The confusion is often stated thusly: “deontological theories are full of injunctions like ‘do not kill’, but they generally provide no (or no interesting) explanations for these injunctions.”
It’s not a confusion it’s just something that isn’t true. Deontological theories routinely provide explanations for these injunctions and some of these explanations are interesting (though I guess that’s subjective).
This is confused because the term ‘deontology’ in philosophical jargon picks out a normative ethical theory, while the question ‘why is it wrong to kill?’ is not a normative but a meta-ethical question.
No it isn’t. “Why is it wrong to kill?” is a great example of a normative question! Utilitarianism provides an answer. So does deontology. A meta-ethical question would be “what does it mean to say, ‘it’s wrong to kill’”. An applied ethics question would be “in circumstances x, y and z, is it wrong to kill?”. Normative theories are absolutely supposed to answer this question.
Some consequentialists and deontologists are also moral realists. Some are not.
While I guess this could be logically possible, anyone who is not a moral realist needs to provide some kind of explanation for what exactly a normative theory is supposed to be doing and what it mean’s to assert one if there are no moral facts. I say this as a non-realist who is pretty confused about what everyone thinks they’re arguing over.
To be absolutely clear, my post is about the way academic philosophy happens to organize a certain debate, and I cite that SEP article as my major source. It will be very helpful to me if you point out where you disagree with the SEP article (and on what basis), or where you think I’ve misread it. (Look specifically at this section: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/#DeoTheMet
Again, there is no fact of the matter about what is a normative and what is a meta-ethical question, just a convention.
While I guess this could be logically possible, anyone who is not a moral realist needs to provide some kind of explanation for what exactly a normative theory is supposed to be doing and what it mean’s to assert one if there are no moral facts.
Being a moral anti-realist is compatible with having, and following, a moral theory: you just think you have reasons to be moral which are not based on mind-independent facts. For example, you might think convention gives you reason to be moral, where conventionalism is traditionally described as a form of non-realism. (see: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/#ChaMorAntRea
Being a deontologist (I think, and my post assumes) is even compatible with being a moral nihilist: “Moral principles must come in the form of injunctions, and there are no such injunctions.”
Again, there is no fact of the matter about what is a normative and what is a meta-ethical question, just a convention.
Well there is a fact of the matter, it’s just a fact about a convention.
To be absolutely clear, my post is about the way academic philosophy happens to organize a certain debate, and I cite that SEP article as my major source. It will be very helpful to me if you point out where you disagree with the SEP article (and on what basis), or where you think I’ve misread it. (Look specifically at this section: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/#DeoTheMet
Yes, I understand what your post was arguing and I’m familiar with the way academic philosophy organizes this debate. And yes, deontology does not presume any particular metaethics. Your error, as far as I can tell, is in not getting what counts as a meta-ethical question and what doesn’t. “Why is murder wrong?” is a straightforward question for normative theory. Kantian deontology, for instance, answers by saying “Murder is wrong because it violates the Categorical Imperative.” And then there are a lot of details about what the Categorical Imperative is and how murder violates it. Rule utilitarianism says that murder is wrong because a rule that prohibits murder provides for the greatest good for the greatest number. And so on. Normative theories exist precisely to explain why certain actions are moral and other actions are immoral. A normative theory that can’t explain why murder is (usually) immoral is a terribly incomplete normative theory.
Meta-ethics isn’t about asking why normative claims are true. It is about asking what it means to make a moral claim. Thus the “meta”. E.g. questions like “are there moral facts?”
At no point have I mentioned credentials to try and win a philosophical debate on Less Wrong. But if there is anything my philosophy degree makes me a minimal expert in, it’s jargon.
Being a moral anti-realist is compatible with having, and following, a moral theory: you just think you have reasons to be moral which are not based on mind-independent facts.
I realize this, but this resembles just about no one interested in debating consequentialism vs. deontology.
Being a deontologist (I think, and my post assumes) is even compatible with being a moral nihilist: “Moral principles must come in the form of injunctions, and there are no such injunctions.”
Right. Like I said, it isn’t logically impossible. It’s just silly and sociologically implausible.
It is about asking what it means to make a moral claim.
Um, that’s not a very interesting question, is it. Making a moral claim means, more or less: “I am right and you are wrong and you should do what I say”. Note that this is not a morally absolutist view in the meta-ethical sense: even moral relativists make such claims all the time, they just admit that one’s peculiar customs or opinions might affect the kinds of moral claims one makes.
What’s a more interesting question is, “what should happen when folks make incompatible moral claims, or claim incompatible rights”. This is what ethics (in the Rushworth Kidder sense of setting “right against right”) is all about. When we do ethics, we abandon what might be called (in a perhaps naïve and philosophically incorrect way) “moral absolutism” or the simple practice of just making moral claims, and start debating them in public. Law, politics and civics are a further complication: they arise when societies get more complex and less “tribal”, so simple ethical reasoning is no longer enough and we need more of a formal structure.
