What does moral phenomenology tell us about moral objectivity?

Social Philosophy and Policy

Volumn 25, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 267-300

  Horgan, Terry ^a   Timmons, Mark ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA   (United States)

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EID: 37349080669     PISSN: 02650525     EISSN: 14716437     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0265052508080102     Document Type: Review

References (79)

1. In Section III below, we discuss the subject matter and method of phenomenology in general, and in Section V, we say more about the subject matter and method of moral phenomenology.
2. Nor have they spent much time grappling with questions about the scope, unity, and distinctiveness of moral phenomenology. One major exception is Maurice Mandelbaum, The Phenomenology of Moral Experience (Glencoe, IL: The New Press, 1955).
3. More recently, we ourselves have broached such questions in Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons, "Moral Phenomenology and Moral Theory," Philosophical Issues 15 (2005): 56-77;
4. and in "Prolegomena to a Future Phenomenology of Morals," Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7, special issue on moral phenomenology edited by Uriah Kriegel (2008).
5. By "introspectively accessible elements" we mean elements that are readily introspectively accessible by people with ordinary introspective acuity - as distinct, for instance, from elements that are introspectively accessible only by people with unusually powerful and accurate introspective skill.
6. We also believe, although we will not argue for this here, that moral experiences in fact do not carry ontological objective purport. But even if we happen to be wrong about this, we still could be right about the Neutrality thesis. The truth of the Neutrality thesis would be enough to undercut the argument from phenomenological introspection, even if that argument's conclusion happens to be correct.
7. Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons, "Nondescriptivist Cognitivism: Outline of a New Metaethic," Philosophical Papers 29 (2000): 121-53;
8. and "Cognitivist Expressivism," in Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons, eds., Metaethics after Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). The construal of moral phenomenology that we will explore below is not ontologically objectivist; nevertheless, it does recognize and accommodate phenomenological features of direct moral judgment that count intuitively as objective. See Section X below.
9. Of course, if cognitivist expressivism cannot accommodate the phenomenological data, and if no other metaethical view that rejects ontological objectivism can do so either, this does not yet guarantee that the argument goes through. For it might be that the phenomenological data can be accommodated by some form of metaethical rationalism that denies ontological moral objectivism.
10. Some moral realists prefer to characterize realism (including moral realism) in terms of "stance-independence" rather than in terms of "mind-independence." See Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 15-16. Whether this way of characterizing realism allows for a response-dependent account of secondary qualities to count as realist will depend on how one understands the notion of stance.
11. This is how John McDowell, "Values and Secondary Qualities," in Ted Honderich, ed., Morality and Objectivity (London: Routledge, 1985), 170, characterizes a kind of objectivity characteristic of secondary qualities (understood as response-dependent) that he contrasts with a stronger kind that does not recognize response-dependent properties as being objective.
12. See also Jonathan Dancy, "Two Conceptions of Moral Realism," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 60 (1985): 167-87.
13. For more discussion of these two conceptions, see Mark Timmons, "Objectivity in Moral Discourse," in Keith Brown, ed., The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2d ed. (Oxford: Elsevier, 2006), 9:5-10.
14. Roderick Firth, "Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 12 (1952): 317-45.
15. Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
16. Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Akademie volume IV, 1985), 389, in Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 44-45.
17. J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), chap. 1.
18. Note that if one claims both (1) that moral properties are analogous to primary qualities in being human-response independent and (2) that moral properties are intrinsically reason-providing, then one seems committed to the rationalist claim that recognition of moral properties provides all rational agents with reasons. This seems to be why Mackie believed that moral thought and discourse presuppose both ontological and rationalist conceptions of objectivity.
