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Notes
Farbod Akhlaghi, “On the Possibility of Wholesale Moral Error,” Ratio 34 (3) (2021): 236-247.
Ibid., p. 237.
I will use “naturalism” as a shorthand for “moral naturalism”.
Daan Evers, “How to explain the possibility of wholesale moral error: a reply to Akhlaghi,” Ratio 35 (2) (2022): 146-150.
See Ibid., p. 246.
Which is reflected in what Akhlaghi calls (Internal). See Ibid., p. 242.
See Ibid., p. 237.
Evers, op. cit., Sect. 2.
What should be understood as a moral natural property is a vexed issue (for a recent account see Alexios Stamatiadis-Bréhier, “Nomic moral naturalness,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy First View (2022): 1-22).
I take “grounding” in this context to merely be a placeholder for whichever more specific metaphysical relation one chooses to posit (for a pluralist, but still unified, account of grounding, see Alexios Stamatiadis-Bréhier, “Grounding Functionalism and Explanatory Unificationism,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association First View (2022): 1-21).
Evers, op. cit., p. 149.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 148.
See, in particular, Akhlaghi, op. cit., p. 244.
Norwood Russell Hanson, Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry Into the Conceptual Foundations of Science (Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 19.
For the various intricacies of the role of evidence concerning theory-choice see Thomas Kelly, “Evidence,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/evidence/>. Hanson’s example arguably assumes a theory-ladenness account of observation. But a similar point could be delivered by adopting some version of standpoint epistemology, or other post-positivist accounts.
Akhlaghi, op. cit., p. 238.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pushing me on this.
In this sense, I disagree with Evers that this begs the question against non-naturalist theories that also incorporate a moral epistemology that easily secures moral knowledge (Evers, op. cit., p. 147). Non-naturalism is a metaphysical theory. If such a moral epistemology is added on top of that, then the epistemic impossibility of wholesale moral error is secured in virtue of that epistemology; not in virtue of non-naturalism.
Mental nihilism should be distinguished from eliminative materialism. Eliminative materialism is not the claim that there are no mental facts, but that certain generalizations captured by our folk psychology are radically false (given the lack of relevant one-to-one reductions à la Nagel).
Richard Boyd, “How to be a Moral Realist,” in G. Sayre-McCord (ed.), Essays on Moral Realism (Cornell University Press, 1988), 181-228.
See, e.g., Parisa Moosavi, “Neo-Aristotelian naturalism as ethical naturalism,” Journal of Moral Philosophy (forthcoming); David Copp, Morality, Normativity, and Society (Oxford University Press, 1995).
Peter Railton, “Moral realism,” Philosophical Review 95 (2) (1986): 163-207.
Akhlaghi, op. cit., p. 244.
Boyd, op. cit.
This extrapolates to other kinds of N*-facts. For example, it is epistemically possible that there is no coherent set of policies that, if implemented, would deliver societal stability as per Copp, op. cit. Again, note that what is concerned here is a fine-grained conception of stability (call it stability*) rather than a general notion of societal stability simpliciter. Even though it is trivial that every society can exhibit different degrees of stability, it isn’t obvious that this is also the case concerning stability* (since it is epistemically possible that stability* does not even exist). Or consider again Railton’s appeal to objectified subjective interests. These interests might not exist in the simple sense that there cannot be any positive instances that would meet their satisfaction-conditions. So, for example, let these satisfaction-conditions involve the instantiation of a property type P, and let the instantiation of P be nomologically impossible. Or, perhaps, there is something conceptually incoherent with the set of instantiation-conditions themselves (see Richard Joyce, “Moral Anti-Realism,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/moral-anti-realism/, Sect. 3.2.).
I thank an anonymous referee for encouraging me to consider this objection.
Akhlaghi, op. cit., p. 244.
This is not to say that one’s credence to particular moral beliefs is completely dependent on the existence of the relevant N/N*-facts. Certain prima facie plausible first-order moral claims enter into reflective equilibrium in the same way claims concerning the existence of N/N*-facts do (Boyd, op. cit.). The idea is, rather, that the former are epistemically defeasible and are partly dependent on the latter (in the sense that we should assign more ‘weight’ on the existence of N/N*-facts thus making error theory a fallback position to realist moral naturalism).
