Hallvard Lillehammer

Smith on Moral Fetishism

According to internalism about moral judgements there is an interesting conceptual connection between an agents making a moral judgement and that agents motivation. The externalist denies this and claims that any interesting connection between moral judgements and motivation is contingent.1 The resolution of this dispute has important consequences. For whereas the internalist can construe moral judgements either as noncognitive states like desire or as cognitive states like belief, the externalist is committed to construe moral judgements as cognitive states like belief.2 A vindication of externalism would therefore lend support to those who believe in the possibility of some kind of moral reality. In his book The Moral Problem and in a recent issue of this journal, Michael Smith claims to refute any theory which construes the relationship between moral judgements and motivation as contingent and rationally optional. He claims that no such theory is able to account for the platitude that a good and strong-willed person is reliably motivated in accordance with her moral judgements.3 More specifically, the claim is that although the externalist may provide a reliable link between the moral judgements and motivations of some individual, the only link at his disposal is a basic moral motive to do what is right, where this is read de dicto. But, so Smith argues, we can read off from the platitudes that are definitional of moral discourse that this self-consciously moral motive makes for moral fetishism and not for moral goodness.4 Good people care about what is right, where this is read de re, not de dicto. He calls this a reductio of externalism.

Debunking morality: Evolutionary naturalism and moral error theory

The paper distinguishes three strategies by means of which empirical discoveries about the nature of morality can be used to undermine moral judgements. On the first strategy, moral judgements are shown to be unjustified in virtue of being shown to rest on ignorance or false belief. On the second strategy, moral judgements are shown to be false by being shown to entail claims inconsistent with the relevant empirical discoveries. On the third strategy, moral judgements are shown to be false in virtue of being shown to be unjustified; truth having been defined epistemologically in terms of justification. By interpreting three recent error theoretical arguments in light of these strategies, the paper evaluates the epistemological and metaphysical relevance of empirical discoveries about morality as a naturally evolved phenomenon.

Moral realism, normative reasons, and rational intelligibility

This paper concerns a prima facie tension between the claims that (a) agents have normative reasons obtaining in virtue of the nature of the options that confront them, and (b) there is a non-trivial connection between the grounds of normative reasons and the upshots of sound practical reasoning. Joint commitment to these claims is shown to give rise to a dilemma. I argue that the dilemma is avoidable on a response dependent account of normative reasons accommodating both (a) and (b) by yielding (a) as a substantial constraint on sound practical reasoning. This fact is shown to have significance for the contemporary dialectic between moral realists and their opponents.

VOLUNTARY EUTHANASIA AND THE LOGICAL SLIPPERY SLOPE ARGUMENT

In his recent book “Euthanasia, Ethics, and Public Policy”, John Keown puts forward two slippery slope arguments against the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia. One of these arguments claims that a defender of voluntary euthanasia is logically committed to the permissibility of non-voluntary euthanasia. This paper seeks to show that Keown’s argument either rests on a logical confusion or on a misunderstanding of the value of autonomy.

The Epistemology of Ethical Intuitions

Intuitions are widely assumed to play an important evidential role in ethical inquiry. In this paper I critically discuss a recently influential claim that the epistemological credentials of ethical intuitions are undermined by their causal pedigree and functional role. I argue that this claim is exaggerated. In the course of doing so I argue that the challenge to ethical intuitions embodied in this claim should be understood not only as a narrowly epistemological challenge, but also as a substantially ethical one. I argue that this fact illuminates the epistemology of ethical intuitions.

Reproduction, Partiality, and the Non-identity Problem

This paper argues that there are reasonable grounds for scepticism about the idea of a uniquely integrated account of the ethics of human reproduction on either partialist or impartialist terms.

The Normativity of Practical Reason

One influential form of subjectivism about ethics and value consists in denying the coherence or validity of a certain type of rationally inescapable norm of action. In the terms of a distinction historically associated with the work of Immanuel Kant, this form of subjectivism denies the coherence or validity of so-called categorical imperatives of practical reason, where these are imperatives that apply to agents regardless of their contingently given ends.1 Thus, when John Mackie claimed to have diagnosed a constitutive error embodied in the prereflective morality of his time, this was because he claimed to have shown that this morality was committed to the validity of something very much like categorical imperatives of practical reason. Thus, Mackie writes: So far as ethics is concerned, my thesis that there are no objective values is specifically the denial that any … categorically imperative element is objectively valid. The objective values which I am denying would be action-directing absolutely, not contingently … upon the agent’s desires and inclinations. (1977, 29)

Values and Secondary Qualities

Some arguments for the subjectivity of value are premised on the absence of any reference to values in the objective world as described by the natural sciences. According to these arguments, it is a necessary condition for the existence of objective values that values form part of what John Mackie called ‘the fabric of the world’ (Mackie 1977, 15). On this view, objectivity entails mind independence: the domain of objectivity is a domain of existence independent of all thought and experience of it. It is a domain that could form the content of a representation that presupposes no particular perspective on the world — what has variously been called ‘the absolute conception’, or a View from nowhere’ (c.f. Williams 1985; Nagel 1986). Given these assumptions, the subjectivity of value follows from the further claim that values are not mind independent entities with a non-eliminable place in an absolute conception of reality.1 Given that we can only make sense of values with reference to a perspective on the world of beings disposed to value some things over others, there are no objective values, and some form of subjectivism about value must be true.2

Companionship in Guilt

Philosophers hunt in packs. The obvious advantage of this is that the spread of collective attention promotes in-depth illumination of different areas of inquiry. The obvious downside is a tendency to one-sidedness and partiality. Different packs fail to communicate at the cost of missing out on illuminating insight, whether of general philosophical interest or of particular relevance to their own area of expertise. The latter tendency is clearly diagnosed by Hilary Putnam, when he writes: I believe that the unfortunate division of contemporary philosophy into separate ‘fields’ … often conceals the way in which the very same arguments and issues arise in field after field. For example, arguments for ‘antirealism’ in ethics are virtually identical with arguments for antirealism in the philosophy of mathematics; yet philosophers who resist those arguments in the latter case often capitulate to them in the former. We can only regain the integrated vision which philosophy has always aspired to if at least some of the time we allow ourselves to ignore the idea that a philosophical position or argument must deal with one and only one of these specific ‘fields’. (Putnam 2004, 1)

Ethics, Science and the Absolute Conception

One of the most common grounds for scepticism about ethical objectivity is the apparently different ways in which ethical and scientific claims are responsive to evidence and criticism. The comparative obscurity of notions like ‘ethical proof, ‘ethical experiment’, ‘ethical observation’, or even ‘ethical knowledge’ is often put forward as grounds for thinking that ethical claims are not rationally responsive to the world in the way that standard claims in at least the natural sciences are. Bernard Williams is one of the most influential contemporary philosophers associated with this line of thought (Williams 1978; 1981; 1985; 1995).