Abstract
The meaning of propositional truth is captured by William Alston’s T-scheme: “the proposition ‘that p’ is true iff p.” Truth is determined by the “way the world is,” whether in non-moral or moral contexts. True propositions express facts, but false propositions do not. Facts are states of affairs that obtain, and true propositions expresses such states of affairs. Thus, ‘It is wrong for Smith to strike Jones’, if true, expresses a state of affairs that obtains, namely, that it is wrong for Smith to strike Jones. Types of states of affairs are determined by the types of properties characterizing those states of affairs. Moral states of affairs are “moral” because they instance moral properties, which supervene on physical properties.
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Notes
- 1.
This is not, however, my preferred reading. I think that the Law of Identity is better read in ontological terms, and expressed thus: A = A, where ‘A’ designates an entity, any entity, and where this expression is interpreted to mean that A shares exactly the same properties as A itself. Similarly with A = B: here A and B share exactly the same properties, for the simple reason that what is denoted by the symbol ‘A’ is exactly the same entity as is denoted by the symbol ‘B’. I won’t pause over these matters here.
- 2.
See Sect. 2.4 regarding the meaning of ‘alethic’.
- 3.
Strictly speaking, alethic antirealism is not anthropocentric. There no reason to rule Martian’s or other extra-terrestrials out of the truth game. Certainly theists do not rule out God.
- 4.
William P. Alston, “Realism and the Tasks of Epistemology,” in Realism/Antirealism and Epistemology, edited by Christopher B. Kulp (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield: 1997): 53–94; 57; my insertion. In fact, Alston doesn’t strictly regard the T-schema as a proper definition of truth. He notes that, “First…it does not give us a contextual definition of ‘true’. Second, it is not a statement at all, much less an unqualifiedly general statement as to the conditions under which a proposition is true. It is merely a schema for statements,” ibid. He settles on the following version—a principle about the T-schema: “Any instance of [the T-schema] is necessarily true by virtue of the meaning of, inter alia, ‘true’”: ibid., my insertion. The version of the T-schema I use here, however, will do for our purposes.
- 5.
See William P. Alston, A Realist Conception of Truth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), for a more extended discussion of these matters.
- 6.
Richard Rorty does not think that it is sufficiently robust to qualify as “realist.” See his “Realism, Antirealism, and Pragmatism: Comments on Alston, Chisholm, Davidson, Harman, and Searle,” in Realism/Antirealism and Epistemology, edited by Christopher B. Kulp (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997): 149–71, especially 157–59.
- 7.
Some would advocate for a third category, “irrealism,” a notion owing to Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978), such that realism and antirealism may apply to different ways of conceiving the actual world, but irrealism refers to a variety of actual worlds. We may safely ignore this distinction for our purposes. In any event, the moral realist theory developed and defended in these pages assumes that there is only one actual world—a matter that will occupy us in Sect. 5.2. Should it turn out that what some contemporary theoretical physicists are correct, and that there is more than one, perhaps an indefinite number of (parallel) universe(s), what I say here would need modification. My comments are intended to apply to the universe in which we find ourselves, “this universe,” this world. Others may take it upon themselves to speculate about what may be the case in alternative universes; I confess that I have my hands full making sense of this one. For useful discussion of irrealism, see Crispin Wright, “Realism, Antirealism, Irrealism, Quasi-Realism: The Gareth Evans Memorial Lecture,” delivered in Oxford, June 2, 1998, reprinted in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. XII: 25–46.
- 8.
F. H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914): 1. I am indebted to William Alston for stimulating many of the remarks to follow.
- 9.
Ibid.: 223.
- 10.
Brand Blanchard, The Nature of Thought, Vol. 2 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1939): 264.
- 11.
I am indebted to Alston for this point: see his “Realism and the Tasks of Epistemology”: 62f. I make exactly this point in Knowing Moral Truth: Theory of Metaethics and Moral Knowledge (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield, 2017): 29.
- 12.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971): 176. Later in his career, Rorty backs off of this patently absurd conception of truth.
- 13.
More precisely, James says that the true is “the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite assignable reasons”: William James, Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978): 42.
- 14.
