Final Exam

The University’s scheduled final exam slot for our class falls at 8:00am today. You must complete the exam for this class unless you have petitioned for the alt-exam option before the end of classes last week and carried out the steps explained in class for the alt-exam option before the start of this exam time.

That’s a Wrap

Today we’re going to wrap up the semester, overview how we got here, and finally draw the whole picture on the board of the two challenges to moral realism that we’ve been considering this semester. In encourage you to keep reading in Slaves of the Passions, if you are interested, but Chapter 7 is the hardest chapter of the book, and it contains the most important loose strands from chapters 5 and 6.

Congratulations! If you have kept up with everything this semester you have mastered a large portion of contemporary metaethics, and if you encounter almost anything else in the area of metaethics, you will have enough reference points to be able to see how it relates in some way or another to the topics that we’ve covered in this class.

Please don’t forget to make progress on your final term paper and to take advantage of early submission in order to receive your three opportunities to submit!

Too Few Reasons

The flip side of the argument from the Humean Theory of Reasons and Objective Prescriptivity to the moral Error Theory is the argument from Objective Prescriptivity and moral realism against the Humean Theory of Reasons. According to this argument, the Humean Theory of Reasons allows for Too Few reasons, and a better theory should be less stingy about how hard it is for something to be a reason for someone. It should not have to depend on anything special about them, this argument goes.

Reading

In this chapter we’ll turn to Schroeder’s response to this challenge. Schroeder’s response turns on getting a delicate balance right between taking the problem seriously enough and still trying to solve it. As you read, ask yourself whether it seems plausible or not that he can get this balance right. For today’s class please read chapter six of Slaves of the Passions.

Objectivity

Recll that we saw last week that Mackie objects (among other things) to the idea that anything could be objectively prescriptive. Since he thinks morality must be objectively prescriptive, he thinks that nothing could be morality. In last class and this one we are looking at two different ways of rejecting the idea that morality has to be objectively prescriptive, and hence which are ways in which the argument for the Error Theory would fail. We can reject this idea by rejecting that morality must be prescriptive, or we can reject it by rejecting the idea that morality must be objective.

Moral Relativism

It is a common trope that college sophomores all endorse some kind of moral relativism, endorsing claims like ‘everything is relative, man - even whether everything is relative’. Most university professors who teach ethics think that this is not a particularly coherent view and that it is not well-motivated. But Princeton philosopher Gilbert Harman argued for most of his career that there are intelligible and coherent forms of moral relativism, and that we have some substantial reason to think that some kind of moral relativism is true. (Harman has now retired but he was one of my supervisors in graduate school.) Our reading for today was the first thing that he wrote about this topic, and it was published originally in 1975 - right around the same time that Foot and Mackie were thinking about similar problems in different ways.

Reading

For class we are reading Harman’s paper, ‘Moral Relativism Defended’. This paper is about twenty pages long. It is packed with different ideas and terminology and we won’t be able to talk about everything, but as you read, ask yourself how Harman would respond to Mackie.

Prescriptivity

We saw on Monday that Mackie objects (among other things) to the idea that anything could be objectively prescriptive. Since he thinks morality must be objectively prescriptive, he thinks that nothing could be morality. In this class and the next class we are going to look at two different ways of rejecting the idea that morality has to be objectively prescriptive, and hence which are ways in which the argument for the Error Theory would fail. We can reject this idea by rejecting that morality must be prescriptive, or we can reject it by rejecting the idea that morality must be objective.

Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives

The most famous attempt to reject the idea that morality must be prescriptive comes from a 1973 article by the philosopher Philippa Foot, who went on to teach at UCLA after Oxford for much of the 1980s and 1990s. We encountered Foot earlier in the semester when Michael Smith discussed her prominently in chapter three of The Moral Problem. Though Foot has written many things (she was the philosopher who invented the trolley problem that many of you have heard of and has been featured in popular media like The Good Place), Smith was talking about this paper. So now we’re going to look at it in more detail. Foot was the philosopher who best appreciated, in the second half of the twentieth century, the structure of our second big challenge to moral realism.

Reading

For class we are reading Foot’s paper, ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’. This paper is only twelve pages long so I’m making up the deficit I gave in extra reading for Monday’s class. As you read, ask yourself what Foot means by the claim that something is a ‘hypothetical imperative’, and how Foot can be seen as offering a response to Mackie’s argument from queerness.

Error Theory

We have been reading Slaves of the Passions in order to get insight into one of the two main challenges to moral realism. The Humean Theory of Reasons is important to understand this challenge because it is a premise in the most important argument that presses this challenge. Now it’s time for us to turn to one of this challenge’s main proponents, the Oxford Philosopher J.L. Mackie.

Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

In 1977, Mackie published a book called Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong that surprised most readers at that time with what people took to be a new view about metaethics. Readers at the time were familiar with the ideas of noncognitivism, according to which moral language and thought are not even trying to describe the world, and most people who were skeptical about moral realism identified with noncognitivism. But Mackie argued on the realist’s side for one of the main things that realists and noncognitivists disagree about - that moral thought and language really do try to describe or represent reality. He just thought that they make a fundamental mistake in doing so, and that nothing in reality is quite as ordinary moral thinking presupposes. Mackie’s view and views similar to it have come to be known as the moral error theory, and in class I have defined this view as the thesis that nothing is truly wrong.

Minor Trigger Warning

In 1977 in Oxford, the time and place in which Mackie was writing, it was possible to use the word ‘queer’ to mean something like ‘peculiar’, and without any of the connotations of a homosexual slur - or at least in such a way that the users could be in self-denial about whether their use was sufficiently distinct by that use as to not be implicated by it. And one of Mackie’s most famous arguments in his book is what he calls the ‘Argument from Queerness’, according to which moral facts or properties are “just too queer” to exist. In class we’ll be trying to understand what this argument is and how it is supposed to work, and I’ll follow Mackie in using the word ‘queerness’, but I beg that all of you note and acknowledge that this word has a complicated history that after this warning I am going to completely ignore.

The Reading

For Monday’s class we are going to read chapter 1 of Mackie’s book, sections 1-9. This comes to about 28 pages, a little bit more more than we’ve been reading in the second half of the semester, but I think that you’ll find Mackie’s writing engaging and provocative. This chapter is what philosophers like to call a “rich text”, meaning that it is full of different thoughts and arguments that its author does not always distinguish from each other as well as we might, and in which a lot of later thinkers can each find inspiration even though that have very different ideas from one another. So we are definitely not going to cover everything that he says or figure out many of the most interesting interpretive questions about what he’s trying to say. But try to figure out what you think he means by saying that morality is “too queer”. That’s what we’ll discuss in class.

Too Many Reasons

Quinn’s radio man example is a forceful way of pushing the worry that the Humean Theory of Reasons results in too many reasons - i.e., that it is subject to counterexamples of the following form: cases in which there is actually no reason to do something, but the HTR says that there is in fact some reason to do it. For today’s class we return to Schroeder’s response to this pattern of counterexample to his theory.

Reading

Please read chapter 5 of Slaves of the Passions. As you read, try to pay attention for two things: first, can you resist Schroeder’s explanation of what is going on in the cases of proposed counterexamples? And second, do you feel like there is still an objection left to be pressed, after we take on board Schroeder’s defense?

Putting Rationality In Its Place

In order to set up the next class of objections that Schroeder tries to respond to in chapter 5 of Slaves of the Passions, for today’s class we’re reading a famous article by the philosopher Warren Quinn, who like Jean Hampton with whom I believe he was friends, died at a tragically young age in the 1990’s. In this article, Quinn introduces an example that has become very famous. As you read, see if you can guess which example is the one that is so important and has become so famous. Who, among the philosophers who we have read this semester, does this example make the most trouble for?

Reading

You will find the reading here. Note that this online PDF includes both Quinn’s article and another paper published in the same volume by Philippa Foot - you will want to stop reading after Quinn’s article, which is just 22 pages. As you read, ask yourself: is Quinn trying to argue against noncognitivism, or against the Humean Theory of Reasons? Separate this question into the separate questions of what does he seem to say that he is trying to argue against, and what does his argument really attack?

Paper 2 Prompts

Click below for the prompts for paper #2. The same rules apply as for Paper #1, except that the initial deadline is Sunday November 13th.

Reduction as Property Analysis

Schroeder’s answer to Hampton and Korsgaard in chapter 3 requires him to defend the claim that the best version of the Humean Theory of Reasons doesn’t just tell us which reasons you have, but it also tells us what it is for something to be a reason for you. It is, in his terms, a reductive analysis of reasons.

Recall from chapter 2 of The Moral Problem Smith’s classification of views with respect to what they say moral words describe. All of the view that Smith considers are forms of descriptivism, because they say that moral words describe - they pick out a way that things might be, or in other words, a moral property. Non-naturalists, in Smith’s terms, say that ‘good’ or ‘right’ pick out a non-natural property. Moore was our example of a non-naturalist. Smith then divides naturalists into definitional and non-definitional naturalists. Neither Smith nor Schroeder are non-definitional naturalists. Smith thinks that there are naturalistic definitions of ‘right’ and ‘reason’, and so does Schroeder (though he only discusses ‘reason’ in this book). But Smith and Schroeder offer different answers to Moore’s Open Question Argument. As you read, try to figure out how Schroeder’s answer to the Open Question Argument is different from Smith’s.

