资源描述
Morality without Foundations
A Defense of Ethical Contextualism
Mark Timmons
New York Oxford Oxford University Press 1999
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Oxford University Press
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Copyright © 1999 by Mark Timmons
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Timmons, Mark, 1951Morality without foundations: a defense of ethical contextualism /Mark Timmons.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-511731-X (cloth) 1. Ethics. 2. Naturalism. 1. Title. BJ37.T55 1998 170'42-- dc21 97-26312
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Preface
My main purpose in writing this book was to gain a better understanding of philosophical issues and questions about the status of morality. I am as much interested in questions of philosophical methodology as I am in the substantive philosophical positions that philosophers articulate and defend. I have thus tried to produce a book that is clearly written and methodologically self-conscious. I have also tried to stake out a metaethical position that is not obviously on the menu of standard metaethical options (though its similarity in many respects to the views of certain other metaethical irrealists will be apparent). Since I wanted the book to be relatively short, I have zeroed in on opposing views and arguments that strike me as providing the clearest and stiffest challenges to the sort of irrealist metaethical view I defend in the pages to follow. My hope is that I have managed to get to the heart of things in making a case for the sort of metaethical view that I favor. I will let the reader judge whether and to what extent I have succeeded in doing these things.
In the recent years that I have been working out the ideas contained in this book, I have benefited from comments and criticisms on part or all of this book from Robert Audi, John Bickle, William Frankena, Michael Gorr, Mitchell Haney, R. M. Hare, William Connolly, Stephan Sencerz, William Throop, and William Tolhurst. I have also benefited greatly from discussions with and written comments from my colleagues David Henderson and John Tienson. The written comments I received from Michael DePaul and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong were very useful in helping me to improve the clarity and content of this work.
I owe my greatest debt to friend and colleague Terry Horgan, who not only coauthored with me a number of articles whose contents have found their way into this book but with whom I have had many useful and illuminating philosophical discussions about ideas, themes, and arguments contained in the chapters to follow. In particular, much of chapter 4, in which I set out an irrealist moral semantics, derives from a paper, "Taking a Moral Stance", that I coauthored with Terry and which we presented at a conference in honor of the retirement of
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R. M. Hare from the University of Florida ( "Hare's Heritage: The Impact of R. M. Hare on Contemporary Philosophy", March 1994).
I mentioned that my metaethical position bears some resemblance to the views of other irrealists. The view about moral semantics that I defend is quite similar in some respects to the views of R. M. Hare and Simon Blackburn. Terry and I worked out various details of the semantic view with an eye on Hare's work, particularly his 1952 book The Language of Morals. I later discovered just how similar some aspects of the view are to some of the details of Blackburn's so-called quasi-realist treatment of moral discourse (which is particularly evident in his 1996 work "Securing the Nots: Moral Epistemology for the Quasi-Realist"). However, there are some important differences between the Horgan and Timmons semantic view and the views of Hare and Blackburn, some of them indicated in the text.
Some of the material in various chapters is taken from the following articles: "Troubles on Moral Twin Earth: Moral Queerness Revived" (with Terry Horgan), Synthese 92 ( 1992), pp. 221-60; "New Wave Moral Realism Meets Moral Twin Earth" (with Terry Horgan), Journal of Philosophical Research 16 ( 1991), pp. 44765, reprinted in Rationality, Morality, and Self-Interest, J. Heil (ed.), Rowman & Littlefield, 1993; "Troubles for New Wave Moral Semantics: The 'Open Question Argument' Revived" (with Terry Horgan), Philosophical Papers 21 ( 1993), pp. 15375; "Irrealism and Error in Ethics", Philosophia 22 ( 1992), pp. 373-406; "Outline of a Contextualist Moral Epistemology", in W. Sinnott-Armstrong and M. Timmons (eds.), Moral Knowledge? New Readings in Moral Epistemology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996; "Moral Justification in Context", The Monist 76 ( 1993), pp. 360-78. I wish to thank the various editors for permission to use material from these publications.
Finally, I wish to thank Robert Milks, production editor at Oxford University Press, for his help in guiding this book to press. And I wish to thank Linda Sadler, production editor for the Southern Journal of Philosophy, for her generous help in preparing the manuscript for publication.
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Contents
Introduction
3
ONE Metaethics and Methodology
9
TWO New Wave Moral Realism
32
THREE The Argument from Moral Error
71
FOUR Contextual Moral Semantics
107
FIVE Moral Justification in Context
178
Appendix: Some Remarks on Metaethical Rationalism
247
References
253
Index
263
Introduction
This book addresses fundamental metaphysical, semantic, and epistemological questions about moral discourse and practice-- so-called metaethical questions. In recent years, there has been a rebirth of interest in metaethical issues after a couple of decades of relative inactivity, and metaethical inquiry is again in full swing. If we compare recent metaethical inquiry with metaethical inquiry as it was practiced during the bygone era of analytic philosophy, we notice a change in how metaethics is conceived and practiced.
From around the turn of this century, beginning with the work of G. E. Moore and into the 1950s, metaethics was primarily focused on the analysis of moral language. Metaethical inquiry during this period was preoccupied with questions about whether or not moral terms, and sentences containing such terms, could be reductively analyzed into terms and sentences of some other sort and, if so, what sort. Philosophers divided on these questions, some arguing that moral terms and sentences could not be reductively analyzed, others arguing that they could. The predictable result was an outpouring of competing metaethical views ranging from the non-naturalism of Moore, W. D. Ross, and A. C. Ewing, to the brands of non-descriptivism defended by A. J. Ayer, C. L. Stevenson, and R. M. Hare. However, despite these metaethical disagreements, the work of philosophers at this time was guided by general views about semantic analysis and about proper philosophical methodology. In short, semantic analysis was understood to involve investigation into analytic meaning connections-- an investigation that was supposed to yield necessary truths about what our terms mean. Consequently, proper philosophical methodology was thought to differ markedly from the empirical methods of the sciences; philosophical investigation was essentially a priori. These guiding philosophical assumptions about the proper content and methodology of philosophy put severe limits on all philosophical inquiry, including, of course, metaethical inquiry. But times have changed.
