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A localist turn for defending moral explanations

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Abstract

One influential positive argument for moral realism is the Explanatory Indispensability Argument. A crucial premise of this argument is the explanatory relevance of moral properties. On this premise, moral properties, such as wrongness, rightness, courage, and cowardice, are explanatorily indispensable to some empirical phenomena. Although there has been a lively debate on this premise, one crucial challenge to this thesis, what I call the Scientific Standard Challenge, has not been properly discussed. After explaining this challenge and a related concern, I argue that in response to this central challenge, the proponents of the argument should take what I call the localist turn to defend the explanatory indispensability of moral properties. The localist turn encourages the defenders of moral explanations to be more sensitive to the nature of each moral explanation. For instance, some moral explanations are explanations of social matters, so the standards they need to meet are provided by relevant branches of the social sciences. On the other hand, some other moral explanations are about our psychology, so the theoretical standards those explanations need to meet should come from psychology. I illustrate how this localist project can be conducted in the case of the moral explanation that appeals to injustice. I argue that the field of comparative politics provides the theoretical standards moral explanations of institutional change need to meet. I shall then illustrate how a sophisticated moral explanation can meet those theoretical standards and how this moral explanation can be strong evidence of injustice’s explanatory indispensability.

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Notes

  1. The live debate on this argument started by the exchange between Gilbert Harman (1977) and Nicholas Sturgeon (1984). So-called the Cornell realists (including Sturgeon) and some other writers provide arguments in favour of the explanatory indispensability of moral properties (e.g., Brink, 1989; Cuneo, 2006; Miller, 2013; Railton, 1986; Roberts, 2016; Sayre-McCord, 1988; Stringer, 2021; Sturgeon, 2006; Zhong, 2011), so they attempt to defend the second premise of the EIA (the IT). Other writers expressed their doubts about the soundness of this argument. Some people argue that explanatory necessity is not a proper test for assessing the ontological genuineness of normative properties in general, so denying the first premise (Nagel, 1980, p. 114n, Enoch, 2011, Chapter 3). Some people argue that moral properties are not explanatorily indispensable; either, their supervenient base properties can provide equally good explanations, or rival non-moral explanations provide better explanations (Audi, 1997; Blackburn, 1991; Harman & Thomson, 1996; Harman, 1977; Leiter, 2001; Zangwill, 2006 [note Zangwill only criticises the moral explanation of moral belief/judgement]). Some people argue that the truths of the two premises of the EIA are not enough to support moral realism. Neil Sinclair (2011, 2012b) argues that expressivists can accept moral explanations as the best explanations of our experience, while Alex Miller (2016) also argues that subjectivist anti-realists can accept moral explanations as the best (see also Blackburn, 1991 which is an early attempt to accommodate moral explanations within the framework of anti-realist quasi-realism). Finally, Seiriol Morgan (2006) argues that the EIA does not support realism since the soundness of the argument is compatible with the existence of what he calls (Nietzschean) “noble values” that normatively encourage people with certain psychological tendencies to act immorally.

  2. The proponents of moral explanations typically argue that the unique causal roles moral properties play show relevant modal information, and this information cannot be provided by other non-moral explanations. See the relevant discussion below in pages 6 to 7.

  3. The term “moral explanations” could mean explanations in which their explananda are moral phenomena. Consider the following explanation: it was wrong for me to break a promise to my spouse because this act hurt her. This explanation attempts to explicate the wrongness of my act (a moral phenomenon) by revealing some non-moral features of the act. Indeed, providing such explanations may be one of the central tasks of normative ethics. But my focus in this paper is not on these explanations. My focus in this paper is causal explanations in which the explananda are some empirical phenomena and the explanans are moral properties. I use the term “moral explanations” to refer to this type of explanation.

  4. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for encouraging me to clarify the distinctive nature of the Scientific Standard Challenge as a threat to the proponent of the EIA.

  5. Brian Leiter gives the following remarks related to the Scientific Standard Challenge (2001). The first remark is that outside the contemporary philosophical debate, there is no serious empirical researcher who employs moral facts as explanans of any empirical matters. Leiter writes, “there is no school of “Moral Historians” using moral facts to do any interesting or complex explanatory work” (2001, p. 94). The second remark is that the moral explanations suggested in the literature presuppose some causal regularities, but such assumptions are doubtful. For instance, according to this worry, [The Social Instability Case] needs to be backed up by the real regularity between injustice and social instability, but it is not clear if there is any such regularity between them (Leiter 2001, pp. 94–95). I take Leiter’s these two remarks to be the ones that come from the Scientific Standard Challenge, but Leiter’s discussion does not make it clear what the real challenge the proponents of moral explanations need to answer. Although his first remark indicates that moral explanations cannot meet relevant scientific standards, the lack of empirical enquirers who appeal to moral facts may be easily sorted once people see the real explanatory power of morality. His second remark presupposes that a plausible moral explanation needs to provide a strong regularity between the moral fact employed as an explanans and the corresponding empirical explanandum. Because of the discussion I provide in Section 3, the question of whether a particular moral explanation requires a strong causal regularity needs to be assessed case by case.

  6. I thank the anonymous reviewers for encouraging me to clarify the nature of the Epistemological Concern.

  7. The term “localist” comes from the localist manoeuvre found in the recent discussion on scientific realism (Asay, 2019).

  8. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing out the multidimensional feature of a single case and its potential worry for the localist project.

  9. I admit that my discussion of [The Japanese Medical Schools Case] and the relevant fake case is speculative and what the proponent of this type of moral explanation needs is not speculation but some real cases, cases that show recognisable social patterns. Providing such real cases involves detailed analyses of some relevant cases, the analyses that are usually done by real theorists in comparative politics. Such an inquiry requires at least another full paper and beyond the scope of this paper. What this paper tries to show is how a particular moral property, injustice, can be defended in the way the localist suggests, namely, by appealing the theoretical standards of a relevant empirical discipline (in this case, comparative politics).

  10. One of the anonymous reviewers commented that non-cognitivists could make sense of the child’s moral explanation in the following way. The child’s moral explanation, “wrong acts tend to generate unhappy results,” can be interpreted as the child’s expressing his disapproval of acts that have this tendency, or his negative emotional reactions to these acts. If such a non-cognitivist reading of moral explanations is possible, just accepting a moral explanation as best may be not sufficient for establishing moral realism. I admit that the child’s act of giving his moral explanation can be interpreted in a non-cognitivist way while it is still debatable whether causal moral explanations themselves can be accepted by anti-realists. Indeed, this is the topic Neil Sinclair and Alex Miller engage in their work. See the references listed in footnote 1. Since the discussion on this issue requires an extended assessment of these writers’ arguments, this issue needs to be dealt with on another occasion.

  11. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for encouraging me to clarify this point.

  12. I thank two anonymous referees for providing very useful comments and suggestions for the paper. I also thank Nick Shackel and Peter Shiu-Hwa Tsu for giving invaluable comments on earlier drafts.

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Funding

The research of this paper is supported by Grants in Aid for Scientific Research, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) [the code 19KK0303].

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Correspondence to Ryo Chonabayashi.

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Chonabayashi, R. A localist turn for defending moral explanations. AJPH 1, 42 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-022-00044-0

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