Moral Fixed Points, Rationality and the ‘Why Be Moral?’ Question

Abstract

Cuneo and Shafer-Landau (Philos Stud 171:399–443, 2014) have argued that there are moral conceptual truths that are substantive and non-vacuous in content, what they called ‘moral fixed points’. If the moral proposition ‘torturing kids for fun is pro tanto wrong’ is such a conceptual truth, it is because the essence of ‘wrong’ necessarily satisfies and applies to the substantive content of ‘torturing kids for fun’. In critique, Killoren (Anal Philos 57(2):165–173, 2016) has revisited the old skeptical ‘why be moral?’ question and argued that the moral fixed points give us no reason to care about morality (and the right thing to do) and, therefore, they are normatively irrelevant. He concluded that this is a counterintuitive implication that undermines the proposal. In this paper, I develop a rejoinder to Killoren’s (2016) argument that explains why, at least from the perspective of the moral fixed points framework, if the moral fixed points exist, they are necessarily normatively relevant for rational agents. I supplement this explanation with an explanation of why it might prima facie appear that moral fixed points are not normatively relevant, although ultima facie they are relevant. The supplementary explanation explains prima facie normative irrelevance as the upshot of failures of rational agency (of various aetiologies). I conclude that the moral fixed points, can, in principle, offer an interesting response to the skeptical ‘why be moral?’ question’.