Abstract
What is a moral argument? A straightforward answer is that a moral argument is an argument dealing with moral issues, such as the permissibility of killing in certain circumstances. I call this the thin sense of ‘moral argument’. Arguments that we find in normative and applied ethics are almost invariably moral in this sense. However, they often fail to be moral in other respects. In this article, I discuss four ways in which morality can be absent from moral arguments in the thin sense. If these arguments suffer from an absence of morality in at least one of these ways, they are not moral arguments in what I will call the thick sense of ‘moral argument’. Because only moral arguments in the thick sense could possibly qualify as proper responses to moral problems, the absence of morality in thin arguments means that these arguments will fail to give us a reason to do whatever they claim that we ought to do, even if we see no independent reason to question the truth of the premises or the logical validity of the argument.
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Notes
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for the suggestion to put the point in these terms.
I am speaking of a tradition in the sense explained by Glock, as ‘held together both by ties of influence and by a family of partially overlapping features’ (2008: 223). Glock distinguishes a tradition from a school, the latter being ‘a tightly knit group based on relatively intimate personal contact and a direct transfer of certain doctrines of methods’ (2008: 220).
For a recent overview of the discussion and helpful references, see Pleasants (2015).
A reviewer has remarked that it is not really clear where to draw the line between moral change or evolution and moral revolution. I cannot deal with the issue at length here, but I can say, first, that an answer to this remark crucially depends on one’s understanding of ‘moral revolution’. If a moral revolution is a change so radical that our moral certainties such as ‘killing innocent people is wrong’ would no longer be certainties, then it is doubtful, as I have tried to make clear, whether we can conceive of anything like a moral revolution at all. If, on the other hand, a moral revolution is a radical change in our dealing with and thinking about moral matters, then there can be moral revolutions, but whether something is a revolution or an evolution will then depend on how radical the change is. I would say that the way in which we think about slavery has undergone a revolution rather than an evolution, while the way in which we treat animals has undergone an evolution but not (yet?) a revolution. Admittedly, the distinction is not clear-cut, and neither is the distinction between ‘radical’ and ‘not radical’. The fact that there is a grey zone here does not prove, in my view, that the distinction is useless, and I do not even know whether we should try to draw a clear line between evolutions and revolutions. See, on a related point, footnote 14.
A good overview of the characteristics of certainties can be found in Rummens (2013). For reasons of space, I can only briefly mention them here. (1) Basic certainties cannot be meaningfully doubted. (2) Basic certainties cannot be justified. (3) Basic certainties are certainties of our acting. (4) Doubt regarding basic certainties is a form of insanity. (5) Basic certainties are the preconditions of local doubt. (6) Basic certainties form a system. (7) Basic certainties are not necessarily certain (they are not conceptual or a priori truths) (2013: 134).
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for the suggestion to put the point in these terms.
In an earlier version of this article, I maintained that a thick moral argument should embody what Lawrence Blum has called ‘a sense of shared humanity, of regarding the other as a fellow human being’ (1994: 177). Reviewers have remarked that this formulation raises questions about whether we should restrict the moral community to humans alone. I believe that ‘a participant attitude’ and ‘an attitude towards a soul’ are better ways of making the point, since these formulations do not exclude that we can take up these attitudes towards animals as well. This is not to say that we only have moral responsibilities towards other human beings and animals, and not, for example, towards the environment. The need for a participant attitude will boil down, in these cases, to the need for a participant attitude towards those we are arguing with, an attitude that shows awareness of our shared responsibility towards the environment.
According to Gaita, ‘it is mere prejudice to believe that it is an obvious virtue of a philosophical account of ethics to characterise our sense of the ethical in such a way as to yield a decision procedure for what to do in any conceivable situation’ (2004: 73).
Compare Murdoch: ‘[…] it is characteristic of morals that one cannot rest entirely at the conventional level, and that in some ways one ought not to’ (2001: 29).
Note that I do not say ‘subjective’. The pairs personal-impersonal and subjective–objective are not equivalent, for the personal may be objective. While many philosophers will be inclined to say that morality is personal in some sense or another, not so many hold that it is subjective.
Murdoch remarks: ‘It is all very well to say that ‘to copy a right action is to act rightly’ (Hampshire, Logic and Appreciation), but what is the form which I am supposed to copy? It is a truism of recent philosophy that this operation of discerning the form is fairly easy […]’ (2001: 29). Against ‘similar persons in similar circumstances’ arguments, see Gaita (2004: 67) and Rhees (1999: 50).
Compare Murdoch’s description of someone’s moral activity as ‘peculiarly her own’ (2001: 22).
The boundary between offering guidance and telling us what to do is blurred, and different persons confronted with the same argument may reasonably locate it on different sides of the boundary.
The absence of morality in one of these ways will often not be a matter of course: while Glock understands Singer’s argument as leading to the denial of a moral certainty, some will deny that this is so. The distinction between thin and thick arguments is not sharp, but that does not make it useless. Wittgenstein addresses the objection that ‘a boundary [in our case, the boundary between thin and thick moral arguments] which is not sharply defined is not really a boundary at all’ and that, consequently, we ‘haven’t accomplished anything at all’ (2009a: §99). The vagueness of our boundary between thin and thick moral arguments is not to be denied, but it does not stand in the way of our boundary being a boundary. What it does stand in the way of is our being able to say without doubt in every conceivable case whether a moral argument is thick or merely thin. Even if this boundary is vague, that does not prevent us from showing that a certain argument falls on this or that side of it.
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing this objection.
An early version of the first part of this paper was presented at the 38th International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg-am-Wechsel, Austria, 2015. I am grateful to Danièle Moyal-Sharrock and Anne-Marie Christensen for their comments. I am grateful to Stefan Rummens and to the members of the Reading Group Ethics of the Institute of Philosophy (KU Leuven) for their comments on a full version of this article.
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De Mesel, B. How Morality Can Be Absent from Moral Arguments. Argumentation 30, 443–463 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-015-9389-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-015-9389-8