Accommodating Common Sense

Kenny Pearce has an interesting post contrasting Locke's and Berkeley's diverging approaches to common sense:

Locke's goal, it seems, is to turn our ordinary beliefs into a system of metaphysics... Berkeley's project is, as he famously put it, to "think with the learned, and speak with the vulgar." His metaphysical system, he is well aware, bears no resemblance whatsoever to common sense. Nevertheless, he claims, his system preserves the correctness of common sense within its own domain.

It's a nice distinction, and I'm with Berkeley at least in thinking that we shouldn't read too much into the platitudes of common sense. "Folk ontology", for example, strikes me as an oxymoron: the folk don't have anything to say about the questions that interest contemporary ontologists. Ordinary talk of 'existence' invokes the 'superficial', non-ontological sense of the word. I'm skeptical whether there is any sense to ontology at all, but even if there is (say we can make conceptual sense of the objective structure of reality), that sure isn't a domain the folk are concerned with in their everyday talk of how many chairs are in the room. (It would miss the point to answer, "None; there are only atoms arranged chair-wise." This is not a difference of any concern to the folk.)

I think we also need to be careful about how we seek to integrate "common sense" moral intuitions into our moral theory. The folk concepts of 'right' and 'wrong' again strike me as fairly superficial, and so not of great philosophical interest. Moral philosophers (of my stripe) are instead concerned with the most fundamental normative questions, e.g. about what we have most reason to do. To say it's intuitively "wrong" to push the fat guy in front of the trolley is neither here nor there. The vague intuitive idea being expressed here may correspond to any number of more precise claims (e.g. that it's a bad rule/decision procedure to allow killing innocents, or that we should censure someone for acting so) that are quite compatible with consequentialism. So, properly understood, I don't think consequentialism is really counter to common sense at all. It's orthogonal -- addressing a different, deeper, question.

So, accommodating the claims of commonsense is often less philosophically demanding than one might expect. Still, we shouldn't be too complacent. In particular, it is not enough to simply give an account on which the folk platitudes come out true, if this involves revising their meaning beyond recognition. One might think David Lewis guilty of this, for example, when he analyzes modality in terms of concrete spatio-temporal regions. Such regions just don't seem to be the right kind of thing to be that in virtue of which our ordinary modal claims are true. At least, this surely violates the folk understanding of what their modal talk is about. That's not an automatic disqualification -- I'm often sympathetic to philosophical revisionism -- but it is worth noting as a genuinely "counterintuitive" result. (Similar remarks may apply to Berkeley's phenomenalism.)

Irrelevant Interests?

We may think there's a sense in which it is "bad for a plant" to be deprived of sunlight and water. For then the plant won't flourish; it will wither and die. But, one might add, it doesn't (intrinsically) matter if a plant dies, for plants lack moral status. Someone who accepts both these claims must then hold that the following two questions are independent: (i) whether an entity has interests; and (ii) whether the entity matters morally. Some harms are real enough, but they don't matter. On this view, the moral significance of a harm depends not on the nature of the harm, but on the nature of the entity being harmed.

Corrupt Mind or Honest Mistake?

I think there's an important difference between factual and moral mistakes. Intuitively, the person who mistakenly puts arsenic in their friend's coffee (believing it to be sugar), has made an "honest mistake" that doesn't reflect on their reliability or quality as an agent. Their internal deliberations proceeded appropriately enough; it's just the external inputs that were faulty. Compare this to the person who mistakenly believes that poisoning people is morally okay. We would not be inclined to call such moral ignorance - however sincere - an "honest mistake", for it reveals a kind of corruption in the agent. They are revealed to be vicious, lacking concerns that they ought to have, though they may not themselves realize it.

Gideon Yaffe, in his excellent paper 'Excusing Mistakes of Law' (Philosophers' Imprint, 2009), captures this intuitive idea in the following principle:

Uncorrupted Deliberation Principle: If D falsely believes that p and such a false belief indicates that his deliberations pertaining to A-ing were acceptable, then D is excused for A-ing.

Intuitively: the unwitting (factually ignorant) poisoner deliberates in an acceptable manner, whereas the morally ignorant poisoner does not. In the former case, the flaw is in the inputs to deliberation; in the latter case, the flaw lies in the agent's deliberation itself.

This assumes that normative beliefs play a different role in deliberation from factual beliefs. In particular, whereas factual beliefs are seen as "mere inputs" to deliberation, normative beliefs are seen as partly constitutive of the deliberative process. But what, exactly, does the difference consist in? One possibility is to understand factual beliefs as providing premises of reasoning, whereas moral principles serve not as premises but as rules of inference. [Feel free to skip the following section if you're already familiar with this distinction.]

