Meta-Ethics and Moral Arguments for God

I haven't talked much on this blog about moral arguments for the existence of God, at least not explicitly. In a way this is a bit odd, because my first book can be viewed as offering one kind of moral argument--not for the existence of God, but for the legitimacy of having faith in God's existence.

Moral arguments for God's existence, or for religious faith, fall right at the intersection of my main philosophical interests. In this post, I want to consider one such intersection: The need for moral arguments for God to engage with the diverse range of ideas that fall under the heading of what is called "meta-ethics."

Off and on I've posted things on this blog pertaining to what is called "meta-ethics," although I've tended to eschew that term. The field of meta-ethics is perhaps best understood in terms of the questions it asks, which in turn are best understood as question about the answers to lower-level ethical questions. Such lower-level questions are usually categorized as either "applied" or "normative." Applied ethics asks questions like the following: "Is it always wrong for a person to terminate an unwanted pregnancy?" Normative ethics, meanwhile, asks more general-level questions about the nature of morality, such as,"Are there some things that are wrong regardless of the consequences, or is the moral status of an action always a function of its outcomes?"

Meta-ethics steps back, looks at the answers to such lower-level questions, and asks about the nature of these answers. When you say that deliberately terminating a pregnancy is always wrong, are you asserting something of pregnancy-terminations that you take to be true of them, namely that they always have the property of wrongness? If so, what kind of property, exactly, is "wrongness"? And if not, what are you doing when you say these words?

When I say that the end does not always justify the means, am I asserting a fact which is either true or false apart from how I feel? Or am I simply expressing, say, a general-level feeling about actions that prioritize ends over means? Or am I, perhaps, simply voicing my personal commitment never to let consideration of ends trump consideration of means? If I'm asserting a fact, is it morel like a mathematical fact ("2+2=4"), an empirical one ("There are two beers in the fridge"), or a socially constructed one ("Barack Obama is President of the United States")? Or are moral facts unlike any of these?

When I've wandered into meta-ethics on this blog, it has generally been in relation to the question of whether moral claims are "objective" or "subjective." This is a classic way of attempting to get at one of the most crucial meta-ethical questions: Does a moral judgment have a truth value that is independent of the preferences/attitudes/beliefs of the individual making the judgment?

Although I haven't explicitly pursued the connection here, these meta-ethical questions have bearing on issues in the philosophy of religion. More precisely, there's one especially widespread kind of moral argument for God's existence whose soundness depends on some very precise answers to a number of questions in meta-ethics. The species of argument I have in mind has something like the following form:

1. Moral claims have an objective truth value, and some moral claims are true (they're not all false).
2. In order for moral claims to have this sort of objective truth value, theism must be true (or at least metaphysical naturalism must be false).
3. Therefore, theism is true (or metaphysical naturalism is false).

(Clarifying note: What is premise 1 saying? Here's a rough elaboration: A moral claim attributes a property of a certain kind--what we might call a normative property, such as "right" and "good"-- to such things as persons, actions, character traits, and states of affairs. Premise 1 is saying, first, that some of these attributions are correct and others incorrect; and second, that what makes the correct attributions correct is something apart from anyone's (individual or group's) actual approval or disapproval, acceptance or rejection, of that which is being called good or right, etc.)

Typically, the case for the first premise of such an argument rests on an appeal to basic moral intuitions. We are invited to consider a moral claim such as "Torturing children for fun is immoral." We are invited to think about what it would mean for such a claim to be treated as lacking in objective truth. If the implications of such thought experiments are deeply counter-intuitive, it follows that we intuitively accept the first premise. Once this is established, an effort is made to defend the second premise--that is, to show that in order to remain true to our intuitions--in order to underwrite the meta-ethical position we intuitively embrace--we must suppose there is a God. How this is done will vary greatly according to the version of the argument being considered.

A weaker form of this strategy of argument would hold that theism does a better job of making sense of our moral intuitions than does any form of naturalism; hence, theism is the best way (at least given our current understanding of matters) to underwrite those intuitions.

One crucial weakness of any such strategy of argument is this: Even if it works, the reasoning can work in both directions. As one of my friends from graduate school once quipped, "One person's modus ponens is another person's modus tollens." (I won't explain the terms. Google them if you care.) In a nutshell, if you agree that given your intutions premise 1 should be accepted, and you accept 2, you actually have two choices: accept theism or reject your intuitions. And there are some who find theism so implausible (or naturalism so obvious) that they are more than ready to take the second option.

But this is hardly the only way to resist the conclusion of a moral argument along these lines. In fact, there are meta-ethicists who question whether our intutitions really speak as strongly in favor of premise 1 as defenders of this sort of argument suppose. Furthermore, there are meta-ethicists who deny premise 2, having offered quite sophisticated defenses of naturalistic accounts of objective moral truth

Put simply, both premises 1 and 2 make meta-ethical claims that can be and have been challenged in the philosophical literature.

Let's start with the first premise. I have formulated this premise so that it would be true if either of two important meta-ethical positions is correct: (i) moral realism and (ii) objectivist versions of constructivism. Moral realism is, roughly, the view that there are moral facts "out there" whose truth is independent of what any individual or group, even an "ideal" one, does or would think/feel/endorse. Objectivist versions of constructivism hold, roughly, that moral truth is determined by the judgments that would be made by a person or community under certain ideal conditions--for example, under the condition that the individual were being perfectly rationally consistent in the presence of complete knowledge of all relavant facts. In other words, what makes some moral claim true is that the moral claim would be endorsed by the ideally-situated person or group (not by what anyone actually endorses--actual endorsements are correct or incorrect based on their correspondence to this ideal). This view is to be distinguished from subjective and relativistic versions of constructivism. Subjectivism holds that a moral claim is true if it correctly reports the actual contingent thoughts/feelings/attitudes of the individual making the report. Relativism holds that a moral claim is true if it correctly describes that actual agreements reached by a given group, such as a culture or society.

The reason I've formulated premise 1 so that it encompasses both (i) and (ii) is simply this: In my judgment the intuitive case for objectivity in ethics (assuming it is convincing) would be satisfied by either of these theoretic approaches. This is not to say that I think both approaches can be philosophically developed or worked out with equal success. It is one thing to say that our intuitions would be satisfied if there were a moral truth "out there." It is something else to give a plausible account of what such moral truth would be like. It is one thing to say that our intuitions would be satisfied if there were some idealized perspective from which these intuitions would be reliably endorsed. It is something else to attempt to describe such a perspective and show that it would actually underwrite our moral intuitions.

In any event, what the first premise rules out are those meta-ethical views that deny that there are objective moral truths. These are: (a) noncognitivist theories (which hold that moral utterances don't have any truth value at all, since they don't assert anything but, instead, merely express attitudes or plans or some such); (b) subjective or relativistic versions of constructivism (sketched out above); and (c) "error theory" (which holds, in effect, that moral claims do have an objective truth value, but that all moral claims are objectively false in the way that all claims about the properties of non-existent things, like unicorns, are objectively false).

Premise 1 of the argument above effectively rejects each of these theories. But there are, of course, sophisticated meta-ethicists who have rigorously defended these alternative meta-ethical views, even in the face of the intuitive challenge. Simon Blackburn, for example, has been an importand defender of (a). Another, with whom I had dinner a couple of weeks ago, is Allan Gibbard. Gilbert Harman has defended (b). And John Mackie has defended (c). These philosophers have endeavored to account for the intuitions that seem to support an objectivist meta-ethical stance either by explaining the intuitions away or by showing that there remains a way to preserve the intuitions (perhaps in a modified form) within these alternative meta-ethical frameworks.

As to the second premise, there are some sophisticated moral realists who, in recent years, have attempted to stake out a version of moral realism that is thoroughly naturalistic (David Brink and Richard Boyd are good examples). Furthermore, there are a range of sophisticated theories--most of them inspired by Kant--that purport to provide an objective foundation for moral truth that is "constructivist" in the technical sense and which makes no appeal to God in the course of offering that foundation (John Rawls, Alan Gewirth, and Christine Korsgaard offer examplars of such approaches). In general, constructivist accounts of morality, whether objective or subjective or relative, are consistent with naturalism (even thought at least some constructivist theories may also be consistent with theism or other forms of supernaturalism). As such, there are a wide range of theories that would need to be discredited in order for the second premise of the above argument to remain anything more than controversial.

In short, moral arguments for the existence of God that have anything like the above structure need to tackle the entire range of meta-ethical literature. It's not enough that they be able to show how moral objectivity could be defended on theistic assumptions. They also need to show (a) that naturalistic forms of moral realism don't work as well as the favored theistic theory; (b) that objective forms of constructivism don't work as well; (c) that contrary to claims made by some noncognitivists, subjective constructivists, etc., these theories really do fly in the face of our moral intuitions; and (d) if one must choose between one's moral intuitions and a metaphysical naturalism, there is good reason to jettison the latter.

This is quite a project, to say the least. It's unlikely that even with a hefty book one could adequately pursue each elements of it (Robert Merrihew Adams has gamely attempted something along these lines with his Finite and Infinite Goods; but while I regard that books as a great intellectual achievement, it is hardly the final word on the subject--as is evidenced by the rich exchange, following the book's publication, between Adams and the naturalistic moral realist Richard Boyd).

