Abstract
It is often said that normative properties are “just too different” to reduce to other kinds of properties. This suggests that many philosophers find it difficult to believe reductive theses in ethics. I argue that the distinctiveness of the normative concepts we use in thinking about reductive theses offers a more promising explanation of this psychological phenomenon than the falsity of Reductive Realism. To identify the distinctiveness of normative concepts, I use resources from familiar Hybrid views of normative language and thought to develop a Hybrid view of normative concepts. In addition to using this new Hybrid view to explain why reductive theses are difficult to believe, I show how to preserve several patterns of inference involving normative concepts that, intuitively, it is possible to make, and hence answer an important recent challenge to Hybrid views from Mark Schroeder.
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Notes
Following Andrew Melnyk (unpublished manuscript).
Some, like Jackson (1998), state reductive theses in terms of property identity. Others state them in terms of property analysis, like Schroeder (2005), although he and still others don’t treat these formulations as incompatible with one another. Since the arguments to come in this paper do not turn on the question of which approach is best, I will use the word ‘reducible’ to avoid privileging either reading. I’ll also employ a variety of idioms that can be found in the works of Reductivist-friendly philosophers, including ‘is’, ‘just is’, ‘what it is’, ‘all there is’, ‘nothing over and above’, ‘it lies in the nature of’, ‘fully grounded in’, ‘fully analyzable in terms of’, etc., in my effort to remain neutral. It’s worth mentioning up front, too, that the arguments in this paper also do not hinge on whether we formulate reductive theses in terms of a relation between different kinds of properties or a relation between different kinds of facts. I’ll stick to formulating them in terms of properties, but nothing should be read into this choice.
In the previous note, I said that the arguments in this paper do not turn on whether reductive theses are best understood in terms of property identity or analysis. But it is interesting to note that when reduction is understood as a kind of property analysis, many philosophers who report experiencing the sense of incredibility apparently turn out to hold views that aren’t clearly at odds with at least some versions of Reductivism, at least on Rosen’s (2017) taxonomy of views concerning the metaphysics of normativity.
Several reactions to this intriguing observation come to mind. So much the worse for Rosen’s taxonomy, for one. Another, more constructive response is to understand the observation as supporting the idea that reductive theses are best understood in terms of identity, insofar as we want to preserve as, they currently are, the relevant controversies in ethics. I’m inclined to think, however, that it is a consequence of the arguments to come, as we’ll see, that even card-carrying Reductivists will experience at least some trouble believing reductive theses. That those who experience the sense of incredibility might also themselves be Reductivists is exactly what we should expect, at least if my arguments are on the right track. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising the issue.
Apart from brief remarks from Finlay (2014), Forcehimes (2015), McPherson (2012), van Roojen (2015), and Wedgwood (2013), few ethicists have acknowledged the sense of incredibility, let alone tried to explain it. While Schroeder (2005) does not discuss the sense of incredibility itself, his discussion is in the same spirit as what I aiming to accomplish in this paper.
This case makes its first appearance in Parfit (1997).
Parfit focuses much of his criticism throughout his work on Reductive Naturalism. But it is clear that Parfit takes issue with Reductivism, in general. For he thinks, like many other opponents of Reductivism, that normative properties are of their own kind, which suggests that he would not welcome reducing normative properties to supernatural properties or any other kind of non-normative property. So, I will be understanding any discussion of Reductive Naturalism as discussion of Reductive Realism more generally throughout this paper.
Small caps denote concepts.
See Finlay (2014) for a recent book-length defense of Analytic Reductivism.
For example, McGinn (2014, my emphasis) writes, “…consciousness as it presents itself to introspection appears to be just a different kind of thing from activity in the brain.” And in describing what he calls the “intuition of distinctness,” too, Papineau (2002: 2) says that it is “the compelling intuition that the mind is ontologically distinct from the material world.”.
This idea is often found under the heading of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy. Many philosophers advance different versions of it. See Sundström (2011) for an overview.
