Murphy and Moral Law

A moral law expresses a governing relationship between two properties, P and Q.  It is not the law itself that governs P or Q.  Rather, a moral law is an expression of the governing relationship P has over Q, with P morally selecting Q to be performed. It is the governing relationship that’s central to moral law, not that a law itself governs.

On Natural Law, it is the good itself that fixes what is wrong, that calls the shot.  So it fulfills the role of P.  The goods generate the laws by selecting properties, and these selections of properties are what explains the wrongness of certain actions.  This makes Natural Law an axiologist theory: Value concepts are basic and deontic concepts are derivative.

Moral laws explain moral facts.  A moral fact is something like “Bob shouldn't disrespect the good.”  Moral laws are not moral facts.  For a moral law is an expression of a relationship between a property, “goodness,” selecting for other properties, “must be respected.” This explains the moral fact of why Bob should not disrespect the good.  So the good calls the shots, selecting the proper responses to it.  This relationship results in an expression of moral law.  And moral facts are then explained by the moral law.

Hume's Law

I think I’ve finally settled on a position in regard to Hume’s Law.  There is a version of it that is true, but it has much less import than many philosophers seem to think.  The version that I affirm is weak.  It can’t do the work that many wish it to do - it can’t be used to support non-cognitivism, nor the fact-value distinction, at least insofar as that distinction tries to banish values from the realm of fact.

I think, along with Pigden, that Hume’s Law is an instance of the more general logical principle that one cannot “get out” of a conclusion what one has not put into the premises.  If there is no normative content in a premise, then the conclusion will have no normative import.  

So yes, one can indeed not move from purely descriptive premises to a normative conclusion. This requires the natural lawyer to employ the use of Bridge Principles, to move between descriptions of what constitutes human flourishing to normative claims that we ought to support human flourishing.  Murphy’s Real Identity Thesis and Oderberg’s belief that nature has built-in normativity or values are examples of such bridge principles.  The New Natural Lawyers tend to affirm Hume’s Law.  Robert P. George and Patrick Lee both affirm it, for instance. Plus Mark Murphy’s use of the Real Identity Thesis seems predicated on the truth of this version of Hume’s Law and seems to be offered as a bridge principle to cross the fork. 

But there’s a stronger version of Hume’s Law, one that many believe supports non-cognitivism, banishing values and normativity from the realm of fact entirely.  The philosopher Russ Shafer-Landau provides a relatively common formulation:  

When we describe the world, we talk about what is the case.  But morality speaks of what ought to be the case.  How can we get from descriptions to prescriptions?  How does knowing how the world actually works enable us to learn how it ought to work?  Hume thought that there was no answer to this question.  If he is right, there is a gap between what is and what ought to be, a gap that can never be crossed.

So we can distinguish two versions of Hume’s Law:

Weak Version:  You can’t derive an ‘ought’ from purely descriptive premises.

Strong Version: You can’t derive an ‘ought’ from any descriptive premises.

The Strong Version seems to be false.  Here’s a counter-example to it:  “There is an obligation.”  This is a descriptive statement, for it’s describing what there is.  And from this descriptive statement, I can infer that I ought to do something. So, contra Hume’s Law as described by Shafer-Landau, we can indeed move between ‘knowing how the world works’ to ‘how it ought to work.’ So I can indeed derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’  And here’s the thing:  If moral realism is right, then something like this descriptive statement is true.  If there are no statements like this that are true, then moral realism is false.

Again, if the Strong Version of Hume’s Law is right, then you cannot derive an ought from any descriptive premise, including the one just given.  But that seems clearly false with this example.  Why? Due to normative entanglement.  Though the statement is descriptive, it contains a normative element.  And since the normative element has been “put in,” you can get it out with the conclusion. 

Pruss and Beauty

Heavily Pruss Dependent:  

An often cited example in support of subjectivism is the idea that in some cultures what counts as beautiful isn’t considered beautiful in other cultures.  The long necks of the Padaung are beautiful to members of that culture but not to Americans.  This seems to intuitively support the relativity of beauty judgements.  But consider the following example:  In visible light, Van Gogh’s paintings are beautiful - but not so much under x-ray.  We don’t think that this implies relativism.  Why not? What’s different about the two cases?  In both cases, for beauty to be appropriately perceived, you must possess the necessary context and perceptual apparatus.  But once you have that apparatus, you will - presumably - find these cases beautiful.  So while there’s a sort of relativism present in both cases, there’s also an absolutism.  

Still, there also seems to be the possibility that the Padaung are in error about their judgment.  But this supports absolutism, for one cannot be in error about their judgements of beauty if beauty judgements are relative. 

