by Tim Sommers
Even as we want to do the right thing, we may wonder if there is really, in some objective sense, a right thing to do. Throughout most of the twentieth-century most Anglo-American philosophers thought not. They were mostly some sort of subjectivist or other. Since they focused on language, the way that they tended to talk about it was in terms of the meaning of ethical statements. Ethical statements, unlike factual claims, are subjective expressions of our emotions or inclinations and can’t really be true or false, right or wrong, in any objective sense.
Emotivists, for example, argued that when I say something is good or bad, I am just expressing my like or dislike. This is sometimes referred to as the “Yay! Boo!” theory. Others argued that ethical statements are more like descriptions of our subjective states or imperatives commanding or exhorting others to act in the way we prefer they would.
Some philosophers took a subtler approach. J.L. Mackie’s “error-theory,” for example, accepted that people mostly believe that ethical statements can be correct or incorrect and that people do mean to do more than express themselves when making ethical claims. Unfortunately, Mackie says, there is nothing that makes it so. When I say something is bad, I may imply that there is an external standard according to which it is bad, some source of objectivity beyond my emotions or idiosyncratic beliefs, that makes this so. But all moral talk, including this style of “objective” moral talk, fails to be meaningful because nothing could make it objectively so. Hence, moral language needs to be reinterpreted in some subjectivist way.
Of course, philosophers outside the tradition of analytic philosophy have also been skeptical of the objectivity of morality. One of Nietzsche’s “terrible truths” is that most of our thinking about right and wrong is just a hangover from Christianity and it will eventually (soon!) dissipate. We are in no sense moral equals, he said. Democracy is a farce. The strong should rule the weak.
(Plus, there is no god. Life is meaningless. We have no free will. We suffer more than we experience joy. He was a real riot at parties, I bet.)
I wonder what it would be like if most people really believed that claims about what is right or wrong, good or bad, or just or unjust, were just subjective expressions of our own emotions and desires. What would our shared public discourse, and our shared public life, look like if most people believed that?
I fear that we are like the cartoon character who has gone over a cliff, but is not yet falling, only because we haven’t looked down yet.
One of the arguments that David Hume, the great godfather of subjectivist ethics, made in support of subjectivism about ethics is that there is nothing in the world, no objective features, that support, or are picked-out by, the label “good” or “bad.” If I witness an act, a robbery or an assault, say, I can describe all of its real, objective features without any evaluative labels at all. “So, the one guy walks up to the other buy and pulls out a gun…” Ethics just isn’t out there in the world. It’s all in your head.
But leave aside for a moment whether anything is good or bad simpliciter, good for everyone, surely some things are good or bad for you. The emotional distress of the robbery victim or the injuries of the assaulted are real enough features of our shared, objective world. What is good or bad for people is not wholly subjective.
Here’s a way to deny that. What makes something good or bad is simply whether or not I prefer it. But this is not really plausible – even though it’s a useful over-simplification sometimes. Surely, it’s true that part of what makes some things good or bad for me is whether or not I prefer it. There are things who are only good if chosen, for example. but this is not the whole story. There seems to be an objective component to human welfare. A good way to think about welfare is to compare it to health. Health is studied quite rigorously by doctors and scientists. Even though we choose sometimes, with full knowledge of the bad consequences, the unhealthy option, we are not tempted, therefore, to describe “health” as a subjective notion. Human beings are animals. Some things simply are healthy or unhealthy for them. Judgements about health do always take on an evaluative dimension. Smoking is unhealthy because, among other things, it increases your risk of death. Your love of smoking may be great enough to lead you to risk death to pursue it, but it is still, objectively, in at least one way, unhealthy.
We can think of welfare in much the same way. We sometimes do things that are not to our benefit, but this doesn’t show that there is no objective content to claims about what, in fact, benefits us. Quite the contrary. It suggests that we already intuitively grasp that what is good or bad for us is (at least partly) objective. Hence, one source of objectivity in ethics, we might say, is that welfare, like health, is at least partly objective.
Even if that is true, one might respond, it only proves that what is good for me is objective, not that what is good simpliciter is objective. Neither Plato or Aristotle would see it this way, by the way. For them, what is good for me and what is good in general are the same. But in modern thought these two ideas have come apart. We tend to think almost the opposite, in fact. We think that the right thing to do is typically something we must sacrifice (to some degree) our own interest to do. Why this is the case is too much to get to here. But maybe we should think about the objectivity of moral reasoning by thinking about the difference between reasoning about what is good for us and reasoning about what is good in general.
The late, great Derek Parfit used to present a chart that distinguished between theoretical reason and three distinct kinds of practical reason. Theoretical reasoning is reasoning about what to believe – logic, math, science, etc. Practical reasoning is reasoning about what to do. There are at least three kinds of practical reasoning.
