Morality and the Challenge of Scientific Naturalism:

From Hume to ‘Oxbridge’

THE RECONSTRUCTIVE CHALLENGE
Claim 1: Values are not in the mind-independent world, but in our ”internal sentiment”

Claim 2: Ordinary moral discourse is in error – we talk about values as if they are mind-
independent

Claim 3: Our sentiments create moral properties and facts

Hume’s Mind-Dependent Realism: “‘[O]bjects acquire [moral] qualities from the particular
character and constitution of the mind which surveys them”
THE RECONSTRUCTIVE CHALLENGE
Claim 1: Values are not in the mind-independent world, but in our ”internal
sentiment”

Claim 2: Ordinary folk moral discourse is in error – “negligent thinkers” talk about
values as if they are mind-independent

Claim 3: Our sentiments create moral properties and facts

A “Revisionary” Realism? An Attempted
Interpretive Solution
THINK: How might one appeal to the following distinction between Descriptive
Metaethics and Revisionary Metaethics to resolve the interpretive problems raised
above?
Descriptive Metaethics aims to describe our ordinary moral discourse - i.e. how the
folk often do make moral judgments and what the folk take themselves to be doing
when they make moral judgments
Revisionary Metaethics aims to delineate the possibilities of how our moral discourse
could potentially be revised in light of our changing explanatory framework
THE RECONSTRUCTIVE CHALLENGE
Hume’s Descriptive Anti-Realism about Mind-Independent Values:
"[V]ice and virtue...may be compar’d to sounds, colours, heat, and cold, which,
according to modern philosophy, are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind”

Hume’s Revisionary Realism about Mind-Dependent Values:

“‘[O]bjects acquire [moral] qualities from the particular character and constitution of
the mind which surveys them”
 Many find Mind-Dependent Realism attractive, insofar as it
allows us to preserve the possibility of moral truth on an
empiricist framework consistent with natural sciences.

Mind-Dependent However, even if Humean Sentimentalism is able to preserve a

kind of moral truth, many have argued that it is nonetheless
Realism and incapable of providing foundations for the kind of objectivity,
the universality, and necessity that attends many of our most
deeply held moral commitments
Problem of Radical
For example, compare the following judgments:
Contingency
Recreational torture is morally wrong
Vivaldi's Four Seasons is beautiful
 Perfume and the Challenge
of Radical Contingency
In the novel Perfume, the misanthrope Grenouille is
born with an uncanny olfactory sense and an ability
to manufacture aromas capable of inducing intensely
euphoric experiences in those who smell them.
In the course of the story, Grenouille goes on a killing
spree in order to harvest materials for his “magnum
opus” perfume. Grenouille is eventually captured,
though not before completing his perfume. At his
trial, waiting to be executed, he releases his perfume
before the angry mob, who experience such intense
euphoria that they immediately forget their demand
for justice and revere him as divine, including the
father of one of the victims, who bends to one knee
and praises Grenouille as his son.
Sentimentalism and Radical Contingency:
The Challenge of Süskind’s Perfume
THINK:What worry does the foregoing story pose to Humean Sentimentalism (indeed,
even on a Mind-Dependent Realist reading)?
Painted Morals?
Elijah Millgram's Poetic
Objection to Mind-
Dependent Realism
Millgram on the Contingency of Emotional Responses:
“Compare 'funny' and 'red'; these differ from each other...in that the scarf still looks red the hundredth time you see it,
whereas the joke no longer gets a laugh the hundredth (or usually even the second) time through.”

“Human moral responses are in this respect much more like the reactions that underwrite 'funny' than they are like
the reactions that under write 'red'. Your first encounter with a street person may have produced moral outrage at
matters having been allowed to come to such a pass, and a possibly sizable financial contribution; your hundredth
encounter probably consisted in stepping around the sleeping body without any reaction at all.”

