The variety of virtue ethical systems

One thinks of virtue ethics as a unified family of ethical systems. But it is interesting to note just how different virtue ethical systems can be depending on how one answers the question of what it is that makes a stable character trait T be a virtue? Consider, after all, these very varied possible answers to that question, any one of which could be plugged into a virtue ethical account of rightness as what accords with virtue.

• having T is partly constitutive of eudaimonia (Aristotelian virtue ethics)

• having T is required by one’s nature or by the nature of one’s will (natural law virtue ethics)

• a typical human being is expected to gain utility by having T (egoist virtue ethics)

• a typical human being is expected to contribute to total utility by having T (utilitarian virtue ethics)

• it is pleasant to think of oneself as having T (hedonistic virtue ethics)

• it is pleasant to think of another as having T (Humean sentimentalist virtue ethics)

• God requires one to have T (divine command virtue ethics).

The resulting ethical systems are all interesting, but fundamentally very different.

Unicorns and error theory

Kripke famously argued that unicorns cannot exist. For “unicorn” would have to refer to a natural kind. But there are multiple non-actual natural kinds to which “unicorn” could equally well refer, since it’s easy to imagine worlds w₁ and w₂ in each of which there is a natural kind of animal that matches the paradigmatic descriptions of unicorns in our fiction, but where the single-horned equines of w₁ are a different natural kind (at the relevant taxonomic level) from the single-horned equines of w₂. The proposition p expressed by “There are unicorns” is true in one of the worlds but not the other, or in both, or in neither. Symmetry rules out its being true in one but not the other. It can’t be true in both, because then “unicorn” would refer to two natural kinds (at the relevant taxonomic level), while it arguably refers to one (at least if we index it to a sufficiently specific body of fictional work). So, the proposition must be true in neither world, and by the same token, there will be no world where it’s true.

It seems to me, however, that rather than saying that the proposition expressed by “There are unicorns” is impossible, we should say that “There are unicorns” fails to express a proposition. Here’s why. We could imagine Rowling enriching the Harry Potter stories by introducing a new species of animals, the monokeratines. Suppose she never gives us enough detail to tell the two species apart, so all the descriptions of “unicorns” in her stories apply to “monokeratines” and vice versa, but she is clear that they are different species (perhaps the story hinges on one of them being an endangered species and the other not).

Now, if “There are unicorns” in these (hypothetical) stories expresses a proposition, so does “There are monokeratines”. But if they express propositions, they express different propositions (neither entails the other, for instance). Thus, suppose “There are unicorns” expresses p while “There are monokeratines” expresses q. But no reason can be given for why it’s not the other way around—why “There are unicorns” doesn’t express q while “There are monokeratines” expresses p. In fact, the exact same reasoning why Kripke rejected the hypothesis that “There are unicorns” is true in one of w₁ and w₂ but not in the other applies here. Thus, we should reject the claim that either sentence expresses a proposition.

But if we do that, then we should likewise reject the claim that in the actual world, where Rowling doesn’t talk about monokeratines, “There are unicorns” expresses p (say). For it could equally well express q.

Maybe.

But maybe there is another way. One could say that “There are unicorns” is vague, and handle the vagueness in a supervaluationist way. There are infinitely many species u such that “There are unicorns” can be taken to be precisified into expressing the proposition that there are us. Thus, there is no one proposition expressed by the sentence, but there are infinitely many propositions for each of which it is vaguely true that the sentence expresses it.

This might be a good response to my old argument that error theorists should say that “Murder is wrong” is nonsense. Maybe error theorists can say that “Murder is wrong” has infinitely many precisifications, but each one is false, just as “There are unicorns” has infinitely many precisifications, but each one is false.

This suggests a view of fiction on which claims about fictional entities always suffer from vagueness.

An interesting thing is that on this approach, we need to distinguish between in-story and out-of-story vagueness. Suppose a Rowling has a character say “There are unicorns.” In-story, that statement is not vague. I.e., according to the story there is a specific species to which the word “unicorn” as spoken by the character definitely refers. But out-of-story, we have vagueness: there are infinitely many possible species the claim could be about.

This suggests that the error theorist who takes the vagueness way out is not home free. For it is a part of our usage of “(morally) wrong” that it refers fairly unambiguously to one important property. But the error theorist claims vagueness. If the statements about wrongness were made in a story, then the error theorist could handle this by distinguishing in-story and out-of-story vagueness. But this distinction is not available here.

A similar problem occurs for a real-world person who claims that there are unicorns. Maybe one could say that the person intends in saying “There are unicorns” to express a single specific proposition, but fails, and vaguely expresses each of an infinity of propositions, all of them false. If so, then a similar move would be available to the error theorist. But I am sceptical of this move. I wonder if it’s not better to just say that “There are unicorns” as said by someone who intended to express an existential claim about a single definite species is nonsense, but there is a neighboring sentence, such as “There is an extant species of single-horned equines”, that makes sense and is true.

A constraint on metaethics

Suppose that we lived lives like ours in a world (possible or not) whose metaphysics included nothing like moral duties except that there was a loving God and he issued commands. If in that world we used the phrase “morally wrong”, that phrase would refer to the property of being forbidden by God.

Or suppose that we lived lives like ours in a world (possible or not) whose metaphysics included nothing like moral duties except that we had Aristotelian forms and they specified what the will should will, the phrase “morally wrong” would refer to the property of being contrary to what our form says the will should will.