From these considerations, Pruss argues that beauty has both a relativistic and absolutist element.  There may not be one objective beauty for humans, angels, and vulcans.  But so long as Bob, Sally, and Daryl are humans, there is one beauty for them.  So beauty is relativized to the kind of thing something is - mixed with a proper function account.  If a member of a kind is properly functioning, then it will find beautiful what that kind considers beautiful.  

For something to be objectively beautiful, it is true regardless of human opinion, feelings, beliefs, or experience.

For something to be subjectively beautiful, it is only true because of human opinion, feelings, belief, or experience.

If we let in too much subjectivism, then we cannot admit the possibility of bad taste and error.  It seems possible that someone is wrong about what they consider to be beautiful.  But societal subjectivism isn’t right either, for then when one is admiring a proof or painting, then it ceases to be beautiful if society happens to change its mind behind your back.  So that seems wrong.  Plus this strong subjectivism doesn’t seem to make much sense of the importance of beauty.

Some further arguments against the subjectivity of beauty:  If beauty were just the pleasure and appreciation experienced by those who behold the beautiful object, “then Renoir would have done something in every way more valuable had he made his paintings somewhat less beautiful (say, 20% less beautiful, if that makes any sense) but worked to ensure that they would have twice as many viewers. That is absurd. Furthermore, although this intuition is not shared by all, it appears wrong to me to destroy a beautiful vase for no good reason even if nobody would ever again see it.”

But too much objectivism doesn’t seem to work either.  For what a human finds beautiful may not be beautiful to a vulcan.  Perhaps vulcans only see in infra red, and even though a human will find Van Gogh’s paintings beautiful, a vulcan cannot properly appreciate it.  

So it seems that we need a mix of subjectivism and absolutism or objectivism.  The beautiful is relative to kinds, and properly functioning members of a kind will find beautiful what that kind finds beautiful.  We get absolutism in that individual relativism is ruled out and in that there is a proper function for individuals.  

There is a stance dependence to beauty, but it’s an absolutist kind of stance dependence. Beautiful simpliciter is what is beautiful relative to some kind or other. For every kind of beauty, there is a kind of being that appreciates it.

Motivation and Reasons Externalism

Humean Theory of Reasons (HTR):  Reasons reduce to desires.

Also known as Reasons Internalism.  If a person doesn’t have a desire for something, then they have no reason to do it.

Humean Theory of Motivation:  Desires are necessary and beliefs are not sufficient for motivation.  Beliefs cannot motivate on their own.

It seems to follow that if one has no desire to do A then one has no reason to do A.  

Shafer-Landau holds that these theses lead to the Non-Cognitivist Argument for moral anti-realism: 

1. Necessarily, if one sincerely judges an action right, then one is motivated to some extent to act in accordance with that judgment. (Motivational Judgment Internalism)
2. When taken by themselves, beliefs neither motivate nor generate any motivationally efficacious states. (Motivational Humeanism)
3. Therefore, moral judgments are not beliefs. (Moral Non-cognitivism)

We can deny 1 or 2.  A person can make a sincere moral judgment and be left cold and unmotivated to perform it - this requires the possibility of the amoralist.  Or, beliefs can motivate all by themselves - perhaps normative type beliefs?  Kant took this option. 

Moral Rationalism:  If something is morally wrong then that entails that there is a reason not to do it.

Philippa Foot denied Moral Rationalism in rejecting Categorical Imperatives.  She would hold that what Hitler did was wrong even though he had no reason not to do it.

Moral Absolutism: Some actions are morally wrong for any agent no matter their desires or motivations. 

If we take HTR, Moral Rationalism, and Moral Absolutism, we get the Central Problem:
It was wrong for Hitler to commit genocide, even if it was his desire.
If, as MR holds, its wrong for Hitler to commit genocide only if there’s a reason for him not to do it, and
If, as HTR holds, there is a reason for him not to do it only if he has some desire against it,
Then it follows that whether an action is morally wrong for an agent depends on what he desires.
But that contradicts Moral Absolutism.

And this is the central problem.  So we must reject HTR, Moral Rationalism, or Moral Absolutism.  

I think we should reject HTR.  An agent can have a reason to do something whether or not he desires it.

If one admits Categorical Imperatives and Moral Rationalism, then they are committed to Reasons Externalism.

If one admits that moral beliefs can be non-motivating, then they are motivation externalist.  They believe the amoralist is a possibility.

