Michael Harmond's Proseminar Research

Meta-Ethics

Meta-Ethics is defined by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as "the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice." Basically, Meta-Ethics answers questions regarding the nature of moral thought and action. So, when a Meta-Ethicist asks "what is good?" he or she means something completely different than when a Normative Ethicist asks "what is good?" The Normative Ethicist is asking "What sort of things are good things?" Whereas the Meta-Ethicist is literally asking "what IS good?" or, more precisely, "what constitutes goodness?"

Contemporary Meta-Ethical Theory

To get an initial understand of contemporary Meta-Ethics, I did a close-reading of the Chapter on Meta-Ethics in the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy (2007). So far, everything here on out is more or less my loose attempt at reconstructing the arguments from this chapter.

The chapter on Meta-Ethics, written by leading Meta-Ethicist Michael A. Smith, claims that: "the main question that has preoccupied moral philosophers in recent years is whether, when we make moral judgements, we express beliefs about the way the world is morally, or instead express some sort of non-belief state, a desire that the world be a certain way in non-moral respects" (4).

Basically, the contemporary theory boils down to this: are moral judgements expressing beliefs or desires? are they expressing the way things are (believed to be)? or the way things ought to be? Thus, when we make moral judgements, we either:

1. express a belief about the way the world is morally - this view presupposes that in making moral judgments we commit ourselves to the existence of a distinctive realm of moral facts. OR

2. express some sort of non-belief state, a desire that the world be a certain way in non-moral respects. As Smith puts it: "on this view, any talk of moral facts or beliefs is simply a loose manner of speaking. Strictly speaking there are no moral facts and no moral beliefs at all. There are merely desires that gain expression in syntactically complex sentences, where expression must be understood to be exactly the same relation as holds between emotions and exclamations" (5). So, just as "Boo!" and "hurray!" indicate certain emotions, sentences or statements about certain moral judgments represent specific moral desires.

Cognitivists vs. Non-Cognitivists

These two beliefs are represented in two Meta-Ethical schools of thought. The former, the view that moral judgements express belief, is upheld by Cognitivists. The latter, the view that moral judgements express desires, is upheld by the Non-Cognitivists.

Some famous Cognitivists include: G.E. Moore, Thomas Nagel, and Phillipa Foot. Some famous Non-Cognitivists include: A.J. Ayer, Charles Stevenson, and Simon Blackburn

More to come on this later!

Deontic Concepts vs. Evaluative Concepts

Smith contends that "Those who are interested in meta-ethics should adopt the working hypothesis that moral norms reduce to norms of reason or rationality. They should focus their attention, initially at any rate, on meta-level questions about norms of reason and rationality. As creatures with beliefs and desires we are, as such, subject to norms of reason and rationality" (9), and also that, "in the domains of rationality, common sense distinguishes between two broad families of concepts" (10). Those two families of concepts are Evaluative Concepts and Deontic Concepts. The task of Meta-Ethicists is to say how these concepts are related.

So, just what the hell are these concepts?

Deontic Concepts

"The normative claims that entail the possibility of holding some agent responsible are Deontic" (10). From what I've gathered from Smith's chapter, there seem to be three primary Deontic Concepts: the Obligatory, the Forbidden, and the Permissible - all of which can be understood in terms of one another. If something is Forbidden, it is not Permissible to do, nor is it Obligatory. If something is Permissible, then it is not Forbidden, but is also not necessarily Obligatory. If something is Obligatory, then it is Permissible to do, but not Permissible not to do; likewise, it is not Forbidden to do, but also Forbidden not to do.

Evaluative Concepts

Normative claims that do not entail the possibility of holding some agent responsible are Evaluative. From what I've gathered from Smith's chapter, Evaluative concepts consist of opposing ethical properties - good and bad, better and worse, desirable and undesirable, etc. A thing can be 'evaluated' in terms of possessing these properties - e.g. food tastes good or bad, it is desirable or undesirable.

Goodness and badness come in degrees and are arranged on a scale ordered by the better and worse relations. More goodness is better than less, some goodness is better than none, no goodness and no badness is better than some baddness, and less badness is better than more.

