Describing, Evaluating, and Moral Conclusions

Abstract

Ethical naturalists have claimed, and their opponents denied, conceptual connections between what both have been happy to call facts and moral values. Neither camp has in the past made it clear whether what is at issue is the existence of a connection between linguistic performances or between propositions expressed in such performances. This omission, encouraged by the terms 'moral evaluation' and 'description', has been responsible for much confusion on both sides about what a speaker can and cannot say without thereby morally evaluating or else in some obscure sense committing himself to a moral evaluation. To give just one instance of confusion: a good deal of what both Naturalists and Prescriptivists have said makes sense only on the assumption that if a moral conclusion is entailed by given descriptive statements, then one who makes those statements must do so with a view to drawing and stating the moral conclusion which they entail. So availability is confused with inescapability. If in a given case an entailment holds, and if I propose to draw and state a moral conclusion rather than some other conclusion, or no conclusion at all, then there is indeed one and only one moral conclusion which I must draw and state; but that is all. It is tempting to see beneath this confused assumption about the consequences of Naturalism the curious view that acknowledgement of and allusion to a certain sort of facts can have one point only: the derivation of moral conclusions. Statements of such facts are thus cast in the restricted and restrictive role of premises for moral conclusions, the implicit model being proofs in mathematics. But it cannot be a logical truth about the nature of moral evaluation, and it is unlikely to be a moral rule, that whenever a moral conclusion is available it must be stated. There are, indeed, exercises, the rules of which demand this: 'Describe and morally appraise the life of Saint Teresa' specifies one. But this is quite a different matter. Are these strictures fair? Well, let us, in accord with recent