Moral Skepticism

New Essays

Diego E. Machuca, Diego E. Machuca

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317239307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Moral skepticism is at present a vibrant topic of philosophical inquiry. Particularly since the turn of the millennium, the debates between moral skeptics of various stripes and their opponents have gained renewed force not only by taking account of innovative ideas in moral philosophy, but also by drawing on novel positions in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language as well as on recent findings in empirical sciences. As a result, new arguments for and against moral skepticism have been devised, while the traditional ones have been reexamined. This collection of original essays will advance the ongoing debates about various forms of moral skepticism by discussing such topics as error theory, disagreement, constructivism, non-naturalism, expressivism, fictionalism, and evolutionary debunking arguments. It will be a valuable resource for academics and advanced students working in metaethics and moral philosophy more generally.

1
Moral Skepticism

An Introduction and Overview

Diego E. Machuca

1. Introduction

Introductory chapters of edited collections are hardly ever read, and are often rather brief. Despite the double risk of writing something that might not be perused and in a manner in which it is not often done, I will here not only present the essays that make up this volume but also offer an extensive critical overview of moral skepticism with the hope that it will turn out to be useful particularly to the uninitiated reader. I will first provide a taxonomy of varieties of moral skepticism, then discuss the main arguments advanced in their favor, and finally summarize the ten essays here collected, which deal with one or more of those skeptical stances and arguments. But before getting down to business, let me clarify the purpose of the present volume and say something about the peculiarity of its topic.

The aim has not been to put together a collection of essays that would jointly provide a comprehensive treatment of moral skepticism in the manner of a companion or a handbook. Rather, given the fertility of metaethical discussions of skepticism over the past fifteen years, it seemed timely to edit a volume of new research papers that would reexamine old issues in a fresh light, motivate further exploration of them, and introduce novel views. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first collection entirely devoted to exploring distinct varieties of moral skepticism.

An intriguing aspect of metaethics is that it is one of the few areas of philosophy—the others being philosophy of religion and philosophy of action—in which at present one finds quite a number of real skeptics, of one or another kind. In general, philosophers deem the importance of skepticism to be merely methodological, i.e., they regard skeptical arguments as useful tools for their inquiries. For instance, even though epistemologists think that skeptical arguments cannot be dismissed out of hand, most of them take it as plain that their conclusions are false and hence that there are mistakes somewhere in their premises. Careful analysis aimed at discovering the mistakes is considered philosophically useful and rewarding insofar as it allows us to get rid of the erroneous epistemological views expressed by the mistaken premises, and insofar as it allows us to acquire a deeper understanding of the nature and scope of knowledge and justified belief in general or in particular areas. What are the reasons for there being quite a number of real skeptics in areas like metaethics, philosophy of religion, or philosophy of action? They are perhaps the fact that their subject matters are highly controversial and the fact that life can go on even if one denies, or suspends judgment about, the objectivity of morality, the existence of God, or the existence of free will.¹ Although purely epistemological matters are highly controversial as well, at least the great majority of epistemologists agree on the possibility of knowledge or justified belief in general, differing on how best to characterize their nature and scope. Also, denying, or suspending judgment about, the possibility of knowledge or justified belief in general would have many more damaging implications for our lives for the simple reason that it would target our beliefs as a whole. Whereas moral skepticism or free will skepticism might render certain kinds of action impossible—such as moral, responsible, or free action—radical epistemological skepticism would render action tout court impossible—“or so it is claimed,” a Pyrrhonian skeptic would immediately add.

