Abstract
This essay concerns two forms of moral non-naturalism according to which general moral principles or laws enter into the grounding explanations of particular moral facts. According to bridge-law non-naturalism (BLNN), the laws are themselves partial grounds of the moral facts; whereas according to grounding-law non-naturalism (GLNN), the laws explain the grounding connections that obtain between particular natural facts and particular moral facts. I pose and develop an objection to BLNN concerning moral worth: as compared to GLNN, BLNN has trouble accommodating the common intuition that actions performed out of motivation for rightness de dicto are, at least in paradigm cases, deficient in their moral worth as compared to those performed out of motivation for rightness de re. After presenting the moral worth objection to BLNN, I respond to a possible defense of the view and explain why GLNN is not itself imperiled by an analogous objection. I finally argue that in light of the moral worth objection, a purported analogy between the law and morality fails to give us any reason to prefer BLNN to GLNN. I conclude that non-naturalists who accept the existence of general and explanatory moral principles should adopt GLNN rather than BLNN.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This characterization of metaethical non-naturalism follows (Rosen, 2017b, 2017d); see Leary (2020, manuscript) for discussion and dissent. On Leary’s understanding, the debate between naturalists and non-naturalists in metaethics concerns the essences of the normative properties. (Her own view (2017), a version of non-naturalism, is that moral supervenience is explained by facts about the essences of hybrid normative properties).
This view is to be contrasted with the view that moral principles merely state the explanatory connections that hold between particular natural facts and particular moral facts, according to which moral principles are merely explanatory-in-content or explanation-involving. (Fogal and Risberg defend the first view, while Berker defends the latter).
I remain officially neutral on several controversies within the theory of grounding. These controversies include but are not limited to: (i) whether grounding should be understood as a relation or an operation; (ii) if grounding is a relation, what its relata are; and (iii) the precise connection between grounding and explanation, in particular whether grounding is itself a species of explanation (“unionism”) or whether it only backs explanation (“separatism”). (This terminology is due to Raven 2015; see there for a full discussion of these and other controversies of grounding.) Following Berker (2019, 906–7), I accept unionism, yet I assume that this choice is immaterial to the argument. (See also Fogal & Risberg 2020, 13–14).
Enoch refers to GLNN as the iterated grounding picture.
I should note that on Bader’s view, the moral facts are not metaphysically grounded but rather normatively grounded in the relevant natural facts, where normative grounding is understood as a sui generis notion, not definable in terms of metaphysical grounding. (The notion is due to Kit Fine 2012, 37–40 and is criticized by Berker 2018). I shall not appeal to this feature of Bader’s view in the text, focusing exclusively on the structural differences between BLNN and GLNN’s views of the place of laws in moral explanations.
I take it that Bader has the same view in writing that what it is for a law to govern is for it to serve as a “grounding principle” (2017, 117). Bader and Schaffer both caution against conflating this functional role with the functional role of serving as a ground. Bader calls this a “confusion of levels” (Ibid), and Schaffer writes that “one must distinguish… between that which plays the source role of ultimate grounds, and that which plays the linking role of root principles. When there are three roles involved, nothing but confusion can arise from insisting on only using two classificatory boxes” (2017a, 20–21).
Jackson appeals to this intuition in identifying the moral properties with the first-order natural properties that realize the relevant functional roles in the folk moral theory rather than with the higher-order properties of being the properties that play those functional roles.
In both papers, Johnson King uses the idioms of realization, constitution, and the “makes it the case relationship,” but I assume these pick out the same relation as grounding. In fact, however, Johnson King herself is critical of the metaphysical construal of the de re/ de dicto distinction in her (manuscript), in which she argues that it is illuminating to consider the distinction between motivation by rightness de re and de dicto on the basis of how the de re/ de dicto distinction is standardly understood in the philosophy of mind and language.
