Over at Crescat Sententia, Will Baude has been defending subjectivism about morality. Will doesn’t defend the traditional positivist view that "Murder is wrong" means (roughly) "Boo for murder!", but rather that it means "I disapprove of murder". Freespace’s Timothy Sandefur responds to Will with several moral and legal arguments. This seems to me to be a mistake. Will’s making a metaphysical and semantic claim, and the right responses will be based on metaphysics or semantics. Fortunately, there are plenty of the latter kind of argument.
Argument from indirect speech reports
Consider the following little discourse.
Mr Bigot: Homosexuality is wrong.
Brian: Mr Bigot said that homosexuality is wrong.
My statement seems obviously right – I just reported what Mr Bigot said. But it’s hard to see how this could be true on a subjectivist theory. Normally, when I say S said that p, what I say is true just in case the proposition expressed by p is true when I say it. For instance, if I say You said I am an idiot, that’s true just in case you said that Brian is an idiot, not just if you self-ascribe idiocy. Generally, indexicals in speech reports get their meaning from the reporter’s setting, not from the speaker’s setting. The subjectivist thinks that ‘wrong’ is just another indexical. So my report should mean "Mr Bigot said that I disapprove of homosexuality." But he said no such thing.
Argument from direct speech report (due to Ernest Lepore and Herman Cappelen)
If "Homosexuality is wrong" just means "I disapprove of homosexuality" then I should be able to say the following thing in response to Mr Bigot.
When Mr Bigot said, "Homosexuality is wrong" he spoke truly, even though homosexuality is not wrong.
After all, Mr Bigot does disapprove of homosexuality, so by subjectivist lights the first clause is true. And homosexuality is not wrong, so the second clause is true. But then the sentence is true, even though native speakers would naturally take it to be a contradiction.
Argument from deleted material (due to Jason Stanley)
Here’s a surprising fact about indexicals in English. In the following, Jill’s statement can’t mean that she lives in the Ritz.
Jack [pointing at the Savoy]: I live there
Jill [pointing at the Ritz]: So do I
This is odd, because you might have thought that when Jill says ‘So do I’, she’d be picking up on the words Jack used, and effectively saying "I live there". And since she says that by pointing at the Ritz, you might then think she meant she lives in the Ritz. It’s certainly conceivable that there could be a language in which that was how statements like Jill’s are interpreted. But English is not such a language. (Neither, I think, is any other natural language.) But consider how moral talk works.
Brian: Murder is wrong.
Mr Bigot: So is homosexuality.
The subjectivist wants to say that by that statement Mr Bigot is saying that he disapproves of homosexuality. But if moral terms are indexicals like the subjectivist says they are, then Mr Bigot’s statement should mean that Brian disapproves of homosexuality, just like Jill’s statement means that she lives where Jack is pointing.
What does this mean for ethics
One response to all these arguments would be that ethical terms are just very special kinds of indexicals. For instance, one might try and argue that somehow speakers don’t realise, even tacitly, that they are using different rules for embedded ethical terms as they do for other indexicals. But sui generis theories are as a rule pretty bad, and I think they should be avoided like the plague.
There are a few other responses that are consistent with subjectivist intuitions. One could go with Ayer’s position that "Murder is wrong" means "Boo for murder!". (Though it’s necessary to be careful here – this view of Ayer’s is inconsistent with his views on the nature of truth.) One could adopt a position of one of the modern day non-cognitivists, such as Blackburn or Gibbard. (I’m not enough of an expert to accurately present their views here. If you’re really committed, try their books here or here.) And, finally, one could think that the data shows that our native moral concept is an objective concept. But you might think for independent reasons that there are no such things as objective moral concepts. And then you’ll be an error theorist about morality. As Blackburn (I think) puts it, your theory of evil will be like the atheist’s theory of sin. This would be a fairly radical position, but I think it’s better than a theory that involves changing the meaning of our moral terms.
UPDATE: There’s a bad mistake in the above text. Where I said
bq. Normally, when I say S said that p, what I say is true just in case the proposition expressed by p is true when I say it.
I should have said
bq. Normally, when I say S said that p, what I say is true just in case S said something which expresses the proposition expressed by p when I say it.
That is what I meant all along, but somehow it’s not at all what I typed. (Trust me!) Thanks to Michael Kremer in the comments for picking up the mistake, and apologies for getting it wrong the first time.
