Ought to Is: The Puzzle of Moral Science John Basl and Christian Coons 1

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1 Ought to Is: The Puzzle of Moral Science John Basl and Christian Coons 1 Our moral commitments influence our views about the empirical world. Consider, for example, the strong correlations between political ideology and beliefs about climate change, the president s religion/birthplace, or the effects of gun control. 2 These correlations, we presume, are partly explained by our propensity to see world in ways that comport with our moral outlook. This also seems a poor way of arriving at beliefs. It threatens the grounds for common inquiry among those with different evaluative outlooks; but more directly, our evaluations (or their contents) seemingly cannot count as evidence for claims about the earth s climate, the president s birthplace, or the effects of gun control. As obvious as this may seem, the puzzle is how to best explain why this is so. Thus, here is our puzzle: The Puzzle: Why is it typically impermissible to revise or adopt views about the empirical world in light of our evaluative or moral views? In short, we want to know what s wrong with inferring from ought to is. Notice that while many doubt that purely descriptive premises can deductively entail any moral conclusion, deduction from ought to is seems relatively straightforward. For example, if ought entails can, then i. we ought to reduce net suffering entails ii. we can reduce net suffering. In fact, sometimes our evaluative views may support non-evaluative conclusions in seemingly the strongest way: logical 1 We would like to thank the following people for their helpful input on various parts of this paper: Matt Barker, Marty Barrett, Selim Berker, Matthew Brown, Agnes Callard, Richard Yetter Chappell, David Copp, Dale Dorsey, Jamie Dreier, Matt Kopec, Patrick Forber, Paul Gowder, Pete Murray, Steve Nathanson, Doug Portmore, Bill Roche, Ron Sandler, Andrew Sepielli, Neil Sinhababu, Rory Smead, Jacob Sparks, Daniel Star, Michael Titelbaum, and Jack Woods. We are also grateful to Pea Soup for hosting a discussion of the initial puzzle raised in this paper. 2 See Kahan and Braman 2005; McCright and Dunlap 2011; Jones 2010; Crawford and Bhatia 2012.

2 entailment and yet when they do it nevertheless seems illegitimate to draw the conclusion. For example, consider the following inference, call it Ought to Is : Ought-To-Is: A. It is never wrong to do what maximizes utility. B. It is always morally wrong to kill an innocent child. C. Therefore, killing an innocent child never maximize utility. A and B are, of course, moral claims, C is descriptive generalization and, it seems, C is logically entailed by A and B. Interestingly, however, it also seems clear that one makes some serious mistake were they to infer C from merely A and B. But diagnosing the mistake is difficult. To illustrate, imagine a scenario where clever student in your introductory ethics class call him Smart Alec says the following: Smart Alec I ve reflected on last week s arguments for utilitarianism, and I found them pretty darn convincing. While I m still not sure about the view, I am confident that it s at least always permissible to maximize utility after all, what could be wrong about doing what would be impartially best for everyone? And, yet, I ve always felt confident just from reflecting on the act itself that killing an innocent child is always wrong. So, thanks to this class, I ve had to re-think many of my assumptions, and I ve learned a lot. Specifically, I now see that killing an innocent child actually never will maximize utility. Moral reasoning is much more powerful than I thought it would be! Alec s comment sounds like a joke; but what s so funny? We d be inclined to tell Alec to avoid the inference, and revisit A or B or both. But on what grounds?! The premises are consistent. And surely no one can claim to have observed cases where such killing did, in fact, maximize utility. And it won t be very powerful to reply But remember the hypothetical example I gave involving the time-bomb? You know, the one with the rocket sled and the stadium full of children who are even more innocent. We all agreed killing the innocent child in this case would maximize utility I stipulated that it would and you agreed! To this, Alec could simply

3 reply yes, but I now believe that situations like that won t actually occur. And for all we know, maybe they won t. Even though the type of evidence Alex has for A presumably differs from B, this isn t problematic there s no rule against deducing conclusions from premises whose mode of justification differs. And though Alec belief in A and B may not be fully justified, unless one is willing to simply reject the predominant modes of gathering moral evidence, Alec appears to have at least some justification for both A and B but why then doesn t he have some (defeasible) justification for C? What, exactly, are we to say to Alec? And more generally, given that moral claims can have empirical entailments, why isn t moral reasoning a tool for learning about the physical world? On its face, this kind of research, call it moral science, seems not only less reliable, but wholly illegitimate; Alec seemingly has no theoretical grounds for believing killing innocent children never maximizes utility. Our paper assumes this is true, and attempts to explain why. We will begin by outlining and then rejecting the two extant approaches to this puzzle, both appear in Alex Barber s Science s Immunity to Moral Refutation. 3 Each proposal, Barber acknowledges, comes at a cost. The first call it the anti-realist strategy assumes that we (those who object to these inferences) are unwittingly anti-realists. The second, call it the realist-friendly strategy relies on a controversial brand of generalist moral foundationalism. We contend we needn t pay either price, because neither approach plausibly explains the puzzle. Barber s anti-realist solution, we will argue, explains too much it may answer the puzzle but 3 Barber s focus, however, is slightly different than our own focusing on why moral premises can t overturn or count against a scientifically supported conclusion. But we stress, and Barber seems to acknowledge, that the phenomena is broader: not only do we tend to think moral science can t be used to revise our scientifically supported beliefs, it also shouldn t even count as a reasonable way to form beliefs (e.g. inferring C in Ought to Is) when we don t already have scientific evidence for (or against) the conclusion. The difference is of little import as most of the explanations Barber considers, if successful, also answer our puzzle.

