The Futility of Philosophical Ethics

Metaethics and the Grounds of Moral Feeling

James Kirwan

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350260665
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The Futility of Philosophical Ethics puts forward a novel account of the grounds of moral feeling with fundamental implications for philosophical ethics. It examines the grounds of moral feeling by both the phenomenology of that feeling, and the facts of moral feeling in operation – particularly in forms such as moral luck, vicious virtues, and moral disgust – that appear paradoxical from the point of view of systematic ethics. Using an analytic approach, James Kirwan engages in the ongoing debates among contemporary philosophers within metaethics and normative ethics. Instead of trying to erase the variety of moral responses that exist in philosophical analysis under one totalizing system, Kirwan argues that such moral theorizing is futile. His analysis counters currently prevalent arguments that seek to render the origins of moral experience unproblematic by finding substitutes for realism in various forms of noncognitivism. In reasserting the problematic nature of moral experience, and offering a theory of the origins of that experience in unavoidable individual desires, Kirwan accounts for the diverse manifestations of moral feeling and demonstrates why so many arguments in metaethics and normative ethics are necessarily irresolvable.

Part I

Metaethical considerations

1

Moral experience

The phenomenology of moral experience

We experience moral responses. It is tempting to try to expand on this ‘responses’ with a list of the kinds of feeling they are constituted by: anger, resentment, contempt, disgust, admiration, gratitude, approbation, disapprobation and so on. Clearly, however, such a list would illuminate nothing. Any item that could appear on it would be either a feeling (like anger or admiration) that is neither necessary nor sufficient to constitute a moral response or simply a synonym for ‘moral response’ itself (‘approbation’, ‘disapprobation’).

While moral responses are self-evidently a matter of emotion – in that they are motivating ascriptions of value – they cannot be reduced to any other emotions that accompany them or perhaps signal their presence. I may, for example, be shocked by some action that I feel is wrong, but that shock appears to arise from the feeling that it is wrong rather than being the cause of that feeling. Likewise, the anger I feel towards the person responsible for the action arises from my holding them to be responsible for what I feel is wrong. The feeling of wrongness precedes the anger. The moral response, then, does not appear to either be or be caused by the anger or the shock in themselves.

We might, then, attempt a more abstract characterization of the kind of response that is a moral response. We might say, for example, that a negative moral response is a strong feeling of this should not be. This feeling is not, of course, an implicit appeal to the limits of either rationality or likelihood; that is, it does not bear the sense in which we might use the expression if, for example, suddenly confronted with a talking elephant in pyjamas. Neither is it possible to interpret the formula as an incomplete conditional statement – “This shouldn’t be if I/you/we/they want/expect…” Indeed, insofar as the expression actually does capture the feeling of the moral response, this is precisely the sense it does not bear. However, once these rational or empirical meanings are excluded, we are left only with a meaning of should not that makes the explanation circular: what makes the response a moral response is that it depends upon a moral response. The same holds for positive moral responses, as feelings of this should be or I am glad this is. Once we have excluded the meaning of should that expresses our feeling about either the possibility or likelihood of the object or its instrumental value in relation to a definite goal, only the moral meaning remains.

If we cannot, then, identify a moral response with any emotion other than a moral emotion, it is at least possible to give an account of how we distinguish moral responses from other kinds of response: to say what gives a response its identity as a moral response from the subject’s point of view. For we do, in fact, have no problem in giving intuitive assent to, for example, the proposition that anger per se and moral response are not identical. We do feel immediately the inappropriateness of a statement like “That’s not fair; I wanted to win”.

What follows, then, is intended as purely descriptive rather than prescriptive. That is, it is not intended as an account of what conditions a moral response must fulfil to be “properly” a moral response irrespective of the subject’s feeling that it is a moral response. Rather, it is an account of how we recognize a response as a moral response when we experience one. The question of whether or not, in any particular case, the subject is justified in identifying their response as a moral one is a separate question (as also are the questions of what ‘justified’ means here and whether such a notion is even meaningful in this context). Clearly, however, that question cannot precede an examination of what are experienced as moral responses since this experience is, for the moment, all we have to work on.

