2015-08-21
372
We see that the Eucalyptus leaf is green and oblong when we look at it, and
we taste its bitterness when we put it in our mouth; these properties can affect our sense organs, in ways that make them potential objects of empirical investigation and scientific study.
But the properties involved in moral thought do not in the same way seem
to make a causal difference to our experiences.
We don’t, after all, have any special organs of perception or sensation
that enable us to detect the wrongness of acts of lying[4].
Considerations of this kind make it natural to suppose that the world is devoid
of the evaluative and normative properties that moral thought apparently trades in.
But if there are no evaluative and normative properties in the world, it
seems to follow that moral thought cannot be understood in objective terms.
It does not answer to a set of independent facts about the way things are in the world, since the world as we find it has no place for evaluative and normative
objects and properties.
A second consideration that encourages the subjectivist interpretation concerns
the effects of moral thought on action.
One of the important ways we use moral concepts is in deliberation —
the kind of systematic reflection we engage in when we attempt to get clear about
what we ought to do[5].
In deliberation, we take it for granted that we could choose to act in a number of different ways (keeping a promise or breaking it, say), and we reflect on the
those alternatives, asking, among other things, whether they are morally permissible or required.
The thoughts that figure in deliberative reflection are in this way practical in their subject matter: they are about what to do. But deliberation is practical in a
very different sense as well.
After reaching a conclusion about what they ought to do, those who engage in deliberation often act on the verdict they have arrived at, choosing the option that deliberation has identified to be for the best.
Consider the members of a campus club who, after deliberation, decide
that it is wrong to maintain their secret policy of excluding people from certain ethnic groups, even if doing so would be to their advantage.
(Perhaps there are wealthy benefactors who will stop supporting the group if it becomes more inclusive in its membership.)
Having arrived at this moral conclusion, the club members might adjust their
policies accordingly, opening the club to people from all ethnic and cultural backgrounds because they have come to see that that is the right thing to do.
Moral thought might not have as much influence on action as we would like, but it is at least capable of moving people directly to act. It is thus practical not merely in its subject matter, but also in its effects.
This practical dimension of moral thought appears difficult to make sense of if we understand such thought in objectivist terms.
The judgments that seem paradigmatically about a realm of independent objects and relations do not have this kind of influence on the will.
The thought that fresh beets are available for sale in the local supermarket, for instance,
does not on its own seem able to move us to action one way or another.
To do so, it would need to combine with some distinct attitude on our part, such as
a desire to have roast beets for dinner; if you hate beets, or are simply indifferent to them, then the true belief that you can buy some at the local supermarket will have no effect on your motivations whatsoever[6].
Moral thought, by contrast, seems capable of engaging the will directly, without the addition of attitudes that are extraneous to it.
The conclusion that it is wrong to discriminate against members of certain ethnic groups,
as we saw above, is already apt to move us to action by itself.
It is natural to hypothesize that such conclusions must essentially involve
the subject’s desires or emotions, mobilizing the kinds of subjective attitudes that move us to act.
We might refer to these two lines of thought as the arguments from metaphysics
and from motivation, respectively.
They were both taken very seriously by David Hume, who was led by them to the subjectivist conclusion that morality is more properly “felt than judg’d of”[7].
Hume meant by this that moral deliberation trades in attitudes of emotion or desire of the kind that move us to action, rather than judgments about an independent set of normative and evaluative facts.
This conclusion is an extremely tempting one when we think about moral thought, and
it contains at least a grain of truth.
In the end, however, I don’t believe that we should accept the Humean position.
In support of this claim, I shall begin by considering a simple version of moral subjectivism, and then explore three different ways of refining the position.
A particular crux will be the role of critical reflection in normative and moral thought: its role, that is, as a method of scrutinizing and improving our own subjective reactions.
I shall argue that this is something the subjectivist cannot give an adequate account of.
Perhaps the simplest way to develop the subjectivist idea is to interpret it as a
