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Normative Qualia and a Robust Moral Realism

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Normative Qualia and a Robust Moral Realism Normative Qualia and a Robust Moral Realism By Sharon Hewitt A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy New York University September, 2008 ___________________________ Thomas Nagel UMI Number: 3329889 Copyright 2008 by Hewitt, Sharon All rights reserved INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ______________________________________________________________ UMI Microform 3329889 Copyright 2008 by ProQuest LLC All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. _______________________________________________________________ ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 © Sharon Hewitt All Rights Reserved, 2008 To an Irishman, a Scotsman, an Englishman, and a Breton iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am very thankful to my advisors, Thomas Nagel, Sharon Street, and David Velleman, for their interest in this project, their generosity with their time and energy, and their always insightful criticisms. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Sharon, whose passion for metaethics first inspired my own. Many other people have also contributed to the refinement of the ideas in this dissertation through discussion and written feedback, including Yuval Avnur, Ned Block, Dana Evan, Don Garrett, Béatrice Longuenesse, Colin Marshall, John Richardson, Jacob Rosen, William Ruddick, Karl Schafer, Jonathan Simon, and Peter Unger. Derek Parfit provided particular help on that portion of Chapter 5 that addresses his writings on the Repugnant Conclusion. Jeff Sebo has been an invaluable conversation partner, not least because he has pushed me to live out the commitments of my view in a more consistent way. And, of course, I am heavily indebted to my most devoted opponent: Melis Erdur. I am grateful for the financial support I received at New York University through a MacCracken Fellowship and a Frankel Fellowship, and for the welcome and support I received as a pensionnaire étrangère at the Ecole normale supérieure. I am thankful to Caleb Miller, whose ethics class first introduced me to the joys of philosophy and whose encouragement and able advising led me to graduate school. iv Finally, I am deeply appreciative of the unfailing love and support of my parents, Herbert and Debra Hewitt, the encouragement and humor of my sisters, Rebecca Hewitt-Newson and Sarah Hewitt, and the ever-surprising companionship of Simon Biausse. v ABSTRACT This dissertation formulates and defends a version of moral realism capable of answering the major metaphysical and epistemological questions other realist theories have not: namely, “What makes it the case that our concept of goodness objectively applies to certain things in the world?” and “How can we know to which things it objectively applies?” To answer these questions, I propose a descriptive analysis of normative concepts: an analysis of intrinsic goodness and badness as phenomenal qualities of experience. I argue that all of our positive experiences share a common phenomenal quality that can only be accurately described in normative terms—as “goodness”—and that our negative experiences all share a phenomenal quality of badness. I claim that we acquire our concepts of intrinsic goodness and badness from our experience of these qualities, and that it is thus a conceptual truth that an experience that has one of these qualities is intrinsically good or bad. I address Moore’s Open Question Argument against such an analysis by arguing that, though the question of pleasure’s goodness has an open feel, two things explain this: (1) the fact that we have a concept of all-things-considered goodness which depends not just on a thing’s intrinsic goodness but also on its instrumental goodness, which is not knowable by reflection on the mere concepts involved, and (2) vi the fact that we easily mistake the goodness or badness we associate with pleasure for an intrinsic normative property of it. I go on to explain how the pro tanto goodness and badness of phenomenal experiences justify judgment-independent claims about which states of the world as a whole ought to be promoted, all things considered. I argue that to pursue anything but the greatest total balance of good over bad phenomenal experience for all subjects would be arbitrarily to ignore the normativity of some of these experiences. Finally, I defend the hedonistic utilitarian implications of this view against arguments that it conflicts with our moral intuitions, arguing that our intuitions are more consistent with the practice of hedonistic utilitarianism than is usually recognized. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv ABSTRACT vi INTRODUCTION 1 PART I: MOTIVATION FOR A ROBUST MORAL REALISM CHAPTER 1: THE IMPORTANCE OF MORAL REALISM 5 CHAPTER 2: INADEQUATE REALISMS 35 PART II: A ROBUST REALIST THEORY AND ITS METAETHICAL DEFENSE CHAPTER 3: NORMATIVE QUALIA 99 CHAPTER 4: ANALYTIC DESCRIPTIVISM 150 CHAPTER 5: FROM PRO TANTO GOODNESS TO GOODNESS ALL THINGS CONSIDERED 185 PART III: THE NORMATIVE ETHICAL DEFENSE INTRODUCTION TO PART III 244 CHAPTER 6: THE PRACTICE OF UTILITARIANISM 249 CHAPTER 7: THE PRACTICE OF HEDONISM 303 CONCLUSION 341 BIBLIOGRAPHY 342 viii INTRODUCTION The aim of this dissertation is to formulate and defend a version of moral realism that answers, at least in outline, the major metaphysical and epistemological questions that other recent realist theories have not: namely, “What makes it the case that our concept of goodness objectively applies to certain things in the world?” and “How can we know to which things it objectively applies?” To motivate this project, I provide two preliminary chapters. Chapter 1 is addressed to those who see little interest in tackling the metaphysical and epistemological questions of realism because they believe that some version of antirealism can preserve all of our everyday moral values, discourse, and motivation, with more ontological simplicity. I argue that accepting or rejecting the metaphysical and epistemological commitments of realism actually has implications for one’s motivational structure: belief in realism reduces perspectival bias in one’s motivations in a way that belief in antirealism does not. This makes the case for antirealism less conclusive. If we value the reduction of perspectival bias, then we should be interested in seeing whether there might be a version of realism with plausible answers to the metaphysical and epistemological questions realism poses. In Chapter 2, I explain why four types of currently defended realist theories— intuitionism, minimal realism, ideal-observer theory, and synthetic naturalism—are inadequate alternatives to antirealism. I follow this discussion with a list of four 1 criteria that a realist theory must meet if it is to be a plausible alternative to antirealism. These are the criteria for what I call a metaphysically and epistemologically “robust” realism. After these two preliminary chapters, I turn to formulating my realist view and defending it against metaethical objections. In Chapter 3, I explain the core claim of my realist view: that intrinsic goodness and badness just are phenomenal qualities of our experience and that our concepts of intrinsic goodness and badness actually come from our experience of these phenomenal qualities. I argue that all of our positive experiences (like pleasure and happiness) share a common phenomenal quality that can only be accurately described as “goodness,” and that all of our negative experiences (like pain and sadness) share a common phenomenal quality of badness. I go on to argue that, if intrinsic goodness and badness just are phenomenal qualities of experience, then the intrinsic goodness or badness of an experience that has one of these qualities is objective: i.e., it does not depend on our judgments about it. Chapter 4 has two aims. The first is to defend the claim that there is a conceptual connection between positive and negative phenomenal qualities and normativity. I defend this view against G. E. Moore’s famous Open Question Argument against analytic descriptivism. The second aim is to show how the conceptual connection I posit allows my view to meet the four criteria for a robust realism. 2 In Chapter 5, I explain some further details of my view: namely, the way in which, using only facts about the intrinsic goodness and badness of individual phenomenal experiences, it can justify claims about which states of the world as a whole are best, all things considered. The conclusion is a classical utilitarian one, but I discuss questions the answers to which utilitarians often take for granted. I ask whether one’s own normative phenomenology is truly normative for others and whether the value of normative phenomenology is strictly additive, and I answer both questions in the affirmative. Having defended my view from a metaethical standpoint, I spend the final two chapters of the dissertation defending its substantive normative implications. While I find the
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