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.

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.

Distinctions, Part II: Absolute vs. Objective Truths

In thinking about objectivism in morals, it is important to distinguish objectivism from something with which it is often confused in polemical debates--something that we might call "absolutism." This distinction is best characterized in relation to what absolutism and objectivism are paired against--their contrasting concepts, if you will--which are context-dependence and subjectivism respectively.


We're typically called absolutists or objectivists with respect to propositions in which we predicate something of an object, event, state of affairs, natural kind, etc.--that is, statements of the form "A is a p" or "A has property p." So, consider the following statement: "Water boils at 100˚C" ("Water has the property of boiling at 100˚C").To be an absolutist about this is to hold that water has this property of boiling at 100˚C regardless of context. It is to say that this is a context-independent truth about water (that, in other words, the boiling point of water is not a function of any other variable). Of course, to say this is to be committed to something that is false. Indeed, we might say that it is objectively false. To be an absolutist about the boiling point of water is to believe things that are objectively false of water, and as such is to fail to believe what is objectively true of it (such as that its boiling point is in part of function of atmospheric pressure).


Of course, I'm getting ahead of myself--but the point is that to be able to say this, "objective" must mean something different from "absolute." And indeed it does. When I say that "Water boils at 100˚C" is true objectively, I am not thereby saying that it is true absolutely. As such, if I say this, it is not an objection to my claim to point out that there are a range of conditions under which water does not boil at 100˚C. Either I will take this as a friendly amendment to my claim (as a more precise characterization of what the objective truth is, but not as a challenge to my main contention, which is that what is at issue is an objective truth), or I will treat it as an annoying failure to realize that I was speaking elliptically (that I was intending to refer implicitly to a set of agreed "standard conditions," and was simply saying, in an abbreviated way, "Water boils at 100˚C under these standard conditions").


So what do I mean when I say that it is objectively true that water boils at 100˚C? I mean that when I attribute the predicate "boils at 100˚C (under standard conditions)" to water, I am saying something of water that is true of water, as opposed to merely saying something about me (that I happen to feel 100˚C-iously towards boiling water, or something to that effect). By contrast, when I say from the swimming pool, "The water is pleasant," I am really just saying something about myself--that I happen to feel comfortable in the water. This latter claim is thus subjective rather than objective. In short, to say that "Water boils at 100˚C" is objectively true is to say that what one is saying is not primarily about oneself, that the truth-maker for the claim is not some wholly subject-relative response to the water. One has, in effect, discovered something about the water, as opposed to merely discovering something about oneself.


But the line here is trickier than it may at first appear. After all, there is a fairly narrow range of water temperatures such that anyone immersed in them would be inclined to call them pleasant. Given the nature of human physiology, anyone who leaped into near-boiling or near-freezing water and declared it pleasant would be lying, kidding, or suffering from a dangerous disability of the nervous system (the sense-of-touch equivalent of blindness). Furthermore, the property of being at 100˚C is the property of corresponding in a certain way to a measuring system created by human beings.


(In fact, it was created using the boiling point of water under standard conditions as the basis for setting the 100˚ mark--just to complicate matters and make me wish I'd chosen a different example. But let us set this aside for now and presume that "Water boils at 100˚C under standard conditions" is not simply an analytic truth, that is, true by definition).


The point is that water's boiling point being 100˚C is arguably a relational fact about how the behavior of water effects certain human artifacts (thermometers) in terms of a human system of measurement (the Celsius system). And one could imagine a much cruder system of measurement being highly effective for certain purposes--one involving immersing body parts in water, and appealing to the pleasantness or unpleasantness (and kind of unpleasantness) that resulted. ("Are you feeling hot or cold? On a scale of 1 to 10, just how badly do you want to get out of the water?") So why isn't "The water is pleasant" treated as stating an objective property of a specific body of water--only much cruder and vaguer, less informative (for those familiar with the relevant measuring system), than "The water is 30˚C"? 


Perhaps the thing to say is this: While a temperature measurement is a relational property between the thing being measured and certain human artifacts (measuring tools and systems of measure), the artifacts are carefully designed to precisely and consistently track certain features of the water, and as such are designed to be unaffected (or largely unaffected) by variable features of the individual doing the measuring. There is a (relatively successful) attempt to refer to and track something that exists independent of the human subject--something that was true of water long before humans ever started sticking thermometers into boiling kettles (indeed, well before there were humans in existence). When someone says "The water is pleasant," while this statement does typically tell us something that is true of the water (insofar as human nervous systems are generally callibrated to generate unpleasant sensations outside of a certain fairly narrow range), what it is primarily aimed at telling us is something about how the subject feels (a certain qualitative state that the subject is in). And should it turn out that the person who makes this claim has an unusual physiology--an unusual resistance to hypothermia paired with a neurological resistance to cold temperatures that would set other people to shivering and seeking a quick escape from the water--it would remain true that, for him--the water was pleasant. Why? Because the statement is really about the qualitative state that the subject happens to be in, and as such remains true even if the "objective features of the world" that ordinarily correspond with that qualitative state are not present in this particular case.


