Reading: Inventing Right and Wrong

Question 1

J. L. Mackie - Inventing Right and Wrong

Answer 1

Inventing Right and Wrong:

MORAL SCEPTICISM – There are no objective values.

• A moral sceptic might be the sort of person who says “All this talk of morality is tripe,” who rejects morality and will take no notice of it. Such a person may be literally rejecting all moral judgements; he is more likely to be making moral judgements of his own, expressing a positive moral condemnation of all that conventionally passes for morality.
• Or he may be confusing these two logically incompatible views, and saying that he rejects all morality, while he is in fact rejecting only a particular morality that is current in the society in which he has grown up.
• These are first order moral views.
• What I am discussing is a second order view, a view about the status of moral values and the nature of moral valuing, about where and how they fit into the world.
• A man could hold strong moral views, and indeed ones whose content was thoroughly conventional, while believing that they were simply attitudes and policies with regard to conduct that he and other people held. Conversely, a man could reject all established morality while believing it to be an objective truth that it was evil or corrupt.
• It is a hard fact that cruel actions differ from kind ones, and hence that we can learn, as in fact we all do, to distinguish them fairly well in practice, and to use the words “cruel” and “kind” with fairly clear descriptive meanings; but is it an equally hard fact that actions which are cruel in such a descriptive sense are to be condemned?
• The present issue is with regard to the objectivity specifically of value, not with regard to the objectivity of those natural, factual, differences on the basis of which differing values are assigned.

Question 2

Subjectivism

Answer 2

SUBJECTIVISM – Another name often used, as an alternative to “moral scepticism,” for the view I am discussing is “subjectivism.”

MORAL SUBJECTIVISM – Is the doctrine that, for example, “This action is right” means “I approve of this action,” Moral judgements are equivalent to reports of the speaker’s own feelings or attitudes.

• Moral scepticism is a negative doctrine, not a positive one: it says what there isn’t, not what there is.
• It says that there do not exist entities or relations of a certain kind, objective values or requirements, which many people have believed to exist.
• Moral scepticism is an ontological thesis, not a linguistic or conceptual one. It is not, like the other doctrine often called moral subjectivism, a view about the meanings of moral statements.
• No doubt if moral values are not objective they are in some very broad sense subjective, and for this reason I would accept “MORAL SUBJECTIVISM” as an alternative name to “MORAL SCEPTICISM.”

Question 3

The claim To Objectivity

Answer 3

THE CLAIM TO OBJECTIVITY– The main tradition of European moral philosophy includes the ✻ ✻ ✻ claim, that there are objective values of just the sort I have denied.

• He wants to know whether this course of action would be wrong in itself.
• The prevalence of this tendency to objectify values—and not only moral ones—is confirmed by a pattern of thinking that we find in existentialists and those influenced by them.
• The denial of objective values can carry with it an extreme emotional reaction, a feeling that nothing matters at all, that life has lost its purpose.
• That it does so is evidence that the people in whom this reaction occurs have been tending to objectify their concerns and purposes, have been giving them a fictitious external authority.
• A claim to objectivity has been so strongly associated with their subjective concerns and purposes that the collapse of the former seems to undermine the latter as well.
• I conclude, then, that ordinary moral judgements include a claim to objectivity.
• And I do not think it is going too far to say that this assumption has been incorporated in the basic, conventional, meanings of moral terms.
• The claim to objectivity, however ingrained in our language and thought, is not self-validating.
  
  • It can and should be questioned.
• But the denial of objective values will have to be put forward not as the result of an analytic approach, but as an “ERROR THEORY,” – a theory that although most people in making moral judgements implicitly claim, among other things, to be pointing to something objectively prescriptive, these claims are all false.
  
  • It is this that makes the name “moral scepticism” appropriate.
• Since it conflicts with what is sometimes called common sense, it needs very solid support.

Question 4

The Argument From Relativity

Answer 4

THE ARGUMENT FROM RELATIVITY – Has as its premiss the well-known variation in moral codes from one society to another and from one period to another. Disagreement on questions in history or biology or cosmology does not show that there are no objective issues in these fields for investigators to disagree about.

• But such scientific disagreement results from speculative inferences or explanatory hypotheses based on inadequate evidence, and it is hardly plausible to interpret moral disagreement in the same way.
  
