I've started to work on my PhD, and people have been asking me about meta-ethics, specifically about what my basic position is. I suppose that having 3 seminars on Meta-Ethics on my transcript and sending in a writing sample about meta-ethics gave one or two people the impression that I have a meta-ethical position or that I know what to say about it. Truth is, however, that I have absolutely no idea what to say about it in general. I've been puzzling over why this is so, and I've come up with a puzzle that I think ought to be causing some trouble in the field.
First, a little background. I've observed that some meta-ethical debates have direct implications for what might be called "first-order" or "normative" or just "ethical" questions. Take, for example, one's view about reasons for action. If, as I've argued, our reasons for action are deeply conditioned by contingent facts about who we are, then Moral Rationalism is false, and there are possible persons for whom it is rational to be immoral. This means, to use Bernard Williams' famous exmaple, that a nasty man who cannot be motivated to be nicer to his wife has no reason to be nicer to his wife. This is a serious first-order normative implication that falls out of a meta-ethical position about reasons. Just ask the guy's poor wife.
Other meta-ethical debates, however, don't seem to have this property. People have spent much time and energy, for example, trying to figure out if ethical claims have truth-conditions, whether they can be true or false. Not so, say non-cognitivists, who generally believe that ethical statements express attitudes or desires rather than beliefs. Of course, Cognitivists hold that ethical language expresses belief, and thus aims at a kind of truth.
Now, I have all kinds of reservations about they ways in which this debate is framed, not the least of which revolves around the extraordinary assumption that ethical language is homogenous enough to admit of such broad-brush generalizations. Nevertheless, I want to focus on an interesting dialectic that unfolds in this debate. Cognitivists sometimes accuse noncognitivists of holding a position that would somehow undermine first-order ethical activity: "You don't believe moral statements can be true? Then where do you get your confidence in your own moral feelings?" The noncognitivists rightly point out that their position has nothing to do with their first-order, "internal" experience of ethical life. As Simon Blackburn has put it:
But, hold on: if a debate has literally no substantive first-order implications whatsoever, then why are we having it?
Let me explain. I could, if I wanted to, spend the next 15 years counting all the grains of sand in Dubai. This example alone is enough to demonstrate that knowledge in and of itself is not intrinsically valuable. Inquiry is only valuable if it aims at knowledge that is itself determined to be valuable in some way, that is to say, it must be non-trivial knowledge. Yet, the question: "Is X valuable?" is a first-order ethical question. So, inquiry which makes no contact whatsoever with first-order normative questions is inquiry that cannot be justified.
The dilemma: Either the positions in the cognitivism-noncognitivism debate entail substantive and non-trivial normative propositions or they do not. If they do not, then the debate is literally non-justifiable. If they do, then a new uncomfortable question arises: why is this called meta-ethics? Why not just be honest with ourselves and admit that it is just another branch of ethical inquiry?
There's a lot that can be said for the first horn. I observe, for example, that two wildly disparate thinkers like Derek Parfit and Martha Nussbaum both count as "cognitivists". Parfit believes in timeless, objective moral truths that humans grasp intuitively, Nussbaum believes that morality is concerned primarily with emotions, but has a cognitivist theory of emotions (emotions are judgments of value that can be true or false). Both are a species of cognitivist, yet their first-order beliefs are noticably different.
From another angle, R.M. Hare, a staunch defender of morality's universal scope, was a non-cognitivist, which is kind of the last thing you'd expect. Williams, his arch-nemisis who began his career as a staunch non-cognitivist, eventually espoused a form of moderate cognitivism based on "thick" concepts. What substantive or important element are these labels picking out, here?
But the second horn has its own plausibility, and is equally vicious. The first meta-ethical debate I cited (about reasons for action and moral rationalism) was initiated by Plato with his Ring of Gyges example, and he certainly didn't take himself to be doing some form of "meta-" inquiry. He was just trying to answer Socrates' plainly first-order question about justice and happiness. But if this is all so, whither "meta-ethics"?
This dilemma arises, indeed it must arise, for any form of allegedly meta-ethical inquiry. I suppose one of the sources of my ambivalence towards meta-ethics is that I don't see the problem addressed in the literature I've read. Any ideas?
First, a little background. I've observed that some meta-ethical debates have direct implications for what might be called "first-order" or "normative" or just "ethical" questions. Take, for example, one's view about reasons for action. If, as I've argued, our reasons for action are deeply conditioned by contingent facts about who we are, then Moral Rationalism is false, and there are possible persons for whom it is rational to be immoral. This means, to use Bernard Williams' famous exmaple, that a nasty man who cannot be motivated to be nicer to his wife has no reason to be nicer to his wife. This is a serious first-order normative implication that falls out of a meta-ethical position about reasons. Just ask the guy's poor wife.