Making a moral claim means, more or less: “I am right and you are wrong and you should do what I say”
Well your attempt to explain what a normative claim is actually includes a normative claim so I don’t think you’ve successfully dissolved the question. You are “right” about what? Facts? The world? What kind of facts? What kind of evidence can you offer to demonstrate that you are right and I am wrong?
“what should happen when folks make incompatible moral claims, or claim incompatible rights”
That “should” is there again.
When we do ethics, we abandon what might be called (in a perhaps naïve and philosophically incorrect sense) “moral absolutism” or the simple practice of just making moral claims, and start debating them in public.
I don’t imagine there ever was a “simple practice of just making moral claims”. Moral claims are generally claims made on others and they are speech acts which means they exist to communicate something. People don’t spend a lot of time making moral claims that everyone agrees with and abides by which means it’s pretty much in the nature of a moral claim to be part of a debate or discussion.
I can’t see the importance or the force of the distinction you are trying to make.
What kind of evidence can you offer to demonstrate that you are right and I am wrong?
Who says I need “evidence” to argue that you should do something? I could rely on my perceived authority—in fact, you could take this as a definition of what “moral authority” is all about. Sometimes that moral authority comes from religion (or cosmology, more generally), sometimes it’s derived from tradition, etc. So I have to dispute your claim that:
it’s pretty much in the nature of a moral claim to be part of a debate or discussion.
since it is quite self-evident that many people and institutions have made moral claims in the past that were not perceived as propely being part of a “debate” or “discussion”. It’s true that, sometimes, moral claims are seen in such a way—especially when they’re seen as originating from individual instinct and cognition, and thus leading people to think of themselves as being on the “right side” of an ethical dilemma or conflict. And yet, at some level, more formalized systems like law and politics presumably rely on widespread trust in the “system” itself as a moral authority, if only one with a very limited scope.
So, you’re never going to get an answer to the question of “what a normative claim is”, because the whole concept involves a kind of tension. There’s an “authority to be followed” side, and an “internal moral cognition” side, and both can be right to some degree and even interact in a fruitful way.
I still feel like we’re talking past each other. I made a straightforward empirical claim in my post. So all we need to do is find some empirical evidence. If you accept that SEP typically and in this case represents the academic state of the art and conventional usage, then look at the last section of the SEP article I linked to. It agrees with me (I think).
If you don’t think the SEP article represents the convention accurately, just say that and we can move on to another source. There’s no sense in arguing about whether or not the distinction between normative and meta ethics reported in the SEP article makes sense. I agree that it does not. But we’re not arguing about that. We’re arguing about what the convention actually is.
If you accept that SEP typically and in this case represents the academic state of the art and conventional usage, then look at the last section of the SEP article I linked to. It agrees with me (I think).
The SEP does not agree with you. No where in that section does it say that the “Why is murder wrong?” is a meta-ethical question. All it says is that while deontology does not assume a meta-ethical position, though certain meta-ethical positions are more hospitable to it. I agree with you and the SEP here.
I’m not saying deontology is a meta-ethical theory. It isn’t. As I said:
And yes, deontology does not presume any particular metaethics. Your error, as far as I can tell, is in not getting what counts as a meta-ethical question and what doesn’t. “Why is murder wrong?” is a straightforward question for normative theory.
By convention “why is murder wrong?” is a question for normative theory. Your sentence in the post, this one:
This is confused because the term ‘deontology’ in philosophical jargon picks out a normative ethical theory, while the question ‘why is it wrong to kill?’ is not a normative but a meta-ethical question.
is wrong. The SEP does not say otherwise. In any way. “Why is it wrong to kill?” is a normative question. Maybe what is tripping you up is this sentece from the SEP?
Likewise, a deontologist can claim that we know the content of deontological morality by direct intuition, by Kantian reflection on our normative situation, or by reaching reflective equilibrium between our particular moral judgments and the theories we construct to explain them (theories of intuitions).
I could see how that could be read as “reasons for the truth of deontological morality”. But these are questions actually about the epistemology of moral claims—“how do we know x is immoral?”, is actually different from “why x is immoral?” Obviously these questions are usually connected but they don’t have to be. It is logically possible to think that the Categorical Imperative makes murder wrong but that the way we learn that is by God speaking to us or by studying physics or whatever.
There’s no sense in arguing about whether or not the distinction between normative and meta ethics reported in the SEP article makes sense. I agree that it does not. But we’re not arguing about that. We’re arguing about what the convention actually is.
The distinction makes plenty of sense. It just isn’t what you think it is.
Great, I assume this means you think the SEP article is representing the convention. Let me know if that’s not the case, since if it isn’t, we’re wasting our time talking about my interpretation of it.
