Topics Ethics

Question Most people seem to assume that animals cannot commit immoral acts - if a person murders another person, this is immoral, but when two alley cats fight and one dies, we generally don't say the surviving cat is a murderer, at least not in a sense that implies moral guilt on the part of the cat (though of course the cat is the causal source of the other cat's death). The immorality of the act does not lie in the act itself, else the surviving alley cat is a murderer. Yet the act and its context (why, where, why, etc.) are the only objective (i.e. human-independant) features relating to the act. So where does moral objectivity come from, then? Why don't moral objectivists accuse animals of behaving immorally? The difference can't be as simple as "The animals didn't know they were acting immorally", because if morality was found in the act itself, the action would be immoral. Thus the morality of an action must lie in the cognition concerning that action, rather than the action itself, yet why should we expect all cognitions about acts to come to the same conclusions? And even if they did, it would only be a fact - Hume's Is-Ought problem still holds, doesn't it?

Accepted:
April 20, 2011

Comments

Thanks for your question You've raised more than one issue, so let's divide up the territory. The more straightforward question has to do with whether animals can be judged morally. But in the background are questions about whether morality is objective in the first place.

Start with the simpler matter. For the moment, bracket skeptical doubts about whether there's an objective difference between right and wrong. What makes action what they are is in part the intentions, beliefs, etc. behind them. Two bits of behavior that look the same (say, firing a gun at someone) might be very different actions. Suppose one person is trying to kill someone for the insurance money. That's murder. But suppose the other is defending himself against a homicidal maniac. That's not murder, but self-defense, and the difference is in part a matter of what's going on in the minds of the people firing the guns. There's nothing mysterious here: whether we judge someone to have done something wrong is partly a matter of their intentions, motives, beliefs, etc. We'll come back to this below, but in the meantime, the trouble with cats is that, far as we know, they don't have the mental equipment needed to think truly murderous thoughts.

So far, so good. But the way you've posed your question brings issues the objectivity of moral judgments into the picture. What you suggest is that because we shouldn't expect everyone to come to the same conclusion when they think about an action, the question of whether the action was right or wrong can't have an objective answer. But why think that?

Compare: Suppose Mary is a mathematician. She offers an argument intended to prove a certain conjecture. John and Sally are evaluating her performance. John concludes that she didn't really offer a proof because there was a fallacy in her argument. Mary concludes that the proof was valid. Same action being scrutinized, different scrutinizers, different conclusions. But this doesn't mean there's no objective fact of the matter. Mary's argument was either valid or it wasn't. The fact that people can come to different judgments about this doesn't mean that all judgments are on a par. For all that's been said, the same could be true in the case of moral judgments about actions.

Now the case you have in mind is a bit less clear. I found myself unsure which cogitations by whom and about what were supposed to threaten objectivity. Two people evaluating a third person's action might come to different moral conclusions. But that fact, by itself, doesn't threaten the objectivity of morality. One of the people might be in possession of relevant facts that the other is unaware of. Or one of the people might have a moral blind spot that the other lacks. And so on.

We can also ask questions from an agent-centered perspective. Two people might perform actions that look similar on the surface. Our first example is a case of this sort. But their beliefs, motives, states of mind make a difference to what actions they are performing. Indeed, even if I believe quite mistakenly that someone is trying to kill me, that calls for judging my gunfire differently than the gunfire of someone who's under no such delusion but wants to cash in on the insurance.

So far, then, nothing that's been said has any clear bearing on whether morality is objective. People disagree about all sorts of things, but disagreement doesn't prove that there are no objective facts at stake. State of mind is relevant to moral judgment and to a good deal else. But nothing you've said suggests that states of mind aren't objective. And so we come to the final point: the "is-ought" problem. That's a big, interesting issue and it won't get solved here. But notice: the theoretical issue would still be there even if we agreed about both the non-moral facts and the moral judgments. The "is-ought" point, in essence, is that moral conclusions can't follow from non-moral, merely "factual" premises, whether we agree about those premises or not. The underlying issue is what J. L. Mackie called the "queerness" of morality -- the fact that moral facts, if such there be, seem to be utterly different in character from other facts. Gallons of ink and gazillions of pixels have been spilled on that topic, but however we approach it, it seems to be quite detached from the matter of whether animals can act immorally -- which is the place where our colloquy began.