Other meta-ethical debates, however, don't seem to have this property. People have spent much time and energy, for example, trying to figure out if ethical claims have truth-conditions, whether they can be true or false. Not so, say non-cognitivists, who generally believe that ethical statements express attitudes or desires rather than beliefs. Of course, Cognitivists hold that ethical language expresses belief, and thus aims at a kind of truth.
Now, I have all kinds of reservations about they ways in which this debate is framed, not the least of which revolves around the extraordinary assumption that ethical language is homogenous enough to admit of such broad-brush generalizations. Nevertheless, I want to focus on an interesting dialectic that unfolds in this debate. Cognitivists sometimes accuse noncognitivists of holding a position that would somehow undermine first-order ethical activity: "You don't believe moral statements can be true? Then where do you get your confidence in your own moral feelings?" The noncognitivists rightly point out that their position has nothing to do with their first-order, "internal" experience of ethical life. As Simon Blackburn has put it:
Is it that we... at the crucial moment when we are about to save the child, throw ourselves on the grenade, walk out into the snow, will think, "Oh, it's only me and my desires or other conative pressures- forget it."? (Blackburn 1998)Sensible participants usually end up agreeing on this point: one's position on the cognitive status of ethical statements (as being truth-seeking beliefs or mere expressions of attitude) shouldn't be taken to imply anything substantive about one's actual ethical life, or about the particular shape of one's ethical ideas.
But, hold on: if a debate has literally no substantive first-order implications whatsoever, then why are we having it?
Let me explain. I could, if I wanted to, spend the next 15 years counting all the grains of sand in Dubai. This example alone is enough to demonstrate that knowledge in and of itself is not intrinsically valuable. Inquiry is only valuable if it aims at knowledge that is itself determined to be valuable in some way, that is to say, it must be non-trivial knowledge. Yet, the question: "Is X valuable?" is a first-order ethical question. So, inquiry which makes no contact whatsoever with first-order normative questions is inquiry that cannot be justified.
The dilemma: Either the positions in the cognitivism-noncognitivism debate entail substantive and non-trivial normative propositions or they do not. If they do not, then the debate is literally non-justifiable. If they do, then a new uncomfortable question arises: why is this called meta-ethics? Why not just be honest with ourselves and admit that it is just another branch of ethical inquiry?
There's a lot that can be said for the first horn. I observe, for example, that two wildly disparate thinkers like Derek Parfit and Martha Nussbaum both count as "cognitivists". Parfit believes in timeless, objective moral truths that humans grasp intuitively, Nussbaum believes that morality is concerned primarily with emotions, but has a cognitivist theory of emotions (emotions are judgments of value that can be true or false). Both are a species of cognitivist, yet their first-order beliefs are noticably different.
From another angle, R.M. Hare, a staunch defender of morality's universal scope, was a non-cognitivist, which is kind of the last thing you'd expect. Williams, his arch-nemisis who began his career as a staunch non-cognitivist, eventually espoused a form of moderate cognitivism based on "thick" concepts. What substantive or important element are these labels picking out, here?
But the second horn has its own plausibility, and is equally vicious. The first meta-ethical debate I cited (about reasons for action and moral rationalism) was initiated by Plato with his Ring of Gyges example, and he certainly didn't take himself to be doing some form of "meta-" inquiry. He was just trying to answer Socrates' plainly first-order question about justice and happiness. But if this is all so, whither "meta-ethics"?
This dilemma arises, indeed it must arise, for any form of allegedly meta-ethical inquiry. I suppose one of the sources of my ambivalence towards meta-ethics is that I don't see the problem addressed in the literature I've read. Any ideas?
7 comments:
But, hold on: if a debate has literally no substantive first-order implications whatsoever, then why are we having it?
Beyond that, how can we even be sure that there is a distinction? A similar question is often raised about the difference between the position that "God is the Ground of Being, not a being" and "There is no God, but the unity and elegance of existence are worthy of awe and reverence." It sounds more like a difference in battle-cry than different intellectual positions.
My last comment was knocked out in a hurry before going to teach a class. Now that my workday's over, I can spend some time being more thoughtful.
My concern with the distinction is not so much related to William James' pragmatism so much as Wittgenstein's concerns about language. Just because people are saying different words, and think they are disagreeing, doesn't mean they are.
