In this chapter, I shall try to explain what I mean by 'moral' and its cognates. I do not claim to be using the term in any eccentric sense. Nevertheless, readers may wish to check their semantic intuitions against mine to ensure that we are not at cross purposes. I shall not attempt to construct a neat definition which captures all the relevant logic of the term within one short axiom. I am not sure, in any case, whether that is possible. Instead I shall make ten logical points and hope they will suffice to ensure sufficient understanding.
I do not claim that all these points are uncontroversial as a description of the commonly accepted meaning of moral terms. Indeed I doubt very strongly that there is such a thing as the commonly accepted meaning of these terms. I would claim, to the contrary, that there is considerable variation in the semantics of 'moral' and its cognates throughout English speaking societies at least. Moreover, even within what might be regarded as standard usages, there may be vagueness and variation of meaning which can engender confusion. In such cases, I may take the liberty of stipulating exactly what I mean. Nevertheless the senses of 'moral' to be used here will be within range of what is standard understanding. This claim will be supported by appeal to recent empirical investigations by F.E.Trainer [1] in Sydney with children, university students, university staff and adults from the public at large. It would be surprising if this sub-culture differed markedly in these respects from other parts of Australian society or, for that matter, from other sub-populations of the English speaking societies, or even from any of those societies that have been influenced strongly by any of the major religions, including at least Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Hinduism and Buddhism. Our evident ability to comprehend the morality, if such it is, in the cinema and television productions of these various cultures would otherwise need an alternative explanation. Nevertheless, the matter is in need of further empirical investigation.
The ten points concern:
I shall now go on to say a little about each of these points in turn.
In a moral society, most people will want to do what is morally right and hence will want to know their moral obligations. A correct understanding of what counts as moral knowledge is therefore important in an understanding of the moral society. As we shall see in section 2.6, there are many different theories about moral knowledge. What many of these theories have in common is the idea that moral knowledge has very different origins to knowledge of the world gleaned through the senses (such as knowledge of how many coins there are in my pocket) or to knowledge of a conceptual nature (such as whether all divorced people have been married).
For such theories to make sense, moral truths and falsities have to be differentiable from other sorts of truths and falsities. I shall call anything that is either a truth or a falsehood a proposition. So the problem is to differentiate moral propositions from other kinds of propositions.
Some have claimed that if moral knowledge is to have different origins from knowledge of other matters, then moral propositions should not be validly deducible from non-moral propositions. This seems to be the intent of David Hume's famous dictum, in his Treatise of Human Nature that it is fallacious to argue from 'is' to 'ought' or 'ought not'. To quote:
In every system of morality which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it is necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. [2]
Arthur Prior has argued, [3] that if moral propositions cannot be deduced from non-moral propositions, then there cannot be any moral propositions. The way his argument runs can be illustrated as follows.
Allow that both 'The moon is yellow' and 'The moon is not yellow' say nothing about what is morally right or wrong. Allow also that 'It is morally wrong for Mary to have an abortion' expresses a moral proposition (whether false or true does not matter) and consider the argument:
If we count this as a valid argument (and most people would), then we would have to count the conclusion as a non-moral proposition, if Hume's dictum were to be respected.
Very well. Let us count the conclusion as a non-moral proposition. But consider now the equally valid argument:
We appear now to have a valid argument from non-moral premises to a moral conclusion. If we stick to the idea that we cannot validly deduce moral conclusions from non-moral premises, then we shall have to count as non-moral the proposition that Mary has a moral obligation to feed her children. Since we could do the same for any proposition whatever, it appears that we cannot count any proposition as a moral proposition if we stick to the idea that we cannot deduce a moral proposition from non-moral propositions. [4]
But does this show that we can reap moral knowledge from non-moral facts? That was Hume's primary concern. The answer is no. Why?
Allow that it is possible to know that the moon is yellow. Then by virtue of the first argument it is also possible to know via such knowledge that either the moon is yellow or it is morally wrong for Mary to have an abortion. So if knowledge of moral propositions cannot have its origin in knowledge of non-moral propositions, we have to count 'The moon is yellow or it is morally wrong for Mary to have an abortion' as expressing a non-moral proposition.
Allow now that it is possible to know that the moon is not yellow (on nights when it is silvery, say). Then if we have knowledge that either the moon is yellow or it is morally wrong for Mary to have an abortion, we have not derived this knowledge from the colour of the moon alone. We could, of course, have such knowledge if we knew the second disjunct to be true, namely that it is morally wrong for Mary to have an abortion. But then we would have derived knowledge of the disjunction from knowledge of a moral proposition instead of vice-versa. If Hume is to be rebuffed, someone would have to show how the disjunction is to be known without any prior moral knowledge, given that we know the first disjunct to be false. That does seem to be impossible.
A fairly simple way of differentiating moral propositions from other sorts of propositions that seems to capture the epistemological spirit of Hume's dictum, if not its logical letter is to define a moral proposition as one which entails that there is at least one moral obligation. Thus (1) expresses a moral proposition, but (2) and (3) do not.
(2) The moon is not yellow.
(3) Either the moon is yellow or Mary has a moral obligation to feed her children.
Although moral (1) is validly deducible from non-moral (2) and (3), we cannot learn the truth of (1) from that deduction.
A term, M, will be said to be a moral term if and only if 'There is something that is M' or 'There is something that is an M' or 'There is something that Ms' expresses a moral proposition.
I shall use the expression 'moral nihilist' to mean one who believes that all moral propositions in the above sense are false. So although a moral nihilist may quite happily believe in (2) or (3), she or he will not believe in (1).
Thus any proposition that entails a moral proposition will itself be a moral proposition. So there will be no non-moral proposition which, by itself, entails a moral proposition. It will still be possible, as in the second argument above, for two or more non-moral proposition to entail a moral proposition. However, the conjunction of any statements, moral or non-moral, which together entail a moral statement will be a moral statement.
Someone may object that this definition of moral propositions is too narrow because, so they might claim, there are morally evaluative propositions that fail to entail the existence of moral obligations. They may claim, for example, that there are acts that someone might want to describe as morally good, even though the agent had no moral obligation to perform the act, or indeed, any act at all.
However, it is not just moral obligations of the agent that are relevant to our stipulation. Anyone's moral obligations will do. The question is whether someone, not necessarily the agent, has a moral obligation, given that the act is morally good. I would wish to claim, firstly, that if an act is morally good, then one has a moral right to perform that act, and secondly, if one has a moral right to do something, then at least one person has a moral obligation to refrain from hindering one in the performance of the act. If these points are allowed, then clearly this sort of evaluative statement falls within my definition of a moral statement.
Similarly, statements asserting the existence of virtues, thought of as a subclass of those personal characteristics which everyone has a moral right to promote, and vices, thought of as a subclass of those personal characteristics we all have a moral right to discourage, as well as moral rights as suggested above, entail the existence of moral obligations and hence come within the definition.
