Methodology and Moral Philosophy

Jussi Suikkanen, Antti Kauppinen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429839238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Many ethicists either accept the reflective equilibrium method or think that anything goes in ethical theorizing as long as the results are plausible. The aim of this book is to advance methodological thinking in ethics beyond these common attitudes and to raise new methodological questions about how moral philosophy should be done.

What are we entitled to assume as the starting-point of our ethical inquiry? What is the role of empirical sciences in ethics? Is there just one general method for doing moral philosophy or should different questions in moral philosophy be answered in different ways? Are there argumentative structures and strategies that we should be encouraged to use or typical argumentative patterns that we should avoid?

This volume brings together leading moral philosophers to consider these questions. The chapters investigate the prospects of empirical ethics, outline new methods of ethics, evaluate recent methodological advances, and explore whether different areas of moral philosophy are methodologically continuous or independent of one another. The aim of Methodology and Moral Philosophy is to make moral philosophers more self-aware and reflective of the way in which they do moral philosophy and also to encourage them to take part in methodological debates.

1
Introduction

Jussi Suikkanen

Background

I often come across two different but equally perplexing attitudes towards methodological questions in moral philosophy. Firstly, many think that, as a discipline, moral philosophy has a unique method, comparable in significance to the ‘experimental method’ of the natural sciences. This well-known reflective equilibrium method was first explicitly outlined by John Rawls (1951, 1971, 1974). Many ethicists appear to think that knowing the basics of how the reflective equilibrium method works is all you need to know about how moral philosophy should be done.

The reflective equilibrium method is easy to outline. We must begin from judgements about individual cases which must be held sincerely and which must also be stable in the kind of careful deliberation that is not distorted by strong emotions or self-interested bias. In the second stage, we attempt to formulate a set of general moral principles that could both fit and also justify the previous convictions. When we formulate these principles at this preliminary stage, it will be likely that there will not be a perfect match between our carefully considered judgements about the cases and the general principles.

In the third stage, we then try to get rid of the previous conflicts in two ways. In some conflict cases, it makes sense for us to modify our judgements about the cases on the basis of the general principles because those principles support our intuitions so well elsewhere. In other cases, in contrast, it makes more sense to attempt to find new, more sophisticated principles so that we do not have to give up our convictions about the cases given how deeply held they are.

Finally, in the fourth stage, we fine-tune our principles by taking into consideration the leading ethical theories on the topic and the best arguments made in their support. We are also to seek wider reflective equilibrium by broadening the set of moral and non-moral beliefs with which the relevant moral principles we have formulated are supposed to be compatible. Thus, at this final stage, we check that the latter principles are compatible also with what we know, for example, about what kind of social systems can be stable and what influences our moral judgements.

It is easy to see just why the reflective equilibrium is such a promising account of how we ought to do moral philosophy. It is an ideal that seems to provide us with almost something like an algorithm—clear steps which anyone should be able to follow systemically in order to achieve moral knowledge. The description of the method also intuitively seems to capture something about how many moral philosophers themselves understand what they are doing. It is thus not surprising that the majority of moral philosophers continue to endorse the method at least in some form.

Despite this, many ethicists have always been torn about the reflective equilibrium method for several reasons. Firstly, there have always been many forceful objections to the method. One of the most poignant criticisms has always been that, even if when we use the reflective equilibrium method we must begin from our carefully considered moral judgements, these judgements are still bound to be a reflection of cultural indoctrination, superstition and bias (Hare 1975; Brandt 1979, pp. 21–2). As a consequence, whatever moral principles end up being in a reflective equilibrium with our carefully considered judgements, these principles will be just as unlikely to reflect the moral reality as the intuitions that serve as the input, or so the objection goes.

Even if this objection seems to have considerable force, it has not been able to change that many people’s minds about the reflective equilibrium method. This is because, if we are not allowed to rely on our carefully considered judgements in the evaluation of moral principles, then we would be required to evaluate those principles from a completely non-moral, non-evaluative point of view.¹ Yet, in this situation, it becomes less clear on what grounds we could be able to choose between alternative moral principles (Hooker 2000, p. 11). As Frank Jackson (1998, p. 135) put it, ‘we must start from somewhere in current folk morality, otherwise we start from somewhere unintuitive, and that can hardly be a good place to start.’

The reflective equilibrium method also suffers from other problems—two of which are relevant here. Firstly, many ethicists feel like the description of the reflective equilibrium method is not especially helpful when it comes to their everyday work. Somewhat boringly, the method merely guides us vaguely to seek coherence between our carefully considered moral convictions, moral principles and the relevant empirical beliefs. Yet, very few people have thought that incoherent views are better than coherent ones, and more importantly the reflective equilibrium method does not tell us exactly how we should make our principles cohere with our carefully considered convictions. In any given conflict situation, is it better to give up your carefully considered conviction or reformulate the general principles? The method itself does not tell, and therefore, when we make these choices, we must rely on our judgement. Yet, nothing in the description of the method helps us to avoid making mistaken judgements.

