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Can the Canberrans’ Supervenience Argument Refute Shapeless Moral Particularism?

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Abstract

Frank Jackson, Michael Smith, and Philip Pettit (henceforth the Canberrans, as they once worked together in Canberra in Australia) contend in their 2000 paper that an argument from supervenience deals a fatal blow to shapeless moral particularism (or SMP for short), the view that the moral is shapeless with respect to the natural. A decade has passed since the Canberrans advanced their highly influential supervenience argument. Yet, there has not been any compelling counter-argument against it, as far as I can see. My aim in this paper is to fill in this void and defend SMP against the Canberrans’ supervenience argument. Such being the case, I will firstly re-construct the Canberrans’ supervenience argument in detail and push it as far as it can go. In fact, I will defend it against a number of existing objections respectively from Garfield, Dancy, and McDowell. Next, I will argue, however, that the supervenience argument, despite its initial plausibility, has one major pitfall: it hinges on an overly permissive conception of ‘shape’ such that it does not generate the right kind of moral principles the shapeless moral particularists are concerned to refute. I thus conclude that the seemingly scathing supervenience argument turns out to be toothless against SMP. Although this would not prove SMP to be right, for it might attract criticisms from other fronts, yet, until they come up, SMP, contrary to prevalent (mis)conceptions, remains alive and kicking.

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Notes

  1. Although in Moral Thinking, Hare (1981) uses the term ‘universalizability’ to mean what most people mean by ‘supervenience’, as Dancy (1993) correctly notes in his Moral Reason, Appendix II.

  2. In subsequent references to this article, only page number(s) will be indicated unless contexts dictate otherwise.

  3. Kihlbom (2002, Chapter 5) mounts objections against Canberrans’ argument along the McDowellian lines I discuss in Sect. 4.1.3. I argue in that section, however, that the Canberrans might well come up with an effective reply to the McDowellian objection. On the other hand, although Salay (2008) attempts to vindicate Dancy’s objection to Canberrans’ argument, yet again, I contend, in Sect. 4.1.2, that the Canberrans can effectively deal with it.

  4. This construal of moral particularism is also adopted by Setiya (2007, pp. 4–5). Dancy (Dancy 2004, p. 110, footnote 6) contends, however, that this is not how (his) moral particularism is supposed to be understood; Dancy’s reason is this: moral particularism is not merely the view that the moral is shapeless with the natural; if the moral can be reduced entirely to the natural, moral particularism holds that still there is no shape amongst one set of natural properties that connects them to another set of natural properties. I think two replies can be made here. First, it is not clear there is a standard way moral particularism is supposed to be understood, as it has been understood in various ways by different philosophers (Albertzart 2014; Audi 2008; Berker 2007; Bakhurst 2013; Crisp 2000; Cullity 2002; Darwall 2013; Gert 2008; Harman 2005; Holton 2002; Hooker 2000; Jeske 2008; Larvor 2008; Lebar 2013; Little and Lance 2005; McKeever and Ridge 2006; McNaughton 1988; Price 2013; Raz 2006; Robinson 2006; Salay 2008; Schroeder 2011; Sinnott-Armstrong 1999; Smith 2011; Strandberg 2008; Timmons 2002; Tsu 2011, 2013a, b; Väyrynen 2006, 2008; Zamzow 2015). Second, even if there is a standard way how it is supposed to be understood, the shapeless reading is not thus invalidated. It provides a novel version of moral particularism that is worthy of exploration in its own right. (As a meta-footnote, this footnote is largely adapted from Tsu 2013b, p. 52, footnote 1).

  5. The meaning of ‘the natural’ is notoriously difficult to define. See Ridge (2008). For the purposes of this paper, I take it to mean ‘the non-moral’. And ‘the moral’, as I take it, will include both the morally thin, e.g. properties of rightness and wrongness, and the morally thick, e.g. properties of honesty and cruelty.

  6. McKeever and Ridge (2006, Chapter 5) contend that the Canberrans’ natural-moral principlism is vulnerable to a Moorean style open-question argument. Perhaps so, but I think we should treat the principlism-versus-particularism debate independently from the naturalism-versus-non-naturlaism debate. For even if some form of Moorean non-naturalism turns out to be right, as McKeever and Ridge seem to imply, this per se does not seem to lend support to particularism immediately. So for the purposes of this paper, I shall not dwell on the details of their argument.

  7. The proto-structure of the supervenience argument was firstly mentioned in Tsu (2013a). Looking back, I am not entirely satisfied with the way it was presented and how it was fleshed out. It has been modified for our purposes here. The details provided here to flesh it out are also significantly modified accordingly.