Anyway, suppose someone were to come along and say ‘Moral truths come primarily in the form of absolute injunctions!’ (or whatever would fix him as a deontologist). We ask him for an example of such an injunction, and he says ‘Do not kill.’ So far, we agree that this whole discussion has taken place within normative ethics.
Now we ask him ‘Why shouldn’t we kill?’ This is a pretty ambiguous question, and we could be asking a clearly normative question to which the answer might be ‘because there’s an injunction to the effect that you shouldn’t’. But this isn’t the kind of question I’m talking about in my (perhaps poorly phrased) initial post. What the confused person I discuss wants is not an answer to the question ‘what is right and wrong’, from the deontologist, he wants answers to questions like ‘what makes a particular injunction true?’ ‘How do you know this injunction is true?’ and so on.
What this confused person often complains about (I know you’ve had some recent experience with this on “Philosophical Landmines”) is that the only explanations they get, explanations which are obviously inadequate, are explanations like ‘Because God said so in the Bible’. In complaining about this, the confused person implies that this is the kind of answer they want, but that it’s a very poor one.
A deontologist who gives this kind of answer is, I think we will agree, endorsing some form of divine command theory. So what kind of a thing is ‘divine command theory’, and what kind of answer is ‘because God said so’? Is it meta-ethical, or normative? Well, the SEP article says this:
Deontological theories are normative theories. They do not presuppose any particular position on moral ontology or on moral epistemology. Presumably, a deontologist can be a moral realist of either the natural (moral properties are identical to natural properties) or nonnatural (moral properties are not themselves natural properties even if they are nonreductively related to natural properties) variety. Or a deontologist can be an expressivist, a constructivist, a transcendentalist, a conventionalist, or a Divine command theorist regarding the nature of morality.
Notice that Divine command theory is on the list of things next to ‘expressivist’, ‘constructivist’, and other meta-ethical positions, implying that ‘because God said so’ (the kind of answer the confused person is asking for) is not a claim within normative ethics (which would rather involve claims about what, exactly, God said), but a meta-ethical claim. After all, even if we accept we should do what God says, we have not yet committed to either deontology or consequentialism, much less any specific deontological or consequentialist claims like ‘do not kill’ or ‘minimize deaths’.
So I grant that ‘why is it wrong to kill’ was a poor phrase: this question is ambiguously normative or meta-ethical. If this is all you meant by ‘right in spirit but wrong in letter’, then I agree, and I’ll now try to come up with a way to make my post clearer.
Nevertheless, according to the SEP article anyway, I’ve correctly identified the conventional line between normative ethics and meta ethics, and so I’ve correctly diagnosed a confusion. What do you think?
Okay. I think I see what is happening. The whole issue get’s weirdly skewed by divine command theory, which is so simple it is hard to see the distinction and which implies a very particular formula for a normative theory. Let me outline the position:
Metaethics: Divine Command theory. In answer to the question “What is morality?” they answer “the will/decree of God”.
Normative Ethics: In answer to the question “Why is murder immoral?” they provide a proof that God decrees murder to be immoral, say, a justification for the Bible as the word of God and a citation of the Ten Commandments. Non-judeo-christian divine command theorists would say something else. Some normative theories under the umbrella of divine command theory could even be consequentialist, “God told me in a dream to maximize preference satisfaction.” These answers assume divine command theory but they’re still normative theory.
Now in a real life debate with a divine command theorist they may emphasize the “God said so part” instead of the “here is where he said it” part. But that’s just pragmatics: you don’t care about the normative proof until you share the meta-ethic so it is reasonable for a divine command theorists to skip straight to the major point of contention.
In the case of divine command deontology the “non-answer” issue is pretty much entirely about the meta-ethical assumptions and not the actual normative theory. So I can see why you were emphasizing the fact that deontology is logically independent of any particular meta-ethical framework.
It might be less confusing to just emphasize that “deontology” isn’t a particular normative theory—just a class of normative theory determined by a particular feature (just like consequentialism) and that there is nothing necessarily mysterious or magical about that feature; that that association is due to a particular sort of deontological normative theory which is popular among non-philosophers, a theory which assumes a stupid meta-ethics even though there is no need for deontologists to embrace that meta-ethics.
To summarize: I’m not sure that you’ve correctly identified the conventional line between normative ethics and meta-ethics, but I can see why the context of divine command theory makes the question “why is murder wrong?” seem like a meta-ethical one. When I said you were right in spirit I meant that I agreed that people were strawmaning deontology but disagreed as to the nature of the error. I don’t think it’s that “why is murder wrong?” isn’t a normative question. Rather, it’s that people assume deontology refers to a particular kind of deontology which assume an unhelpful and uninteresting metaethics and this leads that brand of deontology to be unable to given interesting answers to “why” questions.
