Moral Realism, For and Against | Don Loeb & Peter Railton

hi Don how are you I'm great how are you Peter I'm just fine I'm for folks at home I'm Peter Railton professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan and then I don't want it down low that's right it's a separate one feet University Vermont and one a student of yours Peter well truth in advertising although I guess is also fair to say that I mostly helped you by giving you views to criticize yes you did and that's one reason overcooking today very good you can't imagine how much help it can be sometimes somebody's got to put the view out there so that the idiocy can be undone so today we're talking about moral realism for and against yep and I should say a little bit at the beginning perhaps about how I understand moral realism which is the position that I'll be defending and to me it's useful to begin with a kind of an analogy suppose you know someone who's planning a vacation and you say you know it's very nice in the mountains right now and he says well I don't like the mountains well that's fine then he can take his vacation somewhere else he's not really disagreeing with you you're not really making any argument with him you're perfectly happy for him to go off somewhere else suppose on the other hand he's a major coal company and he's just acquired an important it's very scenic mountain in your native state of Vermont and he's about to bulldoze the top of the thing to get the coal and you say but wait a second this mountain is very important for recreation and and scenery and for the wildlife and sources yeah but you know I don't much like mountains then you're not going to say oh okay then make up your own mind it's this is just your choice you'd say well that doesn't settle the question because what would settle the question is a lot more facts and a lot more interest in concerns than the ones you're taking into account this is not the kind of question you can settle on the basis of your own interests alone and in that sense you're claiming that there's a kind of issue there with a sort of objectivity and a scope that goes beyond anything like a question of personal taste and this is for example the distinction between an aesthetic judgment a judgment of value in which you're trying to communicate information to others about what is of value and what is not where you don't take yourself as being an expert where you realize that it's possible for you to be wrong and you can learn from others there's a common subject matter of concern and people want to learn your views if indeed they do because they think it's going to be informative and relevant to them about things that are of value to discover or experience so think of the same view in the moral case in the moral case we want to say that having an opinion and a given subject is fine but it's not up to you to decide which interests are involved what would count as a fair distribution why it is that certain it's issues are more vital than others it can't just be your own preferences or your own sense of what's important to you your own commitments aren't sufficient we think we should be answerable to a higher or a different set of standards when we're making moral judgments and in that sense we think there's a domain of considerations of facts of reasons which is not mine or yours alone which is in a sense impersonal or shared which might govern not only our behavior but our interactions with the natural world and in that sense I want to be a realist about morality I think moral questions are to be decided by trying the best we can working together to figure out what those concerns are and how best to meet them and that there is a fact about better or worse answers to that question and because these are vital and enduring interests we've probably learned a lot from human practices about better or worse answers to the question these answers are better or worse not based on the Preferences of any particular individual or the attitudes of any individual even subjected to critical reflection am I right about that yes that's right and so in that sense any individuals views are not really criteria for morality and it's one of the things I think we think is characteristic of moral reasoning that you have to be prepared to take up a standpoint that's impartial it doesn't just govern by any one particular interest or set of interests and so in that sense people often contrast realism with the kind of relativism in which they think that the right answer to a moral question depends upon individuals norms or social customs local practices and I think a lot of people resist moral realism because there's something right about moral relativism that we should be respectful of other practices in other ways of life and of course it's that second thought the thought that we should be respectful of these and show tolerance and understanding toward them that's the thought that I would say is the characteristically moral thought and toward which I think there are themselves evincing a realist attitude they think there's a good there are good reasons on behalf of that that have to do with human flourishing and well-being and they think it's not up to them to decide which the tolerating which not to tolerate which to be concerned with in which not to be concerned with so I would say relativism although it often is seen as the antithesis of realism often the relevant that people actually espouse is more like a kind of relational ism they think what is morally required in a situation depends upon local customs and expectations and mores which seems to be quite sensible but they think there are higher order questions about tolerance and humane 'no Sande mutual understanding about which they have I would say a more realist attitude so um we talked at one point about an example of this involving getting food to somebody with your left hand right um as a realist you wouldn't deny you serve I guess that it's wrong at least minimally wrong to give somebody in India say food with your left hand but not wrong here but that's not because morality in some broad sense differs from place to place it's because it's wrong in every location to give offense unnecessarily and getting some food with your left hand will cause offence in one place and not the other oh my god you're right yeah so it's a higher order principle about respecting others and not showing disrespect for them Richard ously that's the principle that I would think is actually functioning as the moral grounding for the judgement and that's what gives it the objectivity that it has so that it can be seen as a critique of people when they aren't prepared to make those kinds of adjustments to the local customs in order to be respectful of others that seems completely consistent with realism it's not something I've much of what you've said so far I guess I don't want to deny you want to say more to qualify realism or should I say a little bit that contrast well I guess just very briefly there's a the realist faces a very heavy burden because he has to try to explain in what this domain of objectivity or shared facts might consist how we could have knowledge of it how it's possible for us to communicate about it how we discover if we do it all the moral truths and so I think it's a view that bears a lot of explaining but I think the fair amount of common sense actually answers to this conception and so it's the job of the philosophical more realist like myself to try to explain how that's possible okay now I take it that I know there were a couple of occasions you want to mention maybe I could just say something briefly about moral realism or anti realism so I'm going to use those two words to mean the same thing I'll try to say my rules and just so that I can be heard although I tend to favor the other location beliefs so you and I have one time spoke about distinguishing two different senses of the word morality right one sense is a descriptive sentence in that sense we could say well you know he's got a different morality than I do or that culture has a different morality than our culture but that's not the sense philosophers are interested in neither one of us I guess since we're interested in this uh more normative sense no I guess we're interested in the descriptive and so far as you want to understand human diversity and learn from it but yeah you're right it's it's not the question that we're directly facing when we asked about realism versus anti-realism so when we talk about realism I'm not I don't want to claim that I think my morality and the descriptive sense the code I choose to live by or something like that is the correct one I don't think that there's anything authoritative about my own judgments or anybody's judgments that's why I'm not