  8. See for instance Brink (1989, p. 160), Huemer (2005, p. 202), Jackson (2000, p. 118), McPherson (2012, p. 205), Smith (1994, pp. 21–22), and Shafer-Landau (2003, p. 77).

  9. It might rightly be wondered whether a conditional can contain an infinite number of disjunts in the antecedent. This is a valid concern. But nothing really hangs on this. So I shall ignore this complication and stick with this formalization.

  10. The Canberrans follow Blackburn (1992) in taking ‘shape’ to mean ‘commonality’ in the current context.

  11. To use a somewhat schematic example to illustrate, all the right actions might have the disjunctive shape of being d1 or d2 or d3.

  12. I firstly discussed these points in Tsu (2013a), albeit somewhat briefly. For a more detailed discussion, see Tsu (2013b, pp. 55-57).

  13. This is confirmed in particular by Dancy (1993, pp. 77–79; 2004, p. 87).

  14. A caveat: P1 has recently been challenged by a number of philosophers. See Harrison (2013), Majors (2009), Raz (2000) and Sturgeon (2009) for instance. If they are right, it is all the worse for the Canberrans’ supervenience argument. But I shall not dwell on the dispute here.

  15. See Tsu (2013a, b, pp. 56-57) for a similar discussion.

  16. This objection is echoed by Brown (2011, p. 209). Brown is inclined towards the view that the total number of right actions is uncountably infinite.

  17. This point was effectively made by Luntley (2002) too.

  18. See Tsu (2013b, pp. 60–61) for a detailed discussion of how, on McDowell’s view, we can come to acquire moral concepts even if the items they refer to have no natural shapes. Roughly, on my analysis, McDowell is of the view that the acquisition of moral concepts is more of a matter of gaining the perspective from which their competent users see things than latching onto natural shapes or commonalities of those items.

  19. A caveat: what follows is different from the actual reply made by the Canberrans. In their actual reply, they contend that the response-dependent objection violates the platitude ‘predication supervenes on nature’ and is thus to be rejected. I have argued elsewhere in Tsu (2013b) that their actual reply does not work.

  20. The moral properties referred to by moral concepts might well turn out to be non-natural if non-naturalism is right. But even if non-naturalism turns out to be right, people’s behavior of applying moral concepts to things can remain as natural as their behaviors of eating and gargling, on any standard construal of the term ‘natural’.

  21. The ‘in virtue of’ relation is sometimes put in terms of ‘resultance’. See Dancy (1993, pp. 73–77) for instance. For our purposes, we might put it like this: the wrongness of the act does not result from its having the disjunctive property.

  22. I do not claim any originality for this point. In fact, a similar point has been made in discussions about particularism and principlism in aesthetics. Richards (2005, p. 287) observes that “[the principlists] do not incorporate subjects’ [responses] into their value principles”.

  23. True, it might be retorted that the universal validity of moral principle is not incompatible with the response-dependent account, for, as is commonly implicitly supposed, the device of rigidification can endow the moral principles endorsed by the response-dependent account with some sort of objectivity or universal validity. Yet, as Peter Vallentyne has convincingly argued (in my view), a rigidified response-dependent account isn’t really response-dependent in any interesting sense. See Vallentyne (1996).

  24. I thank Hahn Hsu, Ren-June Wang, Linus Huang, Ben Blumson, Kazunobu Narita, Kevin Kimble and two anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful and constructive comments on the earlier drafts of this paper. Many thanks to Jonathan Dancy, Roger Crisp, James Grant and Ralf Bader for illuminating discussions. I am also indebted to Daniel Stoljar, Jeanette Kennett, and Daniel Star for numerous relevant thought-provoking supervisory sessions during my Ph.D. studies in Australian National University. And many thanks to Rie Takeda, May Wu, Ser-Min Shei, Chung-Hung Chang, Hsing-Chien Tsai, Kiki Wang, Richard Hou, Ruey-Lin Chen, Miura Hiroshi, Sungho Choi, Chiwook Won, Sungil Han, Daniel Lim and Clark Yhan for their constant encouragement. Part of the revision of this paper was completed during my term as an academic visitor in Oxford University. I thank Roger Crisp, Ralf Bader and Julian Savulescu for acting as hosts for my visit and their warm hospitality. Finally, this research is subsidized by Taiwan’s Ministry of Science & Technology [NSC 102-2628-H-194-002-MY2; MOST 104-2918-I-194-007; MOST 104-2628-H-194-001-MY2].

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Chung Cheng University, Min-Xiong, Chia-Yi County, Taiwan

    Peter Shiu-Hwa Tsu

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Tsu, P.SH. Can the Canberrans’ Supervenience Argument Refute Shapeless Moral Particularism?. Erkenn 81, 545–560 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-015-9754-x

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