“When the joke is told again and again, we cease laughing…As more and more human beings are degraded by being
forced to sleep on sidewalks, we cease to react; if moral values are secondary qualities, we will have to say that
[homelessness], which was once a moral outrage, isn’t such a bad thing anymore. The first Holocaust was absolutely
evil; the twentieth, on the secondary-quality account, might end up being only ho-hum.”
 The Challenge of Radical Contingency: If there are no
necessary truths about which emotions we will or ought to
have in response to any state of affairs then the truth or
falsity of our judgements is an arbitrarily contingent matter of
our possessing a certain emotional repertoire.
Hume and the Moral Psychologist Shaun Nichols summarizes this “Humean
Challenge of challenge” for moral objectivism as follows:

Radical 1.Rational Creatures who lack certain emotions would not

make the moral judgements that we do.
Contingency
HU 2. There is no principled basis for maintaining that these
certain emotions (on which our moral judgments depend) are
the right emotions.
 Psychopathy is a developmental disorder associated
with core affective traits, such as low empathy, guilt,
and remorse, and with antisocial and aggressive
Psychopaths and behaviors.
Mind-Dependent
Evidence from brain imagery suggests that they do
Realism not experience emotions as intensely as others, and
therefore, it is thought that they are not inhibited
by guilt, fear, anxiety, self-doubt, or remorse.
Morality and the Challenge of Scientific
Naturalism:
Metaethics at ‘Oxbridge’
What is the point of metaethics?
Appiah on ‘Oxbridge’ Philosophy
20th Century Metaethics was largely shaped by the empiricist project inaugurated by Hume

This influence can be seen in the so called ‘Oxbridge’ philosophers, a group of early 20 th Century
philosophers who were grappling with the philosophical challenges that attended the rise of
scientific naturalism - the view that all facts about the natural world are those that can be
described through empirical observation and measurement.

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a contemporary philosopher who carries the Oxbridge banner.

APPIAH: “One might suppose that when it comes to moral inquiry, one should be impervious to the
Cavalry of the Contingent….Even if you couldn’t derive an “ought” from an “is” facts would still be
relevant to moral life. Morality is practical. In the end it is about what to do and how to feel; how
to respond to our own and the world’s demands. And to apply norms, we must understand the
empirical contexts in which we are applying them.”
Naturalism, Morality, and the Big Book of the World:

20th Century Metaethics can be seen as a reaction to the rise of scientific naturalism -
the view that all facts about the natural world are those that can be described through
empirical observation and measurement.

Wittgenstein gives us a helpful metaphor for the naturalistic worldview in his idea of the
“big book of the world,” a hypothetical book containing all true statements about the
world:
Naturalism, Morality, and the Big Book of the World:

“Suppose one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew all the movements
of all the bodies in the world dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind
of all human beings that ever lived, and suppose this man wrote all he knew in a big
book, then this book would contain the whole description of the world. It would of
course contain all...true scientific propositions and in fact all true propositions that can
be made”
Naturalism, Morality, and the Big Book of the World:
Wittgenstein’s Humean Inheritance: Following in the footsteps of Hume, Wittgenstein
claims that the big book of the world would only contain:
Trivial logical necessities
Descriptive facts that can be empirically verified
Nowhere in the book of the world is there a moral truth:
“[W]hat I want to say is, that this book would contain nothing that we would call an ethical
judgment or anything that would logically imply such a judgment….If for instance in our world-
book we read the description of a murder with all its details physical and psychological, the
mere description of these facts will contain nothing which we could call an ethical proposition.
The murder will be on exactly the same level as any other event, for instance the falling of a
stone.”
Three Early 20th Century Responses to Naturalism
Three notable representatives of the attempt to grapple with the moral implications of
scientific naturalism are A.J. Ayer, J.L. Mackie, and G.E. Moore.
Markedly, all three agree that the naturalistic book of the world contains no
moral truths, albeit for radically different reasons:

Ayer’s Non-Cognitivism
Mackie’s Error Theory
Moore’s Non-Naturalist Realism
Metaethics at ‘Oxbridge’:
From A.J. Ayer’s Non-Cognitivism to
Mackie’s Error Theory
Like ‘Rational Men’?
A.J. Ayer and Mike Tyson
Like ‘Rational Men’? A.J. Ayer and Mike
Tyson:
Ben Rogers, A.J. Ayer: A Life (2000)
““Ayer was standing near to the entrance of the designer's apartment, chatting with a group of young
models and designers.There was a commotion as a young woman rushed in, saying her friend was
being assaulted in the bedroom.Ayer went to investigate and found heavyweight champion Mike
Tyson pestering a young model just embarking on her career, Naomi Campbell.Ayer asked the boxer
to desist but he was unwilling.