Okay. I think I see what is happening. The whole issue get’s weirdly skewed by divine command theory, which is so simple it is hard to see the distinction and which implies a very particular formula for a normative theory. Let me outline the position:
I’m not sure that divine command theory implies “a very particular formula for a normative theory”. In practice, many divine command theorists pay a lot of attention to things like casuistry (i.e. case-based reasoning) and situational ethics. In other words, they do morality “case by case” or “fable by fable”. Surely any such moral theory must contain a lot of non-trivial normative content. It’s not at all the case that all arguing happens on the meta-ethical, “God said it” level.
Now we ask him ‘Why shouldn’t we kill?’ This is a pretty ambiguous question, and we could be asking a clearly normative question to which the answer might be ‘because there’s an injunction to the effect that you shouldn’t’.
The answer to this question actually depends on whether you are doing normative ethics, or talking about morality. In the former case, a sensible answer would be: “because, as a matter of fact, most individuals and societies agree that “non-killing” is a morally relevant ‘value’, where ‘value’ means a conative ambition (i.e. what “should” we do?). As a normative ethicist, I fall back on such widely-shared values”.
When doing morality in a sort of common-sense way, the answer is more complicated. Generally speaking, you’re going to find that such ‘values’ (or, again, conative ambitions of the “should” variety) are a part of the “moral core” of individuals, what they take their “morality” to be about. This moral core is influenced by many factors, including their biology (so, yes, they’re generally going to share most other humans’ values), society, perceived moral authorities, etc. It can also be influenced by ethical debates they take part in: most people can be convinced that they should drop some moral values and take up others.
All of this means that the real world is quite complicated, and does not fully reflect any of the “moral positions” that philosophers like to talk about.
All of this means that the real world is quite complicated, and does not fully reflect any of the “moral positions” that philosophers like to talk about.
That is doubtlessly true, though I wonder if its an entirely fair criterion. While most ethicists would agree that the right view should reflect actual everyday moral judgements, nothing in particular holds them to that. It’s simply possible that no one is presently good, and that the everyday moral judgement people make are terribly corrupt and over-complicated compared to the correct judgements.
To be absolutely clear, my post is about the way academic philosophy happens to organize a certain debate
Note that “the way academic philosophy happens to organize” debates about ethics and morality should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Most people who engage in moral/ethical judgment in everyday life pay very little attention to moral philosophy in the academic sense.
In fact, as it happens, most of the public debate about ethics and morals takes place outside academic philosophy, and is hard to disentangle from debate involving politics, law and general worldviews or “cosmologies” (in the anthropological sense).
Very true, though I think it’s important to acknowledge two things: a) philosophers like Mill and Kant have had a huge impact on everyday moral thinking in the west, and b) the kinds of moral debates we typically have on this site are not independent of academic philosophy.
Except since those are simply hypothetical imperatives, the Moral Non-Realist won’t see the need to call these theories ‘moral’ in nature. The Error Theorist agrees that if you want A then you should do B, but he wouldn’t call that a theory of morality.
There are all kinds of preferences, and distinguishing moral preferences from other types of preferences is still useful, even if you don’t believe that those preferences are commands from existence.
The Error Theorist might not call that a theory of morality. My reply to him is that what others call moral preferences have practical differences to hat preferences. Treating them all the same is throwing out the conceptual baby with the bathwater.
And others, perhaps you, might not want to call these theories “moral” either, because you seem to want “imperatives”, and my account of morality doesn’t include imperatives from the universe, or anything else.
The problem is that the line between what has felt like a “moral” preference and what has felt like some other kind of preference has been different in different social contexts. There may not even be agreement in a particular culture.
For example, some folks think an individual’s sexual preferences are “moral preferences,” such that a particular preference can be immoral. Other folks think a sexual preference is more like a gastric preference. Some people like broccoli, some don’t. Good and evil don’t enter into that discussion at all.
If the error theory were false, I would expect the line dividing different types of preferences would be more stable over time, even if value drift caused moral preferences to change over time. In other words, the Aztecs thought human sacrifice was good, we now think it is evil. But the question has always been understood as a moral question. I’m asserting that some questions have not always been seen as “moral” questions, and the movement of that line is evidence for the error theory.
If the error theory were false, I would expect the line dividing different types of preferences would be more stable over time, even if value drift caused moral preferences to change over time.
The line between “truth” and “belief” is also not stable across cultures.
I meant in the same sense that you meant the statement about cultures, i.e., if you ask an average member of the culture, you’ll get different answers for what is true depending on the culture.
I was talking about community consensus, not whatever nonsense is being spouted by the man-on-the-street.
As you noted, the belief of the average person is seldom a reliable indicator (our even all that coherent). That’s why we don’t measure a society’s scientific knowledge that way.
Sorry, I was in a hurry when I posted the grandparent and was unclear:
Specifically my point was that the form of extreme be-yourself-ism implicit in your statement is still a moral theory, one that would make statements like:
“If you’re a paper clip maximizer, then maximize paperclips.”