19. This seems to be the view that Smith is advocating in Michael Smith, "Objectivity and Moral Realism: On the Significance of the Phenomenology of Moral Experience," reprinted in Michael Smith, ed., Ethics and the A Priori (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
20. The idea that certain forms of discourse, including mathematics, logic, and ethics, can be objective - that claims in these areas can be objectively true - without there having to be a realm of objects and properties that make them true is one main theme of Hilary Putnam's Hermes Lectures, published as Part I of Hilary Putnam, Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
21. See esp. Lecture 3, "Objectivity without Objects."
22. R. M. Hare, "Objective Prescriptions," Philosophy 35 (1993): 1-17.
23. Perhaps an objective moral property can be constructed from the components that Hare posits. But it is enough for present purposes to note, as we do, that embracing rationalist objectivism but denying ontological objectivism is, prima facie, a metaethical option.
24. Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 311.
25. Charles Siewert, for instance, in his "Who's Afraid of Phenomenological Disputes?" Southern Journal of Philosophy 45 (2007), understands phenomenology as primarily methodological.
26. There are various ways that one might widen somewhat the scope of phenomenal consciousness, while still regarding its scope as fairly restricted. For instance, one might hold that moods and/or emotions, in addition to sensations and sensory images, have distinctive phenomenal character.
27. Ned Block, "On a Confusion about a Conception of Consciousness," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (1995): 227-47.
28. For a defense of this broader conception of the scope of phenomenal consciousness, see, e.g., Terry Horgan and John Tienson, "The Intentionality of Phenomenology and the Phenomenology of Intentionality," in David Chalmers, ed., Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 520-33;
29. Terry Horgan, John Tienson, and George Graham, "Phenomenal Intentionality and the Brain in a Vat," in Richard Schantz, ed., The Externalist Challenge (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 297-317;
30. Uriah Kriegel, "Consciousness as Sensory Quality and as Implicit Self-Awareness," Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 2 (2003), 1-26;
31. David Pitt, "The Phenomenology of Cognition, or What Is It Like to Think That P?" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (2004): 1-36;
32. and Galen Strawson, Mental Reality (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004).
33. These intentionalist views bifurcate into two broad kinds: one kind maintains that all phenomenal character is sensory or sensory-imagistic (while insisting that phenomenal character is also inherently intentional); the other kind maintains that the scope of phenomenal consciousness is much broader, encompassing all (or virtually all) mental states that are conscious-as-opposed- to-unconscious. The former view is advocated, e.g., in Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995);
34. and Fred Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995). The latter view is advocated, e.g., in the texts mentioned in note 22 above.
35. For some discussion of this matter, see Charles Siewert, "Who's Afraid of Phenomenological Disputes?"
36. See, e.g., Susanna Siegel, "Which Properties Are Represented in Perception?" in T. Gendler Szabo and John Hawthorne, eds., Perceptual Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005),
37. and Siegel, "The Phenomenology of Efficacy," Philosophical Topics 33 (2005): 265-84.
38. Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 4.
39. Note, however, that careful application of the introspective method - or of a mixed methodology that is partly phenomenological and partly abductive - might well be very relevant to such disputes. See, e.g., Siegel's mixed-method argumentation for the claim that causation is represented in visual-perceptual experience in Siegel, "Which Properties Are Represented in Perception?" and "The Phenomenology of Efficacy."
40. Roderick Chisholm, "The Problem of the Speckled Hen," Mind 51 (1942): 368-73.
41. For more on this theme, see Terry Horgan, "Agentive Phenomenology and the Limits of Introspection," Psyche 13 (2007): 1-29.
42. Our broad characterization of moral phenomenology allows for experiences (or elements of them) that give rise to moral judgments to be included within the purview of moral phenomenology. For example, my experiencing a certain contemplated action as being (in relation to certain elements of my circumstances) unfitting may result in my morally coming down on the matter and judging that the action is all-in unfitting and ought not to be done. (For more on the distinction between experiences of prima facie and of all-in unfittingness and fittingness, see note 56 below.) And, of course, our characterization allows for experiences that include (perhaps exclusively) the having or making of a moral judgment. (This particular point about the breadth of moral phenomenology is prompted by some remarks by Philip Pettit in conversation.)
