Abstract
Different versions of moral projectivism are delineated: minimal, metaphysical, nihilistic, and noncognitivist. Minimal projectivism (the focus of this paper) is the conjunction of two subtheses: (1) that we experience morality as an objective aspect of the world and (2) that this experience has its origin in an affective attitude (e.g., an emotion) rather than in perceptual faculties. Both are empirical claims and must be tested as such. This paper does not offer ideas on any specific test procedures, but rather undertakes the important preliminary task of clarifying the content of these subtheses (e.g., what is meant by “objective”? what is meant by “experience”?). Finally, attention is given to the relation between (a) acknowledging that the projectivist account might be true of a token moral judgment and (b) maintaining moral projectivism to be true as a general thesis.
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Notes
Edward Craig (2000) also argues for the compatibility of projectivist and realist interpretations of Hume, but, unlike Sainsbury, Craig thinks that Hume can be interpreted as both regarding causality.
Mackie tends to prefer the term “objectification.” It is clear, however, that he means to capture a kind of projectivism. In his 1980 book he provides a typical description of Humean projectivism (along with the Enquiry quote given above), and twice refers to “this projection or objectification” (72). For discussion of Mackie’s view of objectification, see Joyce (forthcoming).
A.W. Price (1992) also distinguishes the nihilistic (error-theoretic) form of projectivism from other forms deserving the name: Simon Blackburn’s “reductive projectivism” and Richard Wollheim’s “genetic projectivism.”
These are not Sainsbury’s labels.
For no-frills discussion of the relation between realism, noncognitivism, and the error-theoretic stance, see my entry for “moral anti-realism” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Joyce 2007).
Psychologists sometimes use the term “moral emotivism” to denote the theory that emotional faculties play a central role in the causal generation of moral judgment. Although philosophers are trained to think of emotivism as a kind of noncognitivism, it is clear that in this case the taxonomy doesn’t apply; psychologists are not using “emotivism” in its metaethical sense. See Joyce 2008a for analysis.
The necessity condition also fails. A speech act (such as an assertion, or an apology, or a promise, or an interjection, or a command) may express a type of mental state (such as a belief, or regret, or a commitment) without the speaker having that mental state. One need reflect only on the phenomenon of insincerity to see this. An insincere act of promising still succeeds in being a promise (unlike, say, an overtly sarcastic promise utterance, which is not a promise at all), and, as such, an insincere promise still expresses a commitment on the speaker’s behalf—a commitment that the speaker actually does not have at the time of utterance. Similarly, an insincere assertion (a lie) expresses a belief that the speaker does not have at the time of utterance. But if speaker S can, through uttering U, express mental state M while S does not have M (and perhaps has not had M), then the relation between M and U cannot be a causal one. Rather, the relation is a complex one concerning the entrenched linguistic conventions understood by both speaker and audience. If both speaker and audience take it that acts of promising express commitment—if this understanding is a necessary prerequisite to being granted competence with the concept promising—then a successful act of promising does express commitment, irrespective of whether the speaker as a matter of fact is committed. (I seem to have said this many times before; in the unlikely event that anyone has been paying attention, I apologize for the repetition.)
A notable exception is D’Arms and Jacobson 2006. Simon Blackburn is also no doubt aware of the metaphorical status of references to “projection,” yet (in my opinion) he has done little to replace the metaphor with a precise literal hypothesis. On at least one occasion he confesses that “projectivism” is not an entirely happy term for the position he has so frequently advocated (Blackburn 1995: 36).
I offer some criticisms of Huemer’s view in Joyce 2008b.
Those who have come closest are Nichols and Folds-Bennett 2003, and Goodwin and Darley 2007. One might also reasonably claim that the extensive empirical research program concerning the moral/conventional distinction (in developmental psychology, clinical psychology, and cross-cultural studies) has bearing on the phenomenological thesis, to the extent that judgments concerning moral transgressions are taken to be those that (inter alia) hold irrespective of any authoritative decree, which is one way of understanding objectivity. (A reasonable starting point for this large literature is Nucci 2001, Smetana 1993, and Turiel et al. 1987.) However, even these interesting studies do not target the hypothesis that we experience morality as objective (as oppose to believe that it is). In my opinion, Goodwin and Darley also employ a misguided notion of objectivity.
A subject matter has wide cosmological role if the kinds of things with which it deals figure in a variety of explanatory contexts—specifically, if they explain things other than (or other than via) our judgments concerning them.
By restricting attention to “the emotion of sadness,” I hope to put aside tricky (but clearly different) cases involving sad music, sad events, sad faces, etc.
