Follow up to: The Map and the Territory and The Patriotic Humanist

Author’s Note: If you’re coming here from another website and have never read any of my writing before and you have the time, I recommend starting at “The Origin of Truth”, “Unscrew the Applause Lights”, “Free Will That Makes Sense”, and “The Patriotic Humanist” and reading until you get back to this article through the chain of follow ups.

Whenever you think you have an obvious answer to a question that has been debated for several thousand years by some of the greatest philosophers, and you’re just a college student, one would be justified in presuming you to be a bit arrogant.

Of course, while I try to be a bit humble about it, this describes me all to well — on both accounts of atheism and morality, and several other things. Whether this counts as grounds to dismiss all of my ideas without considering them — well, that’s your fallacy to commit.

Very few other topics have had more ink and electrons dedicated to them than studying the topic of morality. However, despite tens of thousands of pages, all that remains is the same amount of confusion as where we started. It should be obvious that if a process goes through thousands of years of thinking and emerges with nothing to show for it, something isn’t just wrong with the answers, but with the process that is generating those answers.

The discussion of morality clearly has at least one, if not several, stumbling blocks that need to be addressed and demystified, before we can actually expect to get any answers.

This means that it it’s finally time for us to talk morality. With the bulk of previous posts, I think I finally have enough written that I can say what I want to say about it and make sense. It’s time to finally attempt to solve a two-thousand year old problem in a series of blog posts.

Which Problem, Exactly?

When it comes to morality, there are actually two types, descriptive ethics and normative ethics (the terms morality and ethics are often used interchangeably). Descriptive ethics describes what a society, group, or individual currently thinks is “right” and “wrong”, whereas normative ethics describes what a society, group, or individual should say is “right” or “wrong”, or what actually is “right” or “wrong”, if there is such a thing.

Descriptive ethics is a question for anthropologists, and not all that interesting to us at the moment. So we’re going to set aside descriptive ethics and focus on normative ethics. Within normative ethics, there are three different key questions to answer, each getting more general:

• The question of applied ethics: Which specific things are right and wrong? Is eating meat wrong? Is abortion wrong? Is murder wrong?
• The question of ethics: Which processes should we use to answer questions of applied ethics? What makes eating meat right or wrong?
• The question of meta-ethics: What does morality describe? What is “right” referring to, exactly?

Luckily, all three of those questions can typically be answered by answering these five questions:

1. Do moral statements like “Abortion is wrong” actually communicate something that is truth-apt?
2. If yes, do moral statements communicate something that can sometimes be true?
3. If yes, are moral statements justified by appealing to descriptions of the world?
4. If yes, are these descriptions something other than people’s opinions?
5. If yes, which descriptions should we specifically focus on?

Moral Dispute

Unfortunately, there is disagreement on every step of those five questions, and there have been for centuries. It seems like there has been little progress made in this philosophical field.

Take someone like Aristotle. He believes that statements like “abortion is wrong” can communicate something that is truth-apt, potentially true, a description of the world, independent of opinion, and absolute, because “abortion is wrong” refers to “abortion is not virtuous“. (Note that’s what the statement would refer to, not the statement that Aristotle or other virtue ethicists would necessarily accept as true.)

Kant agrees that “abortion is wrong” communicates something that is truth-apt, potentially true, a description of the world, independent of opinion, and absolute, but disagrees on question #5, because “abortion is wrong” refers to “we have a rational duty to not preform abortions“.

And someone like Bentham also agrees with Aristotle and Kant all the way to question #5, but says that we shouldn’t care about virtue or duty, but rather should say that “abortion is wrong” refers to the claim that “abortion does not maximize the pleasure of all sentient beings“.

Additionally, someone like Alonzo Fyfe agrees with Aristotle, Kant, and Bentham until question #5, instead suggesting that “abortion is wrong” refers to the claim that “the desire to have an abortion is not a desire that we have, all things considered and all else being equal, a strong reason to promote”.

And not to be outdone, Locke disagrees on #5, claiming that “abortion is wrong” means that “abortion is not something everyone would agree to if signing a hypothetical social contract“.

Lastly, Rand disagrees with the whole crew on #5, saying that “abortion is wrong” is actually referring to the claim that “having an abortion is contrary to an individual’s rational self-interest.

Morality Rooted in Preferences

And others take different paths on other points in the line of questions. Ockham disagrees on #4, saying that we should appeal to an opinion because “abortion is wrong” means that “abortion is contrary to the commands of God“.

Railton argues that we should also appeal to opinion, but this time “abortion is wrong” has nothing to do with God, and instead means “abortion is not what a perfectly rational and fully informed person would approve of“.

In further disagreement, Westermarck states that “abortion is wrong” means “abortion is not what our society approves of“.

Lastly for this group, Harman also disagrees, thinks that being moral is about what the individual approves of.