43. The following point bears emphasis. If indeed not all aspects of mentality that belong to the subject matter of phenomenology are introspectively accessible (say, because some aspects of phenomenal character are not thus accessible but are present in experience nonetheless), then the distinctive phenomenological method (namely, introspection) will not suffice by itself to answer all pertinent questions about the subject matter. Other methods will need to be brought to bear too, over and above introspection.
44. Note that what we are here calling "theoretical" semantic issues are meant to be distinct from issues concerning the introspectively accessible content of intentional mental states.
45. The case is pro tanto, rather than complete in itself, because one theoretical option is an error theory asserting both (1) that it is an introspectively accessible fact that direct moral experience carries ontological objective purport, and (2) that there are no in-the-world moral properties or facts - and, hence, (3) that direct moral experience is systematically nonveridical in its intentional content. Those who seek to defend moral realism by appeal to the argument from phenomenological introspection need to say something about the theoretical disadvantages of such an error theory, in comparison to moral realism.
46. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus, "What Is Morality? A Phenomenological Account of the Development of Ethical Expertise," in David Rasmussen, ed., Universalism vs. Communitarianism: Contemporary Debates in Ethics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), 237-64.
47. This is not to deny that, in many cases, one's moral emotions "run ahead" of one's first-order moral judgments: in thinking about some past action of his, John begins to have feelings of guilt, and it is through his feelings of guilt that he comes to realize the wrongness of what he did. One way in which this might happen is described by Robert Audi in "The Axiology of Moral Experience," The Journal of Ethics 2 (1998): 355-75.
48. Mandelbaum, The Phenomenology of Moral Experience, 127.
49. Jonathan Haidt, "The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment," Psychological Review 108 (2001): 818.
50. Harman, The Nature of Morality, 4.
51. Cases involving intuitive moral judgments are to be contrasted with cases of "ethical comportment" of the sort that the Dreyfus brothers discuss in "What Is Morality?" in which one spontaneously responds as a matter of reflex. The latter are cases of experiences that do not seem to involve having or making a moral judgment, not even a spontaneous judgment that generates spontaneous, unhesitating behavior.
52. Strictly speaking, moral experiences might exhibit some common features that serve, in a weak sense, to unify them; however, it is possible that such common features do not serve to distinguish moral experiences from certain types of nonmoral normative experiences. For more on this, see Horgan and Timmons, "Moral Phenomenology and Moral Theory."
53. See also Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, "Is Moral Phenomenology Unified?" Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (2008).
54. "Levels" is our term, but it seems appropriate given Mandelbaum's talk of felt demand being "grounded in" one's apprehension of fittingness or unfittingness.
55. Mandelbaum, The Phenomenology of Moral Experience, 54.
56. Ibid., 55.
57. Ibid., 55-56.
58. Ibid., 55.
59. Ibid., 67-68.
60. For more on this point, see Horgan and Timmons, "Prolegomena to a Future Phenomenology of Morals."
61. Interestingly, Roderick Chisholm, "Practical Reason and the Logic of Requirement," reprinted in Joseph Raz, ed., Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 118-27, distinguishes two senses of fittingness, a strong and a weak sense, both of which he defines in terms of requiredness. (Chisholm mentions Mandelbaum.)
62. See Horgan and Timmons, "Cognitivist Expressivism." The view we describe does treat moral judgments as objective, in a specific sense to be described in Section X below. But the view is a form of expressivism, and thus it also treats moral judgments as being nondescriptive in their overall content. This precludes them from carrying ontological objective purport, because the latter is a species of descriptive content.
63. Here, again, we emphasize that our thesis concerns what is introspectively accessible in order to distinguish what we are calling the Neutrality thesis from a stronger neutrality thesis according to which moral phenomenology itself is neutral with respect to ontological objective purport.
64. According to an error theory, (1) affirmative moral judgments purport to represent objective moral facts, but (2) since there are no such facts, (3) affirmative moral judgments are erroneous (false).
65. Here we use the term "descriptive," as applied to content talk, to include content that purports to attribute irreducibly normative properties to items of evaluation. On this usage, J. L. Mackie's claim that moral judgments purport to ascribe to actions the alleged normative property to-be-pursuedness counts as a construal according to which such judgments possess descriptive content.