a relative or the city's one reason we're not relative here's the way I contrast things there are questions of fact like the question of whether there's life on other planets for example we may not know the answer to that question but there is an answer and then there are questions that are not questions of fact or questions in realms which are not realms of fact like what's the best color for which is better chocolate or vanilla even people who turn towards a kind of gastronomic objectivism or realism wouldn't I think accept that there's a fact of the matter about which is better chocolate or vanilla they might get fact about what people prefer and might be fact about what's it less expensive than what the affect about what's more healthy or helpful there's no backdrop which is better and likewise I want to claim that there are no facts about what's morally better no correct answers to moral questions that's not the same thing as saying that we don't know the answers you and I agree that if there were an certainly might not know some of them that's not my way of saying that I'm not going to be dogmatic about the answers and you are I don't think either one of us is some people have accused anti-realists of being dogmatic because we are we believe we can't be wrong but I think it's important to remember that we think we can't be right either I don't think there are now there's to be right or wrong about with respect to the traditional terms in the moral vocabulary like good right in the north sense virtuous vicious etc it doesn't mean that I don't have values again just think about realms in which you make a value that sort of judgments that you don't think that any value judgments are really correct one example from use sports teams on the Red Sox fan I'll say things and I'll say boom Yankees or I might even say the Yankees stink but I certainly won't be making a claim about their baseball playing skills when I say that they sting I'll be expressing my attitude which is anti Yankee I don't think it's the correct attitude to have my son has the opposite attitude I don't think he's wrong so if I disagree with them it's a disagreement in attitude but those are attitudes that I might feel very strongly in the case of attitude that would traditionally be thought to be moral ones and I take them very seriously indeed because like anybody else I recognize that we face questions of cooperation and coordination we have collective problems to solve about resource allocation etc and I take those questions be ones that human beings are extremely interested in answering I'm trying to answer in ways that are cooperative and involve reason where possible and so I take these moral values very seriously even though I don't believe them to be reflective of some fact of the matter that we could hope to discover so I guess I would to take you back to your analogy with sports and flavor I guess I would say that when you say you're Pro Yankees or you're Yankee fan I'm Samer I don't think Peter look at this great is kind of important on the rims on your Red Sox I'm sorry yeah please don't end mistake again you know it's typical of philosophers that we don't pay attention to such vital things so yes some of the most important things right good luck decide right so you're a Red Sox fan now presumably you don't think that the Yankee fans are making it kind of a mistake by rooting for the Yankees even though you hate it when the team when the Yankees win when you look at some native New Yorker being loyal to his team you think no that's that's as he should be there there should be fans for the Yankees just as there should be fans for the Red Sox and that you don't see yourself as disagreeing really with the the fans evaluation in that sense because there's a sense of it you're not competing for the same question when you cheer your team and he cheers his own team because what you're rooting for there is something that expresses a personal loyalty and it's the nature of a sports competition that we think that it's reasonable that the teams be competitive and that the better team win but now take a different kind of sports analogy can I just point out can I just call apply what you said I'm going to make sure we're in agreement sure I don't think that it's correct for the other person to be a Yankee fan in the sense that there's a right team for New York there to support but this gets to be a little inside baseball but you may know that they are playing New Yorkers who hate the Yankees and love the Mets for example and they don't think that they're that anybody's making any mistakes they're doing the right thing I think it's okay to not again shall we say picking a team utterly arbitrarily so I might have been born in you know [Music] all right I don't think that mistake do you think it's for this it's possible and find that some people don't pretty good care about baseball at all absolutely yeah yeah and take another sports even another sports case suppose there's been a call in an important game made by a ref and you know this is the fourth time in that game that the ref has made a very controversial call in favor of one team rather than the other and you look at the video replay and you think you know this is he's not exercising his function as a ref he's not judging fairly no if he says well you know there's no fact about a fair judgement here I'm I'm I think I'm right and you you have your own opinion that's fine I just happened to be the one who decides this you'd say well the fact that you're deciding it gives you special responsibilities and you have to be reasonable and objective and fair and it seems to me that in defending that principle also as a rule of sports you think that's a good principle that's how sports should be done it shouldn't be done by payola or by bias and so it seems to me those judgments are quite different from your feelings for the your very strong positive feelings for the red sox and your antipathy to yeah i think that's a different kind of feeling that you have and therefore when the ref makes this call your response isn't that i hoped that we'd hope that we'd win your response is well that's wrong and that man should be removed he's not exercising his function properly he's violating a very important principle so let's let's see if we can break that down a little bit and i think it might help to get us some of our differences because yeah once again i agree with a lot and i don't agree with all of what you've said first there's a factual matter about whether say the foot touch the base first or the glove or let's say the batter's foot or the runners foot touch first base first or the first baseman's foot touched first right there's an objective question about what happened did the ball go over the field was it to the left or the right of the foul pole and of course i can claim that somebody got the facts wrong without having made any evaluative judgment that much we agree on whether I think that the wrap-up to make actually correct judgment and that it's a fact that the rep ought to make the factually correct judgment but the second layer of facts I guess we agree that there's a fact of the matter about whether the ball went over the fence or not there's further question what the rest ought to do about that Tim you're claiming that as a sports fan I probably am committed to the claim that there's a way the Redhawks behaved well I would say that that your your sense theirs isn't just contingent upon your being a sports fan I might not be particularly a baseball fan but I think you think you could explain to someone why you had this reaction to this refs call and why you think it's important for the ref to be removed from the game or whatever in a way that doesn't even presuppose the person's interested in sports it's a it's a perfectly intelligible explanation given what function is supposed to play your men so the reasons that you give are I think quite general reasons and if if we think of that kind of a dispute as the model of a moral dispute it seems to me people want to be able to make their views express their views in a voice that's not just their personal voice that is when you're criticizing their breath you're trying to speak in an impersonal voice not just on behalf of Don Loeb or on behalf of the Red Sox but an impersonal voice and so you impose upon yourself certain constraints so if the video replay does in fact contradict the way you thought it went you'll have to say well I was wrong about that so you take that as a set of constraints but I think you also take in partiality as a constraint and in much the same way I would say is a typical moral norm now I don't want to disagree that there can be something which the philosopher John Mackay called objectivity relative to standards so