---

Compare the following two arguments:

1. The Sun has risen every day thus far.
So: The Sun will (probably) rise tomorrow.

and

1. The Sun has risen every day thus far.
2. The future will (probably) resemble the past. [In particular, if the Sun has risen before, it (likely) will again.]
So: The Sun will (probably) rise tomorrow.

The first is an inductive argument, which moves directly from a claim about the observed to a conclusion about the unobserved. The second is a deductive argument, which takes the "Inductive Principle" [2] as a premise. There's an obvious connection between the two arguments, since our grounds for believing the inductive inference to be cogent are ipso facto grounds for thinking that [2] is true. Nonetheless, there's an important formal difference between a rule of inference and its associated proposition, since rules of inference license certain moves in a way that inert premises by themselves cannot. (This is the crucial lesson of Lewis Carroll's tortoise.)

In the same way, we may think there's a formal difference between the following two chains of reasoning:

1. I could poison Bob by putting this arsenic in his tea.
Therefore, I have sufficient reason to put the arsenic in his tea.

versus

1. I could poison Bob by putting this arsenic in his tea.
2. I have sufficient reason to poison Bob.
Therefore, I have sufficient reason to put the arsenic in his tea.

The first treats normative principles as rules of inference, internal to the deliberation, licensing moves from factual premises directly to practical conclusions. The latter, by contrast, makes the normative assumptions explicit, treating them as inputs (on a par with any other premise), from which we derive the conclusion using more general rules of reasoning.

---

Here's my worry: do we have any grounds for favouring the former interpretation? For if one preferred the latter instead, then (at least from a formal perspective) it begins to look as though moral beliefs are mere "inputs" to deliberation in just the same way that factual beliefs are. And so the morally ignorant poisoner could object, "My deliberation was in no way corrupt; I reasoned as well as anybody could ask, given my premises. The only problem was that the premises turned out to be false! Since I had no way of knowing this, given the peculiarity of my circumstances, this in no way reflects more generally on my internal quality as an agent, so I ought to be excused from blame for this inadvertent wrongdoing."

What do you think?

Feedback on Prospective Students' Writing Samples

I was recently struck by the thought: professors carefully read and assess the writing samples of (at least) those prospective graduate students to whom their department offers admission. So why do they not write up their assessments (including constructive suggestions for how to improve the paper), and offer this to the prospective student along with the offer of admission? What better way to signal your commitment to helping the student develop as a philosopher than to provide such help before they even arrive?

It seems individually rational for departments to start doing this, since it seems likely to give them an advantage in recruiting the top students, relative to departments that don't make such an effort. (At least, I imagine I would have been influenced in my grad school choice by receiving useful, detailed written feedback on my work -- it would make me look much more favourably upon the school in question. I assume other students would respond similarly.) Since professors care about attracting the best students, it seems likely to be well worth their while to write up such feedback, at least for the students they want most to recruit.

It also seems globally desirable that this become standard practice. Given plausible assumptions, it should help match up students with the professors/departments that are most likely to help them develop as philosophers. This is obviously good for the students, and what's good for grad students' development is good for the discipline. Further, it also seems good for the professors to be able to increase their chances of recruiting the students they want most among the admitted class (at the cost of reducing their chances of recruiting admitted students who are desired more strongly by competing institutions).

And, quite apart from the assortive benefits, it's just intrinsically desirable that all this reading and evaluation, on the part of some of the top minds in the field, not go to waste. I'm currently revising my old writing sample, since I rather like the paper, and I'm struck by the thought that I could have received helpful comments on it from experts at seven top schools. Moral philosophers at those institutions read the paper carefully enough to decide that they wanted me to spend the next five years studying with them, so presumably they also had various thoughts on how the paper might be improved. But this invaluable information was never communicated (at least in writing -- I can't remember my visits well enough to recall whether it came up much in discussion; I would have been too flustered to absorb it then anyhow). What a shame!

Has anyone had this idea before? Is there some reason why it isn't as desirable as it prima facie seems to me? (If not, here's hoping the idea starts to catch on!)

Blog 'Diversity Obligations'

Brian Weatherson writes:

Just what diversity obligations a blog has is a slightly tricky matter. I think anyone is perfectly within their rights to start a solo blog, and if that blog’s authorship is thereby 100% white and male, I don’t see how that’s a problem. I don’t think there’s a problem if they add a second author, even if that still means 100% white and male. A philosophy-oriented group blog that had, say, 10 authors and was 100% white and male, now that I would think was troubling in its lack of diversity. My intuitions about these cases feel fairly strong and robust, and I assume they are tracking something, but I don’t have a good theory about what they are tracking.

