Abstract
The author considers how constructivism, presently known to us essentially as a theory for generating rules of social cooperation, embodies a certain conception of justification that in turn may be thought of as a general theory. It is argued that moral realism and projectivism are by turns platitudinous and unsatisfactory as conceptions of justification; by contrast the general conception of justification in constructivism makes sense of reason giving and coherent rivalry. The author argues that once the right picture of justification is in place, the picture constructivism illustrates or embodies, the problem of moral ontology disappears.
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Notes
By “constructivism” I mean arguments like Rawls’ or Scanlon’s that propose to understand right or fair principles as those that would be agreed to by rational agents under appropriately constrained conditions. The term, “constructivism,” awkward as it is, refers to the way such principles represent a solution to the problem of fair cooperation (and these principles are “a construction”), and to the related idea that, apart from such a solution, there is no further way of identifying what is right or fair.
Obviously, I have the arguments of Rawls’ Political Liberalism and Law of Peoples in mind.
John Rawls (1980)
See Peter Railton (1986)
Of course, in including “the just” in this list, I am being intentionally provocative. It seems so obvious that other these norms, for example “the expressive,” cannot admit of type-type identity I enjoy adding a moral term to take advantage of the thought. I acknowledge that this sort of talk is no argument and shamelessly assumes one side of issue here against someone like Railton. This is fine; at this point I am content to point out the assumption just seems so much more natural than its counterpart.
This is not always so—our interest in sex or even in something as diverse as “the erotic,” may well be constrained by certain natural facts—this is quite possible. I do not wish to rule this possibility out from the start. I very much doubt moral life may admit of that sort of analysis, but that is exactly the sort of analysis that would vindicate substantive naturalistic moral realism as I understand it.
Obviously, I do not mean here by “realism” objectivism. To hold that certain moral judgments may be objectively justified, as say Rawls does, or Kant does, is not the same as to be a realist in the sense I am using the term here. I am very anxious to draw this distinction and resist the conflation of any view that speaks of moral judgments admitting of an objective justification, (again, such as Kant, or Rawls), with “realism” which is best thought of as an ontological-justification doctrine—there are things, either in the world or in some non-natural world, that explain why a moral attribution is so. To use the term “realism” in such a way so that Moore and Kant, or Moore and Mill, are both “the same,” both “realists,” is just not at all helpful.
See Simon Blackburn (1988)
See R.M. Hare, The Language of Morals, (Oxford, 1952) and Alan Gibbard, Thinking How to Live (Harvard, 2003). This is not always so; John McDowell carries on the sensibility tradition. See his “Values and Secondary Properties” in Honderich Value and Objectivity.
This is of course Gibbard’s remarkable expression, in Thinking How To Live
I don’t like the projectivist getting to claim credit for this platitude with which no one disagrees but I suppose Mackie and Blackburn were the first to trumpet this claim as central in their arguments.
To his credit, McDowell concedes that the secondary property model, so useful a corrective to Mackie’s “queerness” argument, as it counters Mackie’s claim that no fact could have an intrinsic connection to an internal state, nevertheless cannot make space for the idea of “the merited.” See his “Values and Secondary Properties” op. cit.
For the classic, and most provocative, version of this view, for this way of taking the contrast between aesthetics and ethics, see Stuart Hampshire’s “Logic and Appreciation” The World Review, 1952.
See the “Toleration and Fanaticism” chapter his Freedom and Reason (Oxford, 1963) for this bracingly clear account.
Actually, I think both views often make both mistakes. Under the sensibility version of projectivism at least, evaluative justification is also a species of fact detection—one just looks elsewhere, inward, and detects the fact/ the response going on inside one’s head. (Recall Hume in this regard.) That Moorean realism can make no sense of why some fact-types matter more than others I take as obvious—the open question test makes sure of that. Railton like realism is harder to assess in this regard. Some fact-types (e.g., social stability) and not others will be reliably constitutive of goodness of course, but it is not obvious within the constraints of the theory that this is something we can explain; it may be that this must just be presented as a brute contingent fact of nature, like the way we happen to like the look of the evening sky and not the look of earthworms. However, we need not settle this; it may be that a brute naturalistic explanation of what people like or value, while in my lights unsatisfactory in terms of getting at the truth of moral life, is nevertheless a plausible philosophical candidate. The main point survives. We have two mistakes here, presenting justification as a species of fact detection and failing to make sense of why some facts but not others must matter in moral life. That the right view should not make either of them is sufficient for my purposes here.
A Theory of Justice, p. 18
I believe Ronald Milo makes just this mistake in the last section of his “Contractarian Constructivism (1995).
References
Blackburn, S. (1988). How to be an ethical anti-realist” for this claim, and for the argument that it is a central feature of projectivism. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 12, 361–375.
Milo, R. (1995). Contractarian constructivism. The Journal of Philosophy, 92(4), 181–204.
Railton, P. (1986). Moral realism. Philosophical Review, 95, 163–207.
Rawls, J. (1980). Kantian constructivism in moral theory. The Journal of Philosophy, 77, 515–572.
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Ross, S. The End of Moral Realism?. Acta Anal 24, 43–61 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-009-0045-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-009-0045-5