The Mystery of Moral Authority

Russell Blackford

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137562692
• eBook ISBN: 9781137562708
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The Mystery of Moral Authority argues for a sceptical and pragmatic view of morality as an all-too-human institution. Searching, intellectually rigorous, and always fair to rival views, it represents the state of the art in a tradition of moral philosophy that includes Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and J.L. Mackie.

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Introduction and Overview

Abstract: Morality appears to claim objective authority: it claims to be inescapably authoritative in guiding our actions, irrespective of our varying ends and attitudes, and transcending the local authority of human social institutions. On reflection, morality’s special authority appears mysterious, and we may suspect it is illusory. The Mystery of Moral Authority will scrutinize morality’s claims to objective authority over how we should live, act, and speak.

Keywords: hypothetical imperative; moral authority; moral scepticism; morality; Philippa Foot; Richard Joyce; Robert Merrihew Adams

Blackford, Russell. The Mystery of Moral Authority. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137562708.0003.

Morality’s special authority

There’s something about morality. There is a mystery about it, since morality claims a special authority that is difficult to articulate. Moral judgments, or at least a crucial subset of them, appear to state that certain conduct is demanded or forbidden in the nature of things. Morality’s requirements appear to transcend any ends that human beings actually desire and any social institutions – such as law, custom, etiquette, or the rules of sports and games – that apply to us locally as we go about our lives.

Throughout this book, I write of objective moral authority (or use related expressions such as “morality’s claim to objective authority”), but the terminology is a secondary issue. I could, for example, employ the expression transcendent authority or (as I’ll sometimes say) inescapable practical authority. Alternatively, I could join Richard Joyce in writing of the practical clout claimed by moral judgments (Joyce 2006, 57–64). However we express the point, morality claims a sort of authority over us that it is difficult, on reflection, to make intelligible or accept as real.

In later chapters, I inquire more closely into the concept and nature of morality itself. Meanwhile, I am hardly the first author to express worries about its claims to a special authority. Indeed, there is a long tradition of worriers.

Among recent scholars, Robert Merrihew Adams, a religious theorist of morality and the philosophy of value, cogently summarizes many of the possible doubts and explains why he understands morality as, in a sense, an object of faith. There are, as he explains, numerous ways in which a rational person might come to have doubts. Most obviously, they might arise in studying moral philosophy, where a student could be left unsatisfied with answers to questions about the meaning of moral terms, or to a jaw-dropping question such as “Why be moral?” Additional doubts can creep in from elsewhere: an anthropology student might be left “wondering whether moral opinions about such issues as the rightness or wrongness of headhunting aren’t simply relative to different cultural systems and their expectations”; study of Marxism or related forms of analysis “might lead the student to doubt whether any moral belief can be anything nobler than an intellectual tool or weapon for the service of the self‐interest of the believer or of some group to which the believer belongs” (Adams 1999, 374).

Adams adds that these questions are serious ones “that are unlikely to be permanently cleared off the philosophical agenda.” As he notes, responses to them often seem to involve a degree of circularity: appealing in one way or another to moral assumptions in order to defend morality itself. Thus, even if this is ultimately justifiable, “a certain level of rational discomfort with the situation seems to me appropriate” (Adams 1999, 375).

One useful way to approach this moral mystery is via a classic article published by Philippa Foot in 1972. Following the great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, Foot explains the concept of a hypothetical imperative that tells us how to act for the sake of some desired end, or for the sake of our own happiness or in our own self-interest (1972, 306). She emphasizes the diversity of hypothetical imperatives, in that we can describe them, variously, as based on desires, inclinations, projects, aims, and so on, and on those of individuals and groups (1972, 306–307). In all cases, however, the imperative involves a relation, whether explicit or implicit, between some kind of means and some kind of end.

For example, I might tell you, “Catch the 9.15 train” (or “You should catch the 9.15 train”) on the unstated assumption, or hypothesis, that you want to be in the city by 10.00 am. If that is incorrect, then the imperative has no force for you; and if I discover as much, I’ll withdraw my words.

Foot goes on to observe that institutional rules, such as the local rules of etiquette, apply to us non-hypothetically in a sense: they apply to our conduct (and may be enforced against us socially) irrespective of our own ends (Foot 1972, 308–309). They retain a certain force even if you or I, for example, don’t want to follow them.

