Many people believe there are many paths to God. People also believe that ‘reduced sodium’ equals ‘low sodium’ or that the earth is flat or that Moses brought two of each animal to the ark.
What happens when one of the supposed paths to God contradicts the other? Either only one path is true or the two are false, but they can’t both be true.
(John 14:6) Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
This seems pretty exclusive to me, which is why the ‘anything goes’ mentality, better known as relativism, is a problem: It’s self-refuting. Religious relativism, for instance, is not something that truly exists. It’s clear that not all religions are the same or lead to the same destination, considering the example given above, which concerns the core of a belief that completely negates every concept that stands in opposition to it.
Christianity isn't exclusive to that, of course. Other religions are just as readily opposed to one another as Christianity is to every single one of them, which, again, means that only one of them is true, since they can't all be true.
So, if you hold on to the ‘anything goes’ mindset too tightly, it’s going to come back to bite you. If anything goes, then things will start contradicting each other pretty soon, and if the answer to that is just to keep on saying “everything is equally true” or "it’s true for you, but not for me” or “everything is relative, there are no moral absolutes,” then you'll be continually committing a logical fallacy here.
Nobody truly believes in relativism, of course. At least not when it comes to morality.
If you’re walking down the street at night and find yourself hoping nobody is going to suddenly jump you and take from you your phone and money, then it’s because you agree with me when I say being robbed is bad. Or are you instead going to happily hand the money you may well be working hard to earn to some coward who threatens violence if you don’t? Might as well hand him your apartment keys and have him carry away every shiny little thing that meets the eye.
So, stealing is bad. Nobody likes to be mugged. Period.
But you might argue: “Well, the thief certainly thinks it’s all right,” yeah ok, but if the thief himself were being robbed, he probably wouldn’t like it that much, now would he?
If there’s no objective moral standard for right and wrong, then issues like stealing, bullying, murder, rape, and others would be a simple matter of preference, like choosing your favorite color or food.
If relativism is true, then my belief that it is wrong can be true. Oops.
If no one can know anything for sure, then no one can know anything for sure, including the former statement that... no one can know anything for sure.
Now, if there is an objective standard of morality, it follows that certain things are either good or not and that calling the good ‘bad' or the bad ‘good’ is against the principles of objective reality, or objective truth.
‘Objective truth’ is a pleonasm, but it must be stated, if only to reinforce what ‘truth’ actually means. It’s definite, it’s objective, it simply is. You can’t argue against truth.
So if relativism is self-refuting, then we know that people generally know right from wrong, even if they deny it by ascribing strange definitions to the concept of truth.
Good.
Now, it remains to be seen where does this objective concept of morality and truth comes from. That’s a subject for the next post.
There is a great difference…between these two situations: one who is ignorant and must be given some knowledge, and therefore he is like the empty vessel that must be filled or like the blank sheet of paper that must be written upon—and one who is under a delusion that must first be taken away. Likewise, there is also a difference between writing on a blank piece of paper and bringing out by means of chemicals some writing that is hidden under other writing. Now on the assumption that someone is under a delusion and consequently the first step, properly understood, is to remove the delusion—if I do not begin by deceiving, I begin with direct communication. But direct communication presupposes that the recipient’s ability to perceive is entirely in order, but here that is simply not the case—indeed, here a delusion is an obstacle. That means a corrosive must first be used, but this corrosive is the negative, but the negative in connection with communicating is precisely to deceive. What then does it mean “to deceive”? It means that one does not begin directly with what one wishes to communicate but begins by taking the other’s delusion at face value.
Kierkegaard, Point of View for My Work as an Author
How sympathetic are you with moral noncognitivism.
Moderately sympathetic. I see some of the appeal - sometimes an utterance of “X is wrong!” really does just mean “Boo X!” or “Don’t X!”. But I don’t think it captures how moral language is actually used. For example, “I wonder if X is wrong?” is a meaningful sentence, but “I wonder if don’t X?” is not.
Just wrote a final for meta-ethics, December 2014. Expect political dimensions w/r/t Ferguson soon; happy to conclude my dalliance with analytic work.