I think that the referee could be appointed to do a certain job which we find it useful to accomplish being an impartial judge of whether the ball went over the fence or not just to use are quite example right and I think we could say the referee is not doing the job that he agreed to do the referees not doing the job that we hired him to do we don't know when we'll enjoy the game as much if referees don't do that that's grounds for choosing to hire and fire that all seems okay to me the question is no that seems to me to suggest that the standards themselves are objective you know it didn't have to be the case that the rule was if it's over the fence it's a homerun it's not it's not a homerun that was a matter of decision and sure there's an objective question about what meets that standard but the standard itself is not one that was chosen because it's objectively correct or not now and I'd be more realistic on that I guess right I mean of course many of the rules of a sport are arbitrary on the other hand I think some of the things that you consider you just mentioned such as keeping to one's contractual obligations keeping one's word and so on those I don't think we think of as varying depending upon the local rules for what counts as a score or the laws of any particular state or the customs of any particular set of people we think keeping one's word is a perfectly general kind of principle and we can understand how there are enduring interests that underwrite the principle these are situations that will recur throughout human existence it's a form of failure to not only respect other people but to take their concerns seriously if you think that you can give them expectations and then arbitrarily break them on your own account and so the I think an institution like keeping one's word which seems to be perfectly generic it's something we find everywhere and we find people everywhere honored or criticized depend whether they're people who keep their word that that's a principle that again does not depend upon anyone having set up any rules in advance of baseball or traffic laws or even a constitution of a country that's something counting on someone else and giving someone an expectation and meeting their expectation that seems to me something that we can understand non conventionally even though of course there are conventions about contracts and so on when we finally spelled the thing out that the underlying principle seems to be one of faithfulness and fidelity and taking the other person is interested into account that generalizes quite indifferently with regard to local customs well first I do want to agree I hope I can end with a question for you but I do agree that there could be inter subjectively agreed-upon norms that is there might be known as that suggest themselves to any group of people for example that want to get along with one another in a way that involves communication if you can't by and large assume that what's coming out of people's analysis the truth especially when they say things like I promise or in my role was roughly I you know hereby proclaim then you're not going to be able to enjoy things like baseball very much and I think that's a fact about the world and one I can acknowledge so I don't want to disagree that there are say take chocolate versus vanilla and maybe that right now I guess when I do surveys in class I never was sure how accurate these are but I guess most of my students preferring John talked about pretty strongly to vanilla but I don't get anybody thinking seriously that the other side is wrong suppose you could make a perfectly healthy food that tasted an awful lot like Sam I don't think anybody would like it and I don't think anybody would make any money selling it and I don't think anybody would buy it or consume it unless they have to I don't think it's flavor that's not one that people like right and so one question that I faced as a moral realist as someone will say well what are these moral facts you're talking about are they things like people's need you know do they just supervening on depend upon people's needs and interests do they have some kind of metaphysical status of being abstract truths the way that we think some people at any rate think there are abstract truths of arithmetic and geometry which can be known by kind of rational a priori insight and of course moral realists vary quite a bit and how they answer that question some do think of morality something like on analogy with mathematics and that it's a kind of rational intuition I don't myself find that view entirely understandable it seems to me that when I'm understanding moral judgments and moral principles where they come from I'm looking at the facts on the ground about enduring human needs and interests what constitutes or doesn't constitute flourishing what would be an impartial arrangement if they counted the interest of all fairly and so on and so I'm what's called a naturalistic moral realist because I think moral judgments come to ground in essentially natural facts of that kind so it might have very well be an eraser sorry more than that you think the natural the moral facts themselves are natural facts they're not because they even down yet the person who took it on the analogy of mathematics say might think that moral facts are grounded in natural facts so it's wrong to break the promise as a non natural fact but it's what you did was wrong is true in a certain circumstance because of the natural fact that you broke the promise right and this is a really a delicate question because I don't think moral concepts are natural concepts whereas I do think moral facts are natural facts so how would I make this kind of a distinction think of a concept as a way in which we reach something to think about it so concept just means that with which we take and so a moral concepts are a distinctive way of thinking about essentially natural facts and they have their own requirements I think among the requirements of moral concepts are many things I mentioned already they need to be impartial they need to concern human well-being or sorry need to concern some form of well-being it could be animal for example they need to embody some notions of reciprocity they have to be such that they can be responsive to features of the human motivational system so there are constraints regarding what sorts of things we can be obliged to do based upon what sorts of motives people could potentially have and so I think there's sort of a concept there of the moral that leads us to think about the natural world in this evaluative frame and in that frame it is essentially connected with phenomena like evaluation recommendation judgments of obligation and so on at the same time I think that this doesn't require some special class of moral properties in order for those judgments to be true it suffices that there be natural properties which answer to the needs that are laid down by this concept or these concepts and so in that sense I would accept your characterization of the view as not having moral facts feed non-natural they in fact participate I think in the natural world and that's how we are able to know about them and refer to them in our language but at the same time I think the concepts that we use in the moral case are distinctive and part of the way in which morality gets its role in our lives or why we have a moral language is that there's a function for our concepts that have exactly those features okay so the various constraints on moral reasoning and thought that you have adverted to here including things like impartiality maybe consistency responsiveness to the non moral facts taking people's interests series as a non morally care for some how seriously where do those come from you think they come from that is there there's certain kinds of questions that we want to ask and their concepts reflected in those which listen perfectly that's right think of it might think of this is sort of in two steps you might think suppose people didn't have moral concepts they could ask questions about you know what would we decide to do if we were to take everyone's interests into consideration what we decide to do if we took into account reciprocal relations of respect among people how would we think about this if we required ourselves to be consistent from case to case so they'll be treated like cases alike they could ask all those questions and then they say you know we often are involved in this kind of discussion and there ought to be a term that we use specifically to talk about this constellation of features so that'll be possible for us to have these discussions and so they would invent themselves moral concepts they would be the ones that answer to those roles and so I don't think that the mere existence