But suppose now we lived in a world where there was nothing like moral duties, no God, no forms, but buried underground and unseen by humans there was a stone tablet that arose from a random volcanic process millions of years ago. On these tablets by chance there were markings that looked just like French sentences, and when interpreted as French sentences, they stated imperatives, like the Golden Rule, that that fit very well with our intuitions about what are the core moral duties. I doubt that the phrase “morally wrong” would refer to the property of being contrary to what the stone tablet would enjoin if it were interpreted as French. (I am careful in my wording, because strictly speaking the stone tablet, being the product of random processes, does not contain any sentences—it only contains markings that look like sentences of French.)

Suppose my intuition is right. What is the difference between the third case and the first two? Here is a hypothesis. In the divine command world, presumably our beliefs about what we call “morally wrong” have some sort of a connection to the commands of that God. In the Aristotelian world, our beliefs about the “morally wrong” presumably come in some way from the Aristotelian forms. But in the stone tablet world, the “morally wrong” beliefs have no connection to the stone tablets, except that the stone tablets happen to fit them.

This suggests an important constraint on metaethics: our beliefs about the morally wrong had better have a real connection—perhaps even a real causal connection—with their grounds. If this constraint is right, then evolutionary debunking arguments against morality cut more deeply than is recognized: if the arguments correctly show that our “moral concepts” lack a relevant connection with any grounds, then our “moral beliefs” not are not knowledge, but they are in fact just nonsense.

Of course, I want to turn this around: given that our moral beliefs are not mere nonsense, it follows that they have a real connection with grounds, and this undercuts the idea that we are mere products of completely unguided evolution.

Two kinds of moral relativism

A moral relativist has a fundamental choice whether to define moral concepts in terms of moral beliefs or non-doxastic moral attitudes such as disapproval.

In my previous post, I argued that defining moral concepts in terms of moral beliefs leads is logically unacceptable.

I now want to suggest that neither option is really very appealing. Consider first this case:

1. Bob believes he ought to turn Carl in for being a runaway slave. But his emotions and attitudes do not match that belief. He hides Carl and feels morally good about hiding Carl despite his belief. (Bob may or may not be like Huck Finn.)

A relativist who defines morality in terms of beliefs, has to say that Bob is doing wrong in hiding Carl. That seems mistaken. It seems that mere belief is less important than actual attitudes. Thus, if something is to define morality for Bob, it is his attitudes, not his mere beliefs.

So far, we have support for a relativist’s defining moral concepts in terms of non-doxastic moral attitudes. But now consider:

2. Alice thinks of herself as a progressive, and thinks that racism is wrong. Nonetheless, her moral attitudes do not evince genuine disapproval of racist behavior, say when she is with friends who tell racist jokes.

If we define right and wrong in terms of non-doxastic moral attitudes, then our implicit biases unacceptably affect what is morally right and wrong, so that racist behavior turns out to be permissible for Alice, her beliefs to the contrary notwithstanding.

So, neither approach is satisfactory.

A vicious circularity in one kind of moral relativism

It’s just occurred to me that simple moral relativism on its face just makes no sense as a metaethical position. It holds:

1. What it is for an action to be morally required is that one believes the action to be morally required.

But here we have an account of a property, namely moral requirement, where the account makes use of that very property.

Here’s another way to put the point. The moral relativist presumably also accepts:

2. What it is for an action to be morally forbidden is that one believes the action to be morally forbidden.

Now, claim (1) says the same thing about the morally required as (2) says about the morally forbidden. Thus, (1) cannot be a correct account of the morally required, since the morally required and the morally forbidden are different. A correct account of X cannot say about X the same thing that a correct account of Y says about Y when X and Y are different!

In other words, the morally relativist metaethicist needs some replacement for “believes the action to be morally required/forbidden” in (1) and (2) that does not employ the concepts of the morally required and forbidden.

Related point: Here is a way to see that (1) is not the right definition of moral requirement. Suppose I am wrong about what I believe, and so I believe that I believe that A is morally required, but in fact I don’t believe that A is morally required. (Perhaps I would like to be the sort of person who believes that A is morally required, and by wishful thinking I come to believe that I believe it, but in fact my actions belie my alleged belief, and I don’t actually believe that A is morally required.) But if to be morally required is defined as to be believed to be morally required, then believing that A is believed to be morally required is believing that A is morally required. So, I cannot have a case where I am wrong in believing that I believe that A is morally required. But clearly I am fallible in my introspection!

A better move, then, for the relativist seems to be to replace beliefs with other attitudes, such as:

3. What it is for an action to be morally required is that one have an attitude of moral disapproval towards refraining from the action.

On this version of relativism, our moral beliefs can be incorrect. For it is quite possible for our attitudes of moral disapproval to fail to match our moral beliefs. And this is especially true if (3) is the right account of moral requirement. For we can easily be self-deceived about whether in fact we exemplify an attitude of moral disapproval, and hence we can be self-deceived about whether the action is wrong. The moral relativist now owes us an account of moral disapproval that does not depend on first order moral concepts, and that’s tough, but at least we don’t have a vicious circularity like in (1).

How the law needs to be written in the heart

In ethics, we seek a theory of obligation whose predictions match our best intuitions.

Suppose that explorers on the moon find a booklet with pages of platinum that contains an elegant collection of moral precepts that match our best intuitions to an incredible degree, better than anything that has been seen before. When we apply the precepts to hard cases, we find solutions that, to people we think of as decent, seem just right, and the easy cases all work correctly. And every apparently right action either follows from the precepts, or turns out to be a sham on deeper reflection.

