Here I appeal to the notion of goodness-for, or benefit, to advance an argument for value-realism. I begin with the following dialogue:
Q1: "What makes a kitchen knife good?"
A1: "That it be sharp, durable, and handle easily."
Q2: "Why is a kitchen knife that has those features good?"
A2: "Because it is good for something, use in preparing food."
Next comes an argument:
1. A2 provides* an explanation.
2. If A2 provides an explanation, then there is an explanandum.
3. There is an explanandum: the hypothetical knife's being good.
(This is basically the kernel of the argument and I could probably stop there, but in the interest of being thorough):
4. Such knives exist.
5. So there exist things that are good.
6. To be good is to instantiate a property, goodness.
7. Value-realism is true iff there exist evaluative properties that are stance-independent.
8. Goodness is an evaluative property.
9. The explanation of the knife's goodness does not require appeal to anyone's evaluative stances.
10. There exists a stance-independent evaluative property.
C11. Value-realism is true.
Is this argument rationally compelling? What would be the defeating conditions of the argument's conclusion, and can those conditions plausibly be met without begging the question in favor of anti-realism or error theory? Merely to deny A2, 1 (from the premise that there is nothing to be explained), 3, 5 (from the consideration that there exists nothing good), or 9, I believe, would do so.
*By "provides" I mean not merely that it offers an explanation, but that it succeeds in doing so by standards that plausibly satisfy the explanatory needs of the question.
Interesting. Here are just a couple of thoughts of the top of my head.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I am a little worried about (9), since it is not obvious to me that the stance-independence of a property is to be established by looking at what it takes to explain the fact that something has it.
Here's what Shafer-Landau has to say (Moral Realism: A Defense, p. 15) about the notion when he introduces the term "stance-indepedence":
"Realism is sometimes contrasted with constructivism by invoking the claim that, for realists, morality is mind-independent. There is some truth to this, but it seems ill expressed by the present notion. Any plausible moral theory will claim that some moral truths depend crucially on an agent's mental states. We obviously can't enter a moral assessment of an agent's motivations and intentions without recourse to what is going on in her mind. And the moral status of an action may depend very importantly on how pleased or miserable it makes others, whether it prompts feelings of anger or empathy, whether one who is harmed has given his consent to the treatment, etc. Further, it seems to make eminent sense to say that, absent all agents, there would be no moral facts (as opposed to moral standards)—no particular instances of right and wrong, moral good and evil, etc.2 We must be careful to define realism in such a way as to allow for these home truths.
The way I would prefer to characterize the realist position is by reference to its endorsement of the stance-independence of moral reality. Realists believe that there are moral truths that obtain independently of any preferred perspective, in the sense that the moral standards that fix the moral facts are not made true by virtue of their ratification from within any given actual or hypothetical perspective. That a person takes a particular attitude toward a putative moral standard is not what makes that standard correct."
This makes it look like the fact that it is stance-independent (as Shafer-Landau understands the term) is a fact about a property's supervenience base.
Also, (7) gives an unorthodox account of realism. More typically, realism is thought to be comprised of two other claims in addition: evaluative claims are truth-evaluable (cognitivism) and some of them are true. David Killoren replaces the latter with the claim that most of the claims we typically take to be true are in fact true. He calls this claim "optimism". I bring this up, not to nitpick, but because I think it is an artifact of your unorthodox definition of realism that your conclusion follows from (10). Typically, it would be thought that we need to establish the existence of more than one stance-independent property.
Hi Josh,
DeleteThanks again for your comments. A few thoughts:
I'll start with your second remark, that cognitivism is required for realism about values. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord says the same thing in his definition of moral realism. I actually disagree that cognitivism is necessary for value realism (which I actually take to be not exactly the same as moral realism). Richard Boyd does this as well. Cognitivism is a take on the semantics of moral claims. "Realism", straightfrowardly construed, is simply the position that there exists something real, in this case, evaluative facts. For that reason, I disagree with Sayre-McCord's and Boyd's inclusion of cognitivism among the necessary conditions of moral realism. Though it would be an odd position to hold, I think one could conceivably be a non-cognitivist and moral realist: she could hold that there are moral facts, but that moral claims are always expressive and thus cannot refer to those facts.
Some (Boyd) have also posited the epistemic accessibility of moral facts as a necessary condition of moral realism. For similar reasons, I disagree: it seems to me to be beyond the scope of what the term captures.
Regarding the first comment about Shafer-Landau: I agree that many moral claims obtain in part because facts about human minds (that it would be bad to inflict pain, that it would be bad to thwart someone's valued projects or goals, etc.). But someone's judging these things to be good or bad, or someone's pro- or anti-attitudes towards them, is not what constitutes their goodness or badness. Perhaps we can substitute stance-independence with the term of objectivity, which I think, in the relevant context, means much the same thing. So the badness of a certain pain is instantiated only if someone is experiencing pain, but its badness is objective.