To put the point another way, the truth-maker for a subjective statement is something "in the head" of the person making the statement--what makes the statement true or false is whether the person's consciousness is characterized by this subjective qualitative condition or not. By contrast, the truth-maker for an objective statement is something outside the head of the person making the statement--something "in" the object under discussion.


But this distinction leaves something out--something that may be helpfully pointed out if we change our example to one having to do with color. When it comes to color perception, the standard contemporary view is that our experience of color is linked to encountering wavelengths of light of different frequencies. Our color perception is a fairly (but hardly perfectly) refined tool for tracking different wavelengths of light, and as such might be seen as doing for us something very like what a thermometer and a system of temperature measurement does for us: it gets us in touch with something "out there," tracking changes in the external world with a fair degree of precision.


More significantly, when we say that the ball is blue, we mean to be referring to something out there. That is, we intend to name a property that is possessed by the ball independent of our subjective qualitative states. At the same time, however, there is a qualitative subjective experience that corresponds with the term "blue." We can close our eyes and "picture" what blue is like. According to the dominant contemporary paradigm, this subjective color experience, blue's "quale" (to use a quasi-technical term from philosophy of mind), is "all in our heads" in the sense that it isn't actually a feature of the ball at all. Instead, what is "out there" is a surface that differentially reflects different wavelengths of light, such that more of the "blue" wavelengths are reflected and fewer absorbed. Our eyes have mechanisms for discerning this and communicating it to the visual center of the brain, which in turn somehow (mysteriously) plays a role in creating the subjective color experience with which we are immediately familiar. 


But let us suppose that Mary has suffered a head injury, and that--while possessed of vivid color experiences like the rest of us--has these experiences in a manner that no longer reliably tracks what is "out there." Her color experiences used to track--and so she learned how to use color language, and for a long time wedded her language usage to her qualitative color experiences with great success: She'd see something, experience it as blue, call it blue, others would agree, and everyone was happy. 


But not anymore. (If this way of framing the example seems unnecessarily convoluted to you, it's because you haven't read Wittgenstein--who probably would still be unhappy with my way of putting this example despite my care). Now, when Mary sees the ball, has an immediate color experience, and calls it blue, others say things like, "Um, that's yellow. Do you need to get your eyes checked?" She tries to relearn her language usage--but the next time she sees a "seemingly" blue object and calls it yellow, she'd told that it's red.


We can imagine that she gives up, concluding that her color experiences no longer track onto anything objective in the world. But suppose, instead, that--being rather stubborn--she insists that everyone else has got it wrong. She sees that the ball is blue--and so it is. In that case, when the ball in question happens to be preferentially reflecting light in the yellow spectrum, we'd be inclined (well, I'd certainly be inclined) to say that her subjective color experience doesn't fit with the objective reality, and hence that she is objectively mistaken in attributing "blue" to the ball--even if (as may be the case) the subjective color experience she is having is the same one that, before her accident, tracked "blue objects" very well (and--although I'm not sure how we could know this--is the same one that I have when I see blue objects).


The point of all of this is that much of what goes on in color experience is "subjective"--but color judgments are not subjective ones, because the purpose of color judgments is to track something in the world that is independent of the subject--to say something that is true of objects in the world. When my subjective qualitative color experiences, produced during my visual encounter with the external world, "fit" with their intentional object (in the way that Mary's do not), the judgments that follow from them are objectively true. When these subjective color experiences do not fit (as is the case with Mary), then the judgments that follow (in Mary's case because she is too stubborn to give up making such judgments) are objectively false. And Mary's judgment that the ball is blue is objective false even though it is true of Mary that she is having a subjective "blue" color experience when she looks at the ball. What makes it true that the ball is blue is not that Mary has an experience of this sort, but that the experience "fits" the ball--in something like the way that it would in the case of someone with normally functioning vision, or in something like the way that temperature measurements fit their objects when the measuring equipment and scale are not faulty.


In any event, it should be clear that being objective in this sense is nothing like being absolute--and that it does not preclude subjective experiences of a certain kind being the primary mechanism through which (objective) judgments are reached. 

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.