Incoherence and Chauvinism

We saw in last week’s class that Jean Hampton argued that it is not just false, but incoherent to think that all or your reasons have their source in your desires. Since the Humean Theory of Reasons says that all of your reasons do have their source in your desires, that means that the Humean Theory of Reasons cannot possibly be true - it is confused.

This is the challenge posed and answered in chapter 3 of Slaves of the Passions. For class, read the full chapter and try to answer for yourself how you would resist this answer if you were Hampton. Is there anyone else who we have read this semester who you could recruit as your ally if you were trying to resist Schroeder’s response to Hampton? Who? Why would they make a good ally?

Jean Hampton on the Authority of Reason

The philosopher Jean Hampton died at a young age in the early 1990’s before being able to complete the book that she was working on. Her notes were pulled together and published as The Authority of Reason in 1996. One of the main themes of Hampton’s book is that it is not just false, but incoherent, to think that rationality or reasons could be purely instrumental in nature.

I’m assigning chapter 4 of her book as the context in order to understand the kind of objection that Schroeder is trying to respond to in chapter 3 of Slaves of the Passions, which we’re reading next week. Schroeder is also motivated by trying to respond to a couple of other things by Christine Korsgaard that we have not read, but those are a little bit too difficult to read, and so I am assigning Hampton instead.

The Reading

The Hampton reading is here. The chapter is around 40 pages, but you can get the feel for the main issue by reading up to page 142 and then stopping. The main question that I want you to think about while reading this chapter is: why does Hampton think that it is incoherent and not just false to think that desires are the only source of reasons?

No New Reading

In class today we’ll do a change-of-pace topic that is a little bit orthogonal to the other topics this semester but which I think you’ll find interesting and will give you something to think about to get some leverage in thinking through some of the possible shortcomings of all three of the books that we’ve read this semester.

The Classical Argument for the Error Theory

We are now making the transition to unit 3 of the course. In unit 1, we spent two weeks on Moore, who is in many ways a paradigmatic realist in metaethics - he thinks that there are truths about morality out there to be discovered, that these truths are independent of anything about us, and that when we discover them we are forming beliefs about the world.

In unit 2, we spent six weeks reading Michael Smith’s book The Moral Problem, which is about what I have called the “classical argument” for noncognitivism. (Noncognitivism, recall, is just what we get if we solve the Moral Problem by concluding that moral judgments are not really beliefs, or not just beliefs.) The classical argument for noncognitivism challenges moral realism by challenging the idea that moral judgments are beliefs.

Now in unit 3, we turn to think about a different kind of traditional challenge to moral realism. Instead of challenging the idea that moral judgments are beliefs, it challenges the idea that moral judgments are true. This challenge is what we can call the “classical argument” for the moral error theory. According to the version of the moral error theory that we will consider, nothing is wrong. Since Smith’s book was about rightness and we’ll be talking from now on about wrongness, you could think that this just changes the subject, but most issues would stay the same if we translated either into the other.

Reading

Our reading for today is chapter 1 of Slaves of the Passions, which introduces and explains what the book will be about. Slaves of the Passions is about a theory that we’ve already encountered in class in our sub-unit on Williams and Korsgaard - The Humean Theory of Reasons. You won’t see a lot in the first chapter about the classical argument for the error theory, but the reason why the Humean Theory of Reasons is so interesting, is because of the role that it plays in the classical argument for the error theory.

A Note About Reading Work By Your Professor

When a professor assigns their own work in class, they are not trying to convince you that what they think or have said is true. They are inviting you to see them as a colleague and engage with them. A book or article that was not written for students, but written for colleagues, when shared with students, is an invitation for those students to put themselves into the role as colleagues. I published this book 14 years ago and I have changed my mind about a number of things in the book, including some really important things. So try really hard not to be shy about exploring where you disagree with what you read in the book!

Finishing up with Smith’s Solution

Okay, this is the end of Smith. In chapter 5 he showed how he could use the rationality loophole in order to explain how it could be true that reason-judgments motivate even though they are beliefs and beliefs don’t motivate. In this chapter he uses this to solve the Moral Problem by arguing that moral judgments are reason-judgments.

