Logical Positivism, Ethics, and Hope

I’d like to expand on a comment that Franklin Mason made on my last post, regarding logical positivism. As I understand logical positivism, it is a philosophical theory about the meaningfulness of propositions, according to which the following proposition is said to be true:

A proposition is meaningful if and only if it is either analytic (roughly, it is a statement about how ideas or concepts are logically related to one another) or empirically testable (in other words, the truth or falsity of the proposition would make a difference in what we would or could observe).

I will call this proposition the Logical Positivist Thesis (LPT).

Franklin points out, rightly, that logical positivism fell out of favor among philosophers as soon as it was noticed that LPT simply cannot be true because it is self-referentially incoherent. If we look at LPT, we can see quite readily that it is not simply a statement about how concepts are related to one another. Nor is it empirically testable. As such, if LPT is true, it is meaningless and can be neither true nor false.

But what follows from this? Here’s my reasoning:

1. If LPT is self-referentially incoherent, it must be rejected. That is, we must assert that “It is not the case that a proposition is meaningful if and only if it is either analytic or empirically testable.” In other words, we must assert that other kinds of propositions, besides analytic and empirically testable ones, are meaningful too.

2. In order for a proposition to be meaningful, it has to have a truth value. This is not the case with exclamations or questions, etc., since these don’t make a claim about anything. Wittgenstein rightly noted that we play different language games, and that the meaning of a term is given by how it is used in a language game. But the language game of stating propositions is precisely this: the activity of saying that something is the case. And when one says that something is the case, what one is saying has to have a truth value: either it is the case or it isn’t.

3.It follows from this that there are propositions that have a truth value which are neither analytic nor empirically testable. And since every false proposition is such that it’s contradictory opposite is a true proposition (and since the contradictory opposite of a proposition that’s neither analytic nor empirically testable will itself be neither analytic nor empirically testable), it follows that there are propositions which are true, but which are neither analytic nor empirically testable.

4. From this it follows that there are truths that we cannot access through conceptual analysis/logic nor through empirical investigation of the world.

If all of this is right, we should ask ourselves several questions. First, how is this possible? What is the truth-maker for these non-analytic/non-empirical propositions? If they are true not by the logical relations among the ideas in the proposition, nor by correspondence to the empirical world, there must exist some other standard of truth. What is it?

Second, can we discern propositions that are meaningful even though they are neither analytic nor empirically testable? How can we distinguish between propositions of this kind and meaningless pseudo-propositions?

Third, can we access the truth-maker for this third kind of proposition so as to have knowledge with respect to propositions of this kind? And if not, what are we to do in relation to propositions that qualify as being meaningful propositions of this third kind (assuming we can discern them)? Should we just be agnostic in relation to them? Or are there reasons of some kind that can guide us in deciding what to affirm and what not to affirm in this third category even though we can’t have knowledge?

To bring these questions out of the realm of mere theory, let me consider a claims that I think might be a good candidate for a meaningful proposition that is neither analytic nor empirically testable. Here it is:

“It is morally wrong for someone to extinguish a cigarette in a baby’s eye just to see how loudly the baby will scream.”

Now I think this claim is meaningful. In fact, I think it is true. But it isn’t true by virtue of the logical relations of the ideas in the proposition. And there is no empirical test one could conduct which is such that a certain empirical observation, if made, would falsify/verify it.

But with respect to this last point, I need to pause for a moment. Logical positivists were of course confronted with moral statements, and they wrestled with how to fit them within their system. They didn’t want to reject them as meaningless. What they did, therefore, was to subjectivize them. They said that these statements were really statements about the attitudes of the speaker. The statement above would therefore translate into something like the following: “I (the speaker) disapprove of someone extinguishing a cigarette in a baby’s eye just to see how loudly the baby will scream.” Others said they weren’t statements at all, but mere emotive expressions of one’s desires. Thus, Bertrand Russell would translate the above into, “Would that no one would extinguish cigarettes in the eyes of babies just to see how loudly they’ll scream!”

The former move is attractive to logical positivists because it makes moral utterances meaningful propositions with a truth value, even given the logical positivist thesis. After all, if moral utterances are just claims about the speaker’s attitudes of approval and disapproval, then the baby-torture statement becomes empirically testable: If it is true, then we shouldn’t expect to observe the speaker extinguishing cigarettes in babies’ eyes to see how loudly they scream. If we do make this observation, then the speaker doesn’t actually possess the attitude expressed. (Some room for controversy here, but I’ll let that pass.)

