Topics Ethics

Question I recently read in the New York Times that a majority of philosophers are moral realists. That is, they believe there are right and wrong answers to moral questions. I have always been under the impression that David Hume has had the last word on this and that questions of morality are emotive. That is, the come from our emotions, not our reason. They are similar in kind to positions on aesthetics, for example, however in the case of morals we view them as much more important. This seems certainly correct to me. If not, how can any position on basic values or morals be verified? We can verify that the moon is not made of cream cheese, but we cannot verify in the same way that it is "moral" for that human beings survive.

Accepted:
October 4, 2010

Comments

In Book 3, Part 1, Section 1 of A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume argues that "morals...cannot be deriv'd from reason; and that because reason alone...can never have any such influence. Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason." Hume himself went on to argue that moral judgments are akin to judgments of pleasure and pain, and, therefore, are akin to aesthetic judgments. The problem to which you point--how can moral judgments be verified--may rest on too narrow a conception of reason. (Surely the judgment that some work of art is beautiful is a cognitive judgment, not merely an expression of one's response to a work. Perhaps it is not the same sort of judgment as when one judges that 'Water is H2O', but maybe that only goes to show that there are different kinds of 'objective' judgments, which shouldn't be assimilated.) Be that as it may, Hume's own argument depends on his own particular narrow conception of reason, a conception of reason that contemporary 'moral realists'--here taking 'moral realism' simply to be the view that there are objective moral judgments--reject. (See, for example, T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other.)

Emotivism, which can be seen as a descendant of Hume's view, has been shown to be problematic, in virtue of the fact that moral judgments can be embedded in intensional contexts--e.g., 'X judges that sodomy is wrong'--and emotivism doesn't account for how moral judgments could be so embedded. (This argument was advanced by the philosopher P. T. Geach.)

There are, to be sure, recent exponents of a variant of emotivism, sentimentalism, such as Alan Gibbard (_Wise Choices, Apt Feelings_) and Simon Blackburn (_Ruling Passions_). But these are far more sophisticated views than those advanced by emotivists such as Stevenson and--in an even starker form--Ayer. Yet I think that the jury is still out as to whether these arguments are successful.

Just a minor correction, or perhaps elaboration. The (most?) famous argument of Geach's against emotivism (in "Ascriptivism", Phil Review, 1960), concerns embeddings in the antecedents of conditionals, such as: If sodomy is wrong, then it ought to be against the law. The contrast here is with something like, "If OUCH, then I should go to the hospital". That just makes no sense. Geach was not necessarily assuming a truth-functional analysis of conditionals, but the point is easiest to see from that perspective: The conditional is supposed to be true so long as its antecedent is false or its consequent is true; but the emotivist view is that "sodomy is wrong" does not have a truth-value, because it is not truth-evaluable. The response one tends to see from anti-realists turns on a different sort of understanding of conditionals, as so-called "inference tickets". But on this too, the jury has not yet reported.

If I'm reading the question correctly, it assumes that if morals aren't empirically verifiable, then they must be based upon emotion rather than reason. Frankly, I don't know why anyone would make that assumption. There are lots of important claims that aren't based upon emotion, but that ultimately aren't empirically verifiable. For example, the claim that 'if morals aren't empirically verifiable, then they must be based upon emotion rather than reason' is not empirically verifiable but does not seem based upon any emotion.

If any of the great modern philosophers had the 'last word' on ethics (and a vast range of other issues) it would have probably been Kant who wrote after Hume and rejected many of his views (including this one).