There is a considerable amount of literature devoted to the question of which moral concepts are more fundamental than which. Philippa Foot, for example, has claimed that a sound moral philosophy should start from a theory of the vices and virtues.[5] Some feel that some moral entities are reducible to others or conversely that some are ontologically prior to others. Some, like Bernard Williams, reject this approach as wrong-headed. He considers all these things as different considerations which are genuinely different from one another. (Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 16) [6] Part of Williams' case involves a rejection of certain semantic analyses of moral terminology, for example, a semantic analysis of moral rights in terms of goods, put forward by G.E. Moore. [7] Many involved in such debates appear to take it that the sort of logical considerations which semantically link the existence of one sort of entity with the existence of another entails some sort of metaphysical reductive relationship between the entities themselves. I have argued elsewhere [8] that the notions of necessary existential dependence and ontological priority whose applications involve so much controversy are themselves highly suspect. I certainly do not wish to claim that any ontological priority of obligations over moral rights or virtues or vice-versa arises out of the merely logical claims made above. Rights, virtues, vice, goods, evils and obligations, like husbands and wives, would be of quite distinct kinds even if the meanings of those terms are inter-definable.
This does not allow, however, that there could be rights without obligations any more than there could be wives without husbands. Williams attempts to drive a wedge between a morality based on moral obligations (without which, he claims, we would be better off) from other aspects of ethical life (which he would like to see retained). This separation, however, cannot be maintained.
Many words which are used to assert or deny moral propositions are also used in non-moral contexts. Consider for example:
(5) Given the present position and velocity of the missile it ought to impact hereabouts fifteen minutes from now.
(6) In Britain, Australia and New Zealand, one is obliged to drive on the left hand side of the road.
(7) In soccer, all players except the goalkeepers are obliged to keep their hands from touching the ball.
(8) You should use this spanner if you do not wish to burr the nut.
Philippa Foot has expressed doubt that there is a specifically moral sense of 'good'.[9] I would claim in addition that 'obliged', 'ought' and 'should' do not change meaning as we move from moral to non-moral discourse. The uses of these words in the examples above are not even evaluative usages, let alone moral usages.
The word 'obliged', in moral and non-moral uses, simply means 'bound' or 'constrained'. The constraint may sometimes be moral, but it may, on other occasions, be due to aesthetic feelings, social pressures, legal considerations, physical laws, long or short term aims or desires, or any other boundary conditions that restrict behaviour.
The word 'ought' is commonly used with a verb in the infinitive mood, for example, 'ought to use' and 'ought to be'. Call any single-verb sentence containing an 'ought to V' verb phrase an ought-sentence. Let the same sentence with 'ought to V' replaced by the appropriate indicative mood form of V be called, in the tradition of David Hume, the corresponding is-sentence. I claim that what an ought-sentence says is that the corresponding is-sentence expresses a truth throughout a restricted range of possibilities. The restriction is, or at least should be, determined by the context of the discussion in which the ought- sentence occurs. The restriction may be one in which people are supposed (truly or falsely) to be doing what they are morally obliged to do, or one in which all the laws of physics remain true. The restriction may be to some possibly false suppositions or perhaps some facet of the actual world, or both of these things simultaneously. Note that the restriction may be determined, at least in part, by the specification of a whole class of propositions, for example, as above, by the specification that all the laws of physics (whatever they may be) remain true, without any member of the class having to be specified or known.
Some philosophers in recent times have failed to pay heed to the fact that certain words of constraint that are commonly used in making moral statements can also be used within contexts that are logically unrelated to morality. As a result, they have led themselves to believe that one may argue from indisputable and, indeed, empirically determinable worldly facts to conclusions asserting the existence of moral obligations. This belief is commonly called 'naturalism'.
In the last few decades, an essay by John Searle, 'How to derive "ought" from "is"' [10] and another by Philippa Foot, 'Moral Beliefs' [11], have given some hope to many would-be naturalists. Because the influence of these articles has been so widespread, I propose now to examine the arguments in some detail. Readers who are already find naturalism to be implausible may care to proceed directly to the next section. We shall see that Foot's argument suffers from the fallacy just mentioned. Whether Searle's argument does or not, depends on whether one takes him as arguing that propositions asserting the existence of moral obligations follow from propositions describing a matter of fact, namely an act of promising. There is no need to read his article in that way, though many have done so. Nowhere in it does he actually talk of moral obligations, though he does talk of obligations and he does take the entailment to be to what he calls an 'evaluative statement'. Regardless of Searle's intention in this regard, it is the argument that purports to show that moral obligations arise out of promising that is of interest to us here, so (with apologies to Searle) we shall substitute 'moral obligation' for 'obligation' throughout a reconstitution of that argument.
The stimulation for Searle's essay was the famous passage, quoted in section 1.2 above, from David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. [12]
In opposition to Hume's idea that there is a logical gap between matters of fact and the existence of moral obligations is the time worn idea that some moral obligations arise out of those sorts of human interaction known as promising or entering into contracts. It can be found in Hobbes' Leviathan and more recently in E.F. Caritt's Ethical and Political Thinking. [13] This is the basis of Searle's argument, or at least the argument with which we are concerned here, which I shall hereafter call 'the argument from promises'. This is the way it goes:
There may be differences between people in what they mean by 'promise'. Some may accept that it is logically true that the act of promising places the agent under at least a prima facie moral obligation, by which I mean a moral obligation that may or may not be over-ridden by some other moral obligation.
Others would argue that, whether or not it is true that promising places the agent under a prima facie moral obligation, it is not logically true that it does so. This truth, if it were a truth, would be a contingent truth -- contingent, not necessarily on how the world happens to be, but rather on what is right and what is wrong. Such people would claim that one would not be contradicting oneself if one were to say that someone had made a promise and were to deny that there was a corresponding prima facie moral obligation. With this sense of 'promise', a moral nihilist, one who did not believe in the existence of moral obligations, could consistently believe in acts of promising without having to give up her nihilism. She could simply deny premise (4).
Could the nihilist consistently accept the idea that it is logically true that promises generate a prima facie moral obligation? Yes, provided that she also believed that there were no promises in that sense of 'promise'. But she would not have to deny the existence of many cases of people deliberately engendering expectations by the 'promising' ritual. The same sort of argument would apply to any term which had both moral and non-moral implications, 'murder' and 'traitor' for example. The fact that the non-moral implications of such terms are frequently exemplified would not entail that the moral implications of those terms are also exemplified. So regardless of the nihilist's interpretation of the term 'promise', it appears that sound observations of promising rituals need not affect her nihilistic belief.
In an article replying to objections,[14] Searle says:
when one enters an institutional activity by invoking the rules of the institution one necessarily commits oneself in such and such ways, regardless of whether one approves or disapproves of the institution.'
Now this point of Searle's seems to be quite correct. Further, to commit oneself is to bind oneself to a course of action. Let us, for the purposes of the argument, also grant the rather moot point that promising is a social institution having a set of associated rules. Then it would follow that to give a promise is to render oneself obliged to act in accordance with the rules of promising, that is, to keep one's promise. Let all this be allowed. The question which then arises is whether such an institutional obligation (let us call it) is also a moral obligation. As we have seen, an obligation need not be a moral obligation. An obligation is merely some sort of constraint on behaviour.
The word 'committed' is similarly associated with restriction of choice, though again the restriction need not arise from any moral beliefs. Although the word can occur in moral and evaluative contexts, examples (9) and (10) below clearly show that this need not be the case.
(10) The horse rider is committed to the jump.
Thus Searle is wrong when he regards R.M. Hare as tacitly accepting the derivation of an evaluative statement from a descriptive one when Hare says: 'If a person says that a thing is red, he is committed to the view that anything which was like it in the relevant respects would likewise be red.' [15]
But as Hare points out in reply, [16] the commitment involved here is one that arises simply from the business of sticking to the meaning of the word 'red'. It may be true that that is something we want people to do and that, in a sense, may be evaluative and it may be true that Hare is presupposing that this preference is held by his readers. But being constrained by a particular aim is a different matter from having other people preferring that you are so constrained or even from having that preference yourself. The two are quite logically distinct.