Process matters. I think the relevant feature here is not the size of the blog, but rather whether the pool of potential contributors is open-ended. Suppose, for example, a dozen drinking buddies decide to set up a group blog as an online supplement for their in-person philosophical banter. Despite the larger size, such "social group" blogs are relevantly like individual or two-person blogs. Assuming you don't have "diversity obligations" regarding the company you keep, you likewise won't have such obligations regarding the blogs you set up with those friends -- whatever their number might be.

A different kind of "closed" contributor base is found in department blogs, for example. So long as everyone feels welcome to join the blog, there doesn't seem any further moral issue at stake. It may turn out that the global result of respecting each individual's preference (to participate themselves or not) is that disproportionately few women end up blogging. But so long as each individual freely chose what they wanted (without distortion induced by fear of hostility or the like), this procedural fact is surely all that matters. Whatever outcome results from the aggregate of individual choices in this situation is ipso facto just.

Things seem different when we consider an "open-ended group" blog, e.g. topical group blogs that welcome any contributors who work in the relevant field. Because it is open-ended, not every potential contributor receives an explicit invitation to join. And if, of all the experts in the field, one only thinks of men to invite, such implicit bias (however innocent) certainly seems unfortunate -- and worth remedying (e.g. by making an explicit effort to remember women in the pool who are equally deserving of an invite).

So far, this all strikes me as fairly commonsensical (no?). But what if, despite all procedural fairness, it turns out that women are less likely to accept the invitations? Is one obliged to take further, affirmative steps to promote "diversity" in outcome? This is more controversial, as it rehashes the whole 'affirmative action' debate.

On the one hand, it seems plausible that increasing the visibility of (expert) minorities in the field could have good consequences, e.g. in counteracting implicit bias, and perhaps in making the field seem more welcoming to minority students. So there's probably some reason to affirmatively recruit minorities.*

Still, as a deontic minimalist, I don't think such efforts could be reasonably demanded, or considered 'obligatory' as opposed to simply desirable. (Maybe this is even true of the procedural case, above, for explicitly counteracting one's implicit biases?) It'd be a good thing to do, but perhaps not so pressing as to justify burdening individuals with moral demands. Consider: if someone goes to the effort of creating a new and worthwhile group blog, it seems rather perverse to expose them to moral censure for their failure to exert additional feminist efforts in the process. (And writing letters of complaint to the "higher-ups" at affiliated institutions, as I think I saw someone suggest, seems downright counterproductive.)

Moralists should inspire, not harangue -- or so I'm inclined to think, at least. (Perhaps not everyone reacts so negatively to haranguing?)

* = It's worth noting that affirmative action generally risks burdening brilliant women with self-doubts about whether they were selected in part for their gender, and not just on their merits. This seems less of an issue in the particular case of blogs, since they're never all that selective to begin with. But it may be a reason to oppose AA practices in general (especially if the benefits are minimal, and more effective means can be found to make the field inviting to minority students).

Natural Beauty and Human Control

David P. has gotten me thinking about whether achieving the ideal of total human control over nature would undermine the distinctive aesthetic value of natural beauty. The rough idea is that when we consider our experience of natural beauty, part of the aesthetic value seems to derive from the awe-inspiring sense of "otherness" -- something that would be missing in a man-made replica of the environment, for example.

Admittedly, "total human control" does not imply "totally man-made": we might freely choose to establish boundaries for untouched wilderness reserves, for example. We could possess the freedom to remake nature however we please, without necessarily exercising this power in every location. So, is there any further worry? So long as we hold sufficient wilderness areas 'in reserve', would anything be lost by our achieving the capacity to remake nature as we please?

I wonder whether the environmentalist might at this point co-opt Pettit's theory of freedom as non-domination, claiming that actual non-interference -- where nature takes its course but only "by our leave" -- is insufficient; on this view, it must further be the case that we couldn't interfere even if we wanted to. Typically, non-domination is achieved through political institutions that ensure non-interference. There's a sense in which this still leaves one at the mercy of the 'system' as a whole, but it is presumably less whimsical than individual humans, and so - perhaps - reliable enough. In any case, is there any sense in which the abstract "domination" of nature by our political system would undermine our aesthetic experiences of natural beauty? It seems not.

For example: if, after a marvelous forest walk, I'm told that the forest is only preserved by the government's leave, this will not undermine my recent aesthetic experience (unlike, say, telling me that it is all fake). Indeed, appreciation of the aesthetic value may move me to ensure that the old forest continues to be preserved. (The comparison to a clear case of undermined aesthetic value is striking: I would not likewise be moved by the need to maintain the paintwork on the "forest" facade!) So human 'domination' of nature, in this very broad sense, seems quite compatible with the aesthetic value of untouched natural beauty.

