Should we be moral skeptics?
Skepticism can be applied to one of the most fundamental aspects of human intercourse: ethics
We are awash with moral statements. Just check the news headlines and you’ll see that moral judgment and outrage are everywhere, especially on social media. But what if it turned out that there are no good basis for moral judgments in the first place? Welcome to moral skepticism, the denial that anyone actually possesses moral knowledge.
According to a fascinating essay by Richard Joyce, published in the collection Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present (edited by Diego Machuca and Baron Reed, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), there are fundamentally three types of moral skepticism:
Non-cognitivism: moral judgments are not beliefs
Error theory: moral judgments are beliefs, but they are never true
Justification skepticism: moral judgments are beliefs, but we have no justification for them
Before taking a closer look let’s remember that ever since Plato [1] philosophers have defined knowledge as justified true belief [2]. This means that whenever we make a claim, like “tomorrow there will be an eclipse of the Sun,” for it to count as knowledge it must satisfy three conditions:
First, as I utter the claim, I must believe it. It would be really odd to say that I know something that I do not actually believe.
Second, the belief has to be true. That is, there really ought to be a solar eclipse tomorrow, otherwise I simply believed something false, and therefore had no knowledge.
Finally, and perhaps most crucially, I have to have a justification to provide you, if you challenge my claim. How do I know that there will be an eclipse tomorrow? It turns out I don’t: I simply read it in the newspaper, and hearsay is not a good justification. Only if I were conversant in celestial mechanics and had either done the necessary calculations myself or checked that others had done them correctly could I claim knowledge of the coming eclipse.
In other words, if we adopt Plato’s definition of knowledge, we have to admit that in many cases we don’t actually know what we claim to know. Do I know that quantum mechanics is true? Hell no, I just heard it. Do I know that the dinosaurs once walked the earth? Same thing. And so on. Much of what we call knowledge is only repeated opinion, which opens up the question of whose claims to knowledge we should trust and why.
But that’s not the topic of this essay, so let’s return to the three types of moral skepticism. Two of them—non cognitivism and error theory—are kinds of anti-realism about morality. In philosophy, being an anti-realist about X means that one does not believe in the reality (physical or otherwise) of X. Atheists, for instance, are anti-realists about God. Likewise, non-cognitivists and error theorists deny the reality of moral judgments.
However, moral skepticism doesn’t necessarily imply anti-realism. It is logically possible to hold true moral beliefs without being able to justify them. Heck, it is possible to hold true beliefs of any kind and yet not being able to justify them. For instance, I’m pretty sure that the square root of nine is three. But my high school math is too rusty to provide you with a proof that that is the case. Similarly, a justification skeptic might agree that perhaps some moral beliefs are true, but he will insist that you are in no position to justify them, and therefore you don’t really know whether they are true or not.
Non-cognitivism, the first kind of moral skepticism mentioned by Joyce, goes back to the 18th century Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, but in its modern version was articulated by the logical positivists Rudolf Carnap and Alfred J. Ayer during the early part of the 20th century.
The idea is that moral utterances appear to be assertions, but they are not. So when someone says “genocide is wrong,” she actually means something like “don’t commit genocide!” or “boo to genocide!” In other words, when we utter moral statements we are really communicating feelings.
There is some interesting empirical support for this position, for instance from work in social psychology about the connection between disgust and emotions, and specifically between disgust and moral judgments. But of course just because there is a link between feelings of disgust and moral utterances it doesn’t mean that the latter are only feelings. After all, we evolved to be disgusted by things that are bad for us—from rotten foods to the sight of snakes—and such feelings of disgust do track a human reality: rotten foods may kill you, and so can snakes!
According to error theory we do make moral assertions (cognitivism), but the world is structured in a way that it is not possible to attach “true” or “false” labels to such assertions. John Mackie’s famous book, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, published in 1977, is the crucial reference for error theorists, although the ancient Greek Anaxarchus (380-320 BCE), who went to India with Pyrrho as part of Alexander the Great’s expedition, is often considered the first error theorist.
An example of error theory applied outside the moral realm would be an atheist’s treatment of religious discourse. “God loves us,” according to the atheist, is a nonsensical phrase, because the referent, God, does not exist. The theist is therefore making an error. Similarly, if I say “to steal is wrong” I am indeed asserting something, but that assertion—according to the error theory—is predicated on the mistaken assumption that “wrong” is a category of things in the real world.