This would give us good reason to think the precepts of the booklet in fact do sum up obligations. But now imagine Euthyphro came along and gave us this metaethical theory:

1. What makes an action right is that it follows from the content of this booklet.

Euthyphro would be wrong. For even though (1) correctly gives a correct account of what actions are in fact right, the right action isn’t right because it’s written in the booklet. (Is it written in the booklet because it’s right? Probably: the best theory of the booklet’s composition would be that it was written by some ethical genius who wrote what was right because it was right.)

Why not? What’s wrong with (1)? It seems to me that (1) is just too extrinsic to us. There is no connection between the booklet and our actions, besides the fact that the actions required by the booklet are exactly the right ones.

What if instead the booklet were an intrinsic feature of human beings? What if ethics were literally written in the human heart, so that microscopic examination of a dissected human heart found miniature words spelling out precepts that we have very good reason to think sum up the theory of the right? Again, we should not go for a Euthyphro-style theory that equates the right with what is literally written in the heart. Yet on this theory the grounds of the right would be literally intrinsic to us—and they could be essential to us, if we wish: further examination could show that it is an essential feature of human DNA that it generates this inscription. This would give us reason to think that human beings were designed by an ethical genius, but not that the ground of the right is the writing in the heart.

The lesson is this, I think. We want the grounds of the right to be of the correct sort. Being metaphysically intrinsic to us is a necessary condition for this, but it is not sufficient. We want the grounds of the right to be “close to us”: closer than our physical hearts, as it were.

But we also don’t want the grounds of the right to be too close to us. We don’t want the right to be grounded in the actual content of our desires or beliefs. We are looking for grounds that exercise some sort of a dominion over us, but not an alien dominion.

The more I think about this, the more I see the human form—understood as an actual metaphysical component intrinsic and essential to the human being—as having the exactly right balance of standoffish dominion and closeness to provide these grounds. In other words, Natural Law provides the right metaethics.

And the line of thought I gave above can also be repeated for epistemological normativity. So we have reason to think the Natural Law provides the right metaepistemology as well.

Anti-reductionism and supervenience

In the philosophy of mind, those who take anti-reductionism really seriously will also reject the supervenience of the mental on the non-mental. After all, if a mental property does not reduce to the non-mental, we should be able to apply a rearrangement principle to fix the non-mental properties but change the mental one, much as one can fix the shape of an object but change its electrical charge, precisely because charge doesn’t reduce to shape or shape to charge. There might be some necessary connections, of course. Perhaps some shapes are incompatible with some charges, and perhaps similarly some mental states are incompatible with some physical arrangement. But it would be surprising, in the absence of a reduction, if fixing physical arrangement were to fix the mental state.

Yet it seems that in metaethics, even the staunchest anti-reductionists tend to want to preserve the supervenience of the normative on the non-normative. That is surprising, I think. After all, the same kind of rearrangement reasoning should apply if the normative properties do not reduce to the non-normative ones or vice versa: we should be able to fix the non-normative ones and change the normative ones at least to some degree.

Here’s something in the vicinity I’ve just been thinking about. Suppose that A-type properties supervene on B-type properties, and consider an A-type property Q. Then consider the property Q^B of being such that the nexus of all B-type properties is logically compatible with having Q. For any Q and B, having Q^B is necessary for having Q. But if Q supervenes on B-type properties, then having Q^B is also sufficient for having Q. Moreover, Q^B seems to be a B-type property in our paradigmatic cases: if B is the physical properties, then Q^B is a physical property, and if B is the non-normative properties, then Q^B is a non-normative property. (Interestingly, it is a physical or non-normative property defined in terms of mental or normative properties.)

But now isn’t it just as weird for a staunch anti-reductionist to think that there is a non-normative property that is necessary and sufficient for, say, being obligated to dance as it is for a staunch anti-reductionist to think there is a physical property that is necessary and sufficient for feeling pain?

Supervenience and natural law

The B-properties supervene on the A-properties provided that any two possible worlds with the same A-properties have the same B-properties.

It is a widely accepted constraint in metaethics that normative properties supervene on non-normative ones. Does natural law meet the contraint?

As I read natural law, the right action is one that goes along with the teleological properties of the will. Teleological properties, in turn, are normative in nature and (sometimes) fundamental. As far as I can see, it is possible to have zombie-like phenomena, where two substances look and behave in exactly the same way but different teleological properties. Thus, one could have animals that are physically indistinguishable from our world’s sheep, and in particularly have four legs, but, unlike the sheep, have the property of being normally six-legged. In other words, they would be all defective, in lacking two of their six legs.

This suggests that natural law theories depend on a metaphysics that rejects the supervenience of the normative. But I think that is too quick. For in an Aristotelian metaphysics, the teleological properties are not purely teleological. A sheep’s being naturally four-legged simultaneously explains the normative fact that a sheep should have four legs and the non-normative statistical fact that most sheep in fact have four legs. For the teleological structures are not just normative but also efficiently causal: they efficiently guide the embryonic development of the sheep, say.

In fact, on the Koons-Pruss reading of teleology, the teleological properties just are causal powers. The causal power to ϕ in circumtances C is teleological and dispositional: it is both a teleological directedness towards ϕing in C and a disposition to ϕ in C. And there is no metaphysical way of separating these aspects, as they are both features of the very same property.

