Metaethical Positions Research Articles

Experience and naturalism

AbstractMuch of contemporary metaethics revolves around the issue of “naturalism.” However, there is little agreement on what “naturalism” is or why it should be of significance. In this paper, I aim to rectify this situation by providing a set of necessary conditions on what positions ought to count as “naturalistic.” A metaethical view should count as an instance of naturalism only if it claims that there can be evidence for normative claims that is both public and spatiotemporal. I argue that, unlike other characterizations of “naturalism,” this view shows a clear difference between many metaethical positions and the sciences. The view thereby renders debates about naturalism philosophically significant: the division between naturalists and non‐naturalists is that between philosophers who hold that ethics is relevantly similar to the sciences and those who deny this.

Catharine Trotter Cockburn on Moral Knowledge

Abstract In the wake of Locke’s Essay, empiricists faced the challenge of giving an empiricist account of the origins of moral knowledge. Locke did not rise to this challenge and relied on revelation as the source of moral knowledge. Other empiricists, including Hume and Hutcheson, opted for either emotivism or subjectivism. Clarke and others opted for rationalism and non-naturalism. In contrast, Catharine Cockburn’s meta-ethics combined Locke’s empiricism with naturalism. She held that moral good is natural good and that natural good is known just as any other matters of natural fact are known: empirically. Cockburn’s position was unusual for its time, and the full originality and appeal of her meta-ethical position have not been fully appreciated.

Noncognitivism without expressivism

AbstractAccording to expressivists, normative language expresses desire‐like states of mind. According to noncognitivists, normative beliefs have a desire‐like functional role. What is the relation between these two doctrines? It is widely assumed that expressivism commits you to noncognitivism, and vice versa. This paper opposes that assumption. I advance a view that combines a noncognitivist psychology with a descriptivist semantics for normative language. While this might seem like an ungainly hybrid, I argue that it has important advantages over more familiar metaethical positions. The noncognitivist aspect of the theory captures all of the explanatory benefits standardly associated with expressivism. At the same time, the descriptivist element allows us to avoid the semantic headaches for expressivism.

Social ontology in metaethics

This article enriches discussions about the metaphysics of normative facts with conceptual resources from social ontology that metaethics has neglected so far: the resources of Haslanger’s critical realism as social constructionism. By pointing out the viability of understanding reasons as socially constructed facts, the article shows how normative facts can be understood as features of mind-independent reality that are, however, not features of the universe independently of social practices. The move into social ontology allows us to understand normative facts as mind-independent in a more substantial sense than deflationists do, by stressing individual mind-independence, while denying collective mind-independence – the subsistence independently of established human cultures. The new position can fruitfully mediate between realism, error theory and constructivism. Finally, the metaphysical nuances provided by social ontology pave the way for novel approaches to normative change and progress – thereby indicating pathways to normative theorising that many traditional metaethical positions lack.

A Critical Review of Moral Relativism, Universalism/absolutism and the Teaching of the Catholic Church on Catholic Morality

Ethical relativism is the thesis that moral judgements are relative to culture and individual preferences. It claims that there is no universal morality as pointed out by moral universalism/absolutism. Moral universalism is the meta-ethical position that ethics or morality applies universally, that is for all similarly situated individuals, regardless of culture, race, sex, religion, nationality, sexuality or other distinguishing features. Catholic Church teaches that moral law is universal across people in varying cultures and fact is rooted in the natural human condition or reason. All adult persons are capable of knowing the truth. John Paul II insisted that no matter how separated someone is from God, in the depth of his heart, there always remains a yearning for the absolute truth and a thirst to attain full knowledge of it.

A tale of two cities: emotion and reason in the formation of moral judgement and possible metaethical implications.

The project of naturalizing ethics has multiple contributions, from cognitive and moral psychology to primatology, neuroscience or evolutionary theory. One of the strategies for naturalizing ethics has been to argue that moral norms and values can be explained away if we focus on their causal history, if it is possible to offer both an ultimate and proximate causal explanation for them. In this article, I will focus on the contribution of cognitive and moral psychology as a way of offering a proximate causal explanation for moral judgments. I am mostly interested in understanding to what extent these cognitive and psychological questions have some bearing in the fields of ethics and meta-ethics. Does this research programme put at stake the contention that ethics is a manifestation of human rationality? Is it true that finding the cognitive underpinnings of some of our moral judgments vindicates some meta-ethical position, namely some kind of reductionist naturalism? In the end, I will argue that even if scientific disciplines such as cognitive psychology give us a naturalized picture of the moral agent, there seem to be no reasons to think that from a naturalized perspective of the agent capable of perceiving value it must follow the naturalization of value itself.