The question I would ask this is: what, really, is the distinction between the non-cognitivist's position and that of the cognitivist? Can the distinction be described without invoking the very difference in terms being examined? If not, why not?
Ultimately, though, I think there is a difference between these two positions, and that non-cognitivism undermines itself. Firstly, statements such as "Stealing is wrong," "Children should honor their parents," or "Lenin was one the greatest enemies of socialism," certainly look like assertions of fact. Even if one were to grant that such statements cannot be true because evaluative statements do not correspond to anything real, it seems too much to say that they are not generally attempts to express such truths.
But a more decisive problem, in my opinion, is that if non-cognitivism is true, then value judgements are placed outside the realm of rational discourse. There would no more point in debating whether, for example, Gandhi's actions were good or his religious views reasonable, than debating whether McDonald's sweet and sour sauce tastes better than Burger King's.
Most problematically, there will be no point in debating whether or not my belief in cognitivism is reasonable or not. Even if it were blatantly false, a non-cognitivist's accusation of irrationality on my part will ring hollow, because ultimately it is no more than an expression of personal displeasure at my views. But that's just too bad for them; I'm not going to re-examine my views because random people are displeased by them.
To a certain extent, I think shiningwhiffle is right, and cogs and non-cogs are just talking past each other. Both would seem to concur that on a practical level we can distinguish between good and bad, or right and wrong, despite the disagreement about whether or not moral propositions can be "true."
But the difference that remains does tell you something about how each camps's metaethical stance integrates with its metaphysical stance. (For example, whether or not only physical and logical entities are "real.")
This matters, even if it can't be used as a single-issue predictor of first order ethical reasoning. Nussbaum and Parfit may be worlds apart, but it does mean something that they both believe in the objective foundation of ethical precepts. We see the same thing in politics: There is a world of difference between John Zerzan and Murray Rothbard. They are both anarchists, but we need more information than that single ideological marker to fully flesh out their positions.
There is, in other words, an important difference between metaethics influencing an ethical stance, and predictably doing so without other data.
Regarding the other horn: Plato didn't have the word "metaethics" at his disposal, but he was undeniably one of its first practitioners. The question from Euthyphro, "what is piety?" is a metaethical question--a question of a very different type than "what sorts of things are pious?"
It might be difficult or impossible to locate the exact dividing line between normative ethics and metaethics (the Ring of Gyges discussion is a little bit of both), but the same is true of the difference between physics and metaphysics: what counts as a presupposition depends on the order of magnitude of the thing that rests upon it--which turtle, on the long trip "all the way down."
Sounds like you are on the verge of discovering the pragmatic conception of inquiry. Dewey?
Ha ha, Anonymous, I'm not sure I'm ready to fall down the Pragmatist rabbit-hole, yet. In my experience, those people are remarkably cavalier about the status of the truth-claims they themselves deploy in describing "situated knowers" and in describing how one set of ideas "works" better tha another.
Chris, I understand that the question "what is piety?" has the surface appearance of what we NOW call meta-ethics. What I'm wondering about is the underlying justification for making the distinction at all. If what characterizes first-order discourse is that it has implications for actual ethical decision-making, then... any philosophizing that has this feature will be just plain old ethics. Plato did not make the categorical distinction because he did not need to. Y'know, parsimony and all that.
It was, truly, not necessary for Plato to invoke a new category. But here we are 2,500 years later, and we want to be able to make a distinction between people with competing theories about what morality is that don't necessarily compel competing theories about what is moral. That seems to me a confusing proposition without invoking a metaethical realm of inquiry.
Part of the intellectual project--and by extension, the civilizational project--is, it seems to me, an ever-increasing complexity in the way we describe the world. It's no critique of Plato to say there's an awful lot he could not say about contemporary thought without a major revision of his conceptual apparatus. A lot has happened since the Republic (even if it's just "footnotes.")
I'm not clear to me how you talk about the differences between deontologists, utilitarians, virtue ethicists and error theorists (all of who may be in complete accord on any given ethical choice, like murdering your flatmate) without resort to a higher level discussion on what empowers moral reasoning. Plato, as one of the earliest moral philosophers, did not have this problem; but we do. Don't we?
Anonymous:
Sounds like you are on the verge of discovering the pragmatic conception of inquiry. Dewey?
I know this was a comment to Nick, but I find it interesting for myself, because not that long ago I would have wholeheartedly considered myself a pragmatist, and now I'm not so sure. Nor am I even sure that my position has actually changed, and not just the words I use to describe my position.
At the end of the day, I subscribe to some combination of both relativity, objectivity, and realism in pretty much all of the major areas of philosophy.
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