I think I agree with Eugine_Nier that it isn’t a moral theory to be able to draw conclusions. One doesn’t need to commit to any ethical or meta-ethical principles to notice that Clippy’s preferences will be met better if Clippy creates some paperclips.
At the level of abstraction we are talking in now, moral theories exist to tell us what preferences to have, and meta-ethical theories tell us what kinds of moral theories are worth considering.
It sounds to me like you only think a person has a moral theory then the moral theory has them.
moral theories exist to tell us what preferences to have,
For you, under your moral theories. Not for me. I’m happy to have theories that tell me what moral values I do have, and what moral values other people have.
Obviously not—but it isn’t your moral theory that tells you how Clippy will maximize its preferences.
Alice the consequentialist and Bob the deontologist disagree about moral reasoning. But Bob does not need to become a consequentialist to predict what Alice will maximize, and vice versa.
What do you want to call those kinds of theories?
Reasoning? More generally, thinking (and caring about) the consequences of actions is not limited to consequentialists. A competent deontologist knows that pointing guns at people and pulling the trigger tends to cause murder—that’s why she tends not to do that.
moral theories exist to tell us what preferences to have,
For you, under your moral theories. Not for me.
I should be working now, but I don’t want to. So I’m here, relaxing and discussing philosophy. But I am committing a minor wrong in that I am acting on a preference that is inconsistent with my moral obligation to support my family (as I see my obligations). Does that type of inconsistency between preference and right action never happen to you?
This is right in spirit but wrong in letter:
It’s not a confusion it’s just something that isn’t true. Deontological theories routinely provide explanations for these injunctions and some of these explanations are interesting (though I guess that’s subjective).
No it isn’t. “Why is it wrong to kill?” is a great example of a normative question! Utilitarianism provides an answer. So does deontology. A meta-ethical question would be “what does it mean to say, ‘it’s wrong to kill’”. An applied ethics question would be “in circumstances x, y and z, is it wrong to kill?”. Normative theories are absolutely supposed to answer this question.
While I guess this could be logically possible, anyone who is not a moral realist needs to provide some kind of explanation for what exactly a normative theory is supposed to be doing and what it mean’s to assert one if there are no moral facts. I say this as a non-realist who is pretty confused about what everyone thinks they’re arguing over.
To be absolutely clear, my post is about the way academic philosophy happens to organize a certain debate, and I cite that SEP article as my major source. It will be very helpful to me if you point out where you disagree with the SEP article (and on what basis), or where you think I’ve misread it. (Look specifically at this section: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/#DeoTheMet
Again, there is no fact of the matter about what is a normative and what is a meta-ethical question, just a convention.
Being a moral anti-realist is compatible with having, and following, a moral theory: you just think you have reasons to be moral which are not based on mind-independent facts. For example, you might think convention gives you reason to be moral, where conventionalism is traditionally described as a form of non-realism. (see: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/#ChaMorAntRea
Being a deontologist (I think, and my post assumes) is even compatible with being a moral nihilist: “Moral principles must come in the form of injunctions, and there are no such injunctions.”
Well there is a fact of the matter, it’s just a fact about a convention.
Yes, I understand what your post was arguing and I’m familiar with the way academic philosophy organizes this debate. And yes, deontology does not presume any particular metaethics. Your error, as far as I can tell, is in not getting what counts as a meta-ethical question and what doesn’t. “Why is murder wrong?” is a straightforward question for normative theory. Kantian deontology, for instance, answers by saying “Murder is wrong because it violates the Categorical Imperative.” And then there are a lot of details about what the Categorical Imperative is and how murder violates it. Rule utilitarianism says that murder is wrong because a rule that prohibits murder provides for the greatest good for the greatest number. And so on. Normative theories exist precisely to explain why certain actions are moral and other actions are immoral. A normative theory that can’t explain why murder is (usually) immoral is a terribly incomplete normative theory.
Meta-ethics isn’t about asking why normative claims are true. It is about asking what it means to make a moral claim. Thus the “meta”. E.g. questions like “are there moral facts?”
At no point have I mentioned credentials to try and win a philosophical debate on Less Wrong. But if there is anything my philosophy degree makes me a minimal expert in, it’s jargon.
I realize this, but this resembles just about no one interested in debating consequentialism vs. deontology.
Right. Like I said, it isn’t logically impossible. It’s just silly and sociologically implausible.
Um, that’s not a very interesting question, is it. Making a moral claim means, more or less: “I am right and you are wrong and you should do what I say”. Note that this is not a morally absolutist view in the meta-ethical sense: even moral relativists make such claims all the time, they just admit that one’s peculiar customs or opinions might affect the kinds of moral claims one makes.