Some Phenomenal Concept Strategists, like Balog and Papineau, suggest that the concepts we use to pick out phenomenal properties (i.e. phenomenal concepts) also activate phenomenal or proto-phenomenal states. Since it is not plausible to think that normative concepts are a species of phenomenal concepts, I will not explore a strict analogue of some Phenomenal Concept Strategists’ idea that phenomenal concepts both pick out properties and activate phenomenal states. In this paper, I will be relying very loosely on the core Phenomenal Concept Strategy idea that there is something special about the nature of normative concepts to which we can appeal in explaining away anti-Reductivist phenomena like the sense of incredibility.
Yetter-Chappell and Yetter-Chappell (2013) were the first to suggest that Reductivists in ethics might benefit from a kind of analogue of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy. By their own admission, however, the authors merely offer a sketch of such an analogue, concluding their paper by writing, “The remaining challenge for the [Reductivist] who wants to adopt [the Concept] Strategy is to flesh it out by providing an account of [normative] concepts…” The sections to come can be read as an attempt to meet this challenge.
I am using the terms ‘ethics’, ‘moral’, ‘normative’ and their cognates interchangeably.
This is not to downplay any of the burdens that proponents of Invariantist Hybridism face in explaining how normative language has come to be about a single property. Doubts about whether it is possible to discharge this explanatory burden arguably serve as one of the principal motivations for Contextualist views of normative language on offer from theorists like Finlay (2014). Relatedly, however, in defending a version of Contextualism about normative language on behalf of Robust Realism, it could be that part of what it is for a range of uses of language to be distinctly moral is for it to be about a particular property. See Laskowski (2014) for more on this suggestion.
Another route to a Hybrid view of normative thought is to first offer an analysis of normative thought, as Tresan (2006) seems to do, and then offer a semantics for thought-words, in order to make sense of the language necessary for stating such a view. See also Laskowski (2015) for how Reductivists might put such views to use.
His idea is to characterize the noncognitive attitudinal component as generalized attitudes towards types. Instead of saying that S desires not to do whatever has the property of failing to maximize pleasure, for example, Hay might recommend we understand S as desiring not to do actions of the type that fail to maximize pleasure. Plausibly, it doesn’t follow from S desiring not to do actions of the type fail to maximize pleasure that S desires not to do every particular action of that type. And if this is right, then it doesn’t seem like S would necessarily be motivated upon thinking that a particular action fails to maximize pleasure.
Normative Concept Hybridism is built out of the resources of Normative Thought Hybridism, which is built out of the Invariantist Hybridist resources of Normative Language Hybridism. It is worth mentioning that one of the main motivations for Invariantist Hybridism is its capacity to accommodate familiar Frege–Geach type worries. As Boisvert (2008) and Schroeder (2009) both emphasize, Invariantist Hybridism doesn’t have any trouble capturing the embedding and logical properties of normative language, because the view piggy backs on standard Descriptivist accounts of such properties. Normative Concept Hybridism inherits the Invariantist Hybridist solution to Frege–Geach type concerns.
It’s important to keep in mind that the desire not to do whatever fails to maximize pleasure is simply an example.
Remember that the property of failing to maximize pleasure is a placeholder for the correct reductive base property. It’s not actually a constraint that the analysis includes a concept that refers to the particular property of failing to maximize pleasure, per se.
Keep in mind that the property of failing to maximize pleasure is simply a placeholder for the correct reductive base property, which is likely to be even more complex if the sophistication of any of the major ethical traditions in contemporary philosophy is any indication. But even if it turns out that a relatively complex property like the property of failing to maximize pleasure is the correct reductive base property, it’s easy to miss its complexity as professional philosophers who are comfortably familiar with the substantive elements failing, maximize, and pleasure that structure it. See Laskowski (2017) for an extended discussion of the relationship between sophisticated ethical theorizing and Reductivism.
Or whichever the constituents of the corresponding concept of the correct reductive base property might be. Again, the property of failing to maximize pleasure and the corresponding concept fails to maximize pleasure are placeholders.
Space prevents me from expanding on these suggestive remarks about the relationship between ordinary normative agents and substantive ethical theorizing. See Star (2015) for a detailed, systematic treatment of the issue.