of moral concepts makes morality important rather it's the sort of thing that makes morality important didn't make moral concepts so vital to us and that's that's really helpful and maybe I could use that to segue and get a bit into a little bit of further detail about kinds of moral realism and what they accept might not and denying that picture yes what does one denied well first a traditional distinction that not all our viewers may be familiar with is between isten non-carbon list approaches to moral language and thoughts sometimes called descriptivists and non-descriptive approaches and there's much heated and to my mind unnecessary debate over which term to use on a cognitivist approach when people in general make moral claims or talk moral talk think moral thoughts they're in a sticky case making factual assertions more technically expressing propositions the sorts of things that could be true or false so to make a moral claim is to make a statement just like to make a statement that the cat is on the mat us to make a statement could be true it could be false it could have a false peace of addition even but at least it's a factual assertion as opposed to shut the door which is not a factual assertion or a red sauce which is not a factual assertion it'd be very hard if someone said yes you're right yay red sauce or yes you're right shut the door because I didn't make a factual assertion when I said either one of those things another approach says that the expressive or attitude displaying function is primary and that when people make moral assertions for example they're from an earlier version of this view merely expressing their attitudes or emotions and not either way they're trying to make factual claims and thus not saying something that could be true or false that would be a non cognitivist approach to moral semantics and if I hear first those some enough for people to grasp on what I'm getting at then you can see that there are two sorts of a realism that can emerge one is a non cognitive Authority realism the claim to which we were never talking about a realm of fact in the first place and the other is a cognitivist version which says we're talking about a realm we take to be a realm of faith but there are no such facts analogizing to say unicorn talk among unicorn believers or you know the way an atheist would look at talk about God when people talk about God they're not merely displaying their emotions they're making factual assertions the he has just believes that they're wrong about them right and we could even make make a distinction here between two kinds of use of God might be useful illustration of this distinction one view about God is that God is some kind of a person all powerful person governing the universe and when the atheist denies the existence of God he's claiming there is no such person and when the theist says that God exists he's claiming that there is and that seems like a straightforwardly factual dispute on the other hand there are theologians who say no no to believe in the existence of God is not to think that there's some being or some entity it's to have a certain attitude toward the world it's to be an optimist about possibility it's to advocate and practice certain rules and so belief in God is is really constituted by set of attitudes and practices and in that sense to be an atheist would be to object to those attitudes of practices perhaps but it would not be a factual disagreement between them and so the person who's advocating the second view about God is in some sense he's theological enough he may be extremely earnest but he's making the claim that theological language is not best understood as factual and a lot of people say the same thing about moral language that it's not best understood as factual and so to be an a realist in that sense isn't necessarily to want people to change the way they Siddiq morally but just to recognize that when they're speaking morally they're advocating and expressing attitudes they're not making factual claims one way or another yep now the the moral version of this is much more familiar at least to me than the theological version I'm inclined to say of it but the illusion to make such claims well you've changed the subject God talk was always talked about a being and it may be that you want to take over that talk for a different purpose and gosh because it doesn't make a mistake of believing in an entity that doesn't exist I admire the purpose more but um I'd ask the person to I guess admit that that's that we've really changed the subject and I would think that that's not a standard God talk it's an open question whether that's true in the whole case or not right on the kitchen any more language or not but in the god case I'd find that kind of an unusual move on the part of someone claiming to be a theologian yeah and that's I think that's quite true in the religious case and it does seem fairly obvious that if nothing else maybe that maybe such a view is it is it there's a reasonable one to have but it doesn't seem to be a very accurate view about what most people mean by God or have meant historically by God and so an advocate of that view as you say it's going to look like he's advocating some kind of a reform of our language some change in the way that we speak about God by contrast that a non cognitivist in the moral case is trying to give an analysis of the way we ordinarily use the moral language and claiming that in our ordinary use we are essentially expressing attitudes taking stances and not making claims of a descriptive or factual nature and of course what's the challenge for any such position is to say why it is the moral language has the features that it does have if it's not about a subject matter with regard which we have treated falsehood because people commonly say of some particular moral claim that's false they talk about inconsistency in moral claims they talk about logical implications and moral claims and so non cognitivists in that sense have the burden of trying to explain how all these features of language could exist even if all along it's just been expressive and in the recent decades a great deal of progress has been made by non cognitivists jumping up to the blaming moral philosophies showing how this is possible so there's been a whole suite of developments and that the debate is now much clearer but with what's interesting in a way is that the people advocating these views which are now called expressive is more generically often want to be able to talk about truth as well and so they want that feature of moral language to remain unperturbed and so they will say in effect there's use of truth which for which it suffice is just that the language have enough of this logical structure to make that use of truth appropriate and so it's a sort of non metaphysical or a minimalist notion of truth you know but someone with such a view is is not going to try to contradict me at any rate by saying that we can't speak of moral judgments as true or false and indeed he would be trying to claim just how we can do that whereas the error theorists all along thinks that the judgments can be true or false he simply thinks that they're systematically false if it's okay let me make two comments about that one is that I actually think that those the folks you were talking about we can use the word expressive as perhaps or the tomahto variety that wants to reincorporate notions of truth it's only minimalist truth and so on into their interpretation of morality is essentially small talk is essentially expressive and something like traditional non cognitivists for the variety that we began with we're making a moral statement is something like saying yay or commanding somebody to do something I guess I think that these explosive isms of recent vintage have a lot more in common with you realists then they do with somebody like me make statements like that and I don't [Music] what it is more this course might be trying to get out putting aside certain very fine-grained metaphysical disputes well the position that's emerged is one that in my mind looks a lot like in many ways looks a lot like a realist position and very much unlike my view I think if I could just interject it remains the case that basic very fundamentally different explanation is being given of the surface features of moral discourse and it's it's part of the expressiveness position now that of course moral discourse is not is just one form of normative discourse we also have normative discourse about what's right to believe or appropriate to believe what's best warranted discourse about what's rational or irrational to do prudent or imprudent aesthetic discourse and what they want to do is to give a perfectly general account of how that kind of