We've been discussing the status of morality, the status of moral judgements. And I've introduced three broad brush approaches to answering questions about the status of morality. The first approach is objectivism, so the idea that our moral judgements are about objective matters of fact. So as a comparison, think about our empirical judgments about the observable world around us, or the world as is discovered by science. So, those seem to be, the empirical judgments seem to be objective. The objectivism about morality says that moral judgments are also objective in a similar way. The second view is relativism, so, the relativist idea is that our moral judgements are true or false, that only relative to something, like our culture, our feelings. So as a rough analogy, think again about our statements of law, like our traffic laws, one must drive on the left, it's true relative to one country, false relative to another country. So the moral relativist thinks something similar is the case for moral judgements, they're true relative to one culture, or one person's feelings, but possibly false relative to another culture, or another person's feelings. The final view that I introduced was emotivism. So this was the idea that our moral judgements aren't the expression of beliefs about objective or relative facts, but rather the expression of our moral emotions. The expression of our approval or disapproval about something. Which of these views is right? Which one do you think is right? This is a really large question, one that we're not going to settle today. It's the foundational question of an area of moral philosophy called meta ethics, the area of philosophy that I work most on. And in the contemporary discussion we see all sorts of different theories that pick up on one or another strand from these three basic approaches. So today were not going to settle the huge question of which ones the right one? Maybe these three, none of them is the right one, but we need some refined more nuanced view that overlaps one, or more, these views, one or more of these basic approaches. But what we can do today is think about one main objection to each theory. And by thinking about one main objection to each theory we can refine our views towards these theories. Are they a good starting point to work out further, or are they the beginning of a dead end that is going to go nowhere. So, it's good philosophical methodology to think about your preferred view about something, and then whatever you take to be the best objection, is it possible to overcome that objection? So what I'm going to do in the rest of this lecture is to introduce one main objection to each of these theories, and think a little bit about whether that objection undermines the theory. Okay, so here's an objection to objectivism. Remember the objectivist thinks our moral judgements are the sorts of things that can be true or false, and when they're true, they're objectively true. Like the empirical judgements made in science are objectively true. But you might think, well, there's an important disanalogy between our moral judgements and our empirical judgements. When somebody disagrees with us about some empirical matter, there is a method that we could use to go out and verify the right opinion. We can observe reality and the determine whether it was indeed sunny in Edenburg, for example, or whether the earth indeed does rotate around the sun. These sorts of judgements look like they admit of empirical verification through some sort of observational method. The same doesn't seem to be true in the case of morality. With a moral judgement, like genocide is morally abhorrent, or polygamy is morally dubious. If somebody disagrees with you it seems difficult to know what method we would use to settle the issue. How do we figure out who's right about the issue? It doesn't look like we can observe the world and find the moral facts in the same way that we can with the empirical facts. So, this basic disanalogy is the challenge to objectivism. Can we objectivists explain this basic disanalogy? The second objection I want to talk about is an objection to relativism, remember that the relativist thinks that our moral judgments are true or false. But they're only true or false relative to somebody's culture, or someone's individual subjective moral feelings. But if that's right, it seems like it's hard to make sense of moral progress. So, we think that morality, humanity gets better at being moral in certain way. So, for example in the past, people thought that slavery was perfectly fine, but now we think that slavery is morally abhorrent. That seems like a piece of moral progress, we've gone from a bad view to a good view. But if the Relativist view is right, somebody in the past said slavery's morally okay, that could be true relative to that culture. Whereas somebody now that says slavery's morally wrong, that could be true relative to our culture. And there's sort of difference in opinion, but there's no progress in opinion, so, the basic challenge here for the relativism is to explain the possibility of more progress. The final objection I want to discuss is an objection to emotivism. Remember that emotivism is the idea that our moral judgments aren't beliefs about matters of fact, either objective or relative, they're expressions of our emotions, our motor reactions to things. They're like saying, boo for polygamy, or hooray for charity. The challenge