So, even if I were inclined to defend this sort of moral argument for God's existence, I wouldn't be inclined to do so in a blog post. And the fact is, I'm not sure what to think about this moral argument. I'd love to find a version of it that convinces me when I put on my critical philosopher's hat, but I haven't yet.

There are, however, other kinds of moral arguments. Some I find myself more drawn to than others.

In fact, one way to read Is God a Delusion? would be to treat it as an extended defense of a moral argument, not for God's existence as such, but for the decision to have faith in the existence of God. Here's how I'd formally reconstruct the argument along these lines that is nascent in the book:

1. Some things are objectively morally good.
2. If naturalism were true, then reality at a fundamental level would be indifferent to what is objectively morally good (the basic constituents of and principles governing reality would, given naturalism, neither embody such goodness themselves nor reliably promote its expression or preserve/perpetuate that which expresses it).
3. There is a worldview, opposed to naturalism, according to which reality at a fundamental level would not be indifferent to what is objectively morally good but, on the contrary, would embody such goodness, promote its expression, and preserve/perpetuate that which expresses it. A worldview of this sort is what unites theists who regard God as a proper object of devotion, trust, and worship (as opposed to fear and fawning subservience), and so can be described as the worldview of theistic religion (as opposed to theistic superstition, following Plutarch's distinction).
4. Both naturalism and the worldview of theistic religion are compatible with reason and our overall body of experience, even though both exceed what reason and evidence can establish.
5. Given the definition of theistic religion offered in (3), it would be objectively morally good if the worldview of theistic religion were true.
6. Living as if the worldview of theistic religion were true is a morally benign choice--that is, doing this would not produce outcomes or behaviors that are objectively morally bad, but would produce outcomes or behaviors that are objectively morally good.
7. Faith in one important sense of the word involves the decision to live as if a worldview is true based on the hope that it is true, and this decision is reasonable and moral if (a) the worldview is compatible with reason and experience even if not uniquely supported by it; (b) it would be objectively morally good were the worldview true (hence making the worldview a suitable object of hope); and (c) living as if it were true is morally benign.
8. Hence, faith in the worldview of theistic religion is reasonable and moral.

Framed in this way, it's obvious that my overarching line of argument in Is God a Delusion? depends on a meta-ethical premise, one which I never explicitly defend. But notice that this premise--roughly, that there are objective moral goods--would be true were any form of moral realism or objective constructivism correct. In other words, this argument does not depend on discrediting naturalistic forms of moral realism and every version of objective constructivism. It does, however, suppose that noncognitivism, error theory, and subjective and relativist forms of constructivism are mistaken.

In short, a unifying argument in Is God a Delusion? presupposes a meta-ethical position, but a far broader one than the more narrow moral argument requires.

There are other moral arguments for God's existence, and I suspect that each such argument probably depends for its soundness on some kind of meta-ethical position being correct. If so, then criticisms and defenses of moral arguments for God, to be complete, will inevitably have to consider work being done in meta-ethics.

Iris Murdoch on the Fact/Value Distinction

I had occasion this week to revisit some of Iris Murdoch's writings while working on a professional article, and I found myself meditating on the rich opening passage of her chapter on "Fact and Value" from Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. The final remark of the passage--focusing on what she takes to be the work of the moral philosopher--struck me as particularly significant for my own work. And it was especially resonant in light of a complementary account of the aims of moral philosophy offered by Murdoch in an earlier essay, "Vision and Choice in Morality." Since her thoughts connect with issues that tend to inspire the regular readers of this blog, I share both passages here (with some elipses, simply because it would otherwise be a lot of typing). (Note that while Murdoch was not a naturalist, she was also not a theist. She ended up embracing something like a Platonic conception of "the Good" as the ground for morality as we encounter it.)

From Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals:

A misleading though attractive distinction is made by many thinkers between fact and (moral) value. Roughly, the purpose of the distinction (as it is used by Kant and Wittgenstein for instance) is to segregate value in order to keep it pure and untainted, not derived from or mixed with empirical facts. This move however, in time and as interpreted, may in effect result in a diminished, even perfunctory, account of morality, leading (with the increasing prestige of science) to a marginalisation of 'the ethical'...This originally well-intentioned segregation then ignores an obvious and importan aspect of human existence, the way in which almost all our concepts and activities involve evaluation. A post-Kantian theory of morals: survey the facts, then use your reason. But, in the majority of cases, a survey of the facts will itself involve moral discrimination...The moral point is that 'facts' are set up as such by human (that is moral) agents...In many familiar ways various values pervade and colour what we take to be the reality of our world....To say all this is not in any way to deny either science, empiricism or common-sense. The proposition that 'the cat is on the mat' is true, indicates a fact, if the cat is on the mat. A proper separation of fact and value, as a defence of morality, lies in the contention that moral value cannot be derived from fact. That is, our activity of moral discrimination cannot be explained as merely one natural instinct among others, or our 'good' identified with pleasure, or a will to live, or what the government says (etc.). The possession of a moral sense is uniquely human; morality is, in the human world, something unique, special, sui generis, 'as if it came to us from elsewhere'. It is an intimation of 'something higher'. The demand that we be virtuous. It is 'inescapable and fundamental'. The interpretation of such phrases, including less fancy versions of the same intuition, has been, and should be, a main activity of moral philosophers.

And then this from "Vision and Choice in Morality":

There are situations which are obscure and people who are incomprehensible, and the moral agent, as well as the artist, may find himself unable to describe something which in some sense he apprehends. Language has limitations and there are moments when, if it is to serve us, it has to be used creatively, and the effort may fail. We we consider here the role of language in illuminating situations, how insufficient seens the notion of linguistic moral philosophy as the elaboration of the evaluative-descriptive formula. From here we may see that the task of moral philosophers has been to extent, as poets may extend, the limits of the language, and enable it to illuminate regions of reality which were formerly dark.

In both passages, Murdoch finds a problem with the "evaluative-descriptive formula" according to which facts are the reality "out there" and value is nothing but the subjective act of commending this or that fact or possible fact. We have intimations that this way of representing matters, which flows so readily out of modernism and scientism, is inadequate to characterize our experience with morality and goodness. But we lack the language to do more than gesture to the nature of the inadequacy. To characterize morality more truly, we need to stretch our language in new ways. For Murdoch, concepts and conceptual schemes offer us new ways of seeing things. The trick is to explore alternative conceptual schemes, hoping to find one that "clicks into place" in a way that existing ones fail to do (the nagging sense of their inadequacy). And "where the attempt fails," Murdoch tells us, "the virtues of faith and hope have their place." 

Ethical Relativism vs Preference Utilitarianism

There’s been a provocative discussion going on in the comments section of an earlier post, “Spitting at the conventional wisdom.” Specifically, the conversation has been about a recurring topic on this blog: the nature of morality and the respective merits of relativistic and objectivist understandings of moral claims—a conversation sparked by Darrell’s suggestion that the effort to change hearts and minds on the issue of same-sex marriage requires invocation of objective moral standards.


In this discussion (and elsewhere on this blog), Bernard has been an eloquent voice in defense of relativism. His comments, however, have features that cause me and others like me—probably Darrell among them—to scratch our heads and wonder if we might simply be miscommunicating. That is, I’m led to wonder whether we are using terms like "objectivism" and "relativism" in different senses.

Specifically, Bernard’s comments in the earlier discussion thread are rich with normative language, and I wonder how to make sense of those remarks if I interpret that normative language in accord with what I understand relativism to be. For example, he says the following:

"(The fact that most leaders of social movements were objectivists rather than relativists) certainly doesn't establish social progress requires such leaders. It may well be that incremental change is more positive and lasting than revolutions (and here we must balance the positive achievements objectivists against some of their immeasurable damage, hence my use of Stalin as a possible example)."

An underlying assumption of this remark seems to be that there is such a thing as social progress—that social change can be positive (change for the better) or negative (change for the worse). And the suggestion is made that maybe an advantage of relativist approaches to making social progress is that the changes, while more incremental, are more likely to last.

The difficulty I have with this perspective is that one of the key philosophical challenges to relativism is that, because it makes the subjective preferences of the individual or community the standard of value, and because "progress" is a value judgment (change for the better), relativism seriously truncates the senses in which any social change can count as progress.

If what is "good" for a society and its members is relative to a culture's collective subjective values, then we might say that a culture progresses to the extent that it develops institutions and practices that more effectively realize those values. But no change in the dominant subjective values could count as progress.

And so a slow, negotiated change in the dominant valuation of same-sex relationships wouldn't count as progress in any deep sense. It would count as progress only relative to those individuals who happen to already value such relationships. From the standpoint of those who abhor same-sex relationships, it wouldn't count as progress at all. It's not just that it wouldn't seem like progress to them. It wouldn't be progress. Progress itself is fundamentally relativized.

And one wonders: why should I seek to persuade people to move away from their subjective preferences in favor of mine, if there can in principle be no reason to think that my preferences are any more fitting or appropriate than theirs? Why should I be open to being persuaded, to adjusting my preferences in the light of theirs, if there is in principle no reason why my preferences are any worse than theirs?

