| About Ethics | |
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Recommended Reading |
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Norman Kemp Smith (1966) The Philosophy of David Hume, London:Macmillan Stevenson, C. L. (1942) ‘Moore’s Arguments against Certain Forms of Naturalism’ in Foot, P. (ed.) (1967) Theories of Ethics Oxford:OUP, pp. 16-32. Frankena, W. K. (1939) ‘The Naturalistic Fallacy’ in Foot (op. cit.) pp. 50-63. Pigden, C. (1991) ‘Naturalism’ in Singer, P. (ed.) A Companion to Ethics, Cambridge MA:Blackwell, pp. 421-441.
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Text of Hume |
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David Hume (1969) A Treatise of Human Nature, London:Harmondsworth (1965) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in Cohen (ed.) Essential Works of David Hume, New York:Bantam; pp 44-167.
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Text of Moore |
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Moore, G. E. (1903) Principia Ethica, Cambridge:CUP
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Hume |
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Born 1711, Edinburgh, Scotland. Philosopher, historian, diplomat. Died 1776,
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Moore |
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Born 1873, London. Philosopher at Cambridge. OM, 1951. Died 1958.
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Introduction |
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The
ethical theories that we’re going to look at in the following lectures
claim to tell us what is good and what is obligatory. They are theories
which are used to justify claims like ‘You ought not to kill innocent
people without reason’, or ‘you ought to obey the laws created by
proper authorities’ or ‘Don’t tell lies’ or other such statements.
Theories
that claim that there is something true to be said in moral language tend
to fall into just a few broad categories.
They are: 1.
Teleological:
theories in which the consequence of the moral act is the important thing.
The goodness of the act is to be determined by reference to some
(nonmoral) value produced by the act. Is it wrong to kill someone? Well,
let’s see what the consequences of that act would be, and then
let’s make that call. A teleological, or consequentialist
theory, may talk about rights and duties, but these can only be derived
from consideration of consequences. So, it is possible that there is a
right to property, say, but only because establishing that as a rule leads
to the best consequences. If eating small children led to good
consequences, that would be a
duty. 2.
Deontological:
theories in which what is right to do is determined by some moral value in
the potential acts themselves. Is it wrong to kill someone? Well, let’s
see what the nature of that act would be, and then
let’s decide. 3.
Aretaic:
theories that focus on the character or attributes of the moral agent are
at least as old as Aristotle, but they went out of fashion in the period
of the Christian ascendancy. Is it wrong to kill someone? Let’s discover
whether that is that the sort of thing a virtuous person would do, and go
on from there. We’ll
be looking at the classic examples of each of these when we look at the
Utilitarians, Kant and Aristotle, respectively. And we’ll note in each
case that there are reasons to believe that they don’t tell the whole
story. Since they actually claim that they do tell the whole story this
can be taken to indicate that they are false – that is, if
you think the objections are sound. If you continue your studies in this
area you’ll see that many of the objections that we’ll bring to each
of these theories are actually specific instances of more general
objections that can be made against whole classes of ethical theories. We’ll take the opportunity now to have a look at some theories or claims about ethics and ethical theories. Because this is not exactly ethics but about ethics, enquiries of this sort are called metaethical, but you will see that the same problems will arise over and over again for the ethical theories that we’re going to talk about, and it’s good to have an idea about these problems before we dive into the details of each theory. We’ll know what we’re looking for when we start looking at them.
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Naturalism |
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There are a lot of topics that could be covered by the term metaethics, but I’m going to concentrate on just one small area. We’ll restrict ourselves to considerations concerning Naturalism and ethics. I’m generally interested in showing that everything in the world can be explained without having to suppose that there are other types of thing in the world than what science can tell us about. You’ll have noticed this in the section on Mind. But it’s not just me: it’s a general preference that has been the motivating force in science and philosophy for quite some time now – probably at least since the Enlightenment in the 18th century. In the case of ethical naturalism, the claim is that to call something good or bad is to make a moral claim about something (so far so good) and that that claim is either true or false.
(Let us pause to remark here that you might think that that is pretty uncontroversial, but you’d be wrong. There are theories of ethics that make ethical statements out to be no more than exclamations or types of commands. For example, to say ‘Killing is wrong’ is to say no more than ‘Killing! Boo!’, or ‘I don’t like killing,’ or ‘Don’t kill!’, or some other such thing. You’ll notice that such expressions aren’t typically evaluated in terms of their truth or falsity. Theories of this type are called non-cognitivist or emotivist or prescriptivist, and they are not – in this context – to be taken as naturalistic. But let us resume.)