The Relationship Between the Evaluative and Deontic

Smith claims that the Evaluative is definitionally prior to the Deontic: "Agents are, after all, capable of desiring things that they cannot bring about. So if agents ought to have such desires, then it follows that the class of good things is much broader than the class of things that an agent has reason to do: indeed, the class of things that the agent has reason to do is a subclass of the things that are good, namely, that subclass of good things that the agent can bring about. This, in turn, explains why facts about goods and bads as such are not responsibility-implicating" (and thus not Deontic).

Illustrated like this: Let's say that Mike's mom leaves a pie on the windowsill, and Mike gets hungry and eats the pie. The pie is not Mike's, so he is rationally obligated to not eat the pie - the concept of Mike being obligated to not eat the pie is Deontic. So, once Mike's Mom finds out Mike ate the pie, she asks him why he ate the pie. Mike says because he was hungry - he is specifying some 'desirability characteristic' possessed by his action. Mike's mom evaluates this 'desirability characteristic' in terms of good and bad, and ultimately decides that it was bad.

Moore's Definition of the Deontic

G. E. Moore provides an analytic approach to Meta-Ethics. His famous work, Principia Ethica, - "contains the following analytic connection between the fact that an act is our duty - an act that we ought to perform - and facts about the goodness and badness of that action's outcome" (13). In other words -the connection between an act that we ought to perform, and the facts about the goodness and badness about that action's outcome.

Moore's idea of the Deontic (which, according to Smith, is more or less a definition of "ought") can be expressed as such:

(x) (x ought to φ in circumstances C if φ-ing is the unique action of those that x can perform in C that has the best outcome)

So, in other words: Mike ought to not eat the pie in the circumstances that Mike's Mom slaved away all day making the pie and wants to share that pie with the whole family if not eating the pie is the unique action of all the actions Mike can perform in the aforementioned circumstances that will have the best outcome.

Smith asks us to "note that [with this definition] we can readily define what it is for someone's acting in a certain way be permissible, and we can also readily define what it is for her acting in a certain way to be forbidden" (13). - i.e. - it would be permissible for Mike to not eat the pie, to smell the pie, to look at the pie; it would be forbidden for Mike to eat the pie

"Moore's definition suggests that the application of a deontic concept entails the possibility of holding someone responsible because responsibility follows in the wake of having the option or the capacity to bring about a good outcome. If an agent has the option of bringing about a good outcome, rather than a bad outcome, then we expect her to bring about the good outcome." Contrast this to "evaluative concepts, [where] no responsibility arises. The fact that someone experiences pain is a bad thing, but it is not as such a responsibility-implicating because there is so far nothing for the person to give an account of."

Problems with Moore's Definition

Smith articulates the following problems with Moore's Definition of the Deontic:

1. In Moore's definition, "the evaluative cannot be spelled out in deontic terms, it has to be defined in terms that are not normative at all - or else be simply indefinable. Moore himself argued that it is implausible to suppose that the evaluative is definable in non-normative terms."

2. Moore's "definition of Deontic is inconsistent with the truth of certain very standard views about the substance of the norms of reason and rationality, views about what we have reason to do in ego-centric terms. If we accept Moore's definition, then how do we limit the good-making features of an agent's actions to the satisfaction of that agent's own current desires? Since Moore's definition of the deontic in terms of the evaluative really does entail that no reasons need to be characterized in egocentric terms, this means that the evaluative must not be definitionally prior to the deontic."

So, I think what Smith is saying is that Moore's ethical approach, his definition of deontic, cannot be sufficiently evaluated because it doesn't take into account the motivations - egocentric vs. utilitarian - for acting. A moral agent may act on either an egocentric or a utilitarian motivation, and this motivation is what sets up the circumstances for his ethical equation - Mike (the moral agent) not eating the pie because he is not hungry (egocentric) vs. Mike not eating the pie because he is deontically obligated not to (utilitarian). OR - Mike eating the pie because he is hungry is morally permissible, because Mike ought to choose the unique action that will result in the best outcome - in this case, Mike no longer being hungry (purely egocentric, and, in Moore's view, morally justifiable reason for Mike to eat the pie).