Morality as an Irreducible Truth

Others disagree on #3. Boyd thinks that “abortion is wrong” is a truth-apt, potentially true statement, but is irreducible, thus not justifiable by appeal to other facts.

Morality as Systematically False

Others disagree on #2. Mackie holds that while morality is something that is truth-apt, it is not something that can be true, because statements about morality refer to properties that don’t exist, like intrinsic value.

Morality as Not Truth-Apt

In case you’re sensing a pattern, others disagree on #1. Stevenson believes that morality cannot be truth-apt because it does not express a proposition. Instead, something like “abortion is wrong” is saying “Abortion! Boo! Ick! Hiss!” or something like “I disapprove of abortion, do so as well”.

So there is dispute on every level of moral argument, and it’s our job to see what is going on and unravel all this if we want to arrive at a moral theory that we can use confidently, if such a thing exists considering #1 and #2.

Debating Moral Definitions

However, we have tools to resolve a large amount of this debate in one gigantic swoop. To do this, we have to go back to the debate over the definition of sound.

One person says “a tree falling in a forest that we do not hear makes a sound” and the other says “a tree falling in the forest that we do not hear does not make a sound”.

Ostensibly we have a contradiction because one person says “Yes, it makes sound” and the other says “No, it does not make sound”. However, look what happens when we take away the word sound and replace it by what we mean by the word sound:

“A tree falling in a forest that we do not hear makes a sound (generates an acoustic vibration)”
“A tree falling in a forest that we do not hear does not make a sound (generates an auditory experience)”

Here, we have two people using two different, yet perfectly usable definitions, and fighting over which definition best captures the word “sound”, but the debate is not resolvable because the two are talking about fundamentally different things. The only way the argument can be solved is for the two people to pick one of the two definitions at random and stick with it, or to ditch the word “sound” and just argue about “acoustic vibrations” and “auditory experiences”.

We also see this in the debate over whether free will exists, which seems like a completely unresolvable question until we clarify what free will refers to. Like sound and like free will, there seems to be no initially privileged definition of good.

In fact, the idea of “good” may be the mother of all applause lights we have to unscrew — a vague word that has no commonly accepted or acceptable definition, yet is seen by everyone as something overwhelmingly desirable. Who doesn’t like things that are considered to be good?

Therefore, when faced with the question “Is abortion good?” or “Is abortion right?” we must first request the definition of “good”/”right”. Only when they say “Oh, I meant does abortion maximize the happiness of sentient creatures?” or “Oh, I meant would abortion be approved of by an ideally rational and fully informed person?” can we actually attempt an answer at the question.

We can’t just use the word good without knowing what it means, and it’s very easy to reduce it just like we did to the ideas of sound and free will. We can talk about “maximizing happiness” or “approved of by fully informed people” without needing to muck it up with the word good.

While I would like to say I thought of this myself, this idea is called Pluralistic Moral Reductionism and is the brainchild of Luke Muehlhauser.

The Angle of Oughts

We just looked at morality initially as a systemization of “right” and “wrong”. But morality also talks about something else — morality is about what you ought to do, at least for those who answer Yes to #1 and #2. For instance, Bentham doesn’t just think that it is good to maximize the happiness of sentient creatures, but that everyone ought to, that everyone has a moral obligation to do so.

However, this is also where we must be careful about smuggling connotations, because the step from “X is the morally right action to preform” to “You ought to preform X” is not logically valid, despite it appearing to be. We smuggle in the connotation that “right = ought”, but this isn’t quite accurate.

The invalidity of this conclusion can be seen easily when we replace “morally right action” with it’s definition. Let’s say that we agree to a definition of morality for the sake of discussion, saying (for instance) that the morally right action is one everyone would agree to if signing a hypothetical social contract. This means that if we’re trying to prove social contract theory’s notion of “you ought to be moral”, we must reason from “X is the action everyone would agree to if signing a hypothetical social contract” to “You ought to preform X”.

This is also perhaps why people like to cling to using the word “good” so much, instead of reducing it to what they’re actually talking about. Saying that “gay marriage is bad” makes people feel like they should condemn gay marriages, but saying that “gay marriage is contrary to the teachings of the Bible” makes people respond with “Why should we care what the Bible thinks?”

But perhaps it isn’t the case that we should call something good whatever it is you ought to do. Instead, we should analyze what it is that people ought to do and see if these actions align with any of the previous definitions of “good”. Are any of these leaps from good to ought justified? And how do we justify them?

What is the relationship between what is good and what we ought to do?

What does it even mean to say statements like “You ought to do something”? With or without a leap from good to ought, how could we justify an ought statement on it’s own?

We’ll explore some of this in the rest of the series, as well as attempt to dissolve away the disagreement on the five key questions, all until we have something that will no longer confuse us.

Followed up in Of Oughts and Is, Part I and Is God Good?, Part I

Be Sociable, Share!

•