2. The Multiple Faces of Moral Skepticism

It is important to make clear the range of views that are taken as varieties of moral skepticism in the present volume. The essays here collected deal not only with skepticism about moral knowledge or moral justification, but also with skepticism about moral reality. In other words, they deal with both epistemological and ontological forms of moral skepticism. Moral anti-realism (or irrealism, as some prefer to call it) is therefore treated as a variety of moral skepticism. This remark will strike metaethicists as obvious and hence unnecessary, but I make it to respond to an objection sometimes voiced, most particularly by epistemologists. The objectors argue that it is a surprising mistake to consider moral anti-realism a form of moral skepticism inasmuch as it does not target the possibility of moral knowledge or the epistemic justification of moral beliefs.² This objection reveals more the background of its proponents than the illegitimacy of the label. Note, first, that it is common among metaethicists to regard moral anti-realism as a kind of moral skepticism. Two examples might suffice. J. L. Mackie defended a position according to which first-order moral judgments are all false because the objective moral values, prescriptions, qualities, or relations they purport to describe do not exist. He called his position “moral skepticism” (Mackie 1977: 16–18, 35, 48–49; cf. 1946: 80–81, 83, 85, 90). And Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, in his comprehensive taxonomy of varieties of moral skepticism, includes what he calls “skepticism about moral reality” (2006: 12). A common practice may of course be mistaken. It is legitimate, however, to deem the various forms of moral anti-realism as skeptical for two interrelated reasons. First, moral anti-realism can be taken to target also moral knowledge or justified moral belief inasmuch as it claims that there are no moral facts, properties, or relations to be known or about which to hold justified beliefs. Second, moral anti-realism calls into question most people’s beliefs about morality by claiming either that all of our first-order moral judgments are false because there are no objective moral facts, properties, or relations; or that they are all neither true nor false because the moral facts, properties, or relations they presuppose do not exist; or that moral judgments are actually expressions of non-cognitive attitudes and not assertions about alleged mind-independent moral facts, properties, or relations. (More on these distinct views in a moment.) Hence, though some might be reluctant to regard moral anti-realism as a form of skepticism, not only is it a fact that it is commonly regarded that way among metaethicists, but there are also good reasons for so doing.

How to define moral anti-realism? The answer of course depends on how one conceives of moral realism. In the metaethical literature, a common distinction is that between minimal (or minimalist) and non-minimal (or non-minimalist) moral realism. According to the former, moral propositions are truth-apt and some of them are true. On this conception of moral realism, moral relativism could be considered a form of moral realism inasmuch as it affirms that certain moral propositions are true relative to a given framework. Moral constructivism, too, could be deemed to be a type of moral realism inasmuch as it maintains that certain moral propositions are true if they are those to which agents would agree, were they to engage in an idealized process of rational deliberation. Moreover, those versions of moral non-cognitivism that endorse a deflationary account of truth could also be regarded as forms of moral realism inasmuch as they accept that some moral sentences are true: to say that the sentence “Stealing is wrong” is true is just to say that stealing is wrong.³ Non-minimal moral realism maintains, in addition, that some moral propositions are true by virtue of something in the world, namely, the objective or mind-independent moral facts or properties that those judgments track. This second form of moral realism can be either naturalistic or robust: roughly put, whereas naturalistic moral realism contends that moral facts and properties are either identical with or reducible to natural ones, robust moral realism claims that moral facts and properties are non-natural or irreducibly moral and hence causally inert.⁴ In line with J. L. Mackie and Richard Joyce, I think that moral thought is inherently committed to the idea that objective moral facts or properties are intrinsically prescriptive—they categorically demand or require that people act in certain ways irrespective of their desires, aims, or interests—and that moral naturalism fails to account for such intrinsic prescriptivity (or inescapable authority or irreducible normativity).⁵ If so, then a commitment to the existence of objective moral facts or properties that are intrinsically prescriptive characterizes not only the position of those philosophers who are robust moral realists, but also ordinary moral thought and discourse. Somewhat less contentiously, it seems that ordinary people are typically non-minimal moral realists of some sort, even though at least the great majority of them are of course unable to articulate their position the way metaethicists do.⁶

Given these considerations, a possible general formulation of the moral anti-realist’s ontological skepticism is the following:

Ontological Moral Skepticism

There are no objective or mind-independent moral facts or properties.

This formulation has the advantage of encompassing all those views that reject the ontological commitment of non-minimal moral realism. The two main views to be mentioned are moral error theory and moral noncognitivism (also known as “non-descriptivism”). Since I will focus on the former, let us start with the latter, whose standard version could be formulated thus:

Moral Non-Cognitivism

Moral judgments are not truth-apt because they are expressions of non-cognitive attitudes or states (such as emotions or commands), not assertions that convey beliefs about alleged objective moral facts or properties.