If I refuse to follow the local rules of etiquette, I may find myself lectured, shamed, ridiculed, ostracized, and otherwise subjected to informal social punishments. Note, however, that the rules of etiquette can be challenged by somebody who chafes at having to abide by them (let’s call her Abigail). Abigail might ask for a reason to follow the rules, and one reason might, indeed, be that she’d better toe the line or she’ll be punished. Perhaps, for example, she’ll be invited to no more dinner parties. Assuming that she wants such invitations, that is a perfectly good reason to do as she’s told. Alternatively, she might conform willingly if it’s pointed out that following the rules will tend to make things go pleasantly for her and others whom she cares about.

Either way, Abigail’s ultimate reasons to follow the rules relate to her well-being or to ends that she cares about. If she could get away with breaching the rules, and if she didn’t care about the consequences for others, she might, in a sense, have no reason to follow them. We can imagine her being informed that she’s breaking the rules and upsetting other people. She replies, absent-mindedly, as she eats her peas with her dessert spoon, “But what’s that to me?” (compare Joyce 2001, 41).

This kind of insouciance or defiance may seem possible with the rules of etiquette, but it is not how we usually think about moral rules. In fact, if you think Abigail really should toe the line, it is probably because you think she is doing something morally blameworthy by spoiling the gathering for others. We usually assume that the requirements of morality are binding on us inescapably or categorically. They bind us whatever we are aiming to achieve, whether following them is in our interests or not, and irrespective of whether we could get away with breaching them. Thus, we think – don’t we? – that the force of moral requirements is not withdrawn in the absence of a hypothetical end relating to our welfare or to whatever else we might desire or care about (Foot 1972, 308–309).

Unfortunately, this kind of binding force – which I’ve already labelled objective moral authority – is mysterious. As Foot states, it is not as if breaching the moral rules is necessarily irrational, at least as she understands irrationality: “Irrational actions are those in which a man in some way defeats his own purposes, doing what is calculated to be disadvantageous or to frustrate his ends” (1972, 310). If, however, we are not required to follow the moral rules on pain of being irrational, there is a mystery about morality’s special force. What does the “fugitive thought” (Foot 1972, 311) amount to?

We have powerful feelings, Foot suggests, that we must behave in accordance with morality. These are explicable, perhaps, given the social importance of the moral rules and the way we are taught them (they are impressed on us strongly during childhood). That, however, does not entail that they have a special kind of authority over us any more than do the rules of etiquette (Foot 1972, 312). We might commit ourselves to follow the moral rules, thinking that this will advance our own values. But when other people emphatically demand that we comply with morality for its own sake, as an ultimate end, “they are relying on an illusion, as if trying to give the moral ‘ought’ a magic force” (1972, 315). Foot concludes:

It is often felt, even if obscurely, that there is an element of deception in the official line about morality. And while some have been persuaded by talk about the authority of the moral law, others have turned away with a sense of distrust. (1972, 316)

Foot later modified her views considerably. Nonetheless, her arguments in “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives” seem to be on the right track. It is refreshing to read such a clear analysis, acknowledging the common, baffling, often inarticulate, suspicion that morality cannot be everything it claims.

Foot was far from the only person to voice suspicions. Another such voice was that of Bernard Williams. Writing in 1985, Williams suggests that there may be no single clear-cut distinction to be drawn between values and matters of fact. Nonetheless, he continues, there is an important distinction between the claims of morality (or ethics) and those of science:

Still I believe that in relation to ethics there is a genuine and profound difference to be found, and also – it is a further point – that the difference is enough to motivate some version of the feeling (itself recurrent, if not exactly traditional) that science has some chance of being more or less what it seems, a systematized theoretical account of how the world really is, while ethical thought has no chance of being everything it seems. (Williams 1985, 134–35)

He recalls this idea later in the same book: “I have tried to say why ethical thought has no chance of being everything it seems” (1985, 199). For Williams, convergence by many people on the same scientific beliefs is guided by how things actually are, whereas nothing quite like that applies to our moral thinking even if something of a convergence eventually takes place.