In his book Non Cognitivism in Ethics, Mark Schroeder suggests that pejorative language may offer license for optimism in the case of non-cognitivism. While he himself argues that pejoratives offer only a limited license, it is my view that they do, in fact, model moral language well and that we should therefore find full license for optimism about non-cognitivism in sentences containing moral terms. In this essay, I will explain what it is to have license for optimism about noncognitivism. Having set the stakes thusly, I will then, with Schroeder, show how pejoratives seem to function, finding that we can productively understand them as expressing both a belief and a desire-like attitude. In the course of that discussion, I will consider Schroeder’s objections to that position, which he terms the “Big Hypothesis,” but find them lacking. This essay will conclude with a discussion of the merits of the “Big Hypothesis” as applied to moral sentences. While I agree with Schroeder that understanding moral sentences in terms of the Big Hypothesis jettisons several key advantages of traditional non-cognitivism, I will argue that it is nevertheless a productive route of inquiry.
Schroeder sets the stakes for his discussion of pejoratives with an exploration of license for optimism. License for optimism is a method of argument that acknowledges the complexity of moral thought and moral sentences; those non-cognitivists who use it first find sentences that they can explain uncontroversially by means of their model of choice, then express the hope that moral sentences, though more complex than their toy examples, could behave in a similar fashion (Schroeder 2010, 189). RM Hare, for example, thought that the persuasive non-cognitivist account of the logical relationships between complex imperative sentences licensed optimism for logical relationships between all complex sentences. Schroeder thinks that his non-cognitivist model for pejoratives might function in the same way.
Pejorative sentences like “Al is a ***” are interesting because their descriptive content does not seem to exhaust their meaning.[1] A bigot who calls Al a *** seems not only to claim that Al is a member of a certain oppressed group, but also to express a contemptuous attitude toward that group (Schroeder 2010, 190). Sentences like this behave in ways consistent with moral sentences:
“There is no puzzle about what it is to believe that Al is a **, or why someone who believes that Al is a *** disagrees with someone who believes that Al is not a ***. Nor is there a puzzle about why believing that Al is a *** intrapersonally disagrees with believing that Al is not a ***, or about how it is possible to be more or less confident in whether Al is a ***, or to hope that or wonder whether Al is a ***, or about why believing that Al is a *** and wanting to avoid ***s is the kind of state to motivate one to avoid Al” (Schroeder 2010, 190).
If one were to substitute “x is wrong” for “Al is a ***,” they would see that the above paragraph could also describe moral sentences. I think that those phenomena, when taken together, are sufficient to license optimism for so-called hybrid non-cognitivist theories about moral sentences, which claim that moral sentences also express both beliefs and desire-like attitudes, but Schroeder thinks that pejoratives may not, in fact, work as I have described them. Were that the case, then we would still have two similar phenomena, but we would be unable to understand why they work as they do. I will now consider his objections.
Schroeder asks us to consider a case involving three people: Bigot, Nice Guy, and Al. Bigot, who holds that group in contempt, and Nice Guy, who does not, are both aware of Al’s group affiliation and of each others’ attitudes toward that group. Schroeder asks us to consider what would happen were we to ask Nice Guy, “what race Bigot thinks Al is” (Schroeder 2010, 203). He thinks that Nice Guy would say only that Bigot thinks Al is a member of an oppressed group, though Bigot in fact thinks that Al is a ***. This indicates to Schroeder that his pejorative model does not fit this situation, as Nice Guy would more accurately describe Bigot’s views by saying that Bigot thinks Al is a ***.
If this case seems confused, that is because it is. While Schroeder contends that Nice Guy would describe Bigot’s views more accurately by use of a pejorative, I think he has answered satisfactorily. After all, the question asked after only the descriptive content of the pejorative term; by describing Bigot’s views thusly, Nice Guy does not claim that Bigot could not describe Al as a ***. Were the question’s scope properly broadened to, “Nice Guy, do you think that Bigot thinks of Al as a ***?” Nice Guy could accurately respond, “Yes, Bigot thinks that Al is a ***.” As Nice Guy could (and probably would) then say, “…but I do not think that Bigot should say that,” this poses no trouble to Schroeder’s theory that pejoratives express both a belief and a desire-like attitude. His second objection, however, is more interesting.