4 it also entails that many inferences that seem fully legitimate, are not and would not seem so. And Barber s realist-friendly approach, we will argue, explains to little it cannot explain what s wrong with some particularly troubling inferences from is to ought, including the inference in our framing example, Ought to Is. Next, we ll briefly canvas a number of tempting alternative approaches to the puzzle e.g. that the puzzle rests on a dubious closure principle, the hunch that the metaphysical priority of the non-moral explains why the non-moral should also have an epistemic priority, the proposal that a general program of moral science would make our beliefs (moral and non-moral) less accurate -- we ll argue each is a dead-end. With the lessons from these failed solutions in place, we turn our sights to our own proposal. We argue that any attempt at making a moral science inference faces a dilemma: we take all the moral premises of such inferences to be necessary truths or we do not. If we accept that all the premises are necessary, our taking them as grounds for inferring from ought to is yields the result that, contrary to fact, some contingent proposition is necessary. On the other hand, if we accept that one of the moral premises essential to our inference is contingent on some empirical matter, then moral science is innocuous since our ultimate justification for coming to believe the conclusion wouldn t be wholly moral, but partly empirical. 2. Barber s Anti-Realist Strategies The ambition of Alex s Barber s Science s Immunity to Moral Refutation is more than exploring explanations for why we strongly resist inferences from ought to is. Rather, Barber thinks our resistance anchors a powerful case for moral anti-realism an argument he calls the argument from moral immunity (663). Specifically, Barber claims that anti-realists of various stripes skeptics, subjectivists, non-cognitivists, and error theorists--can explain easily our

5 resistance to inferring from ought to is, while realists, he says, can do so only by placing significant constraints on the structure of evidence for moral judgments (663). Anti-realism s unique ability to neatly resolve our puzzle, the argument concludes, is a powerful reason to think that our moral discourse is implicitly anti-realist in at least one of these ways. Here we will present and reject his case that each of the four main types of anti-realism --non-cognitivism, subjectivism, skepticism and error theory--easily explain our puzzle. In fact, we ll argue that none of these views provides plausible approach to the puzzle. Here we will present his case for each, using Barber s own text: Moral non-cognitivism: Non-cognitivists ( expressivists ) hold that our moral utterances express, not genuine judgments of belief, but mental states for which truth is an inappropriate measure of evaluation. Premises that are not even truth-apt, let alone true, cannot legitimately be used to infer anything that is truth-apt; hence we can never reasonably infer from our moral convictions to the falsity of a scientific theory with which they seem to conflict (637) Moral subjectivism: Moral subjectivists allow that moral utterances express genuine judgments of belief but deny that these judgments are objective. Their truth conditions are tied too closely to the inclination of the judger to make the judgment. If this is right, the feature of our moral convictions that explains why we cannot draw on them to overturn scientific claims is poverty of content. Their content is so proximal that they cannot be used to draw objective scientific distal conclusions. (638) Moral skepticism: Skepticism deserves to be classified as a form of moral anti-realism only as it tends towards extreme and generalized pessimism about the quality of evidence available in the moral sphere. Skeptics of this calibre can readily account for its being wrong to pitch moral considerations against scientific evidence, since an argument is only as secure as its premises. (638) Error theory: Error theorists have the simplest explanation of all for why we should not call on our cherished moral beliefs to settle a scientific question: they aren t true.