The latter move, by contrast, makes moral utterances into mere exclamations, akin to “Ouch!” By stripping them of their status as propositions, one thereby dispenses with the need for empirical testing altogether.

But there are deep worries about either move, some of which are lucidly expressed by Baruch Brody in his classic essay, “The New Subjectivism in Ethics.” My own problems with this kind of subjectivism in ethics can be summed up as follows: When I say that gratuitously torturing babies is wrong, I mean to be saying something about gratuitous baby torture that is true of gratuitous baby torture (not something about myself as a speaker that is true of me). And this is, in fact, what most people intend when they make moral utterances. They intend to say something about actions and people and states of affairs. They do not intend merely to express their own attitudes. If they did, they’d say, “Yuck!”

Put more simply, when people say that some action is wrong, they mean that the action has this non-empirical property of wrongness. And so they are operating on the assumption that non-empirical moral properties are something “real” that can be truly or falsely attributed to actions, states of affairs, etc.

Our moral language is riddled with this assumption. Moral disagreement would make no sense in the absence of this assumption. Our view that some people make mistakes in their moral judgments would make no sense otherwise. The sociopath who approves of gratuitous baby torture “all the way down” wouldn’t be evil in any absolute sense; instead, by the only standard of morality that there is, this sociopath would be doing something that would be truly right for him even if it were truly wrong for us. He wouldn’t be mistaken any more than we would.

Our view that people can make moral progress by abandoning misguided attitudes and adopting more fitting ones would also make no sense—and we can say goodbye to the coherence of some of our most cherished stories. Scrooge would have simply gone from one set of attitudes about love and community and money to a radically different set of attitudes—but the change could not in any meaningful way be declared an improvement, since that would require a standard outside of the attitudes themselves by which the attitudes could be assessed.

In short, our ordinary moral language has a meaning that is very different from the meaning that logical-positivism-inspired subjectivism foists upon it. When people use moral language, they think it is perfectly coherent to talk about improvement in someone’s moral attitudes, errors in someone’s moral attitudes, and genuine disagreements about the truth of moral claims (so that when I say that abortion is always wrong I am saying something that is inconsistent with your saying that it is not always wrong). But if morality is purely an expression of the subjective attitudes of the speaker towards things in the world, and nothing more, then none of these things that are treated as meaningful by ordinary users of moral language end up being meaningful at all.

And this means that subjectivism in ethics is not just a radically new theory of ethics. It is moral nihilism in disguise. What I mean to say when I use moral language—that actions and the like have this property of wrongness or rightness—is something that the logical positivist insists I cannot meaningfully say, because there is no such property. Let me repeat that: according to the logical positivist, there is no such thing as morality in the sense of morality that actual users of moral language have in mind. There is only this other thing, described by subjectivists and called morality, which cannot sustain any of the linguistic moves that characterize the “moral language game.”

One could, of course, bite the bullet here and embrace all of these implications: morality as we ordinarily understand it is a delusion, and our ordinary moral discourse is so much nonsense. Or one could decide, since logical positivism is self-referentially incoherent, and since there must be a third kind of meaningful proposition besides analytic and empirically testable ones, that moral claims are claims of this third kind. On this view, it can be true of gratuitous baby torture that it is wrong—it can be true that it has this property of wrongness, even though this property is not reducible to any empirical property.

But then we need to ask, of course, what is the nature of this property? What gives something this property? What makes it true that gratuitous baby torture has this property? Here we might pursue a neo-Kantian approach and say that “rightness” is equivalent to “conformity of our will to the motive of respect for a rationally universalizable law.” While such an equivalence makes moral utterances a bit more like analytic ones insofar as reason plays a crucial role in determining their truth value, it nevertheless thrusts us into a view of reality in which there are real entities that are not empirically discoverable.