What’s a more interesting question is, “what should happen when folks make incompatible moral claims, or claim incompatible rights”. This is what ethics (in the Rushworth Kidder sense of setting “right against right”) is all about. When we do ethics, we abandon what might be called (in a perhaps naïve and philosophically incorrect way) “moral absolutism” or the simple practice of just making moral claims, and start debating them in public. Law, politics and civics are a further complication: they arise when societies get more complex and less “tribal”, so simple ethical reasoning is no longer enough and we need more of a formal structure.
Well your attempt to explain what a normative claim is actually includes a normative claim so I don’t think you’ve successfully dissolved the question. You are “right” about what? Facts? The world? What kind of facts? What kind of evidence can you offer to demonstrate that you are right and I am wrong?
That “should” is there again.
I don’t imagine there ever was a “simple practice of just making moral claims”. Moral claims are generally claims made on others and they are speech acts which means they exist to communicate something. People don’t spend a lot of time making moral claims that everyone agrees with and abides by which means it’s pretty much in the nature of a moral claim to be part of a debate or discussion.
I can’t see the importance or the force of the distinction you are trying to make.
Who says I need “evidence” to argue that you should do something? I could rely on my perceived authority—in fact, you could take this as a definition of what “moral authority” is all about. Sometimes that moral authority comes from religion (or cosmology, more generally), sometimes it’s derived from tradition, etc. So I have to dispute your claim that:
since it is quite self-evident that many people and institutions have made moral claims in the past that were not perceived as propely being part of a “debate” or “discussion”. It’s true that, sometimes, moral claims are seen in such a way—especially when they’re seen as originating from individual instinct and cognition, and thus leading people to think of themselves as being on the “right side” of an ethical dilemma or conflict. And yet, at some level, more formalized systems like law and politics presumably rely on widespread trust in the “system” itself as a moral authority, if only one with a very limited scope.
So, you’re never going to get an answer to the question of “what a normative claim is”, because the whole concept involves a kind of tension. There’s an “authority to be followed” side, and an “internal moral cognition” side, and both can be right to some degree and even interact in a fruitful way.
I still feel like we’re talking past each other. I made a straightforward empirical claim in my post. So all we need to do is find some empirical evidence. If you accept that SEP typically and in this case represents the academic state of the art and conventional usage, then look at the last section of the SEP article I linked to. It agrees with me (I think).
If you don’t think the SEP article represents the convention accurately, just say that and we can move on to another source. There’s no sense in arguing about whether or not the distinction between normative and meta ethics reported in the SEP article makes sense. I agree that it does not. But we’re not arguing about that. We’re arguing about what the convention actually is.
The SEP does not agree with you. No where in that section does it say that the “Why is murder wrong?” is a meta-ethical question. All it says is that while deontology does not assume a meta-ethical position, though certain meta-ethical positions are more hospitable to it. I agree with you and the SEP here.
I’m not saying deontology is a meta-ethical theory. It isn’t. As I said:
By convention “why is murder wrong?” is a question for normative theory. Your sentence in the post, this one:
is wrong. The SEP does not say otherwise. In any way. “Why is it wrong to kill?” is a normative question. Maybe what is tripping you up is this sentece from the SEP?
I could see how that could be read as “reasons for the truth of deontological morality”. But these are questions actually about the epistemology of moral claims—“how do we know x is immoral?”, is actually different from “why x is immoral?” Obviously these questions are usually connected but they don’t have to be. It is logically possible to think that the Categorical Imperative makes murder wrong but that the way we learn that is by God speaking to us or by studying physics or whatever.
The distinction makes plenty of sense. It just isn’t what you think it is.
Great, I assume this means you think the SEP article is representing the convention. Let me know if that’s not the case, since if it isn’t, we’re wasting our time talking about my interpretation of it.
Anyway, suppose someone were to come along and say ‘Moral truths come primarily in the form of absolute injunctions!’ (or whatever would fix him as a deontologist). We ask him for an example of such an injunction, and he says ‘Do not kill.’ So far, we agree that this whole discussion has taken place within normative ethics.
Now we ask him ‘Why shouldn’t we kill?’ This is a pretty ambiguous question, and we could be asking a clearly normative question to which the answer might be ‘because there’s an injunction to the effect that you shouldn’t’. But this isn’t the kind of question I’m talking about in my (perhaps poorly phrased) initial post. What the confused person I discuss wants is not an answer to the question ‘what is right and wrong’, from the deontologist, he wants answers to questions like ‘what makes a particular injunction true?’ ‘How do you know this injunction is true?’ and so on.
What this confused person often complains about (I know you’ve had some recent experience with this on “Philosophical Landmines”) is that the only explanations they get, explanations which are obviously inadequate, are explanations like ‘Because God said so in the Bible’. In complaining about this, the confused person implies that this is the kind of answer they want, but that it’s a very poor one.