So far I've considered objective conditions that might undermine the distinctive aesthetic value of natural beauty. The only one that looks to be genuinely problematic is the condition of inauthenticity, or human interference in the actual production of a landscape. Yet this is no problem for the ideal of human control, because the capacity for control is compatible with exercising restraint.

One might instead appeal to subjective conditions. That is, one might claim that, in dominating nature, people would (likely?) come to have certain attitudes that would interfere with their ability to appreciate the distinctive value of natural beauty. The beauty would still "be there" (in a sense), dormant, but we would all be blind to it. I take the rough idea to be that dominating nature would lead to our conceiving of it as a mere means to be reshaped and "used" for our purposes, and such crass instrumentalism is incompatible with aesthetic appreciation (or at least the distinctive kind of appreciation that we associate with natural beauty).

But how plausible is the former claim? Why would the objective condition of having control entail any particular subjective attitudes, such as crass instrumentalism? This may seem odd in the abstract, but consider a concrete case. When I imagine someone looking at a waterfall and thinking, "I could waggle my fingers and reshape it this way or that," it does seem plausible that the salience of their power could interfere with their appreciation of the waterfall as a natural object 'outside' of themselves. So I'd say the worry here is that having power often leads to consideration (however idle) of its exercise, and that is no longer to think of the natural object as properly untouched and 'other'.

While granting that this is a potential problem, it looks to me as though it should be avoidable. There are presumably techniques that could make the fact of one's capacity for control less salient, and hence less likely to interfere with aesthetic appreciation. Further (recalling my earlier discussion of non-domination), things may be set up so that no individual person actually has this sort of control in any case. Then, at least insofar as one experiences the natural scenery in one's role as a private citizen (as opposed to a member of a collective deliberating about whether to interfere this way or that), the object will be in the relevant sense 'untouchable', or beyond one's control, in such a way as to facilitate the aesthetic experience of 'otherness'.

Does that sound right? Or are there reasons to think that expanding human control would necessarily undermine aesthetic appreciation of nature?

Birthday Charity

I've previously noted the norm-shaping importance of public giving, for which social-networking sites like Facebook seem especially well suited. The Facebook "Causes" application now makes this even easier, by encouraging users to make a "birthday wish" inviting their friends to donate to their preferred charity.

Today I get to make use of this new feature, picking GiveWell as my (meta-)charity of choice.

If you're a Facebook user, you can view my birthday wish here (and donate here). Or, if you don't use Facebook, feel free to donate directly to Givewell. Thanks!

Schools: too busy to educate?

Interesting article (via sympoze) on philosophy in schools:

Philosophy lessons are being introduced in dozens of primary schools in a bid to get more children reading and open their minds...

But critics say that teaching youngsters how to discuss the finer points of Cartesian dualism over the dinner table with their parents is only diverting them from the more important lessons of learning the times table and spelling.

I'd dispute the claim that petty skills are "more important" than learning how to think, but whatever. It turns out the critics are wrong even on their own terms:

In 2007, psychologists in Scotland did a study on the benefits of teaching schoolchildren philosophy. In a survey of 105 ten-year-olds, it found children showed significant improvements in tests of their verbal, numerical and spatial abilities at the end of the 16-month period of lessons, compared to those who were not taught philosophy.

But Chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, Nick Seaton said: 'Schools have enough to do teaching the basic three Rs without worrying about philosophy for children at that age. Considering how many youngsters leave education without a fundamental grasp of the basics, schools should concentrate on building a foundation of knowledge for youngsters in the limited school time they have.'

You've gotta love journalistic objectivity. "On the one hand, X actually promotes goal Y. But wait -- here's someone saying that Y is too important for us to worry about X (the effective means to Y, remember). Oh noes! How will we ever decide?"

Pro-Life, Pro-Zombie?

Here's a curious line of argument. Many pro-lifers hold that an individual has moral status in virtue of its biological kind (being "human") rather than its particular cognitive qualities (being a self-aware "person"). But then, our counterparts in the zombie world are presumably still biologically human. They're physically identical to us, after all, and biology supervenes on physics. As far as biologists are concerned, they are "individual human lives" the same as you and me. So the bio-focused pro-lifer would seem committed to the view that non-conscious zombies have moral status. But that's absurd. (At least, it's absurd to think that they have anything like the kind of moral importance that conscious people do. Maybe complex physical structures can have a kind of value, like ant colonies, or New Zealand's pancake rocks. But I assume the pro-lifer wants to make a stronger claim than that embryos have the value of ants and rocks.)

