Abstract
Moral rationalism has long been an attractive position within moral philosophy. However, among empirical-minded philosophers, it is widely dismissed as scientifically untenable. In this essay, I argue that moral rationalism’s lack of uptake in the empirical domain is due to the widespread supposition that moral rationalists must hold that moral judgments and actions are produced by rational capacities. But this construal is mistaken: moral rationalism’s primary concern is not with the relationship between moral judgments and rational capacities per se, but rather with developing a conception objectivity normativity that avoids Platonism. In light of this, I develop an alternative approach to translating moral rationalism into the empirical domain that builds on the common rationalist view that normative requirements are explained by the relationship between agents and the social structures and practices in which they are embedded. I propose that this social conception of normativity can be translated into a scientific framework by interpreting it as a claim about the importance of constraint-based explanation when accounting for norm-governed behavior. In order to develop this point more concretely and show that it is empirically tractable, I turn to research on macaque social organization that highlights the ways in which (proto)normative standards are generated by empirically observable social structures. The insights garnered from the macaque case allow me to then locate moral rationalism’s core claims about the relationship between morality and the standards of practical rationality within an empirically plausible framework.
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Notes
There are two apparent exceptions to this claim. The first is the moral grammar thesis (Mikhail 2011), which has certain affinities with moral rationalism and which is sometimes presented as the relevant contrast to empirical sentimentalism. However, moral grammarians are best seen as adopting the empiricist framework [points (1) and (2) above], while resisting the emotion-based characterization of the underlying moral cognitive architecture. As a result, they end up failing to count as rationalists on the view defended here (see note 6).
The second exception is the much older constructivist tradition in moral psychology that stretches from Piaget, through Kohlberg, to Turiel. However, although Turiel’s moral/conventional distinction has been adopted by some (e.g. Nichols 2004; Joyce 2006), empirical moral philosophers have largely dismissed the underlying constructivist philosophy of psychology out of hand [e.g. “much of (Turiel et al.’s) discussion is couched in the philosophically tendentious and less than perspicuous terminology that grows out of the Piagetian tradition. Rather than get bogged down in textual exegesis, we’ll set out some conclusion that are plausible to draw from (Turiel’s) findings” (Nado et al. 2009, p. 624)]. Yet it is this constructivist philosophy of psychology that ultimately ties the Piagetian tradition to rationalism. As a result, the standard uptake of the moral/conventional distinction effectively divorces it from its rationalist roots.
Underlying much of this debate is a shared commitment to Hume’s Law, which states that one cannot infer an “ought” from an “is.” Hume’s Law is widely taken to imply that substantive normative phenomena cannot be fully accounted for in scientific terms. However, as I see it, there is no reason to accept Hume’s law as an antecedent constraint on scientific theory construction. Hume’s Law is ultimately an intuitive principle and, for this reason, should not be taken to have more than heuristic value within the sciences. This is because it is entirely possible for a scientific theory to undermine deeply ingrained intuitions [the actuality of non-Euclidean space is the clearest example, another is the apparent violation of the identity of indiscernibles in quantum theory; for relevant discussion, see Ladyman et al. (2007)]. Moreover, even if we accept Hume’s Law, it is not clear that we should accept the claim that scientific theories cannot trade in both “is’s” and “ought’s.” Usually, this restriction on scientific theory is made by baldly asserting that science concerns description while ethics concerns prescription (e.g. Prinz 2007). But this is a false dichotomy, since scientific theories do not merely describe phenomena, they also explain them. Thus, it leaves unaddressed whether there is a form of non-reductive normative explanation available to the sciences (cf. Hampton 1998; Putnam 2002).
The most substantial condition having to do with rational capacities is that a practically rational agent must be an agent that possesses rational capacities. But since the class of practically rational agents is generally taken to be equivalent (more or less) to the class of human agents, and since human agents characteristically possess rational capacities, this condition is easily met as long as one’s ultimately goal is to model the behavior human agents.
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.
Notice that the view Nagel is trying to avoid is almost exactly the kind of view defended by moral grammarians (e.g. Mikhail 2011). They hold that humans possess a species general moral faculty that encodes a set of universal principles that govern judgment and action. It is these principles that then explain the widespread acceptance of certain norms. Such norms, on Nagel’s view, would be subjective because they are ultimately grounded in contingent features of human psychology.