Note in passing that whether or not it is correct to allow that all moral statements are evaluative, not all evaluative statements are moral. Statements concerning personal preferences are evaluative but not necessarily moral. 'I prefer sex to golf' is an evaluative statement but it is not a moral one. 'You should prefer golf to sex' may be a moral statement depending on whether the constraint being commended is presupposed to be a moral constraint rather than, say, a constraint imposed by the heart condition of the person being advised together with the presupposed desire of that person to avoid a heart attack. Non- moral evaluative statements concerning preferences and desires are statements concerning the psychology of individuals -- not what they have a moral obligation to do or to prefer.
If some philosophers regard themselves as naturalists by virtue of being able to argue from statements about the way the world is to what people ought to do, they have missed the point of Hume's famous is-ought gap. For it is quite clear from the context of Hume's discussion that by a proposition 'connected with an ought, or an ought not' he was referring to moral propositions. That matter is quite a different one from the matter of being able to argue from propositions truly descriptive of the world or aspects thereof, to propositions expressed with sentences containing words like 'ought', 'should', 'must', 'committed' and 'obliged' which can occur both in sentences expressing moral judgements as well as sentences which do not.
With these thoughts in mind, let us return to the claim that the existence of moral obligations is a logical consequence of the fact that people sometimes commit themselves to rule-governed institutionalised relationships with other people and that promising is such an institution. If this claim is correct then it should apply equally to other rule-governed institutionalised relationships between people -- playing soccer for example. However, it is far from clear that this is the case. If one is committed to playing a game of soccer and one is subsequently in breach of the rules of soccer, then one has provided evidence towards one's lack of ability as a soccer player, or perhaps that one has decided to stop playing soccer and to do something else. But one has not necessarily thereby provided evidence of one's bad moral character. It does not follow that one has sinned.
Hare [17] comes close to the point. He considers an example of Searle's, namely that whenever a player (of baseball) satisfies conditions E (where conditions E are the conditions under which, according to the rules of baseball, a batsman is out) he is obliged to leave the field.
Hare claims that this is not a tautology nor a statement about English word-usage nor a prescription about word-usage in English. He claims that this is a rule of the game of baseball and that it is not therefore a rule about how we speak correctly but rather how we play baseball correctly. He goes on to claim that it is, or implicitly contains 'a synthetic evaluation or prescription not necessarily about word-usage'.
But Hare gives too much away here. The rule of the game is not that the batsman is obliged to leave the field under conditions E, but rather that he does leave the field under conditions E. The obligation or constraint on the batsman's behaviour under conditions E, is that he can't both act as baseball batsman under condition E and not leave the field. If he does not leave the field under those conditions, he is not playing baseball.
Now, if the person who has been batting refuses to leave the field under conditions E, the onlookers may hiss and boo and cry out that the batsman ought to leave the field. There are several different possible obligations to which the onlookers could be referring. They may believe that the batsman, although committed to acting in accordance with the rules of baseball, does not know the rules, and they are telling him just what those constraints amount to. More likely, however, they believe that he is perfectly aware of the rules and is aware of the fact that conditions E applies and has reneged on his commitment to play the game thus frustrating the desires of the other players and the onlookers. Thus they may be reminding him of the social constraints in the situation on the assumption that he would wish to act in accordance with the wishes of the other players and onlookers. Alternatively, and especially if the batsman has made a rude gesture at the onlookers indicating that he does not care about their desires in this regard, they may be referring to what they believe are moral constraints on his behaviour to (say) minimise the frustration of other people.
There may be multiple constraints on one's behaviour. In the baseball situation mentioned above, there could be at least three quite distinct constraints on the batman's behaviour, all of which are obliging him to leave the field. It would be incorrect to treat these quite disparate obligations as identical.
Similarly in the 'promising game' -- assuming that there is such a thing -- an obligation to keep one's promise could arise in a number of ways including the one of committing oneself to the game, the one of not wishing to disappoint the expectations of the person promised, and finally the one (if it existed) of having a moral obligation not to renege on one's promising obligations. These are quite distinct constraints on behaviour and neither the existence of the second constraint nor the existence of the third constraint is deducible from the presence of the first.
Some may still insist that the second and third constraints are identical to the first, that is, that social constraints arising out of altruism or fear of sanctions are identical to moral constraints which are in turn identical to the constraints arising out of commitments to institutionalised rule-governed procedures. That this identification is a mistake becomes clear if we consider a case where the third sort of constraint is present without the other two. The case I have in mind is the case whereby people commit themselves to a game of solitaire patience. Insofar as one is so committed, one is obliged to place a black seven on a red eight. Yet even if this commitment held, it would be absurd to say that the player was thereby socially obliged by altruism or fear of reprisals to put a black seven on a red eight. Likewise it would be absurd to say that the player thereby had a moral obligation to do so. However an argument which parallels the argument from promises is no less applicable in the case of solitaire patience than it is to any other case of commitment to rule-governed behaviour.
So as an example of an argument from empirically testable statements to moral statements, the argument from promises fails. From the fact that one has committed oneself to keeping a promise, it follows only that there is a commitment to oneself. It does not follow, without further premises, that there is a commitment to another person let alone society at large. Nor does it follow that there is any social, let alone moral, commitment involved. It is logically possible of course, that both the latter sorts of commitment also obtain, but they would not have to obtain.
In deductive logic one cannot get something for nothing. As many have pointed out, if there is evaluative or moral information in the conclusion of argument, then that information must be there in the premises -- otherwise the argument is deductively invalid. Most critics of the argument from promising have been concerned to examine the premises of the argument for hidden moral connotations. However it turns out not that there are moral implications in the premises, but that there should be none in the conclusion.
Philippa Foot's case for naturalism is contained in her article 'Moral Beliefs'.[18] The first half of this article is an attempt to argue a conclusion which most people would readily accept, namely that many moral assertions have empirically testable entailments. Let me short-circuit discussion of Foot's reasoning here to say that I for one would agree with this conclusion for reasons to be given in section 1.8.
It is the second half of Foot's article which is more relevant to naturalism. She begins by arguing to the conclusion that it is a bad thing to injure oneself.
Now if by 'bad' she means morally bad, and if by something's being an injury she means something which is wholly determined by the way the world or aspects thereof happen to be, then her case for naturalism is established. But can 'bad' here mean 'morally bad'?
Moral descriptions correctly apply only to acts, agents, the tools or products of agents, certain items called 'goods' that we are morally obliged to promote, and others called 'evils' that we are morally obliged to avoid or perhaps eradicate. So if we accept that necessarily injuries are morally bad, then any injury would necessarily fall into one of these categories. The obvious candidate is an evil that we are morally obliged to avoid. But why should we believe that we are morally obliged to avoid injuries?
What is this badness that injuries necessarily have, according to Foot? Recall that words like 'good', 'bad', 'ought', 'right' and so on can properly be used in contexts other than moral contexts, and let us ask 'What sort of a context entails the sort of badness that Foot associates necessarily with injuries?'.
It seems clear that the sort of badness she has in mind is failure to be prudent. Now, as Foot herself claims in her article 'Goodness and Choice' [19], goodness may have nothing logically to do with the choices of the person who speaks of it and hence with the prudence (or the lack thereof) of that person. However, the sort of 'badness' associated with her idea of 'injury' certainly has. The premises of her argument seem to be:
(ii) that necessarily such damage is a harmful thing to the body and
(iii) that necessarily all people want to avoid harm to their bodies.