66. J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), chap. 1.
67. On our view, the is in the case of is-belief is also in the attitude. The idea is that the descriptive content of a belief - of either an is-belief or an ought-belief - is most perspicuously expressed not by a declarative sentence but rather by a "that"-clause such as "that John takes out the trash" (or by a nominalized sentence such as "John's taking out the trash"). In English, an is-commitment is canonically expressed linguistically by asserting a complete sentence in the declarative mood - as in "John took out the trash." An ought - commitment is canonically expressed by asserting a declarative-mood sentence whose predicative constituent comprises the modal auxiliary "ought" appended to an infinitival verb-as in "John ought to take out the trash." On our account, however, the logical structure of is-beliefs and ought-beliefs is more perspicuously revealed via sentences employing a commitment-operator applied to a descriptive "that"-clause, thus: "It is the case that John takes out the trash"; "It ought to be the case that John takes out the trash."
68. Horgan and Timmons, "Nondescriptivist Cognitivism";
69. Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons, "Expressivism, Yes! Relativism, No!" in Russ Shafer-Landau, ed., Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006);
70. Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons, "Cognitivist Expressivism," in Horgan and Timmons, eds., Metaethics after Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
71. This cake example is from Elizabeth L. Beardsley, "Moral Experience and Ethical Analysis," The Philosophical Review 68 (1959), 519-30
72. (critical review of Mandelbaum's The Phenomenology of Moral Experience).
73. The moral experiences that we are here calling direct ought-judgment-involving moral experiences are all-in moral experiences of moral unfittingness. We also recognize moral experiences of unfittingness that are like all-in moral experiences except that one does not come to feel ought-committed; rather, one only experiences oneself as having a tendency to feel ought-committed. These are cases in which one would find oneself ought-committed if the relevant non-normative feature in question were the only feature one took to be a reason. In contrast to all-in experiences of unfittingness (or fittingness), such cases are those of prima facie unfittingness (or fittingness). This distinction between two types of experiences of moral unfittingness bears on an example that Julia Driver described (in conversation) in which one comes across a pigeon lying on the ground (apparently hit by a car) that is in pain and obviously cannot be saved. One can walk away or crush its skull (thereby putting it out of its misery). One judges that it is morally best (and hence fitting) to crush the pigeon's skull, but in doing so one takes the act of crushing to be unfitting. In this case, putting the pigeon out of its misery is experienced as fitting, but the act of crushing is experienced as unfitting. Driver asked whether our model of moral experience, featuring as it does experiences of unfittingness and fittingness, can handle this case. Given what we have just said about the distinction between all-in experiences of moral unfittingness (and fittingness) and experiences of prima facie moral unfittingness, we can say of Driver's case that, on the one hand, given that the act in question is a crushing of a live animal's skull, one experiences the contemplated action as prima facie unfitting. On the other hand, given that the animal is suffering and cannot be saved, one experiences the act as prima facie fitting. On our picture, then, one has a tendency to feel ought-committed to crushing the skull, and an opposing tendency to feel ought-committed to refraining from crushing the skull. As in typical cases of conflicts of prima facie duties, one must determine which consideration is all-in or most fitting in the circumstances.
74. i[A]}. Again, such a logically complex commitment-state is not an is-commitment with respect to a putative descriptive content (namely, my having promised to take out the trash being a reason for my taking out the trash now). On the contrary: according to cognitivist expressivism, there is no such descriptive content, and there is no such is-commitment to such a putative content.
75. This phrase is inspired by Putnam's phrase "realism with a small 'r'." See Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987), 17.
76. See Horgan and Timmons, "Cognitivist Expressivism."
77. See note 54.
78. Questions about the theory-ladenness of moral experiences were raised in conversation by David Wong. Michael Gill, in his "Variability and Moral Phenomenology," Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (2008), pressed this same worry.
79. We reply to Gill in our "Prolegomena to a Future Phenomenology of Morals."