Modern Moral Philosophy: Lecture Two (week 14) Error Theory
1. So far...
(a) Last week we were discussing IMR and the motivation for adopting it. This week, weıll see why many people donıt like it. We are going to focus on two arguments given by Mackie in his Ethics (1977).
2. Error Theory
(b) Weıll come onto the arguments below. However, be aware that Mackie is attacking what he calls moral objectivismı. We will assume, correctly I think, that Mackie means by this IMR. (The big question is in all of this debate is what type of ethical properties exist? What grounds their existence? Thatıs for week 16.) Mackie believes that it is a widespread and key belief amongst people (that is everyone, not just philosophers) that there exist moral properties, that when we make ethical judgements we are trying to represent the ones that exist. But there are no such things, says Mackie because......(his arguments then go here). (That is, itıs not just on any one occasion we get the existence of ethical properties wrong. Rather, there is no such type of property at all, in any situation.) So, ethical thought is guilty of widespread error. Hence the name. Strictly, Mackie is an ethical sceptic. However, in the rest of Ethics he builds up how we can talk as if there are ethical pseudo-properties. See Joyce (2001) for a modern version.
(c) To put this another way, we make ethical judgements all the time. But ethical properties do not exist. (Assume that the only thing that could make an ethical judgement true is whether it correctly refers to an existing ethical property.) So, no ethical judgements are true. Note, it isnıt just a matter of fact that we happen to have made all false judgements, but if we include a few notsı, say, we could arrive at true judgements. There are no ethical properties at all, so ethical judgements are just not the sorts of things that could get to be true. There is widespread error in our thought.
The challenge for error theorists is to explain what is going on with our ethical thought and language. The danger is that their explanation will characterize our ethical lives so richly that we end up with a pretty substantial ethical life where the idea of ethical propertyı is changed so that there is little problem in assuming that such things can and do exist. (See the debate between Wright and Miller referred to in the recommended reading on this.)
(d) For reflection during week 15. Error theory differs from Blackburnıs noncognitivism in terms of how the function of ethical judgements is treated. Blackburn thinks that there arenıt any ethical properties. But he seeks to show how we can build up such talk of value from an anti-realistı base. He thinks that there is no need to revise, even in theory, the propositional form of our ethical judgements.
3. The Argument from Relativity
(e) A famous discussion in Mackie. He starts with an unarguable premise:
The argument from relativity has as it premiss the well-known variation in moral codes from one society to another and from one period to another, and also the differences in moral beliefs between different groups and classes within a complex community.
(f) IMRealists claim that the variation occurs because of different and mostly (or all) wrong perceptions of the existing mind-independent ethical properties. Mackie says that the simpler explanation is that people are raised to live and think differently and that that is all that can be said on the matter. The onus is on IMRealists to explain why their theory is better. But there is a lot more to say.... (First thoughts: Where does the onus lie? Who says that Mackieıs is the simpler theory? Even if it is, arenıt we after the true theory? Although simpleı is good, the true theory might be complexı.)
(g) Side-issue of modality. Mackie notes that IMRealists could counter by distinguishing between specific and general principles (codes, rules, dispositions, etc.). General rules are mind-independent but they receive different expression because of geography, climate, history, etc. Mackie says that moral objectivists will then be committed to the contingency of ethical properties (if society had been different then different ethical properties would have existed). As Brink points out (1984), modality is a red herring. We are interested in the mind-independence or otherwise of ethical properties that do exist, supposedly, in this world.
(h) Hang on. There are important polarized and long-running debates in science. We donıt think that their existence casts doubt on the mind-independence of scientific properties and relations. (Weıll assume for this module. Even if we donıt believe in scientific properties and even if it is because of disputes, their existence seems more plausible in the face of disagreement than ethical propertiesı existence.) Ethics might be different because ethical debates seem irresolvable, whereas scientific ones donıt. So, IMRealists need to explain ethical debates. (See Brink (1984) as well.)
(i) Disagreement over nonethical facts
(ii) Incommensurability. E.g. of building a road. Existence of incommensurable values doesnıt cast doubt on the fact that those values might be mind-independent.
