Abstract
Creeping minimalism threatens to cloud the distinction between realist and anti-realist metaethical views. When anti-realist views equip themselves with minimalist theories of truth and other semantic notions, they are able to take on more and more of the doctrines of realism (such as the existence of moral truths, facts, and beliefs). But then they start to look suspiciously like realist views. I suggest that creeping minimalism is a problem only if moral realism is understood primarily as a semantic doctrine. I argue that moral realism is better understood instead as a metaphysical doctrine. As a result, we can usefully regiment the metaethical debate into one about moral truthmakers: In virtue of what are moral judgments true? I show how the notion of truthmaking has been simmering just below the surface of the metaethical debate, and how it reveals one metaethical view (quasi-realism) to be a stronger contender than the others.
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Notes
Though it is anticipated by Zangwill (1992).
But see Dunaway (2010) for an argument to the effect that expressivists cannot help themselves to a global minimalist semantics.
Timmons (1999) comes closest to such a view.
It is simply evident that there is no single explanatory request for some simple truth, say, that Adam ate the apple. Why did Adam eat the apple? Why did Adam eat the apple? Why did Adam eat the apple? For a single truth, we have several explanations, depending on the contrast class generated by the request. Which explanation is appropriate is a matter that must be settled (at least in part) by context. See chapter 5 of van Fraassen (1980) for a canonical presentation of this sort of approach to explanation.
See Chrisman (2008) for more criticism of Dreier’s proposal. He thinks Dreier’s suggestion ultimately falls prey to creeping minimalism after all. Chrisman goes on to offer an inferentialist option for drawing the debate between realism and anti-realism (see also Chrisman 2009). I fear that his proposal, which relies on a distinction between theoretical and practical commitments, will likewise fall prey to the creeping minimalist. Why can’t ethical commitments be theoretical? Can we not have a theory of ethics, in the relevant sense? Given my commitment to moral realism being a metaphysical thesis, my view predicts that any psychological or semantic basis for the distinction, including Chrisman’s, will fail to be sufficient for properly grounding the debate.
For example, Mark Schroeder’s recent work (Schroeder 2008, 2010) on expressivism is first and foremost engaged with the semantic possibilities open to expressivists. (Schroeder himself is explicit about this at his 2010, p. 3). My interests, by contrast, are fundamentally metaphysical. Though traditionally expressivist theories of ethical language have gone hand in hand with anti-realist metaphysical theories of ethics, they are now sometimes paired with realist theories. See, e.g., Copp’s realist expressivism (2007) and Ridge’s ecumenical expressivism (2009). As a result, the distinction between realists and quasi-realists can no longer be drawn in terms of the latter’s expressivist philosophy of moral language. A distinctly metaphysical way of drawing the distinction is needed.
Armstrong (2004) is a locus classicus.
The language of truthmaking does surface here and there in metaethics, though in a way that is clearly disengaged from the “truthmaking industry” alive and well in contemporary metaphysics. See Blackburn (1986), Milo (1995), Bloomfield (2003, p. 513), Shafer-Landau (2003, pp. 15 and 48), and Horgan and Timmons (2006) for some instances.
We must be extremely careful about how we wield ‘fact’, given that facts are the sort of thing that get swept up by creeping minimalism. Everyone can admit that there is a sense of the word ‘fact’ that is synonymous with ‘truth’, such that ‘It’s a truth that snow is white’ and ‘It’s a fact that snow is white’ are synonymous. This is the “minimal” or “linguistic” conception of facthood that all can admit. Granting that there is this sense, however, in no way erases the debate over whether there are such things as (the other kind of) facts posited by realists. Here we have a metaphysical conception of facts, such that facts are things that exist in the world. Armstrong (1997) calls them ‘states of affairs’, Mellor (1995) calls them ‘facta’, and Russell (1985) just calls them ‘facts’. On Armstrong’s picture, for example, facts are compound objects composed non-mereologically of universals and particulars. They are entities that exist or don’t (not truth bearers that are true or false). The semantic minimalist has earned the right to there being moral facts in the first sense, just as anyone else has who has earned the right to speak of moral truth. But the minimalist has in no way earned any moral facts in the metaphysical sense of Russell, Mellor, or Armstrong. It is misleading to say, without disambiguation, that anti-realists can agree with moral realists that there are moral facts. There is no more agreement here (if the realist adopts moral facts as entities) than there is when you and I “agree” that there are banks, while you’re thinking of the Danube and I’m thinking of Wall Street. In essence, we have two conceptions of facts. There is the linguistic conception of facts as truths, and the metaphysical conception of facts as truthmakers. These are just different kinds of beasts, and we should not conflate them. Realists and (cognitivist, non-error-theoretic) anti-realists are agreed that there is the first kind of moral fact. What they disagree about is whether we need the second kind to make true the first kind.
Some metaethical views do not fare so well when answering truthmaking questions. Here I have in mind various forms of constructivism (e.g., Milo 1995) and superassertibilism (Wright 1992, 1995) that account for moral truth in terms of counterfactuals (about what an ideal observer would judge, or about what would be warranted in a state of full information). These views push our question back a step: in virtue of what are those counterfactuals true? That’s the question that needs to be answered if we are to understand whether the views are realist or not.
