Abstract
Moral contextualism is the view that claims like ‘A ought to X’ are implicitly relative to some (contextually variable) standard. This leads to a problem: what are fundamental moral claims like ‘You ought to maximize happiness’ relative to? If this claim is relative to a utilitarian standard, then its truth conditions are trivial: ‘Relative to utilitarianism, you ought to maximize happiness’. But it certainly doesn’t seem trivial that you ought to maximize happiness (utilitarianism is a highly controversial position). Some people believe this problem is a reason to prefer a realist or error theoretic semantics of morals. I argue two things: first, that plausible versions of all these theories are afflicted by the problem equally, and second, that any solution available to the realist and error theorist is also available to the contextualist. So the problem of triviality does not favour noncontextualist views of moral language.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
There are also forms of nonindexical contextualism, described with respect to predicates like ‘is tall’ in MacFarlane (2005). Both indexical and nonindexical contextualists relativize some relevant item to the speaker’s perspective (or that of a group to which the speaker belongs), whereas relativists do it to a judge or assessor. See MacFarlane (2007) for an accessible presentation of a relativist view about judgements of taste.
Thereby avoiding the problem of disagreement. However, Francén (2010) argues that relativists cannot secure deep disagreement. For an argument that relativists cannot keep standards out of normative propositions, see Daan Evers (unpublished) Relativism and Normativity.
I use ‘obligation’ in a loose sense, comprising whatever is expressed by ‘ought’ and ‘must’ claims. I take it that ‘ought’ is in some sense weaker than ‘must’.
Another problem that may occur to you is the following. If contextualism is a claim about the meaning of ‘ought’ and other terms, then it is not very illuminating to say that ‘ought’ statements are relative to standards which themselves involve the concept of ought (as I have done in (1*)). But I did this only for convenience. Although utilitarianism is commonly formulated using ‘ought’, we can imagine (1) to be relativized to the imperative ‘Maximize happiness!’ instead of the claim that one ought to do this (and there are other options). That way, a contextualist account of ‘ought’ can be informative.
Olson wields this as an objection to Stephen Finlay’s (2009) end-relational view of moral language in particular, but I think the problem is quite general for contextualist views. It should be noted that the problem of triviality is not the main focus of Olson’s paper, which is primarily concerned with a defence of the error theory.
Given this assumption, it is also not problematic that all moral statements are necessarily true in a standard-relative framework (an objection raised by Judith Thomson in Harman and Thomson 1996). If it is necessary that arbitrary torture is wrong, then it is necessary that if something is a case of arbitrary torture, it is wrong. This is not the same as saying that it is necessary that some act is a case of arbitrary torture. But a standard-relative account does not imply that all actions have their right- or wrong-making properties necessarily.
Notice that triviality in the sense of obviousness needn’t always be a problem either. It seems pretty obvious that arbitrary torture is wrong, but it is not a requirement on an adequate semantics for this sentence that it is unobviously true. The problem of triviality is really a problem about the source of obviousness. Even though it may be obvious that arbitrary torture is wrong, it does not seem obvious in virtue of the quasi-tautological nature of the content of the sentence.
This seems quite possible to me, as claims like ‘Standard S is correct’ do not involve any modal auxiliary verbs and have a completely different structure.
An anonymous referee for this journal pointed out that many philosophers think there may be no non-circular justification for fundamental moral principles. For example, Mill wonders whether ethical principles admit of proof at all (2004, introduction). The referee thinks this probably means that few ethicists would consider the problem of triviality to be very troubling. However, this seems to me to conflate issues of justification with issues concerning the meaning of moral statements. It may be impossible to prove the validity of induction without presupposing it. But that does not mean that a statement describing an inductive principle is akin to a tautology, which is what the problem of triviality is all about. Fundamental moral claims do not seem to be akin to a tautology and very few ethicists make claims to this effect.
