Abstract
In this paper, I do two things. First, I argue for a metaethical view that I call moral folkism. The two main subtheses of moral folkism are as follows: (A) if there are any wrong-like properties, then there’s a vast plurality of them; e.g., there’s a property of Kant-wrongness, and Mill-wrongness, and Moore-wrongness, and so on; and (B) which of these properties count as genuine kinds of wrongness (i.e., real moral wrongness)—if any of them do—is determined by facts about us, in particular, our usage, intentions, and practices concerning moral words. Second, I discuss the consequences of moral folkism. In particular, I argue that (i) moral folkism leads us to the deflationary conclusion that many of the normative and metaethical questions that philosophers discuss are settled by empirical facts about what ordinary folk happen to mean by their words—and so they’re not settled by mind-independent facts about reality. In addition, I also argue that (ii) moral folkism does not imply that applied ethical questions are settled by facts about folk meaning, and (iii) moral folkism does not imply moral anti-realism (i.e., moral folkism is perfectly compatible with a robust sort of moral realism).
Thanks are due to Rebecca Chan, Justin Clarke-Doane, Matti Eklund, and Michaela McSweeney for providing feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Notes
- 1.
Moral folkism is similar in certain ways to Frank Jackson’s (1998) view, but it’s also different in important ways.
- 2.
Our intentions might sometimes be imprecise. E.g., our intentions concerning ‘set’ might not be precise enough to zero in on a unique structure up to isomorphism. If so, there will be some set-theoretic sentences that are true in some intended structures and false in others; on my view (see, e.g., my (2009)), these sentences would be indeterminate—i.e., neither true nor false.
- 3.
As with the mathematical case, our intentions concerning ‘wrong’ could be imprecise and, hence, fail to zero in on a unique property. I’ll say more about this in Sect. 15.4.
- 4.
Dasgupta (2017) makes a similar point.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
Of course, if an analysis picks out a property that couldn’t be instantiated, then the relevant set will be the empty set—i.e., there won’t be any (actual or possible) actions that instantiate the given property—and you might think that facts like this could be relevant to the what-is-wrongness question. I’ll consider this suggestion below, in Sect. 15.3.8.
- 10.
A related view, suggested by Eklund (2017), is that the word ‘wrong’ has a certain normative role, and this role fixes the reference of ‘wrongness’. But this just seems to push the problem back a step. For if normative role really determines reference (and that’s a big if, for it seems that all of the wrong-like properties could be employed in normative ways), then it would seem that there are many normative roles (or normative-like roles), and we can ask what determines which of these roles is the role of ‘wrong’, and so we’ll be right back where we started.
- 11.
Note that this is different from scenarios in which we use ‘wrong’ to express a property that couldn’t be instantiated. According to PP, properties like that do exist.
- 12.
Suppose that wrongness 1 and wrongness 2 both fit with our usage and intentions concerning ‘wrong’ and that type-T actions are wrong1 but not wrong2. Then on my view, there’s no fact of the matter whether type-T actions are wrong. This is exactly analogous to what happens when mathematical and physical predicates are imprecise.
- 13.
This, at any rate, is true if we interpret this debate as being about the nature of moral properties like wrongness and goodness and so on. If we interpret the debate as being out the extensions of moral predicates, then it’s not settled by facts about meaning. In this case, the debate is analogous to applied-ethical debates—which I’ll discuss in Sect. 15.6.
- 14.
Clarke-Doane (forthcoming) puts forward an argument like this, but his argument is a bit different; his point isn’t that moral pluralism is false; it’s that questions about moral facts aren’t the important questions surrounding deliberation.
- 15.
We have to be careful how we put this point. If the question at issue is ‘What is the decompositional structure of wrongness?’, then facts about us don’t metaphysically settle the question in the sense at issue here. But as we saw in Sect. 15.3.1, once we’ve answered the question “Which wrong-like property is expressed by ‘wrong’?”—which is metaphysically settled by facts about us—there’s nothing left to discover.
- 16.
This is essentially equivalent to the argument in Horgan and Timmons (1991)—although they were arguing against Cornell realism, not moral pluralism.
- 17.
Clarke-Doane’s (forthcoming) position is that non-factual pragmatic questions of this kind (and not moral questions about what we ought to do) are the really important questions. And Gibbard (2003) thinks that questions about what we ought to do just are questions about what to do.
- 18.
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Balaguer, M. (2020). Moral Folkism and the Deflation of (Lots of) Normative and Metaethics. In: Falguera, J.L., Martínez-Vidal, C. (eds) Abstract Objects. Synthese Library, vol 422. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38242-1_15
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