A natural worry to have is that LUNCH does not provide a complete explanation of the sense of incredibility that is at the same time plausible. After all, philosophers experience the sense of incredibility in response to all sorts of reductive theses in ethics, not just to reductive theses concerning wrongness. This suggests that a proponent of LUNCH might have to posit that all our normative concepts are hybrid concepts with their own unanalyzed cognitive-naturalistic concept as a constituent, e.g. gnorw1, gnorw2, and so on. And the mind might start to look implausibly furnished from this perspective.
This sort of worry is a useful reminder that a proponent of LUNCH still faces a number of choice-points in developing a full theory of normative concepts that carries with it an explanation of the sense of incredibility. Whether and if so how normative concepts stand in structural relationships of fundamentality among each other is one such choice-point that comes to mind, for example. In the spirit of Schroeder (2007), it could be that some normative concepts are more basic than others, and that the less basic ones are most plausibly understood in terms of those that are more basic. A proponent of LUNCH could then say that we only have a single unanalyzed cognitive-naturalistic concept that forms a proper part of the most basic normative concept in terms of which all less basic normative concepts are best understood. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this concern.
Note that I am only claiming that this is one way to avoid Schroeder’s Challenge. I am not claiming that LUNCH is the only way to go in response.
I call this “Copp’s Challenge” because David Copp raised it in correspondence.
There is a sense in which one pattern of concept deployment is not possible on LUNCH: So long as Stan has some beliefs about wrongness, and hence desires not to do whatever is gnorw, Stan cannot first deploy gnorw in believing that stealing is gnorw and then on this basis go ahead and further deploy wrong in believing that stealing is wrong. This is because LUNCH tells us that there is no further deployment to be made; that is, deploying wrong just is deploying gnorw while desiring not to do whatever is gnorw. But the idea that it is possible to deploy any sequence of normative and non-normative concepts is far from an obviously compelling, pre-theoretical constraint on a plausible theory of the nature of normative concepts that we have to satisfy.
It might be said that the explanation depends on the assumption that desires phenomenologically project, which some philosophers, like Hulse et al (2004), call into question. But while it’s not clear to me that desires don’t themselves have a phenomenological upshot to them, they might nevertheless carry with them other experiential states that do. That would be enough to run the explanation.
However, LUNCH is built out of resources from NTH and NTH is built out of resources from NLH, which is inspired by the idea that the best explanation of the meanings of slurs appeals to the desire-like attitude that uses of them express. It is natural to think, then, that the explanation of the sense of incredibility from LUNCH over generates to cases involving slurs. Reverse-engineering LUNCH to provide an account of deploying a slur concept like mick leaves us with the view that deploying mick in believing that Patrick is a mick involves deploying irish in believing that Patrick is Irish while having contempt for people who are Irish. Since deploying mick looks like it involves the activation of contempt, LUNCH might be said to predict that we will experience the sense of incredibility in attempting to believe that the Irish are micks.
While I do not think examples like this are devastating to the explanation of the sense of incredibility on offer, I admit that the issue is tricky. Notice, on this LUNCH based account of slur concepts, a subject cannot deploy mick without having contempt for the Irish. This means that a subject has to be a racist to even begin attempting to believe that the Irish are micks. While the view does predict that racists will experience the sense of incredibility, it’s not easy to determine whether this is a problem without getting inside the headspace of racists.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Renee Jorgensen Bolinger, David Copp, Terence Cuneo, Alexander Dietz, Stephen Finlay, Joe Horton, Nathan Robert Howard, Tanya Kostochka, Wooram Lee, Janet Levin, Michael Milona, Caleb Perl, Abelard Podgorski, Mark Schroeder, Tim Schroeder, and Ralph Wedgwood for extensive feedback. Thanks also to multiple audiences at the University of Southern California and University of Duisburg-Essen for asking thoughtful questions about this paper and the bigger project of which this paper is a part. I’m grateful Philosophical Studies, too, for both processing my submission quickly and providing highly constructive referee reports. Finally, I want to thank Amanda Prunesti especially for help with the illustrations.
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Laskowski, N. The sense of incredibility in ethics. Philos Stud 176, 93–115 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-1007-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-1007-1