I discuss the logical structure and power of Geach's argument in “Force and Sense”, Mind, 89 (1980), pp. 214-33.

23 An example would be a rational motivation theory which construes ‘A ought to be done’ as ‘A rational prospective agent would have a positive attitude toward doing A.’ Unlike the meaning-holist theories considered in Section Ill, however, this sort of rational motivation theory yields a systematic multi-vocalism and thus a systematic breakdown of logical relationships. That is, the logical relationships among ‘ought’ -statements do survive among statements about rational attitudes, but only within the set of statements about the attitudes of particular prospective agents. In his recent Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, J.L. Mackie argues that the ontology underlying ordinary ethical discourse is intuitionist and that the only viable alternative is a kind of rational motivation eliminativism. It is a mistake, however, to overlook the reductionist alternative. The theoretical question is whether enough logical structure is carried over from moral discourse to rational motivation theory to Justify the claim to reduction rather than elimination. The whole issue needs more thought.

24 See reference note 19.

25 Stephen Stich discusses these two programs for an account of logical form in “Logical Form and Natural Language”, Philosophical Studies, 28 (1975), pp. 397-418. I am much indebted to this essay.

26 Putnam, “Language and Reality” in Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2, (Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 274-5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In applying Putnam's apparatus to an account of the ontological commitments of moral language I do not mean to imply that moral terms designate natural kinds. Whether they do or not will depend on what sort of naturalized meta-ethics is ultimately accepted. (And, of course, on whether or not there are any natural kinds.)

27 If meta-ethical theses do function as normative principles, then the distinction drawn in section IV between “descriptivist” and “non-descriptivist” versions of cognitivism goes by the board, since conditions of modal entry turn out to be members of their own law-clusters. The obliteration of this distinction is not a problem, though. The important thing is that a condition of modal entry be provided. A meta-ethical theory does not cease to perform this explanatory task simply by virtue of being absorbed into a normative theory.

28 This is not to suggest that I find descriptivist versions of a naturalized reductive meta-ethics plausible. Such a theory reduces rightness (for example) to the set of right-making properties in the normative law-cluster. But unlike rational motivation theories, descriptivist reductionism gives no clear answer to the crucial question of what determines entry into a law-cluster.

29 I return to this issue in a fuller way in “Meta-ethics as Reduction,” to appear in Reason in Ethics, edited by Copp and Zimmerman.

30 Sections I-III of this essay were presented (under the title “Does Meta-ethics Rest on a Mistake?”) at the Western Division Meetings of the Canadian Philosophical Association, October, 1977. Sections IV-V grew out of conversations with J. L. Mackie, Kai Nielsen and, especially, my colleague, David Copp. I am most grateful to each of them. The usual disclaimer about shared responsibility is in order.