Epistemology

Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that there are moral facts. Suppose even that the moral facts are properly thought of as at least compatible with science. One thing Moore’s Open Question Argument still seems to show is that no appeal to natural facts discovered by scientific method would establish that the moral facts are one way rather than another. That something is pleasant, or useful, or satisfies someone’s preference, is perfectly compatible with thinking that it is neither good nor right nor worth doing.

The mere fact that moral facts might be compatible with natural facts does nothing to support the idea that we could learn about the moral facts. David Hume seems to have been, in effect, pressing this point long before Moore, when he argued that no moral conclusion follows non-problematically from nonmoral premises (Hume 1739). No “ought,” he pointed out, followed from an “is”—without the help of another (presupposed) “ought.” More generally, there is no valid inference from nonmoral premises to moral conclusions unless one relies, at least surreptitiously, on a moral premise. If, then, all that science can establish is what “is” and not what ought to be, science cannot alone establish moral conclusions.

But from where, then, can we get the moral premises needed?

Of course no answer is to be found in a claim that certain norms are in force or that a powerful being commanded something since, in both cases, nothing about what ought to be done follows from these claims without assuming some further moral claim (e.g. that one ought to obey the norms in force or that one owes allegiance to the powerful being).

If at least some fundamental moral principles were self-evident, or analytic truths, or at least reasonably thought to enjoy widespread consensus or to be such that eventually all would converge on those principles, there might be some plausible candidates.

Yet the few principles that might be candidates—one ought to treat people with respect or one ought to promote human welfare or, other things equal, pleasure is good—are all either so abstract or inspecific in their implications that they could hardly alone work to justify the full range of moral claims people are inclined to make.

These considerations highlight a crucial difficulty moral realists face even if one grants the existence of moral facts: they need some account of how we might justify our moral claims.

Otherwise, whatever the moral facts are, we would have reasonable grounds for worrying that what we count as evidence for any particular claim is no evidence at all.

In light of this concern, it is worth noting that the challenge posed here for our moral claims actually plagues a huge range of other claims we take ourselves to be justified in making.

For instance, just as no collection of nonmoral premises will alone entail a moral conclusion, no collection of nonpsychological premises will alone entail a psychological conclusion, and no collection of nonbiological premises will alone entail a biological conclusion.

In each case the premises will entail the conclusions only if, at least surreptitiously, psychological or biological premises, respectively, are introduced. Yet no one supposes that this means we can never justify claims concerning psychology or biology. That there are these analogues of course does not establish that we are, in fact, justified in making the moral claims we do.

But they do show that granting the inferential gap between nonmoral claims and moral claims does not establish that we can have no evidence for the moral claims. And they refocus the challenge facing moral realists. Under what conditions, and why, are psychological and biological claims reasonably thought justified? Might similar conditions and considerations hold for moral claims?

At one time, philosophers thought there was a quick and easy answer to these questions, an answer that immediately discredited moral claims. That answer was that in psychology and biology our justifications can and do ultimately ground out in empirical observations, whereas nothing of the kind is available for moral theory.

If true, this would explain in a sharp way why psychology and biology might have a real claim on our opinions while morality and alchemy and various crackpot theories do not. The former can be tested against experience and pass the test, while the latter, while testable, can be seen to fail utterly.

Moral realists have three sorts of reply to the epistemic challenge they face. One is to argue that a proper appreciation of the ways in which all observation is theory laden leaves no real contrast between the observations that support psychology and biology and those that are appealed to supporting moral theories.

As proponents of this view would have it, the process of justifying various scientific theories, which involves moving back and forth between particular specific claims and more general principles seeking a mutually supporting system, is matched step for step by when people develop and defend moral theories. In both cases specific judgments (concerning observations or the badness of a certain act, for instance) are tentatively accepted and an attempt is made to make sense of them by appeal to more general principles that explain the judgments.

When the more general principles are available the specific judgments are taken as evidence for the principles and the principles reciprocate by helping to justify the thought that the specific judgments are accurate. But if no general principles are available the specific judgments are called into question and the suspicion is rightly raised that they might be illusory or misleading. Whether they are taken to be warranted is decided in large part, and rightly, by appealing to other principles that so far have themselves found support in their fit with still other specific judgments. The process is of necessity tentative and piecemeal but it is, many argue, nonetheless no different in science than in morality. All of this is, of course, compatible with thinking the process might end in failure—alchemy and crackpot theories are prime examples of how the attempt to sustain a systematic and mutually supporting set of beliefs can fail. But absent special arguments that morality fails in the way they do, morality no less than psychology and biology can claim that experience may well provide confirmation for our moral claims (Sayre-McCord 1996).

Some moral realists, particularists, reject the general picture of systematic justification just described and yet argue that, when it comes to the role of observation, moral claims are nonetheless actually on a par with non-moral claims (Dancy 1993). According to them, our justification for our particular nonmoral observations depends not at all on our having any sort of articulatable general grounds to offer as support. To suppose otherwise is to succumb to a misguided picture of when and why people are justified in believing as they do concerning what they observe. The situation is exactly the same, particularists maintain, with our moral claims. Here too someone can be perfectly justified in claiming, for instance, that some particular action was wrong or that some response was obligatory, without having articulatable general ground to offer as support. Such moral claims might, of course, still prove to be mistaken, but then the same is true of what people take themselves to have seen.

Another realist reply to the epistemic challenge is to argue that mathematics and logic, not science, are the right models of moral theory (Scanlon 2014). Neither mathematics nor logic, some maintain, rely on experience for their confirmation. They are, instead, supportable a priori by appeal to the nature of the concepts they involve. On this view, a sound defense of the principles we need to ground moral arguments can be found in a suitably subtle and careful bit of conceptual analysis. In light of Moore’s Open Question Argument, those who advocate an epistemology of conceptual analysis acknowledge that the correct analysis, whatever it is, is likely not at all obvious. And, they point out, this means that people who are genuinely competent with the relevant concepts might themselves not recognize the correct analysis as correct (Jackson 1998). Nonetheless, the analysis might be correct. If there is some such analysis to be had, and if it is rich enough to provide the sort of substantive principles needed to underwrite our various particular judgments, realism will have met well its epistemic burden. Of course putting things this way assumes we have a good epistemology of conceptual analysis, which might well be called into question. But worries about conceptual analysis are not specific to morality. And if they prove decisive, then those worries leave mathematics and logic, no less than morals, in need of some grounding or other. Whatever might be advanced on behalf of mathematics and logic, many think, should work as well for morality.

Still another reply, compatible with the first two but relying specifically on neither, shifts attention from science and from mathematics and logic, to epistemology itself. To think of any set of considerations that they justify some conclusion is to make a claim concerning the value (albeit the epistemic as opposed to moral value) of a conclusion. To hold of science, or mathematics, or logic, that there is a difference between good evidence or good arguments and bad ones is again to commit oneself evaluatively. This raises an obvious question: under what conditions, and why, are epistemic claims reasonably thought justified? Whatever answer one might begin to offer will immediately provide a model for an answer to the parallel question raised about moral judgments. There is no guarantee, of course, that our moral judgments will then end up being justified. The epistemic standards epistemology meets might well not be met by moral theory. But there is good reason to think the kinds of consideration that are appropriate to judging epistemic principles will be appropriate too when it comes to judging other normative principles, including those that we might recognize as moral. This means that any quick dismissal of moral theory as obviously not the sort of thing that could really be justified are almost surely too quick.