6 Because most of us are not anti-realists and the explanandum is our widespread rejection of inferences from ought to is -the anti-realist strategies postulate a collective delusion about our own views, a delusion for which Barber provides no independent evidence. Barber acknowledges this concern, but does not think it s damning. After all, we have many implicit beliefs, and Barber contends our reluctance to infer from ought to may be a good reason to suspect that below the radar of conscious reflection we are all moral anti-realists (638). The primary problem with this strategy, we will see, isn t its appeal to implicit belief; instead, the problem is that the implicit beliefs would each explain too much they would also predict faults in reasoning that we tend to find faultless. For example, postulating implicit skepticism or error theory is a rather poor way to explain the puzzle. Subconscious acceptance of skepticism or error theory shouldn t only assert itself in our hesitancy to infer from is to ought, it would predict a hesitancy to accept any substantive moral claim whether it s in conflict with our empirical judgments or not. In short, we don t balk at moral premises; we balk at certain inferences from them. So, if implicit acceptance of some anti-realist theory explains our rejection of moral science, the theory isn t error theory or skepticism. Barber s subjectivist strategy is more intriguing. Though he does not characterize the solution very precisely, the rough idea appears to be that for subjectivists the content of moral claims would be particular facts about our own attitudes; these proximal contents can t license inferences to any general and/or attitude independent scientific conclusions. This strategy, however, would appear to prove both too much and too little. First, it proves too little: it predicts that we will be less inclined to reject inferences from ought to is when the is is highly proximal and lacks the generality of a scientific conclusion; but this prediction fails. Our

7 hesitancy to infer from ought to is extends to particular descriptive conclusions and not just general scientific hypotheses. For example, if I reason about what I ought to do now and reach the particular verdict I must save Sally now my verdict and reasoning may presuppose or entail the highly particularized facts that I physically and psychologically can save Sally now but it s certainly not independent evidence that I physically and psychologically can save her now--e.g. it s clearly not evidence that I m not in a Frankfurt case (etc). Barber might respond that even this highly particularized non-moral conclusion is still somehow too distal to be inferred from the relatively proximal content of a (subjectivist) moral claim. Indeed, it s hard to assess our first objection because it s not yet clear what, precisely, the subjectivist answer to the puzzle is supposed to be. Nevertheless, there s a second, more serious, problem with the subjectivist strategy no matter how it is fleshed out. Unlike the skeptical or error- theoretic strategies discussed above, the subjectivist strategy attacks the validity of inferences from ought to is. Any strategy of this type will prove too much. The problem is that inferences from ought to is can be legitimate and even rationally required specifically when the premises are certain or hypothetically stipulated. For while we want to criticize Alec for believing that C. killing an innocent child will never maximize utility in virtue of his beliefs that A. It is never wrong to do what maximizes utility and B. it is always morally wrong to kill an innocent child, he also would appear to a mistake if he denies that C is entailed by A and B. If we ask someone Would C have to be true if A and B were true? we d be equally baffled by someone who said no and yet this precisely what the subjectivist strategy suggests one should say. Indeed, when Alec infers C from A and B we re not tempted to see his reasoning as a non-sequitur, on the contrary, It s because A and B entail C that we insist that he revisit either A or B. Roughly, we re inclined to point out to Alec that A and B are inconsistent unless C is true.

8 And because he has no reason to accept C, he must reconsider A or B. Of course, the puzzle itself is explaining why he has no reason. But our point is that the best answers to the puzzle should explain why someone like Alec is thought to be under pressure to revise his premises, strategies that deny the validity of the inference cannot explain this. These concerns, we will see, also apply to Barber s final anti-realist strategy: implicit non-cognitivism. According to this strategy, we implicitly hold that moral utterances express mental states for which truth is not an apt measure of evaluation, and as such, it s natural for us to also think that moral science s premises can t support any truth-apt conclusions (637). 4 This explanation explains too much in two respects. First, if we implicitly and generally accept that moral claims are not truth-apt, then we should also expect at least puzzlement about truth preserving inferences using moral and non-moral premises to moral conclusions, and puzzlement about how arguments using embedded or unasserted moral claims could be valid. 5 For example, it s puzzling how an argument like i) If grass is green then killing is wrong, ii) killing is not wrong, therefore iii) Grass is not green could clearly seem valid, if we implicitly believed non-cognitivism. To be clear, we acknowledge that philosophers might one day or may have already explained how a non-cognitive theory could capture the validity of these inferences; but the fact remains that explaining the validity of these inferences is (or was) an immediate puzzle for non-cognitivists something that they acknowledged, prima facie, looks like a problematic implication of their views. But ordinary speakers are not puzzled, for them these arguments look just as valid and of a piece with any analogue without moral 4 Barber is aware that this explanation is simplistic and that only some versions of non-cognitivism can explain the puzzle. For example, it s not clear whether Quasi-Realist accounts and/or those that also are non-cognitivists about epistemic norms have the resources to address the puzzle in the manner Barber suggests (637). 5 A locus classicus here is Geach (1965).