But (i) and (ii) might not be enough. We still want to say that there can be cases where all of the nonethical facts are known, there is no incommensurability and where disputants can still disagree. So, we still need to show that the cause of disagreement is that most, if not all, people has misperceived the ethical properties. How to do this? In science we assume that epistemic access is possible so that we can know which judgements are correct. The same seems to be true for IMRealists they have to show that ethics is similar to science in this regard.
(i) But, that doesnıt seem that troubling. There seems nothing weird about the possibility that one can know that a situation might have a mind-independent ethical property without knowing if it does or what it is. After all, if there are scientific properties, then it seems fine to assume that they are mind-independent. The point being that it isnıt the knowing part that seems troubling here, but rather the type of property itself. This takes us to.....
4. The Argument from Queerness
(j) Nothing to do with epistemology, focuses on metaphysics. (Ignore the stuff about intuitionism.) Focus is on Thesis IMR (from last week) the very idea of conceiving ethical properties to be mind-independent. Mackie talks in terms of making prescription objective. It appears that what he means by this is the claim that there are (good, ethical) reasons for people to act and that such reasons exist not only outsideı any particular individual, but outside of all people. In his terms, ethical practice is based on the belief that there are objective prescriptionsı. A comment on the connection between values and reasons. (Weıll assume that although there might be a philosophical difference between the two, this doesnıt affect Mackieıs argument, as I believe it doesnıt incidentally.)
(k) So why is this queer? General thought: arenıt things valuable because they are valuable for us and to us, and that is because we value them in certain ways.
(l) And, in fact, it seems that... If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.ı (p. 38) This is rhetoric, in my view. Uniqueness itself isnıt a reason for thinking that something doesnıt exist. It is the tension in (j) that is at the heart of the charge.
(m) Another way of bringing out the queerness....supervenience. It isnıt enough that these natural features are (mind-independently) of value and that whenever Ns occur there is an E. We need to explain how there is a link, why these Ns and Es are together in the first place. Coincidence is assumed (possibly illegitimately) to be a non-starter. (Coincidence rules out only supervenience on nonethical features, not the existence of mind-independent ethical properties.) The easy position, thinks Mackie, is to tell some complicated story that comes down to the idea that it is because humans value those Ns in this E way. But this move is obviously unavailable to the IMRealist.
(n) Brink (in his (1984) and (1989)) argues via partners in innocence, such as the mental. He argues that we do not think that the mental supervening on the nonmental is queer (at least in the way Mackie means), so why assume it for ethics? But Mackieıs point (according to Garner (1990)), is that mind-independent ethical properties are queer in a unique way, they demand. This takes us back to (j).
(o) What are we left with by Mackie? There is a charge, in (j), that we cannot make sense of there being demands on us without there being a demander in some way; things cannot have value unless valuing creatures have valued them in some way. Assuming that a theistic metaethic isnıt an option (at the least, this move will fail to convince many), we are left with the idea that there cannot be any moral properties. But, is there simply a scientistic prejudice here? Who says that such things cannot be real?
(p) A few words about ethical naturalism. Think back to the supervenience way of putting the point. It is all very well for ethical naturalists to say that there is an equivalence between natural and (supposed) ethical properties, such that ethical properties just are natural properties. But we want to know what that relation is: is it mind-dependent (do humans in some fashion fix the relationship), or not? If not, as ethical naturalist writings seem to imply (partic. Railton), then they are IMRealists and, I think, reductionists. Then we get into the debate about queerness. If the relation is fixed mind-dependently, then we may have a chance of showing why the features are not queer. But then, one has to give up on naturalism. One is then either a nonnaturalist or an expressivist. Weıll see why in the next two weeks.
Supervenience (definition): A-properties supervene on B-properties (or B-featuresı, or) iff: two situations that have exactly the same B-properties have exactly the same A-properties, and there is some interesting link between them (i.e. it is not some cosmic coincidence why A- and B-properties have this relation, nor is it some sort of logical truth that they are connected). A corollary: if A-properties supervene on B-properties then there is a change in A-properties only if the B-properties change.
Questions and extra work
(i) Is SK right that the arg from relativity fails? What intuitions do we have that oppose relativism?
(ii) What does queerness mean? After all, itıs a slightly metaphorical description. Are there any other metaphysically queer types of property? So what if it is unique? What exactly are the claims of the arg? Do we have to be error theorists even if the arg from queerness works?