Murphy on Mackie's Queerness Objection

An excerpt from Murphy's Natural Law and Practical Reason: 

The ontological worry about substantive theories of rationality is that the notion that there are independent reasons waiting to be grasped by agents is just too Platonically lush to endure.  In addition to our ordinary world of experience, there is an extra realm of things, reasons, which are quite unlike the usual things that we deal with.  But the real identity thesis along with the analogy to first- and third-person judgments on which it is based, suggests that this is but one, not terribly charitable, way to describe the situation presupposed by the defender of a substantive view of rationality.  When I say that it is straightforwardly true both that I am in my office and that Murphy is in his office, I am not committing myself to the existence of two worlds, the ordinary world, describable in a third-person way, and a peculiar, shadowy first-person world, in which there is a strange thing called 'I.'  Rather, there is but one world, which can be described in one way using indexical concepts and another using non indexical concepts.  When I say that it is straightforwardly true that there reasons for action, that certain states of affairs are goods, thing that make agents better off, this does not - if the real identity thesis is true - require me to say that there is another realm, in addition to the ordinary world with which we are acquainted; rather, I am speaking of a certain aspect of reality using normative rather than nonnormative, practical rather than theoretical, concepts.

Is RIT Necessary?

Thinking a bit more deeply about Murphy’s relationship to Pruss, it now seems to me that RIT is not necessary for a Pruss-style argument.  To see this, here’s a proposal for how a Murphy-style and Pruss-style argumentative framework against homosexual activity may (very broadly) go:

Murphy-Style Argument: 
1. Marriage is an aspect of human flourishing
        (Discoverable via theoretical reasoning)
2. We are obligated to not undermine aspects of human flourishing.
        (RIT)
3. Homosexuality undermines marriage and is not itself an aspect of flourishing.
(Theoretical reason?)
C1. So homosexual behavior is wrong.

vs.

Pruss-Style Argument:
4.  We should love everything appropriately.
(Intuitively known norm?)
5.  What counts as appropriate depends upon the nature of the patient
(Theoretical reason and the definition of love--union and goodwill)
6.  Homosexual behavior is inappropriate given human nature.
(Theoretical reason)
C2.  So homosexual behavior is immoral as it violates the norm to love everything appropriately.

Premise (2.) seems reliant on a RIT sort of move, or at least seems best supported by a RIT sort of move.  Aspects of human flourishing provide us with normative reasons to promote and pursue them.  But it doesn’t seem to me that Pruss’s argument needs RIT.  Which premise would depend upon it? (perhaps premise (5.)--more below) These two argumentative styles diverge on the source of normativity.  Do the goods themselves generate normative reasons to pursue them?  Or does a master rule, like the norm to love everything, give them their normative power?  I think Murphy’s argument falls more in line with the former, and Pruss’s with the latter.   (It's not even clear that these two approaches are opposed to one another in terms of ontology. The different styles could be reflective of merely an argumentative strategy.)

Premise (5.) best mirrors the more classical style of argument given by Murphy.  Still, I think it can work on a weaker principle than RIT, which I’ll call the Combination Principle.

Combination Principle:  It’s possible for an action that would otherwise be morally insignificant to gain moral significance in light of the nature of some agent P.  Imagine that P cannot make a statement of C-type without, from the necessity of P’s nature, subsequently lying.  C-type statements may not be wrong for any other types of agents other than P, but they are morally wrong for P in light of P’s nature.

Note: Values still have a place in the Pruss approach, they just aren’t playing the normative role they usually play in Natural Law.  We are to respond lovingly to the good, and this is how the goods exercise their normative force.

Outline of Ch. 1 of Natural Law and Practical Rationality

This is an outline of the first chapter of Mark Murphy’s book Natural Law and Practical Rationality.  It is a selectively interested outline, leaving out the details of many arguments of which I have little interest.  This is a part of a larger project to get a better grasp on Natural Law metaethics and its use by Alexander Pruss in practical ethics, especially in regards to sexual practical ethics.

I.  Ch. 1:  The Real Identity Thesis

    A. Definitions:  

Practical judgement = a judgment about what ought to be done.

Theoretical Judgment = a judgement about the way things are in fact.

    B. The Epistemic Problem; How are practical judgements known to be true?

i. Inclinationist:  Practical judgements are known immediately and in a non-derived way.  They may be occasioned by inclinations towards goods.  No practical judgements can be drawn from non-practical judgments.  

a.  Hume’s law is the driving principle behind this principle.

                        b.  They reject, however, the reduction of value to sentiment as exemplified by Hume.

c.  John Finnis, Girgis, Robert George, represent this strand.

ii. Derivationist:  More standard for the old style of Natural Law.  Practical judgments can be drawn from non-practical, theoretical judgments.  By examining the nature of humans, we can discover what the good of humans consists of.

a.  David Oderberg and Ed Feser represent this strand.