This view is a form of ontological moral skepticism because it maintains not only that moral judgments are not descriptions of objective moral facts or properties, but also that these facts or properties do not exist. Insofar as they are not statements of matters of fact, moral judgments are radically different from non-moral ones, which also explains the intimate connection between moral thought and motivation. As we will see, the claim that moral judgments are not assertions that convey beliefs, despite their being usually expressed in the indicative mood, is what distinguishes moral noncognitivism from moral error theory. It should be noted, however, that there is a form of moral non-cognitivism that is milder inasmuch as it holds that, though moral judgments are primarily expressions of non-cognitive attitudes, they also express beliefs. This view is commonly dubbed a “hybrid” form of moral non-cognitivism.⁷

A possible formulation of the other main type of ontological moral skepticism is this:

Moral Error Theory

First-order moral judgments are truth-apt because they are assertions that attribute moral properties to objects, but they are all false because such properties do not exist or are not instantiated.⁸

This is an error theory precisely because it claims that, in making first-order moral judgments, we misdescribe or misrepresent the world inasmuch as it does not contain the items posited, implied, or presupposed by those judgments. Such a formulation of moral error theory corresponds to the way it is typically understood (see esp. Mackie 1977: 35, 48–49). There are also nonstandard versions, one of which can be mentioned here because its departure from the standard one is not significant.⁹ It maintains that, given that there is a referential or presupposition failure in moral judgments inasmuch as they refer to, or presuppose the existence of, objective moral facts, properties, or relations that nonetheless do not exist, those judgments are neither true nor false (see esp. Joyce 2001: 6–9). So a slightly better formulation of moral error theory would say, not that first-order moral judgments are all false, but that they are all untrue, which may be understood either in the sense that they are all false or in the sense that they are all neither true nor false.

It is worth noting that Mark Eli Kalderon (2005: 105–106, 144–145) claims that the standard formulation of moral error theory should be revised so as to also include moral agnosticism: “Competent speakers should not believe [moral] propositions expressed by the target [moral] sentences that they accept either because they are false or because they are unjustified” (2005: 106).¹⁰ The problem with this revised formulation is that it creates confusion inasmuch as a moral agnostic who remarks that the available evidence justifies neither moral realism nor moral anti-realism refrains, for that very reason, from affirming that there is a fundamental error in moral discourse in that this discourse is committed to an erroneous picture of the world. Saying that moral beliefs are unjustified is clearly different from saying that they are erroneous.

An error theory is a theory about a given discourse, not a cluster of items, and defining moral error theory as the denial of the existence of objective moral facts, properties, or relations does not allow one to distinguish it from other types of moral anti-realism (cf. Joyce & Kirchin 2010: xii). What sets it apart is the view that moral judgments are assertions that express beliefs. But this should not make us lose sight of the fact that it is the ontological element of moral error theory that leads its proponent to affirm that morality has been undermined or debunked. Note, in this regard, that Mackie explicitly presents his skeptical stance as an ontological thesis and remarks that its linguistic aspect is a corollary of the ontological aspect, which is the central one:

[W]hat I have called moral scepticism is an ontological thesis, not a linguistic or conceptual one. It is not, like the other doctrine often called moral subjectivism, a view about the meanings of moral statements. Again, no doubt, if it is to be at all plausible, it will have to give some account of their meanings…. But this too will be a development of the theory, not its core.

(1977: 18)

These remarks make perfect sense in light of the fact that Mackie opens the first chapter of Ethics with the assertion “There are no objective moral values” (1977: 15).

The other main variety of moral skepticism is epistemological in nature:

Epistemological Moral Skepticism

We do not possess moral knowledge or epistemically justified moral beliefs.

The disjunction in this formulation is due to the fact that epistemological moral skepticism may either target only moral knowledge or be broader in scope and target epistemically justified moral belief. The formulation also attempts to capture two other distinct stances: one extreme that denies the very possibility of moral knowledge or of epistemically justified moral belief, the other more cautious that recommends adopting an agnostic attitude:

Nihilistic Epistemological Moral Skepticism

Moral knowledge is impossible or no moral belief is ever epistemically justified.

Pyrrhonian Moral Skepticism

One mus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Moral Skepticism: An Introduction and Overview
• 2 Projection, Indeterminacy and Moral Skepticism
• 3 Error Theory, Relaxation and Inferentialism
• 4 Why We Really Cannot Believe the Error Theory
• 5 Are There Substantive Moral Conceptual Truths?
• 6 The Phenomenology of Moral Authority
• 7 Arguments From Moral Disagreement to Moral Skepticism
• 8 Evolutionary Debunking, Realism and Anthropocentric Metasemantics
• 9 Moral Skepticism and the Benacerraf Challenge
• 10 Veneer Theory
• 11 Moral Skepticism, Fictionalism, and Insulation
• Contributors
• Name Index
• Subject Index