As James Rachels and other have argued, it seems as if subjectivism in ethics takes away the possibility of rational discourse about ethical issues. If there’s no sense in which it really is better (or really is worse) to allow same-sex marriage in society than to forbid it, then there’s no sense in which there really are reasons to allow same-sex marriage rather than forbid it (or really are reasons to forbid it). And if there are no such reasons, then if I talk as if I am trying to give you reasons to believe as I do I’m really just engaged in a kind of deceptive use of language (perhaps self-deceptive): I am attempting to present as a reason something that cannot be a reason for the simple reason that in the ethical domain there are no such things as reasons that support one ethical view over another.

And so, all arguments and efforts at persuasion reduce to a kind of psychological manipulation: I attempt to get you to embrace my preferences, not because there is any good reason to do so, but because I want you to; and I try to make it look, falsely, as if there is a good reason to do so in order to more effectively influence your preferences. Since this is done in the absence of any actual reasons to suppose that such a change would be a change for the better, there is no meaningful distinction between reasonable persuasion and pschological manipulation. All of it's nothing but more or less effective forms of the latter.

So can this line of concern be answered? And if so, how? It seems to me that the best way answer to these concerns while staying within the spirit of relativism makes something like the following move: while there’s no such thing as “values” or "the good" apart from subjective preferences, other people's preferences have the same status as my own, shaping the good of other people as surely as my preferences determine what is good for me. And every person’s subjectively-defined good has just as much of a claim on being realized as anyone else’s, implying that there is a reason to attempt to negotiate our way towards policies and practices that do the best job of maximizing preference-satisfactions.

In such negotiations, the fact that someone subjectively values X becomes a reason (all else being equal) for anyone to pursue actions or policies that help to bring about or maintain X. But each such reason must be balanced against a wide array of potentially conflicting reasons in the effort to find that course of action which has the strongest reasons in its favor.

From such a perspective, it becomes possible to reject certain preferences, to view them as ultimately bad reasons on which to act. Some preferences effectively "drag down" our potential for maximizing preference-satisfaction, since they are preferences about the preference-satisfaction of others. More precisely, some people prefer that certain important preferences of others not be satisfied. This creates a conflict among preferences. Not all such conflicts "drag down" the potential for maximizing preference satisfaction (for example, I prefer that pedophiles not satisfy their preference for child sex partners; but in this case, we know that children who fall prey to pedophiles suffer long-term affects that negatively impact their prospects for maximizing preference satisfactions of their own).

In many cases, however, there can arise good reasons to oppose such conflict-generating preferences and to encourage those who have them to take steps to change those preferences--for example, by cultivating and practicing empathy. More broadly, we might argue that the more widely people practice empathy—the more their actual preferences are shaped through the practice of empathy—the less conflict there is among our preferences and the more preferences it becomes possible to satisfy. This, then, becomes a reason to call empathy “good” in a sense that isn’t just an expression of personal preference, and to use empathy as a standard for assessing the merits of individual preferences.

But none of this is relativism as I (or most moral philosophers I know) would define it. It's preference utilitarianism. Preference utilitarianism is a moral theory which holds each person's (and, arguably, animal's) preferences to be reasons for anyone to favor actions that satisfy those preferences (all else being equal). And this means that what is right is determined by what has the best reasons in its favor, not by what any person happens to prefer—even if the preferences that are out there in the world serve as the basis on which moral reasoning is done. Subjective preferences become, on this theory, objective reasons for action: That Joe prefers that X come about is treated, on this theory, as a reason for anyone to favor the realization of X in the absence of any competing reasons against X.

There are many who explicitly label themselves relativists who, when I listen to what they have to say or read what they write, sound to me as if they are actually preference utilitarians. This is the case with some of the regular commenters on this blog. Which leads me to wonder whether they are using "relativism" in a broader sense than I do--or whether, perhaps, they are a bit unsure themselves about whether they find relativism or preference utilitarianism more attractive.

Thoughts?

Matters of Taste: A correction on my last post...and a follow-up reflection

In a comment on my last post, JP brought up a comparison between moral matters and matters of taste, a comparison that was intended to call into question my purported contention that if values are wholly subjectivized, there is no longer anything to learn from engaging thoughtfully with the divergent value perspectives of others.


As I prepared to jot off a quick response to this, I realized I’d made a significant error in my last post—an error that made JP’s comment more credible, as well as making it considerably harder for me to quickly make the response I wanted to make. Specifically, in creating my previous post I referred to a true-false question that, at one time, I'd used in some of my classes. In course of preparing the post I found that question in my files and cut-and-pasted it into the post. But somehow the cut-and-pasted version disappeared in the course of completing the post. Rather than hunt it down again in my files, I recreated it from memory.

The resultant wording was this:

Consider the following statement: "We should be respectful of everyone’s opinion on moral matters. Only if we listen to each other and take what the other person has to say seriously are we going to open our minds and learn something new about morality." Someone who makes this statement is most likely an ethical subjectivist.

This, however, turns out to be more ambiguous than the original wording of the question. Where I wrote “learn something new about morality,” the original question said “learn something new about what is morally right and wrong.”

And this difference makes a big difference, since learning something about morality is a far broader thing, encompassing many more kinds of lessons, than what is encompassed in learning something about what is morally right and wrong.

Of course we can learn things about morality by listening to each other, even if morality is wholly subjective. And of course we can learn things about tastes by listening to each other, even if taste is wholly subjective. But it doesn’t follow that we can learn more about what really is moral or what really is tasty by such listening, if the truth about morality and taste is wholly subjective.

Consider a comparable statement relating to science. Suppose you’re a subjectivist about science. That is, you believe that all “truths” in science are wholly subjective. You might still agree that listening to others will teach you “something new about science,” given that the ambiguity of that phrasing allows the “something new” to include new discoveries about the history of science, the range of beliefs people have, etc. But if you’re a subjectivist about science, you won’t expect to learn anything new about scientific truth—for example, about the temperature at which ethanol actually boils, or the typical behavior of electrons in an oxygen atom. If you really are a subjectivist on scientific truth, then you’ll believe that whatever attitudes you happen to have are the standard of truth on this matter, and hence that there is nothing for you to learn.

So, consider the following disambiguated parallel statement regarding taste:

“We should be respectful of everyone’s opinion on matters of culinary taste. Only if we listen to each other and take what the other person has to say seriously are we going to open our minds and learn something new about what tastes good and what doesn’t.”

If what tastes good is simply a function of what I happen to enjoy when I taste it, then clearly there is nothing new to learn about what tastes good (to me) and what tastes bad (to me) by listening to what other people enjoy and don’t enjoy eating—even if I might learn lots of interesting stuff about them. So if we’re complete subjectivists about tastes, then the disambiguated statement makes little sense. While I might learn things “about matters of taste” from open discourse with others, I won’t learn anything about what tastes good and what doesn’t. For that, I just have to consult my own subjective responses.

Nevertheless, I think there is more to be said on this matter. Even disambiguated in this way, the statement about tastes doesn’t seem like something we want to wholly dismiss. Part of the reason for this, I believe, is that we’re not as wholly subjective about matters of taste as we often like to think.

But I believe there’s another reason. Specifically, even if we agree that taste is wholly subjective, if there are broader values which are not wholly subjective then there might be compelling reasons to expand our tastes, that is, to come to like (to “find tasty”) things that we had not previously liked. And while we wouldn’t learn anything new about what tastes good and what doesn’t from open discourse with people whose tastes differ from our own, we might come to like things we didn’t like before. Some things that previously hadn’t tasted good to us might start to taste good because someone pointed out flavors and nuances we’d never attended to, or because we decided to give it a try enough to acquire a taste for it.

And liking more things might mean enriching our lives in valuable ways.

Let’s assume that there are no objective standards that ever make it inappropriate to like some foods and not others. Culinary taste would then be, as I see it, unlike humor, for reasons discussed at length in an earlier post: to be amused by certain things (say the deliberate psychological abuse of another person) is just inappropriate, and so deliberately cultivating a taste for such things is similarly inappropriate. You’re not enriching your life by acquiring a taste for the humiliation of racial minorities. Rather, you’re acquiring a new vice and thus making the world a worse place. But if taste is wholly subjective, there is no such constraint, no objective reason not to expand one’s tastes so as to be able to find pleasure in more foods

And there would be a reason to find culinary pleasure in more things, assuming that such pleasure is good all else being equal. In other words, if we adopt a broader values framework that attaches presumptive objective value to the pleasures associated with eating—a values framework that holds such pleasure to be a value worth cultivating in the absence of any reason not to—the increase in pleasure opportunities resulting from expanding one’s tastes becomes a reason to seek to expand one’s tastes whether one is so inclined or not.

And so, if taste is wholly subjective but other values pertaining to what makes for a good life are not wholly subjective (such as the worth of expanding the range of culinary pleasures in one's life), there may well be compelling reason to seek to expand one’s culinary tastes broadly. And since listening to why other people enjoy what they enjoy can help in this process, there is reason to engage in attentive discussions about taste even if taste is wholly subjective. One might, thereby, come to like new things, thereby enriching one’s life.

