Abstract
In this paper I lay out, argue for, and defend ethical Mooreanism. In essence, the view says that some moral propositions are Moorean propositions and thus are epistemically superior to the conjunctions of the premises of skeptical arguments to the contrary. In Sect. 1 I explain Mooreanism and then ethical Mooreanism. In Sect. 2 I argue for ethical Mooreanism by noting a number of important epistemic parities that hold between certain moral truths and standard Moorean facts. In Sect. 3 I defend ethical Mooreanism against the objection that moral propositions are too epistemically dissimilar to standard Moorean facts to count as Moorean truths.
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Notes
These examples come from the first lecture in Moore’s, (1953) Some Main Problems of Philosophy, which is entitled “What is Philosophy?”.
See Lemos, (2004: pp. 6–14).
To be more precise, Rowe called it the “G. E. Moore shift” (339); Rowe was using this phrase in a different context and I don’t mean to imply that Rowe was referring to or endorsing Moore’s commonsense anti-skepticism.
Mooreans typically do affirm–e.g. Armstrong, (2006), Kelly, (2008), and Lycan, (2001)–that arguments utilizing “careful empirical investigation and scientific theorizing” (Lycan [2001: p. 40]) can sometimes overturn commonsense propositions. Kelly’s (2008) explanation of this asymmetry between purely philosophical arguments and those that utilize empirical investigation and scientific theorizing is that scientific theories can use prediction to get confirmation in a way that abstract philosophical theories cannot. Whether one accepts this explanation of the asymmetry or not, it is not hard to see that there is a big difference between, say, a BIV-style argument which utilizes empirical observations that point to my actually being a BIV and one that merely highlights the conflict between the idea that one knows that one has hands and a particular set of epistemological principles.
A point also made by Pryor, (2004: p 370).
The example of hands rather than stumps vs. hands rather than hand-images comes from Schaffer, (2004).
There are minor differences in how these positions are formulated, but my formulations capture the way these terms are typically used. For discussions of liberalism and conservatism, see Pryor, (2004), Silins, (2008), Tucker, (2010a), Neta, (2010), and Willenken, (2011). The choice of the terminology here is unfortunate, in my view, for Huemer, (2001) had coined the term “phenomenal conservatism” just before those engaged in debate about perceptual justification started using the phrases “liberalism” and “conservatism.” Huemer used, and uses, “phenomenal conservatism” for the view that, roughly, a seeming that P gives one prima facie justification to believe that P. Owing to Pryor, (2000) and Tucker, (2010b) that view is often called “dogmatism.” A dogmatist about perceptual justification says that a perceptual seeming that P is enough, all by itself, to give one justification to believe that P–no independent justification to rule out skeptical hypotheses incompatible with P is needed for one’s perceptual seeming that P to give one justification to believe that P. It is sometimes thought that anyone who is a dogmatist must therefore also be a Moorean, but this also seems untrue; see Fuqua, (2017) for the details.
There are two ways that having an independent justification for rejecting the idea that S is in a skeptical scenario might bear on S’s having justification to believe she has hands. First, it might be that S’s having independent justification for rejecting skepticism is an enabling condition on S’s having justification to believe that she has hands; second, it might be that S’s having independent justification for rejecting skepticism is part of S’s justification for believing that she has hands. These distinctions, and others, are drawn in Silins, (2005).
More rational, again, only if: (i) we are normal, cognitively mature, properly function human beings; (ii) we have proper grounds for certain moral propositions which are the contents of certain of our moral beliefs; and (iii) we base these moral beliefs on their proper grounds. The example of recreational genocide is adapted from an example of a “moral fixed point” identified by Cuneo and Shafer-Landau, (2014), namely that “it is wrong to engage in the recreational slaughter of a fellow person.”.
Antony made this comment in 2008 in a public debate with William Lane Craig, which is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6WnliSKrR4. Unfortunately, in Antony’s, (2009) written response to Craig, she doesn’t mention or develop this Moorean response to the moral skeptic.
See Parfit, (2011: p. 525ff.).
Lemos’s, (2020) fine essay, “Morality and Common Sense,” is no exception. Though Lemos makes it clear that, on his view, some moral truths amount to items of commonsense and that such a view can be found in the commonsense tradition, he does not give an argument for the view that there is such a thing as moral commonsense. Further below, in the main text, I develop such an argument, one that appeals to the epistemic symmetries that hold between non-moral examples of commonsense (e.g., “I have hands” and “I know I have hands”) and moral examples of commonsense.
