Moral Truth and Hume’s Fork: The Prospects of Reconciliation by Clark Embleton A THESIS submitted to Oregon State University Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Honors Baccalaureate of Science in Physics (Honors Scholar) Presented May 27, 2020 Commencement June 2020 AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF Clark Embleton for the degree of Honors Baccalaureate of Science in Physics presented on May 27, 2020. Title: Moral Truth and Hume’s Fork: The Prospects of Reconciliation. Abstract approved:_____________________________________________________ Allen Thompson Hume’s division of truth into agreement with matters of fact or relations of ideas casts doubt on our capacity to have moral knowledge, as moral propositions do not seem to fall obviously into either category. This thesis looks at how two views, ‘descriptive moral functionalism’ and ‘moral concept essentialism’, try to account for moral truth as agreement to matter of fact and relations of ideas, respectively. Descriptive moral functionalism uses our folk- theoretic template of moral intuitions to try to fix the truth conditions for when a state of affairs possesses a moral property. Moral concept essentialism tries to find a place for moral truth among relations of ideas by appealing to the essences of concepts. I conclude that both views are unsatisfactory and that this should motivate us to look for other accounts of moral truth if we want to preserve our claim to moral knowledge. Key Words: Hume’s Fork, moral knowledge, truth, functionalism, essence Corresponding e-mail address: [email protected] ©Copyright by Clark Embleton May 27, 2020 Moral Truth and Hume’s Fork: The Prospects of Reconciliation by Clark Embleton A THESIS submitted to Oregon State University Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Honors Baccalaureate of Science in Physics (Honors Scholar) Presented May 27, 2020 Commencement June 2020 Honors Baccalaureate of Science in Physics project of Clark Embleton presented on May 27, 2020. APPROVED: _____________________________________________________________________ Allen Thompson, Mentor, representing the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion _____________________________________________________________________ Jonathan Kaplan, Committee Member, representing the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion _____________________________________________________________________ Joseph Orosco, Committee Member, representing the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion _____________________________________________________________________ Toni Doolen, Dean, Oregon State University Honors College I understand that my project will become part of the permanent collection of Oregon State University, Honors College. My signature below authorizes release of my project to any reader upon request. _____________________________________________________________________ Clark Embleton, Author Table of Contents 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 1 2. Moore’s Challenge .................................................................................................................................. 9 3. Descriptive Moral Functionalism ........................................................................................................ 18 3.1 Moral Functionalism ........................................................................................................................ 18 3.2 Supervenience and Descriptive Properties. ...................................................................................... 22 3.3 Putting Things Together ................................................................................................................... 26 3.4 What about Moore? .......................................................................................................................... 28 4. Trouble with Moral Functionalism ..................................................................................................... 30 4.1 Regress and Circularity .................................................................................................................... 30 4.2 Immaturity, Disagreement, Reference-Fixing, and the Input Clauses .............................................. 33 5. Moral Concept Essentialism ................................................................................................................ 37 5.1 The View and its Payoffs ................................................................................................................... 37 5.2 The Trouble with Moral Fixed Points having Framework Status ..................................................... 42 5.3 The Trouble with “worlds like ours” and “beings like us” .............................................................. 44 5.4 The Trouble with Moral Properties .................................................................................................. 45 5.5 Necessary Connections ..................................................................................................................... 47 7. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 51 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................................. 54 1. Introduction Normativity is entrenched in society as it guides our beliefs, actions, feelings, and language. We expect our beliefs to be based on evidence and feel more confident in our beliefs as the evidence accumulates. We strive to live up to moral codes, whether personal, cultural, or professional, and these codes are often reflected in laws and practices. When a tragedy occurs, we feel sorrow, and expect others to feel the same. If I point to a flying, feathered animal and call it a ‘dog’ you will be baffled, but if I call it a ‘bird’ you will think nothing of it. It goes without saying that norms are an indispensable part of human life. Morality is a species of the normative. We evaluate the rightness and wrongness of actions, compare the value of goods and evils, categorize people as virtuous and vicious, and decry violations of rights. Moral judgments are concerned with what ought to be the case and can be distinguished from judgments about what is the case. ‘People should not be discriminated against based on the color of their skin’ is a moral judgment, whereas ‘Humans have different colors of skin’ is a purely descriptive judgment. While both claims are widely accepted today, the claim that racism is wrong was denied by many for millennia. Do we know that racism is wrong? If we do possess that knowledge, which certainly seems to be the case, then our belief that racism is wrong must be true. Truth is a notoriously difficult topic1 that has engaged philosophers since the time of antiquity2. I will use Hume as an entry point into the topic of truth, as Hume captures what I take to be a commonsense view of truth. As will be shown, Hume’s view raises questions about the truth-aptness of moral judgments and, in turn, moral knowledge. A judgment is truth-apt if it can 1 For an introduction to the philosophical issues surrounding truth see Kirkham (1992). 2 See Szaif (2018) for a discussion of Plato and Aristotle’s views on truth. 1 bear a truth value of ‘true’ or ‘false’. For example, the belief that four is the sum of one and three seems truth-apt, whereas the desire to climb a mountain does not seem truth-apt. Hume, in both his Treatise and Enquiries, discusses truth as the object of reason: Reason is the discovery of truth or fals[e]hood. Truth or fals[e]hood consists in an agreement or disagreement either to the real relations of ideas, or to real existence and matter of fact. Whatever, therefore, is not susceptible of this agreement or disagreement, is incapable of being true or false, and can never be an object of our reason. Hume Treatise of Human Nature Book III, Part I, Sect. I All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact. Hume Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding [EHU] Sect. IV, Part I This division between relations of ideas and matters of fact has become known as Hume’s Fork because, according to Hume, a proposition3 is true if and only if it agrees with a real relation of ideas or a matter of fact. Judgments that concern relations of ideas are an “affirmation which is either intuitively or demonstratively certain… [and] …discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe”, whereas “the contrary of every matter of fact is still possible; because it can never imply a contradiction”.4 For example, ‘Thirteen is prime’ and ‘Bachelors are unmarried men’ are true propositions that concern relations of ideas. ‘Oregon is north of California’ is an example of a true proposition that concerns a matter of fact. Before discussing the challenge Hume’s Fork poses for ethical truth I want to expand on the distinction between matters of fact and relations of ideas. Much of what follows is drawn from Georges Dicker’s second chapter in Hume’s Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Introduction (Dicker 1998), which provides an exegesis of 3 At this stage, the term ‘proposition’ will simply stand