Our naturally-six-but-actually-four-legged quasi-sheep, then, would differ from the actual world’s sheep in not having the same dispositions to develop quadrapedality. This seems to save supervenience, by exhibiting a difference in non-normative properties between the sheep and the quasi-sheep.

But I think it doesn’t actually save it. For the disposition to develop four (or six) legs is the same property as the teleological directedness to quadrapedality in sheep. And this property is a normative property, though not just normative. We might say this: The sheep and the quasi-sheep differ in a non-normative respect but they do not differ in a non-normative property. For the disposition is a normative property.

Perhaps this suggests that the natural lawyer should weaken the supervenience claim and talk of differences in features or respects rather than properties. That would allow one to save a version of supervenience. But notice that if we do that, we preserve supervenience but not the intuition behind it. For the intuition behind the supervenience of the normative on the non-normative is that the normative is explained by the non-normative. But on our Aristotelian metaphysics, it is the teleological properties that explain that actual non-normative behavior of things.

Natural law love-first metaethics

Start with this Aristotelian thought:

1. Everything should to fulfill its nature, and every “should” fact is a norm specifying the norm of fulfilling one’s nature.

But not every “should” is a moral should. Sheep should have four legs, but a three-legged sheep is not morally defective. Here’s a hypothesis:

2. A thing morally should A if and only if that thing has a will with an overriding norm of loving everything and that the thing morally should A is a specification of that norm.

On this theory, moral norms are norms for the same Aristotelian reason that all other norms are norms—all norms derive from the natures of things. But at the same time, the metaethics is a metaethics of love. What renders a norm a moral norm is its content, that it is a specification of the norm that one should love everything.

Why is it, on this theory, that I should be affable to my neighbor? Because such affability is a specification of the norm of fulfilling my nature. But that needn’t be my practical reason for the affability: rather, that is the explanation of why I should be affable (cf. this). What makes the norm of affability to my neighbor a moral norm? That I have a norm of love of everything, and that the norm of affability specifies that norm.

And we can add:

3. A thing is a moral agent if and only if it has a will with an overriding norm of loving everything.

One could, perhaps, imagine beings that have a will with an overriding norm of self-benefit. Such beings wouldn’t be moral agents. But we are moral agents. In fact, I suspect the following is true:

4. Loving everything is the only proper function of the human will.

Given the tight Aristotelian connection between proper function and norms:

5. All norms on the human will are specifications of the norm of loving everything.

This metaethical theory I think is both a natural law theory and a love-first metaethics. It is a natural law theory in respect of the sources of normativity, and it is a love-first metaethics in respect of the account of moral norms. Thus it marries Aristotle with the Gospel, which is a good thing. I kind of like this theory, though I have a nagging suspicion it has problems.

A defense of natural law eudaimonism

My main objection to natural law ethics has for a long time been that it looks egoistic because it is eudaimonistic. One version of that worry is the “one thought too many” objection: You should just do good to your fellow humans because they are who they are, because they are your fellow human beings, or something like that, but definitely not because doing so leads to your flourishing.

I think there is a nice—and probably well-known to people other than me—response to this version of the worry, and to many similar “one thought too many” worries. To put this “one thought too many” worry more abstractly, the worry is that the metaethics will infect the reasons for action in an unacceptable way. But the response should simply be that, first, what metaethics asks is this question:

1. What makes the reasons for action be reasons for action?

Here, read “reasons” factively as “good reasons” or even “good moral reasons” (I don’t actually distinguish the two, but many do), not as motivations. And, second, insofar as R is my reason for my action, I am acting on account of R, not on account of R being a reason. Compare: what causes the fire is the match, not the match’s being a cause.

Thus, the natural lawyer should say that what makes the fact that an action promotes the good of my neighbor be a reason is that I flourish (in part) by intentionally (under this description) promoting the good of my neighbor. But the reason for the action is that the action promotes the good of my neighbor, not that I flourish by intentionally promoting the good of my neighbor. The natural law answer to the metaethics question (1) is this:

2. R is on balance a reason for action if and only if, and if so then because, I flourish by acting on R.

We do in fact flourish by intentionally promoting the good of our neighbor. Note that (2) does not by itself yield any egoism in our motivations. We could imagine selfless beings that flourish only insofar as they are intentionally promoting the good of their neighbor as a final end, and who are blighted insofar as they are intentionally promoting their own good or flourishing. We are, of course, not such selfless beings, but we don’t learn the fact that we are not such beings from (2). In fact, (2) is fully logically compatible with us being such beings. Hence, the metaethical theory (2) cannot by itself give rise to the “one thought too many” worry I started the post with. (Of course, some natural lawyers will go beyond (2). They may say that in fact our happiness is the end of all our actions. If so, then I think they are subject to the “one thought too many” worry.)

It is important to add a little bit to the above story. While it is true that “this benefits my friend” is typically reason enough, and that I don’t need to act on the second order fact that “this benefitting my friend is a reason”, we also do have such second order reasons. That there is a reason for an action is itself a reason for action. A parent might tell a child: “You have good reason to do this, but I can’t explain the reason right now.” In that case, the child could well be acting on the second-order reason that there is a first-order reason. (The child could also be acting on a first-order reasons to please the parent).