{ 17 comments }
Jeremy Osner 07.26.03 at 10:30 pm
Your arg. from indirect speech report seems kinda bogus to me. If “x is wrong” means “I disapprove of x” then it is clearly a subjective statement — when I say “Mr. B. said homosex is wrong” I am saying “Mr. B. said he thinks homosex is wrong”, not “Mr. B. said I think homosex is wrong” — isn’t this obvious? Anytime you quote someone making a subjective judgement it is clear to the listener that I am not ascribing that judgement to myself; if Mr. N. says “Lisa is the most beautiful girl in the world” there is absolutely nothing wrong with my saying, “Mr. N. said Lisa is the most beautiful girl in the world” even if I think Mary is — if English’s subjunctive case were used more frequently there would be no cause for confusion; because I would say “Mr B. said homosex was wrong” and “Mr. N. said Lisa was the most beautiful girl in the world.”
freddie 07.26.03 at 11:12 pm
seems to me, though I am aan old guy, that things have changed a lot. In my day, gay folks were kinky and sodomy was dirty in a number of ways but now it is ok and they can even marry though the good lord will not them make babies. And adultery was cause for stoning or stocks or divorce but now it is simply a signal that marriage may need some counseling. All things seem to change in the moral racket, though the ten commandments are like stuff in other cultures and killing distasteful and to be avoided unless you do it for your country, and coventing your neighbor’s wife is ok now and might get you on Springer show if coveting has follow up…etc etc
there are things that all seem to accept: and though it might be ok to marry my cousin (I won’t: she is ugly), I don’t bvelieve it cool to marry my sister. Or even have sex with her! Undere all this moral stuff then there is some common sense ideas on what finally you can not do for the good of community.
Matthew Yglesias 07.27.03 at 12:32 am
Essays in Quasi-Realism probably isn’t the best way to tackle Blackburn’s view on this subject since most of it has to do with problems in the theory of modality, the philosophy of mind, etc. Ruling Passions focuses exclusively on the effort to provide a quasi-realist (his preferred term for what the rest of us call noncognitivism) theory of ethics.
Michael Kremer 07.27.03 at 3:08 am
Brian:
“Normally, when I say S said that p, what I say is true just in case the proposition expressed by p is true when I say it. ”
I don’t understand this sentence. Is it really what you intended?
Surely this is the true claim (and I think your intent):
“Normally, when I say S said that p, what I say is true just in case S said something which expresses the proposition expressed by p when I say it.”
Jeremy Osner 07.27.03 at 3:33 am
Indeed you can take out “wrong” out of the example and just consider, what if Mr. B. said “I disapprove of homosex” — then it would make no sense for me to say, “Mr. B. said I disapprove of homosex” — because that’s not what he said — but either of the two formulations, “Mr. B. said he disapproves of homosex” or “Mr. B. said ‘I disapprove of homosex'” is available to me — both are accurate statements and neither should cause any confusion on the listener’s part.
Matt Weiner 07.27.03 at 4:04 am
It’s too late for me to work out the ideas here, but I have a case that might cause doubt for the indirect quotation argument.
What happens if you go to Fenway Park and say
(1) “I root for the home team,”
and I go to PNC Park and say, (2) “Brian went to Fenway and said that he rooted for the home team”?
(2) seems acceptable. If I said, “Brian roots for the home team,” though, ISTM that would imply that you’re rooting for the Pirates.
If this is right, then we have “Brian said that p” accurately reporting a true utterance–even though p wouldn’t be true if uttered in the same context.
Chris Bertram 07.27.03 at 8:24 am
I guess I’m not getting the indirect speech argument either. Take an area where subjectivism seems obviously right: taste in food.
Brian: “Oysters are yukky!”
Chris: “Brian said that oysters are yukky.”
My response seems right as an accurate report of what you said and doesn’t commit me to any endorsement of your reaction (in fact I think that oysters are yummy).
Now take an area where objectivism is the right way to go:
Brian: “Paris is the capital of Texas.”
Chris; “Brian said Paris is the capital of Texas.”
Similary unexeptionable as a report of what you said, and not a commitment on my part to the truth of the proposition that Paris is the capital of Texas.
I must be missing something.
Jimmy Doyle 07.27.03 at 12:08 pm
Yeah, I don’t follow the ‘argument from indirect speech reports’ either. But then what about the ‘argument from direct speech reports’? That goes like this:
“If “Homosexuality is wrong” just means “I disapprove of homosexuality” then I should be able to say the following thing in response to Mr Bigot.
