Abstract
Do the introspectively ascertainable aspects of our moral experiences carry ontological objective purport—portraying reality as containing worldly moral properties and facts, thus supporting moral realism? Horgan and Timmons (2008, 2018) answer this question in the negative, arguing that their non-realist view, cognitivist expressivism, can accommodate the introspectively ascertainable moral phenomenology (including categorical authoritativeness) just as well as realism can—where accommodating the phenomenology means accounting for it without construing it as misleading or erroneous. If sound, this constitutes an important defense of cognitivist expressivism, undermining a central attraction of realism. They thus pose a challenge to realists to identify any aspects of moral phenomenology that cannot be accommodated by expressivism and instead favor realism. I here take up that challenge, in two stages. First, I argue that cognitivist expressivism does not after all capture certain important aspects of the phenomenology of the sort of moral experience on which they focus, while realism does. This argument does not depend on claiming that the phenomenology has ontological objective purport. The claim so far is just that there is more to categorical authoritativeness than the expressivist account captures, though this leaves the door open to Kantian rationalism (and perhaps other non-realist accounts) as well as realism. Second, I will go on to argue that although some aspects of moral phenomenology may only point to this broader range of views, others do specifically carry ontological objective purport and thus directly support realism insofar as we take the phenomenology seriously.
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Notes
It doesn’t matter for present purposes how exactly moral standards are to be construed—whether as principles or as something more like virtue-theoretic criteria with limited codifiability, for example. The point is just that attribution of the resultant property of rightness or wrongness to an act based on certain of its ordinary properties involves some conception of the ways in which such properties (individually and in various combinations) bear on rightness or wrongness, amounting to a conception of what the correct moral standards are.
Cf. Jean Hampton’s (1998, 94–96) characterization of moral norms as “culture-independent”: they are “not a matter of social and psychological contingencies,” and possess an independent, objective authority, rather than being optional—an authority that “is not the invention of the agent, nor of human communities, but something to which agents and human communities respond” (98).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing out potential complications here, which I think are avoided with this stipulation. (See also the next footnote.)
Specific fulfillments of an imperfect moral duty of charity would also differ from Hit-and-Run in that those acts would not themselves be experienced as required of every relevantly situated agent, as helping is in Hit-and-Run. But one would still experience the more general demand to be charitable as stemming from standards that seem to merit commitment from anyone, rather than being optional. That phenomenology needs to be accounted for as well, posing a further challenge for expressivists. But again, Struggling Café is meant to raise a different challenge. The point there is just that Struggling Café exhibits the forms of objectivity delivered by the expressivist account while lacking a crucial form of objectivity exhibited by Hit-and-Run, thus highlighting what the expressivist account fails to capture in Hit-and-Run.
This is related to criticism of sophisticated expressivist attempts to escape worries about a deep sort of relativism, in FitzPatrick (2011 and Forthcoming-b). These worries, along with those raised in the text, are also related to problems Andy Egan has raised for quasi-realist expressivism in connection with the idea of “fundamental moral error” (Egan, 2007).
Horgan and Timmons might claim that the error in question isn’t strictly one of “misrepresenting the world” (116), since it is not a matter of erroneous ontological objective purport, but only the more general error I’ve identified, which needn’t be ontology-involving. But although it isn’t a metaphysical misrepresentation it would still be non-veridical, misrepresenting what is in fact that case—in just the way a Kantian view would be in error by representing categorical authority as stemming from practical reason if in fact it does not do so, even though this error doesn’t involve false metaphysical claims about “the world” and its properties. I take it the project of accommodation should not welcome either sort of error in the phenomenology.
Horgan and Timmons (2008, 282) refer to these as “second-order” moral experiences, since they presuppose other moral judgments about the thing in question—as the experience of guilt piggybacks on the more basic judgment that one has acted wrongly. I take such experiences to be just as important to this debate as “first-order” ones.
I’ve elsewhere raised worries about whether such views can plausibly make sense of categorical authoritativeness (FitzPatrick 2018 and Forthcoming-b).
I am grateful to two anonymous referees for helpful comments.
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FitzPatrick, W.J. Moral Phenomenology and the Value-Laden World. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 25, 21–36 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-021-10213-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-021-10213-4