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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 January 2009
The search for moral objectivity has been constant throughout the history of philosophy, although interpretations of the nature and scope of objectivity have varied. One aim of the pursuit of moral objectivity has been the demonstration of what may be termed its epistemological thesis, that is, the claim that the truth of assertions of the goodness or rightness of moral acts is as legitimate, reliable, or valid as the truth of assertions involving other forms of human knowledge, such as common sense, practical expertise, science, or mathematics. Another aim of the quest for moral objectivity may be termed its pragmatic formulation; this refers to the development of a method or procedure that will mediate among conflicting moral views in order to realize a convergence or justified agreement about warranted or true moral conclusions. In the ethical theories of Aristotle, David Hume, and John Dewey, theories that represent three of the four variants of ethical naturalism (defined below) that are surveyed in this essay, the epistemological thesis and the pragmatic formulation are integrated or combined. The distinction between these two elements is significant for the present essay, however, since I want to show that linguistic naturalism, the fourth variant I shall examine, has provided a demonstration of the epistemological thesis about moral knowledge, even if the pragmatic formulation has not been successfully realized.
1 This formulation may bypass, but need not exclude, an interpretation of the ontological aspects of moral objectivity. Despite its origins in Platonic philosophy, moral objectivity can be interpreted so that it does not require an ontological realism, in the sense that the goodness or rightness of moral acts represents or embodies features of the universe that exist antecedent to or independent of human life on the planet. Yet it would be consistent with the epistemological thesis to hold that the rightness of an action is a real feature of the world, constituted by the existence of the reasons that justify the action. This is analogous, for example, to the claim that Gilbert Ryle did not deny the reality of mind in The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949)Google Scholar when he insisted that the Cartesian res cogitans had no separate existence and that all mental terms could be interpreted as modifications of human behavior.
2 Hart, H. L. A., “Are There Any Natural Rights?” Philosophical Review 64, no. 2 (1955): 175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Broad, C. D., Five Types of Ethical Theory (1930; reprint, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971).Google Scholar
4 This discussion of the Kosovo situation has been developed to illustrate various aspects of the Humean method of arriving at moral agreement. In actual historical situations, there are many disputed ancillary issues that are relevant in the process of decision-making. For example, in the Kosovo situation, the Yugoslav government had agreed to allow unarmed observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to monitor human rights violations in the territory. These observers did not succeed in preventing small-scale outbreaks of violence, but did represent a bar to large-scale warfare or ethnic cleansing. The conflict-resolution option these observers represented was eliminated in order to pursue a more comprehensive solution to the Yugoslav conflict. The OSCE observers were withdrawn in order to make possible the bombing of Yugoslavia. The U.S. secretary of state had apparently assumed that this bombing would achieve its intended goal within a few days and that a more robust force of observers would then be reintroduced. In fact, it did achieve its goal, but only after a long period of armed activity and the flight of half a million people. To arrive at a moral evaluation of decisions made in a situation like this, a hypothetical impartial observer would have to reconstruct the complexities of the situation at particular moments in time; the resultant evaluation would probably contain equivocal elements.
5 Urmson, J. O., Philosophical Analysis: Its Development Between the Two World Wars (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).Google Scholar
6 Dewey, John, “Introduction,” in Dewey, , Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Modern Library, 1957), 3–13.Google Scholar
7 Dewey, John, “The Construction of Good,” in Dewey, , The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (London: G. Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1930), 242–72.Google Scholar
8 This thesis is presented in Mill, John Stuart, “Of What Sort of Proof the Principle of Utility is Susceptible,” chap. 4 of Mill, Utilitarianism (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1948), 37–44.Google Scholar
9 Stevenson developed various models of ethical disagreement in Stevenson, C. L., Ethics and Language (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940).Google Scholar Some of these corresponded to the Deweyan model, and others represented a “disagreement-in-attitude.”
10 Strachey, Lytton to Moore, G. E., reprinted in Holroyd, Michael, Lytton Strachey (London: Random House, 1994), 89–90.Google Scholar
11 This review of Heidegger's criticism of Aristotelian ethics focuses on the issue of naturalism versus nonnaturalism. The Heideggerian critique can be construed as involving an ontological dimension. The Aristotelian schema of the actualization of potentialities throughout nature is structured, in Heideggerian terms, by a highest region of Eternal Actuality or Being and a lowest region of Potentiality that is not Non-Being. A Heideggerian would assert that just as Plato did not abandon Pythagoreanism in his idealization of justice as modeled on the harmony of the spheres, so Aristotle never eliminated the traces of Parmenideanism in both the affirmation of the necessary existence of Actuality and the negation of Non-Being or Nothingness. The Parmenidean fragment that Aristotle confirms but Heidegger rejects is “Non-Being cannot be.”