A deontologist who gives this kind of answer is, I think we will agree, endorsing some form of divine command theory. So what kind of a thing is ‘divine command theory’, and what kind of answer is ‘because God said so’? Is it meta-ethical, or normative? Well, the SEP article says this:
Notice that Divine command theory is on the list of things next to ‘expressivist’, ‘constructivist’, and other meta-ethical positions, implying that ‘because God said so’ (the kind of answer the confused person is asking for) is not a claim within normative ethics (which would rather involve claims about what, exactly, God said), but a meta-ethical claim. After all, even if we accept we should do what God says, we have not yet committed to either deontology or consequentialism, much less any specific deontological or consequentialist claims like ‘do not kill’ or ‘minimize deaths’.
So I grant that ‘why is it wrong to kill’ was a poor phrase: this question is ambiguously normative or meta-ethical. If this is all you meant by ‘right in spirit but wrong in letter’, then I agree, and I’ll now try to come up with a way to make my post clearer.
Nevertheless, according to the SEP article anyway, I’ve correctly identified the conventional line between normative ethics and meta ethics, and so I’ve correctly diagnosed a confusion. What do you think?
Okay. I think I see what is happening. The whole issue get’s weirdly skewed by divine command theory, which is so simple it is hard to see the distinction and which implies a very particular formula for a normative theory. Let me outline the position:
Metaethics: Divine Command theory. In answer to the question “What is morality?” they answer “the will/decree of God”.
Normative Ethics: In answer to the question “Why is murder immoral?” they provide a proof that God decrees murder to be immoral, say, a justification for the Bible as the word of God and a citation of the Ten Commandments. Non-judeo-christian divine command theorists would say something else. Some normative theories under the umbrella of divine command theory could even be consequentialist, “God told me in a dream to maximize preference satisfaction.” These answers assume divine command theory but they’re still normative theory.
Now in a real life debate with a divine command theorist they may emphasize the “God said so part” instead of the “here is where he said it” part. But that’s just pragmatics: you don’t care about the normative proof until you share the meta-ethic so it is reasonable for a divine command theorists to skip straight to the major point of contention.
In the case of divine command deontology the “non-answer” issue is pretty much entirely about the meta-ethical assumptions and not the actual normative theory. So I can see why you were emphasizing the fact that deontology is logically independent of any particular meta-ethical framework.
It might be less confusing to just emphasize that “deontology” isn’t a particular normative theory—just a class of normative theory determined by a particular feature (just like consequentialism) and that there is nothing necessarily mysterious or magical about that feature; that that association is due to a particular sort of deontological normative theory which is popular among non-philosophers, a theory which assumes a stupid meta-ethics even though there is no need for deontologists to embrace that meta-ethics.
To summarize: I’m not sure that you’ve correctly identified the conventional line between normative ethics and meta-ethics, but I can see why the context of divine command theory makes the question “why is murder wrong?” seem like a meta-ethical one. When I said you were right in spirit I meant that I agreed that people were strawmaning deontology but disagreed as to the nature of the error. I don’t think it’s that “why is murder wrong?” isn’t a normative question. Rather, it’s that people assume deontology refers to a particular kind of deontology which assume an unhelpful and uninteresting metaethics and this leads that brand of deontology to be unable to given interesting answers to “why” questions.
Any of that make sense?
Yes, and I don’t think we have any further disagreement. Thanks for the interesting discussion.
I’m not sure that divine command theory implies “a very particular formula for a normative theory”. In practice, many divine command theorists pay a lot of attention to things like casuistry (i.e. case-based reasoning) and situational ethics. In other words, they do morality “case by case” or “fable by fable”. Surely any such moral theory must contain a lot of non-trivial normative content. It’s not at all the case that all arguing happens on the meta-ethical, “God said it” level.
This is a good point.
The answer to this question actually depends on whether you are doing normative ethics, or talking about morality. In the former case, a sensible answer would be: “because, as a matter of fact, most individuals and societies agree that “non-killing” is a morally relevant ‘value’, where ‘value’ means a conative ambition (i.e. what “should” we do?). As a normative ethicist, I fall back on such widely-shared values”.
When doing morality in a sort of common-sense way, the answer is more complicated. Generally speaking, you’re going to find that such ‘values’ (or, again, conative ambitions of the “should” variety) are a part of the “moral core” of individuals, what they take their “morality” to be about. This moral core is influenced by many factors, including their biology (so, yes, they’re generally going to share most other humans’ values), society, perceived moral authorities, etc. It can also be influenced by ethical debates they take part in: most people can be convinced that they should drop some moral values and take up others.
All of this means that the real world is quite complicated, and does not fully reflect any of the “moral positions” that philosophers like to talk about.
That is doubtlessly true, though I wonder if its an entirely fair criterion. While most ethicists would agree that the right view should reflect actual everyday moral judgements, nothing in particular holds them to that. It’s simply possible that no one is presently good, and that the everyday moral judgement people make are terribly corrupt and over-complicated compared to the correct judgements.
Note that “the way academic philosophy happens to organize” debates about ethics and morality should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Most people who engage in moral/ethical judgment in everyday life pay very little attention to moral philosophy in the academic sense.
