Moral skepticism for foxes

Boston University Law Review

Volumn 90, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 497-508

  Star, Daniel ^a  

^a USA   (United States)

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EID: 77954332362     PISSN: 00068047     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (39)

1. A fact first commented upon by Aaron Garrett. It should be noted that throughout this essay "moral skepticism" is taken to be synonymous with "moral antirealism," rather than with "uncertainty about morals." This is a rather confusing, but now standard philosophical usage of the term that Dworkin himself adopts.
2. RONALD DWORKIN, JUSTICE FOR HEDGEHOGS (forthcoming 2010) (Apr. 17, 2009 manuscript at 16-63, on file with the Boston University Law Review).
3. Id. (manuscript at 56).
4. In the famous essay that introduced the relevant distinction between foxes and hedgehogs, Isaiah Berlin includes Plato amongst the hedgehogs, who are thinkers that "relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel - a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance." ISAIAH BERLIN, THE HEDGEHOG AND THE FOX 1-2 (1953).
5. Plato is clearly a philosopher if anyone is, even if one does not agree with A.N. Whitehead that the history of Western philosophy is "a series of footnotes to Plato." ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD, PROCESS AND REALITY 39 (David Ray Griffin & Donald W. Sherburne eds., corrected ed. 1978). This does not undermine my claim that philosophy is essentially a fox-like activity. Berlin is far from alone in describing Plato in the way that he does but, arguably, Plato was much closer to contemporary philosophers in his methodology than Berlin suggests. As Bernard Williams says, [I]t is a mistake to suppose that Plato spends his time in the various dialogues adding to or subtracting from his system. Each dialogue is about whatever it is about, and Plato pursues what seems interesting and fruitful in that connection... -. We should not think of him as constantly keeping his accounts ...
6. BERNARD WILLIAMS, Plato: The Invention of Philosophy, in THE SENSE OF THE PAST: ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 148, 154 (Myles Burnyeat ed., 2006). In his original essay, Berlin himself admits that "like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic and ultimately absurd." BERLIN, supra, at 2. It became clear during the conference that Dworkin himself does not wish to make too much of the distinction between foxes and hedgehogs, despite the choice of title for his book.
7. See DWORHN, supra note 2 (manuscript at 42). There is much evidence that moral realism has already become the default option in metaethics: in particular, the opposition does not now consist of philosophers as opposed to the spirit of moral realism as Ayer and Mackie were - they both claimed that first-order moral statements always lack the property of being true, each in his own way - but rather consists of quasi-realists, ecumenical expressivists, irrealists, fictionalists, etc., who would pretty much all like to find a way of agreeing with the realist that each of us can know (or "know") that torturing people for fun is wrong, and of explaining how it is that we can make logically compelling inferences that contain moral claims. For instance, expressivists have squarely faced up to the challenge of solving the Frege-Geach problem, and it is apparent that a solution to this problem will need be very complex. See generally MARK SCHROEDER, BEING FOR: EVALUATING THE SEMANTIC PROGRAM OF EXPRESSIVISM (2008). It is at this point, but not necessarily elsewhere, that the traditional realist has a simpler and more elegant story to tell: we can know that torturing people for fun is wrong because moral judgments are beliefs, and some such beliefs are true and warranted, epistemically speaking (in at least one of the standard ways that beliefs can be warranted). It is not at all surprising that moral realism is, in this way at least, the default option in contemporary metaethics if the "reasons as evidence" thesis I describe below is correct, for this thesis may be thought to provide an explanation as to why moral realism is the default option. I will ignore quasi-realism in this essay; when I speak of realism and the "reasons as evidence" thesis below, I can be read as endorsing either traditional moral realism, which I favor, or a quasi-realism that succeeds in endorsing the same substantive moral and epistemic claims that traditional moral realism attempts to - assuming it can succeed in doing this. This might be termed "weak" moral realism, but it is a realism strong enough for my purposes here.
8. There may be a way of ruling moral skepticism out a priori, for all that I say here; it is simply not my present goal to discover or promote one, and it seems clear, in any case, that Dworkin does not provide us with one.