Schroeder next asks us to consider what would happen were we to question Bigot with regard to Nice Guy’s views on Al’s group affiliation. Schroeder thinks that Bigot should not say, because false, “Nice Guy thinks that Al is a ***,” but would (Schroeder 2010, 204). Again, this is a case of confused questioning. If pressed, Bigot would have no problem saying, “Nice Guy would not say that Al is a ***, but he should.” This further supports Schroeder’s model. Bigot would, in that case, have inappropriately disquoted Nice Guy and in doing so expressed the very contemptuous attitude about Al’s group that Schroeder would predict. Schroder, by means of objection, has strengthened his theory that pejoratives work in accordance with the Big Hypothesis.
Now that we have seen why there is license for optimism that the Big Hypothesis might accurately describe moral sentences, describing as it does pejorative sentences, we should now examine some of the advantages and disadvantages of this view. One significant disadvantage is this: that if moral sentences follow the Big Hypothesis, and both a belief about the world and desire-like attitude are part of the meaning of words like “wrong,” then those words express the same desire-like attitude at every use, which is, “…an extraordinary empirical assumption” (Schroeder 2010, 200). To think that there is some desire-like attitude shared by anyone who has ever uttered a sentence involving “wrong” is an assumption shared by ordinary non-cognitivist views on moral language, which assume that “wrong” has only descriptive content. Those views, by way of explaining the motivational power of moral sentences, also assume that there is a widespread desire-like attitude expressed by anyone who has ever understood a sentence containing a term like “wrong.” The extent to which this is problematic hinges upon how much license for optimism we might have regarding that attitude; this might be great or small, but it does indicate that pejoratives might not model moral sentences any more productively than theories that do not rely on the Big Hypothesis.
As we have seen, however, that disadvantage does not indicate that moral sentences are poorly modeled by pejorative language. If we are searching only for license for optimism that a hybrid non-cognitivist theory might aptly capture what it is to utter a moral sentence, then we should be convinced by the similar functions played by pejoratives and moral terms in sentences and by the possibility of a widespread desire-like attitude about both sorts of terms that moral language is well, if not convincingly, modeled by pejorative language.
Schroeder, Mark. "The Hybrid Gambit." In Non-Cognitivism in Ethics. New York: Routledge, 2010.
[1] I will use “***” to reference “some slur” in order to avoid using offensive language myself.
Do we use moral language to express moral beliefs?
For those of you who are interested, a short essay I have written on the topic of moral discourse:
Moral discourse is pervasive in virtually all aspects of life – both in philosophical and day to day senses – and it is perhaps the prima facie position that our moral language expresses moral beliefs. This is the view held by moral realists and cognitivists. However, philosophers such as A.J Ayer have come to reject the claim that our moral dialect does indeed express moral beliefs, as it is arguable that our moral expressions do not contain the truth values one would assume they incorporate, thus negating the function of a moral belief. For the purpose of this essay, I shall examine the arguments that reject the view that our language expresses moral beliefs, and whether they maintain under scrutiny.
According to the moral realist and cognitivist perspectives, moral language expresses moral beliefs purporting to describe an objective moral status in the world. As cognitivists maintain that language expresses such beliefs, they hold that these beliefs are truth apt - they are either true or false. A cognitivist making the proposition “murder is wrong” is not only stating an opinion on the matter, but it is making claim that ascertains whether this statement is true or false. Non-cognitivists on the other hand, as Mark Van Roojen writes, 'are not in the business of...making statements which could be true or false in any substantial sense'.1 Non-Cognitivists reject the moral realist thesis on the grounds that moral propositions are not truth apt, and instead when we do use moral language we express a non-cognitive state such as a desire, which do not hold any truth values. Therefore, a non-cognitivist reading of the statement “murder is wrong” essentially equates to “Boo! Murder!”.
Despite the radical skepticism of the non-cognitivist premise, there are potentially strong arguments in favour of such a view. Perhaps the earliest favourable argument emerges from David Hume's work A Treatise on Human Nature where he concludes that 'reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions'2 as the basis for his theory of motivation. According to Hume, whenever we are motivated to act, the motivating reason is consistent with a pre-existing desire or emotion and is not dependent on an analytic (a true-by-definition statement) or a synthetic (a statement dependent on the world) proposition alone. We are instead motivated primarily by emotive responses. For example, I may believe it is true that there is a glass of water beside me and that I am thirsty, yet the motivation for me reach out and drink from it is not the truth value of such a statement, but the desire behind it i.e my thirst. It is implausible that reason alone may motivate us to express moral attitudes therefore, as the apparent truth or falsity of propositions appears impotent in terms of motivation. A.J Ayer3 carried this concept further into the meta-ethical view of emotivism which claims that moral language does not express belief, but merely a specific emotion in accordance with the proposition at hand. As our desires are the motivation for moral discourse, and since emotional response are not truth apt beliefs, Ayer argued that moral language expresses a praise or disgust for a moral act.
