Metaethical Positions Research Articles

The argument from moral psychology

The argument from moral psychology is one of the strongest arguments that non-cognitivists use against cognitivism-the metaethical position according to which our moral judgements express beliefs. According to this argument, once we put together the Humean theory of motivation and motivational internalism, we yield the conclusion that cognitivism cannot represent the correct view about the semantic function of moral discourse. I will first attempt to show that a neurological syndrome, called pain asymbolia (a rare condition caused by lesions to the posterior insula that produces complete, thoroughgoing indifference to pain), can be used in order to formulate a persuasive defence of the Humean theory of motivation. After that, I will consider motivational internalism and argue that, without additional empirical evidence, neither internalism nor externalism can provide a plausible explanation of the connection between moral judgements and motivation. In conclusion, I intend to defend the claim that, until more persuasive arguments in favour of internalism are presented, non-cognitivists should not rely on the argument from moral psychology in their attempts to refute cognitivism.

Law as Fact

Based on a non-cognitivist meta-ethical position and an anti-subjectivist concept of “reality”, Hagerstrom questioned the pretension of traditional legal theory, especially legal positivism, to be a science of law, because the entities to which it refers are not real. Olivecrona succeeded in pursuing such a thesis while he tempered it. Taking a socio-psychological approach, he offered a realistic theory of law which is able to emphasize psychical and linguistic phenomena lying at the root of our ideas of rights and duties, which determine what functions they serve in society and how they affect our conduct.

A hard look at moral perception

This paper concerns what I take to be the primary epistemological motivation for defending moral perception. Offering a plausible account of how we gain moral knowledge is one of the central challenges of metaethics. It seems moral perception might help us meet this challenge. The possibility that we know about the instantiation of moral properties in something like the way we know that there is a bus passing in front of us raises the alluring prospect of subsuming moral epistemology under the (relatively) comfortable umbrella of perceptual or, more broadly, empirical knowledge. The good news on this front is that various combinations of metaethical positions and theories of perception arguably have the potential to vindicate moral perception (though I won’t do much to defend this claim here). The bad news, I’ll argue, is that moral perception would be dependent for its epistemic merit on background knowledge of bridge principles linking moral and non-moral properties. Thus, in order to defend a purely perceptual moral epistemology, one would have to argue that knowledge of those principles is likewise perceptual. I further argue it is not.

The Necessity of Value Pluralism in Administrative Practice

Overeem and Verhoef’s critique of my understanding of value pluralism (VP) in public administration boils down to two points. First, VP is a meta-ethical position that has little or no truck with the practical field of public administration. And, second, as they argue, even if we granted that VP might be relevant to real-world events, it would be impossible to infer from it the kind of choices that I suggest, as is allegedly demonstrated by the “inconsistency” beween my position and that of Spicer in this issue. Against this I argue for a pragmatist perspective on VP. In a multi-faceted, conflictual world we have no choice but to engage in practical moral judgment. This is called moral awareness and it enhances our understanding of self and the world that we work and live in. Moral awareness also sustains one of the central tasks of public administration: the creation of a just and democratic society.

The pre-theoreticality of moral intuitions

Moral intuitionism, once an apparently moribund metaethical position, has seen a resurgence of interest of late. Robert Audi, a leading moral intuitionist, has argued that in order for a moral belief to qualify as intuitional, it must fulfill four criteria: it must be non-inferential, firmly held, comprehended, and pre-theoretical. This paper centers on the fourth and seemingly most problematic criterion: pre-theoreticality. The paper begins by stipulating the defensibility of the moral cognitivism upon which moral intuitionism turns. Next, the paper develops the distinction between semantic and epistemic pre-theoreticality, and goes on to explore and reject the putative ubiquity of the theoreticality of first-order moral discourse: it argues that on a defensible understanding of theoryhood, both semantic and epistemic pre-theoretical moral belief is not only possible, but in fact frequently realized. The paper then briefly explores and rebuts objections to (epistemic) pre-theoreticality issuing from (i) the “Cornell Realists” and (ii) considerations of the epistemic relevance of the epistemic/valuational background of moral belief. The paper concludes that, so far as the pre-theoreticality criterion is concerned, moral intuitionism remains in the running as a viable thesis regarding foundationally justified first-order moral belief and knowledge.