The second issue is that very few recent works in moral philosophy employ the reflective equilibrium method in any recognisable and explicit form. One reason for this is that many ethicists work on questions that simply cannot be answered by using it. If you work in normative ethics and are searching for general principles that capture what kind of actions are right and wrong across different contexts, then at least in principle you can rely on the method. Yet, if you happen to be working on any of the other equally interesting and important questions in normative ethics or if you are trying to solve problems in either metaethics or applied ethics, then there just does not seem to be any straightforward way in which you could rely on the reflective equilibrium method. For example, in meta-ethics finding a reflective equilibrium between our moral principles and carefully considered convictions about cases will tell us little about the meaning of moral concepts, the nature of moral judgements or the essence of moral properties. Likewise, in applied ethics, it is equally unlikely that the previous type of coherence between convictions and general principles could shed much light on which morally salient considerations should be taken into account when we consider the most difficult moral questions concerning climate change, war, new biomedical technology and so on.

Perhaps these limitations of the reflective equilibrium method have led to another extreme in the ethicists’ attitudes towards the methodological questions. The second common methodological attitude is a reflection of Paul Feyerabend’s (1975) ‘anything goes’ view in the debates concerning the appropriate methods of science. The core idea behind this attitude is the observation that, if we consider both historical and more recent key contributions to moral philosophy, it is difficult to extract a unique method such that its use would explain the fact that these very contributions constitute the most important advances. Rather, what we seem to find from the key works of moral philosophy is very different kinds of arguments, and so, in a sense, the biggest advances have been made by using very different kinds of methods. As a consequence, it just is not plausible that any strict methodological rules would have governed the growth of knowledge in moral philosophy any more than in the case of natural sciences. Furthermore, those who have this liberal methodological attitude emphasise that, given that we do not yet know how the new advances will be made in the future, we should not require all ethicists to follow any strict methodological rules. After all, doing so would only prevent us from making important discoveries, the making of which will also require inventing new methods. We should thus let different ethicists pursue different lines of inquiry as they see fit and just see what works, or so the argument goes.

There are several reasons why this ‘methodological anarchism’ is not wholly satisfactory either. The main problem is that the attitude is based on a presupposition according to which different views in moral philosophy can be evaluated independently of the arguments provided in their support. If the evaluation of different theories could in this way be distinguished from the arguments that are provided in their support, it would make sense not to be too concerned about the methods of ethics. Any method would do as long as it leads to the right results.

It is, however, much more appealing to think that how plausible different answers to different questions in moral philosophy are is always intertwined with the question of how strong the arguments are that have been provided for those answers. That is, in moral philosophy, evaluating a philosopher’s views and evaluating the kind of arguments she has provided for them always go hand in hand. This is because there are no ways of evaluating different claims in moral philosophy that would be independent of the arguments made for and against those claims. One good reason for thinking that this is the case is that, usually when two ethicists have a substantive disagreement over some significant question, they equally disagree about the arguments used for defending those views. And, if this is the case, then it makes no sense to think that any way of doing moral philosophy is appropriate as long as it leads to the growth of moral knowledge. The ways of proceeding that yield better arguments for the defended conclusions must be better than others.

The ‘anything goes’ attitude can also have harmful consequences for how moral philosophers proceed in practice. It seems to suggest that, as moral philosophers, we do not need to be self-reflective: we do not need to think about the ways in which we pursue our research. It seems to tell us that it is enough that we try to answer our research questions the best we can without paying much attention to the question of whether the methods of inquiry we are using are sound. After all, if we happen to stumble upon the right answers, the methods we used can always be declared appropriate in retrospect in the light of the answers we came up with. Yet, surely, this is not the best way to proceed even for individual researchers.

Rather, it is much more plausible to think that, as practicing moral philosophers, we should pay serious attention to how we intend to find the answers to the ethical and theoretical questions that interest us. Taking our methods seriously requires us, for example, (i) to consider the kinds of arguments that have been used before in ethics—what kind of structures they have and what kind of premises and presuppositions they begin from, (ii) to keep track of the advances in the empirical sciences that touch on the topics of our research, (iii) to follow and take part in the methodological debates within moral philosophy and (iv) to aim at making methodological innovations ourselves. If these recommendations sound overly demanding, one good reason for following them is that the most successful ethicists have always also at the same time been methodologically both innovative and self-aware.