Akhlaghi, op. cit., pp. 244–245.
There are various ways to make this scenario more metaphysically intricate. For example, this could be a gavagai-style indeterminacy according to which it is inscrutable what the referent of a moral concept is. Or, it could be that there are infinite equally natural referents (for more moderate examples of such naturalness-ties see David Mokriski, “The Methodological Implications of Reference Magnetism on Moral Twin Earth,” Metaphilosophy 51 (5) (2020): 702-726.). To illustrate further, what I’ve presented here is arguably a more extreme metaphysical analogue of Cowie’s recent novel argument for moral error theory (see Christopher Cowie, “A new argument for moral error theory,” Noûs 56 (2) (2022): 276-294.). Roughly, Cowie argues that we can derive error theory from the fact that there’s significant inconsistency between different first-order moral theories.
Joyce, op. cit., Sect. 3.2.
Akhlaghi, op. cit., p. 243.
Ibid.
Wouter Floris Kalf, “Moral Error Theory, Entailment and Presupposition,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (5) (2013): 923-937.
Ibid., p. 924.
Relatedly, see Stamatiadis-Bréhier, op. cit., Sect. 5.
Olivier Sartenaer, Alexandre Guay and Paul Humphreys, “What Price Changing Laws of Nature?” European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (1) (2021): 1-19.
David Lewis, “Humean Supervenience Debugged,” Mind 103 (412) (1994): 473-490.
These laws should not be conflated with laws that involve a temporal component (i.e. laws that only apply to certain temporal parts).
This result can be delivered in various ways. For example, it could be that N-facts themselves cease to exist, or that the fact that N-facts ground moral facts ceases to hold. Or, perhaps, the modal operator that binds these facts has an “expiration date” as per Stathis Psillos, “Induction and Natural Necessities,” Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 48 (3) (2017): 327-340.
To be clear, Akhlaghi’s argument concerns both “future” and “present”-based wholesale moral error. As noted, however, the scenario just sketched is limited to the former type of error and, for this reason, doesn’t seem to fully meet Akhlaghi’s requirement. But this shouldn’t cause much concern. The scenarios I present in this paper are supposed to work in a mutually complimentary fashion. Also, both types of wholesale moral error seem importantly similar in spirit.
I take it that this is not a worry about the generality of that moral principle but about whether it is universal. To illustrate, a moral principle could have a narrow scope (i.e. by applying to very specific circumstances) while also being universal (in the sense that it is not restricted to specific persons, times, or places) (see Pekka Väyrynen, “Reasons and Moral Principles,” in Daniel Star (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity. (Oxford University Press 2018), 839-61, Sect. 2).
Note that even if we supplement our stock of evidence with metaphysical assumptions that prohibit the metaphysical possibility of temporally restricted general moral facts, it is still epistemically possible that these assumptions are false. Following Tyler Hildebrand, “Natural Properties, Necessary Connections, and the Problem of Induction,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2016): 668-689, one could suggest that we can appeal to a naturalness constraint to rule out such temporally restricted moral principles (e.g, by stipulating that moral principles need to range over natural, atemporal, properties).
Also, even if it were the case that neo-Humeanism was the only theory that delivers epistemically opaque moral principles, my argument would still be forceful since neo-Humeanism is an independently plausible metaphysical framework overall.
Gideon Rosen, “What Is a Moral Law?” in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol. 12 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017), 135–159.
See Helen Beebee, “Necessary Connections and the Problem of Induction,’ Noûs 45 (3) (2011): 504-527; Stathis Psillos, “Induction and Natural Necessities,” Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 48 (3) (2017): 327-340; Hildebrand, op. cit.
Acknowledgments
For written comments on some of the material that appears in Sect. 4.3., I thank Pekka Väyrynen. I also thank two anonymous referees from this journal for their very helpful comments.
Funding
Research on this paper was funded by the Azrieli Foundation (in the context of an International Postdoctoral Fellowship) whose support is gratefully acknowledged.
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Stamatiadis-Bréhier, A. Wholesale moral error for naturalists. J Value Inquiry (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-023-09938-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-023-09938-5