Philosophy Notes Part 5
This is the fifth post in the Philosophy Notes series. Each post is a supplement to my philosophy study guides, a series of eight books designed to help philosophy students read, understand, and think critically about the classics of philosophy.
Meta-ethics vs. Normative ethics
An important objection to the argument in Part 4 of Philosophy Notes is that it is irrelevant. Neither Kant nor Mill proposes definitions of moral words like “right” and “wrong.” Such proposals are a part of contemporary ethics called meta-ethics or meta-morals. Philosophers who work in this field propose theories about what it means to make a moral judgment but they make no moral judgments themselves. They have theories about what it means to say that an action is morally right or obligatory, but they do not offer theories about what actions are morally right or obligatory or what moral rules people should adopt to guide them in making moral decisions.
Those who propose theories about what actions are right or obligatory are doing what is called normative ethics. The philosophers who do normative ethics might be interested in how moral rules differ from other kinds of rules, e.g. legal rules, the rules of games, and the rules of etiquette, but their main concern is to theorize about what we ought and ought not to do.
Our critic says that having made the distinction between the meta-ethical question “What is the meaning of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’?” and the normative question “What acts are morally right and what acts are morally wrong?” it should be obvious that both Mill and Kant are attempting to answer the normative, not the meta-ethical question.
It follows that we cannot accuse Mill or Kant of asking analytically false questions because neither philosopher is doing meta-ethics. They are not giving an analysis of the meaning of the words “right” or “wrong.” Instead, both philosophers are offering opposing normative theories about what ought to be the content of moral rules, the rules that guide us to do what is morally right and avoid what is morally wrong. These theories are often referred to as theories about the foundation of morality.
Reply: Normative Ethical Theories Breach the Limits of Philosophy
The question now is “What normative
theory/foundational principle should determine the content of moral rules and
thereby tell the world what acts and omissions are objectively right and what
acts are objectively wrong? Consequentialist or Deontological? Utilitarian or
Kantian?"
Or none the above.
If we are going to adhere to the definition of philosophy cited at the beginning of this post, then we must ask whether any normative belief (theory) can be justified through an analysis of basic concepts in terms of which such beliefs are expressed?
Let us start with a simple case. You look in the cookie jar and find it to be empty. You ask your child whether she has taken all the cookies that you baked and put in the jar the previous day. She says that she has not taken the cookies. You caution her not to lie. You tell her that it is always wrong to lie, especially to her parents.
Is it true that it is always wrong to lie? Can you justify the belief that it is always wrong to lie by analyzing the basic concepts in terms of which this belief is expressed? A definition of the verb “to lie” is “to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive.” But the fact that someone has made an untrue statement with intent to deceive does not logically entail the normative conclusion that it is morally wrong to do this. The example of lying to save someone’s life, discussed earlier in this post, is sufficient to prove this.
If we cannot justify basic ethical beliefs like “It is always wrong to tell a lie” through concept analysis, then perhaps we can justify our beliefs through deductive derivation. The derivation is from a foundational normative principle such as those proposed by Mill and Kant.
The derivation from Mill’s Utility or Greatest Happiness principle would look like this: (1) Actions that produce more bad consequences (unhappiness) than good (happiness) are morally wrong. (2) Telling a lie produces more bad consequences than good. (3) Therefore, telling a lie is morally wrong.
The argument is valid but premises (1) and (2) are questionable. Premise (1) is questionable in the sense that it is logically possible (not a contradiction) that actions producing more unhappiness than happiness are not morally wrong. To put it another way, the question “Her action produced more unhappiness than happiness but is it morally wrong?” is an open question. Hence, premise (1) is analytically false.
The derivation from Kant’s Categorical Imperative can also be stated in three steps: (1) It is morally wrong to treat humanity only as a means to an end. (2) Telling lies treats humanity only as a means to an end. (3) Therefore, telling a lie is morally wrong.
In assessing (1) we must ask whether treating someone as a means to an end logically entails moral wrongdoing. The test question is the same as the question asked in the previous section: “She treats him as a means to the ends of another person but is this morally wrong?” This is an open and sensible question, as we have previously seen in the case of telling a lie for the sole end of saving a person’s life. Hence, the Categorical Imperative is analytically false.
Final Thoughts: Hume’s Law
In the opening paragraph of Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill reflects on the “little progress” that has been made by philosophers about “the criterion of right and wrong.” He writes that the debate between the same schools of thought has been going on for 2,000 years without any noticeable agreement between them about the foundation of morality.
If philosophy can do no more than analyze the basic concepts in terms of which our moral beliefs are expressed, then either the search for the foundation of morality must continue or we must acknowledge that it is logically impossible to find what we are searching for.
It has been said that philosophers who search for the foundation of morality are trying to do the impossible. This is because they attempt to deduce moral conclusions from non-moral premises. This observation is referred to as “Hume’s Law,” as expressed in David Hume’s Treatise (T3.1.1.27). The law says that no ethical conclusion whatsoever can be validly inferred from any set of purely factual premises. For example, in Utilitarianism, Mill invalidly infers right and wrong from factual premises that tell us about amounts of happiness and unhappiness. It is one thing to state the fact that a particular action produces more unhappiness than happiness, but it is quite another to infer from this the conclusion that the action is morally wrong. The inference is invalid.
And if it is objected that the inference can be made valid by adding the Utility Principle as a first premise, then we have come full circle. The concepts of happiness and unhappiness contained in the principle bear no logical relationship to the concepts of right and wrong.
Finally, the conclusion that the search for a universal moral principle breaches the limits of philosophy does not mean that society will crumble. Conceptual analyses of moral terms like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ have no more effect on how people ought to live in society than conceptual analyses of the terms ‘change’ and ‘tire’ has on how they ought to change a tire.
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Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.), 2nd ed. revised by P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
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