Layered Constructivism: The Plural Sources of Practical Reasons

Constructivism as a distinct metaethical position has garnered significant interest in recent years due in part to Sharon Street’s theory, Humean metaethical constructivism. According to Street’s account, practical reasons are constructed by individual valuing entities. On this view, then, whether a particular reason applies to an individual is completely contingent upon what that individual actually values. In this article I argue for the recognition of multiple sources of practical reasons and values, including both individuals and communities. The resulting view, which I call layered constructivism, strengthens the constructivist project and begins to resolve some of the common critiques leveled against Street’s Humean constructivism. To begin, layered constructivism retains many of the benefits of Street’s approach, such as providing a naturalistic picture of normativity and maintaining a close tie between practical reasons and individual motivation. Moreover, the inclusion of collective sources of normativity and the importance of the resulting values for individuals is supported by recent empirical research on norms. Layered constructivism can also respond to the common concerns that Humean constructivism fails to adequately account for the immense influence our social lives have on our normative reasons and values, and that it entails an objectionable level of contingency. Finally, acknowledging the existence of differently constructed reasons helps us make sense of the pervasive human experience of navigating a variety of seemingly incommensurable normative reasons.

Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism as Ethical Naturalism

Abstract Neo-Aristotelian naturalism purports to explain morality in terms of human nature, while maintaining that the relevant aspects of human nature cannot be known scientifically. This has led some to conclude that neo-Aristotelian naturalism is not a form of ethical naturalism in the standard, metaphysical sense. In this paper, I argue that neo-Aristotelian naturalism is in fact a standard form of ethical naturalism that is committed to metaphysical naturalism about moral truths and presents a distinctive and underappreciated argument for it. I reconstruct the neo-Aristotelian argument for ethical naturalism in terms of a continuity between the ethical domain and the natural domain of life. I argue that clarifying the meta-ethical import of neo-Aristotelian naturalism not only helps to situate it among other positions in meta-ethics, but also facilitates better critical engagement with the view.

Indigenizing Philosophy on Stolen Lands: A Worry about Settler Philosophical Guardianship

Indigenizing Philosophy on Stolen Lands: A Worry about Settler Philosophical Guardianship

Is Spinoza'sEthicsMetaethically Constructivist?

AbstractCharles Jarrett and P. D. Zuk have argued on independent grounds that Spinoza's Ethics delineates a moral antirealist/constructivist position. I reconstruct their basic arguments, present their textual evidence, and suggest that the evidence is, in principle, compatible with moral realism. As I argue, Jarrett and Zuk have opted for an antirealist/constructivist interpretation of the adduced textual evidence because they tacitly rely on a mistaken metaethical assumption: that relational normativity entails moral antirealism/constructivism. I explain why this is not the case by reference to Aristotle's virtue ethics, as well as by reference to various contemporary metaethical positions that conjoin relational normativity and moral realism. I conclude that the textual evidence Jarrett and Zuk rely on does not suffice to render Spinoza's Ethics unequivocally morally antirealist/constructivist and that the morally realist interpretation remains defensible.

Edmund Burke’s Value Pluralism

ABSTRACT Given his commitment to toleration, Edmund Burke is rightly seen as a moral pluralist. What has largely gone unnoticed, however, is his value pluralism. Whereas moral pluralism refers to normative positions regarding what we have reason to do when faced with diverse considerations, value pluralism is a meta-ethical position regarding how we resolve conflicts between any number of reasons for action. Like Isaiah Berlin, Burke maintains both that we may be faced with value conflicts and that we cannot identify the general rule for their resolution. However, Burke, at times, adopts a weak version of value pluralism, identifying a general rule for the resolution of some moral conflicts. This is the case when he insists that liberty cannot exist at all without order and virtue, and when he reassures his readers that toleration of Irish Catholicism poses no threat to the established order. At other times, however, Burke offers a strong version of value pluralism, eschewing any such rule. One of the benefits of doing so is the awareness that toleration may be justified even when contrary to the demands of order and virtue.

