Abstract
Recently, some philosophers have suggested that a form of robust realism about ethics, or normativity more generally, does not face a significant explanatory burden in metaphysics. I call this view metaphysically quietist normative realism. This paper argues that while this view can appear to constitute an attractive alternative to more traditional forms of normative realism, it cannot deliver on this promise. I examine Scanlon’s attempt to defend such a quietist realism, and argue that rather than silencing metaphysical questions about normative reasons, his defense at best succeeds only in shifting the focus of metaphysical enquiry. I then set aside the details of Scanlon’s view, and argue on general grounds that that the quietist realist cannot finesse a crucial metanormative task: to explain the contrast between the correct normative system and alternative putatively normative standards.
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Notes
I oversimplify: one might (à la Quine) reject an ontology of facts on general grounds, but nonetheless remain a realist about some domains. I set aside this complication.
Besides Scanlon, who will be my central exemplar of this view in Sect. 2, philosophers who have made remarks that may be suggestive of such a view include Parfit forthcoming Part Six., Nagel 1997, and Dworkin 1996. The interpretation of the relevant aspects of each of these authors’ work is difficult and controversial. On Dworkin, compare Zangwill 1996 and Dworkin’s 1997 response. Svavarsdottir 2001 is an extremely helpful exploration of Nagel’s views on these topics. For an important related view, see Kramer 2009.
Complaints of this kind directed at specific naturalist accounts of ethics and epistemology are ubiquitous. Parfit’s “Appendix A: Normativity Naturalism, and Non-Cognitivism.” (Ms. of June 2008) offers an unusually strong general version of this charge against the naturalist.
It is not trivial to spell out this idea once one accepts minimalism. See Dreier 2005 for a helpful discussion. Quasi-realism should be distinguished from the sort of view that a normative realist might have if she found the expressivist treatment of the distinctive normativity of practical discourse compelling, and sought to graft that account onto a realist framework (for attempts at such grafting for different purposes, see Copp 2001 and Finlay 2007). Quietist realists show no signs of seeking to deploy such a strategy, so I set it aside here.
For example, this is one thread of Korsgaard’s critique of ‘substantive moral realists’: she concludes that such realism “… refuses to answer the normative question. It is a way of saying that it cannot be done” (1996, p. 39).
For further discussion of a strong version of such justificatory autonomy in ethics, see McPherson 2008b.
Scanlon glosses natural facts as including “…all and only the physical and (insofar as they may be different) psychological facts” (2003, p. 8). He also suggests the different idea that the natural world is just the world as described by science. The distinction between natural and non-natural properties is actually quite vexing. I set aside the very real interpretive issues here, which are orthogonal to the argument of this section.
As we noted in Sect. 1, non-naturalism is often taken to make the demand for metaphysical explanation especially intense. This is in part because the non-naturalist claims that the sorts of properties that explain normativity are different in kind from the sorts of properties identified by the sciences. Scanlon argues that on his conception, reasons do not conflict with the picture of the world offered by science because plausible claims about reasons do not entail predictions about the spatiotemporal world that might conflict with those generated by scientific theories (2003, pp. 7–9). This response assumes (implausibly, it seems to me,) that the ‘picture of the world’ offered by contemporary science is limited to specific positive ontological claims made by scientific theories, and does not involve more general commitments concerning what kinds of things exist. I set this concern aside here.
1998, p. 57. One might worry over whether we should let propositions into our ontology, and hence whether, on the propositional account of reasons-talk, we should admit reasons. For reasons that will become clear immediately below, I set this concern aside.
Scanlon himself notes that the ‘element of normative force’ does not adhere to propositions themselves, but rather to judgments that if a proposition were true, it would be a good reason for a certain action or belief (1998, p. 57).
Scanlon takes this language from Wright 1996, p. 5. One might worry that this appeal undermines Scanlon’s realist pretensions. Roughly, Wright suggests that we might earn the right to talk of truth and falsehood within a domain of discourse in virtue of the internal discipline of the discourse, rather than by appealing to a more ‘metaphysical’ basis for the truth of such claims. Wright conceives of this denial of ‘metaphysical gravitas’ as anti-realist in an important sense, and with good reason: there is nothing in the idea of an internally disciplined discourse that suggests that there couldn’t be a variety of inconsistent but equally disciplined discourses, which our deliberative practices might just as easily have instantiated.
