1.1 Introduction
Our moral lives are shaped, at the deepest level, by the different forms of life we share together. But they are also anchored in basic, common elements of our humanity . This duality helps account for both the diverse, idiosyncratic nature of our various moralities, and also their profound convergences. In this book I will try to show that the Wittgensteinian notion of basic moral certainty gives us a way of accounting for this unity and diversity, through acknowledging both its universal and local varieties. I will argue that these universal and local basic moral certainties act as the foundation of our moral thinking, that is, that our epistemic moral beliefs are grounded on these indubitable basic beliefs .
This amounts to a claim about the nature of moral justification , or how our moral knowledge claims are grounded. I will argue that the issue of moral justification underlies many of the problems of modern metaethics . Whether we need to appeal to principles to ground our moral talk or whether such principles are unnecessary; whether moral claims can be transposed from their context of origin or not; or whether (as G. E. M. Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre suggest) modern moral thought and action can be justified at allāāthese are all current questions, and they all turn on the issue of moral justification . My aim then will be to show that morality as a whole is groundedāāand that moral beliefs are therefore valid candidates for knowledgeāāand that the ground consists of ungrounded basic moral beliefs .
I will also argue that, far from being basically amoral creatures (as thinkers like Hobbes would have it) in fact human beings are morally concerned to the core. I will seek to substantiate this by giving an account of the source of human morality that I will call āprimary recognition ā. I will argue that this primary recognition, this apprehension of the other as one due moral consideration, is the basis on which we think morally at all, and shapes the nature of what can count as moral thought. The notion of primary recognition will help to show that our morality is rooted deep in the animal , arational level of our nature, rather than being open to rational justification all the way down. My aim throughout will be to show that moral thought is just as well grounded as empirical thoughtāāboth being grounded in ungrounded basic certaintiesāāand to motivate scepticism about moral relativism as a metaethical theory.
1.2 Wittgenstein ās on Certainty and Morality
The notion of basic moral certainty has its origin in Wittgenstein ās later work, On Certainty (1969), where he explores the nature of epistemic justification . There he concludes that underlying our empirical knowledge claims is a class of beliefs that are beyond the practices of doubt and justification Wittgenstein speaks of these beliefs as objects of certainty, as āthat which stands fastā and that which is āabsolutely solidā.1 Commentators have referred to these as ābasic certaintiesā (a term coined by DaniĆØle Moyal-Sharrock (2005, 78 and passim)) or āhingesā (ibid., passim), or āhinge certaintiesā (ibid., 64 and passim), following a metaphor used by Wittgenstein in On Certainty:
[T]he questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt , as it were like the hinges on which those turn. (OC 341)
and
If we want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put. (OC 343)
These basic empirical certainties are, according to Wittgenstein , in a different category from knowledge; in fact they are the āungrounded groundā (Moyal-Sharrock 2005, 74) of our epistemic activities. The features common to these basic empirical certainties that will be most important for this book will be discussed in the following sections of this chapter.
While Wittgenstein ās original discussion concerned basic empirical certainty, there have been several attempts to apply this notion to the moral realm (cf. Goodman 1982; Lichtenberg 1994; Kober 1997; Timmons 1996, 1999; Arrington 2002). Indeed, as Judith Lichtenberg notes in her excellent, and somewhat neglected paper āMoral certaintyā (1994), Wittgenstein ās remarks in On Certainty āfit the moral case strikingly wellā (ibid., 185). Lichtenberg too began to draw some useful distinctions in the debate; for instance between moral certainty and a priori knowledge (ibid., 183), and between āthose moral beliefs that form part of the essential fabric of our thinking and our social life from those that are simply habitual, parochial, or convenientā (ibid., 203).
More recently though, a new impetus was given to the attempt to apply the Wittgensteinian notion of basic certainty to the moral realm in two papers by Nigel Pleasants : āWittgenstein , ethics and basic moral certainty ā (2008) and āWittgenstein and basic moral certainty ā (2009). In these papers, Pleasants defends two examples of what he terms (following Moyal-Sharrock ās ābasic certaintiesā) ābasic moral certainties ā (2008, 243). These examples are āthe wrongness of killingā (2008, 255, 2009, 671) and āthe badness of deathā (2008, 257; 2009, 671). Our belief in the wrongness of killing and the badness of death, claims Pleasants , āoccupies a similar foundational position in our moral practices and judgements to that of basic empirical certainty in our epistemic practices and judgementsā (2009, 671). And in line with our basic empirical certainty, our basic moral certainty
is characterised by the inapplicability of doubt . There are some things which we can doubt only with great difficulty; some which we can hardly doubt; and some which we simply cannot doubt at allā¦ The objects of our basic certainty are immune to questioning, doubting and testing, [and] are also beyond verification , affirmation and appeal to evidence, grounds or reasons. (ibid., 670)
So for Pleasants , basic moral certainties are indubitable and beyond the practice of justification .
Since Pleasants ā original papers a flourishing debate has formed in which various philosophers have supported, criticized or sought to amend the notion of basic moral certainty (e.g. Burley 2010; HarrĆ© 2010; Brice 2013, 2014; Rummens 2013; Hermann 2015; De Mesel 2016; Schmidle 2016).2 Of particular interest for us is Mikel Burley ās paper āEpicurus, death and the wrongness of killingā (2010). In that paper Burley , whilst ātaking seriously the proposal, recently argued for by Pleasants , that the wrongness of killing might reasonably be regarded as a ābasic moral certainty āā (ibid., 69), argued against taking the badness of death likewise as such a basic certainty. Pleasants himself seems to have accepted as much in the light of Burley ās arguments (cf. ibid., 84 (note 9)). And in any case belief in the badness of death has played little part in subsequent work on basic moral certainty .3
Two standout skeptical treatments of the notion of basic moral certainty are those of Robert Brice and Stefan Rummens . Brice ās discussion, whilst generally supportive of the notion of basic moral certainty (āI think Pleasants is right to affiliate his proposition with a Wittgensteinian form of certaintyā (2013, 479)) is, I suggest, marred by some confusions. The major one is his maintaining that being the product of social conditioning disqualifies a belief from being held as a basic certainty, at least in the same wa...