  • Disagreement about moral codes seems to reflect people’s adherence to and participation in different ways of life.
• The causal connection seems to be mainly that way round: it is that people approve of monogamy because they participate in a monogamous way of life rather than that they participate in a monogamous way of life because they approve of monogamy.
• The argument from relativity has some force simply because the actual variations in the moral codes are more readily explained by the hypothesis that they reflect ways of life than by the hypothesis that they express perceptions, most of them seriously inadequate and badly distorted, of objective values.
• Well-known counter to this argument from relativity, namely to say that the items for which objective validity is to be claimed are not specific moral rules but very basic principles which are recognized to some extent in all society—such principles as the DIFFERENT METHODS OF ETHICS.

DIFFERENT METHODS OF ETHICS:

• The principle of universalizability, the rule that one ought to conform to the specific rules of any way of life in which one takes part, from which one profits, and on which one relies, some utilitarian principle of doing what tends, promote the general happiness.
• Such general principles, married with differing circumstances, different social patterns or different preferences, will beget different specific moral rules.
• To take this line the moral objectivist has to say that it is only in these principles that the objective moral character attaches to its subject: other moral judgements are objectively true, but only contingently—if things had been otherwise, different actions would have been right.
• These are very far from constituting the whole of what is actually affirmed as moral thought. Much of this is concerned with ideals. That is, people judge that some things are good or right, not because—they exemplify some general principle for which acceptance could be claimed, but because something about those things arouses certain responses in them, though they would arouse different responses in others.
• “Moral sense” or “intuition” is an initially more plausible description of what supplies many of our basic moral judgements than “reason.”
• With regard to all these starting points of moral thinking the argument from relativity remains in full force.

Question 5

The Argument From Queerness (Strangeness)

Answer 5

THE ARGUMENT FROM QUEERNESS (STRANGENESS) – This has two parts:

• One metaphysical, the other EPISTEMOLOGICAL – Origin nature–limits of human knowledge.
  
  • If there were objective values, then they would be utterly different from anything else in the universe.
• if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty of moral intuition, different from our ordinary ways of knowing.

NON-NATURAL QUALITIES

“FACULTY OF MORAL INTUITION” – The central thesis of intuitionism is one to which any objectivist view of values committed: intuitionism merely makes unpalatably plain what other forms of objectivism wrap up.

• “A special sort of intuition” is a lame answer, but it is the one to which the clear-headed objectivist is compelled to resort.
• Intuitionism has long been out of favour, and it is indeed easy to point out its implausibilities. TBJ– He must resort to this because it is the only way we could perceive an objective morality.

Moral Objectivist Is Not To Evade This Issue But To Look For Companions In Guilt – Not moral knowledge alone that such an empiricism is unable to account for, but also our knowledge of essence, number, identity, diversity, solidity, inertia, substance. TBJ– Says that morality is Not the only thing we fail to find evidence of objectivity.

This Is An Important Counter To The Argument From Queerness – The only adequate reply to it would be to show how, we can construct an account of the ideas that we have most of these can be given in empirical terms.

PLATO’S FORM – Give picture of what objective values would have to be.

• The Form of the Good is such that knowledge of it provides the knower with both a direction and an overriding motive.
• An objective good would be sought by anyone who was acquainted with it, not because of any contingent fact that this person, desires but just because the end has tobe-pursuedness somehow built into it.
• Similarly, if there were objective principles of right and wrong, any wrong course of action would have not-to-be- doneness somehow built into it.

Another way of bringing out this queerness is to ask, about objective moral quality, how this is linked with its natural features.

• What is the connection between the natural fact cruelty—say, causing pain just for fun—and the moral fact that it is wrong?
• It cannot be a necessity. Yet it is not merely that the two features occur together.
• The wrongness must somehow be “consequential” it is wrong because it is a piece of deliberate cruelty.
• What is signified by this “because”? And how do we know the relation that it signifies, if this is something more than such actions being socially condemned.
• It is not even sufficient to postulate a faculty which “sees” the wrongness: something must be postulated which can see at once the natural features that constitute the cruelty, and the wrongness, and the mysterious consequential link between the two.
• Alternatively, the intuition required might be the perception that wrongness is a higher order property belonging to certain natural properties; but what is this belonging of properties to other properties, and how can we discern it?
• How much simpler and more comprehensible the situation would be if we could replace the moral quality with some sort of subjective response which could be causally related to the detection of the natural features on which the supposed quality is said to be consequential.