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Why Quasi-Realism cannot Accommodate Moral Mind-Independence

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Abstract

Quasi-realists have proposed an “internal” reading of the mind-independence claim embedded in our moral discourse, according to which the claim to mind-independence itself is a moral claim. I argue against such a quasi-realist “internal” reading. My objection is that quasi-realists cannot plausibly explain why the majority of us, either implicitly or explicitly, take moral mind-independence to be a metaethical notion. Quasi-realists either must attribute a quite obvious mistake to most metaethical theorists without explaining why they cannot recognize it, or give us an intolerably ad hoc explanation about why ordinary moral speakers fail to understand their own words. Without properly addressing this problem, we have good reason to reject the quasi-realist account of moral mind-independence.

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Notes

  1. Certainly, the notion of mind-independence intrinsic to our concept of morality can be specified in different ways. For instance, we might talk about moral mind-independence by saying “it is not the case that x is morally wrong because we think it is wrong.” Berker (2020) points out that quasi-realists have not told us what this kind of “because”-statement means, and it is not clear whether they can give a plausible account of its meaning. For a reply, see Baker (2021). In this article I focus on the mind-independence claim formulated as negated conditionals without examining other possible formulations. I believe ordinary moral speakers would all agree that the negation of (1) and (2) can capture an important aspect of what we mean by the mind-independence of morality.

  2. Intuitively speaking, for conditional sentences the antecedent and consequent of which are both non-moral descriptive claims, it is epistemic rationality that commits us to the acceptance of the consequent once we accept it and its antecedent. However, for the quasi-realist account of (1) and (2), what plays the same role is practical rationality. It is not clear whether there really is such a difference implicit in our everyday language, but in this article I assume that such a difference is at least not obviously problematic.

  3. This may partly explain why there are metaethical theorists objecting that quasi-realists cannot avoid an “external” or metaethical reading of moral mind-independence, see Rasmussen (1985), Cassam (1986), Moore (2002), Peacocke (2004), Jenkins (2005). For expressivist replies, see Köhler (2014), Schroeder (2014).

  4. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

  5. Street (2011) argues that if quasi-realists commit themselves to moral mind-independence, then quasi-realism will also face an epistemological challenge that typically threatens some robust versions of moral realism. Now we can see there is no such a challenge to quasi-realism. The quasi-realist account of moral mind-independence only commits us to a moral view disapproving of taking mind-related facts into account in the moral evaluation of an object, it does not imply that the object of evaluation has something built into it independently of our judgment, which is supposed to be tracked by our judgment. For replies to Street’s objection, see Blackburn (2010), Gibbard (2011), Dreier (2012).

  6. Cuneo and Shafer-Landau take this framework status to be a mark of being a conceptual truth. They defend the view that first-order moral truths can be conceptual truths. I discuss whether this strategy is available to expressivists in the next section. At this point, I shall assume that first-order moral truths are not conceptual truths, and I think this is a quite plausible claim.

  7. Of course, even for cognitivists, the idea that we can grasp first-order moral truths simply by grasping moral concepts is still highly controversial. For objections, see Ingram (2015), Evers & Streumer (2016), Killoren (2016).

  8. Sinclair (2008) claims that to accept the mind-independence claim is to accept the “correct application” of moral concepts is mind-independent. Now we can see why this notion of “correct application” has nothing to do with conceptual competence under the framework of expressivism. If moral mind-independence is a moral notion, then to accept it is to morally approve of forming moral attitudes and applying moral concepts in a certain way. “Correct application” here simply means the way of applying moral concepts that we approve of. It is obvious that we can approve of applying moral concepts in a certain way while being aware that this is not the correct usage of moral concepts. Therefore, even if we deny the “correct application” of moral concepts is mind-independent, we can still know that moral concepts are essentially coordinating and we can use them to coordinate only if we accept the mind-independence claim.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong SAR

    Yifan Sun

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Sun, Y. Why Quasi-Realism cannot Accommodate Moral Mind-Independence. Philosophia 51, 1663–1676 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00607-8

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