(There are also culturally constructed values related to the art of cooking that deserve attention here as well, but I have run out of time for today).

Empirical Evidence Linking Moral Relativism with Openness?

A few months back, The Philosopher's Magazine published an article reflecting on some recent "experimental philosophy" exploring the relationship between personality and the propensity to be an "objectivist" or "relativist" about morality. I want to reflect a little bit on what conclusions, if any, can be reached based on the research discussed by Joshua Knobe in the article (some of it his own research, some of it the research on which he based his own).

The following passage captures a key dimension of the experimental work on which Knobe basis his own work:

For a nice example from recent research, consider a study by Adam Feltz and Edward Cokely. They were interested in the relationship between belief in moral relativism and the personality trait openness to experience. Accordingly, they conducted a study in which they measured both openness to experience and belief in moral relativism. To get at people’s degree of openness to experience, they used a standard measure designed by researchers in personality psychology. To get at people’s agreement with moral relativism, they told participants about two characters – John and Fred – who held opposite opinions about whether some given act was morally bad. Participants were then asked whether one of these two characters had to be wrong (the objectivist answer) or whether it could be that neither of them was wrong (the relativist answer). What they found was a quite surprising result. It just wasn’t the case that participants overwhelmingly favoured the objectivist answer. Instead, people’s answers were correlated with their personality traits. The higher a participant was in openness to experience, the more likely that participant was to give a relativist answer.

It is the lessons from this research that I want to focus on in the present post. I may return in a later post to a discussion of Knobe's own research, but for now the Feltz/Cokely research outlined above gives plenty of material to chew on.

One of the questions I have about this research is what the researchers mean by "objectivist" and "relativist." Knobe attempts to capture this distinction in the following way: "Should we say that there is a single right answer and anyone who says the opposite must be mistaken, or should we say that different answers could be right for different people? In other words, should we say that morality is something objective or something relative?"

Part of the problem with framing the distinction in these terms is that it runs the risk of conflating two different distinctions: the distinction between absolutism and context-dependence, and the distinction between objectivism and subjectivism. Although I explored these distinctions at length in an earlier post, a brief reminder seems warranted here. An absolutist on a certain matter thinks that something is true under all conditions, as opposed to thinking that what is true depends on a range of valiables and so may vary from one circumstance to another. The latter position is sometimes referred to as "relativism." On this understanding of relativism, the boiling point of water is a relative truth insofar as the temperature at which water boils varies relative to such variables as purity and atmospheric pressure.

But sometimes the term "relativism" is used as a synonym for what I call "subjectivism." Subjectivism is opposed to objectivism. The objectivist with respect to some field of discourse holds that the truth-maker for a claim within that field of discourse is not reducible to the subjective preferences, attitudes, or emotional dispositions of the individual making the claim. The truth-maker (to put it in helpful if slightly misleading terms) is "something out there, rather than something in my head." The subjectivist, by contrast, thinks that the truth-maker is something in one's head. With respect to ethics, the ethical subjectivist thinks that the truth-maker for moral claims is a subjective attitude of approval towards that which is given a positive moral evaluation, or a subjective attitude of disapproval towards that which is given a negative evaluation. In short, ethical subjectivism makes moral truth relative to the subjective attitudes of individuals.

But notice that while the temperature at which water boils is relative to atmospheric pressure and purity, it is not relative to the subjective attitudes, preferences, and emotional dispositions of the person making a pronouncement about said boiling point. Water's boiling point is what it is, regardless of what one happens to think or feel about it. As such, a claim about the boiling point of water is objective. But it is not absolute, since the boiling point of water is context-dependent. Likewise, moral truth might turn out to be context-dependent but not simply a function of whatever subjective attitudes an individual happens to have.

Now if you had to read through the preceding a couple of times to get the distinctions clear your head, you are not alone. Through years of teaching undergraduates, I know just how easily these distinctions can get muddled together. And when they do get muddled, it is easy (for example) for people to reject objectivism because they are deeply bothered by absolutism, and because they think the only way to set aside the latter is to set aside the former. Even when these distinctions are laid out with painstaking precision, people sometimes lose sight of them.

To see this point, let's breifly consider another common meaning of the term "relativism." Sometimes, this term is used as short-hand for cultural relativism, a theory which holds that morality is determined by a kind of cultural consensus as embodied in a cultures customs--and as such that moral truth varies from one culture to another depending on what is customary. But the theory of cultural relativism is itself often confused with other theoretic frameworks, ones which make culture an important contextual variable for the determination of what is moral without making it the foundation for moral truth.

For example, One might hold--as utilitarians do--that the morality of an action is determined by its effect on aggregate human interests, whatever those interests happen to be. In simplest terms (oversimplified terms, really, but pedagogically useful nevertheless), X is right if X does the best job of satisfying the most interests of everyone affected.


If you think that, then you're not a cultural relativist in the sense defined above. After all, you don't believe that cultural consensus, as embodied in custom, determines what is right and wrong. You believe that the effect of actions on aggregative interest-satisfaction determes what is right and wrong...and what satisfies the most interests might not be what custom dictates. Nevertheless, if you are a utilitarian, you will believe that specific moral obligations will depend on a number of variables, including cultural custom. Among other things, the customs with which you were raised will profoundly influence the interests you come to have. And since the utilitarian thinks morality is found in maximizing interest-satisfactions, the utilitarian will therefore be convinced that specific obligations will vary according to cultural context.

Other theoretic perspectives--objectivist but context-dependent ones--produce a similar result: one of the variables that affects our specific moral obligations is culture, even though the foundation for morality is not taken to be culture. From years of teaching experience, I know that students often mistake their own objectivist but context-dependent theoretic perspectives with cultural relativism. They think they are relativists because they don't make all the distinctions they need to make--and once they do make these distinctions, they realize they aren't relativists after all. In other words, what people "think they think"--that is, what theory they think best captures their ideas, commitments, experiences, etc.--isn't always what they actually think (what theory actually fits best with their ideas, commitments, experiences, etc.).

As such, we need to distinguish between giving an accurate account of the patterns that someone's thinking follows, and asking people what they think. The latter may not conform to the former. That people think they are relativists doesn't mean they think and speak and act like relativists. And that people give one answer to a difficult philosophical question because it seems to them to fit better with how they think doesn't mean that the answer they choose really does fit better with how they think. People get themselves wrong a lot.

To appreciate this point more deeply, I want to share here a true-false question I have occasionally used on tests in the past. It is one that I don't use anymore, because the error rate is so high. Here's how it goes:

Consider the following statement: "We should be respectful of everyone’s opinion on moral matters. Only if we listen to each other and take what the other person has to say seriously are we going to open our minds and learn something new about morality." Someone who makes this statement is most likely an ethical subjectivist.

Now the correct answer to this question is....FALSE. (Did you get it right?) Ethical subjectivism is the view that moral truth is subjective in the way that matters of taste are subjective. Food is tasty just in case you happen to like it. Likewise, according to ethical subjectivism, rape is wrong just in case you happen to disapprove of it. What makes a moral claim true or false, on this theory, is whether it corresponds to the attitudes and preferences of the person expressing the view.

Given that definition, can you see why a person making the statement above is not endorsing ethical subjectivism, but on the contrary presupposing that ethical subjectivism is false? In fact, there are multiple ways in which this hypothetical speaker is saying things at odds with ethical subjectivism. First off, this statement begins by making a claim about how people ought to behave--a moral claim if ever there was one. We should be respectful of differing opinions. It would be wrong not to. But does the speaker justify this claim by then saying, "This is true because I happen to have a subjective attitude of approval towards being respectful of people with differing moral opinions"?

No. If the speaker were really an ethical subjectivist, that would be the only relevant consideration. If the relevant attitude is there, then the statement is true...for that speaker, at least. For someone who delights in intolerance towards people with differing moral views, the statement would be false.

But instead of justifying the statement by reference to subjective attitudes, the speaker instead offers reasons to accept the moral claim--reasons that are put forward as if they might convince someone with an initially different attitude. In effect, the speaker is saying, "Here are some reasons offered in support of my moral judgment--reasons which I offer because I think they might be relevant in the thinking of someone who isn't sure they agree with me." Offering such reasons makes no sense if ethical judgments such as "We should be respectful of everyone's opinion on moral matters" are wholly subjective, true if one happens to have an attitude of approval towards showing such respect, false if not. To be an ethical subjectivist is to hold that, if you happen to approve of being disrespectful of people with different moral opinions than your own, they you should absulutley go ahead and be as disrespectful as you please. That would be the right thing for you.

At best, an ethical subjectivist who offered reasons such as this would be engaged in deceptive manipulation--trying to convince you that you have reasons to believe something that there are no reasons for you to believe, and hoping you'll buy it. This is one important outcome of ethical subjectivism: If moral truth is determined by whatever subjective attitude you happen to have, then your moral opinion is true so long as it conforms to your attitudes, and there is therefore no reason for you to change your opinion.

Of course, concern for consistency might inspire you to iron out internal discrepancies among your subjective attitudes. As such, if someone points out such a discrepancy, that might count as a reason to change your opinion. But which opinion do you change? If you harbor attitude A, and I argue that it is inconsistent with attitude B, that isn't a reason to change A as such, since you could just as readily modify B.

