Abstract
It is often said that our moral experience, broadly construed to include our ways of thinking and talking about morality, has a certain objective-seeming character to it, and that this supports a presumption in favor of objectivist theories (according to which morality is a realm of facts or truths) and against anti-objectivist theories like Mackie’s error theory (according to which it is not). In this paper, I argue that our experience of morality does not support objectivist moral theories in this way. I begin by arguing that our moral experience does not have the uniformly objective-seeming character it is typically claimed to have. I go on to argue that even if moral experience were to presuppose or display morality as a realm of fact, we would still need a reason for taking that to support theories according to which it is such a realm. I consider what I take to be the four most promising ways of attempting to supply such a reason: (A) inference to the best explanation, (B) epistemic conservatism, (C) the Principle of Credulity, and (D) the method of wide reflective equilibrium. In each case, I argue, the strategy in question does not support a presumption in favor of objectivist moral theories.
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Notes
For convenience, I’ll omit “or at least the presumption” in what follows. It seems fair to assume that those employing the presumption are at least implicitly relying on the AME. Otherwise they owe us an alternative defense of the presumption, and it is hard to imagine what that could be.
I say, “consider themselves to be moral realists,” because it has become less and less obvious that we can find a satisfactory account of what it is to be a moral realist. Among the many in this category who appear to accept some version of the AME are: Bloomfield (2001), Brink (1989), Dancy (1986), Lovibond (1983), McNaughton (1988), Nagel (1986), Shafer-Landau (2003), Smith (1994), and Wiggins (1988).
See also, Nagel (1977, p. 143): “[I]t is very difficult to argue for such a possibility [as value realism] except by refuting certain arguments against it.”
For simplicity’s sake, I’ll speak simply of morality as a (possible) realm of fact.
See, for example, Korsgaard, (1996, pp. 35–37, 44–48, 112). Although Korsgaard denies that there are moral facts, she nevertheless holds that there are correct answers to moral questions.
Some prefer the etymologically more revealing “descriptivism/non-descriptivism” to the more common “cognitivism/non-cognitivism”. See Timmons (1999, p. 19).
For related views, see Timmons (1999), Wright (1992), and Gibbard (1990, esp. chs. 8–13), who employs a number of ingenious strategies for accommodating what he calls the “objective pretensions” of moral thought and language. For earlier non-cognitivist attempts to capture some of this seeming objectivity, see Stevenson (1963) and Hare (1981).
Indeed, even what counts as experience will be disputed. Here I use the term very broadly.
Brink distinguishes features of our moral experience he thinks count against non-cognitivism from those he thinks count against constructivism.
For another litany of objective-seeming features, followed by an extended discussion of one of them, see Timmons (1999, pp. 74–106).
McNaughton (1988, pp. 3–4) himself begins his book with a discussion of “two contrasting feelings about our moral life that all of us share to some extent...,” one of which “appears to lead to the view that there is nothing independent of our moral opinions that determines whether or not they are correct...”
For a sustained discussion of the parallels between gastronomic and moral realism, see Loeb (2003).
By analogy, if Kant’s arguments were sound, then human experience of objects would presuppose, in this second sense, that we have a priori concepts that correctly apply to things. The existence of these a priori concepts would be a necessary condition of our experience of objects; however, the claim that they exist is one very few people would even recognize to be true.
I discuss them at much greater length in Loeb (2007).
For example, Dancy says that “we abandon moral realism at the cost of making our moral experience unintelligible,” and that we can “make satisfactory sense of our experience of the moral properties of objects” only on the assumption that moral realism is correct. (Dancy 1986, p. 173). See also Nagel (1986, p. 146), McNaughton (1988, pp. 16 and 52), and Smith (1994, pp. 5, 11). Timmons’s (1999, p. 12) term, “accommodate,” is ambiguous in this way as well.
This is (roughly) Quine’s (1961) formulation of the principle of conservatism. Other formulations have been put forward, but the differences do not affect the argument given here.
For a persuasive critique of the principle of conservatism see Christensen (1994). My discussion here has benefited greatly from that paper and from conversations with its author.
Even before the publication of Reid’s “Essays” in 1785, Richard Price (1948, p. 45), offered something like this version of the argument in 1758: “Is there nothing truly wrong in the...misery of an innocent being? – ‘It appears wrong to us.’ – And what reason can you have for doubting, whether it appears what it is?”
For an anti-skeptical suggestion along these lines, see Chisholm (1977).
For an argument similar to Dworkin’s (which acknowledges that connection), see Nagel (1997, ch. 6, esp. pp. 110–12, 115–18, and 125).
On most views of this sort, the justification would not depend upon anyone’s having actually gone through such a process, but on the availability of an explanatory picture of the kind gestured at here. Thus we might not currently be in a position to know (or be justified in believing) that certain of our beliefs are justified, even if they are. Still, if we are not in such a position, then we should not presume that those beliefs are justified until our explanatory theory improves.
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Acknowledgments
For their comments, encouragement, criticism, patience, and generosity, I am grateful to Paul Bloomfield, Sin yee Chan, David Christensen, Stephen Darwall, Tyler Doggett, Richard Joyce, Simon Kirchin, Hilary Kornblith, Arthur Kuflik, William Mann, Mark Moyer, Derk Pereboom, Seth Shabo, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. I wish to thank the Dean’s Office, College of Arts and Sciences, The University of Vermont for providing modest grant support for an initial draft of this paper. I am also grateful to the attendees at a colloquium at Brandeis University, a number of undergraduate students at Vermont (forced to read various drafts), and several anonymous referees (likewise). As always, my wife, Barbara Rachelson, suffered through many, many drafts and conversations about this paper and was a tremendous help to me. I started work on this paper so long ago that I am sure I have forgotten many others to whom thanks are due. You know who you are. Thanks.
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Loeb, D. The Argument from Moral Experience. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 10, 469–484 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-007-9081-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-007-9081-7