Metaethics is about what ethical claims mean, how they can
be “justified,” and how ethical reasoning ought to be conducted. Thomas Scanlon’s writing on metaethics has
become a verbal icon for the enterprise. Scanlon now has two books elaborating
his views, What We Owe to Each Other
and Being Realistic about Reasons. The first was reviewed with applause in
literary venues where philosophy is seldom seen, and one can only expect the
same of the second. Each book is a theoretical disappointment—no, the second is
a disaster--the first from lacunae the second tries to fill, the second from
the filling.[1]
In What We Owe to Each
Other Scanlon’s stalking horse is utilitarianism. The many variants of
utilitarianism share this much: they are voting theories, and so is Scanlon’s
alternative, absent some key features. In utilitarianism, every sentient creature,
or at least every human, has a stock of interests. Properly scaled, those are
voting stocks. Anyone’s action predictably affects some of the interests, or the
well-being, of some creatures. An action is permissible only if, among the
alternative available actions, it maximizes some aggregate of the interests of all
who may be affected by any of the available actions, so far as the actor can
estimate. That is the utilitarian schematic
for how the affected stocks are to be weighed in moral assessment of action. The specifics are contentious. How are pains
and pleasures and sorrows and joys to be compared across persons, let alone
persons and other animals, so that they can be aggregated? That issue aside, suppose we have a number for
each human state or well or mal being that takes account the diverse interests
of each human being. Should one try to maximize the total, the average, the
median well-being over all persons? Minimize the variance? Maximize something
under a constraint (e.g., a bound on the variance, or the Difference
Principle)? Count only changes to an individual’s interests that are above a
certain threshold? Order interests by
type, higher type trumping lower, as one might read Mill to suggest? The
utilitarian literature from Bentham on has this virtue: it takes these
questions seriously and offers answers, not the same answers, of course. These
are philosophers after all.
Scanlon’s theory is one piece of a different voting
theory. For any action one might do, the
deliberator and others may have reasons, conscious or not, why it should or
should not be done. The best of those reasons is decisive. Reasons are not to
be aggregated; the best reason wins, no matter how few people have it. Which
reasons count? Scanlon offers only this in general: We should seek to act only in accord with principles that
other people could not reasonably reject if they too sought principles others
could not reasonably reject. A reason
has moral bearing only if it is an application of such a principle.
One catch to Scanlon’s general schema for moral principles is
“reasonably,” which in this context is particularly flabby. We have pretty
clear notions of reasonable views in mathematics, less definite notions in
science, but in ethics “unreasonable” is more a slur than a methodological
complaint. Does Scanlon imagine a negotiation about which principles meet his
criteria, or a social survey to find nearly universal principles (they would be
few), or does he imagine principles that someone sincerely thinks others ought
to share? In the latter case, utilitarian principles have a vote. No one thinks
that the only reasons I can have for or against an action must be exclusively
about me. Indeed, if by the proper weighting of principles and reasons
utilitarian principles and reasons are the best, then Scanlon is committed to
utilitarianism, one step back.
So what then are the principles of ordering of reasons or
principles, and why? Scanlon does not say, only, examples aside, that the best
reason wins, winner take all. What then individuates
reasons: if your action will impoverish me and cause me an illness besides, is
that one reason or two? Scanlon doesn’t say, but in his voting scheme it
matters. The basic elements of the
theory are unspecified: by what clear principles are reasons to be weighed, and
why, what counts as a reason, how are reasons individuated? Almost all you
might want in a theory is unspecified. One would not want election rules so
vaguely posted.
The book has any number of appeals to quotidian examples
where one would not consider global consequences, or global good, or aggregate harms
and benefits. There are old saws: If a broadcasting engineer is painfully and
continuously injured by continuing shock during the broadcast of a sports
game—say Argentina versus Germany in the World Cup--and the only way to stop
his agony is to interrupt the electric current that is necessary to broadcast
the game, shouldn’t that be done—aren’t the enormous sum of annoyances to the
passions of millions of soccer fans outweighed by the one engineer’s acute
pain? But what would be said in this
kind of case by versions of utilitarianism in which what counts has thresholds,
or versions in which there are layers of goods and bads that trump others?
Should we not consider the number of people who might be killed in mad rages
and riots were the television to go off in the midst of the game? In any case
these examples can be bought cheap by either side. Being murdered is worse than
not having children. If you met a person with a remarkably infectious,
uncurable disease that renders all who catch it permanently sterile but is
otherwise asymptomatic, and you could not capture him and isolate him before he
spread it to the entire human population, would you kill him if you could?
If the aim is to articulate standards for correct norms, why
trifle with mundane examples, unless one is doing moral sociology from an
armchair? That question takes us to Scanlon’s more recent book, a defense of putting
weight on such examples, and, more broadly, a defense of metaethics as a
serious enterprise. Scanlon does not
fill all the gaps his first book left, but he addresses two major ones. The
claims of Being Realistic about Reasons
come down to these: there are true normative principles that are not just about
the best means to ends, and there is a method for discovering them. What is the argument?
Scanlon claims that there are various “domains” of inquiry.
Each domain has its own standards for seeking the truth in its domain.