The last premise is not meant to deny that people may have other desires which may override their desire to avoid harm. D.Z. Phillips and H.O. Mounce [20] have objected to the last premise, and the first, too, is dubious. But let those objections pass. What follows from the premises is that necessarily all people wish to avoid injuries to themselves. So at the most what Foot has shown is that it is necessarily imprudent to allow oneself to be injured. Further it is clear from her discussion of the nature of injuries, that this is all she takes herself to be arguing for.
Now of course it is true that good and bad are used in contexts concerning prudence. Thus we can call people good liars, meaning that when they wish it they can produce speech acts that are good for deceiving others, that is, that are likely to produce the desired result. Again, we can call a high bridge a good place for a suicide, or we can even talk of a good suicide meaning one which was achieved in such a way that success was highly probable. But we do not for those reasons believe that such places and such suicides are morally good. On the other hand there are many things such as masturbation, extra-marital sex, and homosexual acts, which are thought or have been thought by many to be morally wrong, even by those who thought such acts would not run afoul of any desire of those who committed them. Again, Kant believed that we had a moral obligation to punish the last murderer, even if no useful consequences were to accrue from such punishment. Further, the very notion of an evil person is one whose aims are morally bad. If such be an evil person's aims, wherein lies his or her imprudence in trying to achieve them? If some desires can override others, a desire to act immorally may override any desire to avoid any inconvenience arising out of doing so, and if it is prima facie imprudent to act in such a way as to run into things one wishes to avoid, it is even more imprudent to act in a way that is contrary even to one's greater preferences. So even if Foot is right in believing that prudential goodness and badness arise out of situations to be found in the world about us (and I grant that she is, despite her questionable arguments for it), she has yet to show that prudence is necessarily a moral virtue.
In her essay 'Virtues and Vices', [21] Foot reneges on her arguments in 'Moral Beliefs'. She claims that her mistake was in believing that 'moral judgements give reasons for acting to each and every man'. But this is irrelevant to the invalidity of those arguments. The question was not whether or not it was necessarily prudent to act morally well, but rather whether or not it was necessarily morally good to act prudentially.
In section 1.7 I shall argue that moral knowledge cannot be gained from empirical observations, nor from logical considerations, nor from any mixture of logic and empirical studies. I shall claim rather that moral knowledge could be gleaned only via moral intuition. Whether anybody is possessed of such intuition is another matter.
However, there is some unfinished business in this section. Searle's original argument was intended to show that it is possible to argue from empirically determinable facts to 'ought' statements. In our reconstructed version of Searle's argument in section 1.3.2, we omitted Searle's last step, namely the step from an assertion of the existence of an obligation on someone to do something to a statement claiming that that person ought to do that thing. Now that step, I claim, is invalid without further assumptions that may be false, and hence not empirically determinable facts.
Suppose that the government has passed a law saying that all people, on reaching the age of eighteen, should present themselves to army headquarters for national service. Suppose John has just reached the age of eighteen. Clearly, he is legally obliged to present himself for national service. But that he ought to do so is far from clear. What he ought to do is relative to the possibilities under consideration. If the possibilities are those in which he obeys the law, then yes, he ought to present himself. But if his country is at war, so that joining the army is a dangerous business, and if the possibilities under consideration are those in which he optimises his chances for survival, then perhaps it would be correct to say that he ought to flee to another country. Again, if the possibilities under consideration are those in which he does what is morally right, and if the war in which his country is engaged is unjust, then once again, he ought not to present himself.
Again let me stress that the suppositions that determine these 'oughts' and 'ought nots' may not be factual. So that what he ought to do, be that determined by legal, prudential or moral considerations, is not a purely factual matter. Falsehoods as well as facts may determine the truth of the proposition expressed by an 'ought' statement. Thus, given that the possibilities under consideration are those in which John obeys the law, it does not follow that he will obey the law. It makes sense, given the appropriate suppositions, to say that John ought to be doing something but that he isn't doing it. Thus what somebody ought to be doing or, in general, what ought to be the case is dependent on some facts, but not wholly so dependent. However, as Searle has insisted seems correct, that what obligations one has is a factual matter. It is a fact that one is obliged, in the playing of solitaire patience, to refrain from putting a black seven on a black ten. It is a fact that one is legally obliged to obey the rules of the road. It is a fact that one is obliged by prudence to obey the rules of the road. I claim, though there are those who would deny it, that were one to have any moral obligations, that too would be a matter of fact. We shall come back to that point in sections 1.5 and 1.9.
The point I wish to stress here is that whether the proposition expressed by an 'ought' statement follows from a statement which entails the existence of some obligation or other depends on the set of possibilities under consideration. If the obligations are legal obligations and the set of possibilities are one's in which people are doing the morally right thing the proposition expressed with the 'ought' statement simply would not follow. But similarly, if the obligations were moral obligations and the possibilities were those in which the law is being obeyed or in which people are maximising their personal satisfaction, the proposition expressed with the 'ought' statement would not follow. In general, then, it is not a logical truth, that quite independent of dialectical context, one ought to do whatever one is morally obliged to do.
In a society in which almost everybody wants to be doing what they have a moral obligation to do, the possibilities under consideration for future behaviour would probably be one's in which they were doing the morally correct thing. But the fact that it would be a rare context in which a particular form of argument would be invalid, does not validate that argument form in general. There may yet be those whose overriding concerns are for their own well-being or for other matters rather than morality or for whom morality is of no concern at all. moral obligations to what one ought to do.
The sort of moral obligations I am talking about are absolute -- not relative to a society or a person for example. In this section I shall try to make it clear exactly what I mean by 'absolute' and 'relative'. Consider the following sentences:
and
The proposition asserted by an utterance of (12), and hence the truth or falsity of what is asserted, varies depending on the society to which reference is being made. Which society that is, depends on the context in which the sentence is uttered. That information is not carried by the sentence alone. The sentence, as Cartwright [22] would say, is incomplete. An utterance of (11), on the other hand, does not need contextual supplementation identifying a particular society to yield a truth value.
We say that what is expressed by an utterance of (12) is relative to some presupposed society; whereas whatever is expressed by an utterance of (11) is absolute -- at least as far as societies are concerned.
Most of the sentences we utter (some would say all of them) are incomplete, if only because the verb form is tensed and hence refers to an instant in time which may vary from one utterance to another. Even proper nouns vary in their reference from occasion to occasion. Indeed any word at all can be used as a name -- and anything may be called by any name.
Let us assume, however, that the referent of some term, say X, is given; and that the time of the utterance is given also. Let F be some descriptive word or phrase. Then different utterances of the sentence 'X is F' may or may not express different propositions depending on the semantic properties of the description F.
For example, if F were the description 'is big', the proposition expressed would depend on the sample under discussion with which X is being compared. If F were 'is a grandmother', however, no extra contextual information would be necessary to convey a unique proposition.
Call the description F absolute if and only if, given the meaning of F, a particular referent for X, and a particular time at which the sentence 'X is F' is uttered, given that we are presupposing the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, there is one and only one proposition such an utterance may express.
Call F relative if different propositions can be so expressed, depending on contextual information not available from the utterance alone.