Here is another kind of case. I start off without any belief about whether R is a reason for action, and R leaves me cold. Maybe I am completely insensitive to considerations of privacy, and the fact that an action promotes someone’s privacy just leaves me completely cold. But I observe my virtuous friends, and see that they are acting on reasons like R, and I notice that their so acting contributes to what I admire about them. I conclude that R is in fact a good reason for action. But that’s purely intellectual. I am still left quite cold and unmotivated by the fact that some proposed action A falls under R. But what I can do at this point is to act on the second-order reason that A falls under a good reason. I can even say what that good reason is. But I cannot act on it itself, because it leaves me cold.

These are, however, non-ideal cases. If I know that R is a good reason, I should strive to form my will to be motivated by R. It will be better to act on R than to act on the knowledge that R is a reason. And thinking about these cases makes the response to the “one thought too many” worry about natural law even more compelling, I think. It does promote my flourishing to promote my flourishing, though I think that it doesn’t promote my flourishing as well as promoting the flourishing of others does. So that kindliness to others promotes my flourishing is a reason for benefiting others, just not as good a reason as that it benefits others. But such “not as good reasons” are important for our moral development: we are not yet in the ideal state, and so that “one thought too many” is still needed.

This helps make me feel a lot better about natural law ethics. Not quite enough to embrace it, though.

Free parameters in physics, ethics and epistemology

It looks like the laws of physics include "free parameters", constants that we feel could well have had other values than they do. It does not appear that these parameters can all be derived from more fundamental laws that have no free parameters.

Analogous phenomena occur in ethics. If to save your life, I must suffer a minor pain for a second, it is my duty to make the sacrifice. If to save your life, I must suffer constant torture for decades, it is not my duty to do so. As one increases the amount of my suffering to be weighed against your life, at some point one transitions from duty to supererogation (and perhaps eventually to just imprudence). Similar phenomena come up when deciding between goods to people with whom one has different relationships (saving n of one's cousins versus m strangers), when deciding between risks and certainties, etc. It does not appear that these parameters can all be derived from more fundamental laws that have no free parameters. (The best proposal for doing so is utilitarianism, and that just doesn't fit the moral data.)

And there are analogous phenomena in epistemology. For instance, there is the question of how quickly one should make inductive generalizations (in the Bayesian setting this comes to questions like: how high should be one's priors for generalizations).

In physics, the existence of free parameters is strong evidence for some sort of contingency in the laws. There are two ways to have such contingency. The first is to say that there could have instead been other laws. The second is an Aristotelian story on which the laws of physics are necessary but are conditional on the natures of things (e.g., if x is an electron, it behaves thus-and-so), and there could have been other things in the universe with other natures (e.g., shmelectrons instead of electrons) and then other laws--those with antecedents concerning the things with the other natures--would have been relevant.

The first approach raises a problem of explanation: Why are these the laws? The second approach reduces the explanatory question to a different explanatory question that we had anyway: Why are these the entities that exist?

In ethics and epistemology there are two options that can't be taken seriously in physics. One might, for instance, be a subjectivist of some stripe about the parameters (say, by being a subjectivist about all of ethics or epistemology, or just about the parameters). Or one might try to bring in vagueness to solve the problem--maybe it's vague at what point the needs of a larger number of strangers take precedence over a smaller number of cousins.

Vagueness does not, I think, solve the problem. For even if it's vague what the parameters are, it's not completely vague. It's non-vaguely true, for instance, that one should save a billion innocent strangers over one close relative. And subjectivism gives up too quickly.

It would be nice if one could give the same account of the free parameters problem in all three disciplines. Some accounts do not have much hope of doing that. For instance, one might solve the free parameters problem in physics by supposing that there is a multiverse with many different laws, either selected at random or with all possible laws exhibited, and it's just rock bottom that these laws are the laws where they are laws. The idea that there would be such variation in the moral or epistemological laws, with no explanation of the variation, is very unattractive.

There is a uniform Aristotelian story about all three free parameter problems. The parameters are necessarily what they are given the natures of the beings (physical beings, moral agents and epistemic agents) involved. The explanatory burden then shifts to the question of why these are the beings that exist. There is also a uniform divine choice story: God sets the parameters in the laws of physics, ethics and epistemology in a way that makes for a particularly good universe.

But there are, of course, non-uniform stories. One might, for instance, take the Aristotelian story about laws of physics, and a divine choice story about ethics and epistemology. But uniform stories are to be preferred.

Deontology and anti-utilitarian promises

Assume deontology. Can one make a promise so strong that one shouldn't break it even if breaking it saves a number of lives? I don't know for sure, but there are cases where such promises would be useful, assuming deontology.

Fred needs emergency eye-surgery. If he doesn't have the surgery this week, he will live, but he will lose sight in one eye. The surgery will be done under general anesthesia, and if Fred is not brought out of the general anesthesia he will die. But there is a complication. A terrorist has announced that if Fred lives out this week, ten random innocent people will die.

Prima facie here are the main options:

1. Kill Fred. Nine lives on balance are saved.
2. Do nothing. Fred loses binocular vision, and ten people are killed.
3. Perform surgery as usual. Fred's full vision is saved, he lives, but ten people are killed.

Deontological constraints rule out (1). Clearly, (3) is preferable to (2). But there is a problem with (3). Once Fred has received general anesthesia, positive actions are needed to bring him out of it. These positive actions will cause the terrorist to kill ten people. Thus, bringing Fred to consciousness requires an application of the Principle of Double Effect: the intended effect is bringing Fred back to consciousness and keeping him from dying; an unintended side-effect is the terrorist's killing of ten. But as it stands, the proportionality condition in Double Effect fails: one should not save one person's life at the expense of ten others. So once Fred has received general anesthesia, Double Effect seems to prohibit bringing him out of it. But this means that there is no morally licit way to do (3), even though this seems the morally best of the unhappy options.