The upshot is that sophisticated pro-lifers shouldn't be focused on mere biology. It isn't really mere "life", in the third-personal scientific sense, that matters. Rather, it's a special kind of life -- or, rather, the lives of a special kind of being, namely: sentient rational animals. If we understand the kind 'human' in this psychologically loaded sense, then zombies don't qualify as fully human. But embryos - immature members of our kind - do qualify. Sure, they may not yet be sentient or rational themselves. But they are members of a kind with these traits. Intuitively: their acquisition of these traits will occur through natural development (in which they remain the same kind of thing that they already are), rather than radical transformation into a fundamentally different category or kind of thing. (My evil twin explains this picture in more detail, here.)

[Of course, those of us who are pro-choice will insist that it is one's individual traits, rather than one's general kind, that matters morally. But I don't wish to get into that debate here -- see the linked discussion thread instead. The purpose of this post is simply to work out what the most plausible version of a pro-life view would be. I'm especially interested to hear from any actual pro-lifers, whether they are pro-zombie and if not why not -- especially, whether they endorse my evil twin's conception of the pro-life view.]

Misleading Philosophical Jargon

Which philosophical terms do you think do more to obscure than clarify?

Some terms are ambiguous in ways that invite (unintentional) equivocation, e.g. 'autonomy' and 'intrinsic value'. While safely usable in some contexts, I think it's often preferable to replace these vague terms with whatever more precise understanding you have in mind.

(I should add: not all polysemous words are problematic. There are a bazillion different "internalisms" and "subjectivisms" in common use, but equivocation is rare enough, and -- as I note here -- there may not be any better terms available.)

Other terms are simply badly chosen, or have misleading connotations, e.g.:
(1) "Possible worlds" are really possible states of the world, or world-descriptions. Relatedly, talk of truth "at" a world might be better stated as truth "according to" a world-description.

(2) Moore's use of "naturalistic fallacy" to describe normative reductionism is, I think, a doubly intolerable usage. First, it usurps a far more intuitive alternative usage, namely, denoting the fallacious move from "X is natural" to "X is good". Second, Moore's usage isn't even sensible in its own right, since his target isn't really naturalism per se. You could just as well have a supernaturalist version of normative reductionism, as per (certain versions of) Divine Command Theory. (Besides, it's awfully tendentious to call the very statement of your opponent's position a "fallacy".)

Can you think of any further suggestions (for either list)?

Parfit's Nose-Blowing Example

As previously noted, Parfit helpfully distinguishes right-making properties (e.g. maximizing happiness) from the property of being right. But he supports this with a dubious analogy:

Suppose that some rude person said, "Blowing your nose is what you ought to do." This person would not mean, "The property of blowing your nose is the same as the property of being what you ought to do." That claim would be absurd. That person would mean, "Blowing your nose is, or has the different property of being, what you ought to do." In the same way, "maximizing happiness is what we ought to do" means "maximizing happiness is, or has the different property of being, what we ought to do."

But there's an important disanalogy here. The utilitarian claims that maximizing happiness exhaustively specifies what we ought to do (i.e. in every situation). Parfit's imagined rude person is presumably making a very different sort of claim. He merely claims that blowing your nose is what you ought to do in this case. If he were making the same sort of claim as the utilitarian -- if he were claiming that an act is right just in case it is an act of nose-blowing -- that would indeed be "absurd". But it would be an absurd normative claim. It is less obvious that there is any additional absurdity in moving from this normative claim to the meta-ethical claim Parfit wishes to deride, i.e. that the coextensive properties are thereby identical.

So, while I agree with Parfit's conclusion, I don't think this particular example provides much support for it. The two cases aren't functioning "in the same way" at all. The rude person is very obviously using the 'is' of predication, in merely talking about a particular instance of 'what we ought to do'. The (e.g. utilitarian) normative theorist makes much more expansive claims about 'what we ought to do' (not just here and now, but in all cases), which at least opens the possibility that they are using the 'is' of identity.

Unofficial NDPR feed

I'm sure I'm not the only person who has lamented the lack of any rss/atom feeds for keeping up with the wonderful Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. So, I went and created one:

http://ndpr-mirror.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ndpr

Enjoy! (Combine this with kindlefeeder, and now I can read each new NDPR on my Kindle -- how cool is that!)

Guest Post: 'What is Constructivism?'

[The following is a guest post by Jeff Sebo -- now blogging at 'The Dear Self'.]

I understand metaethical constructivism* as the family of theories according to which

1. Our moral discourse is cognitive.
2. Some moral statements are true.
3. Moral statements are true or false in virtue of evaluative attitudes.

