Abstract
Many philosophers have suspected that the normative importance of morality depends on moral realism. In this paper, I defend a version of this suspicion: I argue that if teleological forms of moral realism, those that posit an objective purpose to human life, are true, then we gain a distinctive kind of reason to do what is morally required. I argue for this by showing that if these forms of realism are true, then doing what is morally required can provide a life with meaning, which is a widespread human need. I also argue that rival meta-ethical views, like anti-realism or non-naturalist realism, cannot make morality meaning-conferring in this way.
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Notes
I intend this formulation to rule out views like constructivism, on which moral truths are ultimately mind-dependent, and also views like non-cognitivism, according to which (strictly speaking) there are no moral truths at all, since the function of moral language is not to describe such truths.
Parfit (2011, p. 425).
Sartre (1989).
One terminological note: I’m not using “teleology” in the sense that some moral philosophers use it, to indicate moral theories (like consequentialism) that specify the good independently of the right. Instead, I’m using “teleology” to talk about the purposes of things.
Why think that the normative importance that people attribute to morality is reason-giving rather than merely reason-indicating, though? One might think that we have reason to do what morality requires simply because we have reason to do the specific things that morality requires, like helping others or not harming them, and we have reason to do these things because the promotion of well-being or respect for others’ autonomy is intrinsically important. If the intuition is simply that morality has importance in this reason-indicating sense, then we do not need teleological realism to secure its importance: other meta-ethical views that attribute importance to things like the promotion of well-being or respecting others’ autonomy will do. In response, note that this would not allow for the possibility of the motive of duty: that is, being motivated to do something by the mere thought that it is the right thing to do. When people are motivated by this thought alone, then presumably they think that the mere fact that an act is right provides them with reason to perform it; the belief that they have reason to perform the act then motivates them to perform it. If this is correct, then people must take morality to have importance in the reason-giving rather than (merely) reason-indicating sense.
Williams (1979).
Korsgaard (1996, p. 33).
Frankena (1973).
Nozick (1981, p. 610). Italics mine.
Taylor (1989).
Wolf (2010, pp. 8f). Italics mine.
I’m going to remain neutral on the meta-ethics of mattering or being important. Although moral realism is congenial to realism about mattering, we need not endorse the latter view in order to get the account going. Similarly, I’m not going to provide anything like a theory of what matters; I’ll simply rely on intuitions that ordinary people have.
I want to note that I’m excluding divine command theory, which grounds moral properties in supernatural (hence non-natural) properties, from “non-naturalist realism.” I’m using the term to pick out the kind of view popular in meta-ethics nowadays, according to which moral properties are non-natural and distinct from all other kinds of properties.
Shafer-Landau (2003, p. 55).
Enoch (2011, p. 4).
I don’t want to lean too much on the term “moral”; it’s conceptually possible for the content of morality on this way of defining it to be quite different from what we typically take it to be, as having to do with things like our obligations to other people. (One could imagine a possible world in which the purpose of human life is to link as many paperclips together as possible; in such a world, what morality requires us to do has nothing inherently to do with our behavior toward others.) Nonetheless, what fulfilling the purpose of human life involves on the views I consider overlaps considerably with morality, in the usual sense, so I’m not just changing the subject here.
See, for example, Nicholas White’s introduction to his translation of Epictetus’ Handbook.
See, for example, Louden (2002).
Analects 12:11.
Nicomachean Ethics, V.7.
Pace Kant’s remark that the moral law within is a constant source of awe, I take it that most people would not think that merely meeting the requirements of Kantian rationality would give their lives meaning.
Anscombe (1958).
Smith (1994, p. 75).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Anthony Appiah, Max Barkhausen, Camil Golub, Sam Scheffler, Sharon Street, members of the Extreme Value Theory Group at NYU, and an anonymous referee for insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Zhao, M. Meaning, moral realism, and the importance of morality. Philos Stud 177, 653–666 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1198-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1198-0