As far as the error theorist is concerned, the world simply does not carry properties like good and bad, rightness and wrongness, and so forth. Those are human judgments, not inherent in the fabric of the cosmos. Indeed, it’s rather difficult—outside of a theistic framework—to come up with defensible reasons to think that goodness and badness are inherent properties of the world. Rather they, like beauty, are in the eye of the (human) beholder.
Finally we get to justification skepticism. Here moral judgments are cognitive, and they may or may not be true, but we are not epistemically justified in making them. We should, therefore, simply suspend judgment about moral claims [3].
One reason to embrace justification skepticism is Agrippa’s first mode. Agrippa was a first century CE skeptic associated with the Pyrrhonian tradition. He proposed five “modes” to practice skepticism, each mode being a reason to suspend judgment. The first mode had to do with dissent: Agrippa observed that on a lot of issues there is widespread disagreement among intelligent and competent people. That being the case, who are we to take a strong position one way or the other?
I apply Agrippa’s mode to scientific controversies where I am not competent to judge. For instance, is string theory or loop quantum gravity a better option to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity? Heck if I know! More importantly, not even people who work in that field of fundamental physics appear to know, at least for now. So suspension of judgment does seem the wise course of action.
Very clearly, the justification skeptic will point out, there have always been a lot of disagreement about what is right or wrong, so we would do well to suspend judgment. What goes in Athens, as they say, doesn’t go in Sparta.
The problem is that news of universal moral disagreement are actually rather exaggerated. There is a significant amount of research on human universals, and many such universals are moral in nature: “do not murder” isn’t an injunction questioned in many societies, for the simple reason that a society that did allow unjustified killing of some of its members would not last long as a society.
In the end, I think all three skeptical approaches to morality are worth considering, but I do think there is another option, in between moral realism and anti-realism, what philosopher Simon Blackburn calls moral quasi-realism. I will not go into his version of it (he explains it here) because my quasi-realism takes a different route, often referred to in moral philosophy as nativism, though I think that’s an awful name for it.
Nativism is the thesis that human moral thinking has evolved as a discrete psychological adaptation. As an evolutionary biologist I do think that all human behavior evolved, either biologically or culturally, sometimes in an adaptive fashion and sometimes not. The basic building blocks of what we call morality are found in other species of social primates, where they manifest themselves in the form of instincts that bring animals to cooperate and to behave altruistically.
It makes sense, then, that human beings retained those instincts—which explains our sense of disgust at certain morally reprehensible actions—and then consciously built on them by way of language, eventually giving rise to what we call cultural norms.
Empirically speaking, as I mentioned above, some such norms are variable in time and space, but some are not, or much less so. This latter group includes behaviors that are presumably adaptive for group living, like prohibitions against murder and theft, encouragement of cooperation and kindness toward others, including non relatives, and so forth.
According to nativism, which I actually prefer to call evolutionary ethics, then, fundamental moral rules and behaviors are objectively useful or not useful—better categories than “true” or “false”—for the kind of social, intelligent primate that human beings are. If this is right, it turns out that the Stoics were onto something when they chose as their motto “live according to (human) nature” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 7.87). Since human nature, for the Stoics, is characterized by reason and prosociality, the (objectively) right thing to do (for a human being) is to live reasonably and prosocially.
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[1] Though the equation of knowledge with justified true belief is attributed to Plato, it isn’t really clear what he thought of the matter. In the Theaetetus Plato does propose such definition, but then discards it by the end of the same dialogue.
[2] The only exceptions to the Platonic definition of knowledge are so-called Gettier cases, named after 20th century philosopher Edmund Gettier. Although his 1963 paper made a splash and has since generated a cottage industry of responses, I think it’s far less momentous than most epistemologists seem to believe. So I’m going to ignore it. But if you are curious, here is a good treatment of the issue.
[3] Pyrrhonian skeptics were, of course, “justification skeptics” about any so-called non-evident matters, of which moral judgments are just one category. They thought we ought to suspend judgments on anything that is not clear to our senses.
Fascinating. Always happy to see Hume discussed too. The background discussions of Pyrrhonism in your notes has helped me understand much I did not (or at least provided a framework for my thinking).
timely and telling--thanks