If this is right, then here's how constructivism relates to the other big "metaethical families":

1. Expressivism. Constructivism and expressivism agree that evaluative attitudes are what ground morality. But unlike expressivism, constructivism says that our moral discourse is cognitive. So whereas expressivism says that our moral discourse directly expresses evaluative attitudes, constructivism says that our moral discourse describes evaluative attitudes.

Relatedly, constructivism differs from expressivism in that, for expressivists, I always use moral concepts to express my evaluative attitudes, whereas for constructivists, I may also use moral concepts to describe others' evaluative attitudes. (More on this below.)

2. Error Theory. Constructivism and error theory agree that our moral discourse is cognitive. But unlike error theory, constructivism says that some moral statements are true.

3. Realism. Finally, constructivism and realism agree that our moral discourse is cognitive, and that some moral statements are true. But they disagree about the nature of moral truth: whereas realism says that moral statements are true or false in virtue of mind-independent moral facts, constructivism says that moral statements are true or false in virtue of mind-dependent moral facts, namely facts about evaluative attitudes.

Technically speaking, then, constructivism is a kind of antirealism. But since constructivism agrees with realism that moral facts are real (albeit mind-dependent), some constructivists prefer to avoid the potentially misleading label 'antirealism'. Korsgaard, for example, calls her view 'procedural realist' instead of 'antirealist', and she calls her opponents' view 'substantive realist' instead of 'realist.'

I should note that this is a very expansive understanding of constructivism; it makes constructivism a much larger family of theories than we might have thought. For example, it means that constructivists can disagree about:

1. Which evaluative attitudes are relevant to morality?

Constructivists have a lot of options here. They can say that the relevant attitudes are moral intuitions, moral beliefs, desires, preferences, aims, plans, choices, and much more. Some pick even more exotic options than these. For example, Rawls picks considered moral judgments. Korsgaard picks reflective endorsement. Street picks takings-to-be-a-reason. Velleman picks judgments-about-what-it-makes-sense-for-one-to-do-in-causal/psychological-terms. And so on.

2. Does morality depend on actual evaluative attitudes or ideal (i.e., fully informed) evaluative attitudes? And if the latter, what does it mean for one to be fully informed?

Most constructivists opt for the latter option here. Rawls says that the moral facts are determined by our considered moral judgments in reflective equilibrium. And in his political theory he idealizes by making people rational and self-interested and ignorant about who they are. Korsgaard says that morality is normative iff we would still see it as justified if we understood it completely. And she argues that humanity has value not because we actually value it, but rather because we would value it if we learned what our present values commit us to. Street argues that we have reason to do something iff it figures in our maximally coherent set of reasons, i.e. the set of reasons that we would take ourselves to have if we made our current judgments about reasons coherent. (Although she has a complicated justification for not calling this an ideal-judgment theory.) And so on.

Generally speaking, the appeal of ideal-judgment constructivism is that it helps us avoid the unintuitive implications of saying that we should do what we actually value doing. (After all, some of us value some pretty crazy things.) The problem is that constructivists have a hard time specifying the ideal conditions without presupposing any values, e.g., the value of knowledge, or consistency, or simplicity, etc. (As many commentators have pointed out, Rawls is especially egregious on this score, since he presupposes reasonableness in his supposedly neutral political theory.)

Usually, constructivists try to get around this problem by arguing that valuing knowledge, or consistency, or simplicity, etc. is constitutive of rational agency. So for example, Street argues that valuing means-end rationality is constitutive of rational agency: if someone says that (a) she takes herself to have reason to eat tacos, (b) she needs to go to Taco Bell in order to eat tacos, but (c) she has no reason whatsoever to go to Taco Bell, then she is failing to be a rational agent at all (as opposed to merely making a mistake about what her reasons are). Kant, Dreier, Railton, Velleman, and many others make arguments along these lines too. The upshot of these arguments is that every rational agent values knowledge, consistency, simplicity, or whatever, and therefore every rational agent values doing what she would value doing if fully informed (in the relevant sense).

3. Whose evaluative attitudes are relevant to morality?

Most self-proclaimed constructivists are internalists, i.e., they say that you should do something iff you value doing it. But a constructivist could also be an externalist, i.e., she could also say that you should do something iff someone else values your doing it. This means that constructivism includes, e.g., divine command theory, which says that you should do something iff God values your doing it, as well as cultural relativism, which says that you should do something iff your culture values your doing it.