Johnson King’s (2020b) argues for what she calls the symmetry thesis, according to which “if motivation by rightness de re is praiseworthy, then so is motivation by rightness de dicto” (408). The argument proceeds by considering “minimal pairs” of cases, which differ only with respect to how the agent in question is intrinsically motivated: in particular, whether she is intrinsically motivated to do what is right de dicto or de re. Although I believe it is possible to resist this argument by challenging some claims about grounding on which it relies, I shall not pursue this line of objection here.
In one of Johnson King’s other cases, an agent accidentally finds buried treasure while gardening (BURIED TREASURE); and in the other, an agent accidentally kills a group of vampires by running to an open field at the right time (ACCIDENTAL SLAYER).
What should the de re theorist say about Johnson King’s primary normative example, PROMISE-KEEPING (190)? Here the story is slightly more involved. In PROMISE-KEEPING, an agent keeps her promise accidentally by going to the coffee shop where she promised she would meet her friend, though she goes to the coffee shop for unrelated reasons. The de re theorist should agree that the agent’s act of promise-keeping is accidental, but should argue that the case of promising is importantly disanalogous to standard cases of de re motivation, in the following two ways:
First, notice that as in the non-normative cases, what the agent is motivated to do in PROMISE-KEEPING corresponds only to a partial ground of the fact that she keeps her promise. For in general, [agent fulfills her promise to ϕ] is partially grounded in [agent promised to ϕ] as well as in [agent ϕ-ed]. Additionally, notice further that it is not clear that [ϕ-ing is the keeping of a promise] it itself a full ground for [ϕ-ing is right], at least where [ϕ-ing is the keeping of a promise] is understood entirely naturalistically. For normative explanations of the rightness (wrongness) of promise-keeping (-breaking) might include other kinds of natural facts, such as facts about the social institution of promise-keeping and the predictable (natural) consequences of breaking a promise. So, the de re theorist should argue, the accidental nature of the agent’s keeping her promise in PROMISE-KEEPING fails to generalize to other normative cases.
The absence of a disabler is a mere absence and so cannot ground anything, which is in fact the major consideration Bader advances in favor of distinguishing between grounds and enablers/disablers (2016, 33–35).
The de re theorist can thus concede to Johnson King that “to get a feature that necessitates moral rightness, we would need to specify the feature in an inordinate amount of detail … For instance, we would have to say that the feature of the act that motivates Huck is not just that it helps a person but rather that it helps a person who is trying to do something that is itself morally valuable, and who is not hurting anyone else in the process, and who is not disrupting any social institutions besides those that are harmful and should be disrupted, et cetera” (Ibid, 195–196) without this concession threatening the asymmetry the de re theorist believes obtains between cases like SEMAPHOR DANCER and the case of Huck Finn.
The general distinction between grounds and other elements of a complete explanation does work in other normative contexts, as well. For example, Bader puts the distinction between grounds and modifiers to work in providing an account of agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons and notes that it is an advantage of his theory that it “identif[ies] the object of concern in terms of the ground of the reason, and not in terms of the modifier” (Ibid, 43; see also 49–50; n26, n33). This point parallels the argument in the text about how the distinction between grounds and conditions affords the de re theorist a response to Johnson King’s objections.
Since Bader denies that particular moral facts are fully metaphysically grounded in particular natural facts, holding instead that they are fully normatively grounded in particular natural facts, his view does not amount to a form of moral naturalism.
In the first instance, Enoch appeals to the analogy between law and morals to answer Berker’s (2019) objections to views on which moral principles are explanation-serving. So Enoch’s response to Berker might not be available to the GLNN theorist, though perhaps this point can be resisted. (For another response to Berker, see Fogal & Risberg 2020, 15–17).
References
Arpaly, N. (2003). Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into Moral Agency. Oxford University Press.
Bader, R. (2016). Conditions, modifiers, and holism. In E. Lord & B. Maguire (Eds.), Weighing Reasons (pp. 27–55). Oxford University Press.
Bader, R. (2017). The grounding argument against non-reductive moral realism. In R. Shafer-Landau (Ed.), Oxford studies in metaethics (Vol. 12, pp. 106–134). Oxford University Press.
Bader, R. manuscript. Makers of good-makers.
