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Anti-Autonomism Defended: A Reply to Hill

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Abstract

In the current issue of this journal, Scott Hill critiques some of my work on the “is”-“ought” controversy, the Hume-inspired debate over whether an ethical conclusion can be soundly, or even validly, derived from only non-ethical premises. I’ve argued that it can be; Hill is unconvinced. I reply to Hill’s critique, focusing on four key questions to which he and I give different answers.

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Notes

  1. Scott Hill (2008, pp. 545–566), critiquing my (1998), and my (2006). Parenthetical page-references in the text are to Hill’s article.

  2. See, for example, Toomas Karmo (1988). Hill discusses Karmo’s argument at length.

  3. Among recent sources of counterexamples is Nelson (2007), an article also cited by Hill.

  4. I prefer to talk in terms of ethical propositions rather than ethical sentences, whereas Hill, like some others in this debate, talks in terms of sentences rather than propositions. In “Closing the ‘Is’–‘Ought’ Gap,” I too talked in terms of sentences, deliberately following Karmo’s usage in “Some Valid...Arguments,” but I explicitly assumed that all sentences are being “standardly construed,” i.e., construed as expressing the propositions we normally take them to express. We might as well cut to the chase, then, and simply talk in terms of propositions in the first place, as I’ll continue to do in this response.

  5. Hill, 563, 564, citing P. T. Geach and Michael Huemer as others who accept the existence of necessary and impossible ethical propositions. As I remarked earlier (see note 4), Hill writes in terms of necessary and impossible ethical sentences, but I take it he means “propositions,” for two reasons. First, no sentence—no item of such a contingent production as a language—exists in every possible world, so no sentence is true (or false) in every possible world, even if some propositions are. Second, for any sentence whose actual propositional content (its content in the actual world) has a particular truth-value in every possible world, there is a possible world in which that sentence has a different truth-value in virtue of having a different propositional content in that world. So no sentence has the same truth-value in every possible world even if, contrary to what I’ve said about the contingency of language, some sentences exist in every possible world.

  6. J. L. Mackie (1977), especially Chapter 1 (“The Subjectivity of Values”).

  7. A. N. Prior (1960); 202.

  8. Karmo (1988).

  9. My objections appear in my (1998), one of the two articles of mine to which Hill is responding. Further objections to Karmo appear in Nelson (2007).

  10. In my (2006), I offered this clarification of the phrase “distinctively astrological”: “The proposition ‘There are planets’, while accepted by astrologers, is not a distinctively astrological proposition, because orthodox astronomy (among many other discourses) also contains it. By contrast, ‘Your Sun sign influences your personality’ is distinctively astrological, because other kinds of discourse do not contain it” (456, n. 9).

  11. These inferences are called “reinforced Doppelganger principles” in Pigden (2007), at 452, an article cited by Hill. Pigden sees why we ought to reject such principles: “[T]o say that nihilism is impossible—that it is absolutely inconceivable that neither moral rightness nor wrongness attach to actions—is to make a large and implausible claim” (453).

  12. On p. 561, n. 19, Hill considers something like this reply, but he objects to it on the grounds that it presupposes the problematic notion of moral properties. As I argued earlier, this objection strikes me as peculiar given Hill’s own repeated use of that very notion.

  13. Maitzen (2006), 461, italics in original.

References

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Acadia University, Wolfville, NS, B4P 2R6, Canada

    Stephen Maitzen

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  1. Stephen Maitzen
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Correspondence to Stephen Maitzen.

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Maitzen, S. Anti-Autonomism Defended: A Reply to Hill. Philosophia 36, 567–574 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9155-3

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