9 premises. And so, if ordinary speakers accept non-cognitivism, we should expect them to be puzzled (or initially balk) at these inferences too but, famously, we do not. In any case, implicit non-cognitivism fails as an explanation of the puzzle for a reason mentioned above: some inferences from ought to is do seem legitimate perhaps rationally required when the premises are known, certain, or stipulated. When one is entitled to certainty about the premises in Ought to Is, for example, then one may (and indeed rationally must) infer that it never maximizes utility to kill an innocent child. Implicit non-cognitivism can t explain why the inference suddenly becomes legitimate when we are permitted to assume the premises are true. Indeed, if we implicitly accepted non-cognitivism we d find further mystery (or apparent category error) in the very notions of knowing, being certain of, or stipulating, some moral claim. In short, an inference like Ought to Is can be legitimate in some theoretical contexts and Barber s conjecture that we re implicit non-cognitivists can not account for this for it appeals to the content of moral claims (or lack thereof) a feature that won t vary across the relevant contexts Barber s Realist-Friendly Approach Barber contends that while our widespread implicit acceptance of some anti-realist position would easily explain our puzzle. In contrast, after canvassing some flimsy realist explanations, he concludes that there s only one way realists could hope to explain the puzzle. Barber argues that if realists strategically divide moral claims into two types, they could explain why inferences from ought to is are objectionably circular. However, Barber emphasizes the price of 6 For an extended case for why the non-cognitivist must treat these inferences as irrational (and hence couldn t explain their rationality in privileged epistemic positions, (Dorr 2002). Barber acknowledges this exception to the illegitimacy of ought to is inferences later in his paper (p 645), but never addresses its deep tension with the implicit non-cognitivism approach that he advances.

10 the solution is steep: the strategic division (as the name suggests) may be ad hoc, and it requires that realists deny that particular moral judgments about either fictional scenarios or real events have any independent evidential support (652) Next we will outline what the strategic division is, how it s supposed to help explain the puzzle, and then show that it does not explain the puzzle; it cannot, for example, explain what s wrong with our framing inference Is to Ought. According to Barber, the realist might approach the puzzle by strategically dividing our moral judgments into two classes-- M-class and m-class --distinguished by their epistemic character. M-class judgments are subject only to a priori justification, immune to a posteriori support, while members of the m-class, in contrast, are derived from judgments in the M-class in conjunction with our a posteriori background assumptions. These m-class judgments, by stipulation, cannot themselves enjoy any independent support beyond their derivability from the M-class. Given this division, Barber argues that a realist could maintain that inferences from ought to is always employ an m-class judgment as a premise, and the justification of these premises will depend on the same considerations that serve as evidence for or against the conclusion. In his words, whenever we have a moral argument against a (real or putative) scientific finding, one of the moral premises will depend for all its plausibility on the argument's conclusion, making the argument essentially circular (Barber 2013, 19). To illustrate, considering the following inference: Permissible to Painless i. My eating fish is morally permissible. ii. If eating fish caused them severe and avoidable pain, then eating them would not be permissible. Therefore, iii. My consumption of fish does not cause fish severe and avoidable pain.

11 This inference does not seem merely fishy, a diagnosis is readily at hand. The first premise surely seems to be an m-class judgment. Surely someone who accepts ii will acknowledge that the permissibility of eating fish depends judgment that eating fish depends not only the badness of pain but also, crucially, on background assumptions about both whether fish feel pain and the necessity of consuming fish. When a moral science inference employs an obvious m-class judgment, its circularity is apparent. The success of Barber s solution depends on all such inferences invoking an m-class judgment. But do they? Barber provides no strict criteria by which to identify the class of a judgment; in fact he is willing only to tentatively classify some particular judgments as one or the other (Barber, p. 21). Indeed, which judgments belong to each class will often depend on which normative theory is true. For example, if Rule Utilitarianism is true lying is wrong is an m-class judgment whereas on some Deontological theories, like Kant s, this will be an M-class judgment. Absent full moral knowledge, it is difficult to assess whether Barber s solution is fully general. The generality of Barber s solution is further called into question by moral science inferences that seem straightforwardly to involve only M-class judgments. Consider again the inference used to motivate our puzzle: Ought-to-Is 1. It is never wrong to do what maximizes utility. 2. It is always wrong to kill an innocent child. Therefore, 3. It never maximizes utility to kill an innocent child.

12 The conclusion of Ought to Is is empirical and certainly Alec s reasoning to these premises looks a priori. 7 Ought to Is provides a prima facie reason to reject Barber s solution as fully general. Furthermore, adapting Barber s solution to accommodate Ought to Is exposes a deeper flaw. While my eating fish is morally permissible might obviously seem to require a posteriori justification, if there are no criteria by which to independently determine whether a judgment is M- or m-class, the solution is straightforwardly question begging. In the case of Ought to Is, the only reason we have been provided for thinking that one of the premises is an m-class judgment is that their conjunction has an empirical implication. But, we have no criteria to decide which one is m-class, and, in fact, they seem structurally similar such that both would seem to belong to the same class. So, to employ Barber s solution we must revise our initial view about the class of both of these judgments simply on the basis of their having an implication we find puzzling and for no other reason. 4. Alternatives that Are Not As noted earlier, Barber thinks that only explanation available to the realist requires making the strategic division. We ve argued that not even that helps. But before we offer our own proposal, it s worth examining why some tempting alternative proposals won t work. Barber s paper includes an excellent section on this issue ( ) Here he effectively disarms the proposals that the puzzle can be explained as 1) a corollary of the autonomy of ethics, 2) an effect of our relatively weak evidence for moral claims or 3) an implication of moral supervenience. To avoid redundancy, with his we won t rehearse those arguments here. Instead, we will strengthen 7 Of course, it s tempting to think that both of these premise can t be a priori justified. Many of us are inclined to think that having a priori justification for one of these premises serves as a reason to discount the other. Of course, whether we may do so depends on a resolution to the puzzle.