The point to be made here is that the sort of ascriptions of moral obligation I am talking about are absolute -- not relative. For example, the proposition expressed by any utterance of 'Mary has a moral obligation to care for her mother' is unique given the referent of 'Mary' and the time of utterance.
Many people are relativists and would object to the stipulation just made. Relativists are usually subjectivists also in the sense of 'subjectivist' to be given in the next section. Let us therefore leave discussion of the subjectivist-cum-relativist till then.
It is not uncommon for people to use 'objective' and 'subjective' in the way that I have used 'absolute' and 'relative' in section 1.4 above. However, it is common also for 'objective' and 'subjective' to be used to distinguish between two sorts of values. Subjective values are taken to be personal preferences or values which are a function of personal preferences, for example, the value of goods in a marketplace.
Objective values, on the other hand, are taken to have an existence which is logically unrelated to personal preferences. Thus aestheticians may debate whether the beauty of a sunset is to be equated with the preference most people would show for that sort of visual stimulation, or whether that beauty would be there even if there were no people to think about it; that is, whether the beauty is objective.
The senses of 'morally right', 'morally wrong', 'morally good', and 'morally bad' with which this essay is concerned will be objective.
By 'moral nihilism' I shall therefore mean the belief that there are no objective moral values. Some would interpret Hobbes (The Leviathan) and Hume (Treatise of Human Nature) as being moral nihilists in this sense, and the appellation would apply also to such modern philosophers as Hector Monro [23] and John Mackie [24]; though Hector Monro, who uses moral terms subjectively, may not be content with that way of describing himself.
Clearly, if what is morally right or wrong is an objective matter, then so is the matter of who has what moral obligation. For one's actions will be morally right if they are in accord with one's moral obligations and morally wrong if they are not.
If readers were to think, at this stage, that the difference between the subjectivistcum-relativist, on the one hand, and the objectivist-absolutist-nihilist, on the other, is merely an uninteresting verbal matter of no substantial consequence, they would be wrong. It is true that the world-view of the subjectivist-cum-relativist often coincides with that of the absolutist objectivist nihilist in one important respect -- a disbelief in objective absolute moral values. Indeed it is frequently the case that a disbelief in absolute objective moral values is conducive to the adoption of a subjectivist or relativist semantic theory. Why is this so? To answer this, we must first distinguish between subjectivism and relativism taken as descriptive theories of the semantics of ordinary moral discourse, on the one hand, and subjectivism and relativism taken as prescriptions concerning what we should mean by our moral terminology, on the other.
Let us first discuss the descriptive theories. Of course neither subjectivism nor relativism, taken as descriptions of ordinary moral discourse, are logical consequences of moral nihilism. What would make these positions plausible, given nihilism, is the extra premise that most users of moral discourse are also moral nihilists -- disbelievers in absolute objective moral values. If moral discourse entails the existence of moral values, and most users of moral discourse do not believe in either absolute or objective moral values, then the moral values they are talking about, given their sincerity, must be neither absolute nor objective.
However, it is just this extra premise that is crucial to the difference between the absolutist-objectivist view of the moral society and the subjectivist-relativist view of the society. Clearly, the matter is not merely a verbal issue. It is a matter of primary importance in the sociology of morality. A society in which most people have beliefs in absolute objective values and are anxious for everybody to conform their behaviour to those values is likely to be a very different sort of society to one in which few people, if any, have such beliefs.
The matter is not one to be resolved by armchair discussions between philosophers. The matter is an empirical issue to be resolved by empirical sociological research. Some such research has, in fact, already been done. The study of the moral attitudes and beliefs of people in Sydney, New South Wales, by F.E. Trainer seems to indicate that
... the objectivist view is far more common than the subjectivist view, and that it is a very frequently assumed position. This evidence... reinforces the belief formed early in the interviewing that one of the most notable things about the structure of moral thought is that it is dominated by a (usually vague and implicit) objectivist metaethical position. [25]
Trainer's objectivists, by the way, are also what we here call absolutists, and his subjectivists are also relativists. So if the people of Sydney sampled by Trainer are not morally eccentric, then the subjectivist-cum-relativist is simply wrong to regard his theory as a true, or even approximately true, theory of the semantics of ordinary moral discourse.
Now if one does not understand the moral discourse of others, one is unlikely to understand their intentions in using moral discourse. That is, one is likely to misunderstand the pragmatics of moral discourse. For example, if one believed that moral obligations were, by virtue of the meanings of those terms, what most of the people affected by our acts would want us to do, were they apprised of all the relevant information and were ideally rational to boot, then one might reasonably believe that moral discourse is primarily used in those situations in which people are trying to reach rational social decisions which in some way maximise the satisfaction, in the long term, of all concerned. However, as we shall see in Chapter 4, moral discourse is often used to stifle such attempts at rational social decision.
This is where the prescriber of subjectivism-cum-relativism comes on to the scene. She or he prescribes that we all start talking with a subjectivist-cum-relativist semantics in order to prevent moral discourse from being used in this way -- in order to prevent assertions of intuited falsehoods about alleged absolute, objective moral obligations being used to bring an end to useful social discourse.
However, such a prescription will be like water off a duck's back to the very people that our prescriber is trying to censor. Those who believe that there are such absolute and objective moral obligations and values will, if they have any sanity at all, insist on using a language which is sufficiently rich in concepts to express their beliefs. Furthermore, the conceptual impoverishment prescribed will also inhibit the expression of contrary belief -- the nihilist belief that there are no (absolute, objective) moral obligations or values.
People who use moral terms subjectively in the knowledge that most people do not are akin to those theologians who, like John Robinson in his Honest to God [26], speak of themselves as Christians but interpret religious terms in such a way that, when properly understood, they turn out to believe nothing that a person ordinarily called an atheist would not believe.
It is true that explications, as Rudolf Carnap would have called them [27], which stipulate a revised meaning to terms already in use, can sometimes be useful. Such revisions are not uncommon within the development of scientific concepts, especially when almost all of those who use some descriptive term have come to believe that it no longer describes anything in its original sense. In this way, words like 'atom', electron', 'resistance' and so on have changed their meanings over the years as scientific research has altered the ontological beliefs of the scientific community. These semantic changes would have been pointless if a large proportion of that community had remained committed to beliefs in the existence of the sort of thing that used to be described by the terms in question. For, in that case, people would have wanted to be able to discuss whether or not the things existed, and that would have been difficult if not impossible in the explicated language.
I conclude then that subjectivism-cum-relativism, as a prescription, is so much philosophical pie in the sky. If our wish is to prevent the destruction of rational social decision by moralising, then rather than confuse everbody still further by using moral words with a different meaning, we enter into a discussion of the moral beliefs being asserted, honestly asserting our disbelief in a way in which we shall be properly understood. We say truthfully, in short, that we are moral nihilists and enter into a debate on that issue.
Moral obligations are assumed here to be universalizable. That is, if any particular person had a moral obligation at a particular time and place, then that moral obligation would be an instance of a true moral principle that would apply to any person at any time or place.
As an example, let us assume that Smith had a moral obligation to go home to her husband at five o'clock, whereas Jones would not have sinned had he gone off to the public house at that time. Why should there be such a difference? Because Smith, say, has led her husband to expect that she will return home as soon as possible after work and there is, let us pretend, a moral obligation on everybody at all times to try to satisfy the expectations they have deliberately engendered in others. Jones, of course, has not led anyone to expect anything of him at that time.