See Rosen (1994) for worries.
Another important question is whether or not mind-independence is a realism-relevant notion for every domain of thought. Mind-independence seems prima facie problematic for realism about beliefs, for instance.
One might object here that truthmaker theory is itself a substantive theory of truth, and so not available to the minimalist. Indeed, it’s common to think that truthmaker theory just is a correspondence theory of truth (e.g., Oliver 1996), but this is mistaken. It’s possible that some truths may not have truthmakers (consider negative existentials like ‘There are no Arctic penguins’), and so truthmaker theory may not be sufficiently general to serve as a theory of truth. Furthermore, all extant accounts of the truthmaking relation are defined in terms of truth (see Armstrong 2004; Rodriguez-Pereyra 2005; Lowe 2007; Merricks 2007 and Schaffer 2010), and so a truthmaker based theory of truth would be viciously circular. Truthmaker theory presupposes an antecedent notion of truth; it is not itself a theory of truth. (In fact, I think it presupposes a kind of deflationary theory of truth, but that is a matter for a separate occasion.) Truthmaker theory is about the ontological grounds for truths, not about truth itself. I defend this view at length in my 2011.
If they do try to give such an accounting, then they will face the Euthyphro challenge, namely, to show how the counterfactuals can be grounded in a way that does not end up appealing to moral notions, lest they give up the game of constructivism. But if they cannot appeal to any antecedent moral notions, it will be worrisome how the views can ensure that they end up constructing the right moral views. See Shafer-Landau (2003, p. 41.)
See Lewis (1992, pp. 218–219) for a canonical presentation of this view.
See Blackburn (2006b). Blackburn is fond of complaining that commentators often interpret his view, against his repeated protestations, as being committed to such subjectivism. I think such commentators are best interpreted as not understanding what else it could be that grounds the truth of moral judgments, given that they are in fact true on the quasi-realist’s view (see Bloomfield 2003). Those who charge quasi-realists with subjectivism, then, should pay particular attention to the truthmaking account I am now offering to quasi-realists.
Cf. Blackburn (1985a): “if everyone comes to think of it as permissible to maltreat animals, this does nothing at all to make it permissible: it just means that everybody has deteriorated” (14). See also Blackburn (1988): “It is because of our responses that we say that cruelty is wrong, but it is not because of them that it is so. […O]ur actual responses are inappropriate for the wrongness of cruelty to depend upon. What makes cruelty abhorrent is not that it offends us, but all those hideous things that make it do so” (367). Interestingly, in a later reprint the middle sentence here gets changed to “[O]ur actual responses are inappropriate anchors for the wrongness of cruelty” (1993, p. 172). The talk of “anchoring” here (and the original talk of dependence, as well as the repeated reference to “making”) strongly suggests that Blackburn (despite his own efforts, perhaps) is thinking in terms of truthmaking and ontological grounding, and that our attitudes are not playing that role when it comes to the truth of moral judgments.
See the opening pages of Blackburn (1986), where he contrasts his favored metaethical approach (the “quasi-realist alternative”) with the “truth-conditions” approach that he rejects. As it turns out, part of the truth-conditions approach involves asking the question “of what it is that makes [moral judgments] true” (119). Here, I think, we can see a conflation between linguistic issues (truth-conditions) and metaphysical issues (truthmakers). [A similar conflation occurs at Blackburn (1998, pp. 87–88)]. See also Blackburn (2009, p. 207), the tone of which suggests that Blackburn would be unsympathetic to our investigations here. But note that Blackburn suggests that we may still “ruminate over what it is in virtue of which happiness is good, and deploy our standards and values to pursue this ethical question” (ibid.). But asking in virtue of what it is that happiness is good just is asking what it is in virtue of which ‘Happiness is good’ is true, which just is asking what the truthmaker is for ‘Happiness is good’. That Blackburn can sweep away metaphysical questions with one hand only to draw them back with the other suggests that he is reading too much inflationary metaphysics into truthmaker theory.
This should not come as too great a surprise, since the original open question argument takes any sort of naturalism about morality as its target.
This argument, of course, will not hold sway against those who deny that there is any such openness. For my part, I believe it’s fair to say that this openness is a pre-theoretically familiar phenomenon that, ceteris paribus, metaethical theories ought to capture if they can.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the anonymous referees for Philosophical Studies, as well as Dorit Bar-On, Simon Blackburn, Matthew Hammerton, Ben Herscovitch, Bill Lycan, Huw Price, John Roberts, Geoff Sayre-McCord, and especially Keith Simmons for their valuable comments on this paper and the ideas within it. Versions of this paper were presented at the University of Sydney and the 2010 Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress; the author’s thanks goes to the members of those audiences for their questions and comments.
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Asay, J. Truthmaking, metaethics, and creeping minimalism. Philos Stud 163, 213–232 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9808-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9808-0