Neil Sinclair: Presumptive Arguments for Moral Realism

Neil Sinclair: “Presumptive Arguments for Moral Realism”

Draft of talk for Oxford Moral Philosophy Seminar, 04/-2/08

Please do not quote without permission.

Presumptive Arguments for Moral Realism

By Neil Sinclair (University of Nottingham)

Please do not quote without permission

Disclaimer: This is a copy of my text for a talk I gave at the Oxford moral philosophy seminar on Monday 4thFebruary 2008. The text was intended to be read aloud, and not as a draft of a written paper. I thought it best to make a copy available as soon as possible, so that those who attended the seminar but were unable to ask questions could do so online. For this reason, please excuse the unchecked spelling and punctuation, the lack of references and sometimes patchy explanations.

Introduction

It is often supposed that realist theories of ethics start with an inherent advantage over their rival theories. The apparent advantage is supposed to derive from the fact that moral judgements exhibit certain features, and those who make moral judgements make certain assumptions, which can only be accommodated on, or at any rate are most concordant with, the realist theory. Thus we are told that only realism straightforwardly preserves ordinary moral talk; that only realism takes moral discourse at its ‘face value’ or that only realism can ‘save the appearances’ of moral discourse.

Realists are modest, however, in not viewing this advantage of their theory as tantamount to decisive proof. Instead they feel that it generates a presumption in favour of their theory. It is this presumption that gives realists the courage to take on the various metaphysical and epistemological problems that have plagued their view, and can even be used to nullify some of the implausibility that their theory exhibits in these areas.

But though there can be little doubt that this presumptive case for realism has been hugely influential in structuring meta-ethical debate, there is cause to doubt that the presumptive case itself has been submitted to sufficient scrutiny. In this paper I am to address this deficit.

My argument will proceed as follows. After outlining the core claims the meta-ethical theories I will be discussing I set out two desiderata for such theories: first, the ability to ‘save the appearances’ of moral discourse and second consistency with our wider philosophical theories. These desiderata will help us distinguish three broad species of presumptive argument: what I label weak, moderate and strong presumptive arguments (the last of which subdivides into two further sub-species). I will then outline two common errors made by those deploying presumptive arguments. The first error is to suppose that some of the distinctive claims of moral realism have infected the forms and assumptions of ordinary moral discourse that stand in need of saving. The second error is to underestimate the resources available to the expressivist in saving the (disinfected) appearances. Since a full exposé of the second error would involve an exhaustive analysis of the expressivists’ ability to save the appearances, my conclusions in this area will be circumspect. Nevertheless I hope to provide cause for optimism regarding the expressivists’ ability to save the appearances. If this optimism is well-founded, it follows that there is no presumptive case for moral realism.

Realism and opponents

First then: what is moral realism? What is a presumptive argument?

Moral realists hold that in forming moral opinions and constructing moral theories, our primary goal is to map the contours of a genuinely existing moral reality.

Realists are cognitivists, that is, they hold that moral judgements such as “Torture is wrong” express beliefs concerning moral states of affairs. Here a belief is held to be the paradigm example of a cognitive or ‘descriptively representational’ state, that is, a state of mind that represents the world, or some aspect of it, as being thus and so.

According to cognitivists, moral judgements express moral beliefs. A belief is a moral belief just in case the representational content of that belief can be captured using a moral sentence, that is, when it represents the world as realising distinctively moral state of affairs. So according to cognitivists moral judgements express moral beliefs. Realists differ from other cognitivists in holding, in addition, that there exists a moral reality the nature of which is sometimes correctly represented by our moral beliefs. Realists in turn differ amongst themselves concerning the nature of that moral reality.

[More traditional characterisations of realism often include the claims that moral judgements are truth-apt and that some of them are true. But these truth-based characterisations of realism are secondary to my characterisation, given that we can understand truth-aptness and truth via the notions of belief and (accurate) representation. So, for example we can understand a truth-apt sentence as one that offers a putative description of the way the world might by (say, be expressing a cognitive state), and is therefore true when that description is accurate, false otherwise. Thus realism as I have characterised it leads not only to the claim that moral judgements are truth apt and some of them are true, but to a particular understanding of that claim.]

In this paper I will contrast realism with moral expressivism. Expressivists deny that moral judgements express moral beliefs. Instead, they claim, the primary role of moral judgements is to express affective non-cognitive attitudes whose contents and expression play a distinctive role in the mutual co-ordination of attitudes and actions. According to expressivists, the distinctive import of moral judgements arises from such a co-ordinating role, not from expressing states that offer representations of the way the world might (morally) be. According to expresivists, therefore, when I judge that “Torture is wrong” I am expressing a non-cognitive attitude of disapproval towards vivisection, and hoping to persuade others to share that attitude.