Any Kantian will tell you that the possibility of conformity of the will to a motive of respect for reason requires a non-empirical conception of the self, according to which the self is moved to action by abstract principles as opposed to by empirical causal laws. That is, the possibility of analyzing morality in neo-Kantian terms depends on positing a “noumenal self” distinct from the “phenomenal self” that empirical study can describe—a self in which the will cannot be explicated reductionistically in terms of the interplay of brain states, in which “acting for reasons” amounts to something that is not part of the physical world—an intellectual abstraction called a “reason”—effecting the physical world through the mediation of this non-physical thing we call “the will.”

The empiricist may well say, “So much the worse for Kant.” But my point goes beyond Kant. There is this thing called morality that is extremely important to me. More than that, I have a strong and immediate intuitive sense of the truth of certain moral claims, every bit as immediate and determinate as what I find in my empirical experience. Certain moral claims seems to be clearly, obviously true (such as the claim that gratuitous baby torture is wrong). And it’s not some redefined sense of these claims that strikes me as clearly true. It is these claims understood in the ordinary sense—the sense which says that gratuitous baby torture has this property of being wrong independent of what someone’s attitudes happen to be, so that those who feel nothing but approval towards baby torture are rightly judged to be deeply flawed in their character, with attitudes that are fundamentally at odds with the moral truth.

Logical positivism eviscerates morality in this sense. Thankfully, logical positivism is necessarily false. This means that it is possible for moral propositions to be meaningful and true (or false) according to some standard of truth other than logical analyticity or empirical testability. But as soon as we begin to attempt to unpack a standard of moral truth—a truth-maker for morality that preserves the robust meaning of moral claims that is part of our moral experience of the world—it is (in my experience as well as the experience, I think, of most moral philosophers) essentially impossible to do so without positing more to reality than your typical reductionistic empiricist is prepared to allow.

I was a moral philosopher long before I got interested in philosophy of religion, and there is no doubt at all that my philosophical interest in religious ideas springs from my interest in finding an understanding of morality that does not eviscerate my moral experience of the world, but actually conforms to what my conscience tells me is true. Like Kant, I was motivated by the question, “What makes morality possible at all?”

The beginnings of the answer I’ve found most compelling depend on the following hypothesis: Goodness is something that is objectively real. It is a property possessed by things in the world, especially persons. And this objective value, which exists independent of anyone actually engaging in the act of valuing things, makes certain acts of valuing appropriate (treasuring my children) and others inappropriate (regarding women as mere things to be used). As such, both ethical subjectivism and divine command theory are appalling to me, and for basically the same reasons. Divine command theory is just subjectivism projected onto God.

But what must reality be like more broadly in order for goodness to be this objectively real property possessed by things, especially persons? To be blunt, I don’t know. But I'm convinced that it cannot be the way it is described to be by the most popular forms of naturalism—the reductive materialism espoused by Dawkins and the rest.

Although I don’t know the answer, I do have suspicions, and I do have hopes. And these suspicions and hopes are aligned with the Christian picture of the universe—not as it is presented in its crass legalistic formulations or its fundamentalist instantiations, but in the deep theological ruminations on love and grace that we find in the greatest thinkers of the Christian tradition. In these works I discover what in my book I call “the ethico-religious hope”—the hope that reality is fundamentally on the side of goodness, that goodness is not some subjective projection onto reality by a few critters in one corner of the vast universe of pitiless indifference, nor is it merely a property possessed by things in the universe; it is, rather, of the very essence of reality.

I’m not convinced (as Kant was) that the fulfillment of this hope is a necessary postulate in order for morality to be possible at all. But I am convinced that the decision to live as if this hope were fulfilled helps people to be better than they would be otherwise (Alcoholics Anonymous offers evidence of this). And when I say that people are better, I am making this judgment based on my immediate, intuitive sense of the good, the sense that is given to me directly by this thing I call my conscience.

And if the Good is something real and not merely a subjective projection, then an exploration of the nature of a reality in which that is possible will benefit from living my life in a way that seems to attune me with the Good. And the decision to live as if the ethico-religious hope were fulfilled is precisely such a way of living. It’s value transcends its philosophical value, of course—but I’m convinced that the kind of life you live opens up insights into the nature of reality that would not otherwise be possible. And since the kind of life one lives is shaped by one’s beliefs about reality, this means that we may need to make practical (and provisional) decisions about what to believe that go beyond the evidence available to us in the present moment. The refusal to do so may insulate us from error, but it may also insulate us from a fuller contact with truth.