13 Barber s case that there s no easy answer to the puzzle by considering and rejecting four further superficially plausible alternatives The puzzle rests on a dubious closure principle At first glance, one might worry that the problem with inferences like Ought to Is has nothing to do with ought or is. Instead, the problem might easily explained by a cousin of the relatively well-known epistemic thesis the thesis that knowledge is not closed under known entailments. Similarly, one might deny justificational closure. Roughly, on this view, one might be justified in believing (P) and justified in believing (P > Q) but not justified in believing (Q). Perhaps, for these reasons, it s not at all puzzling that the specific inferences from premises to conclusion in arguments like Ought to Is are not justified we shouldn t expect them to be for even if the moral premises are justified, and the inference valid, it s a mistake to think this entails the conclusion will be justified. Thus, the puzzle itself relies on a dubious closure principle. This preliminary suggestion misses its mark in two respects. First, we acknowledge that justification may not transfer over a known entailment. But the puzzle here isn t why aren t the conclusions of moral science justified, or as justified, as the premises. Rather, it is why don t the justified premises provide any reason, or some justification, for believing the conclusion. 8 Second, and much more importantly, the denial of justificational closure isn t the radical and implausible thesis that one is never justified in believing (Q) in virtue of being justified in believing (P) and justified in believing (P > Q); rather, it is the view that Q s justification is not assured. So appealing to the denial of various closure principles would, at 8 A similar response applies to an attempt to dissolve the puzzle by appeal to the Lottery Paradox (Kyburg Jr 1961). The lottery paradox teaches us that there are cases where can come to be justified in some proposition A and some other proposition B without also gaining justification (or sufficient justification) for the conjunction A&B. But, the lottery paradox doesn t rule out ever coming to be confident in the conjunction on the bases of confidence of A and B. Applied to the puzzle of moral science, we need some explanation for why, in the case of the problematic inferences we can t increase our confidence in the conjunction of the premises.

14 best, predict that the inferences of moral science may not always be justified, but the thing to be explained is why they re always, or at least typically, not justified. 4.2 Metaphysical priority entails epistemic priority? It may be tempting to begin with the hunch that our epistemic puzzle is explained by a metaphysical relationship between is and ought. Though the details are disputed, there s a rough consensus that particular moral facts depend in some sense or other on the non-moral ones--acts have the moral status they do because or in virtue of their intrinsic and/or relational non-moral features. Perhaps this metaphysical priority, whatever it amounts to precisely, may explain why the non-moral cannot be inferred from the moral. 9 This tempting idea is a dead end; we often reasonably infer independent from the dependent and this appears to be true across types of dependence relations--e.g. causal, explanatory, or constitutive. For example, wholes depend on their parts, but we regularly infer from wholes to parts consider our inferences from objects we directly observe to conclusions about the unobservable parts that compose them. Similarly, the dispositions of an object in a fixed context will depend on the object s intrinsic features, and following argument type seems perfectly reasonable: Dispositional to Intrinsic 1. This object has disposition d in context c. 2. Only things with intrinsic properties X, Y, or Z have d in c. Therefore, 3. This object has X, Y, or Z. Here, like inferences from wholes to parts, inferring 3 from 1 and 2 is generally faultless. So, typically at least, no problem with moving from premises regarding the dependent to the independent; in fact, abductive reasoning characteristically takes just this form. Of course, one 9 For a closely related issue, see Barber s case against explaining the puzzle by appealing to moral supervenience. ( ).