Regarding (iv), I have in mind especially the work of Audi’s Ross-inspired brand of intuitionism, as in his The Good and the Right (2004). Evidence for (v) can be seen in the fact that in the three chapters of The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory that deal explicitly with moral realism and its contraries, realism is characterized, in one way or another, as the “default position.” Nihilism is said to be “violently contrary to common sense” and relativism to be “revisionary of common sense.” “Many philosophers” are said to “fear” expressivism because they believe that “our language, thought, and practice are premised on the idea that there is a normative order” of moral facts. See, respectively, Sayre-McCord, (2006:p. 42), Dreier, (2006: pp. 241), and Blackburn , (2006: p. 152). Though armchair judgments about what the folk think are sometimes derided by more experimentally oriented philosophers, Dunaway et al., (2013) provide empirical evidence for thinking that philosophers’ armchair judgments about what the folk think are highly accurate. In any case, empirical evidence for the ubiquity of moral realism as the default folk metaethic can be found in Cummins, (1996), Nichols and Folds-Bennett, (2003), Nichols, (2004), and Goodwin and Darley, (2008). Knobe et al., (2011) provide some evidence that there is a partial drift toward moral relativism during the college years, but Beebe and Sackris, (2016) show that this partial drift is course-corrected for during the post-college years. I should point out that Beebe and Sackris very explicitly stress that, in their view, the easygoing armchair assumption that everyone is a moral realist about every evaluative claim is not supported by the empirical evidence. They argue that people in general are more relativistic in their college-age years (teens and twenties) and that people are not always uniformly realistic about every moral matter. This is of course consistent with its being the case that moral objectivism, understood as the claim that some moral truths are not up to us, is the dominant folk metaethic.
Many easy and standard examples of non-moral, mundane Moorean truths are singular propositions, e.g. that I have hands or that my mother is not a cockroach and so forth. Many of my examples of ethical Moorean propositions are universal or generic, and this might seem to undermine somewhat the symmetry between the two groups. However, Lemos’s examples clearly show that moral commonsense does and can include particular propositions as well. A reader concerned about the generality of my moral commonsense examples can take comfort in the fact that the singular and non-generic “versions” of the ethical Moorean propositions I’ve mentioned in the main text would also count as ethical Moorean truths. So, for example, it is a piece of moral commonsense that I should not engage in the recreational slaughter of my neighbor, that my neighbors have a prima facie duty to care for their children, that my brother has a prima facie duty to keep his promises to his wife, and so on and so forth. Thanks to an anonymous referee for helping me see the need to address this worry.
I have to say “most” rather than “all” here because there are certain very strong anti-realisms which seem to be incompatible with ethical Mooreanism. For example, in contrasting his “radically subjectivist” theory of ethics with the “orthodox subjectivist” view (109), Ayer, (1952) noted that a proponent of the latter view holds that “the sentences of a moralizer express genuine propositions…about the speaker’s feelings.” On such a view, a speaker’s utterance of “Murder is wrong” means “I disapprove of murder,” which seems to be something the speaker could know. This is not the kind of moral knowledge – “moral” knowledge – envisioned by ethical Mooreanism. Compare this example, for instance, with a non-moral one: a thoroughgoing external world skeptic could say that her utterance of “I have hands” simply means “I approve of the idea that I have hands” or “I have a seeming that I have hands” and then could follow that up by noting that she knows she has hands in virtue of knowing that she approves of the idea that she has hands, etc. Clearly no one else would count what such a skeptic knows as a genuine piece of knowledge about the external world. Likewise, knowledge about what you approve or disapprove of is not the sort of knowledge defended by ethical Mooreanism; knowledge about what you approve or disapprove of is fully compatible with the standard sort of arguments for moral skepticism that the ethical Moorean rejects. In short, then, though ethical Mooreanism per se is not a metaphysical position on the ontology of moral facts, it is nonetheless incompatible with certain very strong anti-realisms, e.g. the “orthodox subjectivist” view mentioned by Ayer. Thanks to an anonymous referee for helpful comments on this point.
Cuneo, (2011) argues that “realism deserves to be the default metaethical position” (341), a view which he says is part of Reidian metaethics. Ethical Mooreanism should not be confused with this view, for two reasons. First, as noted in the main text, ethical Mooreanism does not itself take a stand on whether realism is the correct metaethical account of moral truth or even whether realism is the default metaethic; so, someone could endorse ethical Mooreanism without endorsing realism or its alleged default status. Second, someone could agree that realism is the default metaethical position whilst also saying that the presumption in favor of the existence of moral truth is overridden by powerful skeptical arguments to the contrary.