Let me then draw three lessons from the problems of the methodological attitudes outlined earlier. Firstly, given that moral philosophers investigate very different kinds of questions, it is unlikely that there will be any single method of ethics that could be used to make progress in all debates of moral philosophy. It is unlikely that the best ways to approach the second-order metaphysical questions about the nature of moral properties are the same as the ways in which we should think about first-order questions such as what duties we, as individuals, have towards non-human animals. This suggests that, when it comes to the methods of ethics, we should be methodological pluralists rather than monists. Even if it is not the case that anything goes, there will be a number of different and equally appropriate methods which ethicists should be able to rely on with confidence depending on what kind of questions they are investigating.

The second lesson we should draw is that it is unlikely that even the best methods of ethics will be simple step-by-step algorithms, which even a computer could be programmed to follow. It is true that, in the methodological debates, it is often assumed that, if moral philosophy had a method, it would have to be something like a set of instructions that anyone could take off the shelf and apply successfully. Yet, as the example of the reflective equilibrium method suggests, it is unlikely that any method of moral philosophy could be defined at the level of specificity required for making it a simpler algorithm. Because of this, I believe that it is more useful to think of the appropriate methods of ethics as methods in a much looser sense.

Perhaps we should then think of different types of argumentative strategies—different ways of providing support for views—as the genuine methods of ethics. That is, we could think that different ethicists who rely on different kinds of implicit assumptions in their work, whose explicit arguments begin from different starting points (be they the results of empirical sciences, their personal ethical convictions or results of abstract philosophical a priori reasoning) and who employ structurally different types of arguments all use different methods of ethics, loosely understood. It is unlikely that these actual methods could be captured in terms of simple step-by-step prescriptions, because using these methods in new contexts will always require judgement. Yet, despite this, we should still be able to observe enough similarities between different types of arguments in order to be able to evaluate meaningfully different general ways of proceeding.

Finally, insofar as we can identify different methods in the previous looser sense, we should resist the idea that all ways of proceeding are equally good. Instead, as I suggested previously, we should be reflective about the ways in which we do moral philosophy. We should pay attention to different kinds of arguments, we should take part in the evaluation of different methods and we should be aware of the methods we use and willing to defend them when challenged. This is especially true in ethics because, as we have seen, it is impossible to distinguish the plausibility of a view from the strength of the arguments provided for and against it.

In this situation it is fortunate that, despite how common the two attitudes described earlier are, a lot of important work has been recently done on the methods of ethics. Yet, perhaps exactly due to the strength and popularity of those attitudes, many of the recent contributions to the methodological debates have failed to receive the attention they deserve. Of course, the merits of the reflective equilibrium method continue to be debated, and similarly the question of whether the empirical methods of psychology and social sciences could be used to make new progress in moral philosophy is receiving a lot of attention.² Yet, much of the important methodological work tends to remain more hidden.³ One indication of this is that currently there are no overview articles or textbooks that students could use for familiarising themselves with the different ways of proceeding in ethics. Similarly there are very few professional venues in terms of conferences or bespoke publications that would bring together ethicists who take part in the different methodological debates. For these reasons, at the moment, it is unfortunately quite difficult to get a sense of how the discipline of moral philosophy understands its own methods.

Because of this, I organised two conferences on the ‘New Methods of Ethics’ at the University of Birmingham: one in September 2016 and one in January 2017. With the help of funding provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the College of Arts and Law, I was able to invite some of the key contributors to the methodological debates in ethics to these conferences. The amount of submissions I received through an open call for abstracts and the quality of these submissions similarly showed how much interest there really is for exploring the methods of ethics. The purpose of the two conferences was thus to bring together ethicists both from different areas of ethics and from different methodological debates so that they could discuss together the basic question of how we should do moral philosophy.

The aim of this volume is to disseminate the ideas explored at the two conferences to a wider audience. My hope is that the material published here will encourage ethicists to become methodologically more self-aware, critical and innovative. I thus hope that the interesting methodological debates covered here will also receive more attention in the discipline more broadly. Finally, I also hope that the chapters of this volume will prompt others to attempt to map the different ways of proceeding in ethics more clearly and in a way that could be presented in an accessible way to those who are new to moral philosophy. I firmly believe that achieving these aims will help the whole community of moral philosophers to make more progress.

The Chapters

The chapters of this volume have been structured under four categories. Chapters 2–4 take part in one of the most intensive methodological debates in moral philosophy, which is about what role, if any, the empirical methods of psychology and social sciences should play in ethical theorising. After this, the next two chapters will boldly outline brand new methods: a new first-personal method for doing metaethics and a new method for first-order normative ethics based on the idea of comparing the authoritativeness of different normative standards. The three chapters of Part 3 will then critically evaluate some of the most influential methods used in moral philosophy recently. Finally, the two chapters of Part 4 will consider the question of what role, if any, our first-order normative intuitions should play in the ev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART 1 The Prospects of Empirical Ethics
• PART 2 New Methods
• PART 3 Evaluations of Recent Methods
• PART 4 Metaethics and Normative Ethics
• List of Contributors
• Index