discourse differs from prosaically factual discourse in terms of this special relation to the expression of motivational States and and attitudes they have a non cognitive dimension so I would say yes that you seem to converge in many respects but there's a fundamental difference in the structure of explanation I'm sorry I interrupted you know but that's that's very helpful actually um so the difference is in the explanation for the use of this kind of vocabulary and this way of thinking and it's grounded in that desire to connect that or a feeling that it's important somehow to connect that to motivation philosophers call practicality reason giving that sort of thing and that's that involved expressive explain to a traditional non cognitive strong suit or what's often thought to be a strong suit namely there's another element of ordinary moral discourse you focused a lot on the objective seeming features of ordinary moral thought and discourse but there's another element which is the practical element that is we think about it's something you can use to guide our lives as a sometimes we might think that is annoying how to live rather than knowing what is the case and non-congress have always claimed a bit of an edge on that dimension because they're the kind of automatic connection between the more that I'll Express or the attitudes that I will Express and my motivations so that comes as a kind of 3d for the for the sort of expressive this can I write about that yes that and that's been a central part of why these views have been attractive on the other hand people and I would I belong to this group think that motivation itself is not a really adequate answer to the question about normativity and that we can't really understand even our own sense of why norms or obligations or values are at stake in terms of somehow other features that basically trace back to one way or another to the speaker's motivational States it seems to me that when I make a judgement about what it's rational for someone to do or what it's moral or immoral to do there's a way in which I'm essentially trying to anchor my judgment elsewhere and in that sense there will be a relation to my motives because we're mostly motivated to do what we think is rational reasonable and good but I don't think my motives can play this pivotal role in determining what it is that I'm even trying to do or meaning to do when I make moral judgments so that's that's a residual disagreement but I gather that you've got an objection to both the non-cognitive isten the cognitivist both the realist as as we've been describing them and the the non-cognitive us in that you think that there they share an erroneous assumption about moral language itself that's right I'm tempted to be very strongly by a third sort of a realist view one according to which neither cognitivism nor non cognitivism is correct and one which explains the persistence of these two philosophical approaches to moral semantics as stemming in part from they're both getting something right about what we're trying to do when we talk moral talk or think moral thoughts the worry I have is that no account of more of the terms in the moral vocabulary or as you say the concepts that stand behind them we'll get right to capture right to capture what people are trying to do generally when they speak so that sometimes I think we're trying to merely express attitudes or and sometimes I think we're trying to make factual assertions and sometimes I think I think there are some people who are whose moral clock is more generally intended as facta Vande then someone whose moral clock is generally not intended hist active but I I suspect that there's quite a bit of cacophony here and I think that that actually that diagnosis applies to many of the issues that have divided people on the two sides of or the many sides of these debates about moral realism so for example I think that there are people who are trivial or peripheral uses of nm vocabulary and those aren't what I'm worried about right there might be people who you know never refer to something as a table unless it has four legs and those people would be using the word table in a very different way than the rest of us and I don't think in an analysis of the word table needs to accommodate every single idiosyncrasy but I do think there's such a thing as changing the subject so if somebody set up tables that it was essential to their nature that they were immaterial for example or that nothing could ever rest on them then I think that that they'll be very strong evidence that the person is something about something very different than what I'm talking about and there's nothing that we're all talking about in common we may use the words in the moral vocabulary some people perhaps are talking about what they take to be the will of God now some of those people would give up the claim that morality is the will of God if they were to be convinced there was no god but others I think wouldn't they just say well then I guess there's no morality there may be something else but whatever it is it isn't morality because morality is of necessity the will of God and if there is no little god that no morality like motivational power from recognition and many other dimensions of moral thought and language that seem to divide us I'm sorry unless I just your thought is that given this diversity of usage and the fact that you don't think there is a common intention governing all these different uses that people like like me or or like standard non cognitivists are trying to run a coherent interpretation of a discourse that you think lacks enough coherence to support it that's right I think somebody were to try to say look because my analysis of a phrase realm square now it's not an analysis of something that's quite round really or quite square because that would be incoherent but I'm still giving you the essence of round square and not just sort of stepping back and saying oh you know there's no such thing as around forever couldn't be because we would have to be both around them so at the same time and nothing could be they might be roundish squarish things but those aren't round squares with morality there may be no such thing as moral rightness although there may be lots of properties or realms of fact that I wouldn't want to the existence of which I wouldn't want to deny but I just wouldn't want to honor you know attach the honorific our moral rightness to so for example that there may be a fact about what on some conception of utility would be the utilitarian utility maximizing course of action for get an individual in the given circumstance and I get back about that but I don't think the fact about what's morally right so if if I were to respond let's say on behalf of the kind of view that I'm pushing or maybe on behalf even of the non-cognitive expressive interpretation I guess I would say our aspiration at any rate is to capture some core of usage which we think is an important phenomenon in human life that's one that almost everyone touches upon at some point in their discourse in their concerns toward one another and that while it may be the case as you say that people differ a great deal about what sorts of things they think count as moral making features whether they have to be the will of the Supreme Being or whether they have to be in some sense rationally mandatory or something like that they disagree about that it seems to that a common enterprise they're trying to determine how to respond to certain questions about how to live together what conventions we should observe insofar as these are up to us to decide and that those questions remain the same and they require us to be able to think together and along lines that are characteristic of moral thought partially consistently and so on and so there's a problem there that we all face there's a core of language which is invoked in dealing with that problem and that's what we're trying essentially to analyze and to give an account of I guess you would say that we're still misleading ourselves about how much even in that core of usages and those central deliberative questions how much commonality there actually is that's right and the degree to which what's common rests on either subjective choice or attitude even built in by evolution as opposed to discovering facts so you know I agree that we have to figure out how to live together and we have to figure out how to cooperate there are benefits to us of cooperating that I don't want to set aside for the need language for that but I don't think that the that that's going to solve the problem when we start to get down to the particulars like what's the nature of your commitment to consistency or universalizability or objectivity or impartiality I think we'll find