Of course, not all moral statements involve modal auxiliary verbs (or are equivalent in meaning to such statements). One can also express moral claims in terms of reasons or value. I discuss the relevance of these possibilities to the problem of triviality in Section 4.
Examples are Kratzer (1977), Von Fintel and Iatridou (2008) and Finlay (2009, Confusion of Tongues: a Theory of Normativity (unpublished, available upon request at http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~finlay/).
Although this discussion is often explicitly about ‘ought’, it is equally relevant to words like ‘must’ and ‘may’. I take it that if ‘ought’ sometimes takes actions instead of propositions, the same is true of ‘must’ and ‘may’.
John Broome (2004) argues that ‘ought’ means the same in expressions like ‘morally ought’ and ‘prudentially ought’ as when it occurs unqualified (for example in all-things-considered judgments). My remarks about cross-linguistic ambiguities between different readings of modals is consonant with and supports this idea. The ambiguities suggest not only that normative readings of ‘ought’ share a common semantic core with non-normative readings and other modal auxiliary verbs; they also suggest that ‘ought’ denotes the same relation when used in a moral or some other normative context (including all-things-considered judgments).
My claim is not that moral realists usually think that moral statements are implicitly relative to (uniquely correct) standards. Rather, my claim is that a plausible version of realism will involve this kind of relativity.
It should be borne in mind that when I say that the problem will arise (or that the realist ‘faces’ this problem), I don’t mean that the correct semantics for moral language will definitely make fundamental moral statements obvious or uninteresting (after all, I think there is a solution to the problem of triviality). What I mean is that the same considerations which make this problem seem pressing for contextualists apply to all plausible semantics.
See also footnote 24.
Not that many realists deny their existence. Shafer-Landau (2003) even defines realism in terms of moral standards. According to him, ‘Realists believe that there are moral truths that obtain independently of any preferred perspective, in the sense that the moral standards that fix the moral facts are not made true by virtue of their ratification from within any given actual or hypothetical perspective’ (2003, p. 15). And I take it that any generalist (nonparticularist) is not opposed to them in principle. Robert Audi (2004) believes that there are self-evident basic moral principles. Although Audi is not committed to the idea that their self-evidence is due to their semantics, I suggest that he think so.
From a normative perspective, there isn’t much reason to object to standards either. Suppose we interpret them as ends. This is flexible enough to allow any moral view that I can think of. Kantians believe that you are required to act in accordance with universalizable maxims. So they can think of moral judgments as relative to the end of acting in conformity with them. Aristotelians believe that what is morally right is what is conducive to (or constitutive of) human flourishing. They can index moral judgments to the end of promoting human flourishing.
I take it that relativists deny at least (c), though possibly all three. If so, I fail to see what proposition they believe is expressed by normative sentences. See Daan Evers (unpublished) Relativism and Normativity.
It is noteworthy that Olson defines a reason as a fact which explains why an act has a certain moral status. This is justified for reasons of linguistic uniformity. After all, we talk about reasons why the light is off, why I am late for work, as well as reasons why something would be good or bad, or ought to be done (whether morally or not). In all these cases, reasons seem to be facts. This makes it plausible that normative reasons are also facts: facts which explain why something is good or bad or why we ought to act a certain way (see Finlay (unpublished), Confusion of Tongues: a Theory of Normativity, chapter 5.) Similarly, reasons of uniformity suggest that the semantics of modals in moral contexts is not completely different from the semantics of modals in other normative contexts.
I take ‘absolute’ here to mean that these standards matter normatively irrespective of desires, aims or roles. I think this is no more obscure than Olson’s idea that moral reasons matter normatively irrespective of desires, aims or roles.