By contrast, Michael Smith is a prominent contemporary defender of morality’s authority. He is troubled by what looks like an incompatibility between the objectivity of morality and its practicality. By the latter, he means that morality provides us with reasons to act. If we follow Foot‘s approach, we can have reasons to act in a certain way only if acting otherwise would defeat our own purposes, frustrate our goals, leave our desires unsatisfied, cause us disadvantage, or something of the kind. On this analysis, our reasons for action are always sensitive to something about us, as individuals – our varying ends and attitudes – and in that sense they contain a subjective element.

By contrast, morality claims an objective authority: an authority that transcends all our various ends and attitudes, as well as the authority of social institutions (an authority that also, as Foot correctly insists, ultimately relies on whether or not we care to accept it). Morality’s authority seems not only inescapable but also non-subjective and overriding. This is the combination that Joyce (2006, 62) means by practical clout. If there is no objective authority of this kind, and yet morality claims to possess it, the fear is that “Nothing could be everything that a moral judgement purports to be” (Smith 1994, 11).

Is morality an illusion?

Psychologically speaking, it is difficult to believe that our moral concepts, or some of them – for example, such concepts as moral rightness and moral wrongness – could be systematically mistaken, so that morality is an illusion (or rather, it is a social institution that is ascribed an illusory magical power). But something similar applies to related concepts used in other places and times, or in some cases even here and now. For example, Joyce opens his 2001 book, The Myth of Morality, by discussing the Polynesian concept of tapu. This has no exact equivalent in English and does not, according to Joyce, mean either “forbidden by our culture” or “morally wrong”.

As he explains the idea, tapu involves a special kind of pollution, or metaphysical uncleanness, that can be transmitted to others through contact and cancelled using certain rituals (Joyce 2001, 1–2). The obvious implication is that nothing really has these properties, although some actions may, of course, have the property of being classified as tapu in the relevant society. As an anthropological or sociological observation, we can state truly that these actions are forbidden by the society’s mores or norms. These, in turn, may or may not be pragmatically defensible. Irrespective of that, talk of actions or things being tapu is systematically mistaken. Strictly speaking, nothing is tapu, and we should not be tapu realists.

Again, consider the word sin. One theological definition is: “The purposeful disobedience of a creature to the known will of God” (Livingstone ed., 2014). Whether or not we adopt this exact definition, it is clear that the concept involves disobedience to God’s will. If God does not actually exist, the concept of sin is not instantiated in our actual world: strictly speaking, then, nothing is sinful. Not so surprisingly, Joel Marks, a philosophical atheist as well as a sceptic about morality, writes that the world contains no actual sins or evil, since “there is no literal God to ground the religious superstructure that would include such categories as sin and evil” (2013, 16).

As an aside, I am not so sure about the word evil. Theologically, it may be understood as an implacable opposition to God’s will, in which case the non-existence of God would entail that nothing is, strictly speaking, evil. Adams understands goodness as a kind of resemblance to God, and he states that “positive evil . . . is enmity toward the Good, being against the Good, destroying or violating what is good” (1999, 28). But the meanings of words shift over time, so perhaps evil has acquired a secular meaning by now. In some contexts, it seems to refer simply to such things as the occurrence of pain. In other contexts, we attach the label evil to people (or to fictional beings) that show a kind of dangerous and merciless intelligence.

Be that as it may, the word sin continues to bear mainly its theological meaning, and at least in my experience it has dropped out of frequent use among secular people. Marks is correct that nothing can be literally sinful in a godless universe. Could similar considerations apply to the idea of moral wrongness? Perhaps we should not be realists about moral wrongness and moral rightness – any more than we are realists about tapu or atheists are realists about sin.

That issue will trouble us in what lies ahead.

The plan

In what follows I employ the word morality to refer to an observable social phenomenon: the existence within human societies of systems of norms of a certain distinctive kind. At the same time, philosophers tend to be interested in what behav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction and Overview
• 2  Morality and Its Discontents
• 3  Reason as a Foundation for Morality
• 4  The Appeal of Moral Naturalism
• 5  Moral Relativism(s)
• 6  Appeals to God
• 7  Living as a Moral Sceptic
• 8  A Metaethical Coda
• References
• Index