Berker, S. (2018). The unity of grounding. Mind, 127, 729–777.
Berker, S. (2019). The explanatory ambitions of moral principles. Noûs, 53, 904–936.
Dancy, J. (2004). Ethics without Principles. Oxford University Press.
Enoch, D. (2011). Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism. Oxford University Press.
Enoch, D. (2019). How principles ground. In R. Shafer-Landau (Ed.), Oxford studies in metaethics (Vol. 14, pp. 1–22). Oxford University Press.
Fine, K. (2012). Guide to ground. In F. Correia & B. Schnieder (Eds.), Metaphysical Grounding: Understanding the Structure of Reality (pp. 37–80). Cambridge University Press.
Fogal, D., & Risberg, O. (2020). The metaphysics of moral explanations. In R. Schafer-Landau (Ed.), Oxford studies in metaethics (Vol. 15, pp. 170–194). Oxford University Press. (Page numbers to version on PhilPapers, available at https://philpapers.org/archive/FOGTMO.pdf)
Foot, P. (2002). Virtues and Vices. Oxford University Press.
Herman, B. (1981). On the value of acting from the motive of duty. Philosophical Review, 90, 359–382.
Jackson, F. (2000). From Metaphysics to Ethics. Oxford University Press (Clarendon).
Johnson King, Z. A. (2020a). Accidentally doing the right thing. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 100, 186–206.
Johnson King, Z. A. (2020b). Praiseworthy motivations. Noûs, 54, 408–430.
Johnson King, Z. A. manuscript. Deliberation and moral motivation. Accessed at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5930a7361e5b6ce07837229b/t/5eebc410fd65140649f5767a/1592509457126/Deliberation+and+Moral+Motivation+%E2%80%94+draft+4.2.pdf
Kant, I. (1785/2012). Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. M. Gregor, & J. Timmermann (Eds.). Cambridge University Press.
Leary, S. (2017). Non-naturalism and normative necessities. In R. Shafer-Landau (Ed.), Oxford studies in metaethics (Vol. 12, pp. 76–105). Oxford University Press.
Leary, S. (2020). Normativity. In M. J. Raven (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of metaphysical grounding (pp. 472–483). Routledge.
Leary, S. manuscript. What is normative non-naturalism?. Accessed at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55ce6662e4b02a0f1ae0e0de/t/5ed136ffd97d7907c6b40864/1590769407981/What+is+Normative+Non-naturalism_20-5-19.pdf
Markovits, J. (2010). Acting for the right reasons. Philosophical Review, 119, 201–242.
Raven, M. J. (2015). Ground. Philosophy Compass, 10(5), 322–333. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12220
Rosen, G. (2017a). Ground by law. Philosophical Issues, 27, 279–301.
Rosen, G. (2017b). Metaphysical relations in metaethics. In D. Plunkett & T. McPherson (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of metaethics (pp. 151–169). Routledge.
Rosen, G. (2017c). Scanlon’s modal metaphysics. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 47, 856–876.
Rosen, G. (2017d). What is a moral law? In R. Schafer-Landau (Ed.), Oxford studies in metaethics (Vol. 12, pp. 135–159). Oxford University Press.
Scanlon, T. M. (2014). Being Realistic about Reasons. Oxford University Press.
Schaffer, J. (2016). It is the business of laws to govern. Dialectica, 4, 577–588.
Schaffer, J. (2017a). The ground between the gaps. Philosophers’ Imprint, 17, 1–26.
Schaffer, J. (2017b). Laws for metaphysical explanation. Philosophical Issues, 27, 302–321.
Sliwa, P. (2016). Moral worth and moral knowledge. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 93, 393–418.
Smith, M. (1994). The Moral Problem. Blackwell.
Acknowledgements
I thank Ralf Bader, David Enoch, and Gideon Rosen, as well as a very helpful anonymous referee, for their comments on versions of this essay.
Funding
Not applicable.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The author declares that they have no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Salinger, E. Moral laws and moral worth. Philos Stud 179, 2347–2360 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01766-2
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01766-2