This is mainly what I had in mind when I said that this way of understanding constructivism makes it more expansive than we might have thought. I think most philosophers restrict constructivism to what I call internalist constructivism. And I can understand why: what I call externalist constructivism occupies a strange metaethical middle ground that seems not-quite-constructivist and not-quite-realist. On one hand, these theories share the constructivist intuition that value requires a valuer; but on the other hand, they share the realist intuition that value comes from something external to you. Ultimately, this is a terminological issue, and I could see it going either way. But on balance, I think these middle-ground theories have more in common with internalist constructivism than with realism, so I choose to call them a kind of constructivism too.

4. Is there something that you have to value if you value anything at all? And if so, what is it?

This is the question that separates what Street calls 'substantive constructivism' (or 'Kantian constructivism') from what she calls 'formalist constructivism' (or 'Humean constructivism'). Substantivists say that there is something that you have to value if you value anything at all. For example, Korsgaard says that you have to value humanity if you value anything at all. Formalists, in contrast, say that there is nothing that you have to value if you value anything at all. Street is an example of a formalist. (Well, almost: she thinks that you have to value taking the means to your ends if you value anything at all. She also thinks that you have to value constructivism itself, i.e., you have to affirm constructivism as a metaethical theory, insofar as it has normative implications.)

The virtue of substantivism is that it makes morality objective, in the sense that you have certain moral duties independently of what you value in particular (so long as you value something). The problem is that substantivism is hard to establish, especially a substantivism that gives you a robust set of moral duties independently of what you value in particular. And as a result, most (plausible) substantivisms are still quite formalist in spirit. For example, Sartre and Beauvoir are substantivists in the sense that they say that you have to value freedom if you value anything at all. But arguably, this is compatible with your doing anything at all, e.g. lying, killing, stealing, etc.

(To be clear, I don't mean to imply that Sartre and Beauvoir are full-blown constructivists. They don't seem to take a stand on the semantics of moral discourse, for example. But I do think that they come pretty close, and that we should include them in these discussions far more than we do.)

5. Do you have to value anything at all?

Korsgaard says the answer is no; she says that you can fail to value anything at all (even though she personally doubts that you do). Sartre, on the other hand, says that the answer is yes; he says that everyone has to value something.

Of course, how constructivists answer this question will depend on how they answer these other questions. For example, part of the reason why Korsgaard thinks you can fail to value anything at all is that, for her, the relevant attitude is reflective endorsement, which involves stepping back from your desires, asking if you endorse them, and saying yes. Arguably, this is something that you can fail to do. In contrast, part of the reason why Sartre thinks that you have to value something is that, for him, the relevant attitude is choice (if we can call that an attitude). And for Sartre, this is something that no rational agent can escape.

Notice, by the way, how this question interacts with the previous one: If a substantivist says 'yes' to this question, then she can claim an even greater kind of objectivity for morality than before: she can say that every rational agent has certain moral duties, period. Once again, Sartre and Beauvoir are good examples of this: they say that you have to choose freedom if you choose anything at all, and then they say that you have to choose something. Therefore, they might conclude, you have to choose freedom.

6. What kind of normativity are we talking about here?

Stepping back from constructivism about morality: I think that one of the main sources of confusion in discussions about constructivism is that different constructivists are talking about different kinds of normativity. Rawls is a constructivist about morality and political theory. Korsgaard is a constructivist about normativity and morality (insofar as she thinks that morality is normative). Street and Velleman are constructivists about reasons. And so on. (In this sense it might even be misleading to call constructivism a family of metaethical theories, as opposed to, say, a family of metanormative theories, or even something more general still.)

This is important, because one could be a constructivist about one kind of normativity but not about another. For example, one could be a constructivist about reasons but a realist about morality.

One could also be a constructivist about one kind of normativity and then a different kind of constructivist about another. For example, one could think that one's reasons depend on one's own values, one's moral duties depends on one's culture's values, one's legal duties depends on one's fellow citizens' values, and so on. (I actually think that something like this is closest to the truth.)

* I'm not attempting to capture the way that everybody uses the term 'constructivism' here. (I actually think that this would be futile, since everyone uses it differently.) Instead, I'm merely attempting to capture the way that I use it. I think that at least some philosophers also use it this way; but more importantly, I think that using it this way makes constructivism a clear alternative to expressivism, error theory, and realism, and it also explains why people as different as Kant, Rawls, Korsgaard, Velleman, Street, etc. all count as constructivists. (But see the last section for a qualification about what kind of constructivist they are.)

What do you think? Does this capture the way you use 'constructivism,' or does it at least come close to doing that? Does it make sense? If this is right, what else might constructivists disagree about?

-- Jeff Sebo

Parfit's Triviality Objection

Meta-ethical naturalists hold that normative claims, e.g. 'You ought to phi', state purely natural facts, e.g. phi-ing would maximize happiness. Parfit objects that, unless we distinguish right-making features from rightness itself, our first-order normative ethical theories will be rendered trivial.