    C. Problems with both the Inclinationist and Derivationist positions

i.  Problems for Derivationist: (a) The first problem with the derivationist is obvious.  Hume’s law seems correct and the derivationist violates it and  (b) The derivationist also seems to give an inadequate account of the basic nature of moral knowledge possessed by most people.

ii. Problems for the Inclinationist: The non-co-assertability problem, which is the difficulty of holding both (a) the idea that practical judgements are known in a non-derived sense and (b) the idea that goods are grounded in a strong sense in human nature.  If (b) is weakened too much, Inclinationism would no longer count as a NL position.  In other words, the Inclinationist is in tension with the central driving claim that natural law is based in human nature.

This difficulty, however, is less of a direct rejection of Inclinationism and more a challenge for it, which Murphy strives to answer in the next section.  

    D. The Real Identity Thesis Stated

i. Desirables: 

(a) Preserve the basic accessibility of normative truth for the non-theoreticians 

(b) Preserve Hume’s Law 

(c) Preserve a tight and distinctive connection between the natural law and human nature.

ii.  An analogous model for the relationship between practical and non-practical judgements: Indexicals.  Consider the relationship between indexical statements and non-indexical statements: “I am in the office,” vs “Daryl Cotton is in the office.”   

a.  The one statement is not deducible from the other, paralleling Hume’s law.

b.  Yet the connection between the two is extremely tight, satisfying one of our desiderata.  The very same state of affairs is the truth-maker for both claims, which is my actually being in the office.

a.  It’s possible to know one of the statements above without knowing the other.  This can offer a parallel to the possibility of knowing only half of the non-practical vs practical judgements.  

iii.  If the relationship between practical and non-practical judgements are similar to the indexical case, then it seems we may have a bridge by which to understand how the two types of judgements can relate and shed light on one another.  Natural law and judgements about human nature may refer to the same state of affairs and are made true by the obtaining of the same state of affairs; these judgements differ because the former are formulated by practical reason and the latter by theoretical reason--and perhaps, once we become aware of the precise nature of the connection between these types of judgements we may be able to use this information to argue in a justifiable way from judgements of one type to judgements of the other type.

iv.  Why think this model is correct, though?  We need to: 

a. Identify which theoretical judgments we propose to connect with the principles of natural law and 

b. Provide grounds for supposing that the practical and theoretical judgments are made true by the same state of affairs.  

c. There is such a set of truths knowable by theoretical reason that affirms the existence of human flourishing and what the aspects of it are, 

d. There are strong reasons to suppose that such a set will also be grasped by practical reason as a good worth having.  

v. The Real Identity Thesis (RIT): States of affairs understood by theoretical reason as aspects of flourishing are identical with states of affairs understood by practical reason as goods worth having.   

vi. What relevance would RIT have on justifying an account of the basic goods?  If RIT is correct, then it can find a place for both practical and theoretical judgements in accounting for the natural law.  Given independent, theoretical access to the nature of human flourishing and the affirmation of RIT, we can conclude that those states of affairs that are grasped as aspects of human flourishing are goods worth having.  Vice versa.

E.  The Function Argument

i. Murphy argues here that Humans have a function from the fact that systems in our bodies have functions..  He then further argues that our function as humans is to flourish.   

    F.  Epistemic problem again: How do we know what human flourishing consists in?  

i. Mentalism:  Human flourishing consists in satisfying human desires.  We have easy access to what we desire, so the epistemic problem isn’t hard.  Absurd conclusions can result from this position, however. So reject.

ii. Statistical Normalcy:  Whatever is most prevalent among a kind sets the criteria for flourishing among that kind.  But it’s possible for a defect to be the most statistically common: It’s possible that every panda has its right ear removed, but that won’t constitute flourishing for pandas.  This shows statistical normalcy is neither sufficient nor necessary to gauge flourishing for a kind, though it may be suggestive.

iii. By ascribing functions to things we implicity grasp what constitutes flourishing for those things.  This back-and-forth can sharpen each to the point that we can advance in knowledge.  

iv. One way to understand different types of flourishing is to attempt to isolate them by way of imagined malfunctions.  Many of the activities that are included in accounts of human flourishing can plausibly be viewed as such through the application of this method: Imagine what we would say about the seriousness of the malfunctions in the brain that would prevent us from having friendships, or appreciating beauty, or making practical judgements.  Some cases are not merely possible but actual.  And it seems that we recognize that these inabilities count as malfunctions.  So if they are malfunctions, then it is part of our function to have these things, and if they are part of our function to have, then they are part of our flourishing.

