Topics Ethics

Question Depending on which normative system you adopt the statements like “He is a moral person” or “In that situation that was the moral thing to do” will have different content, since what is moral is different in different normative systems. That being said then when looking at ordinary language usage by non-philosophers in everyday life situations I would claim (at least based on my experience) that people tend to use the term “moral person” or “a moral deed” in some sense with a universal meaning, just as if the term would refer to the same kind of people or deeds. Could you please care to speculate on why this is so? Is it only that people are careless or uninformed or might it be that there really are some “universally moral” things and people want to refer to them or is it just the particular culture they happen to live in? Or something else?

Accepted:
March 22, 2008

Comments

Some systems of rules and codes of conduct are arbitrary. In Canadian football, it's 3 downs; in the USA it's 4. There's no question of which is really right, and if the CFL or the NFL decided to change its rules, no one could object that the proposed new rules were wrong. Likewise, a fraternity might have a secret handshake, and members of the fraternity might make it a rule to greet one another that way. But they could do away with the rule or change the handshake and once again, no one could say that they had somehow gotten things objectively wrong.

It's part of the way that we use moral terms, however, that when we make a moral claim, we intend the claim to be universal. It's part of the concept of morality that something could be part ofsomeone's "moral code" or "system of morality" and yet be morallywrong. If someone says "It's wrong to keep slaves" they mean that it's wrong whether or not the slaveholder agrees, and whether or not the particular group or culture that may be at issue has a "moral code" that permits slavery.

This means we need to be careful about the idea of "content" here. Suppose I think X is wrong and you disagree. Then when I say "X is morally wrong," I'm claiming that X has a certain feature that you think it doesn't have. There's a straightforward sense in which we can share the concept of moral rightness of moral wrongness but disagree about what falls under the concept. (By the way: this possibility is hardly peculiar to morality. People often disagree about whether certain concepts apply to certain things.)

And so the reason most people use phrases like "moral person" or sentences like "That's immoral" as though there is a universal meaning to their words is that that's how the concept of morality works, and people are speaking accordingly.

All of this is about the grammar of morality, as it were -- about the kinds of claims we make when we make moral pronouncements. If I make a moral claim as opposed to a statement of preference or a claim about what the rules of some particular game or group call for, I'm presupposing that some things really are wrong even if not everyone agrees. But of course, people have been known to wonder if this makes any sense. The difficulty of resolving moral disagreements, the fact that different groups believe that different codes enshrine the true principles of morality, and the problem of explaining just what sorts of facts moral facts could be has led various people to doubt that the idea of a universally binding morality makes any sense. That's a perfectly interesting issue to pursue, but notice that takes something for granted: there's a practice of making claims that are meant to be universally binding. The question is whether that practice makes sense.

Does the practice make sense? Can we defend the idea that morality is objective? This is obviously a big question, but it's worth keeping in mind that there's a long philosophical tradition of arguing that the answer is yes. If ordinary folk who use moral language to make universal claims are engaged in a hopeless project, then at least they're in good philosophical company.

By the way: if you can get a copy of James Rachels' little text Problems from Philosophy, you'll find a readable, clear-headed defense in chapters 11 and 12 of the view that morality is objective.