This is paraphrase. See Charles S. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–1935): paragraph 407. Peirce in fact says a number of things about the nature of truth, with in my view doubtful compatibility, inter alia that we approach truth asymptotically, which makes it sound rather realist. (One might respond, however, that this means that as inquiry proceeds, we ever more closely approach what would be endorsed in the indefinitely long run. This interpretation does not, however, entail realism, because (i) unless we are dealing with infinite intellects, it is still possible that even in the infinitely long run, finite inquirers may still never “get it right”: their finitude may permanently block them from certain sorts of data and/or conclusions; and (ii) this interpretation still, as a matter of the meaning of truth, couches it in epistemology.)
- 15.
See John Dewey, “Reconstruction in Philosophy,” in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924, Vol. 12, 1920, edited by Bridget A. Walsh (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982): 77–201, especially 156.
- 16.
See John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995): 199–228. I discuss these same matters, albeit in less detail, in Knowing Moral Truth: 29; and also in “Moral Facts and the Centrality of Intuitions,” The New Intuitionism, edited by Jill Graper Hernandez (New York and London: Continuum, 2011): 48–66, especially 50–1.
- 17.
Searle, The Construction of Social Reality: 219.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
Ibid., my insertion.
- 21.
See Alvin Goldman, “A Causal Theory of Knowing,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 64 (1967): 357–72. I am not sympathetic to this view.
- 22.
See Ramon M. Lemos, Metaphysical Investigations (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1988); and also his “Bearers of Value,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. LI, No. 4 (December 1991): 873–89. Lemos’s work has a substantial bearing on much of what I say throughout the remainder of this chapter.
- 23.
As discussed in Sect. 3.2, sentence-tokens such as this may not be adequate to fully express a determinate proposition. It may be necessary, for example, to include a temporal and perhaps other indexicals. I pass over such details here.
- 24.
Lemos, “Bearers of Value”: 873. I will refine this notion a bit momentarily, in a way that differs somewhat from Lemos.
- 25.
See Lemos, “Bearers of Value”: 874–76, for elaboration. What appears here is nearly direct quotation from Knowing Moral Truth: 34.
- 26.
For discussion of these matters, see Searle, The Construction of Social Reality: 220.
- 27.
Although he is the 44th person to hold that office. Grover Cleveland was elected to two non-consecutive terms.
- 28.
I take it that the state of affairs of there being a blue (green, large…) round-square is not possible in any possible world for the reasons just given. But other states of affairs, although not obtaining, and not possible to obtain in the actual world, may nevertheless obtain in another possible world. For example, if Einsteinian General Relativity is correct, no object (with mass) can move faster than the speed of light in the actual world, but presumably could do so in another possible world that instantiated different physical laws. (Note that there are different types of possibility: logical, metaphysical, physical, etc. In this example, I have in mind physical possibility.) We will take up matters of possible worlds Sect. 5.2.
- 29.
That is, assuming that this is a moral state of state of affairs instancing wrongness. In order to make this determination, at least with a high degree of confidence, we would require a fuller description of the state of affairs than that provided here. Perhaps, for example, the stabbing was a legitimate instance of self-defense. Following up on the complex issues underlying such specification must await Chapter 5.
- 30.
Other terms commonly employed to express the concept of a property are ‘attribute’, ‘characteristic’, and ‘feature’. There may well be others, and there are those who insist on different shades of meaning attaching to each. I will treat these terms as interchangeable, but for the most part stick with ‘property’.
- 31.
Of course, proposition F. does not fully express the proposition at issue. One would need to include spatial coordinates requisite for a full description of the situation necessary to ascertain exactly what the proposition means—or better, exactly what proposition is being asserted—in order to be able to ascertain F.’s truth.
- 32.
See John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1979 [1861]), Ch. 2. Mill is problematic on this, however, given his views on the nature of physical objects, which he takes to be “permanent possibilities of sensation.” We will come back to this issue in Sect. 5.1.
- 33.
What follows closely approximates what I have said on these matters in “Moral Facts and the Centrality of Intuitions,”: 55ff.; and also in Knowing Moral Truth, Section 2.6.
- 34.
This is Lemos’s wording.
- 35.