(A legalistic deontologist might try to suggest another option: Perform surgery, but don't bring Fred out of general anesthesia. The thought is that the surgery is morally permissible, and bringing Fred out of general anesthesia will be prohibited, but Fred's death is never intended. It is simply not prevented, and the reason for not preventing it is not in order to save lives, but simply because Double Effect prohibits us from bringing Fred out of general anesthesia. The obvious reason why this sophistical solution fails is that there is no rational justification for the surgery if Fred is't going to be brought back to consciousness. I am reminded of a perhaps mythical Jesuit in the 1960s who would suggest to a married woman with irregular cycles that worked poorly with rhythm--or maybe NFP--that she could go on the Pill to regularize her cycles in order to make rhythm/NFP work better, and that once she did that, she wouldn't need rhythm/NFP any more. That's sophistical in a similar way.)

What we need for cases like this is promises that bind even at the expense of lives. Thus, the anesthesiologist could make such a strong promise to bring Fred back. As a result, Double Effect is not violated in solution (3), because proportionality holds: granted, on balance nine lives are lost, but also a promise is kept.

In practice, I think this is the solution we actually adopt. Maybe we do this through the Hippocratic Oath, or perhaps through an implicit taking on of professional obligations by the anesthesiologist. But it is crucial in cases like the above that such promises bind even in hard cases where lives hang on it.

All that said, the fact that it would be useful to have promises like this does not entail that there are promises like that. Still, it is evidence for it. And here we get an important metametaethical constraint: metaethical theories should be such that the usefulness of moral facts be evidence for them.

Fundamentality and ungroundedness

I haven't been following the grounding literature, so this may be old hat, in which case I will be grateful for references.

The following seems pretty plausible:

1. p is fundamental if and only if p is ungrounded.

But I think (1) may be false. I will put the argument in tensed fashion, but it could also be done a bit more awkwardly in a four-dimensional setting.

Let's suppose that <I ought to respect other persons> is a fundamental moral truth. Call this truth R. But now I validly promise to respect other persons. Then R comes to be grounded in <I ought to keep my promises and I promised to respect other persons>. If (1) is true, then R continues to be true but ceases to be fundamental. That doesn't sound right. It seems to me that if R is ever a fundamental moral truth, then it is always a fundamental moral truth. After I have promised to respect other persons, R gained a ground but lost nothing of its fundamentality.

Maybe I can motivate my intuition a little more. It seems that R has a relevantly different status from the status had by S, the proposition <I ought to come to your house for dinner every night>, after I promise you to come to your house for dinner every night. Each of R and S is grounded by a proposition about promises, but intuitively the fundamentality-and-grounding statuses of R and S are different. A sign (but only a sign--we want to avoid the conditional fallacy) of the difference is that R would still be true were the proposition about promises false. Another sign of the difference is that <I ought to respect you> is overdeterminingly grounded in <I ought to respect all persons> and <I promised to respect all persons and I ought to keep my promises>, while it is false that <I ought to come for dinner tomorrow night> is overdeterminingly grounded in <I ought to come for dinner every night> and <I promised to come for dinner every night and I ought to keep my promises>. The latter is not a case of overdetermination.

The above example is controversial, and I can't think of any noncontroversial ones. But it seems plausible that we should be open to phenomena like the above. Such prima facie possibilities suggest to me that ungroundedness is a negative property, while fundamentality is something positive. Normally, fundamental truths are also ungrounded. But they don't lose their fundamentality if in some world they happen to be grounded as well.

A somewhat tempting way to keep the above intuition while maintaining the idea that fundamentality is to drop the irreflexivity of grounding and say that:

2. p is fundamental if and only if p grounds p.

Then we could say that R is overdeterminingly grounded by a proposition about promises as well as by R itself, while S is only grounded by a proposition about promises and not by S. And in ordinary language we do sometimes use expressions like "p because p" to express some kind of fundamentality of p. I am not that happy with this solution, but can't think of another one that keeps the idea that fundamentality is defined in terms of grounding. Of course, one could take fundamentality to be fundamental.

Expressivism and non-doxastic propositional attitudes

One can fear that a certain medical procedure is wrong, one can hope that one's musical composition is beautiful, one can wish that a certain action be permissible, one can intend that one's children will make the right choices, one can be horrified that someone has committed a murder[note 1], one can promise that one will gain the contract in a morally licit way, one can rejoice that the expensive painting one has commissioned is good, etc. All of these are propositional attitudes. But the objects of propositional attitudes are propositions. Hence, that a medical procedure is wrong and that one's musical composition is beautiful (and and so on) are propositions, and expressivism is false.

Two questions about identity

Here is an interesting line of thought.

Consider these two questions:

1. What is it for x and y to be identical?
2. What necessary and sufficient conditions can be given for a person to be identical with a person?

These two questions seem respectively exactly parallel to:

3. What is it for an action to be permissible?
4. What necessary and sufficient conditions can be given for a killing of a person to be permissible?

Here, (3) is a metaethics question while (4) is an applied ethics question.

One way to notice the difference I'd like to highlight between (3) and (4) is to consider the kinds of answers one might get. For instance, on a fairly standard natural law theory, the answer to (3) is that an action is permissible if and only if it does not conflict with one's nature, while the answer to (4) is, perhaps, that the killing be a proportionate act of justice or self-defense and not otherwise impermissible. On a Kantian theory, the answer to (3) is that an action is permissible if and only if it treats no person as a mere means. But the answer to (4) may be exactly like the natural law answer. On a divine command theory, the answer to (3) is that what makes an action permissible is its not being forbidden by God, but again the answer to (4) might just like on the other theories.