By around the mid- 1950s, the various recognized metaethical options had been more or less played out, and increasingly, philosophers began to see metaethics as
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a rather dull and sterile exercise having little bearing on more substantive moral issues. Moreover, at the same time, philosophers were beginning to question some of the deeply embedded assumptions of analytic philosophy, assumptions about semantic analysis and about proper philosophical methodology. To question the tenability of the guiding assumptions of analytic philosophy was, of course, to question the tenability of those metaethical theories resting on those assumptions. The metaethical theories from the analytic period seemed to rest on shaky ground. Nevertheless, during this same time of philosophical uncertainty and changing climate, developments in such areas of philosophy as metaphysics, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology emerged. These developments helped create a new philosophical climate that allowed metaethical questions to be reexamined in a new philosophical light. Of particular importance here is the fact that constraints on proper philosophical methodology were considerably loosened, philosophical inquiry was coming to be viewed as continuous with scientific investigation, and thus projects in metaphysics, semantics, and epistemology were no longer viewed in quite so narrow a manner as was characteristic of analytic philosophy.
The effects of these changes in philosophical climate are particularly evident in connection with a philosophical program associated with philosophical naturalism. To put it roughly, philosophical naturalism is the view that all that exists-including any particulars, events, facts, properties, and so on-- is part of the natural, material world that science investigates. This general philosophical outlook generates a philosophical program, namely, the program of accommodating all sorts of phenomena-- for example, mental phenomena, moral phenomena, aesthetic phenomena-- in terms of this metaphysical stance. In the former days of analytic philosophy, this project of naturalistic accommodation was severely constrained by the generally accepted views about proper content and methodology of philosophy. So, for instance, in order to naturalistically accommodate moral properties and facts, it was believed that one must be able to provide analytic definitions of key moral terms and expressions-- a project that seemed to most philosophers quite implausible.
We now find ourselves in what may fairly be called a post-analytic era in which, as I have said, constraints on proper content and methodology have been considerably loosened. Narrowly conceived reductive programs have given way to programs with relaxed, more reasonable standards of naturalistic accommodation. So, for example, it is no longer believed that naturalistic accommodation of moral phenomena requires reductive analytic definitions of moral terms and expressions; the road to naturalistic accommodation is not so hard. In these kinder, gentler philosophical times, we find the emergence of new metaethical theories and, in particular, metaethical theories that tackle the project of naturalistically accommodating moral phenomena freed from older, implausibly narrow constraints on carrying out this project. This book, which takes seriously the project of naturalistically accommodating moral discourse and practice, is meant to contribute usefully to the current philosophical dialogue over the nature and status of morality in these post-analytic times.
In Morality without Foundations, my central aim is to articulate and defend a metaethical theory that I will call ethical contextualism. My work engages the
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recent metaethical debate between moral realists on the one hand, who defend the idea that morality is objective (in a fairly strong sense of that term), and moral irrealists on the other who argue that morality is not objective, at least not in the way the realist thinks. I side with the irrealists.
To give the reader an idea of what is contained in the chapters to follow, here is a brief overview, chapter by chapter.
First, in chapter 1, I explain the methodological assumptions that constrain metaethical theorizing. Put most generally, metaethical inquiry is engaged in the dual project of accommodating both the deeply embedded commonsense presumptions of moral discourse and practice, as well as any well-supported general assumptions, theories, and views from other areas of inquiry. Given the plausibility of a naturalistic worldview, I construe the project of accommodation as being constrained by the general metaphysical and epistemological commitments of naturalism. So my investigation of metaethical questions is guided by the project of naturalistically accommodating moral discourse and practice.
Second, having placed my methodological cards on the table, I focus on a recent version of moral realism engaged in the project of naturalistic accommodation, namely, the version defended by, for example, David Brink, Richard Boyd, and Nicholas Sturgeon. These philosophers have ably marshaled various resources mined from recent work in metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and epistemology, in the articulation and defense of a new strain of moral realism that is apparently immune from problems besetting older, more traditional versions of this view. This "new wave" version of moral realism is arguably the most plausible current version of moral realism. However, despite the ingenuity of its advocates in defending this view, new wave moral realism has an Achilles' heel. I argue that (1) in order to fully discharge its accommodation obligations, and thus avoid J. L. Mackie-style queerness objections, these realists seemingly must rely on the sort of causal moral semantics that we find in Boyd, but that (2) causal moral semantics is implausible.
Finally, if moral realism is rejected, what are the prospects for defending a plausible version of moral irrealism? Realists have convincingly argued that standard versions of moral irrealism that would attempt to 'reduce' moral and evaluative notions to non-moral and non-evaluative notions cannot accommodate some of the most deeply embedded commonsense presumptions of moral discourse and practice. The most powerful such criticism (I contend) is the argument from moral error, according to which irrealism is not able to accommodate the presumption that error in moral judgment is always, in principle, possible. In chapter 3, I argue that standard, reductive versions of moral irrealism cannot fully answer this objection, and so the irrealist should explore the possibility of develop
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