Strictly, we would need a fuller state description than provided here to confidently ascertain whether wrongness is instantiated in this case, which would include a description of Smith’s psychic state, Jones’s antecedent behavior, etc. It is a complex matter to formulate principles determining the degree of detail requisite for a description to suffice for predicting resultant moral states of affairs, but we may pass over such issue here.
- 36.
For example, on some taxonomic conceptions, a political state of affairs may have moral properties associated with it. Some, however, may prefer to analyze moral property-bearing political states of affairs in terms of states of affairs regarding moral agents, thereby denying free-standing ontic status to political states of affairs. These matters are too complex to pursue here.
- 37.
This state of affairs is admittedly somewhat under-described, for it neither explicitly rules out nor rules in the presence of, for example, simple life forms on (or in) the moraine. But I will simply stipulate that a lichen, a bacterium, a single-celled protozoa, etc. have no independent moral standing. I am not sure how to respond to anyone who disputes this stipulation, other than to point out that with every step we take, with our every inhalation, we are killing countless such life-forms. Concern with such things under these circumstances seems a reductio ad absurdum of practical morality.
- 38.
What, for example, could have been the status of morality before the Big Bang? Does this question even make sense? If it does, the answer is simple: there was no morality, and could not have been. I recognize that the idealist has ready to hand a range of responses, but I simply do not think that they work. These matters will resurface in Chapter 5, when we talk more about properties.
- 39.
This is not a full statement of the position I am developing. Among other things, we will need to make sense of the wrongness of moral states of affairs that do not yet, or may perhaps never, obtain.
- 40.
I am not using the term ‘direct’ in the sense of, say, sense-datum theorists, who argue for a version of representative realism in the theory of perception. On that view, the direct object of perception is a sense-datum, not a material object. A am trying to remain non-committal here regarding theories of perception; for my object is not to provide a theory of perception, but to put us in a position to understand the ontic status first-order moral properties .
- 41.
Robert Audi’s recent book, Moral Perception (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), is exceedingly insightful on these matters.
- 42.
Perhaps this self-evidence is intuitive; but intuition is cognitive, not sensuous.
- 43.
See John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Ch. 2.
- 44.
See Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 72ff. for a very useful discussion of the relevance of a naturalist (physicalist) theory of mind to the metaphysics of morality. In large measure I concur with Shafer-Landau.
- 45.
Note that a state of affairs that includes mental properties is prima facie the type of state of affairs that may include moral properties.
- 46.
See Jaegwon Kim, “Concepts of Supervenience,” reprinted in Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays, edited by Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 53–78. This could be generalized to any type of base and supervening properties. Cf. David Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 160–61. My point here comes directly from Knowing Moral Truth, Sect. 2.6; and I say the same in “Moral Facts and the Centrality of Intuitions.”
- 47.
See David Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 136ff., regarding the distinction between weak and strong supervenience. As do I, Enoch prefers strong supervenience over weak supervenience. I make the same point I am making here in “Moral Facts and the Centrality of Intuitions”: 58; and also in Knowing Moral Truth, Section 2.6.
- 48.
I do not mean to attribute causal powers to properties. This issue must await discussion until Sect. 5.4. The point here is that if properties of a certain sort are instantiated—physical properties , for example—then there may be other sorts of properties—first-order moral properties , for example—instantiated as a matter of lawlike necessity. The same applies in the case of physical properties and certain numerical and perhaps relational properties.
- 49.
Clearly the description may be expressed in many ways—in German, English, Swahili, etc. And surely there are other types of semiotic systems—sign language, for example—that could likewise serve. We might put it this way: we are concerned not with the sentence-tokens used to express the proposition, but with the proposition itself.
- 50.
Not “completely” independent, however, for if the table had a sufficiently low density—the density of helium, say—or a sufficiently soft surface—the softness of warm butter—the table couldn’t function, as we normally understand these things, as a table. But these are all complications that needn’t concern us.
- 51.
Note that ‘injurious results’ would of course be given a physical interpretation, e.g., contusions, lacerations, breaking of bones, etc.
- 52.
Immanuel Kant, The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by Thomas K. Abbott (Buffalo; Prometheus Books, 1987 [1873]): 58.
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Kulp, C.B. (2019). Truth, Facts, and Properties. In: Metaphysics of Morality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23410-2_4
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