When Mr Bigot said, “Homosexuality is wrong” he spoke truly, even though homosexuality is not wrong.
After all, Mr Bigot does disapprove of homosexuality, so by subjectivist lights the first clause is true. And homosexuality is not wrong, so the second clause is true. But then the sentence is true, even though native speakers would naturally take it to be a contradiction.”
Hang on: what do you mean, “homosexuality is not wrong, so the second clause is true”? Does the argument just help itself to an objectivist conception of moral wrongness at this point? If so, it’s about as blatantly question-begging as it could get. But if not, then “homosexuality is not wrong” in this conctext just means that the proponent of the argument disapproves of homosexuality. So the correct non-question-begging interpretation of the supposed “contradiction” runs:
When Mr Bigot said, “Homosexuality is wrong” he spoke truly (ie he disapproves of homosexuality), even though homosexuality is not wrong (ie I don’t disapprove of homosexuality).
There doesn’t seem to me to be even an apparent contradiction here.
As for the ‘argument from deleted material,’ that’s not very persuasive either. The subjectivist will naturally interpret
“Brian: Murder is wrong.
Mr Bigot: So is homosexuality.”
as:
“Brian: My attitude toward murder is one of disapproval.
Mr Bigot: My attitude toward homosexuality is the same.”
What’s problematic about that? It’s true, as Brian says, that we don’t use indexicals like ‘there’ in the same way. But there are cases where subjectivism seems plausible that should be understood along the lines I suggest. Consider:
A: Oysters are delicious.
B: So are twinkies.
Presumably A and B are expressing subjective tastes, and there is no implication that A thinks that B is making a mistake if he doesn’t agree about oysters or vice versa for twinkies, but it doesn’t seem improper that they should express their tastes via the ‘useful fiction’ that they are ascribing properties to objects independent of themselves.
Brian Weatherson 07.27.03 at 4:01 pm
Normally, when I say S said that p, what I say is true just in case S said something which expresses the proposition expressed by p when I say it.
Er, yep, that’s exactly what I should have said. I must learn to proof-read posts better. All the criticisms directed against what I actually said there are spot on. But some of the criticisms are meant to apply even to the corrected version, so let’s try responding to those.
I’m not really persuaded by the comparisons to aesthetics because I think the same arguments tell against subjectivism there. This is a slightly table-thumping response, so let me try a couple more detailed responses to comments that might be more enlightening.
Matt’s ballpark example is quite good, but I think it doesn’t end up supporting subjectivism. Matt said the following could be OK.
(1) Brian said that he went to Fenway Park and cheered for the home team.
There ‘the home team’ could pick out the Red Sox (i.e. the home team at Fenway), even if it was said in PNC Park, where the home team is the Pirates. But notice that ‘home team’ isn’t really an indexical – even outside speech reports its content can be fixed by other elements in the sentence, as in (2)
(2) Everyone went to a local ball park and cheered for the home team.
There’s a reading of (2) where it is consistent with everyone cheering for different teams – a reading where it means roughly
(2a) For all x, x went to a ball park in x’s location and cheered for the team whose home was that ball park.
Both ‘local’ and ‘home team’ can take variable values in embedded contexts. But moral terms, and aesthetic terms, cannot. (3) can only mean that everyone had the same dish.
(3) Everyone went to Bar Italia and had the most delicious item on the menu.
If ‘delicious’ was meant to be like ‘local’ or ‘home team’, we’d expect that (3) would be consistent with everyone eating different dishes. But as far as I can tell, it isn’t. (3) entails that everyone ate the same thing. Similarly (4) looks like a tautology to me.
(4) If everyone votes for the most virtuous candidate, then everyone will vote for the same candidate.
I think these facts should be very surprising on a subjectivist theory, because in the meaning of ‘delicious’ or ‘virtuous’ there’s a variable place for a subject, and this place _can_ have its value fixed by the reference of other terms in the sentence (as in (5)), but somehow doesn’t have its value fixed by the quantifier in (3) or (4).
(5) Mr Bigot said that homosexuality is wrong.
As Jeremy said, we could interpret that as (6).
(6) Mr Bigot said that _he_ disapproves of homosexuality.
That interpretation will explain the data I presented, but again there’s a missing ambiguity. Consider what happens in (7).
