The Argument from Moral Experience

Journal of Value Inquiry, 2004

Quaestiones Infinitae, 2019

What implications do recent empirical findings from the fields of biology, primatology, anthropology, psychology and history have for metaethical theories about moral objectivity? I defend the thesis that these findings detract from the plausibility of a realist account of moral objectivity but leave room for a more moderate, antirealist account of objectivity, framed in terms of stance-invariance. The dissertation consists of six articles written for publication in academic journals. In these articles I present two novel, empirically informed challenges to moral realism, and point out some shortcomings of existing challenges. One of the novel challenges builds on the second horn of Sharon Street’s ‘Darwinian Dilemma’, according to which moral realists are committed to an implausible evolutionary hypothesis, and extends this criticism to the historical realm. The other novel challenge is fuelled by theoretical and experimental work in moral psychology, and takes issue with the presumed advantages of moral realism in explaining the qualities of our moral experience. Apart from criticizing moral realism, I also develop and defend an alternative account of moral objectivity in antirealist terms and argue that it is as least as successful as a realist account in capturing the objectivist commitments of ordinary moral discourse. In this introductory chapter I outline the aims and methods of the dissertation and demonstrate the coherence of the treatise.

How should we understand the notion of moral objectivity? Metaethical positions that vindicate morality's objective appearance are often associated with moral realism. On a realist construal, moral objectivity is understood in terms of mind-, stance-, or attitude-independence. But realism is not the only game in town for moral objectivists. On an antirealist construal, morality's objective features are understood in virtue of our attitudes. In this paper I aim to develop this antirealist construal of moral objectivity in further detail, and to make its metaphysical commitments explicit. I do so by building on Sharon Street's version of BHumean Constructivism^. Instead of the realist notion of attitude-independence, the antire-alist account of moral objectivity that I articulate centres on the notion of standpoint-invari-ance. While constructivists have been criticized for compromising on the issue of moral objectivity, I make a preliminary case for the thesis that, armed with the notion of standpoint -invariance, constructivists have resources to vindicate an account of objectivity with just the right strength, given the commitments of ordinary moral thought and practice. In support of this thesis I highlight recent experimental findings about folk moral objectivism. Empirical observations about the nature of moral discourse have traditionally been taken to give prima facie support to moral realism. I argue, by contrast, that from what we can tell from our current experimental understanding, antirealists can capture the commitments of ordinary discourse at least as well as realists can.

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1991

Science, thanks to its link with observation, retains some title to a correspondence theory of truth; but a coherence theory is evidently the lot of ethics. --W. V. Quine

2017

Journal of Ethics, 2012

Many philosophers think that moral objectivism is supported by stable features of moral discourse and thinking. When engaged in moral reasoning and discourse, people behave ‘as if’ objectivism were correct, and the seemingly most straightforward way of making sense of this is to assume that objectivism is correct; this is how we think that such behavior is explained in paradigmatically objectivist domains. By comparison, relativist, error-theoretic or non-cognitivist accounts of this behavior seem contrived and ad hoc. After explaining why this argument should be taken seriously (recent arguments notwithstanding), I argue that it is nevertheless undermined by considerations of moral disagreement. Even if the metaphysical, epistemic and semantic commitments of objectivism provide little or no evidence against it, and even if the alternative explanations of ‘objectivist’ traits of moral discourse and thinking are speculative or contrived, objectivism is itself incapable of making straightforward sense of these traits. The appearance of deep and widespread moral disagreement strongly suggests that the explanations operative in paradigmatically objective discourse fail to carry over to the moral case. Since objectivism, no less than relativism, non-cognitivism and error theory, needs non-trivial explanations of why we behave ‘as if’ objectivism were correct, such behavior does not presently provide reason to accept objectivism.

Philosophical Studies

This paper concerns what I take to be the primary epistemological motivation for defending moral perception. Offering a plausible account of how we gain moral knowledge is one of the central challenges of metaethics. It seems moral perception might help us meet this challenge. The possibility that we know about the instantiation of moral properties in something like the way we know that there is a bus passing in front of us raises the alluring prospect of subsuming moral epistemology under the (relatively) comfortable umbrella of perceptual or, more broadly, empirical knowledge. The good news on this front is that various combinations of metaethical positions and theories of perception arguably have the potential to vindicate moral perception (though I won’t do much to defend this claim here). The bad news, I’ll argue, is that moral perception would be dependent for its epistemic merit on background knowledge of bridge principles linking moral and non-moral properties. Thus, in order to defend a purely perceptual moral epistemology, one would have to argue that knowledge of those principles is likewise perceptual. I further argue it is not.

The Journal of Value Inquiry, The Journal of Value Inquiry: Volume 49, Issue 1 (2015), Page 31-45

Some moral claims strike us as objective. It is often argued that this shows morality to be objective. Moral experience – broadly construed – is invoked as the strongest argument for moral realism, the thesis that there are moral facts or properties. Realists, however, cannot appropriate the argument from moral experience. In fact, constructivists argue that to validate the ways we experience the objectivity of moral claims, realism must be rejected. There is a general agreement that ethical theory bears the burden of proof of explaining the objective-seeming features of our moral experience. By contrast, Bernard Williams argues that all such attempts to accommodate moral experience fail because there is a systematic mismatch between the objectivist requirements of ethical theory and the agent’s subjective experience of moral objectivity. Williams’ critique is illuminating in that it points to the relation between the objective features of moral claims and the subjective experience of moral agents. Williams complains that the preoccupation with objectivity caused ethical theorists to neglect the study of the moral life. I agree with Williams that this neglect undermines ethical theory, but I shall argue that Kantian constructivism provides the resources to adequately address the problem. The specific variety of constructivism I defend takes moral claims to be practical cognitions, and it is concerned with their rational validity as well as with their bindingness. This cognitivist form of constructivism starts with Kant’s analysis of respect as a promising starting point for a phenomenological defense of objectivity. Kant takes the moral feeling of respect to show that we are responsive to the categorical demands of morality. Unlike the realist, Kant does not try to demonstrate an ontological relation between how things appear to us and how they stand independently of us. Rather, his argument establishes that our experience of morality is congruent with the objectivist aspirations of morality. My contention is that constructivism best accounts for this congruence by taking the feeling of respect as the subjective condition of the reality of practical reason. Surprisingly, this results in a far more ambitious claim than the realist can defend. While the realist argument is pro tanto, Kantian constructivism purports to provide a conclusive argument for the objectivity of practical reason. Kantian constructivism survives Williams’ critique and presents some important advantages over traditional accounts of the role of moral experience in foundational arguments.

Theoria , 2023

“The wrongness of Albert's action causally explains why Jane judged that his action was wrong”. This type of causal moral explanation has been extensively discussed in the recent metaethical literature. This paper motivates the following claims about this type of moral explanation. First, a typical defence of this type of moral explanation suggested in the literature does not work because it predicts inaccurate modal information. Second, focusing on different aspects of the ways moral judgements are generated provides better chances for the defender of this type of moral explanation. Third, the strategy mentioned in the previous point leads us to the following alternative evaluative explanation: The property of being a harmful action explains a recognisable pattern of moral judgements observed in the relevant empirical studies. One crucial implication the paper alludes to is a localist approach to the debates concerning moral realism: We should consider each moral property's ontological genuineness separately, referring to specific empirical findings that are particularly relevant to the target moral property in question. Such a localist approach can provide solid resources for realists to respond to various anti-realist challenges, such as an influential evolutionary debunking argument.