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The tale of a moderate normative skeptic

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Abstract

While Richard Joyce’s moral skepticism might seem to be an extreme metaethical view, it is actually far more moderate than it might first appear. By articulating four challenges facing his approach to moral skepticism, I argue that Joyce’s moderation is, in fact, a theoretical liability. First, the fact that Joyce is not skeptical about normativity in general makes it possible to develop close approximations to morality, lending support to moderate moral revisionism over moral error theory. Second, Joyce relies on strong, contentious conceptual and empirical claims in support of his views. Third, Joyce’s evolutionary debunking argument threatens to backfire, generalizing to all normative judgments. Finally, Joyce fails to offer an adequate account of the normativity of desire. Each of these four challenges can be either sidestepped (the first and second) or embraced (the third and fourth) by radicalizing and defending a global form of normative skepticism. There are thus several ways in which global normative skepticism appears to be in a more robust dialectical position than Joyce’s moral skepticism. Furthermore, I argue, Joyce’s arguments against global normative skepticism are unconvincing. While this discussion is framed in terms of Joyce’s work, its arguments will apply to other moral skeptics who are not also global normative skeptics. The result is an invitation for Joyce and other moral skeptics to leave these problems behind and join the radical camp.

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Notes

  1. The parenthetical remarks indicate that the argument has two versions, one for externalists and the other for internalists about epistemic justification.

  2. Although this view also targets epistemic reasons, the primary focus of my discussion below will be framed in terms of reasons for action. I briefly address issues surrounding epistemic normativity in Sect. 5. Unless explicitly noted, I will be exclusively discussing reasons in a normative sense—in contrast to, e.g., motivating reasons. As I understand normative reasons, their existence is not guaranteed by the existence of social norms. For example, even if there is a social norm which states that I should form beliefs about people’s characters on the basis of their zodiac signs, there may be no normative reasons for me to form such beliefs on this basis.

  3. Perhaps interests should be included here, in addition to desires. Hume (2007[1739–1740], sect. 2.3.3) may have thought desires that are contrary to one’s interests are not rationally criticizable, but it seems that some idealizing versions of instrumentalism can account for interests to some extent. Joyce suggests (2001, pp. 56–58) that it is best to talk about an agent’s ends, remaining neutral on whether this includes just (actual or idealized) desires, or interests as well. I will continue to talk of desires, but it is acceptable to read my use of ‘desires’ as including ends in Joyce’s sense.

  4. This argument depends on a Humean theory of action, according to which actions require the cooperation of means-end beliefs and desires (Joyce 2001, p. 109ff; Davidson 1980, ch. 1). If beliefs alone could lead us to act, then merely coming to believe that we have a reason to Φ might lead us to Φ, even if Φ-ing does not engage our desires. However, if desire is necessary for action, then we will be unable to Φ unless Φ-ing somehow engages our desires.

  5. Indeed, while the particular desire-based reasons that we have may shift with changes in our desires, there is no opting out of the framework of practical rationality (Sect. 2), and so the fact that our desires give us normative reasons is, for Joyce, inescapable.

  6. Joyce (2001, p. 96) uses the contrast between relative and absolute conceptions of motion as an example.

  7. Of course, this in itself does not show that global normative error theory is more plausible than moral error theory. But it does show that, even if this stronger position turned out to be more difficult to establish, once it had been established, it would be more stable in this regard than Joyce’s moral error theory. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.

  8. Joyce rightly points out (2001, p. 98) that we need to ask not only what people will say about metaethics, but also what account best captures our ordinary practices. However, these studies do contribute to this goal by, for example, interpreting respondents’ claims about moral disagreement and the explanations they offer for why they answered certain questions in the way that they did.

  9. It is true that global normative error theorists are committed to the stronger substantive claim that there are no normative properties (compared to Joyce’s weaker substantive claim that there are no categorical normative properties). The plausibility of this stronger substantive claim will obviously depend on the strength of the arguments supporting it. Although my goal here is not to defend these stronger claims, I do believe that arguments for realism about non-moral normativity are unpersuasive (Sects. 4.3, 4.4; Cline 2016). See also Olson (2014, chs. 6, 8), who argues that Mackie’s queerness argument for moral error theory supports an error theory about all genuine normativity. Although Olson allows for “reducible reasons,” he does not interpret this as a normative notion. As a result, I believe that Olson would agree with the global normative error theorist that to the extent that we make genuine normative judgments, we are in error. In other words, I think that Olson agrees to (1), but perhaps thinks that a good deal of our discourse about reasons does not involve ascriptions of genuinely normative reasons. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.

  10. This claim is intended to be understood as applying to our judgments about genuinely normative reasons, and interpretations of instrumentalism that construe it as a theory about genuinely normative reasons. It will leave intact instrumentalist accounts of Olson’s non-normative “reducible” reasons (see Sect. 4.1), but it is clear that Joyce intends his discussion of instrumentalism to be construed as an account of genuinely normative reasons.

  11. Streumer (2013a) pursues a similar line of thought, arguing that normative beliefs are non-optional because it is impossible to believe the (global normative) error theory. He maintains that this conclusion protects the theory from several important objections. Although I disagree with his claim that it is impossible to believe the error theory, I agree that the non-optional character of our normative beliefs can be used to defang some common objections to the theory, in the way he suggests.

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Acknowledgements

For helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, I am grateful to James Beebe, Alex King, Ken Shockley, and an anonymous reviewer. I have also benefitted from valuable discussion with Ariane Nomikos and audiences at the University at Buffalo, and the 9th Annual Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo, SUNY, 135 Park Hall, Buffalo, NY, 14260-4150, USA

    Brendan Cline

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Cline, B. The tale of a moderate normative skeptic. Philos Stud 175, 141–161 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0859-8

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