In fact, as it happens, most of the public debate about ethics and morals takes place outside academic philosophy, and is hard to disentangle from debate involving politics, law and general worldviews or “cosmologies” (in the anthropological sense).
Very true, though I think it’s important to acknowledge two things: a) philosophers like Mill and Kant have had a huge impact on everyday moral thinking in the west, and b) the kinds of moral debates we typically have on this site are not independent of academic philosophy.
A moral non-realist can have moral theories in the “If, then” form. If you value A.B.C, then you value D.
If you’re a paper clip maximizer, then …
Except since those are simply hypothetical imperatives, the Moral Non-Realist won’t see the need to call these theories ‘moral’ in nature. The Error Theorist agrees that if you want A then you should do B, but he wouldn’t call that a theory of morality.
There are all kinds of preferences, and distinguishing moral preferences from other types of preferences is still useful, even if you don’t believe that those preferences are commands from existence.
The Error Theorist might not call that a theory of morality. My reply to him is that what others call moral preferences have practical differences to hat preferences. Treating them all the same is throwing out the conceptual baby with the bathwater.
And others, perhaps you, might not want to call these theories “moral” either, because you seem to want “imperatives”, and my account of morality doesn’t include imperatives from the universe, or anything else.
The problem is that the line between what has felt like a “moral” preference and what has felt like some other kind of preference has been different in different social contexts. There may not even be agreement in a particular culture.
For example, some folks think an individual’s sexual preferences are “moral preferences,” such that a particular preference can be immoral. Other folks think a sexual preference is more like a gastric preference. Some people like broccoli, some don’t. Good and evil don’t enter into that discussion at all.
If the error theory were false, I would expect the line dividing different types of preferences would be more stable over time, even if value drift caused moral preferences to change over time. In other words, the Aztecs thought human sacrifice was good, we now think it is evil. But the question has always been understood as a moral question. I’m asserting that some questions have not always been seen as “moral” questions, and the movement of that line is evidence for the error theory.
The line between “truth” and “belief” is also not stable across cultures.
The line between “true” and “not true” is different in different cultures? I wasn’t aware that airplanes don’t work in China.
I meant in the same sense that you meant the statement about cultures, i.e., if you ask an average member of the culture, you’ll get different answers for what is true depending on the culture.
I was talking about community consensus, not whatever nonsense is being spouted by the man-on-the-street.
As you noted, the belief of the average person is seldom a reliable indicator (our even all that coherent). That’s why we don’t measure a society’s scientific knowledge that way.
Ok, my point still stands.
That’s still a moral theory.
Which was the point I was making.
“A moral non-realist can have moral theories …” So I presented the form of the moral theory a moral non-realist could have.
Sorry, I was in a hurry when I posted the grandparent and was unclear:
Specifically my point was that the form of extreme be-yourself-ism implicit in your statement is still a moral theory, one that would make statements like:
“If you’re a paper clip maximizer, then maximize paperclips.”
“If you’re a Nazi, kill Jews.”
“If you’re a liberal, try to stop the Nazis.”
Those aren’t accurate statements of the kinds of moral theories I was speaking of.
I gave the example:
That’s not an imperative, it’s an identification of the relationship between different values, in this case that A,B,C imply D.
Ok, that’s not a moral theory unless you’re sneaking in the statements I made in the parent as connotations.
To me, a theory that identifies a moral value implied by other moral values would count as a moral theory.
What kind of theory do you want to call it?
I think I agree with Eugine_Nier that it isn’t a moral theory to be able to draw conclusions. One doesn’t need to commit to any ethical or meta-ethical principles to notice that Clippy’s preferences will be met better if Clippy creates some paperclips.
At the level of abstraction we are talking in now, moral theories exist to tell us what preferences to have, and meta-ethical theories tell us what kinds of moral theories are worth considering.
Does one need to commit to a theory to have one?
It sounds to me like you only think a person has a moral theory then the moral theory has them.
For you, under your moral theories. Not for me. I’m happy to have theories that tell me what moral values I do have, and what moral values other people have.
What do you want to call those kinds of theories?
Obviously not—but it isn’t your moral theory that tells you how Clippy will maximize its preferences.
Alice the consequentialist and Bob the deontologist disagree about moral reasoning. But Bob does not need to become a consequentialist to predict what Alice will maximize, and vice versa.
Reasoning? More generally, thinking (and caring about) the consequences of actions is not limited to consequentialists. A competent deontologist knows that pointing guns at people and pulling the trigger tends to cause murder—that’s why she tends not to do that.
I should be working now, but I don’t want to. So I’m here, relaxing and discussing philosophy. But I am committing a minor wrong in that I am acting on a preference that is inconsistent with my moral obligation to support my family (as I see my obligations). Does that type of inconsistency between preference and right action never happen to you?