Moral rights will also be assumed to be universalisable. Smith's husband had a right to expect her home at five o'clock because (let us suppose for the sake of illustration) anybody has a right to expect someone home at five o'clock if that person has engendered that expectation. Jones' husband had no such right.
There is a common fallacy, particularly within some liberation movements, which comes in the guise of an argument against discrimination between, say, A's and B's (men and women, pigs and human beings, whites and blacks, for example). The person who favours the discrimination is asked to rationalise the discrimination in terms of other properties that A's have or other properties that B's have. So far, so good. Such a question may yield a response which gives us a better understanding of why the person wants the discrimination.
Now occasionally the response is that there are no further properties, C and D, say, such that all A's are C's and all B's are D's and which are the basis for the discrimination. It is just that A's are favoured over B's by virtue of their being A's and by virtue of B's being non-A's.
Now we come to the fallacy -- which is to regard such a response as being either irrational or amoral or both. It need be neither. Indeed, if such a response were either irrational or amoral, it would be a simple matter to push any discriminator into such a response by asking for a rationalisation for the discrimination between C's and D's, and then between E's and F's and so on until the discriminator ran out of ideas and was forced to admit that there was no further rationale in mind which justified the discrimination. Rhetorical ploys of this kind, which tend to leave the respondent speechless, may be good debating tricks; but they are not likely t convert the unconverted who, despite their attitude to women, blacks, Jews, catholic, or animals, may still have a taste for honesty in intellectual discussion.
The fallacy is often thought to be sanctioned by some sort of principle of universalisability, which is why it is mentioned here. There have been some difficulties in formulating various versions of the principle [28], but I do not think that there are any logical difficulties with the principle I have in mind which, put more formally, goes as follows:
If someone X has a moral property M at some time, then there is some property of X, say F, which logically entails neither being M nor being identical to X, but which is such that if any person at any time had F, the they would also have M.
Now, recognising this principle, one might reasonably ask someone for the with which they justify the ascription of M to X; but the principle does not allow one to demand some further property G, non-identical to F, which justifies the ascription of M to all the F's. There may be some such property and discriminators may be able to provide it, but they cannot be accused of irrationality or amorality simply because they are unable to justify their belief that all F's are M's with something of the form 'All F's are G and All G's are M'.
Discrimination is what morality is all about. The whole idea is to provide a rationale for discrimination in favour of certain sorts of acts, people and things are against other sorts of act, people and things. So even if a particular discrimination seems bizarre to the liberationist (or, perhaps, particularly if it seems bizarre) it is not unlikely that the discrimination will have a basis in moral belief. It is ill-conducive to the elimination of discriminations which one dislikes or detests to fool oneself about the rationality or moral fervour of the discriminators. One's chances of bringing about what one takes to be social reform are unlikely to be enhanced by false beliefs about what is going on in the mind of others.
The most distinctive feature of moral obligations is how we are supposed to come to know of their existence. Anything that can be learnt can be learnt from someone who already knows. However, at the beginning of such a chain of education there have to be people who have found out for themselves.
Part of what I shall mean by 'moral obligation' is that any first knowledge of the existence of a moral obligation has to occur via a faculty of conscience, that is, via a sort of sixth sense -- an ability to intuit the moral truths.
For some people, conscience as I have just spoken of it, would be something possessed only by a god. We ordinary mortals would know of our moral obligations only if the god revealed these things to us -- either directly or via a priestly authority. Such beliefs are consistent with the notion of 'moral obligation' being adopted here.
Again, it is consistent with this notion of moral obligation that there is no such thing as a moral conscience in the sense just outlined. Some would claim, and with plausibility, that the only things that can be known by intuition are certain simple so-called analytic truths -- propositions whose truth is a function only of the meanings of the terms used to express them. So-called synthetic propositions, whose truth value is a function, at least in part, of matters other than the meanings of terms, can be known only by sense experience of the world about us.
Such an attitude is often called judgement empiricism. Can one remain a judgment empiricist and still allow the truth of (indeed the analytic truth of) the proposition that if there is any knowledge of the existence of a moral obligation, then that knowledge derives, in part, from the exercise, by somebody or other, of their moral intuitions -- their conscience?
The reconciliation of these two beliefs can proceed in two ways. The first way is to claim that the basic principles of morality are not synthetic but are analytic and hence may be known by logical intuition consistent with the empiricist doctrine. I shall call this belief moral rationalism. John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding held this view of moral knowledge.
The second way is to embrace moral scepticism -- to hold that no moral propositions are known and none will ever be known. The only route to moral knowledge does not obtain in the real world. It obtains only in the imagined possibilities of moral believers. Moral nihilism, of course, would entail moral scepticism, since there would be no moral knowledge if there were no moral truths to know.
Naturalism, the belief that moral knowledge is to be gained by empirical investigations of natural phenomena, is entailed by empiricism conjoined with the belief that there is knowledge of synthetic moral fact. We met with naturalism in section 1.3. Appendix 1 is a discussion of two very popular forms of naturalism. That discussion goes some of the way to justifying the stipulations being made in this present section which rule naturalism out of court. However, the substantive issues about the availability of moral knowledge must await sections 2.6 and 2.7.
Nevertheless, there was a time in the past when Mary could have acted so as to meet Jan as arranged in Melbourne. So 'ought to A' entails, if not always 'can A', 'could have A-ed'.
The point has the following importance. It shows that any moral statement has non-moral worldly consequences. But contrary to what Phillipa Foot seems to be arguing in the first half of her 'Moral Beliefs', [30] the point should give no comfort to naturalists. To assume otherwise is to fall foul of the fallacy of asserting the consequent.
There are two kinds of error which I commonly encounter in discussion about moral statements. The first proceeds as follows. It is pointed out that the words used to morally describe acts, products and people are very numerous and invariably describe non-moral aspects of the world also. It is also pointed out that the whole of the non-moral component of a moral statement cannot be removed to leave a statement which is purely moral in the sense that it has all moral and no non-moral implications. All that is true and indeed follows from what is being said about the non-moral implications of moral statements in this section. But then the conclusion is drawn that moral and non-moral matters are inextricably mixed in the sense that there are aspects of the world which one cannot describe without some moral implications.
This conclusion simply does not follow. Allow that 'flying-horse' statements are those statements which entail the existence of flying horses. Allow also that although the existence of flying horses entails the non-flying-horse statement that there are horses and also the non-flying-horse statement that there are things that fly, all these non-flying-horse statements can still be made truly of the real world. We do not need to believe in flying horses because we believe in the truth of all the non-flying-horse implications of the existence of flying horses.
The second mistake that is commonly made proceeds as follows. It is pointed out that many words, 'pleasant', 'unpleasant', 'kind', 'unkind', 'altruistic', 'affectionate', 'loving', 'hateful', 'hurting', 'loyal', 'honest', 'dishonest', 'trustworthy', 'useful', 'agreeable', 'distasteful', for example, are often used to give an objective evaluation even though these words are purely empirical, having exemplifications that are testable via ordinary observations. It is also pointed out that although a word may have no unempirical semantic aspects, it may still be used evaluatively. The conclusion is then drawn that evaluation is just a matter of use -- that there is no semantic difference that marks evaluative from non-evaluative discourse. Hence there is no need to postulate unempirical ways of knowing evaluative truths.
Of course some evaluative descriptions may be testable in the ordinary empirical ways simply because they are subjective evaluations, that is, statements about personal preferences or statements derivable from such. However, moral statements, as defined in section 1.2, are not of this sort.
