Abstract
After a brief outline of Enoch’s defense of robust realism in his Taking Morality Seriously (§ 1), I focus on Enoch’s taking-morality-seriously thought by making explicit the assumptions I see involved in it (§ 2). Enoch’s argument from impartiality is then reconstructed (§ 3) to show how these assumptions are at work (§ 4). Next (§§ 5 and 6), I explain the reasons why Enoch does not succeed in converting these assumptions into a positive argument for the thesis implied by robust realism that there is a moral objectivity. Finally (§ 7), I conclude that the critical analysis provided casts a shadow on the reliability of the taking-morality-seriously thought as a basis of a theoretical inquiry into the nature of morality.
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Notes
Henceforth, quotations from Enoch (2011) are followed by the relevant page numbers in brackets.
Horgan and Timmons (2005), 58: “In metaethical inquiry, talk of ‘moral phenomenology’ is used very broadly to include such deeply embedded phenomena as: (1) the grammar and logic of moral thought and discourse; (2) people’s ‘critical practices’ regarding moral thought and discourse (e.g., the assumption that genuine moral disagreements are possible), and (3) the what-it-is-like features of concrete moral experiences.” Enoch’s argument from impartiality relies on the existence of interpersonal moral conflicts treated as if one of the parties were right and the other one wrong (that is to say, as “genuine” disagreement: cf. point (2) of the above-cited passage from Horgan and Timmons 2005), in such a way that the parties feel morally entitled to stand their ground. Enoch’s argument from deliberative indispensability relies on “what it is like to deliberate” (Enoch 2011, 72) from a first-personal point of view (cf. point (3) of the above-cited passage from Horgan and Timmons 2005).
In this sense, according to moral realism “things are really as they seem” (Sayre-McCord 2006, 40).
In our personal correspondence, Enoch has written that he does not disagree with any of the three assumptions listed here. However, he adds that he does not see “what the big deal is”, since in his opinion the three assumptions would be “just instances of the most general epistemological or perhaps methodological claims – all intuitions count, and we should go for the overall most plausible theory”. On this point I disagree: in the three assumptions I see much more than the reasonable and, so to say, harmless general epistemological/methodological principle which Enoch refers to. In particular: as far as (i) is concerned, it is not undisputed that morality is experienced and presents itself as a realm of objective facts (to limit myself to the references I have mainly relied on, namely Loeb (2007), 473; Björnsson (2012), 372 f., and fn. 8, 373); as far as (ii) is concerned, it seems to me that the morally engaged metaethical stance that MORAL NEED tries to capture is not a neutral stance that anyone (for instance, an error theorist) could easily adopt when doing metaethics (cf. Loeb 2007, 475; cf.; Sinclair 2012, 164); finally, as far as (iii) is concerned, it has been convincingly argued (Björnsson 2012) that objectivism would not obviously provide the best explanation of the objective-seeming characters of morality.
Cf. Loeb (2007), 473: “The evidence may well take us in more than one direction. […] even if we find substantial evidence of a commitment to objectivity, we may also find evidence against such a commitment”.
Note that assuming moral realism as the default view in metaethics is also very common among those who do not share the realist point of view, as Loeb (2007), 471 remarks with reference to Mackie.
Cf. Brink (1989), 24: “Realism, and realism alone, provides a natural explanation or justification of the way in which we do and can conduct ourselves in moral thought and inquiry”.
Here Enoch is arguing that the way in which mathematicians do mathematics is not sensitive to our endorsing a meta-mathematical error-theory, while what he wants to do with his two arguments is precisely to show that the way in which we experience normativity is sensitive to our endorsing a metanormative view. See also the appendix on the neutrality of metaethics, § 2.7.
Both [I] “and the intuitive judgments about where it plausibly does and where it plausibly does not apply, are straightforwardly moral judgments” (117). 4, that is to say [I], is called “a normative premise” (17), an “approximation of a moral principle”. As far as 6 is concerned, Enoch writes: “(6) itself is a moral statement”. As far as 5 is concerned, Enoch defines it “a first-order, moral (that is, not non-moral) conclusion” (48). 4 and 6 are true moral statements, while, as far as 5 is concerned, Enoch writes “when presenting the Reductio argument I argued on first-order, normative grounds directly that 5 is false” (49). To sum up, 4, 5 and 6 are all moral statements, two of which are said to be true (4 and 6), and one false (5).