Recall

Recall from chapter 5 that Smith’s solution to the puzzle about how reason-judgments motivate had two key parts. First, he defended an answer to what reason-judgments are about. And then, he defended an answer about what practical rationality does. Reason-judgments, according to Smith, are judgments about what you would desire yourself to do if you were fully rational. And what practical rationality does, is make you desire to do things that you believe you would desire yourself to do if you were fully rational. So together, these two claims explain why someone who makes a reason judgment will be caused to desire to do the thing that they believe they have a reason to do. So together, these explain why reason-judgments will motivate rational people: rational people will come to have a desire when they have a reason-judgment, and the desire will motivate them - which is consistent with the Humean Theory of Motivation.

So

So all that he needs to add in this chapter to this solution is that moral judgments (“right”-judgments, in particular) are judgments about what you have a reason to do. If they are, then everything that goes for reason-judgments will go for right-judgments as well.

Reading

Read chapter 6 of The Moral Problem for class - it is short, and goes back and explains why Smith thinks his view is better than alternatives. And because it doesn’t add a lot that is new compared to chapter 5, it will provide us with a good opportunity to review what happened in chapter 5 once more.

Solving the Moral Problem

This week we finally get to Smith’s solution to the Moral Problem. HIs solution is actually simpler than he makes it sound, so try hard while you are reading to separate the wheat from the chaff. But in chapter 5 of The Moral Problem he explains why judgments about reasons will motivate rational people, even though judgments about reasons are beliefs, and the Humean Theory of Motivation is true.

Our Reading

Our reading for Monday is chapter 5 of The Moral Problem. I hope that you will read it all, but I’m also going to warn you in advance that almost everything that is most important is in sections 5.9 and 5.10. Section 5.9 is quite long, so together these take up about the second half of the chapter. The first eight sections are kind of Smith’s transition to section 5.9, motivating why he is turning to the question that he does in 5.9.

But…

But the simple answer to why he turns to the subject that he does in sections 5.9 and 5.10 is that he thinks that there is a puzzle that is perfectly analogous to the Moral Problem but is about reasons, rather than rightness. According to this puzzle, reason-judgments are beliefs, reason-judgments motivate without the help of a desire, but beliefs don’t motivate by themselves. The only difference between this puzzle and the original Moral Problem, Smith thinks, is that this problem is easier to solve. So in sections 5.9 and 5.10, Smith gives his solution to this, easier, puzzle. Then in chapter 6 the trick to solving the Moral Problem is going to be arguing that the Moral Problem is really just a special case of this more general problem about reasons. (If I were writing Smith’s book, I would have done this in the reverse order - first arguing that the Moral Problem is just a special case of the more general problem, and then solving the more general problem. But I didn’t get to write Smith’s book and this is how he does it.)

Preview: Smith’s Anti-Humean Theory of Reasons

The reading for today is Korsgaard’s article ‘Skepticism About Practical Reason’, which I lectured about on Monday. Today we’re going to pause and review Korsgaard’s response to Williams, and then spend the rest of the class previewing how we expect Smith to exploit his loophole in the Moral Problem in order to solve it.

Come With Questions!

Please come with questions about Korsgaard or about anything that you want to review from our unit on Smith, as this week is our chance to catch up before getting Smith’s solution in our last week on Smith next week.

Korsgaard

Today in class we’re going to discuss Christine Korsgaard’s answer to Bernard Williams’ argument in his paper ‘Internal and External Reasons’. Because I am late to post this reading, you are not required to have read it before class and will not expect you to have. Instead, in class I will review the argument from Williams’ paper, I’ll explain the central line of argument in Korsgaard’s paper, and then you will be able to read Korsgaard’s paper for Wednesday’s class after I explain it, and then on Wednesday we’ll review it again and you’ll have the opportunity to follow up with questions after having read it.

Skepticism About Practical Reason

The setup in Korsgaard’s article and her explanation of why she thinks it is important can be a little bit confusing. But the main things to keep in mind is that she is trying to respond to what she understands WIlliams’ argument to be, and that she understands Williams’ argument in the way that I have explained it in class.

Williams’ Argument: Review

The conclusion of Williams’ argument is that whether you have a reason to do something depends on your psychology. His argument has two premises.

Existence Internalism About Reasons: If there is a reason for you to do something, then you could be motivated to do it for that reason.

Sub-Humean Theory of Motivation: Any psychological process that results in your motivation must start from a feature of your actual psychology.

————————————————(therefore)———————————

Conclusion: If there is a reason for you to do something, then there must be a feature of your actual psychology to be the starting point of the psychological process that could motivate you to do it for that reason.

————————————————(therefore)———————————-

Sub-Humean Theory of Reasons: Whether there is a reason for you to do something depends on your psychology.

The Reading

If you want to read Korsgaard’s article in advance, you can find it here.