Mathematics has its methods, empirical science has its methods, and, lo,
normative matters, moral matters in particular, have theirs. One domain may not
contradict, or, presumably, undermine, the methods and conclusions of
another. They are separate empires, contractually
at peace. This last I call Scanlon’s Rule. He continues with implausible
parallels between set theory (Scanlon was a logician in his youth) and
normative reasoning. Just as set
theorists may debate and disagree about, say, Zorn’s Lemma, so metaethicists
may debate and disagree fine points of the correct normative principles. Can
one seriously think that the reasoning in ethics and metaethics has the rigor
of mathematics? I can’t, and I doubt Scanlon does. Scanlon’s thesis is that
they share the same style, the same form viewed with sufficient abstraction. So,
with sufficient abstraction, do science and Cargo Cults. The intellectual legitimacy of metaethics
needs a better bolster.
The crucial point is Scanlon’s Rule. Scanlon’s Rule is pure
defense, a paper wall to keep out critics. Mathematics and logic may be immune
to contradiction from physics (although Hilary Putnam once thought otherwise,
and presumably Mill would have allowed the possibility, and certainly the status of geometry has been altered by
physics—and the status of metaethics is what is at stake here), but ethics is
not immune to contradiction from other “domains.” Is religion a domain?
Theological reasoning is more like metaethics than is set theory, and theology
most definitely intrudes on ethics and on metaethics. Empirical science may not
directly contradict normative claims, but it can surely undermine them. Once
upon a time it was widely thought that there are particularly evil people,
sorcerers and witches, who had made contracts with the most evil entity, Satan,
and should be killed. Science has convinced the civilized that there are no
witches and no sorcerers and no Satan. Once upon a time, it was thought that
living beings have a superphysical constitution, that their chemicals are not
the ordinary, “inorganic” stuff, and that living beings possess an unphysical
“vital force” that guides evolution. Science has convinced us (Tom Nagel
perhaps aside) otherwise. Science bids fair to do the same with the Will, and
Autonomy, and Agency, and as, and if that more fully comes about, the idea of
true, moral principles will go the way of true principles of witchcraft.
So what about the methods of ethics? Scanlon’s is “reflective
equilibrium,” I think first proposed in Rawl’s essay “Outline of a decision
procedure for ethics.” Rawls imagined a
panel of moral experts (much of his essay is about the qualifications for
membership) who report on the moral statuses of sundry actions. The ethical
theorist takes their pronouncements as data—putative moral facts—and attempts
to form a general theory that accounts for them. Rawls allowed that on
reflection one might reject a few of the experts’ decisions if accounting for
them required excessive complexity in the theory, arbitrary exceptions and so
on. The procedure came to be called “reflective equilibrium.” That is Scanlon’s method, with the panel of
experts replaced by one’s own judgements and the judgements of those whose
ethical perspicuity one respects. His explanation of the reliability of its data
sounds very much like Descartes “clear and distinct ideas”:
“In order for something to count as a considered judgment…
It is necessary also that it should be something that seems to me to be clearly
true when I am thinking about the matter
under good conditions for arriving at judgments of the kind in question.” Scanlon, T. M. (2014-01-06). Being Realistic about Reasons (p. 82).
Oxford University Press, USA. Kindle Edition.
(Italics are Scanlon’s)
I have no doubt that some very thoughtful people, no doubt
Scanlon himself, form their moral views in this way. I even think it’s a good
way. But I have no doubt, either, that in many other “domains” something
similar is often followed. It is general and vague enough to characterize both the
process of Islamic jurisprudence and the quasi Bayesian process often at work
in science in which data are thought to come with probabilities of error and
the sufficiently low posterior of a datum conditional on a hypothesis of
sufficiently high probability is reason to reject the datum, or even to reject
an entire set of measurements. But these examples are exactly the problem. In Bayesian statistics one can prove that
under specified, general assumptions, application of Bayes rule converges to
the truth. One can do the same for modifications, perhaps even considered
variants of the one I suggest off-hand above. In statistical estimation and machine
learning (the latter of which Rawls, in keeping with the opinion of his time,
announced was impossible) proofs are given that under very general assumptions
search methods converge on the truth, and methods are provided for testing the
assumptions. Nothing like that can be done for Islamic jurisprudence, and
nothing like that can be done for Rawl’s decision procedure for ethics or
Scanlon’s variant. That one can apply a vaguely specified procedure in a domain
is no argument, no evidence, that the procedure finds the truth in that domain,
or that there is any truth there to be found.
The least attention to the world shows that the range of
considered moral judgements is incompatible with any unified theory of
morality. Scanlon will have to discard
many of the moral judgements of most people in the world. He should, but he
should not claim that in doing so he is exercising a method for finding truth.
Scanlon has only two responses. Those who want to (and do) crucify Christians
and behead Jewish journalists and do other atrocities are not in “good
conditions” for such judgements; and that
ethics and metaethics have their own standards for concluding what is true--outside
standards and alien practices, however common, are irrelevant.
There is plenty of work for metaethics to do: systematizing vague
strategies of inference—Nozick’s efforts were a good start[i]--finding
and recognizing contradictions, figuring out how principles apply in morally
difficult cases, contrasting misweighings of moral importance, finding
agreements and disagreements in clarified moral perspectives, tempering ethical
demands to human capacities, and so on, all without Scanlon’s truth claims. Scanlon’s
redoubt is a parochial fortress, impenetrable to the forces of science or to the
objections of the world outside and its domains.
[1] I
write this and what follows with some regret, since Scanlon was my closest
friend when we were colleagues. This blog may lose me a lot of friends.
[i]
Nozick, Robert, "Moral Complications and Moral Structures" (1968). Natural Law Forum. Paper 137.
http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/nd_naturallaw_forum/137
http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/nd_naturallaw_forum/137
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