G.  Reasons to affirm RIT 

i. Why hold that those states of affairs grasped by theoretical reason are the same as those grasped by practical reason? 

a. Unifying power.  It’s pretty.

b. Both states of affairs that are grasped as aspects of flourishing and the states of affairs that are grasped as goods to be pursued both rely on evaluative concepts.  It seems right that both judgements, if they are identifying the same state of affairs under different senses, should be marked by evaluative judgements.   (NOTE:  Evaluative and "practical" are not synonymous.  "This plant is in good condition" is an evaluative judgement, but not a practical one.  Evaluative concepts can justifiably operate within speculative reason.)

c. Structural Similarity: Some functions are for the sake of other functions, just as some goods are for the sake of other goods.  

d. Epistemic: Inclinationist say that we grasp goods by examining that which we're inclined towards.  This method bears a striking resemblance to the method for determining what a creature's flourishing is by looking at what makes the functions of its parts intelligible.  

        ii.  The above list seems suggestive for affirming RIT, but not sufficient.  

The point of defending RIT is to support the use of a dialectical method for justifying an account of the goods to be pursued that provide fundamental reasons for action.  If a correspondence can be found in listing basic goods that provide practical reasons and seeing what the concept of flourishing gets us, it can offer some prima facie evidence for affirming RIT.  

H.  Similarities with Aquinas

i. Is this account compatible with historical Natural Law as espoused by Aquinas? Maybe.  It seems like it could provide an account for why both Derivationists and Inclinationists interpret Aquinas as their own.  

ii.  Aquinas’s affirming of goodness being identical with being and differing only in sense seems awfully reminiscent of RIT.  

Morality as Evidence for God?

There are four separate ways for a moral argument for God’s existence to work.  

(a) The meta-ethical approach; moral values and/or obligations cannot be adequately grounded apart from a theistic worldview.  This claim has been asserted most forcefully in regards to obligations.  Robert Adams believes that our ought terms are irreducibly social and require a superior to ground them, and that God best fits this role.  There are also attempts, namely by William Lane Craig, to argue that moral value is best accounted for in a theistic universe.  I think that he’s right about this claim, but it’s difficult to show it.  There are a few routes of escape for atheistic moral realists:  Morality can reduce to pragmatic value.  Morality can be a Platonic universal.  Morality, concerned as it is with necessary truth, requires no explanation.  Morality is brute.  Morality can be generated from rational agents (conventionalism?).  Moral value reduces to a natural property (pleasure? happiness?).  Each of these suggestions I take to have problems, but it’s going to take an involved and lengthy argument to answer each one of them.

(b) The epistemological approach:  Theism best accounts for how we have true moral beliefs.  Platonism, if construed as belief in abstract objects, struggles to explain how we can make epistemic contact with an object that lacks causal powers.  Evolution, too, would seem to endanger at least some forms of secular ethics:  Evolution isn’t aimed at bringing about true moral beliefs, it’s guided towards survival.  So evolution without further explanation seems like it may undermine moral beliefs.  Theism has a ready explanation.  Our God is a good agent and would be interested in making sure agents that he creates would have access to moral truth.  

(c) The accountability approach:  This would be Kant’s argument.  Our moral system calls out for evil to be punished and virtue rewarded.  If atheism is true, many such cases will go unrewarded and unpunished.  But not on theism. God will make sure all wrongs are righted and all rights rewarded.

(d)  Indirect Argument Approach:  These are sort of hodge-podge.  They’d best fit in the meta-ethical category, but their nature is so occasional that I think that they deserve their own.  This category would include Robert Adam’s suggestion that our detection of excellence in the world seems to rely on an intuition that we’re comparing various excelleneces to a transcendent excellence, which would be God.  Maybe.  Adams also suggests that theism is able to maintain the Critical Stance in a way that naturalism in ethics cannot.  I don’t understand this suggestion, so it carries no weight for me. 

My favorite of the indirect approaches is newly emerging work from Alexander Pruss.  He argues that natural law is the best metaethical account and that natural law metaethics requires theism to be cogent.   See my earlier post “Rambling about Metaethics” to see this approach.

God is the Good

A central driving belief of the western theistic tradition is that God is the Good.  We see this claim in Augustine, Aquinas, and all the way to Robert Adams.  It derives from one prominent strand in Plato, that which takes the Forms to be exemplars rather than abstract universals.   Despite my interest in preserving central intuitions and claims of classical theism, this particular claim has always puzzled me.  What does it mean to say that something is the Good? 

I think this puzzlement tracks back, at least partially, to the fact that good is an ambiguous term.  It can mean prudential goodness, that is, something that is good for well-being or instrumentally good for.  Good can denote an emotive property, like when someone hears that their favorite basketball team won and exclaims, “Good!.” Clearly none of these uses are meant by the claim that God is the Good.

So what is meant?  I take it that the best account for the claim that God is Good is that it’s equivalent to saying that God is all-value.  “Goodness” as used in this claim merely denotes valuableness, and the claim that God is “the” Good is the further claim that he’s all-value.  Wait. Hold on.  This is still extremely puzzling. If God is all-value simpliciter, then what about other things that are clearly valuable?  The Mona Lisa, for instance.  Isn’t it valuable? And it clearly isn’t God.  So God is not all-value.  There are other things that have value.