(7) Mr Bigot said that he disapproves of homosexuality. So did Mr Bore.
The second sentence is ambiguous between (7a) and (7b).
(7a) Mr Bore said that Mr Bore disapproves of homosexuality.
(7b) Mr Bore said that Mr Bigot disapproves of homosexuality.
But in (8) there’s no such ambiguity.
(8) Mr Bigot said that homosexuality is wrong. So did Mr Bore.
Again, there’s a ‘sui generis’ response available here. One could argue that there’s special conditions on tacit subject places (like the ‘he’ in (8)) that mean they don’t generate the same ambiguities as explicit references to subjects (like the ‘he’ in (7)). But I think that’s pretty desperate.
On Jimmy’s response to the indirect report, I certainly didn’t mean to be assuming objectivism to argue that the second clause was true. I just meant, as he suggested, that if we interpret it by subjectivist lights, it comes out true. (It was possibly a bad example to use since it’s also true by objectivist lights, so just what the dialectic here was meant to be was a little confusing.) I agree that if we analyse the whole sentence as a subjectivist would have us do, it doesn’t look contradictory. But that’s a bad thing for the subjectivist, since the original sentence _does_ look contradictory. If their analysis removes this feature, it’s a bad analysis.
Jimmy Doyle 07.27.03 at 4:31 pm
“But that’s a bad thing for the subjectivist, since the original sentence does look contradictory. If their analysis removes this feature, it’s a bad analysis.”
I absolutely agree, and I have no time at all for this kind of subjectivism. But I’m still interested in how the dialectic goes. It seems to me that at this stage the subjectivist is in reasonable shape, because she can say:
“It’s true that the original sentence
(S)When Mr Bigot said, “Homosexuality is wrong†he spoke truly, even though homosexuality is not wrong
looks contradictory. But it is not a deficiency of my account if it fails to preserve all such appearances. On the contrary, only the most anodyne metaethics leaves everything as it is. It is, rather, an exciting and novel consequence of my account that sentences like (S) are only superficially contradictory.”
She may say that. But I don’t think there’s that much mileage in it. Much better, at this point, I think, to retreat to something like the positivist view: My saying “X is wrong” *expresses* my disapproval of X, but that disapproval is not the truth-condition of my utterance, because the utterance has no truth-condition. (I agree with you again, Brian, that Ayer’s version of this position is inconsistent with his deflationism about truth, but that point has only ad hominem force.) The reason this view, although (I believe) profoundly wrong, is far superior to subjectivism is that at least its implausibilities buy you something theoretically valuable: a solution to Hume’s problem of how moral judgments can motivate. If you agree with Hume that nothing with truth-conditional content could motivate, this kind of non-cognitivism is the natural place to go. Nevertheless, I think that the notorious ‘Frege-Geach objection’ (appealing to the fact that moral judgments figure in valid infereces) is fatal to noncognitivism.
Uh, sorry, got a litle carried away. I guess I was just wondering (Brian, and any other interested parties) how this compares to how you see the lie of the dialectical land.
Matt Weiner 07.27.03 at 4:46 pm
That seems like a convincing response. I have the same intuitions as you about [your] (4)–but I also have a slight worry that this is because I’m not a subjectivist about morals, linguistic data aside. Perhaps a moral subjectivist would say something like, “Everyone did the right thing–Janie did what she approved of, and Joanie did what she approved of, which was of course something completely different.”
I’m actually a bit more inclined to say that (3) is consistent with everyone eating different dishes–but my intuitions may be affected by my desire to keep up my end of the argument.
This proposal would require the subjectivist to adopt an error theory about statements like “If everyone does the right thing, everyone will do the same thing,” but it seems he’d have to anyway.
A question: What if you proposed that the extension “is wrong” is determined by the approval/disapproval of the speaker, even when “is wrong” is in an indirect discourse context? Then the indirect discourse argument doesn’t go through, but moral arguments are still pointless.
Brian Weatherson 07.27.03 at 5:33 pm
This is going to end up being a lot of people agreeing rather than the usual fun fight I fear!
I agree with both of Jimmy’s points. If the subjectivist wants to adopt an error theory at this point, that will undercut some of the arguments. Then we’d have to have a very different kind of debate about the plausibility of this kind of error theory rather than some other kind. Linguistic data may still be relevant – especially Chomskian considerations about how everyone could have learned the wrong theory – but it will be a much more philosophical debate. Which may be a good thing.