Observe, thus, what we are very unlikely to get from standard answers to (4): we are very unlikely to find out what the permissibility of a killing consists in. If we want an answer to that question, the natural lawyer will say that the permissibility of a killing consists in its comformability to our nature, the Kantian that it consists in its not treating anyone as a mere means, and the divine command theorists that it consists in its not being forbidden by God. None of these answers will answer the applied ethics question we want, as these answers are at too high a level of generality: we can replace "killing" by any other action type, and they remain applicable.

Now go back to the metaphysics. I have no idea how to answer (1). It's hard to think of anything more fundamental than identity to answer it in terms of. But I think the analogy with the ethics question suggests this. If we can get a substantive answer to (2), it's not going to be an answer to the question of what identity of persons consists in. It's simply going to be an answer as to what interesting necessary and sufficient conditions for identity are in the special case where it is given that the relata are persons.

If we want to know what the identity of persons (or at least finite persons) consists in, the correct answer will not be so informative: what makes person a be identical with person b is that (i) a is a person, (ii) b is a person, and (iii) Iab, where "Iab" is a stand-in for whatever identity in general consists in. I have no idea what "Iab" will say, but I know that it won't say anything about memories, gradual replacement of cells, etc. For, "Iab" is the general account of identity, and that is beyond the details of particular kinds of beings.

This line of thought is attractive, but resistable. One might instead insist that identity is something different in different types of beings. (This may or may not involve the further step of accepting a relative identity theory.) Here, the "types" could be categories—substances, accidents, relations, etc. Or they could be kinds—dogs, persons, photons, electromagnetic fields, etc. I prefer the first option, but what I say applies in both cases. One way to flesh out such views is with a theory of analogy. There is no one thing that identity consists in: there is a relation between a substance and substance, and a relation between an accident and an accident, and so on, and these are all analogous (maybe one of them is focal?). Or if one prefers the second type of "type", one might say: there is a relation between a dog and a dog, and a relation between a person and a person, and so on, and these are all analogous.

On this kind of view, we might well have something substantive to say about what identity between, say, a person and a person consists in, which does not reduce simply to saying: this is a person, and this is a person, and this equals this. I think very naturally such a view will call for a typed logic. (Query to self: In a typed logic of this sort, should there be a quantification over types of quantification?)

I wonder if the argument of my recent AJP paper on diachronic identity is vulnerable to this sort of view. Quite possibly. But I still think the reduction of diachronic to synchronic identity that I perform in that paper is plausible.

Divine Command Metaethics

The following simple and valid argument came out of discussions with Mark Murphy (who has a forthcoming book that contains related arguments, though perhaps not this one).

According to the identity version of Divine Command Metaethics (IDCM), to be obligated to A is to be commanded to A by God (or to be willed to A by God or to be commanded to A by a loving God--details of this sort won't matter). But:

1. If p explains x's being F, and to be F is the same as to be G, then p explains x's being G.
2. My being commanded by God to follow Christ explains my being obligated to follow Christ.
3. It is not the case that my being commanded by God to follow Christ explains my being commanded by God to follow Christ.
4. Therefore, it is false that to be obligated to A is the same as to be commanded by God to A. (By 1-3)

And so IDCM is false.

The argument more generally shows that no normative-level answer to a "Why am I obligated to A?" question can provide a property identical with being obligated. Thus, sometimes at least the answer to "Why am I obligated to A?" is that Aing maximizes utility. Hence, by an exactly parallel argument, being obligated to A is not the same as having A as one's utility maximizing option.

The argument is compatible with constitution versions of DCM on which the property of being obligated to A is constituted by the property of being commanded to A. But such theorists then have the added complication of explaining what the constitution relation means here, over and beyond bidirectional entailment (after all, many non-divine-command theorists will agree that necessarily x is obligated to A iff God wills x to A).

An argument against a metaethical naturalism

Consider this metaethical naturalist view:

1. Every moral property is identical with a natural property.

Here is a simple argument against this. Let M be a very general moral property like having at least one obligation or not being morally guilty of anything (the argument doesn't work for all moral properties, but does work for these two). Then:

2. (Premise) For any natural property N, it is possible for there to be a being that lacks N but has M.
3. Therefore, M is not identical with any natural property.
4. (Premise) M is a moral property.
5. Therefore, there is a moral property that is not identical with a natural property.

The controversial premise is (2). One way to (2) is this. We can imagine a non-natural agent that lacks all natural properties but nonetheless has M. We can imagine non-material beings that have no energy, no charge, that do not occupy space and time, but that, nonetheless, have moral properties like M.

But there is, I think, an interesting response to the argument. Maybe a property P can be natural in a being x but not natural in a different being x. For instance, the property of being a cause might be a natural property of a physical event, but a non-natural property of a supernatural being. Thus, one might argue that our non-natural being x that has M but "lacks all natural properties" can still have P, because P might be natural in us, but non-natural in x.