Desiderata for meta-ethics

In order to assess whether or not a presumption exists in favour of realism, and against expressivism, it is first necessary to outline the desiderata for such theories. Following common convention, I take there to be two independent desiderata for meta-ethics, the first of which is as follows:

D1. A meta-ethical theory should be able to vindicate all of the forms of ordinary moral practice and the deeply embedded assumptions of those who engage in it.

To elaborate. Actual moralising takes various forms and agents who engage in moralising make certain assumptions about the nature of the practice they are engaging in. For example, moral claims are standardly expressed in indicative sentences with both a subject and a predicate and most agents who moralise assume that there are better and worse ways of doing so.

A meta-ethical theory must be able to vindicate these forms and assumptions.

To vindicate a form or assumption is to justify the continued engagement in a practice with that form or which makes that assumption. Any theory that fails to vindicate a form or assumption of moral practice is revisionary. According to D1 there is reason to reject any revisionary theory of moral practice.

But as stated D1 is too strict.

Notice a curiosity: when considering non-moral types of discourse, it is not generally true that being revisionary provides a reason to reject a meta-theory. For example, the fact that our best meta-theory of witch discourse recommends abandoning that discourse is not a reason against accepting that account.

The discrepancy between this and the case of moralising must lie in what may be called the pragmatic assumption: the assumption that moral discourse, unlike, say witch-discourse, is, at least in the most part, a useful practice that we have good reason to go on engaging in. With this assumption in hand, being revisionary is a reason to reject a meta-theory of moral practice.

But we mustn’t overstate the content of the pragmatic assumption. The pragmatic assumption is supported by, among other things, the observation that practically all known societies have developed something akin to moral practice.

But the support for the pragmatic assumption certainly does not justify the claim that all forms and assumptions of moralising as it is practiced today are pragmatically justifiable. Indeed there are reasons to think that this is not the case: first because it is unlikely that our actual practice manifests a single teleologically unified practice, second because false meta-theory may have itself infested the practice, so that some more reflective moralisers engage in the practice with a (false) understanding of their activities built in.

For this reason, it is likely that any meta-ethical theory will be revisionary of some of the forms and assumptions of actual moral practice, making D1 unreasonably strict. With what can it be replaced? I suggest the following:

D1’: A meta-ethical theory should be able to vindicate all of the pragmatically important forms of moral practice and the pragmatically important assumptions of those who engage in it.

So any actual form or assumption of moral practice that is revised carries an explanatory cost, but this cost can be met so long as the resulting meta-theory can show how the important things that we want to say and do using moral discourse, and all of those substantial debates moral discourse involves, are preserved in the recommended revised practice.

For example, it will be no good recommending that we replace moralising with a system of communal chanting, if by doing so we lose an important aspect of the way we interact with each other and the world. What the pragmatically important aspects of moral practice are will, of course, be a matter of meta-ethical dispute. Thus in order to be plausible a meta-ethical theory must first defend an account of the way moralising helps us relate in worthwhile ways to the world and to each other and then show how, given this account, some (if not all) of the features of actual moral practice are to be expected.

In any case, most meta-ethicists agree on a core set of pragmatically important forms and assumptions of moral practice. They include:

(1)Actions can be right, wrong, permissible, supererogatory. States of affairs can be good, bad, morally neutral. Characters can be virtuous or vicious.

(2) Indicative moral sentences are capable of intelligible embedding in various logical constructions such as negations, conditions, etc.

(3)The rightness and wrongness of actions does not, in general, depend on our thoughts about those actions.

(4)Some moral judgements are true.

(5)Moral claims can feature as explanations of (non-moral) events.

(6)Genuine moral agreement and disagreement is possible

(7)Moral discussion is sometimes a fruitful way of resolving such disagreement

(8)Moral claims can be supported by reasons

According to D1’ then meta-ethical theories are to be judged in their ability to vindicate such forms and assumptions.

A note on labelling

Now it has, of course, long been recognised that realism can quite easily vindicate these forms and assumptions of moral practice. A more recent trend in meta-ethics holds that expressivists too might be able to vindicate these forms and assumptions. Nor is there any immediate reason to rule this possibility out.