And why should I care about consistency anyway? When it comes to objective matters, consistency is a guide towards truth: If my views involve a contradiction, they can't be wholly true. But when it comes to my subjective attitudes, what's wrong with a bit of contradiction? Approve of A and disapprove of B, even though B imples A. So what? What's wrong with my attitudes being all over the map? There is no truth out there that I'm losing out on by sitting happily in my contradictions, so why bother eliminating them? Because...what, inconsistency is bad? Only if I adopt a negative attitude towards it (on subjectivist assumptions). Why shouldn't I just delight in my own inconsistency, thereby making it good?

But be all of that as it may, there is another reason why the statement from my abandoned test question isn't the statement of an ethical subjectivist. The reason the speaker gives in support of respecting divergent moral voices is one that just doesn't make sense if ethical subjectivism is true. Given ethical subjectivism, what is there to learn about what is right and wrong by paying open-minded attention to people who disagree with you? I might learn that you have such-and-such moral attitude (making such-and-such moral judgment "true for you"), but I can't learn anything about what is moral by engaging in respectful critical discourse with people who have different moral views. I certainly won't make progress in my understanding of morality (since I've already got it right so long as I'm in line with my own attitudes). What's the point of being "open-minded" about moral opinions if the moral opinion I happen to have is right for me regardless of the moral opinion you happen to have? Will you offer reasons for your moral opinions that will require me to rethink my own in a substantive way? No (for reasons already addressed).

In other words, there is nothing in the statement to suggest that the speaker is an ethical subjectivist, and much that is at odds with ethical subjectivism. But people get so fuzzy about the relevant concepts that even when they're taking a course on it, they will mistake a statement which is hardly coherent given ethical subjectivism as an endorsement of ethical subjectivism.

In the face of such muddiness--and in the face of the fact that the objectivist/relativist distinction used in the study invites muddiness by failing to clarify all the relevant distinctions that need to be made--what can we conclude about the study's reliability in correlating views on ethics with personality?

Instead of answering this, let me share one more thing about my true-false question--more specifically, about the statement embedded within it: "We should be respectful of everyone’s opinion on moral matters. Only if we listen to each other and take what the other person has to say seriously are we going to open our minds and learn something new about morality." Although I've stopped using this as a true-false question, I still make use of it in class, as a teaching aid for clarifying ethical subjectivism. One thing I do is read the statement in class and ask students whether they agree or disagree with it.

I think a slight majority agree with the statement--and in my experience, the ones who seem to be most "open to new experiences" are the most likely to agree with it (of course, this isn't a controlled experiment, so you'll have to treat this as anecdotal evidence that calls for further study rather than as proof of anything in its own right). When I ask those who disagree with the statement why they disagree, they don't disagree because they are ethical subjectivists--because the statement implicitly rejects the subjectivism they embrace. They disagree for reasons such as the following (while not direct quotes, these come as close to direct quotation as I can get operating from memory):

"Some people's moral opinions don't deserve respect."

"Some people, like Nazis, are blinded to what is right and wrong, so you can't learn anything from them."

In other words, there are those in my class who agree with this statement--hence implying implicit agreement with the ethical objectivism that it presupposes. And then there are those who disagree with it--grounding their disagreement in ethical objectivism. None have, so far, rejected the statment based on the fact that it implicitly denies subjectivism. So, based on their answers to this question, we can assume that all of my students are ethical objectivists--including the open-minded ones, none of whom reject the statement because of its implicit objectivism. Right?

Well, maybe not. Let me put it this way. Who do you think is more likely to agree with the statement extracted from my true-false question: Someone inclined to "open their minds to alternative perspectives" (Knobe's language), or someone not so inclined? Of course, the statement is an endorsement of the importance of opening one's mind to alternative perspectives on moral matters--and so is nicely geared towards getting people so inclined to agree with it. Since the statement makes sense only if we assume some level of objectivism, does it follow that most of those inclined to open their minds to alternative perspectives are objectivists? Or is it more that they are drawn to the open-mindedness expressed in the statement, regardless of where it falls on the objectivism/subjectivism/relativism divide?

Perhaps the reason why, in the Feltz/Cokely study, the researchers found a correlation between the supposedly "objectivist" option and openness to new experiences was because the objectivist option was the one that sounded more open-minded. I wonder what the results would have been if the research subjects had been asked whether or not they agree with the following statement: "There is no point in listening attentively to people who have different moral opinions than you do, because whatever you happen to already believe to be moral is moral for you anyway, so you can just ignore what other people have to say with no loss." In this case, of course, agreeing with the statement is agreeing explicitly with subjectivism, and disagreeing with it would be the "objectivist" position. But in this case, agreeing with the statement is agreeing with something that sounds really close-minded--and hence would be a turn-off for those students whose personality type falls under the "openness to new experiences" heading.

My point is that how we phrase our questions, and how we classify our answers, likely plays a big role in what sorts of conclusions we can legitimately reach about this (and similar) experimental philosophy studies. A "relativist" option that sounds more open-minded than an "objectivist" option might be attracting those with open-minded personalities because of the open-mindedness it seems to espouse, rather than because of its relativism. And if so, then when the "objectivist" option sounds more open-minded, it will be the objectivist answer that draws the endorsement of those very same personality types. Nothing in the Feltz/Cokely study rules this out. As such, the conclusions Knobe wants to draw from this study strike me as unwarranted.

Some Earlier Distinctions Summarized and Applied to Morality

I think it may be helpful to summarize some points from my last “distinctions” post and bring them to bear explicitly on the question of “objective morality.”


Given the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity offered in that earlier post, it should be clear what I mean by the term “objective morality.” Put simply, I have in mind the conjunction of the following two theses: (1) Some moral judgments are true and others are false; (2) What makes a moral judgment true (or false) is never merely the fact that the one making the judgment is in certain subjective states (most notably in possession of certain attitudes and preferences) with respect to what the judgment addresses.

In other words, if the judgment at issue is “Rape is wrong,” the fact that I disapprove of rape is not sufficient to make rape wrong. If rape is wrong (which I am convinced it is) then what makes it wrong is more than the mere fact that I happen to disapprove of it. By implication, the mere fact that someone else happens to approve of it is insufficient to make rape right “for them.” In short, to be an objectivist about morality is to hold that subject S’s approval/disapproval of action A is not sufficient to render A moral/immoral “for S.”

There are two important points I want to stress about “objective morality” conceived in this way—points that I think it is crucial to keep in mind for the sake of avoiding confusions of various sorts. Both points have been made in other posts, so this is largely an exercise in recapitulation and reframing.

First, to say that morality is objective in the indicated sense is not to say that human subjectivity plays no role in constituting morality. This was part of the point I was hoping to make with my earlier April Fools Day post about amusement. In order for there to be such a thing as “the funny”, there have to be creatures like us who react to things with amusement. In the absence of such creatures having such subjective responses, nothing would be funny. Funniness exists only in relation to risible beings. (I love the word "risible").

But it doesn’t follow that something is funny just in case one is amused by it—that, in other words, being in a subjective state of amusement is sufficient to make it true “for you” that it is funny. It doesn’t follow because it’s possible that Linda Zagzebski is right about emotions: they are “ways of seeing” things in the world (to be amused is to see something as funny; to be offended is to see something as rude) that can fit their intentional objects or not (in something like the way color experiences can fit with what is going on in the physical world—such that when you see something as red, you might be mistaken if, in fact, something has broken down in your color perception mechanisms so that color experiences no longer track the ways in which different objects differentially reflect different wavelengths of light).

(For more on this, see Zagzebski's book, Divine Motivation Theory).

The point is not to argue here that Zagzebski is right about emotional fittingness, but simply to stress that the fact that our subjective states are bound up with moral judgments is not enough to conclude that they aren’t objective in the sense I have in mind.

My second point is that to say morality is objective is different from saying that it is absolute. The former is about whether there is more needed for the truth of a moral judgment than the attitudes and preferences of the one making the judgment. The latter is about whether what is true of something in one context is necessarily true of it in all contexts. As I noted in a comment on my earlier post, even if the boiling point of water varied enormously from case to case, such that it was true of water that it boiled at precisely 100˚C only in very rare but specifiable contexts, it would still be objectively true that it boiled at 100˚C in those contexts.

To think of this distinction in connection with morality, it may be helpful to think of it in connection with a particular ethical theory. I choose one that I do not personally accept, but which has the virtue of being easy to quickly explain: A simple version of preference utilitarianism in its act utilitarian form. Act utilitarianism holds that the right action to perform in any situation is that act which, among all the available courses of actions, has the best results for all affected. But what makes the results “best”? For the simple preference utilitarian, the value of an action’s consequences is a function of the actual preferences of the individuals affected. In other words, preference utilitarianism has an entirely subjective standard of value: what is good for me is determined by my preferences; what is good for you is determined by yours, etc.