I’m more comfortable saying something about what this relation doesn’t consist in. It doesn’t consist in Sally causing the sadness, and it doesn’t consist in Sally judging or believing that she is sad. (I’m willing to accept that she may be sad without believing herself to be.) I am tempted to cash it out in terms of a priori modal dependence. This token episode of sadness (had by Sally on Tuesday afternoon) could only have been had by Sally. If we imagine a possible world, W, strikingly similar to ours—where there is someone very much like Sally, feeling sadness in very similar circumstances (on Tuesday afternoon, etc.)—but for which we stipulate that (for whatever minimal reason) she is in fact not Sally (and does not count even as her modal counterpart, despite the similarities), and nor is anyone else at W, then we would (I suggest) conclude a priori that this token episode of sadness (gesturing to the actual Sally’s actual sadness) does not exist at W. I confess, though, that I am not at all confident that this thinking will give the intuitively correct output across all cases we might want to consider.
Incidentally, from this relativistic notion we could then build an absolute one: A phenomenon is Subject-Independent in the absolute sense (note the upper case) iff there is no perspective relative to which it is subject-dependent. This seems to be something Rosen overlooks. It may well be that for any ‘subjective’ phenomenon we can invoke the anthropological perspective (thus, he thinks, casting the objective/subjective distinction into disarray), but the reverse does not hold. It is not the case that for any ‘objective’ phenomenon (say, the chemical constitution of Jupiter) we can with equal ease invoke the ‘subjective’ perspective, from which some mental activity constitutes the facts of the case. For all Rosen’s arguments, we can still distinguish those cases for which discovery-talk and mind-dependence-talk can co-exist from those cases for which discovery-talk is permissible but mind-dependence-talk is wholly misplaced—and this distinction may be of philosophical significance.
Those with reservations that the folk could possibly be employing a deeply confused or inchoate and indeterminate notion might recall how Socrates typically sets out to demonstrate exactly this: that despite confidently employing a term like “justice” or “knowledge,” his interlocutors in fact do not really have any precise idea what they’re talking about.
For what it’s worth, Hume did not think that anything like ‘subject-independence’ was part of the content of sensory experience: “[A]s to the independency of our perceptions on ourselves, this can never be an object of the senses” ([1740, book 1, part 4, section 2] 1978: 191).
I am not claiming that such non-phenomenal ‘experience’ must take the form of belief. I should like to maintain the earlier distinction between experience and judgment: One can experience something as X while judging that it is not X. The introduction of a more fine-grained framework that would accommodate this does not seem objectionable. Let us further consider the phobic, though we’ll change the example to an arachnophobe. Suppose therapy leads the arachnophobe to understand his problem; he comes to realize (all things considered) that the spiders he encounters pose no threat. (We’ll assume he doesn’t live in Australia!) Yet, when he comes upon a daddy long-legs in the bathtub, he finds himself once more in the grip of the thought that the spider is (in some possibly inchoate sense) dangerous. We might choose to accord this ‘thought’ some phenomenal quality (and of course for the phobic this thought is also accompanied by anxiety, which surely does have a phenomenal flavor to it), but doing so does not seem compulsory. Even so, it seems desirable to distinguish the phobic’s thought from a straightforward belief. Arguably, the phobic has ceased genuinely to believe that the spider is dangerous; he just can’t help entertaining the thought. (For some discussion of the role of thoughts and beliefs in phobias, see Joyce 2000.) Maintaining some logical space between non-phenomenal ‘experience’ and belief also helps to make this way of explicating the phenomenological thesis available to the noncognitivist projectivist (who generally denies the existence of moral beliefs).
I say “ordinary person” to exclude certain philosophers, who may hold all sorts of wacky views. Consider what Bishop Berkeley took himself to be saying when he uttered “There is a tree in the quad.”
Perhaps certain forms of objectivity have been written off as incoherent (see, e.g., Rosen 1994), but, as was noted earlier, the phenomenological thesis doesn’t require that any general concept of objectivity ultimately makes sense.
At least: something that has as good a claim to being true as if you were to assert the same sentence on the basis of visual acquaintance with my screensaver.
The noncognitivist, of course, in a sense denies these things across the board, even for ordinary unimpaired persons. I take it, though, that with a bit of hedging and rewording, the present point about an asymmetry could be expressed in terms amenable even to a noncognitivist.
Some have expressed doubts about aspects of the moral/conventional distinction (see Kelly et al. 2007; Kelly and Stich 2007), but their skepticism does not extend to casting into doubt the evidence that there exists a substantial performance divergence in this respect in individuals manifesting the psychopathic profile.
Kennett (2002) argues that psychopaths lack the concept duty due to their impaired understanding of ends and reasons. Smith (1994: ch.3) argues that having certain motivations in favor of compliance is necessary for mastery of moral concepts. He draws a direct analogy with how things stand in the case of a colorblind person’s grasp of color concepts.
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Thanks to Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Neil Levy, Shaun Nichols, and two anonymous ETMP referees for their comments.
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Joyce, R. Is Moral Projectivism Empirically Tractable?. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 12, 53–75 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-008-9127-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-008-9127-5