vast differences and I suspect anyway that those differences are substantial enough even after careful scrutiny that it would not be appropriate to say that there's a common subject matter there except in the most abstract terms a common set of questions we're all trying to answer and thus that there's such a thing as moral rightness or moral goodness etc there might be moral rightness as I like to say sub 16 whether that means you know of the many many different uses of the term or ways in which we could look at the understand the term there might be you know facts about what one of them requires and that might be one that's you know especially interesting to certain philosophers but they don't think that's I don't think you know one way of doing it among many others none of which has any particular claim to due to the honorific moral rightness a is going to be satisfying for more wheels like you am I right about that yeah and you know even if I were to grant that that there is this large diversity in usage I guess these sort of mortal real as I am I would say yeah historically even you can see that there's been evolution in moral language so perhaps at a certain time historically moral language was fairly essentially tied to religious considerations I think we have in the last several centuries we've been able to distinguish the notion of morality that isn't essentially tied to divine will or divine punishment and I think that that's important gain in conceptual clarity and important also for the possibility of people with religious conflict coming together on moral questions and so I think of things like the United Nations declaration on human rights and I think people from very different cultural and religious backgrounds can agree on those fundamental rights because they do represent something that is a common set of understandings and in that sense we need a language to account for what it is that's being claimed when a fundamental right is being claimed and so I would myself be willing to say sure there probably is a some measure of reform introduced by anyone who tries to give a coherent systematic analysis of moral language that needn't be a terrible thing if what is happening is that an enterprise or a project or a common candidate set of concerns which are being advanced on many fronts can also be advanced by the development of language and so just as I think we've made progress in recognizing the Equality of women human equality respecting the children have rights and claims noticing that people who have disabilities and handicaps deserve treatment that enables them to live so far as possible a life comparable to the rest that we've made progress in recognizing those substantive principles I think we've probably also made progress in understanding what it is that the touchstone for the reasoning behind those and so in that sense there probably is some evolution in moral language happening even now as we speak and I would be someone who is pushing that process trade maybe a bit further along and the direction of saying yes if we recognize what moral language is having the kind of grounding that you and I've been discussing in terms of human needs and reoccurring situations the importance of cooperation as long as we recognize that we will become more and more confident that there is a basis for making moral judgment and it's a constraint on how we should think about our lives that we can Accord respect to understanding that of course this may not be exactly what people meant 200 years ago by morali it may not be but a lot of people mean right now by it if I'm not offending it and so in that sense you could say there really ought to be distinguished two projects one is the project of giving the best descriptive analysis of moral language and that could turn out to be a project which requires a quite a diverse theory in order to accommodate the range of usage and then there's what you might think it was a normative project which is asking something like given the core role of these kinds of concepts in guiding our decisions and our activities how best might we use them when you think how death might leave them I assume you're using the word best in a way that doesn't presuppose an answer to the question you're asking that's right and so it has to be best in some sense that isn't simply moral that would obviously be circular and uninformative so for example we might say well it's important if for example we are able to take factual considerations into account and therefore we seek the best factual information in making moral judgments it's important that we not make arbitrary distinctions between persons and so therefore we need to understand the ways in which people are similar no matter what their race or gender or or where it is they happen to live in the world and so when I think of these criteria of a choice I don't think of them is essentially moral I think of them as criteria that we can use to generate reasons of quite general kind I'm very similar to the kinds of reasons that we use when we're asking about how to justify our claims to knowledge or our claims about what would be of aesthetic value so it's very general criteria there in play here I suspect to find my guess is that there's a good deal more controversy with respect to aesthetic value than moral and less with respect to epistemic value but I'm not sure about that I I guess I'm wondering why you think of this as moral realism anymore instead of realizing about something new an interesting concept not the moral concept maybe a relative or a descendant of it but why do you think that this is moral realism well I think it's grasping the essential core that's been in common from so far as I can tell maybe the writings of the ancient Greeks to the current time and so in that sense there are what you might think of as continued intentions or a commonality and purpose namely we're looking for the most general most universally defensible most capable of being represented as unbiased as operating a basis of reasons that anyone could recognize the the project of looking for something that answers to those criteria that's been continuous for as long as we've had philosophy and so I guess I would say I think of this is part of that project and it's in that sense quite entitled to the term morale it is very when we read Aristotle or we read Comte or we read mill we can identify this common project and insofar as we understand it we can find it in everyday life and in ways in which people defend or attack justify or try to revise opinions and so just as the epistemic Enterprise seems to me to be largely continuous I think the moral enterprises as well even though throughout history people have of course made what we hope is some kind of progress both at the conceptual and at the level of actual application in all these areas I guess my worry is Peter that the if we focus on the elements that appear to be common we may end up rejecting elements that were essential to the concepts in their various manifestations and that what we found is what we can agree on suppose suppose it turns out their elements that are just inherently controversial just the way were put together and so we say well let's leave that out of our concept of morality that would leave morality very impoverished imagine you're talking to a volunteer someone who thinks that morality is rooted in the will of God you say to the person well you're wrong about what this common enterprise that goes all the way back to Aristotle is or do you say you're engaged in a different Enterprise than I am or or what or what yeah so the the common Enterprise is the most general set of most general questions we can ask about how we should act what we should do how we should treat one another how we should live together what sorts of lives our good lives to lead and it seems to me that even the theological voluntarist is clearly trying to answer those questions answering yes it may be that he or she thinks that the touchstone for answering them is something in a sacred scripture but the questions that are at issue seemed to me to be the same ones and that individual sense that they are providing the most general and best warranted rationale for one way or another of answering those questions that that seems to me to be essentially the same so I would point not so much to the specific criteria that are being used but to the kinds of questions that are being asked but purpose there playing in the regulation of human activity and how it is that the person thinks justifications have to be put together and I think if someone insists for example that in this book I meet someone and we're having what sounds like a moral conversation and the individual says well look you see Peter I think that my opinion