Expressivism, Anti-Archimedeanism and Supervenience

Metaethics is traditionally understood as a non-moral discipline that examines moral judgements from a standpoint outside of ethics. This orthodox understanding has recently come under pressure from anti-Archimedeans, such as Ronald Dworkin and Matthew Kramer, who proclaim that rather than assessing morality from an external perspective, metaethical theses are themselves substantive moral claims. In this paper, I scrutinise this anti-Archimedean challenge as applied to the metaethical position of expressivism. More precisely, I examine the claim that expressivists do not avoid moral commitments when accounting for moral thought, but instead presuppose them; they do not look at ethics from the outside, but operate from within ethics. This paper defends the non-moral status of expressivism against anti-Archimedeanism by rejecting a new anti-Archimedean challenge which, on the basis of Hume’s Law, aims to exploit expressivist explanations of supervenience in order to show that expressivism is a substantive moral position.

The Problem of Ethical Vagueness for Expressivism

Ethical vagueness has garnered little attention. This is rather surprising since many philosophers have remarked that the science of ethics lacks the precision that other fields of inquiry have. Of the few philosophers who have discussed ethical vagueness the majority have focused on the implications of vagueness for moral realism. Because the relevance of ethical vagueness for other metaethical positions has been underexplored, my aim in this paper is to investigate the ramifications of ethical vagueness for expressivism. Ultimately, I shall argue that expressivism does not have the resources to adequately account for ethical vagueness, while cognitivism does. This demonstrates an advantage that cognitivism holds over expressivism.

The Role of Disgust in Norms, and of Norms in Disgust Research: Why Liberals Shouldn’t be Morally Disgusted by Moral Disgust

Recently, many critics have argued that disgust is a morally harmful emotion, and that it should play no role in our moral and legal reasoning. Here we defend disgust as a morally beneficial moral capacity. We believe that a variety of liberal norms have been inappropriately imported into both moral psychology and ethical studies of disgust: disgust has been associated with conservative authors, values, value systems, and modes of moral reasoning that are seen as inferior to the values and moral emotions that are endorsed by liberal critics. Here we argue that the meta-ethical assumptions employed by the critics of disgust are highly contentious and in some cases culture bound. Given this, we should avoid adopting simplified meta-ethical positions in experimental moral psychology, as these can skew the design and interpretation of experiments, and blind us to the potential value of moral disgust harnessed in the service of liberal ends.

Bringing Ethics Back to Welfare Economics

Economists do not agree on the nature of welfare economics: is it normative or positive analysis? To overcome this disagreement and bridge the gap between the two views, the argument developed here takes two steps. The first identifies the metaethical positions of those for and those against the moral normativity of welfare economics. Metaethical positions differ on the ontology and ultimate legitimacy of morality. What appears in ethical terms as confusion can, in metaethical terms, be an attempt to arrive at an intellectually consistent position. A more constructive and less polarizing discussion on the aims and scope of welfare economics is expected once metaethical differences are accounted for. In the second step, ethical realism is introduced as a metaethical stance that views morality not in terms of subjective desires or preferences but as truth-apt claims. It is suggested that understanding the moral normativity of welfare economics in terms of ethical realism presents an opportunity to break the deadlock that halted its progress.

Disagreement: Ethics and Elsewhere

According to a traditional argument against moral realism, the existence of objective moral facts is hard to reconcile with the existence of radical disagreement over moral issues. An increasingly popular response to this argument is to insist that it generalizes too easily. Thus, it has been argued that if one rejects moral realism on the basis of disagreement then one is committed to similar views about epistemology and meta-ethics itself, since the disagreements that arise in those areas are just as deep as the moral ones. This in turn is taken to show that a moral anti-realist should seek another basis for her position. For, if she extends her anti-realism also to epistemology and meta-ethics, then she is no longer in a position to say that her meta-ethical position is true or that it is a fact that we have reason to accept it. She therefore seems left with a position that hardly even seems to be a position. The purpose of the paper is to challenge this response and in particular the claim that the argument from disagreement applies equally well to epistemology and meta-ethics as it does to ethics. It is argued that, despite contrary appearances, there are crucial differences between the disagreements that occur in ethics compared to those that arise in the other areas. Moreover, even granted that the disagreements are just as deep, there are other differences between the areas that nevertheless justify drawing different conclusions about their status from the existence of those disagreements.