this view faces is that it looks like we sometimes reason our way to our moral views, our moral opinions. But if Emotivism is right, then our moral opinions are just an emotive reactions that are not recent response to questions about morality. So think about that example of Oedipus' sleeping his mother, Jocasta, was morally bad. You might have initially thought, that's right, but then, reasoning, well, Oedipus didn't know it was his mother, and so it wasn't culpable what he did, come to think, well, it wasn't morally bad. So that kind of transition, changing your mind through reason, is really hard for the emotivist to explain. Because the emotivist thinks that the ultimate judgements that you make, when you make moral judgements, they're a emotive reactions, not reasoned responses to beliefs about the way things are with morality. So the basic challenge to emotivism is to explain how we can reason to our moral views I've discussed challenges for each of the three views that we've discussed. So the challenge to emotivism was to explain the difference in our methodology in determining whether something's right or wrong, and determining whether some empirical judgement is true or false. There seems to be an important difference there. The objection to relativism was to make sense of the possibility of moral progress, and the objection to emotivisim was to explain how it's possible that we reason to our moral opinions sometimes. Can these objections be met? Of course, this is where our philosophy debates, various objections and responses, and tries to develop new theories. For example, the objectivist could argue that sometimes we do use empirical observation to determine what's right and wrong. For example, many objectivist think that what's right and wrong is determined by what maximizes overall happiness, and we can go out and measure different policies as to whether they promote, or don't promote, overall happiness. That's something that you can observe. Alternatively, the objectivists could say, look, in the case of Mathematics, we think there's an objectively true or false answer to many questions. But we don't think you can observe that answer, not with your eyes and your ears, but we have powers of rational reflection, or intuition, that we can come to figure out the objective of that answer. So these are a couple of the types of responses the objectivists might give to that objection. The relativists, the problem with the relativists was of course they can't make sense of moral progress, that was the claim. But relativists argue that different cultures overlap, and so as long as we could see, for example the slavery in America in the 18th century as part of our cultural heritage now. You can see that cultures overlapping with our culture, and so there is moral disagreement there because there’s cultural overlap, it’s not two radically different cultures. So that’s a possible response by the relativist to the injection of moral progress. Finally, the emotivist can say, remember that the objection was that the emotivist can't make sense about the way we reason to our moral opinions. But the emotivist could say, look, some of our evaluative reactions to things are in the space of reasons. They are the sorts of things we can reason to. For example, if you prefer A to B and B to C, but you prefer C to A, there's something wrong with your preferences, they're irrational. This is something that's well studied by theorists of preference, theorists of rational preference and choice. That seems like the sort of thing that you could then reason your way to say, well, I need to change my preference about A and C somehow. To sort this out so that it's not irrational. But those preferences, they are beliefs in objective matters of fact, or relative to matters of facts, they're a valuative attitude. So if you thought of our moral attitudes, our moral judgments as preferences, and when we make moral claims, we're expressing a certain kind of moral preference rather than just an emotive reaction. Then they maybe they emotivism this is more fine version of emotivism can answer that challenge that we can make sense of the way reason are more of views. So again, that's just one possible response to the objection I mention for each of these three theories. You'll have to think to yourself about whether you think those responses are compelling, or whether there's then counter objections that come up because of the response, but this is the methodology of good philosophy. Thinking about how we can refine our views, refine our initial intuitions and opinions in light of the types of objections that people who have different views from us would raise in order to get closer and closer to what we think is the right view about the status of morality. So, that's what I wanted to talk to you about today by considering the three theories, and then also considering the objections. It's been a pleasure talking to you about the status of morality. These lectures have been free and open to the public and so I was wondering if I could ask a favor of you back. My favorite charity is a charity called Partners in Health, who's doing some amazing work in public health and health care access in places like Rwanda, and Malawi, and Mexico. So if you'd like to give a little tip to this lecture, you could click on the link to www.pih.org and give a small donation to Partners in Health, I would really appreciate it. Thank you.