There is a lot of complexity here that warrants further exploration. For instance, in many cases, what may be required to ensure social stability is that a critical mass of people share some attitude. And in those cases, what the content of the attitude is may matter less than that some consensus is reached. Thus, it may turn out that in order to satisfy the requirements of morality everyone must adopt a convention. But notice that, in those cases, the convention does not determine what is moral; rather, the moral thing to do is establish a convention.
Constraints are so ubiquitous that they can often seem trivial. Yet, constraint-based approaches turn out to be crucial to explaining all but the simplest phenomena. In fact, Winning and Bechtel (2018) suggest that the concept of constraints is the primary (if not sole) modal notion in scientific theories. This proposal sits well with the rationalist idea that moral requirements (and perhaps other kinds normative requirements) are characterized by their necessitating force.
This is more or less explicit in Brandom (1979) (the title of the paper is “Freedom and constraint by norms”). However, Brandom is keen to draw a categorical distinction between socio-linguistic practices and objective kinds, such that socio-linguistic practices can only be understood as normative if they are not modeled as objective kinds (although one can model them as objective kinds for different purposes). In contrast, on my construal, an adequate objective model of socio-linguist practices will explain why they are normative.
Notice that this proposal echoes both the dual-aspect interpretation of Kant’s theory of autonomy (Allison 1990), as well as the distinction between the logical space of reasons and the logical spaces of causes that descends from the Sellarsian tradition (Brandom 1979, 1994; McDowell 1994; Thompson 2008). The difference is that those distinctions assume that scientific explanation is monolithic, meaning that the different mode of explanation involved in accounting for things normatively must be extra-scientific. In contrast, the approach developed here holds that scientific explanation is pluralistic (cf. Mitchell 2003), making it possible for these different modes of explanation to operate together within the sciences.
I do not here want to weigh in on the issues of whether macaques count as fully-fledged normative agents or not (although the broader picture being proposed here clearly has implications with respects to this question). Regardless of how one settles this question, it is clear that there are informative analogies that can be drawn between human and macaque social phenomena. My goal here is to explicate macaque social phenomena in a way that makes these analogies informative when considering the human case.
This point is vividly defended by Henrich (2016), who points to numerous cases in which European explorers failed to survive in environments that had been inhabited by humans for quite some time. Henrich convincingly argues that the crucial difference between the explorers and the local peoples was that the explorers lacked access to the culturally accumulated knowledge encoded in the local community’s practices (e.g. concerning food preparation). Importantly, one of Henrich’s central theses is that community members themselves do not generally know which elements of a practice have adaptive value (e.g. which step in food preparation detoxifies the food) or even that a given practice or set of practices is adaptive. Thus, in general, the only way to access the knowledge encoded in a set of social practices is to participate in those practices.
Of course, humans are perfectly capable of organizing themselves into inegalitarian social structures. However, inegalitarian social structures do not distinguish humans from other primates nor do they reflect the most likely social ecology of our hunter-gatherer ancestors (Boehm 2012). The claim here is that whatever social structures do obtain in human societies most likely depend on the social-structural elements that emerged as part of what might be called “the egalitarian adaptive package”.
There is an interesting set of questions here surrounding how these social structural processes are maintained as societies scale. This is important because it is likely that the mechanisms of social regulation that are effective at small scale (when, e.g., it is plausible that everyone knows everyone) will cease to be effective at larger scales. As a result, it is likely that some form of social innovation will be needed for a society to grow beyond a certain size. One interesting proposal along these lines is that pro-social religions emerged as exactly such a social innovation (Norenzayan et al. 2016). On this view, prosocial religious beliefs and practices having to do with omniscient, morally concerned supernatural agents developed and spread because they (1) reduced in-group competition and (2) sustained or increased group solidarity. They did this by taking advantage of a species general sensitivity to third-party monitoring and credibility tracking. In this way, large-scale compliance to group-beneficial norms increased, which in turn facilitated the formation of larger, more complex societies that could effectively outcompete other groups for resources and in warfare.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Liam Kofi Bright, Peter Carruthers, Bryce Huebner, Enoch Lambert, James Mattingly, John Mikhail, Evan Westra, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on earlier drafts.
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Jebari, J. Empirical moral rationalism and the social constitution of normativity. Philos Stud 176, 2429–2453 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1134-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1134-3