So ethical statements are true or false. But look at other, less odd, sorts of statements that we say are true or false. Statements like ‘It’s sunny outside.’ What makes these statements true or false is their correspondence with the world. That statement, for example, is going to be true just if it is sunny outside. What is it that is going to make ethical statements be true or false? The naturalist thinks that there aren’t going to be irreducibly moral facts about the world to play the role of truth-makers, there is nothing in the world other than natural (meaning scientifically acceptable) things. This means that the ethical naturalist is going to disagree with someone like G. E. Moore who is an intuitionist, and who thinks that there are non-natural moral facts as well as natural non-moral facts, and that we get to know about the moral facts through some special moral sense. (You could compare that point of view with the Cartesian Dualist view (q. v.) that there are non-mental natural facts and non-natural mental facts.) For the naturalist the real question is: what are the natural facts that are the truth-makers of ethical statements and how are they the truth-makers. We saw, for example, that the utilitarians identify the good with the greatest happiness for the greatest number, which is a perfectly natural quantity.
You can see why people might argue for naturalism on the grounds that it integrates moral knowledge into the rest of our knowledge of the world, and makes it thus part of the great enlightenment project that has been so successful in other areas, but what grounds could there be for denying naturalism? It is just those arguments that we’re going to be looking at now.
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The Is/Ought distinction |
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Many anti-naturalist arguments are inspired by a passage from David Hume. In the Treatise on Human Nature (III, i, i. (p. 521)) he says:
I cannot forbear adding to these reasonings an observation, which may, perhaps, be found of some importance. In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpiz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason.
This passage has been taken to provide good and sufficient reasons to eschew naturalism, though those who have done so should have taken the time to consider why it is that Hume himself did not become any sort of non-naturalist. Indeed, from one point of view what Hume has said is merely a logical triviality with no very serious implications for naturalism at all. Could not the very same argument be made about electricity, or genes, or hedgehogs. Thus: of a sudden I am surpiz’d to find, that instead of the usual mentions of genes and environments, I meet with no creatures that are not connected with hedgehogs or not hedgehogs. And yet we don’t conclude from this that hedgehogs are a special category of creatures that can’t be explained by genes and environments. All we can conclude is that we can’t have any concepts in the conclusion to a logical argument that weren’t already in the premisses. And we knew that already. Any domain of discourse is logically sealed. You can’t get out of it if you start from within it.
Actually that’s not altogether true, because you can have an argument that goes
A --------------------- Therefore A or B
For example;
Bob is happy --------------------- Therefore Bob is happy or the moon is made of green cheese
But nobody thinks that this is really relevant to the sorts of arguments that we are dealing with. Introducing ‘ought’ in that way is going to be a rather unsatisfactory method of derivation.
Another way of understanding the Humean problem is to suppose that it is claiming that any domain of discourse, for example talk of hedgehogs or talk of morals, is semantically sealed. By this is meant that when we use moral language, the meaning of that speech cannot be replicated by speech from any other domain. That is to say, only moral words can mean what moral words say. But, again, this isn’t really of any great significance for the naturalization of moral theory. We are quite used to having theories about things that allow us to naturalise them but do not allow us to make synonyms of all the words that refer to them. For example, ‘lightning’ has a naturalistic explanation in terms of a discharge of electricity, but that phrase is not a synonym for it. We see the same thing with the evening star and Venus, or with water and H2O, etc. No-one thinks that we can get from evening star-talk to Venus-talk logically, and no-one thinks that the ‘evening star’ is synoymous with ‘Venus’, but nevertheless we do claim that the two are identical. It could be just so with right, good, duty, and some physical terms. This would seem to be fairly clear, but we shall have to return to this matter in just a moment.
What we really need to be able to claim, if we are going to argue that we can’t go from statements of non-moral facts to statements of moral facts, is that the domain of moral discourse is ontologically sealed. If that were the case then the things that have to be proposed in order to justify moral claims are moral facts (moral things in the world) and they are not describable by physical terms because those physical terms and descriptions can refer only to physical, non-moral facts about the world. But is there any reason to think that the argument that Hume presents succeeds in showing that this is the case? It would seem not, for if that separation of ontological domains did follow from that argument concerning the closure of domains of discourse then it would equally follow from our tale of the hedgehog that nothing would allow us to say that ‘hegehog’ and ‘erinaceus europeus’ were coreferential. But they are, and we are quite entitled to make that claim.