But the utilitarian is convinced that it is not rational for me, in decision making, to prioritize my good just because it is mine. I must extend equal consideration to the good of all. And your good is what it is based on your preferences, not mine. And this means your good is, for me, an objective fact I must come to grips with: My preferring that you prefer Bellini to Lady Gaga does not make it true that you prefer Bellini to Lady Gaga. And so, what is true about the general good is determined almost entirely apart from my subjective preferences (which only determine what is good for me). And what is right for me to do is whatever maximizes the good of all affected—in other words, whatever does the most to satisfy the most preferences (typically weighted in terms of importance to the person).

Now as I said, I introduce this theory solely because it is a fairly simple one to understand, and hence one that can be introduced quickly for the sake of applying the absolutist/objective distinction to morality. What I want to do is suppose—purely for the sake of argument—that this form of utilitarianism is correct. If it is correct, what that means is that a judgment such as “John’s lying to Susan about his affair was wrong” is true or false based not merely (or even mainly) on the subjective attitudes of the one making the judgment, but based on the actual effect that John’s lying to Susan had on the welfare of everyone effect, where their welfare is conceived in terms of their actual preferences. And so, “John’s lying to Susan about his affair was wrong” is going to be either objectively true or objectively false, depending on the actual effects of the lie in the specific case.

But it should be clear that, given this version of utilitarianism, the moral status of lying will be highly context dependent. We will have to look at instances of lying on a case-by-case basis. In one set of circumstances lying may be the thing that does the best job of satisfying the most preferences. In another it may not. And so, if this theory is right, the moral status of lying will be highly context-dependent; but in each case, whether the lie is moral or not will depend on its total impact on preference-satisfactions, not on the approval or disapproval of the one making the judgment. Those who make moral judgments can therefore be mistaken. They can disapprove of what is right and approve of what is wrong—because the truth or falsity of such moral judgments is more than a matter of taste. Even though moral truth is highly contextual on this theory, it remains objective in the indicated sense.

I should also note how this theory is related to culture. Clearly, culture strongly influences our preferences. As such, cultural context becomes enormously significant for determining what is right and wrong. But it doesn’t follow that morality is determined by culture. If the preference utilitarian theory is right, whole cultures can be mistaken in their moral judgments. For example, a culture might maintain that the enslavement of blacks is morally acceptable—but if the preference-satisfactions enjoyed by the beneficiaries of slavery are outweighed by the thwarting of the slaves’ preferences, the practice would be wrong despite the culture’s endorsement. Put another way, in this theory cultural context plays a role in what is morally true, but culture cannot dictate moral truth.

Even if you reject this species of utilitarianism (as I do, for reasons I won’t get into here), you might still believe that this theory is onto something. You might think (as I do) that the effect of one’s actions on human welfare is part of what makes them right or wrong, and that human preferences are part of what constitutes human welfare (and hence that welfare is partly a function of culture). And if so, then you will think that context—including cultural context—will play a big role in determining what is right or wrong. And so you will not be a moral absolutist. But that doesn’t mean you won’t be an objectivist.

The April Fools Post: Some Reflections on the Funny and the Unfunny

Warning: While this post reflects on humor and starts with a joke, it includes mention of a rather gruesome real-life case of Rwandan brutality for the purpose of reflecting on my intuition that finding some things funny is just unfitting. If you're wanting April Fools Day entertainment, this isn't the post for you.

Today is April Fools Day, and I thought about putting up a kind of prank post on this blog (coming out as an atheist or hellist or biblical inerrantist, perhaps). But then I thought about all the April Fools pranks I’ve somehow been involved with over the years—some funny, some duds, some just in poor taste. And that made me think about the issue of humor in relation to the ongoing discussion of objectivity and subjectivity of values on my previous post.


So, rather than put up a humorous post, I thought I’d talk a bit about humor as it relates to the question of whether value judgments are purely subjective (and “that’s funny” clearly is a value judgment). When I think about humor these days, the first thing that comes to mind is my son. One way I know he’s brilliant—other than the fact that he’s seven and reads at a seventh-grade level—is that he has an amazing facility for making up jokes. Here’s one of his most recent:

It’s the first day of school, and two monsters are in the classroom talking.
The first monster asks, “Where’s the teacher?”
“I ate her,” replies the second.
The first monster mulls this over for a minute, then says, “Well, I guess that means there’s only one thing to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Cook with substitutes.”

Now that’s funny.

Or, we might say, I am very amused by it.

Consider these two statements: X is funny. I am amused by X. Is there a difference between them? According to the philosopher Linda Zagzebski, emotions have intentional objects, and to experience an emotion is to attach what she calls a “thick affective property” to that intentional object. If the emotion in question is amusement, the corresponding thick affective property is “funny.” To be amused by my son’s joke is to see it in a certain way, to see it as funny. (See her book, Divine Motivation Theory, especially chapter 2, for a fuller account of these ideas).

This property of being funny is affective because it is directly connected with an emotion that motivates me to behave in certain characteristic ways (to laugh, to encourage my son to tell the joke to his aunt, to ask him if he’s made up any more and listen with interest, etc.). It is thickly affective because so much of what it means for something to be funny is characterized in terms of this motivating emotion. As Zagsebski puts it, "A person who has not experienced the emotion accompanying the concept could not understand the concept, just as a person who has never had the sensation of red could not understand the concept of red." If we were to look at funny jokes and attempt to discern their common “descriptive” features, we might be able to draw some descriptive generalizations. But while we might say, “Funny jokes tend to have these properties,” we couldn’t reduce “funny” to those descriptive properties. We learn what "funny" really means only by experiencing amusement.

But Zagzebski doesn’t want to go the other direction either, simply reducing “funny” to our subjective emotions. She thinks there is an important difference between the attribution of a thick affective property (which clearly involves our subjective states) and the kind of radical subjectivism which would make any attribution of a thick affective property “as good” as any other under any circumstances.

What makes the difference is the concept of “fit.” It is one thing to be amused by my son’s joke. It is something else again to react with amusement when considering the horrific story I heard awhile back, of a woman and her son (I think Tutsi) who were seized by enemy soldiers (I think Hutu). The woman’s leg was sawed off and roasted in a fire, and then—while the woman watched—her son was instructed to eat it. When he refused, he was shot.

I can imagine the soldiers laughing as they did this. Does that make it true for them that these events were funny? Or is there more to the truth of statements featuring thick affective properties than that? I think most of us want to say that their crime is horrible, not funny, and that if the soldiers find it funny rather than horrible, that means their emotional responses have somehow become seriously screwed up. They’ve fallen seriously out of touch with reality, perhaps because of deep indoctrination into an ideology of hate, such that when it comes to fellow human beings on the wrong side of the ideological divide, their emotions no longer “fit” their intentional objects.

Or that’s what I (and Zagzebski, and I believe the vast majority of people) want to say. But to say this, the proper attribution of thick affective properties cannot be reducible to whatever subjective emotional response one in fact happens to have in cases like this. In other words, we must have the resources for distinguishing what is funny from what one finds to be funny—even if we concede that nothing would be funny if there did not exist creatures like us capable of being amused by things. Put another way, we might say that the existence of the emotion of amusement is a necessary condition for things in the world having the thick affective property “funny.” But it is not a sufficient one.

In Zagzebski’s understanding of things, for it to be true of something that it is funny, it has to be the case that amusement is a fitting response to it. In other words, funniness is a relational property between a creature with an emotional palette that includes amusement and an intentional object that is the source of the amusement. But X isn't funny just in case someone is amused by X. While “funny” is a relational property between a subject (one who is amused) and an intentional object (the thing found to be amusing), it is a relational property that obtains only when there is a proper fit between the subject and the intentional object—and the “fit” is going to be a function of the nonrelational properties of both the subject and the intentional object.

Zagzebski notes (rightly, I think) that when it comes to emotions, there is not one univocally fitting emotion for each intentional object. That amusement fits my son’s joke does not mean that everyone must be amused by it or there’s something wrong with them. To use an imperfect analogy, the fact that seeing the duck-rabbit image (discussed here) as a duck is “fitting” does not mean that everyone must see it as a duck—because seeing it as a rabbit is also fitting. But there are ways of seeing it that just don’t fit (for example, seeing it as an enraged Viking attacking a lobster).

In other words, there is considerable room for individual variability when it comes to thick affective properties, but that doesn’t mean that anything goes. There are parameters of fit that our subjective emotional responses can fall outside of—and in such cases, we can be said to be in an unfitting emotional state (the Hutus laughing at their horrific crime against the Tutsi woman and her child).

Much of the variability in emotional response is likely to be cultural. Some of these cultural influences might produce dispositions to be amused by what it is unfitting to be amused by (a racist culture might truncate the scope of empathy towards members of other races such that depictions of them being degraded in various ways are seen simply as amusing). But in most cases, these cultural variances will simply be that—variances that fall within the parameters of what is fitting. What this culture finds funny may not be what another culture finds funny, but in neither case is there anything unfitting about being amused by the intentional objects at issue.

Also, since fittingness is not subjectively determined, individuals and cultures can make mistakes in their judgments on these things. A culture can think that amusement over certain jokes is fitting when it is not. (Suppose the jokes reinforce cultural stereotypes about women, stereotypes that help to covertly perpetuate patriarchal subordination). In such cases, a process of cultural enlightenment can lead societies to look askance at jokes that used to be shared with innocent delight.