Again, it is true that any description whatever can be used to evaluate something objectively, as long as one's interlocutors are committed to the belief that anything of that sort is objectively good or bad as the case may be. People may then validly argue to the objectively evaluative conclusion using the unstated linking premise. It is true also that no amount of such a procedure can give objective evaluative semantic content to any explicitly stated premise which does not have objective evaluative content to start with. Nor can such a procedure detract from the objectively evaluative content of the conclusion.
If affection, kindness and love are not necessarily virtues, it is possible for them to remain exemplified even if there are no virtues. One does not have to be affectionate, kind or loving out of a sense of moral duty. Indeed it is doubtful that one can be so. Neither is it logically necessary that being affectionate, kind or loving is being virtuous. But even if these qualities are not virtues, we may still approve, desire, admire and encourage these qualities in others.
Any contingent statement may be action-guiding. 'There are two metre waves at Noosa Beach' may guide the behaviour of a keen surf-board rider, and 'There is a prima-facie obligation not to inflict pain on others' may also guide the behaviour of someone who wants to be morally good.
However, just as statements about waves would be unlikely to affect the behaviour of one who had no intention of going near the sea, so statements about moral obligations need have no guiding effect on the behaviour of those (let us call them amoral) who have no wish to satisfy any moral obligations. [32]
The prescriptive nature of moral statements in our society is not guaranteed by the meanings of such statements, but rather by the large proportion of people who want to do what is right.
The only semantic truths to be gleaned from this area are that people are morally good in so far as their actions conform with their moral obligations, and that people are morally bad, that is immoral, in so far as their actions do not so conform. (Of course, any moral nihilist, myself included, will not believe in moral obligations, and hence will not believe in morally bad people either.)
Note in passing that what I have called amoral people (who are not necessarily immoral people) may be a very mixed group. Firstly, there are those who believe that they have moral obligations, but are indifferent as to whether or not their actions conform with these supposed obligations. Secondly, there are those who are incapable of wishing to conform their behaviour to any moral beliefs, because they have not the conceptual ability to think of moral matters. Thirdly, there are the moral nihilists, who have the conceptual ability to consider propositions concerning the existence of moral obligations, but who do not believe that there are any mora obligations to which their behaviour may conform.
Note that amoral people may or may not be immoral and immoral people may o may not be amoral, consistent with the stipulations offered here.
By moral person, I shall mean one who believes in moral obligations and who wishes her or his own behaviour, as well as the behaviour of others, to conform to those supposed obligations. A society will be more or less moral, depending on the proportion of its members who are moral. Thus 'moral'. in 'moral person' is here opposed to 'amoral' rather than 'immoral'. If moral nihilism were true, nobody would be immoral, but people could still be moral or amoral.
Note that the amoral person as defined here need not be the 'stereotype from gangster movie' that Bernard Williams lampoons in the first chapter of his book Morality. [33] Nor need it be prudent to treat the amoral person as a 'natural disaster' as Frank Snare has suggested. [34] For all that has been said here, it is perfectly consistent for an amoral person to be kind and intelligent, wanting nothing more than the happiness and optimum satisfaction of all other sentient beings. It is consistent also with the existence of self-righteous terrorists rebelling against what they see as the evils of society, and the existence of moral megalomaniacs who sincerely and successfully preach the moral necessity of acts of genocide.
I suspect that both Williams and Snare are conflating being amoral with being what they believe to be immoral or conversely, being moral in the sense of trying to conform one's behaviour to one's moral beliefs (which may or may not be false) a opposed to being moral in the sense of succeeding in conforming one's behaviour to what, if anything, actually is morally correct behaviour.
The mistake is not confined to philosophers. F.E.Trainer has criticised psychologists of the Piaget-Kohlberg school for importing their own moral beliefs into the, observations of moral (as opposed to amoral) behaviour and their theoretical treatment of those observations. [35] Certainly many psychologists of this school, for example Wilson [36] and Bull, [37] [38] equate moral behaviour and altruistic behaviour. Unkind moral behaviour is ruled out a priori. [39]
However, many an unkind act is done out of a sense of moral duty, and conversely, people from time to time regard themselves as having, forsaken their moral duty in refraining, out of altruism, from inflicting some punishment they regard well-deserved.
The cause of this myopic conflation of morality with altruism or with socialist behaviour seems to be the conflation of moral as opposed to amoral with moral as opposed to immoral. These psychologists have set out to study the development moral (as opposed to amoral) behaviour, but this has become confused with the study of the development of (what they believe to be) moral as opposed to immoral behaviour.
Those who regard moral statements as being prescriptive by logical necessity a falling into a similar error. They do not conflate the possibility of immorality with amorality. Rather, they just deny the possibility of being amoral.
The alleged overriding nature of moral obligations is sometimes used by subjectivists [25] to meet the objection that many personal desires about behaviour are logically unrelated to moral considerations -- for example, the desire to scratch an itch. Desires about behaviour that override other considerations are said to mark out the personal morality of the agent. If we allow that one may be indifferent to one's supposed moral obligations, we are not using 'moral' in this subjectivist sense.
Many nominalists, however, would be concerned about being labelled as a moral nihilist because of their belief that there existed no moral obligations. They might believe that there are many people who are morally obliged to do or refrain from doing this or that, but they would not believe that there existed any moral obligations applicable to these people.
To calm the nerves of any such nominalist reader, I shall stipulate for the purposes of this essay that the existence of moral obligations means merely the existence of people who are morally obliged to do or refrain from doing something.
The logical geography of 'moral' as I use that word and its cognates here, is, of course, not limited to the points made in the last ten sections. There are also the fairly obvious connections between 'moral obligation' and such words as 'evil', 'sin', 'virtue' and 'vice' plus many other logical connections that would not be so obvious. However, I hope the logic that has been given will make the usage in the rest of the essay clear to the reader.
In the next chapter, we move on from these semantic matters to examine the sociology of the moral society.
[1] Trainer, F.E., Dimensions of Moral Thought, New South Wales University Press, 1982.
[2] Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part I, Section 1
[3] Prior, A.N., 'The Autonomy of Ethics', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 38 (1960), pp 199-206
[4] Some of these matters, and others throughout this essay, would not have been considered by the author had it not been for the stimulation of his colleague Andre Gallois.
[5] Foot, Philippa, 'Virtues and Vices' in Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978.
[6] Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, London, Fontana, 1985.
[7] Moore, G.E., Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, 1959, sections 8-9.
[8] Hinckfuss, Ian, 'Necessary Existential Dependence', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 54, 1976, pp. 123-132. My scepticism about these notions has been criticise by Richard Routley in Exploring Meinong's Jungle and Beyond, Canberra, Philosophy Department, RSSS, ANU, p. 289. Routley suggests that the difficulties I encounter in explicating these notions in terms of classical and modal apparatus vanish if one is allowed a neutral logic with relevant entailment. It is true that, even with classical constraints, one can construct modal models in which 'a exists entails b exists' is true. Such a model would be one in which there is no possibility in which a exists and b does not. The question then becomes, 'Does such a model model the logic of any terms a and b such that the item designated by 'a' cannot possibly exist under some other designation where b fails to exist?' I remain sceptical on that issue.
[9] Foot, Philippa, 'Moral Beliefs', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, LIX 1958, pp. 83-104. Reprinted in Virtues and Vices, op cit.
[10] Searle, John, 'How to derive "ought" from "is"', Philosophical-Review 73 (1964), pp. 43-58.