Neuromodulation in the Service of Moral Enhancement

Human enhancement is a much debated topic in the bioethical literature. Human beings have long tried to improve their capacities and their performances through training and with the aid of tools; but more recently new means have come to the fore, such as drugs and biotechnological devices, especially in the domain of bodily strength and cognitive powers. Moral enhancement has been more seldom discussed. However, this question has recently been hotly debated between two philosophers, Thomas Douglas and John Harris. Douglas claims that modulating certain ugly emotions directly would consist in moral progress-directly, that is, without using cognitive means like persuasion or deliberation. Harris makes three objections against this thesis: such a direct neuromodulation would be inefficacious, would put our liberty in jeopardy and would lead to a moral decline. In this paper, I examine the third argument: with direct modulation, we risk intervening too much or too little, inducing an inappropriate emotion or an inappropriate level of an otherwise appropriate emotion-two upshots that will put morality in jeopardy. I conclude that the validity of this objection depends on several meta-ethical positions: if you are a rationalist or think that intentionality and consciousness are at the core of morality, you will agree with Harris, but if you are a sentimentalist or someone for whom results count, you will disagree. Here as elsewhere, ethical questions cannot be divorced from meta-ethical ones.

Georges Bataille's post-anarchism

Post-anarchist philosophy has widely been regarded as an attempt to challenge the ontological essentialism of the traditional anarchist discourse. The problem for the post-anarchists is that by focusing exclusively on the critique of ontological essentialism and universalism inherent in the ideology of traditional anarchism, post-anarchists have demonstrated that they are unable to envision a response to meta-ethical questions that occur outside of the universalism/relativism pair. As a result most post-anarchists have retreated into an epistemological defence of relativism. In keeping with the ethical trajectory of post-anarchist philosophy, post-anarchists could stand to benefit by responding nihilistically rather than relativistically to the epistemological problem of universalism. They could also take the ontological problematic of non-being to its limit by rejecting the subject as the locus of ethical agency. I shall aim to demonstrate that this latter position is correlative to the meta-ethical position of Georges Bataille.

Taking the Minimum Content Seriously: Hart's Liberalism and Moral Values

In contrast to existing approaches, this essay examines H.L.A. Hart’s legal philosophy as a single, coherent body of work. Read in this way, key tensions emerge between Hart’s claims about reasons for moral values and his liberal worldview. Hart’s meta-ethics treats moral values as contingent. Yet liberalism, as a political goal, requires the existence of some lasting moral values. It is possible for Hart’s legal philosophy to support lasting values for the critique of substantive law if we build upon the meta-ethical position that Hart tacitly adopts. This approach exposes a more fundamental tension between Hart’s claims about moral values and his strict distinction between questions of what law is and claims about what the content of law ought to be. This final tension cannot be resolved; it presents us with an important choice between Hart’s liberalism and his general approach to questions in legal philosophy.

Cognitivism, non-cognitivism, and skepticism about folk psychology

In recent years it has become more and more difficult to distinguish between metaethical cognitivism and non-cognitivism. For example, proponents of the minimalist theory of truth hold that moral claims need not express beliefs in order to be (minimally) truth-apt, and yet some of these proponents still reject the traditional cognitivist analysis of moral language and thought. Thus, the dispute in metaethics between cognitivists and non-cognitivists has come to be seen as a dispute over the correct way to characterize our psychology: are moral judgments beliefs, or a kind of pro-attitude? In this paper, I argue that this distinction, too, is difficult to maintain in the light of a reasonable skepticism about folk psychology. I conclude by suggesting some new possibilities for the analysis of moral language that look beyond this distinction. I begin by briefly reviewing some contemporary positions in metaethics on cognitivism and non-cognitivism, that are intended to emphasize the supposed psychological differences between the two views. I show that the appearance of a clear difference between these views depends on one's having a very strong commitment to the context-independence and completeness of certain concepts of folk psychology. I then argue for a moderate skepticism about folk psychology. I conclude that folk concepts like “belief” are not sufficiently well-defined to settle this metaethical dispute.

Justification and Application

The Rawls–Habermas debate is having a revival. In this article I argue that both philosophers develop different freestanding conceptions of political legitimacy, and show how they diverge when it comes to how political legitimacy can be justified. Habermas is looking for a deeper justification than Rawls will allow for. I then proceed to show how the different meta-ethical positions yield two different versions of democratic theory, focusing in particular on rights and popular sovereignty. I demonstrate how both conceive of the co-originality of private and public autonomy, and subsequently take issue with Habermas’ reading of Rawls. I argue that Rawls should not be understood as a natural rights theorist, that Habermas misunderstands the role of the original position, and that Rawls cannot be considered a strong constitutionalist. Thus, the real difference between Rawls and Habermas revolves around their different conceptions of political legitimacy.