If so, then (1) should be modified to:

6. Every moral property is identical with a property that is natural as found in beings like us.

Or, even more cautiously, acknowledging that there might be moral properties that a being like us cannot have, but that a supernatural being can have (e.g., if A is some action completely beyond our capabilities, then we cannot be obligated to do A, but a supernatural being that promised to do A can be obligated to do A):

7. Every moral property of a being like us is identical with a property that is natural as found in beings like us.

But (7) is subject to a worry. If the argument is right, then moral properties like being obligated to do something or not being guilty of anything can only be identical with those properties natural in us that a radically supernatural moral agent could also have. Those would be complexes of very general properties like being a cause, but not of properties like having a brain. This constrains the ingredients for a naturalist metaethics to a subclass of the natural properties—namely, those that radically supernatural moral agents could have—and thereby makes naturalist metaethics harder. And the idea that naturalness is relative to the being in which the property is found is going to be at least somewhat controversial.

The same argument applies in the case of mental properties.

Cognitivist normative and metaethical relativism

Cognitivist normative moral relativism is the thesis that for all x and A:

1. x morally ought to A if and only if x believes that she[note 1] morally ought to A.

(Notice that one then has to drop "ought implies can".) Cognitivist normative moral relativism is a thesis at the normative level that tells us what, in fact, is obligatory.
Cognitivist metaethical moral relativism wants to add to (1) a parallel account of what it is to have a moral ought. I want to spend this post thinking about whether this can be done. The simplest attempt is:

2. What it is for it to be the case that x morally ought to A is for x to believe that she morally ought to A.

But this is viciously circular, since "morally ought" appears on both sides of the definition.
But perhaps there is some way of redescribing the belief without mentioning its content. Maybe, for instance, there is some "pragmatic" account of what it is to believe that one morally ought to A in terms of patterns of emotion and behavior. But that threatens to become a non-cognitive account, and it is cognitivist moral relativism that we're looking at. (Maybe, though, one has a pragmatic account of all belief and cognition? If so, then maybe one can run this line.)
Or maybe there is some other "ought" that one can put in the definiens in (2). Perhaps, what it is for it to be the case that x morally ought to A is for x to believe that she simply ought to A, or for x to believe that she all things considered ought to A. Let's take the second option for definiteness—any similar proposal will have the same problem.
Then, the belief that one morally ought to A and the belief that one all things considered ought to A either are or are not the same belief. If they are the same belief, our modification of (2) remains circular, since "all things considered" is just a synonym for "morally". And if they are not the same belief, then we get an account that surely conflicts with (1). For if they are not the same belief, then someone could believe that she morally ought to A without believing that she ought all things considered to A. By the analogue of (2), it is not the case that she morally ought to A, and by the analogue of (1), it is the case that she morally ought to A.
So, it is difficult to come up with a cognitivist relativistic metaethical theory that neatly matches (1). One might give up on cognitivism, but then one needs to modify (1), since (1) commits one to beliefs about what one morally ought. The other move is to accept (1) but couple it with a non-relativistic metaethics. For instance, it is prima facie coherent to conjoin (1) with:

3. What it is for x to morally ought to A is for God to command x to A.

If one wants one's normative ethics to hold necessarily, one should then say that necessarily God commands everybody who is capable of moral beliefs to do what they believe they ought to do and that he commands nothing that goes beyond that. Such a metaethically absolutist normative relativism is fairly coherent, but also not plausible. Why think that God commands this and nothing beyond this? Similarly with other views, like natural law or virtue ethics, that one can plug in metaethically. The resulting theory may be coherent, but it does not appear plausible.
But there is one version of the theory that is kind of interesting. Suppose that

4. Necessarily, if God made persons other than himself, then out of a concern for their moral life he made them in such a way that they believe that they are morally omniscient, where x is morally omniscient provided that (x believes that she ought to A) if and only if x ought to A, and x knows that she ought to A if and only if x believes that she ought to A.

One could couple (4) with any metaethics compatible with theism, and then one gets (1) as a consequence. Of course, on its face, (4) appears pretty implausible when conjoined with a non-relativistic metaethics. There seems to be too much moral disagreement. To make (4) plausible on non-relativistic metaethics, one might have to combine (4) with a view on which people have all sorts of moral beliefs that they apparently don't know about. But notice that at this point we've departed quite far from the spirit of relativism.

Divine command metaethics

Divine command metaethics (DCM) says that

1. the obligatory is defined as what God commands.

(Variants on which the obligatory is defined as what God wills can be handled in the same way.) The following question now seems to me to be quite important. How does the word "God" function in DCM?

Option 1: "God" is a proper name of a particular individual. Then, DCM licenses the following surprising per impossibile counterfactual:

2. If the cosmos were created by an essentially omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, perfectly good, loving, unique, infinite, and necessarily existing (I will abbreviate such a list as "omni-omni") creator other than God, then there would be no duty to obey this creator.

This counterfactual is surprising, because it makes very puzzling why it is that we have a duty to obey God, even though we would have no duty to obey an omni-omni creator other than God. The answer cannot be grounded in any of the attributes of God, since (per impossibile) the omni-omni creator other than God would have all of the same attributes.

In other words, a DCM where "God" is a proper name is implausible.

Option 2: "God" is a definite description. Presumably, then, it is a description such that it is a conceptual truth that any omni-omni creator is God. (If not, just throw enough attributes into the "omni-omni" list to make that be true.) But if so, then the DCM claim is basically that the obligatory is what is commanded by a being who satisfies D, where D is some part of the "omni-omni creator" description. If so, then we have a problem identified in an excellent paper by MacIntyre: Exactly which attributes are a part of D? This problem is not unanswerable, perhaps, but it is very difficult.