is by definition morally correct and therefore I myself am in a position to decide well moral question so I'll say well that's clearly someone who's using the term in a non-standard way and I'm not trying to capture that person's analysis similarly if someone thought the same thing about well my tribe or my people I'd say well I think that is actually a different concept that you're using because you're not even purporting to be answerable to interest in a universal or general way but insofar as they're purporting to be answerable to those concerns then I think yeah we're having a moral disagreement rather than talking about tutoring subjects so forgive me but that seems like the easy case to me I want to try to figure out how to get along with other people I want to try to find codes to live by I want to I might even want to sign off on them you know pass constitutions and that sort of thing [Music] talking to project you talk about the general goals of getting along with one another operating etcetera and sometimes you also talk about what I would take to be certain methodological constraints on how the discussion goes along some of those appear to me less controversial than others you'll find a lot of agreement on consistency for example for reasons I think can be made pretty obvious as I certainly I don certainly don't think I'm an authority on morality I go right answer is much less dancers I give it with the right ones I want to answer these questions in different ways you push this universalizability thing to the point where it looks like that I hold myself very big differences about how to do that some people think laws first famously it thought the best way to do it is to look for the way that you know maximizes utility characterized in a certain way and others have thought no it's the way to treat people as Em's and themselves and never merely as means and consequences are less important on that conception how isn't just optimistic to think that there that built into that common project of trying to get along is a way to resolve questions like that and you know to my mind many many many other questions yeah well if we look at actual moral disputes I think you and I would probably agree that that there are different levels at which Murrell disputes occur so take say the example of the universe the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations I think most moral philosophers no matter what their stripe would agree with most of those principles they'll try to give different explanations of why the principles are true or how we might best justify them but at that level the kind of disagreement that we're getting is is not one of irreconcilable differences people can't understand why on earth anybody would be claiming something like that individuals ought to have some say in the kind of governance that they live under I think this is widely understood and so in that sense I guess I would say when the content and the utilitarian give their competing explanations of where rights come from I think they understand each other quite well and they think they are talking about a common set of concerns and they're competing to give the best explanation but a lot of the constraints on what counts as a good explanation will be the same for both that among other things explains why it is that they tend to give so many judgments in so many areas that are quite similar and I certainly don't think the criteria of moral concepts or sufficient to decide these questions so there will be substantive issues issues of value that will have to settle in other ways but the the premise of realism just as the premise of realism about the external world is not that we have a way of forcing mandatory rational agreement on the way the world is it's rather that the world exists and has certain properties independent of the way that we happen to think about it and that those can if we inquire in just the right way exert a kind of constraint on what we believe that we can be wrong about what we think there's a distinction between appearance and reality and insofar as possible we want our inquiry to be constrained by features of the real and to help us get beyond mere appearances so realism about the external world isn't in peril from the fact that scientific theories and common-sense theories about the world have evolved quite a bit historically and they're still controversial in many ways because what the realist is maintaining there is something about the general process underlying and the general ambitions or aspirations of the claims that are being made and the same is true in the moral case so I would it is very surprised indeed if it were easier to answer moral questions than it is to answer questions about the natural world we're talking about incredibly complex human and well now more than human systems and justice it's very hard to know what the sources of unemployment or inflation might be it's very hard to know what a fair division of social goods would constitute well I don't want to disagree with that I don't want to disagree about whether I guess I'm going to argue that whether there's such a thing as a fair distribution will depend on whether there's such a thing as what we've been talking about when we've used the word fair and that when I look at things I think gosh it seems awfully awfully optimistic to think that there's an answer waiting to be discovered I guess I think the difference is methodology between the conte and say in the utilitarian our differences that count against there being a fact of the matter they're even they agree that it's wrong to bomb the village if they disagree about why it's wrong to bomb the village that can be a pretty substantial disagreement and I guess I think once we get out of our own culture and look around the world or even within our culture in various ways we find an awful lot of disagreement of a sort that when that's at least optimistic to think we'll just resolve itself given our goal of finding a way to live together under terms maybe even other terms we can agree to I do think that there are people in the debate who don't fear about securing agreement from and say you know many others who might wish to be taken into consideration I think they're competing views about what counts as interests or but also about the degree to which others interests are to be taken into consideration and so it looks to me like well yeah I agree that we should try to find it that we will want to try to find a way to get together cooperate etc I agree that some of the you know will probably have some of the same norms of dispute resolution in mind when we do that to my mind that reflects a value choice on my part for values I just find myself with them and comfortable with but not am I having discovered some truth that I could be getting wrong about how to answer those questions so I guess if I look back on my own life I think I can find some moments of moral discovery I'm old enough to remember the first political meeting at which women stood up and said you know this organization for all that it's promoting progressive social causes has systematically denied women important positions and systematically undervalued women's issues and I thought about it and my first reaction was probably like the first reaction of a lot of people say well you know they're always problems in the world is hunger and the war and so on why are these people making this issue and I listen to them more and I thought about Mars you know they're perfectly right we have been systematically discriminating and I don't really think of that as just a change in my values the way that as I got older I got less interested in you know death-defying sports and more interested in my fan whirring well yes and and more interested in activities that involved finesse or something like that it's not just a change in value it was a genuine discovery and I think they taught me that and I think the best explanation of what's going on there is just as in the aesthetic case the emergence of something like jazz the best explanation what's going on there is that there are realms of value that we may fail to recognize but which can be identified and in suitable cases we can come to recognize them and we will have learned something in the process and not simply changed in a way that would make no room for the idea that one set of views is any nearer getting things right than the other because I think I it is nearer getting things right that we should not be discriminating as women or that we should think of jazz as mere noise that's that's an error I think so I guess I would say my own experience is hard for me to understand if I think of it simply as a change in my commitments and values because I think I've changed in response to