The Mona Lisa is valuable because it resembles God.  Donating to orphans is good because it reflects the goodness of God.  Humans are valuable because we participate in the goodness of God.  These three terms are after the same idea.  (Clearly the Mona Lisa doesn’t look like God in a literal pictorial sense.  Perhaps it resembles God in a way that both are beautiful, even though they are not beautiful in the same way.)  The point of these terms is that creaturely goodness is merely reflecting back the goodness of God.  It doesn’t stand on its own.  These terms are themselves somewhat ambiguous, but I think they can do some work if we can give some sort of explanation of the terms.  I think the following analogy goes some way towards that goal.

Imagine a person who has proven a complex theorem in mathematics.  If that person shares the proof for the theorem with someone else and that person understands the proof, then the original person’s justification for believing the theorem has been duplicated.  There’s another case of unique and distinct justification in the world.  Now consider the case where you just tell another person that you’ve proven the theorem, but don’t provide the proof.  They accept the theorem on the basis of your testimony and not on the basis of the proof.  This would be a case where there’s more justified believers, but not more justification.  It’s a derived justification, not another case of justification alongside the original justification.  This story parallels the Mona Lisa case.  The goodness of the Mona Lisa is a derived or participated goodness in God, and not another separate instance of goodness.

Perfect being theology offers us reasons to accept this sort of story.  That which is not only good in itself but is the source of any goodness of other things is greater than that which is simply good in itself, and God is the greatest possible being.  So God is the source of all other goodness in other things. 

Phenomenal Conservatism and the Argument from Morality

I’ve never been a big fan of the standard argument for theism from morality, the one that argues that the existence of morality requires the existence of God.  But I think there are decent arguments that show that morality is a better fit in a theistic universe.  What do I mean by better fit? Quite a number of things.  For one of them, consider a story told by Phenomenal Conservatives that aims to justify moral realism.  

PC:  If some thing p seems to be the case, then that seemings-to-be gives us prima facie evidence to believe that p.  

Given this principle, a Phenomenal Conservative would argue from: It seems that it’s wrong to wantonly murder children, to; we’re prima facie justified to believe that it’s wrong to murder children.

Of course prima facie justification can be defeated.  We only have ultima facie justification if defeaters are lacking or if they fail.  It’s this stage of the argument that the truth of theism can be of use.  

There are a few alleged defeaters for moral realism, ranging from moral disagreement to evolutionary debunking arguments.  If theism is true, then we have a method open to us that allows us to debunk the evolutionary debunker--it seems plausible that a morally perfect God would want to give his rational creatures a moral sense even if God used evolution to create us.  

So theism allows us to answer at least one powerful and popular alleged defeater for moral realism, edging us a step closer to ultima facie justification. 

Rambling about Metaethics

This post will be less apologetic focused than most (though there is a sort of indirect argument for theism that will make an appearance).  It’s also over an area that I have very little confidence to discuss. But in an attempt to get my bearing on the field I’d like to get some of my thoughts down on paper.  It will be mostly a sketch.  If anyone feels that I’ve made an error, please correct me.

Whatever metaethical theory we adopt, it should be consistent with the Ultimacy Intuition:

Ultimacy Intuition:  Whatever is not God is created by and depends upon God.

Moore’s O-QA tries to demonstrate the fundamentality of the good, showing that it cannot be reduced to any other more fundamental property.  It probably fails due to Kripke-style arguments.

Reduction: Every moral theory will eventually reach a final stage of explanation that may seem brute and abrupt.  

Natural Law theory holds that our nature determines what is good for us.  Knowledge is good for humans because we have the natural capacity for knowledge and so on.  

Question: Does the good precede the right? 
On NL, the good precedes the right.  Kant would reject this due to some opaque argument about the autonomy of reason.  I still haven’t been able to grasp how that argument is supposed to work.  
Many philosophers seem to think that a rejection of the right preceding the good leads to consequentialism.  NL claims otherwise, holding instead that the right moral rules are generated by the basic goods of human nature in a non-consequentialist way (the incommensurable thesis?).

Why hold to NL?

1. It explains Mersenne problems in ethics.  (Our natures are essential features of us.  Essential features seem to require less of an explanation than features that are non-essential.  Or God decides our features and this just gives us a single brute fact rather than a multitude of them.)
2. Closeness Principle: It locates moral norms in an appropriately close way to us.  They’re not far off and external, like a command.
3. Kind Relative: It would provide differing moral norms for intelligent sharks, which seems right.
4. Objective: Yet it’s still objective and controlling for each individual, contra relativism. 
5. Epistemic Claim: It provides an easy path of knowing moral noms:  Statistical evidence.
6. Supervenience-Intuition?--Normative truths supervene on the non-normative.
7. Plausible normative implications (contra Utilitarianism?).