Expressivism simply holds that moral judgements do not express moral beliefs but do express affective non-cognitive attitudes. This is at least prima facie compatible with the possibility that moral sentences can intelligibly embedded, and moral judgements can true, known, explanatory and the rest. As we all know, quasi-realism is the view that not only is expressivism the correct view of moral practice, but that moral practice so understood legitimately possesses these forms and features.

Now it is worth heading off some possible misunderstandings of quasi-realism. The above forms and assumptions of moral discourse are sometimes called the ‘appearances’ of moral discourse quasi-realism as the task of ‘saving the appearances’ for expressivism. These characterisations, though not strictly false, are seriously misleading and best avoided. There are two important reasons for this.

First the description of the forms and assumptions as appearances, implying as it does that a practice might appear to possess them, but not really do so, is inappropriate in several cases. For example, having sentences of subject-predicate form is a purely syntactic matter – nothing can appear to have subject-predicate form and yet not really do so.

Second, the phrase ‘saving the appearances’ is crucially ambiguous. There are at least two ways in which a theory might ‘save the appearances’.

First, it may preserve the appearances as mere appearances. To save an appearance in this sense is to justify our right to continue engaging in the practice as if is possessed the feature in questions, when in fact it doesn’t. For example, to save the appearance of truth-aptness for moral claims in this sense would be to justify our behaving as if moral sentences are the sorts of things that can be true or false, when in fact they aren’t.

There is, however, a second sense in which one can ‘save the appearances’ and that is by vindicating them. To vindicate the appearances is to explain them as a perfectly natural and expected result of the actual nature of the practice. For example, to vindicate the appearance of truth-aptness for moral discourse would be to show that moral discourse is truth-apt (and that is why it appears to be). To save the appearances in this sense is to justify the forms and assumptions of the discourse as legitimate.

Quasi-realism intends to save the appearances of moral discourse in the second, vindicating sense. That is, it hopes not to justify our right to behave as if moral discourse is truth-apt, knowledge-apt and the rest, but moral discourse’s right to be truth-apt, knowledge-apt and the rest. This is why a necessary part of the programme is to ‘domesticate’ the notions of truth, knowledge and so on, that is, show that they can be legitimate upshots of more than just cognitive practices.

This crucial ambiguity in the phrase ‘saving the appearances’ is all the reason we need to abandon this terminology. Instead I recommend the following: call the forms and assumptions of moral practice listed above the ‘propositional clothing’ of moral practice. The project to which both realism and expressivism are addressed is that of weaving the propositional clothing for moral discourse, that is, showing how moral discourse can legitimately come possess all of these forms and assumptions. Quasi-realism is best described as the project of weaving, from an expressivist thread, the propositional clothing of moral practice.

And, if the project succeeds, the expressivist will not have weaved the emperors new (propositional) clothing, rather it will be the same type of clothing worn by other discourses, only weaved from non-cognitive thread. Of course, the project may not succeed, but it is important to properly understand its aims.

The second desiderata for meta-ethical theories is as follows

D2. A meta-ethical theory should conform to one’s wider philosophical views about the topics it makes claims about.

Since a meta-ethical theory makes claims about the semantics, psychology, metaphysics and epistemology of moral practice, it should not conflict with our best general theories of semantics, psychology, metaphysics and epistemology. A meta-ethical theory that postulates a unique and mysterious type of meaning possessed by all and only moral terms, for example, would fail to meet this desideratum. Call this the desideratum of ‘placement’.

Presumptive arguments

By a presumptive argument I mean one that establishes a presumption in favour of a theories’ truth. The conclusion of a presumptive argument is that, for all that has so far been said, the theory in question is more likely to be true than any of its rivals. A presumption in favour a theory can be overturned (as when a stronger reason is raised against the theory, leaving the original presumptive reason intact but outweighed) or undermined (as when what was initially thought to be a reason in favour of the theory turns out to be not reason at all).

Presumptive arguments for moral realism can be divided into three species: weak, moderate and strong.

Weak presumptive arguments accept that other theories can vindicate the requisite forms and assumptions of moral practice but argues that the realist vindication is more the moral natural, simpler or otherwise more appealing vindication. Propositional clothing weaved from a realist thread is smoother to the touch. It follows that all realists have to do to present a conclusive case for their position is show that they can also satisfy the desideratum of placement

According to moderate presumptive arguments we cannot rule out the possibility that the realists’ opponents may be able to do the requisite weaving, but it remains the case that such weaving hasn’t been done yet. These arguments provide a case for the ongoing acceptance of realism as our best working hypothesis given that it has been, to date, the only theory that can be shown to meet one of the two desiderata of meta-ethics.