First, then, a moral response must be my response. It may be, as we shall see later, that I can be reasoned into, or reasoned out of, a response to a situation (by being made to see that situation in a certain way), but in that case we should more accurately say not that the first response to x was not moral but rather that my notion of what constitutes x has changed, or that I am now experiencing a different moral response. Unless it is ultimately my response to x, I cannot call it a moral response to x. An unshakeable logical demonstration of the way in which the present case is, for example, an instance of the breaking of a principle I feel should not be broken, may lead me to make a moral judgement that the present case is wrong, that is, to pronounce it “wrong”, but unless I actually feel the present case is wrong, I cannot say that in making this judgement I am actually reporting a moral response. (We shall return to this distinction between responses and judgements in a moment.) Thus, for example, when Frederic equably announces to his pirate foster family that ‘Individually, I love you all with affection unspeakable; but, collectively, I look upon you with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation’, we immediately feel the intended absurdity of the pronouncement.¹

A moral response, then, is only such insofar as it is my feeling that this should not be or, in the case of ‘positive’ responses, either I am relieved this is so (where I foresaw the possibility of a negative response) or I am glad this is so, which is the province of the supererogatory. Moreover, it is involuntary. That is, it appears to me to be necessarily connected to the situation to which it is a response. I do not arrive at the response by asking myself “Is this good for . . .?” or “Is this wrong because . . .?” (though both would be possible with moral judgements). It is only a moral response insofar as it happens to me.

Another way of describing this feeling of the necessity of the response would be to say that it appears to me to imply a universality. We feel – as also we speak – as if rightness and wrongness were qualities of actions, and our responses had universal application (“It is wrong”), in the sen se of being applicable to everyone perceiving the same object. Only insofar as my response feels exemplary do I perceive anything as “wrong” or “right”.² This imputation of universality is, however, only something implicit in our feeling that the wrongness or rightness is a quality of the action.

A moral response, then, feels like a response to a property of the world. What distinguishes it from other qualities that we may perceive as properties of the world – such as the qualities things possess when we find them annoying, frightening, disappointing, embarrassing, boring or desirable – is that we cannot, as we can with these other cases, feel our own sensibilities at play in determining the response we feel. That is, we can acknowledge that a thing bores us personally without feeling that we have at all undermined our own boredom with it, but the same does not hold with moral responses. To declare that an action is wrong (in a moral sense) merely for oneself would be to deny a fundamental condition for the intelligible use of moral language. For someone to call an action “Evil for me”, using it in the same way as one might say “Cheese is disgusting” or “That’s inconvenient”, would be equivalent to our original example of “That’s not fair; I wanted to win”.³ (That is, if someone did use an expression like “evil for me”, we would take it to imply – presuming that person to have a proper grasp of moral language – that they believed the object to be evil in itself, and to be claiming that if we could see it as it really is (i.e. as they do), we would feel as they do.)

Yet another way to describe the felt necessity, or implicit universality, of moral responses would be to say that they are disinterested. “Disinterested” in the sense that, as we experience our response as necessarily linked to the perception of the action, there appears to us to be no personal, and thus interested, reasons to account for that response. Thus, we feel that a person cannot really be reporting a moral response if they call someone “bad” for beating them in a race, while, conversely, there is nothing at all strange about so describing the actions of the Spanish Inquisition, which cannot today have the remotest connection with anyone’s personal interests, in the mundane sense of “interests”. In this sense, all moral responses are altruistic: they imply a concern with the benefit of others – even when, to those others, they might appear to be merely a matter of resentment.

Hume describes this condition for a response to qualify as moral when he writes that it is ‘only when a character is considered in general, without reference to our particular interest, that it causes such a feeling or sentiment, as denominates it morally good or evil’.⁴ However, Hume’s formulation here actually sets the conditions for qualifying as a moral response too high, since it may be that there is a reference to our particular interest without us being aware of it. Rather we should say that to be a moral response, the feeling must be experienced as if it had no reference to our particular interests.