Having grown up in such an evolving culture, you might find yourself trying not to laugh at one of these jokes (at once amused and convinced that you ought not to be). I certainly have had this experience—and I suspect other readers of this blog have as well. But the experience makes no sense without a notion of “fit” between emotional responses and their intentional objects. If “funny” just applies to whatever you happen to be amused by, it becomes hard to make any sense of the thought, “I really shouldn’t be amused by this, but I am.” Is that thought (which I confess to having) simply nonsense? It seems to me it would be nonsense (at least given what I mean to say when I say this to myself) in the absence of some nonsubjective standards by which subjective responses can be said to fit or not fit their intentional object.

But, of course, this point calls attention to the elephant in the room: On what basis is an emotion fitting? What makes it fit? What are the standards, and where do they come from? If the standards of fittingness are determined subjectively, then the Hutus can avoid any taint of impropriety at laughing over their deliberate shattering of two human lives: they can simply adopt a subjective standard of fittingness such that their amusement becomes fitting. So long as they avoid any internal conflict within their own subjective emotional dispositions and responses, on what basis could we attribute unfittingness if "fit" is defined subjectively? In short, a standard for the fittingness of subjective emotional responses that is rooted in nothing more than subjective emotional responses is not much of a standard.

But is there anything else that can serve as such a standard? And if so, what is it? These are some of the key questions that students of ethics wrestle with. And as my previous post helped make clear, I think, these are questions that have been put into sharp relief by the rise of empiricist epistemologies and physicalist metaphysical systems—theoretic frameworks which, to put it simply, don’t quite know what to do with the idea of nonsubjective standards of value, standards that could make affective responses to the world—value judgments of various kinds—fitting or unfitting.

But that certain theoretical frameworks don’t know what to do with the idea of fitting and unfitting affective states doesn’t mean that the notion of fittingness has to be discarded. The questions raised here are really an invitation to pursue a quest of sorts. My own career has been in large measure shaped by a passion for this quest—the quest to see if we can characterize a nonarbitrary standard by which at least some of our value judgments might be measured—not for the sake of identifying the one right way to engage with the world (thereby stifling human diversity), but for the sake of undergirding the recurring and pervasive intuition that some affective responses to the world, some evaluative ways of seeing it, fit the world as poorly as some factual beliefs. That is, they’re just wrong.

So, can a joke be in poor taste? Can an April Fools prank be unfunny, even as the perpetrator laughs at his victim’s humiliation? The answer cannot be separated from a broader investigation into the nature of value. Off and on in the months to come, I will be posting things on this blog that reflect my struggles, my questions, and my tentative conclusions about these issues.

Robert Merrihew Adams on the Primacy of Pretheoretical Ethical Beliefs

My graduate seminar has started looking at sections of Robert Merrihew Adams' book, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics; and this afternoon (over coffee, of course) I was reading a passage from Chapter 2 of that book which speaks to several recurring themes on this blog. So I thought I'd quote the passage here and ask what people think.

First, a bit of context. The passage occurs at the conclusion of a section in which Adams defends the work of the metaethical naturalist, Richard Boyd, against a particular line of attack. Boyd seeks to develop a naturalistic account of moral realism (the view, roughly, that there are objective moral truths, that in calling X good or bad, right or wrong, one can be saying something that is true of X). Although Adams ultimately rejects naturalistic moral realism in favor of supernaturalism, he is unimpressed by those who challenge it on the grounds that ethical propositions are inadequately subject to empirical testing to qualify as objectively true or false.

In the lead-up to the passage, Adams spends some time defending the pursuit of "reflexive equilibrium," that is, the task of developing our theoretic understanding of things through a kind of dialectic between our strongest and most confident pretheoretical beliefs and the the theories we build from them--a dialectic that gravitates towards a state of optimal mutual support. "No cognitive enterprise," Adams insists, "can get off the ground without initial reliance on many confident, pretheoretical beliefs; and a large proportion of those beliefs remain more deeply entrenched than the theoretical superstructure erected on them." As an example, he notes our strong, pretheoretical belief that when you drop a rock, it falls towards the earth. And he notes that "a development of physical theory that would advise us to give that up completely would almost certainly discredit itself rather than the pretheoretical belief."

But, Adams points out, we have evaluative and normative beliefs that we hold to with just as much pretheoretical confidence as that stones fall when you drop them. He uses the example of the wickedness of torturing children.  Adams then notes the universal and justified respect that modern people have for science and its methods--a respect that has led many theorists to attempt to extend its empirical methods beyond the sphere of science. "But it is important," he continues, "to distinguish between the successes of modern physical sciences, which are great and uncontroversial, and the successes of modern empiricist, science-inspired epistemology, which are arguably much less impresive, and certainly much more controversial." The passage I want to share here continues from this point, as follows:

If a pretheoretical ethical belief held confidently by all of us were irreconcilable with well-established principles of physics, that would be a sever problem for ethical theory; and if there were too many such cases, it could certainly call into question the acceptability of the method of reflective equilibrium in ethics. But if initial reliance on confident pretheoretical ethical beliefs fails to conform with an epistemology of exclusive reliance on inference to best explanation, or with some other empiricist epistemology, that is a much less serious problem. Nor do we need an elaborate theory to justify going with pretheoretical belief rather than empiricist epistemology, if such a choice is forced upon us...

Adams then turns from epistemology to metaphysics, making a similar point with relation to physicalism:

(Physicalism) is not a theory in physics, nor more generally a result established by modern physical science. It is rather a metapysical theory. inspired by enthusiasm for science. It holds, roughly, that all the facts there are can in principle be described in the vocabulary, and explained by the laws, of modern physics, in some ideal development thereof. It is obvious that such a theory is issuing large promissory notes to be paid by future developments, and hence is highly speculative. It is attended by much-debated and, I believe, grave and unresolved difficulties. Given the strength of our confidence in many pretheoretical evaluative and normative beliefs, and the pervasiveness of their role in our thinking, I believe that physicalism has much more need to be found compatible with them than they have to be found compatible with it. This is not an argument against physicalism; that's business for another occasion. It is rather an argument for not allowing physicalist worries to undermine ethical beliefs.

Thoughts?

Morality, Religion, Bifurcating Ideologies...and Sam Harris's New Book

Earlier this week, in my philosophy of religion class, I offered a brief review of the questions and controversies surrounding the relationship between morality and religion--a topic that I wanted to touch on in class but (as I was making the difficult decisions one has to make when designing a course) decided not to spend extensive time on.

Because theists so often argue that one cannot have morality without God--or at least that one cannot have any kind of objective morality which can provide normative guidance across interpersonal and cultural divides--it makes sense for atheist thinkers, especially those who believe in an objective morality, to attempt to establish a secular foundation for objectively binding moral standards. Thus, it is no surprise that Sam Harris, the "original" new atheist, would turn his attention to this task.

A few months back I offered my reflection on Sam Harris's efforts to pursue this task in a TED talk. Now Harris has released a book on the topic, The Moral Landscape, developing his claim that science can offer an objective foundation for ethics. Just today, Michael Ruse--a philosopher I greatly respect and author of numerous works in the philosophy of science, (including Darwinism and its Discontents and his most recent book, Science and Spirituality)--offers his take (down) of that book in Religion Dispatches.

Many of the points Ruse makes are similar to those I raised in relation to Harris's TED talk--but Ruse is quicker to highlight Harris's deeper agenda, which is (yet again) to trash religion and people of faith. "To say that religion is a bit of an obsession for Harris," Ruse comments, "is rather like saying Hitler had a bit of a thing about the Jews." Ruse is himself an atheist who wrangles repeatedly with creationists and ID theorists, but he's what William Rowe (the atheist philosopher of religion) would dub a "friendly atheist"--that is, his attitude is one of skeptical but respectful critical engagement with people of faith. I think, like me, Ruse is greatly troubled by the kind of bifurcating ideology--the us/them divide and the villifacion on those on the other side of it--that characterizes so much of the contemporary debate about theism and religious faith.

Often, the issue of morality is invoked by religious fundamentalists to villify atheists: There can be no morality without God, they argue; and hence, atheists must be amoral. The reasoning here is terrible, of course. Even if you think that the existence of objective moral truths in some fashion or another depends on the existence of a God, it hardly follows that atheists can't be deeply moral. Suppose there is ongoing uncertainty about the underlying physics that explains the force of gravity--and suppose that in a debate about this underlying physics, one side in the debate has the right answer. It doesn't follow that those on the other side of the debate don't believe in gravity (let alone that they behave as if it doesn't apply to them).

Ruse, in his review of Harris's new book, seems to worry that Harris is taking a page out of the religious fundamentalist's book--trying to argue, in effect, that religious people can't be genuinely moral because they misconceive the foundations of morality. In fact, Ruse seems to be concerned that pursuing this kind of villification of religious believers is a basic driving purpose behind Harris's book.

How else do we explain Harris's utterly gratuitous 15-page attack on Francis Collins, the head of the NIH who also happens to be Christian--an attack that seems entirely out of place in a book that's supposed to be about the foundations of morality? As one reads his review, one can almost see Ruse blinking in astonishment. If your purpose is to explain the foundations of morality in terms of scientific facts, why ignore G.E. Moore's arguments that this cannot be done (in terms of what Moore calls the naturalistic fallacy) while devoting more than a dozen pages to trashing a scientist who has, buy all accounts (except, perhaps, the accounts of those religious conservatives who want to ban stem cell research) led the NIH with distinction?