Reidian Metaethics: Part II

Does moral realism deserve to be the default metaethical position? The issue is contested. While many realists have maintained that theirs is the view to beat, others contend that realists have offered no satisfactory argument for this position. In this essay and its companion, ‘Reidian Metaethics, Part II’, I maintain that Thomas Reid’s moral epistemology can help us make headway on the issue. Reid, I claim, offers an interesting line of argument, that when conjoined with some other assumptions, supports the claim that realism deserves to be the default metaethical position.

HABERMAS E A QUESTÃO DA VALIDADE COGNITIVA DOS ENUNCIADOS TEÓRICOS E MORAIS

A cognitivist and discursive ethics must distinguish itself from two other metaethical positions: on one side, a cognitivist but non-discursive ethics; on the other side, a noncognitivist but communicative, argumentative and procedural ethics. The aim of the present work is to use Habermas’ reflections on the topic of truth to develop an ideal-typical scheme which could be helpful in explaining those distinctions. This scheme will contain three typical conceptions about the truth of theoretical statements: realist-intuitionist conception, objectivist-semantic conception and discursive-consensual conception. The distinctiveness of the cognitive-discursive ethics will then be explained by relating the cognitivist but non-discursive ethics and the noncognitivist but procedural ethics to their respective conceptions of truth: the realist-intuitionist conception and the objectivist-semantic conception.

AGAINST METAETHICAL IMPERIALISM: Several Arguments for Equal Partnerships between the Deontic and Aretaic

ABSTRACTVirtue and deontological ethics are now commonly contrasted as rival approaches to moral inquiry. However, I argue that neither metaethical party should seek complete, solitary domination of the ethical domain. Reductive treatments of the right or the virtuous, as well as projects that abandon the former or latter, are bound to leave us with a sadly diminished map of the moral territories crucial to our lives. Thus, it is better for the two parties to seek a more cordial and equal relationship, one that permits metaethical pluralism, and acknowledges mutual dependence. I do not seek to prescribe how that relationship should look: this essay offers less a positive metaethical position than a prolegomenon to such a position, one that attempts to head off harmful attempts to reduce the territory of the aretaic to that of the deontic, or that of the deontic to the aretaic.

What is Constructivism in Ethics and Metaethics?

AbstractMost agree that when it comes to so‐called ‘first‐order’ normative ethics and political philosophy, constructivist views are a powerful family of positions. When it comes to metaethics, however, there is serious disagreement about what, if anything, constructivism has to contribute. In this paper I argue that constructivist views in ethics include not just a family of substantive normative positions, but also a distinct and highly attractive metaethical view. I argue that the widely accepted ‘proceduralist characterization’ of constructivism in ethics is inadequate, and I propose what I call the ‘practical standpoint characterization’ in its place. I then offer a general taxonomy of constructivist positions in ethics. Since constructivism’s standing as a family of substantive normative positions is relatively uncontested, I devote the remainder of the paper to addressing skeptics’ worries about the distinctiveness of constructivism understood as a metaethical view. I compare and contrast constructivism with three other standard metaethical positions with which it is often confused or mistakenly thought to be compatible: realism; naturalist reductions in terms of an ideal response; and expressivism. In discussing the contrast with expressivism, I explain the sense in which, according to the constructivist, the distinction between substantive normative ethics and metaethics breaks down. I conclude by distinguishing between two importantly different debates about the mind‐dependence of value. I argue that a failure to make this distinction is part of what explains why the possibility of constructivism as a metaethical view is often overlooked.

Intuitionism and the Secondary-Quality Analogy in Ethics

In the work of John McDowell we find the promise of a new meta-ethical position that illuminates a possible middle-way between moral intuitionism and noncognitivism. This novel account of moral thought is sometimes referred to as sensibility theory, and it is motivated, in large part, by certain similarities McDowell sees between moral properties and secondary qualities. In the hands of a sensibility theorist like McDowell, the so-called secondary-quality analogy in ethics suggests a way in which the motivational force and mind-dependence of moral features might sit happily with the objectivity and cognitive character of moral judgment. While such a novel resolution would be exciting, it will be argued that McDowell ultimately offers us a view that is closer to moral intuitionism than initially supposed. Upon closer scrutiny, the much-discussed secondary-quality analogy seems to be doing little new meta-ethical work for McDowell, or at minimum, the comparison fails alone to do all the work that McDowell sets out for it. A moral intuitionist can avail herself of each of the relevant comparisons McDowell draws between moral value and secondary qualities.