"Do you know who the fuck I am?" Tyson warned Ayer, "I'm the heavyweight champion of the world.”

Ayer’s response:“And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic",Ayer replied calmly. "We are
both pre-eminent in our field; I suggest that we talk about this like rational men."
Ayer’s Non-Cognitivism
Sentences v. Propositions: Ayer’s Non-
Cognitivism
Non-Cognitivism: Moral judgments are neither true nor false but
meaningless

Challenge for Ayer: Moral discourse is ubiquitous, and we appear to talk

about morality as if it is meaningfully true or false

Predicative “Surface Grammar” of Moral discourse appears to be

cognitivist:
“Lying is wrong”
 Sentences v. Propositions
Ayer’s account rests on a distinction between a sentence and proposition:
What is the difference?
Sentence - physical speech act
“Snow is white”
“Schnee ist weiss”
“This looks like that”
Propositional Meaning – assertion of an observable state of affairs
[Snow is white]
[Snow is white]
[Snow is white]
Sentences v. Propositions
For Ayer, not all sentences assert propositions. Surface grammar is not a reliable
indication of propositional content.

EXAMPLE: Someone with a rare form of tourette’s syndrome might make the utterance
“Schnee ist weiss” without thereby intending to assert the proposition [Snow is white]
Ayer’s Positivist Criterion of Meaning
According to Ayer’s markedly Humean criterion of meaningfulness, a meaningful
statement is either:
1. Mere definitional truth
“Analytic”– Predicate is contained in the subject concept
2. Empirically contingent observations
“Synthetic” - Predicate is NOT contained in the subject concept
Ayer’s Humean Dogma: If a proposition is synthetic, it must correspond to an
empirically contingent state of affairs verified by sense experience
Two Basic Take-Aways
1. In order for a synthetic proposition to be meaningfully true or false, it must be
empirically verifiable
2. In order for a statement to be empirically verifiable, it must correspond to some
potentially observable state of affairs
E.g.:
That-[I feel happy while listening to the song] is an empirically verifiable fact
That-[The song is beautiful] is not empirically verifiable
Ayer’s Verificationist Argument for Non-
Cognitivism
1. All meaningful statements are either (a) analytic, or else (b) empirically verifiable
synthetic claims.

2. Moral statements are not analytic

◦ E.g. The predicate “is wrong” is not already informationally contained in the concept “Recreational killing”

3. Moral statements cannot be translated into statements of empirical fact

Conclusion: Moral statements are not meaningful – that is, they are non-cognitive –
and thus can be neither true nor false
Non-Cognitivist “Emotivism”
Non-Cognitivist “Emotivism”
Ayer: “[I]f I say to someone ‘You acted wrongly in stealing that money’, I am not stating anything
more than if I had simply said, ‘You stole that money.’ In adding that this action is wrong, I am not
making any further statement about it, I am simply evincing my moral disapproval about it. It is
as if I had said, ‘You stole that money,’ in a peculiar tone of horror, or written with the addition
of some special exclamation marks.

The tone, or the exclamation marks, adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence. It
merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker. “If
now I generalise my previous statement and say, ‘Stealing money is wrong,’ I produce a sentence
which has no factual meaning – that is, expresses no proposition which can be either true or
false. It is as if I had written ‘Stealing money!!’ – where the shape and thickness of the
exclamation marks show, by a suitable convention, that a special sort of moral disapproval is the
feeling which is being expressed.” ( “The Emotive Theory of Ethics,” p. 124)
Evaluating Non-Cognitivist “Emotivism”
Potential Attractions:
Consistent with Naturalistic Framework - Doesn’t require positing any new entities or
properties beyond what is already available in a naturalistic framework
Explains Centrality of Emotion - Explains the empirical data supporting an intimate connection
between moral judgments and our affective and conative experiences: the former are merely
expressions of the latter.
Conserves Moral Practices (?) - While the non-cognitivist agrees that there are no empirical
moral facts, the non-cognitivist is not an error theorist: moral statements are not false, because moral
judgments never attempt to assert a proposition in the first place.
Some have argued that this feature of non-cognitivism makes it a “conservationist” theory. Even if
moral statements are meaning-less, this presents no rational hurdle to our continuing to engage in
moral discourse: the latter is simply not assessable for rationality.
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sacred Nonsense:

“I see now that these nonsensical [moral] expressions were not nonsensical because I
had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very
essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is
to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all
men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the
boundaries of language.This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely
hopeless.”
Sacred Nonsense?
For Wittgenstein, since moral judgements do not correspond to empirical facts,
moral judgements cannot be true, and for this reason they are, technically
speaking, non-sense. However, this might not entail that our moral commitments
don’t matter:
“Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning
of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science.What it says does not
add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human
mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life
ridicule it.”
DEBATE:
Can the non-cognitivist have it both ways?