12 Williams, Bernard, “The Idea of Equality,” in Laslett, Peter and Runciman, W. G., eds., Philosophy, Politics, and Society, 2d ser. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962).Google Scholar
13 Williams, Bernard, “Internal and External Reasons,” in Williams, , Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 101–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14 In a forum sponsored by the Journal of Philosophy as a Festschrift for Bernard Williams, this example was raised by Allan Gibbard as a probe of Williams's insistence on internal reasons for ethical justification. In his response, Williams cited the statement of Oscar Wilde: “Blasphemy is not a word in my vocabulary.” (Williams's point is missed in the pedantic riposte that Wilde, as the author of Salomè, a text that was influenced by Flobere's Herodius, was aware of the distinctions among such concepts as apostasy, heresy, and blasphemy.) Williams's point is that it would be a conceptual and moral error to hold that a person is responsible for a supposed moral breach if the elements of that breach have no place within his own conceptual moral framework. This response is problematic, however, for it is important to guard against those who commit wrong acts and then claim to lack an understanding of the moral vocabulary. Perpetrators of genocide, for instance, have argued that they did not consider their human victims to be members of the species Homo sapiens.
In the case of blasphemy, virtually all secular cultures have some concept of courtesy or rudeness as well as some notion of prized or cherished objects. Consequently, the idea of blasphemy as the desecration of objects that are held sacred by another person can be understood in secular languages. On this analysis, the conceptual divide between moral judgments and the reasons supporting them is crossed or bridged. The moral question thus becomes whether there are good reasons for not desecrating the objects that others hold sacred or whether there are countervailing reasons that make it permissible, justified, or even mandatory to commit such acts.
15 In this discussion of the Marquis de Sade, the issue with Williams's thesis of the internality of reasons is not squarely joined. Throughout the discussion of linguistic naturalism in this essay, the model of usage for the term “reason” is that of the tradition of the “Good Reasons” school of Oxford ordinary language analysis. Uses of the term “reason” are hence given an objectivist cast. An example is provided by statements of the form “The reason that the New York Yankees are a good baseball team is that they have three hitters with a 300 average in the middle of their batting lineup as well as three relief pitchers whose earned run average is below 2.50.” This pattern is also used in statements that concern human agency and the moral vocabulary: the reason that it is wrong to act aggressively against members of one's family in a dispute is that one makes a fool of oneself and causes pain to persons whom one loves. Williams's analysis, however, takes its point of departure from an analysis of usage of the term “reason” in statements of the form “A has a reason to ø … where ‘ø’ stands in for some verb of action.…” An analysis that justifies the universalizability of reasons while delineating such a position's points of agreement or disagreement with Williams's account is found in Scanlon, T. M., “Appendix: Williams on Internal and External Reasons,” in Scanlon, , What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), 363–73.Google Scholar
16 Thomas, Caitlin, Leftover Life to Kill (Boston: Little, Brown, 1957).Google Scholar
17 The theoretical issue of moral objectivism is independent of different ways of approaching practical solutions for the problem of gender inequality in traditional cultures. In practical contexts, the principles of religious toleration and self-determination, which suggest that each society should find its own path to safeguarding the values that it justifies, may be outweighed by the effective results achievable through intervention, coercion, or sanction in the pursuit of universal human rights. In striking a balance, when cultural practices appear to violate universally accepted standards, it may be significant to recognize that every cultural pattern involves plural values and that these may provide a basis for each culture's own internal method of reform of abuses and wrongs.
18 Conservative thinkers from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott have argued that the existence of a tradition is itself a reason for its justification, since the tradition would not have come into existence unless it had been an adequate response to human needs and desires over a long stretch of time. Yet even if this conservative argument on behalf of traditionalism is conceded, it does not rebut the claims that reasons are required to justify the continuation of a tradition and that there can be sufficient reason to terminate a particular tradition.
19 Hart, , “Are There Any Natural Rights?”Google Scholar There are obviously significant differences between Hart's linguistic interpretation of natural rights and the doctrine as it was present in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophical theories. It is also significant, however, to note the similarities. Jefferson's rhetorical statement that “all men are created equal” may not be too distant from the claim that a significance condition of rights-discourse is the recognition of the difference between human beings and other species of animals. More pointedly, Jefferson's doctrine of the “self-evidence” of the truths of natural rights can be interpreted to mean that no rational person who understands the meaning of the terms in the proposition “all men are created equal” can deny the proposition itself. On this view, the “self-evidence” of rights is not too distant from the presuppositions implicit in rights-discourse.
20 The thesis that these structures are subject to revision in light of evidence is closely argued in Israel Scheffler's criticism of the immunity of Kuhnian paradigms from a process of empirical refutation; see Scheffler, Israel, Science and Subjectivity (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967).Google Scholar