Nietzsche’s Perspectivism as an Epistemological and Meta-Ethical Position

Nietzsche’s Perspectivism as an Epistemological and Meta-Ethical Position

A Smart Ethics is an Ethics Committed to Close-Listening

"A ‘smart’ bioethics is an ethics that is able to recognize and address the real-life and context-embedded moral concerns of the people it intends to serve, whether those people are patients, relatives, healthcare professionals, researchers or policy-makers. Therefore, close-listening to what those people have to say, should be at the start of each bioethics-undertaking. In this presentation, I will explore how narrative approaches taken from the humanities and social sciences could help bioethicists in the 21st century to attune to and examine both the stories of others and the stories we create ourselves in medicine and bioethics. I will discuss why this is an essential first step before we embark on the normative task of bioethics, and how it entails a scrutinization of epistemological and meta-ethical positions. Following, I will use my own research project –an empirical-ethical exploration of physician-assisted dying in Dutch general practice– as an example of how narrative approaches used in empirical research, training of researchers and normative evaluation may change one’s perspective on a highly contested bioethical issue. Last, I will discuss the question whether concepts such as narrative humility and epistemic (in)justice could and should receive more attention in bioethics-training and-research. "

The Impact of the Moral Foundations Arguments on Early Adolescents

The empirical research reported in this article is based on the Moral Foundations Theory proposed by J. Haidt. Objectives. The author examines the impact of moral foundations arguments on early adolescents’ moral judgments regarding violating moral rules and explores gender-related differences between moral foundations preferences. Method. The effect of moral foundations arguments was measured by a newly developed meta-ethical position test (MEPT). The MEPT consists of a pretest questionnaire, treatment by moral foundations arguments, and a posttest questionnaire. The sample contained 178 early adolescents from the Czech Republic (84 females and 94 males). The influence of the moral foundations arguments was analyzed by comparing the pretest with the posttest. Results. 91% of teenagers changed their moral judgment due to confrontations with the moral foundations arguments. A Wilcoxon signed-rank test found that the moral foundations arguments were significantly relevant, since the P-value was lower than 0.001. The Mann-Whitney U test revealed the importance of the gender aspect: P-value care equals 0.01 and liberty 0.01. Girls have a preference for care foundation (21% more than boys), while boys tended to liberty (27 % more than girls). It seems that moral foundations arguments strongly change early adolescents’ moral judgments and can be practically applied as a valuable platform for early adolescents’ moral development.

Phenomenological method and contemporary ethics

Following a brief summation of the phenomenological method, the paper considers three metaethical positions adopted by phenomenologists and the implications of those positions for a normative ethics. The metaethical positions combine epistemological and ontological viewpoints. They are (1) non-intellectualism and strong value realism as represented by the axiological views of phenomenologists such as Scheler, Meinong, Reinach, Stein, Hartmann, von Hildebrand, and Steinbock; (2) non-intellectualism and anti-realism as represented by the freedom-centered phenomenologies of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty; and (3) weak intellectualism and weak value realism as represented by Husserl and Drummond. The paper argues that only the third metaethical view can support a normative ethics (1) that is consistent with the essential features of the phenomenological method, (2) that allows for freedom in an agent’s choosing from a multiplicity of first-order goods, including vocational goods, practical identities, and life plans, available in the agent’s factical circumstances, and (3) that provides norms governing the correctness of our actions and our obligations to others. The normative dimension is introduced, first, by the requirement that the fulfillment of first-order evaluations and choices be truthful, that is, that the (emotive) evaluations be appropriate and the actions right. Second, transcendental considerations revealed in the phenomenological analysis of intentional experience disclose a notion of second-order goods of agency that universally bind agents in their exercise of freedom and their dealings with others.

НАТУРАЛУРАЛІСТИЧНА АРГУМЕНТАЦІЯ В ЕТИЦІ

The principles of the metaethical position of critical naturalism on the basis of understanding the schemes of naturalistic argumentation in ethics are developed. Naturalism in its naive form proceeds either from the identification of the natural with the goodness (with the uncertainty of the criterion of «naturalness»), or reduces this criterion to describe some objective conditions of existence as a model to motivate the agent of rational decision in the face of choice and conflict. In addition, the opposition between nature and culture, which is often the basis of critiques of naturalism, is contrived as a way to justify a valid model of behavior as appropriate, based on some objective law that is known a priori. However, it is impossible to derive a universal principle from such empirical data. Thus, moral norms are fundamentally relative, but their social construction can be understood as part of natural reality. At the same time, substantiation of norms of socially acceptable behavior of an individual in his attitude to other members of the community by addressing nature is possible only as a study of the circumstances under which a certain model of behavior arises and is established as a precedent for conflict resolution. «Nature» in this sense does not outline universal principles to which, as individual cases, life circumstances must necessarily be subject. Moral norms do not follow from natural law or any other law. The position of critical naturalism removes from naturalistic argumentation the naive identification of the goodness with the natural, as well as attempts to bring the moral law to some natural fact, the knowledge of which motivates to behave in a certain way as following moral duty. Empirical research and modeling in thought experiment as the basis of ethics as a science at the intersection of evolutionary biology and anthropology, focused on making precedent decisions and justifying the acceptability of the norm is to analyze the hypothetical consequences of this acceptance by the community. In this case, the objective condition that limits the range of possible solutions is that the norm, which reduces the viability of the bearer of the norm, thus eliminates itself. This determines the metaethical principle of love of life.

