Topics Ethics

Question I once read that "moral properties are causally inert". In other words, the fact that something is morally good or right doesn't make anything (or at least anything physical) happen or cease to happen. Only the fact that somebody BELIEVES that something is good or right does. My question is whether you think that this is specific to moral properties. For instance, aesthetical properties (like beauty) seem to be as inert as moral ones. And the properties of being money, of winning a game or of having an A as a school grade seem to me equally inert. Aren't they?

Accepted:
August 11, 2008

Comments

Let's start with money, which is also a good thing to end up with. Whether the piece of paper in my pocket is money isn't something that depends just on the intrinsic properties of the piece of paper itself. As someone once put it, the fact that something is money is an "institutional property." It depends on a complicated lot of social facts. Of course, if you BELIEVE it's money, I may be able to get you to part with your pet parakeet in exchange for it. And if you believe it's money, that's most likely largely due to non-monetary properties like shape, color, etc. And so someone might say: the monetary properties of the paper are causally inert. What does the causal work are its more metaphysically mundane properties.

But that seems to slice things a bit too crudely. Even if monetary properties are "institutional" or "social" properties, the fact that the institution exists and that some things really are money has all sorts of causal consequences, and the fact that something really is money (has the right history of production, comes from the right source...) might have a lot to do with how it ended up in the ATM machine and then in my pocket. And so even though I might have been able to "buy" your budgie with a forged bill, as it happens the fact that I really do have money in my pocket is highly relevant to how the transaction actually proceeds.

So monetary value isn't like charge. A charged particle will behave the same way in a magnetic field regardless of what we believe. But the fact that some properties are complex social properties doesn't mean that "really" possessing the property doesn't have any role to play in certain kinds of causal stories -- even if the stories sometimes have a certain shaggy dog quality to them.

What about "moral properties"? They're controversial, of course. Not everyone agrees that there really are such things. But let's waive that point and proceed in two steps: "good," then "right." At least some important species of good are "response-dependent" -- something's being good in at least some ways has to do in with its consequences or effects. Some things are held to be goods because they contribute to our flourishing, as it's often put. That means their goodness isn't just a matter of what we believe, but of their causal properties. Properties of THIS sort clearly aren't causally inert. (You can see, by the way, that if we adopt a response-dependent account of aesthetic properties, they won't be causally inert either.)

But now for the hardest case: rightness and its counterpart wrongness. There's no simple story to tell here. The idea is something like this, I assume: the fact that, for example, torture is wrong doesn't produce any effects. The effects are produced by the BELIEF that torture is wrong; the "wrongness" itself is a "queer" property, to borrow J.L. Mackie's term, that seems to be idle in explaining things.

At this point, I will begin with the confession that I'm outside my area of expertise. But to focus our attention, let's suppose we have in mind a particular, real-world and objectively wrong act of torture . (If nothing is objectively right or wrong, of course, then the issue is moot.) Obviously the wrongness didn't stop the torturer from doing as he did; in that sense, the wrongness was inert. But the wrongness of the torture isn't something that's just superadded to the non-moral features of the deed. It's something about the nature of the act, its consequences, circumstances and so on that MAKES it wrong. Those things aren't causally inert. And in fact one of their causal features may be that they tend to motivate psychologically normal people not to act in certain ways. My "belief" that this act is wrong is a response to real features of the act, and those features typically produce sentiments of revulsion, horror and the like that lead me to act -- or not act -- in various ways. To be sure, there's no short path from the "ought" to the "is" (or the "ought not" to the "is not.") But if there really are moral facts, and if they are constituted by facts of the familiar sort, then even if the causal stories to be told are complicated, it seems wrong to say that moral properties are simply inert. It's just that simple push-and-pull stories won'tdo.

As I said, however, I'm outside my area. Perhaps others will have helpful things to add.