Abstract
The main guiding assumption of this paper is that there is need for a taxonomy of ethical sentences (a reliable way for differentiating ethical from non-ethical sentences) that does not overgenerate, yet can make useful contributions to debates about certain controversial sentences (such as conditionals with a non-ethical antecedent and ethical consequent). After surveying the recent literature and concluding that no extant taxonomy that satisfies both of these conditions is available to us, I propose and explain a novel taxonomy which does satisfy them. I then defend my proposal from five potential objections.
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Notes
For the purposes of this paper, I will be assuming that certain predicates are uncontroversially ethical (for example, I will often use ‘is ethically wrong’ as an example of such a predicate). My arguments do not depend on the correctness of this assumption, nor do they require me to offer an exhaustive list of these predicates. If an individual believed that different predicates belong on this list, she need only substitute her list in place of my own for the remainder of this paper. All I require is that the reader accept the following statement: some predicates are ethical, and the predicates I treat as ethical throughout this paper can serve as representative examples of these ethical predicates.
Here is Karmo’s statement of this implication: “if sentences Si,…,Sn (Where n > 0) entail sentence S(n + 1), then for any possible world w in which S(n + 1) is ethical, if all of Si,…,Sn are true in w, then at least one of Si,…,Sn is ethical in w” (Karmo 1988 257).
Maitzen (1998), for example, has argued that Karmo’s account of the is-ought distinction cannot explain valid is-ought inferences that have ethical nihilism as one of the premises (Maitzen 1998 354–6). Hill has interpreted Maitzen’s comments and arguments as suggesting that Karmo can be criticized for being unable to accommodate the intuition that ethical nihilism is not inconsistent (Hill 2008 559). I will not address either of these arguments at this time, as my argument provides more decisive reason to reject Karmo’s taxonomy. Furthermore, I will address Maitzen’s argument as a potential objection to my own proposed taxonomy in later sections.
In a world where there are not peas, the first conjunct would not be ethical because its negation would be an existentially committal sentence that implies the existence of peas. However, since peas exist in our world, the first conjunct is ethical in our world. Similar considerations apply for green objects and the second conjunct. I would like to thank anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
Note that similar proposed taxonomies are still being entertained in more recent literature. Brown (2014) has discussed a proposed taxonomy according to which “an ethical sentence…is one the acceptance of which entails the ruling out of some ethical possibility.” (Brown 2014 63). The objection I raise against Dreier’s proposal will apply to Brown’s ‘ruling out’ taxonomy, but I will not discuss Brown’s proposal independently.
A proponent of Dreier’s view may raise an objection similar to one I discussed above regarding Karmo’s view: we may be able to easily revise Dreier’s taxonomy in order to avoid this counterexample in a way that is analogous to Karmo*. Rather than engage with this proposal at length, I will simply point to the fact that such a revision will likely have the same pitfalls as Karmo*, as it will identify a number of conjunctions of uncontroversially ethical sentences as non-ethical.
This is also a potential problem for at least two other prominent proposed taxonomies. The first is a set of taxonomies that emphasize ontological commitment. One statement of this suggestion is as follows: “φ is an ethical sentence only if it is impossible for φ, standardly construed, to be true unless a given moral property (such as moral rightness or wrongness) is possessed by at least one object” (Maitzen 1998 361). Similar proposals are entertained elsewhere (Brown 2014 62). While these proposals do not obviously overgenerate, they cannot successfully explain why some mixed compounds seem to be ethical sentences. For example, the ontological commitment proposal would suggest that all mixed conditionals and disjunctions are not ethical, as the truth of these sentences does not require the instantiation of any moral properties. Maitzen explicitly accepts this conclusion (Maitzen 2010a 308), but many philosophers find it to be profoundly counterintuitive (see the discussion of mixed conditionals above). As further support for the claim that Maitzen’s bullet-biting is unsatisfactory, consider the criticism of a second prominent taxonomy - Restall and Russell’s (2010) ‘fragility’ proposal. Restall and Rusell argue that a sentence is ethical when changes (translations) to the set of morally satisfactory worlds (while the set of worlds – of which the set of morally satisfactory worlds is a subset - remains unchanged) or additions (extensions) to the set of worlds can result in a change of truth value for that sentence. Such sentences are said to be “fragile under normative translations” (Restall and Russell 2010 253–255), whereas the truth value of descriptive sentences are preserved under such translations or extensions. (This explanation of the fragility view draws heavily on the discussion in Vranas 2010 260–263). This proposed taxonomy has been rejected by several people because it fails to identify mixed conditionals and disjunctions as ethical sentences (see Vranas 2010 264 and Schurz 2010 269). Vranas goes as far as to call such mixed conditionals “paradigmatically moral” (Vranas 2010 264). In short, there seems to be demand in the philosophical literature for a taxonomy of ethical sentences that not only avoids overgeneration, but can also explain intuitive phenomena like the seemingly ethical character of mixed conditionals and disjunctions. This demand give us cause to keep searching for a taxonomy that can explain more intuitive phenomena than either the ontological commitments approach or the fragility approach.
These property-identifications will be discussed in more detail below.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Anthony Skelton, Andrew Botterell, Carolyn McLeod, Sergio Tenenbaum, Katy Fulfer, the attendees of the 7th annual Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress, and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Clipsham, P. Developing a Post-Prior Taxonomy of Ethical Sentences. Philosophia 43, 801–820 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9602-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9602-x