15 might insist there s a special problem with inferences from dependent to independent when the dependent is moral and the independent is non-moral--but that bare insistence merely re-asserts the thing to be explained. 4.3 Moral Science is a bankrupt policy of belief revision One diagnosis of what s wrong with modifying our non-normative beliefs in light of our normative beliefs might be to contend that though individual inferences of this type might be justified, a policy of inferring in this way would be an epistemic disaster, and so we should avoid these inferences individually as well. Such a case might begin by noting that inferences from ought to is amount to modifying our picture of the world to fit our evaluations, when arguably our evaluations are more accurate or justified when they are independently informed by our best evidence about what the world is like. As a result, adopting moral science as a research program will make one s evaluations less sensitive to evidence, and hence, less likely to be accurate. The problem is then multiplied and infects our non-moral beliefs as we continue to infer both moral and non-moral claims from this less accurate set. Ought to Is again helps illustrate the problem: inferring that killing an innocent child never maximizes utility from 1 and 2, blinds us to the tension between act utilitarianism and general prohibitions of act-types (e.g. killing an innocent child), and so we never update (and presumably improve) our moral outlooks in light of the tension. But this cannot be the whole of the story about what s wrong with these inferences from ought to is. First, this diagnosis only explains why there may be something wrong with a general policy or program of moral science it merely explains why such inferences, though legitimate in isolation, might imperil the accuracy of a class of our beliefs. As such, the pragmatic solution seems to entail only that moral science is dangerous when the data to be explained is that it is illegitimate even in particular cases.

16 Second, and more importantly, the diagnosis seems to implicitly rely on the very thing we re looking to explain. After all, why isn t it equally plausible to insist that accuracy of our non-moral beliefs is imperiled if we don t treat moral science seriously--why shouldn t we analogously complain that removing these inferences from our epistemic toolbox blinds us to appropriately revising our non-normative beliefs? In short, the pragmatic reply seems to already presuppose a bias against revising our non-normative beliefs in light of our normative ones--the very bias we re trying to explain. 4.4 Vanishing evidence Intuitively, accepting one premise of Ought to Is is incompatible with accepting the second premise; that is, while the premises are logically consistent, they seem epistemologically incompatible. But, without knowing that the conclusion is false, what could be the source of this incompatibility? Perhaps while the premises are not inconsistent their grounds are. For example, one might argue that accepting the first premise requires reasoning about morality in a broadly consequentialist manner, and thus one would determine whether actions are right or wrong using empirical information about their consequences. If this is so, when Smart Alec, accepting the first premise, assesses the second premise, the evidence he took himself to have (e.g. a spontaneous emotional responses or an insight that the general principle must be true) wouldn t serve as evidence at all; the inference is valid, but the grounds for one premise vanishes when the other is accepted This might be seen as resolving our challenge to Barber. We can, tentatively, classify our judgments concerning the premises of Ought to Is as M-class judgments, but this classification doesn t survive our accepting Utilitarianism; once we do so, we are forced to re-classify our judgment that it is always wrong to kill an innocent child as an m-class judgment, not arbitrarily but as a matter of accepting Utilitarianism. Furthermore, once we recognize this, we see that the argument exhibits just the circularity that Barber posits; a committed Utilitarians evidence for premise 2 is all the evidence the Utilitarian needs to accept the conclusion of Ought to Is.

17 Of course this won t solve our problem unless every moral science inference has this feature, and it would be surprising if they all did. Furthermore, this can t be what s wrong with his solution can only explain why the inferences of moral science would be problematic when one gains sufficient evidence or grounds to accept the premises. But, we often proceed in our investigations without accepting our premises full-stop. When one is dealt a card face down and then is told that an ace in the deck has been replaced with an extra jack, they come to gain evidence that their card is a jack without having sufficient evidence for accepting that the card is a jack. Similarly, we might wish to investigate the consequences of those moral principles we find plausible but don t fully accept. In the case of Ought to Is increasing our confidence in the premises provides grounds for increasing our confidence in the conclusion. 11 Let s assume that someone is skeptical of both premises of Ought to Is as well as the conclusion, but after careful reflection and sufficient reasoning increase their credence in the conjunction of the premises to.5. Such an investigator would be rationally required to increase their credence in the conclusion to at least.5. It seems problematic that one might attempt to increase their credence in the conclusion of Ought to Is in this way, but the proposed solution can t explain why one should not 11 While evidence is not transitive in general or even transitive in the special case where one proposition entails another, there are special cases where evidence is transitive (Roche and Shogenji 2013). One such condition is the following conditions are met evidence for one hypothesis, H1 also serves as evidence for another hypothesis, H2; i.e., under the following conditions evidence is transitive: Entailment: H 1 entails H 2; Dragging; Pr(H 2) < Pr(H 1 E) If we let H 1 represent the conjunction of A and B, and H 2 represent C, it is obvious that entailment holds. Furthermore, so long as we think that the probability of H 2 is sufficiently low such that the probability we assign it is lower than the probability we assign H 1 given the evidence we have for A & B that is, we assume our moral scientist is less confident in C than they are in the conjunction of A & B given the evidence for A&B -- dragging also holds. Of course, nothing ensures that dragging holds, if we were supremely confident in the conclusion, then evidence for the moral hypotheses might not serve as evidence for the conclusion. But, our moral scientist might, like us, assign a very low but non-zero probability to H 2 and feel that they are at least a bit more confident in H 1 given the nature of their reflections on A and B.