I should make it clear that I am not assuming or asserting, qua (ethical) Moorean, that Moorean propositions are known simply in virtue of being more plausible, or even much much more plausible, than skeptical arguments to the contrary. Qua (ethical) Moorean, I take no stance on just exactly how propositions like R are known. Mooreanism is a metaphilosophical view rather than a first-order epistemological account of the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge. As Lemos, (2020: p. 273) points out, a Moorean philosopher could have a mistaken epistemological account of why commonsense beliefs often count as items of knowledge without thereby imperiling her own commonsense knowledge. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify this point.
As Rescher, (2005) puts it, “we are well advised to concede the credibility of common-sense teachings not because we happen to like them but because there are good reasons for doing so” (90).
See Rescher, (2005: p. 37).
According to Rescher, (2005), “even if reasoning is involved…the matter can still be one of common sense provided that the reasoning is sufficiently obvious that its availability is effectively universal” (24). Audi, (2008: 486) argues that almost anything that can be non-inferentially believed can also be inferentially believed.
As Rescher, (2005) puts it, “The fact that common-sense beliefs are obvious and evident means that they do not require further substantiation because no substantiating consideration could be markedly more evident and unquestionable than that belief itself” (pp. 33–34).
Audi, (2008): “I have argued that certain moral propositions…can be justifiedly believed non-inferentially. This does not preclude their also being justifiedly believed inferentially; the point is that in such cases justified belief is not premise-dependent” (480).
See Audi, (2008: p. 484). Greene, (2008) and Haidt, (2012), among others, would consider this to be a case of confabulation, and this is not supposed to be a good thing. However, it seems clear that confabulation need not always be epistemically pernicious, especially when the confabulator is a lay person rather than a professional philosopher. A lay person, when confronted with a why-question regarding her belief that P, may mistakenly think that the only way to answer such a question is to give premises from which P could be deduced. If her belief that P is based on an intuition rather than the given reasons, this will be a case of confabulation. So considered, it needn’t always be a bad thing. It is consistent with the agent’s belief that P being based on a reliable but non-inferential ground.
Giving an account of the grounds of our basically held moral beliefs is important, but the details go beyond ethical Mooreanism itself and is the proper task of first-order moral epistemology. I’m sympathetic to intuitionist accounts; some plausible intuitionist moral epistemologies can be found in the following: Audi, (2004, 2013), Huemer, (2005), Cowan, (2013), Kauppinen, (2013), and Besong, (2014).
See Audi, (1999).
As Bergmann, (2008) says, “We tend to classify as ‘common-sense beliefs’ beliefs that are peculiar to our own culture or upbringing. Reid does not–or at least does not want to. His intention is to include only propositions that almost everyone believes (and knows) non-inferentially–things that are immediately accepted by sane persons once considered and understood” (62).
Lemos, (2020) constructs and then (quite ably) responds to three challenges to the idea that there is such a thing as moral commonsense. Interestingly, none of these challenges come from published critiques of moral commonsense. As I said above, ethical Mooreanism is usually ignored or quickly and blithely dismissed. Lemos’s essay is a good companion to my argument here. The three objections he considers are: (i) non-cognitivism implies that commonsense moral knowledge is not possible, (ii) one cannot have moral knowledge about particular actions (say) without first having a general moral criterion from which one could deduce that a particular action is wrong (right), and (iii) it is methodologically and epistemically inappropriate to use ordinary moral intuitions when doing moral philosophy.
See Keller, (2017: p. 711ff.) for a discussion of eliminativist moral error theory.
Olson, (2014: pp. 141–148), in his critique of the idea of moral commonsense, cites McPherson’s paper and then goes on to argue, as McPherson does, that moral beliefs are not fit for work as Moorean propositions because they are vulnerable to debunking arguments. What I say in the main text in reply to McPherson applies mutatis mutanda to Olson.
I would like to thank Michael Bergmann, Paul Draper, Steven Jensen, Patrick Kain, Matthias Steup, and two anonymous referees for their very helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank audiences at the 2018 Summer Seminar in Moral Epistemology at the Central European University and the 2018 annual meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association for their helpful feedback on earlier versions.
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Fuqua, J. Ethical Mooreanism. Synthese 199, 6943–6965 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03100-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03100-z