A metaethical option for theists

Pending, 2024

The 'prescriptivist' metaethical theory argued here makes the claim that moral assertions are neither true nor false; and thus, they are not knowable. The name 'prescriptivism' is not associated with Hare's (1952, 1963) theory. This theory hypothesizes that ethical assertions and value affirmations are 'prescriptions.' 'Descriptions' are assertions that are literally true or false, and 'prescriptions' are assertions intended to be agreed-upon (but not literally true or false). The 'correctness' of any ethical assertion (or value affirmation) is dependent upon what persons accept, tolerate, or agree-to, and does not refer to an objective moral reality.

Philosophical Studies, 2005

The realist belief in robustly attitude-independent evaluative truths – more specifically, moral truths – is challenged by Sharon Street’s essay “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value”. We know the content of human normative beliefs and attitudes has been profoundly influenced by a Darwinian natural selection process that favors adaptivity. But if simple adaptivity can explain the content of our evaluative beliefs, any connection they might have with abstract moral truth would seem to be purely coincidental. She continues the skeptical attack in “Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Rethink It”, concentrating on the intuitionist realism of Ronald Dworkin. The latter sees the issue fundamentally as a holistic choice between moral objectivity and the genocide-countenancing consequences of abandoning objective standards. Street counters that, because of realism’s skeptical difficulties, Dworkin’s Choice (as I call it) actually works in favor of her Euthyphronic antirealism. I will argue that she misrepresents the realist’s skeptical challenge, and that clarifying the character of that challenge renders the case for normative realism much more appealing. Indeed, I claim that Street fails to exclude the genuine possibility of a rational basis for moral truth.

Taking Morality Seriously is David Enoch’s book-length defense of meta-ethical and meta-normative non-naturalist realism. After describing Enoch’s position and outlining the argumentative strategy of the book, we engage in a critical discussion of what we take to be particularly problematic central passages. We focus on Enoch’s two original positive arguments for non-naturalist realism: one argument building on first order moral implications of different meta-ethical positions, the other attending to the rational commitment to normative facts inherent in practical deliberation. We also pay special attention to Enoch’s handling of two types of objections to non-naturalist realism, objections having to do with the possibility of moral knowledge and with moral disagreement.

Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2014

2015

Decades ago, it was suggested that epistemology could be naturalized, meaning, roughly, that it could be treated as an empirically-informed psychological inquiry. In more recent years, there has been a concerted effort to naturalize ethics, with a focus on questions in moral psychology, and occasional normative ethics. Less effort has been put into the naturalization of metaethics: the study of what, if anything, makes moral judgments true. The discussion presents a systematic overview of core questions in metaethics, and argues that each of these can be illuminated by psychological research. These include questions about realism, expressivism, error theory, and relativism. Metaethics is beholden to moral psychology, and moral psychology can be studied empirically. The primary goal is to establish empirical tractability, but, in so doing, the paper also takes a provisional stance on core questions, defending a view that is relativist, subjective, and emotionally grounded.

2020

Logical positivists have tried to distinguish meaningful questions from meaningless ones for decades. Their criterion of verifiability (and later of falsifiability) has left a strong mark in modern philosophy. However, logical positivism has been declared dead and many of the topics considered meaningless by them, such as ethics and aesthetics, are still lively debated by philosophers. It could even be argued that the conclusion that ethics and aesthetics should be dismissed as meaningless is a reductio ad absurdum of any theory of meaning. However, it is an equally absurd position to dismiss the broader idea that we must respect certain criteria in order to be entitled to claim that our statements are meaningful. In this thesis, therefore, I will try to reconcile the principles of logical positivism with ethics, proposing an alternative set of criteria for meaning and a pragmatic approach to ethics that should respect this criteria. I will do this by using Parfit's (2011) arguments in defense of objectivism as a case study. In chapter one I introduce the concepts that will serve as a foundation for my thesis. In chapter two, I begin my argumentation by laying out a fuzzy theory of meaning that allows for different degrees of meaningfulness based on Wittgenstein’s later work and concepts from cognitive science such as prototype theory and conceptual metaphors. In chapter three I argue that Parfit’s objectivism has a low degree of meaningfulness because it relies on the assumption that there is a “fundamental metaphysical relation that holds between facts, on the one hand, and beliefs, desires, aims, and actions, on the other”, a view that Smith (2017) calls “reasons fundamentalism”. Smith rejects reasons fundamentalism but accepts Parfit’s metaphysical framing of the debate. I will argue that the metaphysical nature of the argument renders it largely meaningless. Finally, in chapter four, I argue that although most metaethics is indeed meaningless, especially questions concerning the ontology of moral claims, the dismissal of moral utterances as mere expressions of emotions is also unjustified, and therefore I promote a pragmatic universalist metaethics that is compatible with the criteria of meaning described in chapter one. Essentially, I defend the thesis that the purpose of ethics is to resolve moral conflict, and that this should be done by appeal to logic, consistency, and universal moral intuitions, not contentious metaphysical commitments and category mistakes.