Suppose that someone notes that the digits of π starting at some position n start looking like they have an odd pattern, and it occurs to someone to turn them into ASCII characters (three digits at a time, say). The result is a surprising English list:
- Murder, cruelty, torture, unjustified promise breaking, ….
The list goes on in the same vein, until after a long time comes a period.
Moral philosophers think hard, and realize that anything that is clearly wrong is on this list, that nothing on the list is such as to be clearly non-wrong, and indeed that the Prohibition Hypothesis that necessarily π at position n has a list of all and only the morally prohibited actions is quite plausible. Most moral philosophers end up accepting the Prohibition Hypothesis, and applied ethics enters a golden age where we are able to figure out whether some action is wrong simply by deciding whether it falls under some description on the list.
Obviously, the Prohibition Hypothesis still presents philosophical puzzles. Is this just random choice? Is there a God who has power even over the digits of π? Is English metaphysically special?
But now imagine that some metaethicists hypothesize that what it is for an action to be prohibited is for it to fall under one of the descriptions in the list in π starting at position n.
I think this metaethical hypothesis is something we would have good reason to reject. That growing people for organs falls under one of the descriptions on the list (say, the first one) gives us good reason to think that growing people for organs is wrong. But it’s surely not what makes growing people for organs wrong. For what makes growing people for organs wrong surely has nothing to do with what the digits of π are.
How could we back up this intuition? It is tempting to say something like this:
- That an action falls under a description in the list at position n in π does not give me a decisive moral reason to omit the action.
But that begs the question. On the metaethical hypothesis in question, what it is for there be to a decisive moral reason for ϕing is for non-ϕing to fall under a description in the list.
Is there a way to argue against the metaethical hypothesis in a non-question-begging way? I think so.
There is a certain set E of emotional attitudes that is appropriately had to the fact that ϕing is prohibited.
The attitudes in E are not always appropriately had to the fact that ϕing falls under a description in the list in π starting at position n.
Given 3 and 4, we should not say that what it is for an action to be prohibited is for it to be on the list. We are not begging the question here. The question of what emotional attitudes are appropriate is not in general a question of what is morally obligatory. Note also that one can hold 3 and 4 while accepting the Prohibition Hypothesis. For emotional attitudes are hyperintensional. Every theist agrees that a child is smiling if and only if God knows that a child is smiling, but that a child is smiling and that God knows that a child is smiling do not appropriately give rise to the exact same emotional attitudes.
The above suggests that we have an emotional test for a metaethical theory: when the theory claims that what it is for an action to be prohibited (or required or whatever) is for it to satisfy some predicate F, we can criticize the theory if we can plausibly argue that different emotional attitudes are appropriate to the action’s being prohibited (or required or whatever) and to its satisfying F.
I suspect one can run an argument against divine command theory along these lines. The appropriate emotional attitudes (say, of disapproval) with regard to ϕing in light of ϕing being morally prohibited are different from the attitudes with regard to ϕing in light of God commanding us not to ϕ.
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