Wednesday 9/18
Relativism II: Simple Ethical Subjectivism
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Synopsis
Having discarded Cultural Ethical Relativism as a possibly true theory, we turned next today to the thought that morality is just a matter of opinion.
There are, it seems, good reasons for thinking that ethical judgments cannot be objectively true. We don't experience the properties of being evil or being right in the same way we experience the properties of being green or being round, a point made clear by none other than David Hume.
Hume's theory, Simple Ethical Subjectivism, takes seriously the view that morality is nothing more than a matter of one's own personal approvals or disapprovals--opinions, in short.
Unlike CER, Simple Ethical Subjectivism (SES) passes the standards of clarity and coherence. But it fails to pass reflective equilibrium. There are generally lots of ways a theory can fail to pass reflective equilibrium. A theory might fail to pass reflective equilibrium because it has implications for types of actions which collide with our (reasoned, experienced, etc.) intuitions about those kinds of actions. So, for example, an ethical theory might imply that homosexuality is morally wrong. Such a theory fails reflective equilibrium, but only weakly. That is, it may be that homosexuality is in fact morally wrong despite my intuition that it is not. There are certainly many people who are willing to give arguments to the effect that homosexuality is morally wrong. So perhaps my intuition is mistaken, and I err in rejecting the ethical theory on those grounds. Of course, I can give very good reasons for thinking that homosexuality is not morally wrong. But that is an issue for later. My point here is that a theory can fail reflective equilibrium weakly. In such a case we would say that the theory arguably fails reflective equilibrium, since counter-arguments can presumably be given to the effect that the theory has the correct implications for action.
But there are theories which completely and utterly fail reflective equilibrium. The strong sense of failing equilibrium is this: an ethical theory has implications about the nature of morality which undermine or contradict the core features of morality it must intuitively have. SES is an excellent example of this.
According to the Infallibility Argument, if SES is true, then it follows that we are infallible in our moral judgments. But it is a key feature of our intuitive, pre-theoretic intuitions about morality that it is possible to be mistaken in our moral judgments. We might, for example, judge that a killing is morally wrong only to find out that the killing was done in self-defense and thus is morally permissible. We can be mistaken. It would be the height of arrogance to think that we are infallible in our moral judgments.
The Infallibility Argument is deeply problematic for SES since it shows that SES is a theory sharply and significantly at odds with reasoned intuitions about morality. But, as if that weren't enough to reject SES outright, we have the additional problem of the Disagreement Argument. According to the Disagreement Argument, it is an implication of SES that there cannot in principle by any moral disagreement. We are mistaken when we argue over whether or not abortion is morally permissible or whether or not euthanasia is morally permissible since, according to SES, our argument is really just a matter of differences of attitude and there is no basis for any real or factual differences. This implication, that there cannot be any moral disagreement if SES is true, is radically at odds with reasoned and experienced intuition about morality. At root our intuition about morality is that, just as we can be mistaken in our moral judgments, it is possible to disagree about the morality of an action. There is a fact of the matter about whether an action is morally right or morally wrong. Morality is not, then, a matter of opinion as SES would have it.
Following the Infallibility Argument and the Disagreement Argument through to their gruesome conclusions--gruesome for SES, that is--philosophers have almost universally rejected SES.
But philosophers are very clever. The idea that there is no objective truth in ethics is hard to dispel. What, though, is objective truth?
We did not have time to take up this question today, so we will begin there next time. I hasten to add that, given the overall quality of our discussion today, I don't in the least bit regret our getting behind schedule. The conversations we have about these theories are vastly more important than sticking religiously to some artificial schedule.