What’s Wrong with Relaxing?

In his new book Unbelievable Errors, Bart Streumer argues that there is no way round the result that all metaethical views other than the error theory fail either for the same reasons as metaphysical normative realism or expressivism. In this contribution, I show that this is false: we can avoid this result by ‘relaxing’ about normative truths. Even if Streumer were right about the fate of other metaethical positions, then, relaxed realism remains immune to the problems he raises.

Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism and the analogy between moral judgments and the evaluation of other living beings

The analogy between moral judgments and the evaluation of animals and plants is a pivotal feature of Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism by means of which this metaethical position attempts to explain the naturalness of morality. However, the usual objection argues that the schema of natural normativity embraced by the main representatives of this view commits it to biological naturalism (a thesis that programmatically Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism rejects). This essay considers the contribution that John Hacker-Wright and Michael Thompson give in answering this challenge. They suggest a non empirical conception of the schema of natural normativity somehow different to the one endorsed by Rosalind Hursthouse. As a result, I will try to show that according to their notion of natural normativity, Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism can maintain the thesis that moral judgments are analogous to the evaluation of animals and plants while avoiding the commitment to biological naturalism.

“Verbindlichkeit”: Some drafts of a groundwork in moral philosophy

Abstract All of metaethical positions today can be replaced by a universal architecture of moral philosophy, all but one: moral realism. Here, I use the term “metaethics” to refer to any theory of ethics concerning the groundwork of ethics, on the one hand, and the inquiry of the use of philosophical words, concepts or methods on the other. In this article, I will present my hypothesis that in moral philosophy, we do not need any specialized metaethics at all. Metaethics as a discipline of philosophy is only required by the work of moral realists, who try to show us a realm of values and norms that exist (per se) naturally, non-naturally or supernaturally. How can they know? The effort of metaethical realists cannot be proven either in ontology or in the philosophy of language or in cognitive science or in any meta-science that works en plus to ethics, because even in every additional discipline, we have to accept the presupposition of a validity of judgments. So, let us try it the other way around; we have to find a way to found ethics by following its structures, and that means, based on David Velleman’s concepts: a) We have to search for a ubiquitous point of ethical theory in its foundation – here, no kind of value or norm can be found that is not based on a universal formal structure of normativity. b) We have to start an empirical inquiry to collect norms and values in actual use. MFT, moral psychology and moral sociology are in charge here. The combination of such an abstract groundwork with mere empirical study has to be legitimized again. Hence, I am going to try to sum up the main ideas of such a project to show the relevance of a new architecture of moral philosophy today. There is a line of reasoning that addresses the possibility of a transcendental critique in practical philosophy; therefore, it has to look into the different notions of “intuition” in moral methods like it was used by Sidgwick (Rashdall, Green, Ross, Brentano, McTaggart) and Moore on the one hand and Brentano and Bergson on the other. In my view, there is a way to combine these perspectives using the two-level-model of Hare, Singer, Greene, where “intuition” is used to categorize habits and customs of the common sense morality in general while a critical reflection uses act-utilitarian calculus to provide a universal decision – in the sense of “concrete reason” – for any possible actor in a singular situation (Hegel, Peirce, Bloch etc.). The change between these levels may be explained by means of a pragmatistic kind of continuum of research with an ideal summum bonum in the long run and a concept of common sense morality as can be found in every group or society.

Deflationism, Creeping Minimalism, and Explanations of Content

Metaethics, like many areas of philosophy, has for some time now been experiencing a trend toward deflationary conceptions of truth. This is owing both to a general skepticism about the prospects of any substantial account of truth and also to the “accommodationist” strategies of metaethical expressivists. But I'm skeptical of this trend toward deflationism. The main source of my skepticism, and what I explore in this paper, is the simple fact that deflationism has consequences—consequences that are far‐reaching, controversial, and often underappreciated. I first draw out a number of consequences of deflationism, and then show how certain metaethical positions, despite their explicit acceptance of deflationism, run afoul of these consequences. The consequences of deflationism I have in mind are all consequences to the effect that deflationism is incompatible with one way or another of explaining content. The positions in metaethics I have in mind are all proposed solutions to a certain metaethical problem known as the problem of creeping minimalism. So in the end my claim will be that various proposed solutions to the problem of creeping minimalism both subscribe to deflationism and yet at the same time appeal to explanations of content that are demonstrably incompatible with deflationism.