In fact, as I argued when Harris first called Collins unfit to lead the NIH in the pages of the New York Times (simply because of Collins' Christian faith), there is a very disturbing similarity between Harris's denunciation of Collins and traditional religious denunciation of heretics. Now, it seems, Harris wants to go further: Belief in God not only disqualifies one from being fit to lead an organization such as the NIH; it fundamentally compromises one's ability to lead a moral life.

To be fair, I have yet to read Harris's book and I am going simply off of Ruse's review. Perhaps Harris's argument is not quite so hostile to religion as all of that. But, of course, having read his other books I'm prone to think Ruse's characterization is right. And if it is, then Harris is once again recreating atheism in religious fundamentalism's image--this time by taking the fundamentalist argument that atheists can't be moral and inverting it to apply to religious believers.

I think the issue of how morality and religion intersect is an important one. But I think it is crucial that we explore this and related issues without the sort of hostile us/them thinking that puts those with different ideas into a morally disabled "out-group."  This is not to say there is no truth to the notion that certain ways of thinking can have morally pernicious effects. After all, I just argued in my most recent Religion Dispatches article that allegiance to a doctrine of biblical inerrancy can threaten our capacity for empathy and compassion. But there's a difference between focusing on specific ways of thinking (making a concrete case that their implications are damaging and inviting critical response), and pursuing an agenda of ideological disqualification in which an entire group of diverse human beings is cast beyond the pale--be it Muslims, or Christians, or Jews, or Hindus, or atheists. If any way of thinking has morally pernicious effects, this surely does.

Is Harris guilty of this? I'll decide for sure once I've read his book. But whatever is the case with Harris, let us agree that neither theists nor atheists have a corner on being moral, and neither theists nor atheists have a unique claim on harboring ideas with questionable implications for our prospects of living the most virtuous life we are capable of. In the struggle to understand what it means to live a good life--and the place of religious faith and respect for science in that struggle--bifurcating ideologies only impede progress.

Sam Harris on Objectivity in Ethics

Earlier today my teaching assistant called my attention to a TED talk by Sam Harris (author of the atheist bestsellers The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation) in which Harris supports objectivity in ethics--by arguing that science can (eventually, with the help of neuroscience) answer ethical questions. You can find a video of the talk here. Since what follows is my reaction to the talk, you may want to read what I say after having viewed the talk itself.


First, let me say that there is much in the talk that I agree with, especially when Harris talks about what objectivity in ethics implies and what it doesn't. Many of the points he makes are similar to ones I routinely make in my classes. For example, I often point out to my students that to say that a moral claim is objectively true is not the same as saying that moral principles don't admit of exceptions. And I often note that even if there are objective standards of human welfare, it doesn't follow that there is only one way for an individual or community to flourish. I've even used the example of physical health that Harris himself invokes to clarify this point.


And when Harris contrasted the conservative Muslim practice of requiring that women's bodies be covered with America's commercial exploitation of women's bodies, I found myself recalling a paper I recently received from a Muslim student in my business ethics class, in which the student carefully exposed the problems associated with the exploitation of women in advertising and the use of unrealistic ideals of female beauty to sell beauty products, and then made an argument for a cultural practice of modestly covering women's bodies as a solution to these problems--as, in effect, a way for women to be taken seriously as persons rather than being judged by how they look. While my extensive marginal comments raised a range of objections and challenges to his argument, I saw both of us groping towards the same kind of middle ground that Harris was pursuing, albeit each of us laden with our respective cultural backgrounds and so coming from opposite sides of the spectrum that Harris vividly depicted with his extreme images.


But despite a number of points of agreement, I have two broad worries about Harris's line of thinking as developed in this talk. First, while he makes the (to my mind rather obvious) point that we can learn much about the conditions of human flourishing and prospects for flourishing through scientific study of human beings, he leaps without argument from this observation to the conclusion that science can answer moral questions about what we ought to do and what ends or goals are worth pursuing.


He clearly makes this move because he is operating on the (unstated) assumption that what is right is what maximizes human flourishing (a species of utilitarianism). But utilitarianism is hardly an uncontested moral theory. And we can rightly ask with some skepticism whether he really thinks science can demonstrate that the utilitarian principle is correct—as opposed to, say, a deontological alternative which posits the intrinsic moral rightness of certain acts apart from their impact on human flourishing, or an egoistic alternative which holds with Ayn Rand that there is no non-indexical good, that the only good is my good or your good, and that only my good can be a reason for me to act (leading to the view that the right act for me is whatever makes me the happiest, regardless of how it affects others).

In short, while scientific study of the conditions of human flourishing is clearly relevant to answering moral questions, what one does with those scientific discoveries will be a function of moral precepts that do not themselves seem to be amenable to the same sort of scientific investigation. As such, to say that science can answer moral questions is problematic at best. Harris certainly hasn't offered any powerful reasons to think so in this talk.

My second problem goes beyond what is most obviously on display in this talk, having to do with worries about the ideological agenda into whose service Harris's claims about objective moral truth are being put. Harris rightly points out that religious demagogues typically embrace the same kind of moral objectivism he endorses, but they put it in the service of their own ideological agendas (and he expressed discomfort with being in the same camp as these demagogues).

The way I’d describe this is as follows: these demagogues adopt the view that there are objective truths in ethics in part for the sake of identifying an “out-group” of individuals and/or communities who are agents of objective evil, thus seeking to justify an in-group/out-group ideology which renders permissible the suspension of norms of moral decency with respect to members of the out-group. In effect, the good is threatened by the out-group, thereby justifying radical action on the part of the in-group in defense of the good. The out-group must be defeated, or it will be the victory of evil.


While Harris does not emphasize in this particular talk his own ideological opposition to religion, it remains as an obvious subtext—and in other writings that ideology becomes explicit and deeply unsettling, insofar as it precisely resembles in FORM the kind of ideology he rightly denounces when it is wedded to religious zealots. That is to say, Harris is not merely an atheist. He doesn't just think that religious believers are mistaken, nor is he apt to say that religion's moral track record is "mixed." For him, religion is evil and a source of evil, and those who are religious are, in his language, "on the wrong side of an escalating war of ideas," one in which he thinks the very survival of humanity depends on the defeat of the religious side by the secular atheist one. Replace "atheism" and "religion" in this ideology with "Christianity" and "Islam," or with "Catholic" and "Protestant," and you can pretty quickly see that it is the same ideology of religious intolerance that has caused so much horror in history, only with all of religion now cast in the camp of the infidel or heretic, and atheism wearing the shining raimant of orthodoxy.

To put it simply, this kind of in-group/out-group ideology depends upon the premise that there is an objective moral truth, because it distinguishes the chosen group from the other group in terms of who has this truth and who poses a threat to it. That certainly doesn't mean that objectivitism in ethics inevitably entails in-group/out-group ideology (how could one say that such ideological thinking is objectively bad if one denied objective moral truth?). But if, like me, you think that such ideologies really are bad, then the defense of ethical objectivism for the sake of vindicating such an ideology will be a cause of deep distress. And I worry that this is exactly what is going on in Harris's case.

On the basis of years working in the field of nonviolence theory and cooperation and conflict studies--both in my academic work and in more practical terms as a facilitator for Alternatives to Violence Project workshops in prisons and other settings--I have become convinced that the deepest moral truths have to do with how we should resolve conflicts with those whose hopes, aims, and values conflict with our own. And I have become especially convinced that one of these deep moral truths is that we should address such conflicts on the basis of a recognition of shared humanity and a with a commitment to bridging the gap of difference so as to make possible mutual understanding and empathy in the face of profound disagreement and conflict--as opposed to, say, anathematizing those who disagree with us, or calling for their deaths or for their exclusion from full participation in the community.


In other words, I think one of the deepest (objective) moral truths is that when we are convinced we have the moral truth and we come into conflict with someone who we are convinced lacks it, and our conflict turns precisely on this difference, we have an obligation to value and affirm the humanity and integrity of the one we think is dead wrong. And part of that obligation is to listen as charitably as we can to their lived experience--including those elements of their experience which lead them to hold the view we find so misguided. Another part of that obligation is to honestly share who we are and what we stand for in a way that has the possibility of inspiring empathetic understanding rather than defensiveness.


And as I see it, one of the greatest impediments to this kind of engagement is the kind of in-group/out-group ideology that is so easy for most human beings to fall into, and which Harris himself is constantly lapsing into with respect to (western) religious communities. That he does so is not, I think, a matter of serious debate (I point out various ways in which it happens in Is God a Delusion?, as well as in a Religion Dispatches essay a while back in which I respond to his strident opposition to Francis Collins' appointment to head the NIH). The real question is how one is to respond to it.

I must confess to an ironic tendency to respond to it by lapsing into an in-group/out-group ideology with respect to those who resist or succumb to in-group/out-group ideologies. But I see this tendency as an objective moral evil. And seeing it at such is one of the things that helps me in the struggle to resist it.