Instrumental practical reasoning is reasoning about what means to take to our ends. If we take some goal as a given, then reason about how to achieve it, we are doing instrumental reasoning. (In the way that one might think that the skeleton of theoretical reasoning is logic, one might say the skeleton of instrumental reasoning is the axioms of rational decision theory.)
But there is also prudential practical reasoning, reasoning about what ends I should have and pursue. At a minimum, I can weigh ends against each other in terms of which will fulfill more of my preferences, but we can also (Parfit argued) reason about which ends are better or more important.
Finally, there is ethical practical reasoning which is reasoning about how to take other’s ends into account. Ethics, on this view, requires, or even consists of, a certain kind of impartiality. I don’t count my interests as less important than the interests of others, but I also don’t count them as more important.
What kind of reasoning is this? Its most basic forms are familiar enough. As Kant said, “Originality in ethics is no virtue.”* We might think that we should do whatever leads to the greatest benefit for the greatest number. Or we might think that we should always act according to principles that we expect everyone to follow. Many complications then ensue. But whatever mix of these, or other, principles we end up endorsing, do we have any reason to think of any of this as a kind of reasoning, really?
Hume said, “It is not irrational to prefer the destruction of the world to the pricking of my finger.” But surely it is. Instrumental reasoning all by itself will tell you that means of preventing the pricking of your finger that result in the destruction of the whole world are irrational since the destruction of the whole world will be worse for you and your ends than the finger pricking – even if you continue to insist that you prefer the world to end. Welfare is not wholly subjective. But Hume’s point is that it is not irrational because it is not a kind of reasoning and “rational” or “irrational” don’t apply. But why not, Hume? Surely, reasoning about how to use means to achieve your ends is reasoning.
That’s the first step and the biggest leap. Parfit believed that this was the thin edge of the wedge that gets us to ethics as a kind of reasoning. If we can get someone to take that step, the rest is easier. If there is practical reasoning of any sort, why deny that ethics is a kind of reasoning? Here’s the next step. If we accept fitting means to our ends as a kind of reasoning, isn’t adjusting our ends, and even comparing and weighting them, also, a kind of reasoning? And if we can reason about which ends are most valuable and how they are to be weighed, can’t we reason about how our ends are weighed against the ends to others?
Most of ethics is about fleshing out how to take others’ ends into account. Ethics is about what impartiality between the ends of persons really means. However, while I have argued that welfare is really out there in the world, these principles really are all in our head. But they are not subjective. They are not emotions. They are the products of reason.
If that sounds unlikely, even mystical, compare mathematics. Mathematics is also all in our head. The axioms allow us to derive further principles which lead to proofs. But we begin with how intuitions are to be balanced and fit together. All the rigor comes later. Consider the claim I made earlier about instrumental practical reasoning. There are whole disciplines – rational decision theory and microeconomics, at least – devoted to systematizing how we think about reasoning about means to ends. There is controversy there and competing axioms are proposed. But almost no one thinks that developing an axiomatic approach to instrumental reasoning is somehow subjective or emotional.
Here’s a weird but revealing question, from George Stock’s The Book of Questions, that I have often posed to my classes. Given the choice between saving the lives of 1000 strangers in a foreign country, 500 Americans on an airplane, or your best friend, whom would you save? In my experience, most people think you should save the 1000. A small but significant group of people say “your best friend.” Almost no one ever picks the 500. Why? Maybe, it’s just the wrong answer. There are consistent, opposed lines of reasoning about the principles that ought to guide our actions that take you to either a 1000 people or your best friend – and which is right is a hard and interesting question. But it’s hard to reason your way to any consistent, plausible principle supporting the other choice. This doesn’t show that ethics is easy or even “solvable.” But it does suggest that we can reason about principles in a way that is not merely, or wholly, subjective.
So here are at least two potential sources of objectivity that can inform our ethics. On the one hand, welfare, what is good and bad for persons, is (at least partly) objective – it’s really out there, part of the “furniture of the world” (Sellars). On the other hand, reasoning about what to do is a kind of reasoning. Like all reasoning, it goes on inside our heads, but, like all reasoning, it (potentially) has a kind of objective rigor to it.
One of many questions that we haven’t answered is this. Why should I care about other people’s ends at all? Why not just do what is good for me? Egoism, however, is not a challenge to the objectivity of ethics, but to its content.
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*Okay, to be clear, Kant didn’t say that. That line is me misremembering footnote five from the second edition of The Critique of Practical Reasoning during a presentation. But I prefer my pithy way of putting it. Here’s what Kant actually said. “Who would want to introduce a new principle of morality and, as it were, be its inventor, as if the world had hitherto been ignorant of what duty is or had been thoroughly wrong about it?”
Thanks.
This essay is based on the first essay I wrote for 3 Quarks Daily exactly 7 years ago. I think it is one of my better and worth polishing a bit. I am grateful to my colleagues at William & Mary for their insight and support, the many students at William & Mary who engaged with me on these topics both in and out of the classroom, and 3QD readers, the sharpest commentators on the internet. All the best.