Abstract
One version of moral error theory maintains that the central problem with morality is an ontological commitment to irreducible normativity. This paper argues that this version of error theory ultimately depends on an appeal to Ockham’s Razor, and that Ockham’s Razor should not be applied to irreducible normativity. This is because the appeal to Ockham’s Razor always contains an intractable element of epistemic circularity; and if this circularity is not vicious, we can construct a sound argument for the existence of irreducibly normative truths that contains a similar kind of epistemic circularity. This argument is a version of Pascal’s Wager which I call “Parfit’s Wager,” because it is based on a passage from Derek Parfit’s On What Matters (2011). It states that, if we believe that there are some irreducibly normative truths, we are more likely to be believing what we ought to believe (and less likely to be believing what we ought not to believe, or to be failing to believe what we ought to believe) compared to not believing that there are such truths, and that this indicates that we ought rationally to believe that there are such truths, justifying the ontological commitment to irreducible normativity in the process.
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Understood in the standard way as the view that moral thinking involves systematically false beliefs about the existence of moral properties and facts, and that consequently all moral judgements are false (Olson, 2014, 8).
Sober (2015) defines Ockham’s Razor as the principle “that a theory that postulates fewer entities, processes, or causes is better than a theory that postulates more, so long as the simpler theory is compatible with what we observe” (2). There are actually two versions of Ockham’s Razor: the Razor of Silence, which prescribes agnosticism about postulates that are not needed to explain our observations, and the Razor of Denial, which actively denies their existence (12). When I talk about Ockham’s Razor in this paper, I am talking about the Razor of Denial, because the moral error theorist actively denies the existence of moral facts.
Kalf contrasts queerness error theory with what he calls “rationality” error theory, which locates the problem with morality in a commitment to categorical reasons, rather than irreducibly normative reasons. He explains that
The difference between categorical and irreducibly normative reasons is that it is built into the definition of the latter that they make an ontological demand on the world, whereas the former leave this open and just require that they ‘bind’ agents regardless of whether they desire to perform the action that a categorical reason tells them to perform. (17)
Since rationality error theory—supported by Joyce (2007) and Kalf himself—is consequently not ontological in its main concerns, I will not argue that it is based on Ockham’s Razor like queerness error theory.
These are not the only questions we ask ourselves in deliberation, of course. But the error theorist can apply Ockham’s Razor and argue that these are the only questions that we need to ask, in light of the less parsimonious commitments involved in the answers to other kinds of deliberative questions (such as moral questions). We will return to this.
Neglected both in the literature and (due to its placement) by the author. Though Streumer (2017) cites it, very much in passing, during his response to Cuneo’s objection that the error theory is either self-defeating or polemically toothless (170). I will not understand the argument as a version of this objection, however.
Or having a true belief that nothing matters (for that matter).
Or even, as Street says, that “plenty of things ‘really’ matter, if we allow, as I think we should, that existing independently of a subject’s point of view of the world is not the only way of being ‘real’.” What Kahane seems to mean when he talks about things mattering, however, is precisely the “robustly attitude-independent sense” of “(really) matters” that Street rejects.
Not to mention that Kahane’s definition of nihilism seems to conflate two quite different views: we could believe that nothing has final value without also believing that there are no reasons to want, do or feel anything.
This is distinct from the assumption that such reasons are metaphysically possible, which risks begging the question against the error theorist for whom irreducibly normative reasons are metaphysically impossible. Something can be epistemically possible while nonetheless being metaphysically impossible: even if irreducibly normative reasons are in fact metaphysically impossible, we may not know (for certain) that this is the case.
Motivating reasons might also be normative reasons (the same reasons might both explain and justify an agent’s behaviour). But since there are two distinct concepts of a reason (the normative/justificatory and the motivational/explanatory), reasons can be motivating without being normative (and vice versa).
In light of Olson’s use of Ockham’s Razor, Evers (2014) is left “with the sense that queerness is not doing any work in the argument against non-natural moral facts after all.” I am left with the same exact sense.
Because it means that normative properties can be specified in entirely non-normative terms (Jackson, 2016, 200).
Brown’s (2011) formulation of the Reduction Argument explicitly involves applying Ockham’s Razor to properties he calls “redundant, in the sense that they do no work in distinguishing possibilities” (210). Streumer’s claim that “if properties are ways objects can be, (N) is the correct criterion of property identity” (13) is surely just another way of saying the same thing, i.e. that distinct, necessarily co-extensive properties are redundant because they do not distinguish between possibilities (ways objects can be), and Ockham’s Razor should be applied to such properties. Despite Streumer’s stated methodology, Enoch is probably right that “[t]he deep reason … for objecting to distinct necessarily co-extensive properties has to do not so much with intuitive judgments about some examples, but with parsimony, with the methodological requirement not to multiply entities (including properties) unnecessarily” (139).
It is not part of my purpose to defend reductive realism, so I will not consider these objections in this paper.
At most they imply that, according to some rule or standard, we ought or have reasons to behave in some way. But such facts are no more normative facts than the fact that, “according to Olson, there are no irreducibly normative reasons,” is a metanormative fact.
In support of this idea, consider that it is clearly a conceptual truth that, if we ought to behave in a certain way, then we have decisive reason to behave in that way. This seems to suggest that, if we are more likely to behave as we ought to behave, and less likely to behave as we ought not to behave, if we behave in a certain way, compared to any other behaviour we could possibly engage in, and we know this, then we have, perhaps not decisive reason, but at least some reason to behave in that way.
To make it clear that it is not premise-circular, we can understand Parfit’s Wager first-and-foremost as an argument for irreducibly normative reasons, and recognize that the key premise used to derive the conclusion that there are such reasons, (NS)—the culprit for premise-circularity if anything is—is a conditional which postulates a normative reason in its consequent, and as such, it does not by itself entail that there are such reasons, and is logically compatible with the negation of the conclusion that there are such reasons. It is only when we combine (NS) with the Normative Matrix—which, I have argued, establishes premise (1)—that we get the conclusion that there are some irreducibly normative reasons.
For the error theorist, questions like “Why would we use Ockham’s Razor?” really mean something like “What explains why creatures like us are affectively disposed to take such naturalistic epistemic criteria seriously?” (Leiter, 2015, 67).
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The author thanks Cristian Constantinescu and Hallvard Lillehammer for providing helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper.
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Beardsley, T. Can Pascal’s Wager Save Morality from Ockham’s Razor?. Philosophia 50, 405–424 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00396-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00396-6