18 proceed in this fashion. Surely, those who are only, at best, half convinced of Utilitarianism need not deprive themselves of non-empirical modes of moral investigation. In other words, the puzzle is not explaining why we shouldn t infer the conclusions of arguments like Ought to Is when the premises are certain, but what is wrong with investigating the conclusion by making an investigation of the premises. The kind of epistemological tension we are looking for isn t merely a tension that holds when we accept one of the premises full stop. An adequate solution must explain not only why both premises of such arguments aren t jointly acceptable but why they aren t jointly confirmable. 5. A Dilemma for Moral Science Our solution is to show that every inference from ought to is faces a dilemma. In what follows, we walk the reader through how the moral scientists comes to face this dilemma. When one wants to infer from ought to is: 1. Either they are committed to treating all the moral premises as necessary or they are not. This premise of our impending dilemma isn t particularly controversial. Granted, most of us do not make explicit judgments about the modal status of the claims we make. However, most of us are disposed to make such judgments. Even if one isn t disposed to make such judgments, if you ask someone why they believe why the premise is true, their answer will reveal their commitment. For example, if one explains that they believe some premise because I made a promise to her, this reveals that the status of this premise is contingent. If instead they deem that an act-type is wrong based on its intrinsic nature, this reveals that the premise acts of this type are wrong are necessary as their intrinsic natures are. So, by examining the modal status of each of their premises, we can determine the modal status of all the moral premises It is possible that one might be able to provide no explanation or reason for accepting the premises, but in such cases, they are in no position to infer from ought to is.

19 2. If they are not committed to treating all the moral premises as necessary, they are committed, by their own lights, to the dependence of these premises on some contingent facts. While this premise may seem obvious, it is not a tautology. One might maintain that a moral premise is contingent but not depend upon any contingent non-moral fact. However, that position entails that there could be a difference in the truth of some moral fact without a difference in the truth of some non-moral fact, i.e., it is inconsistent with the widely accepted thesis of moral supervenience. 3. If they are committed to the dependence of these premises on some contingent facts, then their inference is effectively circular. Our assumption in (3) is that any non-moral entailments of contingent moral premises are the very same entailments as the contingent facts upon which the moral premise is thought to depend. While this principle may seems surprising, it shouldn t be. When an agent deems her grounds for a moral premise to depend on a set of non-moral facts, e.g., I ought to avoid it only because I can avoid it, she can t simply think that this is a brute fact. Ultimately, if she is truly committed to thinking that her premise depends on some non-moral facts, she must be implicitly reasoning from some fact-independent principle like ought entails can. The contingent nonmoral premises shouldn t have any entailments beyond the underlying moral positions and contingent facts that are supposed to ground its truth. 4. If they are committed to treating all the moral premises as necessary, the justification for the premises cannot transfer to the conclusion. In some cases, such as in the case of Alec, it seems clear that all the moral premises of the inference from ought to is are taken to be necessary truths. In such cases, any grounds we have for those premises cannot transfer to our conclusion. To see why it is useful to consider a logical consequence of taking the premises of Ought to Is as necessary. Consider Ought to Must:

20 Ought to Must 1. It is never wrong to do what maximizes utility. 2. It is always wrong to kill an innocent child. Therefore, 3. *Necessarily killing an innocent child will never maximize utility. The premises of Ought to Must are the same as the premises of Ough to Is, the difference is that the conclusion is explicitly not about the actual world, but about all possible worlds. Compare the credence you assign to the claim, call it IS that it never maximizes utility to kill an innocent child (in the actual world) and the credence you assign to the claim, call it MUST, that necessarily it never maximizes utility to kill an innocent child. While a range of assignments might be appropriate in the case of IS, MUST should be assigned a low or zero credence. The reason is clear: the greater our credence in MUST the greater our credence should be that IS is not a contingent truth, but a necessary one, and there are several reasons for thinking that IS expresses a contingent proposition. First, The possibility of a circumstance where killing an innocent maximizes utility (~IS) is eminently conceivable, and conceivability, while perhaps not a perfect guide to possibility, is certainly a decent starting place when considering whether something is possible. 13 Furthermore, unlike, perhaps the discovery that water is H2 O, discovering that killing innocents never maximizes utility in our world doesn t suggest at all that assertions on Twin Earth that killing innocents sometimes maximizes utility must have a different meaning than it does on Earth because killing innocents never maximizes utility is an a posteriori necessary truth. 14 Second, consider what seems the most reasonable way to investigate the truth of IS. IS looks very squarely to express a contingent proposition determined by the empirical facts and evaluated by 13 REMINDER: References to conceivabilit 14 REMINDER: Kripke note and cite.