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The Naturalistic Fallacy |
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Now let us return to the matter of semantic closure, for that is the basis of a second very important argument aginst the naturalisability of ethics. This argument is due to G. E. Moore, and appears in his book Principia Ethica , which was one of the great books of 20th C. ethics – now completely superseded. Moore argues in that book that:
[Moore, ch 1, sec. 10 (pp. 9-10)]
(…Ethics aims at discovering what are those other properties belonging to all things which are good. But far too many philosophers have thought that when they named theose other properies they were actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply not ‘other,’ but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. This view I propose to call the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ …)
But how does Moore justify the claim that any attempt of this sort constitutes a fallacy? He uses two arguments:
1. The Open Question
The argument that he uses is really the method of repeatedly posing a question that he says is always a sensible question to ask – it is sensible because it would seem that the fact after which it enquires is possibly unknown, and it is therefore an open question – and just because it is sensible the question has to be answered in the negative. This is known as the Open Question method. This little summary may make the method seem a bit complex, but what’s happening is really quite obvious when you see the method applied. So let’s see how it works.
We’ll use an example that’s been around since Plato’s time (Euthyphro). In that dialogue Socrates queries the idea that what is right is just what is commanded by God. If that were the case then when someone says ‘X is right’ they are really saying ‘X is commanded by God’. But is it the case? According to Moore the very fact that we can ask this question indicates that it is not the case, because when we are wondering about it we are asking ourselves the question: ‘Is what is right what is commanded by God?’ But if what is right really were what is commanded by God, and if what we meant by saying ‘X is right’ was just what we meant by saying ‘X is commanded by God’ then we could substitute each of those phrases for the other in all occasions where they are used (because they are synonymous) and so it would seem that our question means the same thing as ‘Is what is commanded by God what is commanded by God?’ and this is just a senseless question, because the afirmation is a tautology. But we do not think that the question ‘Is what is right what is commanded by God?’ is senseless. And therefore it can’t be the case that ‘X is right’ means the same as ‘X is commanded by God.’ QED.
The same question can be asked for any proposed naturalisation of the concept of Good, whether it be pleasure or utility, or whatever. The question is always open, and therefore the affirmation of the question cannot be a tautolgy, and therefore the proposed naturalisation cannot describe the Good.
Objection
This argument, however, may itself be a simple fallacy. As we mentioned above, we have good evidence that water is identical to H2O, but ‘water’ is not synonymous with ‘H2O’ as we can quite clearly see by noticing that we didn’t discover the identity by looking it up in Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, we discovered it by looking at the results of experiments and interrogating the world. The identity is not a matter of meanings but of entities. According to Moore’s open question methodology, however, the fact that we can sensibly ask ‘Is water H2O?’ indicates that the answer is negative. Because if it was true that ‘Water is HO’ then ‘water’ and ‘H2O’ would be synonyms and the question would be equivalent to the vacuous question ‘Is water water?’ But it is not a vacuous question! And water is H2O!
And anyway. The open question method assumes that the fact that something is a tautlogy will be known to every member of a speech community. It is just this that allows them to recognise that the question is vacuous. But what grounds do we have for believing that people are so competent? Moreover, it’s hardly unusual to observe that people may not have a grasp of the composition of some of their concepts. For example, there was for a time wide agreement on the conceptual analysis ‘kill’ as ‘cause to die’, but Fodor criticized this analysis (‘The Psychological Unreality of Semantic Representations’). Whether the criticism is correct or not is neither here nor there; the point is just that the fact that there can be controversy indicates that the intuitions of conceptual composition are not univocal.
2. Unmotivated Morality
Moore also thinks that the fact that naturalisations of moral terms seem to remove their motivational power should be taken as evidence that the term and its reduction do not mean the same thing. For example, if ‘X is good’ just means ‘X is commanded by God’ then ‘what is commanded by God is good’ just means that ‘what is commanded by God is commanded by God’ and this tautology does not give us extra reasons for doing what is commanded by God. But if ‘what is commanded by God is good’ is true then we would like to think that that provides us with additional reasons to do what God commands. Therefore the two sentences aren’t synonyms and therefore it is not the case that ‘what is commanded by God is good’.
Objection
The objection to this argument simply asks whether it is really impossible to give an analysis that would include a motivation to action. Certainly none of the proposals so far made – that we have seen, anyway – achieve this, but it’s impossibility can’t simply be assumed on those grounds, surely?
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