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Sam's avatar

Thanks for the post. It was an interesting read. I did, however, think that perhaps you were slightly missing the point of Henry’s tweet (full disclosure I am an old friend of his). My immediate thought was that his point was more pedagogical than metaethical. I also teach philosophy, though at secondary school rather than university, and his tweet chimed with me. What I find interesting (perhaps even ‘bizarre’) is the way that many students are ready and willing to engage in pretty subtle reasoning at the metaethical level, following the line via Moore, Ayer, Hare, Gibbard, Mackie etc… to arrive at a considered anti-realism; but those same students on normative questions seem to be not only absolutely certain of their views but often unwilling to debate them and can even be hostile to intellectual challenges. While I appreciate anecdotes are not data, this certainly has been a pretty common experience for me over the last 15 years of teaching moral philosophy to adolescents. Perhaps the issue being highlighted by Henry isn’t revealing some analytic contradiction, but a tension in how students reason in the different domains of metaethics and normative ethics?

Wading into metaethical waters (a risky endeavour, I am hardly a strong swimmer), I would say that, as a moral realist, I do struggle to comprehend how anti-realists justify specific normative claims. This is particularly so on what you highlight as the question of scope. I certainly don’t doubt that the conative aspect of a moral judgement allows for a subject to hold views that are stance-dependent and to varying degrees of importance. Where I struggle is in justification of the universal scope (or prescriptive element) characteristic of moral claims. I (and I think most non-philosophers) have an intuition that there is an important difference between me saying “I strongly desire that you abstain from acting in this way” and “for you to act in this way is morally wrong”. I also have a strong intuition (again I think shared by most non-philosophers) that a claim for some normative prescription of universal scope should be justifiable. As the moral anti-realist lacks any stance independent element they have nothing but the conative element (whether personal, or culturally augmented) underpinning their expression of a claim’s universal scope. However this conative element lacks the ability to justify the universal scope being asserted, as the desire of a subject (no matter how strongly felt) cannot bridge the gap between ‘I strongly desire all do x’ and ‘x is morally mandated’. While I agree with you that there is no analytic contradiction here, and no necessary cognitive dissonance, I do think this is a problem. Perhaps the best way to describe it would be, following Philippa Foot’s terminology, a mistake of practical reasoning. To justify a universal scope prescription is not a task that can be performed without some recourse to something stance-independent; on the other hand to claim that we do not need to justify a claim of universal scope is to fall short of the normativity moral claims require.

Apricity's avatar

“it’s a bit odd to think that whether an action is right or wrong depends on the standards of the person performing the action (or their culture), but to then be outraged by people acting on those standards: after all, they’re acting in a morally acceptable way! So why be outraged by their disagreements?”

It depends, I suppose, on why they’re agent relativists. If they think it’s the correct semantic account of public language, they can coldly affirm agent relativism and prioritise their cares and concerns over what’s “morally acceptable”.

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