Is the Non-Cognitivist who holds moral commitments guilty of inconsistency or

cognitive dissonance?
‘Like Rational Men’? Moral Conflict and
Moral Discourse:
If moral judgments are in fact just non-cognitive expressions, then they can’t contradict
each other, and we can’t reason about them. Why, then, we do continue to argue about
them?
“Not Meaningless, But False”:
J.L. Mackie’s Error Theory
Mackie and Bertrand’s Bull
Bertrand Russell was famous for being a champion of progressive causes while also denying that
moral judgments are truth-apt. For just one example, he was a strident critic of the practice of
bullfighting. His response to the charge of inconsistency:

“Certainly there seems to be something more [than expression]. Suppose, for example, that some
one were to advocate the introduction of bullfighting in this country. In opposing the proposal, I
should feel, not only that I was expressing my desires, but that my desires in the matter are right,
whatever that may mean. As a matter of argument, I can, I think, show that I am not guilty of any
logical inconsistency in holding to the above interpretation of ethics and at the same time
expressing strong ethical preferences. But in feeling I am not satisfied. I can only say that, while
my own opinions as to ethics do not satisfy me, other people's satisfy me still less.”
Moral Discourse and “Objective Purport”
Mackie thinks that Bertrand Russell’s admission that he takes himself to be in
the right shows our moral discourse carries “objectivist purport” - i.e. in making
moral claims, we take ourselves to be talking about objective matters of fact.

Indeed, Mackie argues that this cognitive character of moral discourse is

precisely what makes it so effective in accomplishing our intended ends, such as
getting people to agree on practices and policies.
Moral Discourse and “Objective Purport”
Mackie thus rejects Non-Cognitivism:

“[O]rdinary moral judgements include a claim to objectivity, an assumption that

there are objective values.”
“[T]his assumption has been incorporated in the basic, conventional, meanings of
moral terms. Any analysis of the meanings of moral terms which omits this claim to
[objectivity]... is to that extent incomplete; and this is true of any non-cognitive
analysis.”
Meaningful, but False:
Mackie’s Argument from “Queerness”
Intrinsic Normativity and Queerness
REVIEW: What is the difference between Intrinsic Values vs. Extrinsic Values?
Mackie and the Secular Euthyphro Problem: Mackie thinks that the radical
contingency of an extrinsic conception of moral values does not allow us to capture
the objective purport of moral discourse
Moral Facts Must Be “Intrinsically Normative”:
“Something's being good both tells the person who knows this to pursue it and makes him
pursue it. An objective good would be sought by anyone who was acquainted with it, not
because of any contingent fact that this person, or every person, is so constituted that he
desires this end, but just because the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it. Similarly,
if there were objective principles of right and wrong, any wrong (possible) course of action
would have not-to-be-done-ness somehow built into it.”
Intrinsic Normativity and Queerness

Ontological Queerness: “If there were objective values, then they would be entities
or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the
universe.”

Epistemological Queerness: ”Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would

have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different
from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else.”
Intrinsic Normativity and Queerness

THOUGHTS?

Is Mackie’s “queerness” objection fair?

Reflect on your lived experiences – whether embodied, aesthetic, moral, and

interpersonal – Have you ever experienced something with a felt “to-be-
ness”?
Philosophy as a Social Enterprise:
An Alternative Assignment
In order to help you get started on your paper, you may do the
following in lieu of your Weekly Blog Paper next week:

1. Read Zadie Smith’s “Joy” along with the readings assigned from
the classical Utilitarians
2. Sign Up for a Social Pod (Link to be distributed over email)
3. Meet with your Pod (In Person or over ZOOM) sometime next week
4. Talk organically about Zadie Smith’s “Joy” and/or audition paper
topics, etc.
5. Build community