Question:  Is this consistent with an EoL?  See Pruss.

NL Requires Theism (Pruss thinks so)

1. Evolutionary history seems to violate the closeness principle.  Need alternative story.  
2. Why are there not conflicting norms within individuals?  We need an explanation.  Because God providentially ordered it that way.
3. Why do natures not include really nasty features?  Because our forms are ways to participate in God, and there’s no way to participate in God in an evil way.

The basic argument for theism being given here is indirect.  It goes something like:

1. We should adopt the best metaethical account available.
2. The best metaethical account is Natural Law.
3. Natural law requires theism.
4. We should adopt theism.  

But why would God choose the natures we have? Wouldn’t that introduce Mersenne problems?  (a) Free choice or (b) incommensurable reasons that do not have arbitrary parameters.

Aside from Pruss, it otherwise seems like NL is a relatively secular theory.  If so, this may imply that the theory violates the Ultimacy Intuition.  The goods of being a human seem to make no reference to God.  Are the goods of humans independently sovereign and would they be good even if God failed to exist?

One way to approach this problem is to say that the goods of humans are just a specification of God’s goodness.  When we say that it’s good to possess knowledge as a human, we’re saying that it’s good to participate in God’s goodness qua human rationality.  That would enable the theory to uphold the Ultimacy Intuition.  This is the approach of both Pruss and Mark Murphy.  Mark Murphy calls this Moral Concurrentism, drawing from the theological position of the same name.  To better understand this we probably need to make sure we also understand concurrentism.  

But the suggestion makes reference to a vague concept, participation.  What does it mean?  Given that its use in NL is a Thomistic suggestion, it does not mean what Plato meant by it.  

As far as I can tell from my study of Aquinas, this is the best account I can give of the concept: 

Participated existence = an effect having a share of the cause plus it having the cause as an exemplar (created properties might turn out to all be deep down relational properties, Leftow for this).  Anything that possesses some trait p (existence, or whatever) but does not possess p to the fullest universal extent is participating in that trait.  Participation is just a weak term of negation.  It means ~simple.  Simple here means essence=existence.  Any essence that is not simple instead has participated existence.

Switching gears;

Parfit is not a naturalist. But he is a reductionist.  He thinks that the concept “good” just means “reason to prefer.” Buck-passing account.  Reasons for Parfit are objective and external to the human mind, can take a truth value, but they do not have an ontology.  Reasons to believe are a species of moral reasons more broadly, and if we accept the former then that gives an argument for the existence of the latter. Why does he believe that these reasons are the reasons?  Why not other reasons?  Are they necessary?  Parfit’s approach reminds me of WLC’s response to the Platonic challenge to theism.  

It seems that the theistic tradition has a strong impulse to say that God is the Good.  Does Parfit’s approach enable us to say this?  Saying that God is good just means that there’s reasons to prefer God. Saying that God is the Good means what?  And could Parfit give us an account of participation?  

Five(ish) Dialectical Arguments for Moral Realism

Moral realism holds that there are moral facts and that at least some moral claims are true.  There really is a fact of the matter whether it’s bad to be a racist.  It really is bad to rape someone. 

The truth of moral realism is difficult to show.  This really isn’t as problematic as it may seem at first blush.  Almost everything in philosophy is difficult or impossible to show.  It’s (probably) impossible to demonstrate the reliability of sense-perception.  People usually just come ready-made with their moral intuitions and accept their beliefs in a basic way, that is, without argument.  I’ve argued before that such belief is not problematic so long as there are no overriding defeaters.  But many defeaters for the truth of moral realism have been offered, ranging from arguments that moral judgements are subjective and thus not reflective of an external reality, to the idea that evolution would fail to produce true moral beliefs, to the idea that morality and naturalism are incompatible.  

I don’t think that moral realism can be deduced from some more fundamental truth.  I think it must be defended in a dialectical manner.  

Here’s one example of such a dialectical strategy: We can show that any alleged defeaters for moral realism can also be levied against the reliability of sense perception, and yet we still hold that beliefs based on sense perception are rational, so we should also believe that beliefs based on moral intuition are also justified.  Here’s how this works:  There’s conflict between different sense-observers of some event E, in which the different observers disagree over what they saw.  Yet this does not offer a strong enough defeater to undermine the whole-web of sense perception.  A similar story can be told for moral realism.  We can even (in many cases) explain why such disagreement arose in the case of the different sense observers as well as the different moral observers.  Maybe the sun blinded a quarter of the sense observers, thus explaining their divergent experience.  Maybe the Nazis failed to take into account all the moral data, thus explaining their divergent experience.