considerations which have the force of reasons and that's quite independent of whether I recognize them or not happily in some cases I have in many cases there is much more for me to recognize like the one you described I I'm not old enough to remember the particular sorts of discussions you're mentioning but certainly there are analogs in my experience and it did feel like progress to me and there's a way in which sometimes I think it was progress and sometimes I think it wasn't so for example when my moral views changed in response to what became clear to me was a more accurate understanding of the non moral world I thought that was an advance because I want my values to be responsive to that so there was a time when I was not as aware of the extent of poverty in the world or the extent to which it was relatively easy for someone here to do something small at least about it and when I learned that minority has changed about what where my commitments changed about what to do or how much charity to give for example how much to take that into consideration in voting for example do I think that it represented progress in the sense that my views were now aligned with better with the subjective reaction I have when confronted with non world facts I wasn't aware of the for sure but what do I take the example you gave about that revolutionary the sexist political group we do find people in the world who have a very different attitude towards the status of women I don't like the way they treat women I'm really strongly against it but is there something I can say to those people to explain why they're making a mistake when it's such a fundamental part of so many cultures yes I really doesn't need to be because a lot of those people feel like you know well take somebody for example who you know came to school here for a little while and said you know for one all I was taken in with that equality of the sexes stuff right but then I realized that that was really just not the proper respect to show to women and to treat them as if they're equals of men that would be to completely deny the important role that they ought to play I don't I don't like that guy's values any more than you do but what can I say to him to show him he's wrong or what convinces you that he's wrong as opposed to just you know nauseating or unto you or acting the way you find on appealing and hope others will and would like to talk others into finding an appealing etc well yeah we ought to take his reasoning step by step so take for example the claim that there's some specific function which is appropriate of women for women we'd want to ask well how does one establish a claim that there's a specific function of women is there a specific function of men and is the fact that for example men live wide variety of different kinds of lives in terms of how much they are in public are not in public and how much they are involved in the raising of children not raising in children is that incompatible with the nature of men in what sense how would it be possible to show that women had such a nature and until one could show that it seems to be the proper attitude to have his skepticism about the idea that there is a specific function to a gender and so I guess we look at that part of his argument we'd say well suppose we ask the question what sorts of lives people find intrinsically rewarding or worthwhile are there women who find other kinds of lives intrinsically rewarding and worthwhile and again if we find that the answer that question is yes then it's an argument against the idea that requiring such people to live a very different kind of life would be good for them in any sense and if we're not paying attention to what's good for them then an important part of that individuals Jessica Tory scheme has been withdrawn because presumably he thinks or wants to tell us anyhow that he's concerned about what's good for people and critically good for women and so he would challenge his claims step-by-step in that way I don't know if he could convince the person to change his mind but I think we could probably discover that it's mirror difference of opinion that's at stake between us and in the process we might be led to revise our own views in certain ways we probably don't take seriously enough for example forms of social solidarity that are characteristics of some societies but not ours and it may be that we have systemically undervalued those and their importance in building good lines yeah I I certainly don't want to doubt any of that I do think that your discussion will probably bottom out at some point I wouldn't want to make the test from succeeding and convincing somebody because then you're held hostage to stubbornness or at least potentially held hostage discover this right but my question is whether I could convince somebody whether I would have the tools that would convince somebody who was being rational and my guess is that and certainly the discussions I had with people like this you know one bottoms out at some point questions about which we can't sing much more the person said I know some women find it less satisfying than they would other ways but those are inherently base ways for people to find satisfaction in life after all they're people to find satisfaction in all sorts of basic pursuit shortly explain too and that that judgment which I wouldn't find myself sympathetically that all would be very hard to distinguish in the abstract from an attitude like yours and my attitude that you know people's interests matter in the first place which I also don't think we can justify beyond a certain kind of commitment to acting as though that's true right um I doubt that anything about you know the way the world is forces that conclusion on us we can see Co here at lifestyles according to which not taken seriously I don't like those I'm not sympathetic and on you know on the same team is you when it comes to that step I think pretty much but my confidence that there is not some kind of you know optimistic assumption that that it's not that this is a matter for discovery enough for you know attitude or commitment is misplaced that's my guess anyway um I could be wrong part of me sort of whoops I'm wrong yeah well I guess I would say the part of you that hopes you're wrong is probably the the part of you which wants to say something like look there's something very important at stake here and I'm not comfortable thinking that it rests entirely upon matters of subjective preference and in that sense there's part of you that wants it there's Anna sort of aspiration to the thought that there are criteria of moral assessment that are non-derivative from particular individual schemes of values or interests and insofar as I'm trying to give an account of our moral self understanding it's that that I'm trying to give an account of you and you might be right that that's a more fragile Enterprise than philosophers often take it to be it may be not as comprehensive in its scope of application as say a good descriptive analysis of moral language should be but it's that aspiration of yours that I'm trying to win a place for and I see also that we've now been hammering away at this very pleasantly for about an hour and twenty minutes we should probably wrap up this conversation but I hope there'll be others and I've found it very useful having this discussion me too absolutely and I hope informative for viewers as well it does seem as though there's a lot we agree on and what we don't agree on it's nice to be able to do it in such a an atmosphere in which it's pretty clear both of us are trying to figure out the truth about this whole set of issues and not just you know defend our particular prejudices as if we're the defense attorneys for our own shows and viewpoints that's pretty refreshing yeah it's not uncharacteristic of my conversations with you but it's still pretty refreshing so I thank you for that well I thank you as well and it's to me a great source of pride and pleasure to see how you've grown to become an important philosopher and to be a significant critic of the view that I would hope myself to make the best case for probably it's a source of great pride to hear you say that just because um I've always taken used to be the period of heat very good well like that I consider a very high praise from a philosopher so thank you I thank you very much for that so talk to you again and we'll hope that there are other occasions in which we can further explore this rather surprising phenomenon of humans that we are we are so concerned it seems with asking moral questions take care okay thanks Peter all right bye okay

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Length: 85min 42sec (5142 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 05 2018