[11] Foot, op. cit.
[12] Hume, loc. cit., [2] above.
[13] Caritt, E.F., Ethical and Political Thinking Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947
[14] Searle, op. cit.
[15] Hare,
[16] Hare,
[17] Hare,
[18] Foot, op cit.
[19] Foot, 'Goodness and Choice', in Virtues and Vices, op. cit.
[20] Phillips, D.Z. and H.O.Mounce
[21] Foot, 'Virtues and Vices', op cit.
[22] Cartwright, R., 'Propositions' in Butler, R.J. (ed) Analytical Philosophy, Oxford Basil Blackwell, 1962.
[23] Monro, D.H., Empiricism and Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1967.
[24] Mackie, J.L., Ethics - Inventing Right and Wrong, Harmondsworth, Penguin 1977 and Hume's Moral Theory, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980.
The non-existence of moral obligations in the sense used here, namely, as obligations which occur, if at all, in a way which is logically independent of human desires an aims, whether self-oriented or other-oriented, is implicit in the teachings of philosophers such as Protagoras, Hobbes, Mandeville, Hume, Nietzsche and more recently John Mackie and John Rawls ('Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory: The Dewey Lectures 1980', Journal of Philosophy, LXXVII, 9, September, 1980), who look on morality as an artifice of human society, rather than an edifice existing independently of human thought and behaviour to which human desire and behaviour ought to conform. The teachings of Protagoras are preserved in the dialogues Plato. The relevant writings of Hobbes, Mandeville, and Hume are to be found D.D. Raphael (ed) British Moralists 1650-1800 vols 1 and 2, O.U.P., 1969. Nietzsche's Geneology of Morals is perhaps the best source of his beliefs in this area. Naturalists such as Philippa Foot who believe that all statements of moral obligations are logically equivalent to prudential statements about human aims and desires, and other moral naturalists, such as John Searle (see section 1.3) who write as if the is-ought gap does not exist, are also implicitly denying the existence of moral obligations in the sense used here -- the intuitionist sense of morality. Such philosophers are akin to those theologians who claim to believe in God, but interpret 'God' in such a way that, when properly understood, they turn out to believe nothing that a person ordinarily called an atheist would not also believe.
Since writing the first draft of this manuscript, my attention has been drawn to an excellent, though as yet unpublished, article called 'Against Ethics' by John P. Burgess of Princeton University. In the essay, Burgess argues for 'amoralism' -- 'the position which rejects the whole institution of morality'. His argument in a nutshell is that there is no reason to believe in objective values and that on the contrary there are good reasons to disbelieve in objective values, and that since morality rests on belief in objective values, it is reasonable to believe that morality rests on falsehoods. That being the case, it is impractical to base one's actions on moral considerations.
Moral nihilists such as Hume, Mackie and Rawls abound, but most of them perversely embrace the institution of morality despite their disbelief. Burgess is a welcome exception to this rule. Mackie, too, began to have doubts about the usefulness of the moral institution shortly before his untimely death. These doubts are expressed in the conclusion of his Hume's Moral Theory, (op cit).
[25] Trainer, F.E., Dimensions of Moral Thought, (op cit), p. 159.
[26] Robinson, John, Honest to God, Philadelphia, SCM Press, 1963.
[27] Carnap, Rudolf, Logical Foundations of Probability, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950, Chapter 1.
[28] See for example John Mackie's Ethics - Inventing Right and Wrong, op. cit., Chapter 4.
[29] I owe this point and the example which follows to Rodney Allen.
[30] Foot, 'Moral Beliefs', op. cit.
[31] See Hare, R.M., The Language of Morals, O.U.P. 1952, or more recently, his Moral Thinking, O.U.P., 1981.
[32] Cf. McNaughton on internalism vs externalism
[33] Williams, Bernard, Morality, Cambridge University Press, 1972.
[34] Snare, Frank, 'Dissolving the Moral Contract', Philosophy, 52, 1977, pp. 301-312. Since writing this, Snare seems to have mellowed a little towards the moral sceptic. See his 'The Empirical Bases of Moral Scepticism', American Philosophical Quarterly, 21, 3, July, 1984, pp. 215-225.
[35] Trainer, F.E., op cit
Piaget, Jean, The Moral Development of the Child, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977. Kohlberg, Lawrence, 'The Development of Children's Orientation Towards a Moral Order. 1. Sequence in the Development of Moral Thought, Vita Humana, 6, 1963, pp. 1-33.
[36] Wilson,J., 'What is Moral Education?' in Introduction to Moral Education by J. Wilson, N. Williams and R. Sugarman, London, Penguin, 1967.
[37] Bull, N.J., Moral Judgement from Childhood to Adolescence, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.
[38] Bull, N.J., Moral Education, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.
[39] P.W.Musgrave's The Moral Curriculum: A Sociological Analysis, (London, Methuen, 1978) does not commit amoral-immoral conflation. However, Musgrave defines morality 'as relating to the principles concerning how we choose to act in situations where there are consequences for others'. As Musgrave realises, this definition is too broad. Principles concerning how we choose to act where there are consequences for others may be prudential as well as moral. 'Kill as many of the enemy as possible' may be a good principle to adopt if you want to win battles, but it is not a moral principle. Again, the principle 'Honesty is the best policy' may or may not be a moral principle, depending on whether 'best' is to mean 'morally best' or 'best for achieving the respect and co-operation of one's fellow citizens'. Again as Musgrave realises, his definition is also too narrow on two counts. It does not cover such possibilities as moral obligations towards animals, nor does it cover such self oriented acts as masturbation which are often regarded as immoral.
The sociologist E. Durkheim (Moral Education, New York, Free Press, 1961, p 30: has correctly said that 'an act is not moral, even when it is in substantial agreement with moral rules, if the consideration of adverse consequences has determined it' that is, if it has been determined by prudential considerations alone whether self-oriented or other oriented. Brian Cheers (Ideology in the Helping Process, Bundoora, Preston Institute of Technology Press, 1978, p.5) says that a moral issue is any question to which there are alternative answers available which cannot be comparatively evaluated by recourse to empirical enquiry. This again is too broad. One common reason why the answers to some questions cannot be evaluated by empirical enquiry is that they presuppose falsehoods. Thus no amount of empirical enquiry can establish the average height of twelfth century gnomes, if there were no gnome, about in the twelfth century; yet the average height of twelfth century gnomes is not a moral issue. If the moral nihilist is right in saying that there are no mora obligations, the unavailability of empirical tests for morally sound behaviour is explicable in the same way. However, Brian Cheers' analysis nevertheless correctly places a limit on the nature of moral issues.
J.Wilson (op cit, pp. 192-4) seems to treat the business of moral education as the business of making people more socially acceptable, and the sociology of morality a the business of finding out what this amounts to. He defines moral development ii terms of the development of certain psychological abilities such as what he call PHIL (the degree to which one can identify with others) EMP (the ability to judge other people's feelings), CIG (the ability to have a reasonable idea of what consequences one's actions will have) and so on. However, a person could be quite amoral and possess all these skills.
Such research may be relevant to morality, but it is inclined to miss those social relationships which are specifically moral among the not necessarily moral factor such as altruism, fear of sanctions, the maximisation of co-operation and probably a host of other causes of inter-personal behaviour.
[40] See, for example, Monro's Empiricism and Ethics (op cit)
[41] 1 was stimulated to write this section by a discussion with Richard Routley as we strolled through an existent jungle at Tambourine.