Cognitivists such as Philippa Foot denied the emotivist standpoint as, according to her in Natural Goodness, if moral language merely functions to express emotional attitudes toward moral actions, then there can be no normative force behind such claims. If Ayer is correct, moral language essentially boils ethical dilemma's down to matters of opinion that have little or no “action-guidingness”4, a conclusion that has damning consequences for any system of moral judgement, (certainly in any legal sense) for one could always argue that any ethical motivation is meaningless and thus not reprehensible. Nonetheless, R.M Hare's universal prescriptivist position may rebuff such criticisms. Hare agreed with Ayer that moral language simply expresses emotional attitudes, yet he argued that our speech contains an imperative element that indeed prescribes a guiding force, rather than merely describing a moral attitude. According to Hare in The Language of Morals: 'the statement that 'Shut the door' means the same as 'Either you are going to shut the door, or X will happen', where X is understood to be something bad for the person addressed.'5 This is to say that when we use moral discourse, we do not only express an opinion toward a moral act, but prescribe an almost Kantian intuitive universality to all acts of such a kind, hence to term universal prescriptivism. This would seemingly counter Foot's position, as it ostensibly gives ethical statements normative force whilst maintaining the non-cognitive thesis of rejecting moral beliefs.
Yet, It is perhaps within the infamous Frege-Geach Problem that argues best against the the non-cognitivist assumption and gives strength to the view that our moral speech does express belief. This argument works best by example: “It is wrong to murder. If it is wrong to murder, then it is wrong for my brother to murder. Therefore, it is wrong for my brother to murder”. While the first proposition is plausible to non-cognitivists as it may be reduced to “boo! Murder!”, it is undeniable that there can be no particular emotional inference made from the unassertive statements made in the latter sections of this argument. To say “if it is wrong to murder...” does not support the conclusive statement “it is wrong for my brother to murder” according to emotivists and even prescriptivists as no emotional imperative can be discerned to give the conclusion any force. How can the precedent sentence hold moral ground while the antecedent seemingly holds none? Thus, non-cognitivism therefore has issue with explaining how moral language is used in unassertive contexts. Moral realists on the other hand are free from this issue, as the antecedent sentence is truth apt in itself and thus entails moral belief in the embedded sentence.
Does moral language express moral belief? Seemingly the response to this would be that it does not, given the apparent strength of Hume's motivational theory, along with Ayer's and Hare's plausible theories. Nonetheless, the Frege-Geach Problem offers a tall order for Non-cognitivists to overcome. Despite this, even if moral language does not express moral belief, would this be strong enough to prevent us from expressing our moral attitudes as such? As Sartre writes: 'man is condemned to be free'6 - even without security of moral beliefs, we may still use our discourse to create our own ethically normative actions to shape the world we live in, despite being condemned to a meaningless universe that lacks expressible moral beliefs.
Bibliography:
Hare, R.M, The Language of Morals (1952), Transcribed into hypertext by Andrew Chrucky, July 2005http://www.ditext.com/hare/lm.html
Hume, David, A Treatise on Human Nature, (1739-1740), Release Date: February 13, 2010 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4705/4705-h/4705-h.htm#link2H_4_0027
Roojen, Mark Van, Standford Encylopedia of Philosophy: Moral Cognitivism Vs. Non-Cognitivism (2004), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#Cog
J.Sadler, Brook, Review of “Natural Goodness”: Essays in Philosophy Vol. 5 No.2 (2004), http://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1166&context=eip
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Existentialism is a Humanism (1946),Transcribed by Andy Blunden, 1998 http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm
"Most of a philosopher's conscious thinking is secretly guided and channelled into particular tracks by his instincts. Behind all logic, too, and it's apparent tyranny of movement there are value judgements, or to speak more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a particular kind of life."
