Lecture 23: The Objectivity or Subjectivity of Morality

J. L. Mackie – “The Subjectivity of Values” Thomas Nagel – “Ethics”

1 Agenda

1. J. L. Mackie 2. Thomas Nagel 3. Ethics versus Metaethics 4. What Does it Mean for Morality to be Objective? 5. Argument from Relativity 6. Argument from Queerness

2 J. L. Mackie

• John Leslie Mackie (1917 – 1981) • Australian philosopher from Sydney. • Interested in metaphysics, philosophy of language, ethics, metaethics, and the philosophy of religion. • Professor of philosophy at the University of Otago in New Zealand from 1955 to 1959. The Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney from 1959 to 1963. Chair of philosophy in the University of York from 1963-1967. 3 Thomas Nagel

• 1931 – present • Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University. • Works in political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. • PhD from Harvard.

4 Ethics versus Metaethics

• First order moral questions concern how you ought to act. (Theoretical and Practical Ethics) • Second order moral questions concern the nature of morality. For example, is morality objective? (Metaethics) • Are first order and second order moral questions completely independent?

5 What Does it Mean for Morality to be Objective? • Mackie says that when he is denying the objectivity of morality, he is denying that any categorical imperative is objectively valid. “The objective values which I am denying would be action-directing absolutely, not contingently… upon the agent’s desires and inclinations” (2). • Mackie understands himself to be espousing an error theory, namely “a theory that although most people in making moral judgments implicitly claim… to be pointing to something objectively prescriptive, these claims are all false” (3).

6 Argument from Relativity

• There is much disagreement and variation across (and even within) cultures and time. Is this evidence that morality is not objective? • Disagreement itself doesn’t necessarily indicate relativity. After all, people disagree about scientific facts (people used to think the Earth was flat). • Mackie argues that moral disagreement reflects not “speculative inferences or explanatory hypotheses based on inadequate evidence” as in the scientific cases, but “people’s adherence to and participation in different ways of life” (3).

7 Argument from Queerness

• Objective moral facts, if they were to exist, would be metaphysically queer, and do not seem to correspond to any object or property in the world. • Compare, for instance, a candidate moral fact such as “Slavery is wrong.” with the fact, “The Empire State Building is 1,454 feet tall.” Being 1,454 feet tall is a property in the world, but where can you locate the property of rightness or wrongness?

8 Argument from Queerness

• Moral facts also seem to impose a demand on us to act in a particular way, but this is also very strange. Facts alone do not prescribe actions or motivate us to act. • “Something’s being good both tells the person who knows this to pursue it and makes him pursue it. An objective good would be sought by anyone who was acquainted with it… just because the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it. Similarly, if there were objective principles of right and wrong, any wrong (possible) course of action would have not- to-be-doneness somehow built into it” (Mackie 5). 9 Objectivity of Moral Reasoning

• Nagel responds to Mackie’s argument from queerness by arguing that the objectivity of morality does not depend on the metaphysical existence of moral properties, but rather on the success of impersonal practical reasoning. • “The objectivity of moral reasoning does not depend on its having an external reference. There is no moral analogue of the external world—a universe of moral facts that impinge on us causally. Even if such a supposition made sense, it would not support the objectivity of moral reasoning” (668).

10 Objectivity of Moral Reasoning

“The standpoint from which one assesses one’s choices after this step back is not just first-personal. One is suddenly in the position of judging what one ought to do, against the background of all one’s desires and beliefs, in a way that does not merely flow from those desire and beliefs but operates on them—by an assessment that should enable anyone else also to see what is the right thing for you to do against that background” (674).

11 Objectivity of Moral Reasoning

“One is trying to decide what, given the inner and outer circumstances, one should do—and that means not just what I should do but what this person should do. The same answer should be given to that question by anyone to whom the data are presented, whether or not he is in your circumstances and shares your desires. That is what gives practical reason its generality” (674).

12 Just Do More First-Order Moral Thinking

“Just as there was no guarantee at the beginnings of cosmological and scientific speculation that we humans had the capacity to arrive at objective truth beyond the deliverances of sense-perception – that in pursuing it we were doing anything more than spinning collective fantasies – so there can be no decision in advance as to whether we are or are not talking about a real subject when we reflect and argue about morality. The answer must come from the results themselves. Only the effort to reason about morality can show us whether it is possible – whether, in thinking about what to do and how to live, we can find methods, reasons, and principles whose validity does not have to be subjectively or relativistically qualified” (669).

13 Just Do More First-Order Moral Thinking

“Attempts to get entirely outside of the object language of practical reasons, good and bad, right and wrong, and to see all such judgments as expressions of a contingent, nonobjective perspective will eventually collapse before the independent force of the first-order judgments themselves” (669).

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