21 examining a series of individual cases. To investigate the truth of IS one should engage in sociological investigation. Recognizing that the credence assigned to MUST should be low, we can explain why moral science inferences from necessary premises are bad: our credence in MUST provides an upper-limit on how confident we can be or become in the conjunction of our premises. To see this, it will be useful to think about how this works under several different assignments of credences to the various propositions. The simplest case is where we assign a credence of zero to MUST. Probabilities of zero and one are sticky in that no amount of evidence should move us from that assignment. It follows that if we assign MUST a credence of zero, we cannot get evidence for the conjunction of the premises of Ought to Is. 15 Evidence for this conjunction would force us to increase not only our credence in IS but in MUST which is, as just stated, impossible. Whatever evidence we get for either claim, it can t serve to increase our confidence in the conjunction at all But, what if we are more cautious and only assign MUST a low, but non-zero credence. Here, the details about our credences over the premises and how much evidence we take ourselves to have for them matters. There are two scenarios to consider. Strong Evidence Alec assigns to MUST a credence of L which is non-zero but low. When considering some a priori reasons he has for the conjunction, C, of the premises of Ought to Is, he judges that he should increase his credence in C such that his credence in C would be higher than his credence in L. Weak Evidence 15 To see why, recall that when the dragging condition is met, that is when Pr(H 2) < Pr(H 1 E), evidence is transitive. In a case where Pr(H2) = 0, this condition will be met whenever our evidence would increase our confidence in H1; i.e., when Pr(H2) = 0, evidence is almost always transitive. But, since Pr(H2) = 0, we can t get evidence that increases its probability. In our case, where H1 = the conjunction of A and B, it means it isn t possible to get evidence for that conjunction.

22 Alec assigs to MUST a credence of L which is non-zero but low. When considering some a priori reasons he has for the conjunction, C, of the premises of Ought to Is, he judges that he should increase his credence in C such that his credence in C is less than or equal to his credence in L. In Weak Evidence, Alec is not forced to increase his confidence in MUST in light of his evidence for C; this is a case where Alec s evidence is not transitive. Alec is not rationally required to revise his credence in either premise or their cojunction, but since Alec s evidence in this case also fails to justify an increase in confidence in MUST (and so also in IS). Here, no puzzle arises; the evidence does not allow for an investigation of the conclusion of the moral science inference via an investigation of the premises. In Strong Evidence, Alec would be forced to increase his confidence in MUST so that it is equal to or greater than his resulting confidence in C. If he is unwilling to do so, recognizing that L is the appropriate credence to assign to MUST, he is required to discount some evidence he took himself to have for C. Confidence in MUST provides leverage against C. 5. So, either one who infers from ought to is makes an objectionably circular inference or their justifications for the premises cannot transfer to the conclusion. On the one hand, Barber-like circularity.but no dependence on assigning things to arbitrary classes. On the other hand.inconsistent with something we are extremely confident inthe justifications that we have for our moral premises has implications for their modal status. Recognizing these modal implications allows us to answer Smart Alec: the conclusion of his inference can only be confirmed via circular reasoning. 6. Conclusion In closing, it is worth discussing some advantages of our solution relative to some of the others discussed. First, it vindicates our initial feeling that there is an epistemological mistake that Alec is making without forcing us to accept any of the meta-ethical costs of Barber s solutions. The

23 anti-realist can appeal to our solution to explain our unease with moral science without invoking wide-spread delusion as the source of our unease. It is much more plausible that we take our moral judgments to be truth-apt, but are unwilling to accept the inferences of moral science because they either invoke non-moral evidence or because they seem to have implausible modal implications. The realist can straightforwardly avail herself of our solution. There is no need to arbitrarily decide the nature of the justification of various moral claims, instead our solution applies whatever one s source of justification for their moral judgments. Second, we are not forced to deny the validity of moral science inferences, nor are we forced to deny that, if somehow we had grounds for the certainty of our premises, we would be reasonable in accepting the conclusion of such inferences. Perhaps we become certain both that God s commands are the source of moral truth and that God commands the truth of the premises of Ought to Is. In such a case, we do in fact have grounds for denying that the conclusion is contingent; given that God s will is necessary, there is no way things could have been otherwise. Third, our solution vindicates our initial reaction to Alec s deployment of moral science inferences. It is natural to tell Alec that thinking you can deploy the inference is a reason to reassess the premises, it is natural to point to a thought experiment about the possibility of maximizing utility via the killing of innocents to get Alec to see this. Our solution explains both why he should reconsider his premises and why the thought experiment is, in fact, a tool we can use to convince him to do so. Of course, these considerations aren t decisive, but they seem telling. Our solution is bad news for some, like Barber, that hope to use the phenomena of moral science to adjudicate metaethical or moral epistemological issues. It seems as if our solution draws on far less contentious resources to resolve the puzzle.

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