Here’s another example of such a strategy: 

We can attack the alternative positions and show that they’re incoherent. This is known as the (non-fallacious) ad-hominem strategy.  This strategy functions as an argument by elimination.  This isn’t the same as establishing the truth of moral realism, it’s merely showing the inadequacy of the alternatives.  So, what's the moral realism's alternative? Moral nihilism, which breaks into two: (a) Error-theory and (b) non-cognitivism.  Error-theory holds that all moral claims are false.  Non-cognitivism holds that all moral claims are just disguised emotions or attitudes and thus not subject to truth evaluation.  Both suffer problems and have strong objections that can be levied against them (see here for an argument against error-theory).  If we succeed in showing that the alternatives are inadequate, this goes some way towards showing that moral realism is rational.  

Another: 

We can reduce the cost of accepting moral realism by accepting a reductionary account of moral claims.  Moral naturalism would be one example of this approach (check out Peter Railton).  Parfit's approach of having moral truth being based on normative reasons that lack an ontology is another.  

And another; 

If it can be shown that God exists, many of the defeaters that are levied against moral realism are weakened.  A theistic universe just seems prima facie more compatible with moral facts than a naturalistic one--some theists even argue that God’s existence is required for certain categories of moral truths, such as obligations and duties.  A theistic universe can offer a very plausible story about how we come to have reliable moral beliefs in a way that evolution struggles to do.  And, a theistic universe allows God to eventually punish and reward moral agents in a just manner.  

Again:

Companion-in-Guilt arguments for moral realism seem quite potent to me.  They rely on a parity between moral reasons and epistemic normative reasons; the idea being that everyone should accept epistemic normative reasons, and in doing so, are committing themselves to the same sort of entity as moral reasons.  I'm thinking this move depends on Moral Rationalism, or the idea that morality reduces to rationality.  

And the final dialectical method available for the moral realists:

Jolt the intuitions of the moral nihilist.  Is it really not wrong for a person to torture and murder a 10 year old child?  Was MLK’s life really wasted--the world really did not improve because of the work that he did?  Was Hitler really no worse than Jesus?  Our intuitions here are as strong as our intuitions that the external world exists.  This experience of moral intuitions counts at least as some sort of justification for believing them.  Phenomenal Conservatives seem to have at least some point to their arguments.

An Argument against Moral Nihilism

The following is an adaption of a friend’s arguments against error-theory.  Error theory is the position that all moral statements are false.  It isn’t the only variant of moral nihilism, but I think it’s the most competent.  If we can give a strong reason to doubt that it’s coherent, that’ll give us a strong reason to adopt moral realism.  

Error-theory: All predications of objective moral value are false.

We can show that this position results in a contradiction.  

1. Assume error theory is true. 
2. Which means that the following is true: If all moral predications are false, and P is some moral predication, then P is false. 
3. Yet if we think that at least some negations of moral predications are themselves moral predications, then we also have that the negation of P is false.   
4.  Error theorist must maintain that all negations of moral predications cannot themselves be moral predications.
5.  But we have a counter-example that shows that a negation of a moral predication is itself a moral predication.  
6.  “P and not P” both being simultaneously true is a contradiction, and any theory that implies a contradiction is false.
7.  Error-theory implies a contradiction, and is thus false.  

But it’s worse than this.  If the error theorist wants to maintain that there is a translation of ¬P that is not a moral predication, he is committed to the position that no proposition of the form ¬P is a moral predication, because otherwise his theory still implies a contradiction. He must then say that propositions of the form “it is not the case that X is morally wrong” are necessarily not moral predications.  

So the error theorist is committed to an even stronger thesis than with which he started: 

Revised Error-Theory (RET): All statements of predication of objective moral value are necessarily false.

RET is the only way to block the negation entailments of moral predications, that is, that “M is not wrong” entails “M is right” are all false.  On its own, this is too strong.   If we even have one counter-example, the theory is defeated.  As shown below, there is a counterexample.  

In support of premise 5, take the following example:

M: It is not the case that it is not permissible to murder.

This seems, on the face of it, to be a moral predication. It asserts that it’s not true that it is impermissible to murder. 
Since M is a moral statement, the error-theorist believes that M is false.  So the error theorist accepts ~M.  Let’s go through the steps here:
~M: It is not the case that it is not the case that it is not permissible to murder
Which means:  It is the case that it is not permissible to murder.
Which obviously is a moral predication.  So we have a counterexample. 

And by modus tollens;

8. If Revised Error-Theory is true, then there are no negations of moral predications that are themselves moral predications.
9.  But ~M is a moral predication that is itself a negation of a moral predication.
10. So Revised Error-Theory is false.