I take it that Scanlon’s commitment to the idea that standards for correct reasoning are fundamental helps to explain his otherwise surprising claim that his view is, in Korsgaard’s (1996, pp. 34–37) terms, a form of ‘procedural’ as opposed to ‘substantive’ realism (Scanlon 1998, p. 380, n. 48). However, Scanlon’s discussion of Korsgaard in 2003, pp. 13–15 suggests that he may no longer want to characterize his view in this way.
Such evidence would be deeply peculiar in virtue of being self-undermining: if one had it, one could not coherently treat it as evidence. However, since one can have evidence that one does not recognize as such, this peculiarity does not undermine the force of the objection.
For example, Jackson and Pettit 1995 offer a holistic account of moral semantics that they conjoin with a naturalistic metaphysics of morality.
Here and below, I talk for the sake of brevity as if Scanlon is correct that reasons are the fundamental normative notions. Nothing hangs on this: for example my argument could be translated without loss into a discussion of values, virtues or standards for reasoning.
The language here is inspired by Enoch’s “Agency, Schmagency…” (2006). However, I am pursuing a different point with the contrast than Enoch is with his.
Again, the deflationary naturalism defended by Tiffany (2007) denies this asymmetry.
Parfit MS Sect. 15 goes so far as to suggest that naturalist realists simply could not be talking about the same sort of thing that he is interested in when he makes normative claims, because such views cannot coherently explain the robust normativity of normative properties.
It is notable that Moore’s 1903, Sect. 13 complaint about the second-order desire view as an analysis of goodness appears to focus entirely on the intuitive case against synonymy. Contemporary opponents of naturalism have tended to abandon the conceptual interpretation of the open question argument as insufficient. An especially clear example is Rosati 1995, which suggests that the open question argument can be resuscitated exactly by focusing on the alleged intuitive inadequacy of naturalist attempts to explain normative authority.
Consider two examples of such a metaphysical explanation. According to the reductive second-order desire theory of reasons, to be robustly normative just is to be properly related to a second-order desire. By contrast, the traditional non-naturalist insists that robust normativity is a sui generis metaphysical property. On either of these views, the explanation of the contrast between reasons and schmeasons is made by appeal to the metaphysical nature of normative properties, and is thus inconsistent with quietist realism.
I am grateful to Sari Kisilevsky for pressing this line of objection.
This claim has been explicitly made across the history of discussions of metaethics and normative ethics. For example, compare Frankena 1951, p. 45, Zimmerman 1980, p. 659, and Kagan 1998, p. 5 (Kagan does not explicitly endorse this claim). Sumner 1967, 96ff shows how a stronger version of this sort of claim has sometimes motivated the thought that metaethics must be ‘normatively neutral’.
I oversimplify: the metanormative theory would also need to preserve the structure of the correct normative theory. So if the correct normative theory were a virtue theory, then on this theory to be a virtue would be to be a character trait hated by Hades, and Hades would need to hate actions because they expressed virtue, etc. The task of filling out the simplified story given in the text is structurally analogous to the task of developing an intuitively extensionally adequate Divine Command metaethic.
Compare the use of rigidification in Dreier 2002 to make a similar point about possible metanormative theories whose content outruns their normative implications.
Against the attempt to resurrect quietism in a Kantian key, it is relevant that similar problems have been raised about Korsgaard’s theory: for example, Hussain and Shah ms. have argued that Korsgaard’s theory is compatible with either realist or expressivist metaethics, thus suggesting that her view is compatible with either a metaphysical or psychological account of normativity. Korsgaard’s best hope of avoiding this problem is to defend the view mentioned above that the debate between metanormative realists and anti-realists rests on a mistaken understanding of the issues (for which compare her 2003). Besides being deeply problematic (see Hussain and Shah ms. and 2006, and McPherson 2008b), this strategy is unavailable to the quietist realist, who is an antagonist in the realism-antirealism debate.
Thanks to David Enoch for pressing this objection on the quietist’s behalf.
In the enormously helpful terms of Schroeder 2005, the divine command theorist offers a constitutive explanation.
For example, Yalom 2004, p. 18 suggests that when chess was introduced to Europe from the Arab world in the Middle Ages, the rules were modified so that it was illegal to promote a pawn to a queen while one still possessed another queen. Yalom suggests that this change was made to avoid the appearance that the game condoned polygamy. While this change has since been reversed, I take it that instances of this sort of pattern of explanation of the rules of chess would in no way undermine the validity of those rules.
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McPherson, T. Against quietist normative realism. Philos Stud 154, 223–240 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9535-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9535-y