9. DWORKIN, supra note 2 (manuscript at 16-63).
10. Id. (manuscript at 18).
11. I say "not necessarily" because a claim of this second kind can, in some but far from all contexts, take the form of a substantive moral claim. For the sake of illustration, compare "It is not the case that I should donate money to that charity, because there are better charities for me to donate money to" with "It is not the case that I should donate money to that charity, because there are no 'should' truths of any kind." This parallels the difference between "It is not the case that she is a witch, because this spell belongs to someone else" and "It is not the case that she is a witch, because witches do not exist." The fact that a claim of some kind can in some contexts be entailed by a substantive moral claim is not enough to make all claims of that kind substantive moral claims. People can claim that witches (or moral truths) do not exist without being committed to the existence of witches (or moral truths). Dworkin himself made this mistake in his response to our panel at the conference: to my objection below concerning the "ought implies can" principle, he responded that some religious people in the past have explicitly rejected "ought implies can" on substantive moral grounds, and that therefore "ought implies can" is itself (always) a substantive moral claim. This is simply a non sequitur.
12. In fact, I do not think the first claim is necessarily a moral claim, because it is not the case that "ought" is always used to express moral claims, even when we restrict our attention to normative uses of the word - there are also non-normative uses, such as in "it ought to stop raining today" - but I will ignore this complication, for the most part, following Dworkin's own concentration on morality, rather than the normative and evaluative spheres in general.
13. DWORKIN, supra note 2 (manuscript at 42). "External error skepticism" is Dworkin's term for a kind of moral skepticism that sees morality as a whole as a mistaken enterprise, from a position purportedly outside of morality itself. Id. (manuscript at 23). An example of internal error skepticism would be the kind of skepticism many of us exemplify in relation to traditional sexual morality, where we use some of our substantive moral commitments to criticize particular traditional moral claims. This is obviously not the kind of skepticism that is at issue between Dworkin and opponents such as myself, Michael Smith, and Russ Shafer-Landau. See generally Russ Shafer-Landau, The Possibility of Metaethics, 90 B.U. L. REV. 479 (2010);
14. Michael Smith, Dworkin on External Skepticism, 90 B.U. L. REV. 509 (2010).
15. DWORKIN, supra note 2 (manuscript at 42).
16. See id. (manuscript at 42-43).
17. Id. (manuscript at 42).
18. See Smith, supra note 11, at 512.
19. See generally J.L. MACHE, ETHICS: INVENTING RIGHT AND WRONG (1977).
20. See generally RICHARD JOYCE, THE MYTH OF MORALITY (2001). For more details on Richard Joyce and his moral error theory, see Shafer-Landau, supra note 11, at 489.
21. Sometimes Mackie makes statements that can be read as suggesting that he was drawn to such a view himself. He writes: "[T]he denial of objective values will have to be put forward ... as an 'error theory', a theory that although most people in making moral judgments implicitly claim, among other things, to be pointing to something objectively prescriptive, these claims are all false." MACKIE, supra note 16, at 35. "These claims" might refer either to the first-order moral judgments themselves, or to the constantly repeated implicit claims to objective prescriptivity. The second reading would give us Joyce's type of error theory.
22. DWORKIN, supra note 2 (manuscript at 43).
23. Id. (manuscript at 15).
24. DAVID HUME, A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE bk. 3, pt. 1, §1, at 469 (L.A. SelbyBigge ed., Oxford Univ. Press 2d ed. 1978) (1740). Of course, Hume's target is different than Dworkin's, since Hume is concerned with first-order moralists who suddenly leap to normative conclusions from purely descriptive claims about the nature of God or human affairs.
25. MACHE, supra note 16, at 15-49.
26. Regarding Hume's target, one might think one is able to rely simply on induction. However, one cannot rely on induction when it comes to Dworkin's target, because one is hard-pressed to find a single example of a standard argument for skepticism in Dworkin's text where he demonstrates convincingly that the argument depends on a hidden premise of a substantive moral kind, let alone a series of such arguments.
27. Shafer-Landau, supra note 11, at 484.
