Abstract
Moral properties lead a double life. We invoke them as high authorities when we feel mistreated or want to redirect others; but we also doubt their authority—or even their existence—when we seek to understand them philosophically. Some philosophers would say that even this open-ended contrast between respect and skeptical doubt presupposes too much: ontological neutrality requires speaking not of moral properties but instead of moral predicates. Nonetheless, even if we confine the contrast to those, a comparable duality is evident. For nearly everyone, moral terms are apparently quite well understood when it comes to bringing up children—an activity in which our true colors surely show—but deeply puzzling when it comes to the attempt at analysis. In this, to be sure, moral language is not so different from many other kinds: we learn how to use moral terms, much as we do psychological and other “descriptive” terms, and in that crucial way we know what they mean, yet even most philosophers are unable to give definitions that capture their meaning. This plainly applies to psychological language embodying action-explaining terms, and it clearly applies to at least a great many physical terms, perhaps all those not ostensively “definable.” This kind of parity between moral and descriptive language is one among many reasons to explore the moral domain on the tentative assumption of realism. This paper does not argue directly for moral realism, but if the framework it presents for understanding moral discourse and practice is plausible, that will perhaps constitute an indirect argument for the view that moral judgments belong to the realm of the true and the real, not simply to that of attitudinal expression and behavioral regulation.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The distinction between these two kinds of normativity is one I have long made and have most recently discussed in “Knowledge, Justification, and Normativity” (2013). I should add here that normativity in content is apparently not equivalent to normativity in ontic constitution, as it may be to normativity in conceptual constitution. Obligatoriness may be argued to be ontically constituted by such properties as being promised, being an avoidance of lying, and others. These are relevant to the content of the concept (as will be apparent below), but I am not assuming that they are internal to its content.
- 3.
The apriority of the reason-giving relation is controversial, I have defended it in some detail, e.g. in Audi (2004) and will extend the case below in Sect. 2. As characterized here, the normative in upshot can also be normative in content, but I use the term only for what is not normative in content.
- 4.
In my terminology, what is normative in upshot is not also normative in content, though I leave open whether what is normative in content can also share with the normative in upshot the important property of being reason-grounding. There are of course other conceptions of normativity. Wedgwood holds that intentional phenomena are normative; e.g. “(i) It is essential to beliefs that they are causally regulated by standards of rational or justified belief, and (ii) the ultimate purpose or point of conforming to those standards is not just to have rational or justified beliefs for their own sake but to ensure that one believes the proposition in question if and only if that proposition is true” (2007), p. 154. This apparently yields an extremely broad notion of normativity—one we might call essential teleological appraisability. Stones lack it, but pain apparently does not: it might be “regulated” by standards of rational behavior (since it tends to signal danger or potential harm and lead to avoiding it) and might have the (evolutionary?) purpose of self-preservation. There are also serious questions about whether belief is causally regulated in the relevant way and about how purpose figures in such regulation. For Wedgwood’s defense of the view, see Normativity (2007) esp. pp. 155–73.
- 5.
My formulation is much like Jaegwon Kim’s in Physicalism or Something Near Enough (Princeton, 2005). In “Supervenience as a Philosophical Concept,” (1990) he maintained that supervenience as I’ve characterized it is a kind of covariance and used ‘strong supervenience’ for (necessary) covariance conjoined with dependence—something close to what I call ‘consequentiality’ below. At present, however, ‘supervenience’ is commonly—though not consistently—used for what Kim called strong supervenience. This is inappropriate on the assumption (which I believe Kim and many others accept) that covariance—which, for many, is equivalent to supervenience, is too weak to do major metaphysical work (as I hold consequentiality does). For recent detailed discussion of supervenience, see the entry of that title by Karen Bennett and Brian McLaughlin in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu.entries/supervenience/ (July 2005), 1–42.
- 6.
Normally because commitments can be acquired without being made, as where one becomes someone’s friend and simply by being in that relationship has a prima facie obligation of to give support of certain kinds.
- 7.
- 8.
Here, as with the supervenience formulation, I am ignoring, for ease of exposition something that figures later in the paper: that the base properties may not constitute an a priori closed list, hence may not be referred to as belonging to a (non-fuzzy) set.
- 9.
The term ‘resultancy’ has been used by Jonathan Dancy and others and is not inappropriate if we keep in mind that its usual association with causal determination is inappropriate; grounding is a non-causal relation.
- 10.
- 11.
Kim seems to think that intuitionists, at least, cannot explain the supervenience of the normative: “An ethical intuitionist like G. E. Moore would see normative supervenience as a fundamental synthetic a priori fact not susceptible of further explanation; it is something we directly apprehend through our moral sense” (2005, p. 13). This claim surely does not hold for intuitionists in general. For one thing, direct apprehensibility is an epistemic property and surely does not by itself entail unexplainability.
- 12.
There is a possible exception: our having “natural knowledge”—roughly, knowledge without a justifying ground—of something’s having a moral property, such as might be implanted in us by an omnipotent being. For discussion of such knowledge, which, since the knower lacks a ground for it, does not require justification, see ch. 10 of Epistemology, 3rd ed. 2010).
- 13.
- 14.
- 15.
For an indication of the importance of resentment in understanding reasons and in explaining (and I would say also grounding) obligation, see Stratton-Lake (2011).
- 16.
Sinnott-Armstrong’s Moral Skepticisms (2006) makes clear why this is so, but in a way that otherwise seems compatible with the view taken here.
- 17.
For a detailed case against countenancing disjunctive properties, see P. Audi (2013).
- 18.
Color and the specific colors are significantly intra-categorial—all being properties of surfaces. Compare sound. Sounds may be pianistic, thunderous, howling (as with wind), crackling, vocal, and much else. Is sound a determinable? And is obligatoriness, even as applied to actions alone, any less varied in kinds than sounds?
- 19.
Cf. Butchvarov (1989) on good as a determinable. He does not consider disjunctive properties or categorial similarity.
- 20.
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at a meeting of Oxford University’s Moral Philosophy Society and at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and I have benefited from discussing the issues on those occasions. Roger Crisp and Brad Hooker were among the helpful discussants in Oxford, and Paul Audi has helped me in dealing with some of the ontological issues.
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Audi, R. (2017). Moral Properties: Some Epistemological, Ontological, and Normative Dimensions. In: Brożek, B., Rotolo, A., Stelmach, J. (eds) Supervenience and Normativity. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 120. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61046-7_3
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