An anonymous referee for this journal wonders whether fictionalist versions of the error theory might evade the problem of triviality. Fictionalists believe that although moral statements involve expressions which refer to or presuppose non-existent entities, moral claims are not asserted by ordinary speakers (i.e. they are not made with the purpose of representing reality). Instead, they are made for various practical purposes, but this does not commit them to the existence of the relevant entities (see, e.g. Joyce 2001, chapter 7 or Kalderon 2005). However, it is obscure how this might prevent the problem of triviality, as this problem concerns the meaning of moral language. It does not seem to be the case that the meaning of fundamental moral claims involves something akin to a tautology. This problem is independent of the question whether ordinary speakers assert those claims or not.
See Dowell J (unpublished) A Flexible Contextualist Account of ‘Ought’ for a similar suggestion about the way to formulate an absolutist moral semantics.
Of course realists will need some kind of reference hook to ensure that everyone who uses moral vocabulary refers to the same moral standards.
And the cognitive significance of either is different from that of a sentence in which the standard is not supplied by description at all, but in some other way.
References
Audi R (2004) The good in the right. A theory of intuition and intrinsic value. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Björnsson G, Finlay S (2010) Metaethical contextualism defended. Ethics 121:7–36
Braun D (2002) Cognitive significance, attitude ascriptions and ways of believing propositions. Philos Stud 108:65–81
Brogaard B (2008) Moral contextualism and moral relativism. Philos Q 58:385–409
Broome J (2004) Reasons. In: Jay Wallace R, Pettit P, Scheffler S, Smith M (eds) Reason and value. Themes from the moral philosophy of Joseph Raz. Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp 28–55
Copp D (1995) Morality, normativity, and society. Oxford University Press, New York
Dreier J (1990) Internalism and speaker relativism. Ethics 101:6–26
Finlay S (2009) Oughts and ends. Philos Stud 143:315–340
Francén R (2010) No deep disagreement for new relativists. Philos Stud 151:19–37
Geach P (1982) Whatever happened to deontic logic? Philosophia 11:1–12
Harman G (1975) Moral relativism defended. Philos Rev 84:3–22
Harman G, Thomson J (1996) Moral relativism and moral objectivity. Blackwell, Cambridge
Joyce R (2001) The myth of morality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Kalderon M (2005) Moral fictionalism. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Kölbel M (2002) Truth without objectivity. Routledge, London
Kolodny N, MacFarlane J (2010) Ifs and oughts. J Philos 107:115–143
Kratzer A (1977) What ‘must’ and ‘can’ must and can mean. Linguist Philos 1:337–355
Kratzer A (1981) The notional category of modality. In: Eikmeyer H, Rieser H (eds) Words, worlds, and contexts. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, pp 38–74
López de Sa D (2008) Presuppositions of commonality: an indexical relativist account of disagreement. In: Garcia-Carpintero M (ed) Relative truth. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 297–310
MacFarlane J (2005) Making sense of relative truth. Proc Aristot Soc 105:321–339
MacFarlane J (2007) Relativism and disagreement. Philos Stud 132:17–31
Mackie J (1977) Ethics: inventing right and wrong. Penguin, London
Mill J (2004) Utilitarianism. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Olson J (2010) In defense of moral error theory. In: Brady M (ed) New waves in metaethics. Palgrave Macmillan, London
Price A (2008) Contextuality in practical reason. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Schroeder M (2011) Ought, agents and actions. Philos Rev 120:1–41
Shafer-Landau R (2003) Moral realism. A Defence. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Von Fintel K, Iatridou S (2008) How to say ought in foreign: the composition of weak necessity modals. In: Guéron J, Lecarme J (eds) Time and modality. Springer, Dordrecht
Williams B (1981) Ought and Moral Obligation. In: Williams B (ed) Moral luck. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 114–123
Wong D (1984) Moral relativity. University of California Press, Berkely
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Thomas Müller, Natalja Deng, Annemarie Kalis, Antje Rumberg and anonymous referees for Ethical Theory and Moral Practice for helpful comments on this paper. Work on the paper was made possible by the European Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC Grant agreement No. 263227.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Evers, D. Moral Contextualism and the Problem of Triviality. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 17, 285–297 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9437-0
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9437-0