Suppose we're utilitarians. So we accept the following principle:

(U) an act is right just in case it would maximize happiness.

A non-naturalist utilitarian may make the substantive claim that whenever an act has the natural property of maximizing happiness, it thereby has the further (irreducibly normative) property of being right. If a naturalist collapses these, then their assertion of (U) seems less substantive. They are simply asserting the fact that whenever an act has the natural property of maximizing happiness, it has this very property. But that's trivial.

A complication: examples like (E) 'molecular kinetic energy is the same as heat' show us that metaphysically 'trivial' identity statements can nonetheless be informative or cognitively significant. This may be so if, although both sides of the identity statement refer to one and the same property, they refer to it in different ways (or by way of different reference-fixing descriptions). For then, in addition to the explicitly stated trivial fact, we may learn an implicitly stated substantive fact. Parfit explains:

This claim [E] gives us important information because the concept of heat is the concept of the property that is related in certain ways to certain other, different properties. (E) can be restated here as:

(F) having molecular kinetic energy is the property that can make an object have the different properties of being able to melt solids, turn liquids into gases, cause certain sensations, etc.

Here is the challenge for the metaethical naturalist: they must explain what substantive natural fact is implicitly conveyed by the likes of (U), to make such moral claims informative.

Parfit doesn't think this challenge can be met. But why not? I would have thought the obvious response for a naturalist is to adopt a kind of moral functionalism (a la Frank Jackson). The reference of 'ought' is fixed by its conceptual role R in our cognitive economy. Then, when the naturalist utilitarian claims that we ought to maximize happiness, they are implicitly conveying the substantive fact that the property of maximizing happiness has the (further) property of being such as to fulfill role R.

The problem is made vivid in Parfit's example of the naturalist utilitarian who horrifies the hospital Ethics Committee by endorsing the surreptitious murder of a patient for purpose of stealing their organs and saving more lives on net. Parfit imagines the naturalist responding as follows:

When I claimed that I ought to kill this patient, I was claiming only that this act would maximize happiness. I was not claiming that this act would have the different property of being what I ought to do. On my view, there is no such different property. Being an act that would maximize happiness is the same as being what we ought to do. Since I was claiming only that killing this patient would maximize happiness, no one has any reason to reject my claim.

But this does not seem to capture how naturalists tend to understand their own view. (The imagined 'distancing' of oneself from the ordinary understanding of moral commitments seems especially inapposite.) When naturalists make first-order claims about which natural features are right-making features, they are not only claiming that these features are self-identical (though that may be the explicit content or truthmaker for their claim, just as when scientists claim that heat is molecular energy). Rather, they are conveying the additional, important information that this feature is what the rest of us are ultimately referring to with our ordinary moral talk. That is: maximizing happiness (or whatever) is the natural property that is ultimately picked out by the reference-fixing descriptions R associated with the normative terms 'right', 'ought', etc.

There are other objections that could be made at this point, e.g. concerning whether the naturalist can really capture the full normative force of these claims. But I think the triviality objection fails.

Update: It turns out I was a bit quick in dismissing this argument.  Parfit appeals to the premise that a claim like (U) is not merely informative, but more specifically that it is a positive substantive normative claim, which attributes a distinct normative property to acts that have the property of maximizing happiness (or whatever).  It's much less clear whether the naturalist can meet this demand, since the "further information" they take us to be implicitly attributing seems to be more sociological or linguistic in nature, rather than attributing any further normative property.

Parfit on Reasons and Normative Facts

From Chp 24 of Parfit's manuscript, On What Matters (lightly edited):

Distinguish facts that are normative and facts that have normative importance in the sense that these facts give us reasons. Two examples would be the facts that
(J) your wine is poisoned; and that
(K) the fact stated by (J) gives you a reason not to drink your wine.

Of these facts, (J) is natural and (K) is normative. But it is (J), the natural fact, which has normative importance, in the sense of reason-giving force... Whenever some natural fact gives us a reason, there is also the normative fact that this natural fact gives us this reason.

It is easy to overlook such normative facts... if we say that natural facts of certain kinds are reasons to act in certain ways, we may be led to assume that, to defend the view that there are normative reasons, it is enough to claim that there are natural facts of these kinds. That is not so. We must also claim that these natural facts have the normative property of being reasons. And this claim, property, and fact might all be irreducibly normative.

In subsequent chapters, Parfit similarly notes the importance of distinguishing right-making features of an act (e.g. maximizing happiness, or whatever) from the property of being right.