Mackie s Error Theory of Moral Judgments Moral Facts and Mind-Independence Harman Mackie Moral goodness The Argument from Relativity The Argument from Queerness For Next Time: Check the website for assignment handout Read: James Rachels Egoism
Recap We have been asking questions about moral facts Although Naturalism appears to secure the autonomy of ethics and gives us a deeper account of moral goodness we have been left with questions about their mindindependence Harman challenged the claim that moral observation gives us evidence for non-reductive mind-independent naturalized moral facts Brink (and Sturgeon) resist this argument by arguing that moral facts can help explain our moral observations
John Mackie Our understanding of moral properties is that they are objective We have good reasons for thinking both that these properties do not exist and, if they did exist, we would not be able to detect them We must adopt an error theory of moral language because moral judgments are always false
Two Arguments for Error Theory Mackie offers two major arguments to support the claim that all of our moral judgments are false The Argument from Relativity The Argument from Queerness Taken together these two arguments imply, according to Mackie, not just that we do not have evidence for the existence of moral facts (Harman s claim) but that we should believe that all of our moral judgments are actually false
Error Theory Mackie adopts what he calls an Error Theory of moral discourse (moral language). What does it mean to hold an error theory? For our purposes: we have an error theory for a particular realm of discourse if (and only if) we believe that that discourse, while intelligible, is always false
The Argument from Relativity The argument from difference, like Harman s criticism, argues that our moral observations are best explained by denying that moral properties are objective & nonreductive If moral facts really had this character, Mackie argues, we should not expect that our moral disagreements would be as fundamental and intractable as they actually are. We should expect some kind of slow convergence. The best explanations for these differences is that moral properties are mind-dependent
Responses to the Argument from Relativity 1) Disagreements about specific moral norms masks an underlying agreement about more fundamental values Ex- Spartan Infanticide 2) Disagreement, even if real and fundamental (i.e. intractable) can be explained equally well by a moral realist who accepts that a plurality of values exists Ex- Intellectual v. Physical v. Creative virtues
Ghost Discourse We have a richly developed ghost-discourse in our culture There are facts about ghosts that we seem to agree on (can we name any?) Ghost language is not obviously fictional. Many believe in ghosts and their ghost discourse presumes the real existence of ghosts
Queerness Argument for Ghost Properties If we analyze our ghost discourse we can discover what our concept of a ghost is (transparent, alive and dead, material but immaterial, telekinetic powers, produces ectoplasm, etc). When we make judgments about ghosts these judgments presume the existence of entities with those properties A problem crops up when we try to fit ghost-properties into our understanding of the world and other natural properties For ghosts to exist they would contain properties that appear to violate the laws of physics as we understand them Furthermore, we would somehow need a form of sensory perception that allows us to sense these strange properties
A Revisionist Ghost Discourse If we come to understand the impossibility of our ghost discourse we can come to make sense of it in a new way Where we once believed that ghosts actually existed out in the world, we can come to understand that the concept of ghostly experiences could be caused by a combination of many psychological factors (fear, desire, etc) In this sense we can come to understand the actual basis for ghost discourse Similar to Harman, Mackie thinks that this understanding of ghosts better explains our seemingly objective ghostly experiences
Moral Discourse Just as with ghost discourse, we can study our moral discourse (moral language) to discover what we believe moral properties are like We tend to believe, for example, that moral requirements are not optional (you can t get out of them just because they are inconvenient) And we also tend to think that they apply to everyone Mackie also thinks that moral truths have other properties
What are moral properties? Mackie: They are a very central structural element in the fabric of the world. But it is held also that just knowing them or seeing them will not merely tell men [and women] what to do but will ensure that they do it, overturning any contrary inclinations. Moral properties are: 1)mind-independent real properties of the world that are also 2) evaluative, 3) categorical and 4) intrinsically action guiding
Moral Judgments If Mackie is right about how we understand moral properties (as objective and intrinsically action guiding) then our moral judgments presume that these properties exist (our judgments wouldn t make sense if they didn t exist) What are the consequences of accepting this view?
Queerness Argument for Moral Properties Ghost discourse did not fit into our best picture of the world and we therefore developed an error theory of ghost discourse to explain it. Moral discourse, Mackie argues, fails for similar reasons Moral discourse suffers from two familiar problems: Moral properties: categorical mind-independent intrinsically action guiding properties, would be unlike any other property in the natural world We would also need to explain how we could even come to sense these properties given their queerness
Revisionist Moral Discourse Recall that we couldn t merely conclude that our ghost discourse was always false. We needed to explain why we would even develop ghost discourse in the first place If moral language presupposes the existence of impossible properties then how did we come to have this conception of moral properties? Mackie argues that moral language is necessary for social cooperation and hence needs to apply to everyone in a society (explaining its a categorical nature and variability) Real moral truths are only true given the existence (and reinforcement) of human institutions
For Next Time Happy Friday the 13 th! For Next Time: Check the website for the assignment handout (going up later today) Read: James Rachels Egoism