This last is an important point since the neglect of it can also lead to a distortion of the facts of moral experience. For, it is evident that self-interest does play a role in moral responses. To return to the Spanish Inquisition for a moment, it should be quite obvious that while a vivid account of the actions of Torquemada may inspire in me a lively sense of his wickedness, this feeling is not likely to be anything like so intense as the moral outrage I will feel at the action of someone who jumps a slow queue in which I myself am standing. No doubt in another context I would certainly feel that the crimes of Torquemada were worse than queue jumping, but at the moment my queue is jumped I do not.⁵

Our first instinct, on reflection, might be to disqualify our response to the queue jumper from being a purely moral response. We might say that we are confusing our own anger at a thwarted desire (to get to the front of the queue) with the seriousness of the immorality involved in queue jumping. Indeed, this is certainly how many philosophers deal with the moral responses of those whose feelings they do not sympathize with. (This tendency to disallow responses that are inconsistent with what the moral response should be, according to consistent ethical systems, will become familiar as we go on.)

However, what qualifies a response as a moral response is not that it should be disinterested, but that it should be experienced as if it were disinterested: should feel, if not impartial, then at least merely a response to properties of the world. For, at this stage we have no theory of the grounds of moral responses that would justify our disallowing a response just because we can see an interest at work in it. It may be that anger always is a part of adverse moral responses, so that the presence of anger in the response is no indication of whether it is moral or not. It may be that ultimately moral responses always are, in some sense, a matter of self-interest; at this stage we do not know. (And we are not likely to find out if we start disqualifying responses that feel like moral responses, when this feeling is the only data we have.) What is important, however, is that, to qualify as a moral response, it should appear to the one experiencing it as if it is not principally a matter of self-interest. M y response to the queue jumper may perfectly fulfil this requirement. It does not matter if someone else, or I myself later, can see a personal interest at work in the vehemence of my response. So long as it appears to me that I am responding to the action in itself, irrespective of my personal interest, then I am satisfying all the conditions that anyone could satisfy in order to legitimately claim that what they were feeling was a moral response. Even my rational recognition, on reflection, that the intensity of my response was (in terms of my normal range of moral responses) apparently “adulterated” by interest is, precisely in being rational, irrelevant.⁶ It is evidence only of what I feel now, not what I felt then.

In summary, then, what qualifies a response to be a moral response as such is not that it can be shown to be made independently of self-interest, but only that it should not feel as if it is dependent on self-interest. Any particular response may be, at the same time, both a matter of personal interest and the object of a moral response, providing that response does not appear, to the subject at the moment it is felt, as dependent on the interest involved. That is, so long as we feel we are responding to rightness and wrongness, as these appear to us to be part of the fabric of the world, we are experiencing a moral response: whatever feels like a moral response is a moral response.

However, if moral responses are experienced as disinterested in the sense that they do not appear to the subject to be a matter of that subject’s self-interest, they are obviously not, at least with regard to negative moral responses, disinterested in the sense of being detached. The moral response, as a feeling of this should not be, is experienced as a disposition to act (to do or to undo), or at least a wish to see action taken. (This is one way in which the felt disinterest of the moral response is distinguishable from the felt disinterest of aesthetic experience.) Paradoxically, then, a moral response feels very much like a desire, though a desire that is, given its felt disinterest, not mine.⁷

To say that a moral response, or at least a negative moral response, is experienced as a disposition to act is not, of course, equivalent to saying that moral responses motivate us to act. The response and the disposition are the same thing. There is no question, then, of making behaviour a measure of the real presence of a moral response, any more than one would make behaviour the measure of the presence of any other disposition or desire. My moral response to the idea of Torquemada is no less a moral response for the fact that there is nothing now to be done about Torquemada, just as my response to the idea of Lauren Bacall is no less the kind of response it is for the fact that there is nothing now to be done about Lauren Bacall. The disposition does not defer to possibility. Moreover, even where possibility is present, it would not make sense to say that acting on a disposition was necessary to prove the presence of that disposition. All that is necessary is the feeling of disposition, and this is already part of the phenomenology of the negative moral response.

It is precisely because of this element of disposition or desire that, desp...