28. An example of a non-normative usage is "the reason it rained was because the clouds were heavy"; compare this with "she is in pain, so there is a reason for me to help her, even though there is also a reason for me to get home, for a friend is waiting for me there," or "she is in pain, so I have a reason to help her, even though I also have a reason to get home, for a friend is waiting for me there." I will ignore the distinction between "there is a reason for me to ..." and "I have a reason to ...," but this distinction is discussed in two papers that I have coauthored with Stephen Kearns. See Stephen Kearns & Daniel Star, Reasons as Evidence, in 4 OXFORD STUDIES IN METAETHICS 215, 215-42 (Russ Shafer-Landau ed., 2009) [hereinafter Reasons as Evidence];
29. Stephen Kearns & Daniel Star, Reasons: Explanations or Evidence?, 119 ETHICS 31, 31-56 (2008) [hereinafter Reasons: Explanations or Evidence?].
30. This thesis is described and defended in much more detail in Reasons as Evidence, supra note 25; Reasons: Explanations or Evidence?, supra note 25.
31. The thesis also applies to reasons for belief, but I will not discuss this aspect of the thesis here, except to say that it is an advantage of this thesis that it provides a unified and informative account of reasons for action and reasons for belief, where other accounts fail to do so.
32. Reasons as Evidence, supra note 25;
33. Reasons: Explanations or Evidence?, supra note 25.
34. See John Broome, Response, Reply to Southwood, Kearns and Star, and Cullity, 119 ETHICS 96,100-03 (2008).
35. See John Brunero, Reasons and Evidence One Ought, 119 ETHICS 538, 538-45 (2009).
36. Shafer-Landau, supra note 11, at 486.
37. Sometimes we rationally move in one direction or another by responding to evidence concerning what we ought to do, but without thinking explicitly about evidence. This should not be surprising, since, putting cases involving the practical "ought" to one side, we spend much of our lives responding spontaneously to evidence when we form ordinary beliefs, e.g., through perception. I sometimes receive the objection that we do not make many judgments about what we ought to do in our daily lives at all, spontaneously or otherwise. I think this objection relies on confusing the general all-things-considered "ought" with the "ought" or, better, "obligation" or "duty" of moral requirements. Many of our actual ought judgments are very mundane (e.g., the judgment I make when I answer the question "Ought I eat the apple or the banana?"), and we may not always explicitly use the word "ought" (or "should," or some other roughly synonymous term).
38. One reason for thinking this is so is that (2) is not an obviously true principle. To the extent we think of it as a principle, I take it that we very naturally think of it being prefaced by a universal quantifier (i.e., in all cases where there is a person standing in front of me in pain, there is a reason for me to help that person), but then we may think there are situations where the relevant reason/evidence is defeated by the presence of other reasons/evidence, if not with the example of pain, at least with a great many examples of reasons that we would ordinarily cite. See generally JONATHAN DANCY, ETHICS WITHOUT PRINCIPLES (2004). Alternatively, the principle might contain a ceteris paribus clause, but then the argument from (1) to (3) is not strictly valid. Another alternative is that the principle might be formulated in a very narrow way to only apply to situations where other reasons do not interfere, but now the requirement that there always be an implicit inference involved in identifying our reasons is starting to look very mysterious indeed - such inferences now seem redundant.
39. It might be thought that Dworkin's position that the skeptic himself must be using normative principles could return with a vengeance at this point: suppose the acceptance of any normative reasons at all, whether reasons for action or reasons for belief, always requires an inference that runs via a normative bridging principle; then it would turn out that the skeptic's reasoning always involves substantive principles, and in presenting us with an argument that needs to be assessed (i.e., with evidence for her view), she would be requiring us to use such substantive principles while assessing it. However, the idea that our judgments concerning the reasons for belief we find ourselves confronting always depend on inference seems extremely implausible. The reason this seems extremely implausible is because it is relatively uncontroversial to understand reasons for belief in terms of evidence, so the point made in the penultimate paragraph of the paper applies. If the reader becomes convinced that reasons for action are also evidence, then the reader should also come to see it as implausible that we typically identify reasons for action through inference.