At the end of Sect. 2.3, Enoch writes: “So my argument from the normative significance of moral disagreement does not amount to a knock-down argument against response-dependence theories […]. But it is not without force. For it highlights an explanatory challenge response-dependence theorists face if they are to escape it” (35).
Joyce (2014), 844.
Wedgwood (2013), 390: “Suppose that you are on a committee that awards a certain art prize, and you have a deep disagreement with the other committee members […] if you are reasonably convinced that the judgment of the other committee members is sufficiently defective, it would not obviously be ‘morally wrong’ for you” to stand your ground. See also Manne and Sobel (2014), 828: “the relative pedigree of the attitude, be it a belief or a desire, generally tends to diminish our intuition that one must be impartial between one’s own high pedigree attitude and the attitude of the other with a much lesser pedigree.”
Wedgwood (2013), 391: “Suppose you are involved in a disagreement […] about whether fox hunting should be banned by law. If there is no prospect of either side’s persuading the other to change their view, it seems right for everyone to agree to settle the conflict by means of a democratic procedure, even though everyone agrees that there is a high chance that the outcome of this democratic procedure may be morally suboptimal.” To take another example of interpersonal moral conflict where [I] seems to apply, see Manne and Sobel (2014), 831: “We’re spending the afternoon together, doing some volunteering. I think we should, and would thus prefer to, help out at the local amateur film society. You think we should, and would thus prefer to, help out at an organization that gives tennis lessons to troubled youths. How should we proceed?”.
It has also been argued (Atiq 2016) that Enoch’s [I] is “mistaken.” By putting together being impartial with being willing to withdraw from one’s own preferences and desires, Enoch would have provided a characterization of [I] that favors his objectivist account. Along a similar line, an anonymous referee has suggested to me that Enoch’s way of conceiving [I] “can be questioned”, since impartiality “does not mean ‘neutrality’ or ‘indifference’, as Enoch understands it”.
Indeed, with reference to his presentation of the non-objectivist theorist’s solution to his explanatory challenge, Enoch himself concedes what follows (34): “Perhaps this is too quick […] because I haven’t shown that the response-dependence theorist has no further explanatory story to tell. I’ve only shown that he can’t help himself to the kind of story the response-independence theorist can help herself to.”
That social cooperation is an aim which the agents share could derive from the fact that, pragmatically, during our evolutionary history social cooperation has proven one of the most functional ways of satisfying the preferences of each individual agent. I thank Aldo Frigerio for encouraging me to clarify this point.
See 33. Here Enoch compares the ways in which two theorists “defend the distinction between eating shrimps (morally permissible) and eating beef (morally wrong)”. The first theorist directly relies “on intuitions with regard to which animal counts”, while the second “tells another kind of story, about the nature of the relevant creatures and the difference between them […] she says that cows have a central nervous system and so are rather clearly capable of feeling pain”, differently from shrimps. Then this theorist introduces a “general moral principle, according to which it is morally wrong to kill and eat creatures that can feel pain”. Thereby “he offers an explanatory layer the first theorist does not offer, and so her theory is […] better.”
I thank Alessandro Giordani for the discussion on this point.
Notice that, as far the following chapter’s sections are concerned – where the argument does not result in a reductio of a caricaturized view, but in the posing of an explanatory challenge to non-caricaturized views – Enoch concedes that the metaphysical understanding of objectivity does count something, even if this something, in his opinion (that I do not share), is “at most very little” (17).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Luca Fonnesu, Aldo Frigerio, Alessandro Giordani, Bruno Niederbacher, Renato Pettoello, Paolo Valore and two anonymous referees for their useful comments on early versions of this paper. I especially wish to thank David Enoch, both for reading an early version of this paper and providing some useful suggestions on how to make my reconstruction of his positions fairer, and for having accepted to write a reply to my paper. Of course, I claim full responsibility for the paper’s final version.
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Mancuso, G. Enoch’s “Taking-Morality-Seriously Thought” Unpacked and at Work in the Argument from Impartiality. Topoi 37, 591–602 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9449-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9449-1