I’m actually a little unsure what the subjectivist’s obligations are at this point. Does she have to provide a re-analysis of all moral talk, including embedded moral talk like here? And must that analysis end up explaining why we react the way we do to various sentences? Philosophers have often thought so, but if she’s just going to say that we make mistakes, she can just say that the internal coding of moral claims is messed up, I don’t think that’s a fair obligation.
My inclinations here are split between two parties. On the one hand, I have sympathy for V. H. Dudman’s line that this kind of linguistic analysis reveals at best the ‘swamp metaphysics’ of our linguistic ancestors. And that isn’t a guide to what’s really out there. (Dudman thinks the swamp metaphysics is committed to the reality of the past but not the future – but he doesn’t think physicists should care about this fact.) On the other, I have sympathy for Frank Jackson’s line that if you give up too many of the intuitions about a subject matter, then you’ve simply changed the subject. I _think_ the best way for a would-be subjectivist to respect both points of view is to adopt something like Mackie’s error theory. Our moral talk (or the ‘swamp metaphysics of morality’) presupposes the existence of objective moral facts, but there are no such facts, so all moral talk is defective. That’s a pretty wild view, but I think subjectivism is pretty wild to start with.
If the subjectivist isn’t going to be an error theorist, what I think what I think she must do is show why the subjective concept she presents is close enough to our original concept in order to not count as changing the subject. Remember, there are lots of naturally occurring concepts that resemble the folk concept WITCH in several ways, but most of us are error theorists about witches. I suspect that what the subjectivist means be ‘good’ is no closer to the folk concept GOOD than the concept YOUNG WOMAN WHO ENGAGES IN OCCULT RITUALS is to the concept WITCH, but I could be wrong there.
And I agree entirely that none of these objections even get off the ground against the expressivist views. And I think versions of the Frege-Geach objection are still pretty telling against all expressivist theories. But that would take a long argument. (Cian Dorr had a recent paper arguing that modern expressivist theories had a hard time accounting for arguments with moral premises and non-moral conclusions, but it doesn’t seem to be online so I can’t link to it.) What started all this off was that Will Baude made a point of saying he endorsed the cognitivist version of subjectivism, not the non-cognitivist version. Most people simply reject that theory because it gets the subject matter wrong – when I say “Murder is wrong” I’m not talking about myself. But I don’t like subject matter arguments for various reasons, so I thought I’d have a go at a few other arguments against it.
Matt, who is determining the reference of ‘wrong’ in indirect discourse? Is it the reporter or the reportee? If it’s the reportee I agree the indirect discourse argument doesn’t go through. It’s going to mean we have a very complicated theory of speech reports, because there’ll have to be all sorts of different rules for moral terms, but maybe this could be worked out.
By the way, almost as soon as I posted it I started to have doubts about my claim about ‘delicious’. Maybe there is some evidence there for subjectivism about taste talk.
karen 07.27.03 at 6:13 pm
If one were a subjectivist, one might wonder about Brian’s reasons for saying “Mr. Bigot said h.i.w.” If he wanted to do more than raise problems for philosophers, he might have had very sensible, subjectivist meanings in mind. For example:
– “Mr B. said HIW” (aren’t you going to object now?)
– “Mr B. said HIW” (and it would be rude to contradict him in public)
– “Mr B said HIW” (he’s been in Gay Pride parades – what a hypocrite)
None of these presume Brian is asserting any objective moral truth about homosexuality, let alone whether or not he subjectively agrees with Mr. Bigot. But the larger context of the conversation, which might be apparent from inflection or gestures, so need not require more words to make clear, shows them to be sensible.
I suspect the various confusions (like the Ritz/Savoy or delicious ones) are the kind of thing that would either come clear in the next few remarks, or else would have prompted the speakers in the first place, for example, to make a joke, or censure the person who ordered the wrong meal. Without imputing errors.
Matt Weiner 07.27.03 at 11:30 pm
Brian–I meant the reporter. The main idea is that, in Mr. Bigot’s mouth, “HIW” is true, and in my mouth, not only is “HIW” false but “What Mr. Bigot said is true” is false. This turns moral debate into “Is not!” “Is too!”–with both assertions being correct–but I think that’s what the subjectivist wants to do.
It’d take me a while to work out how the semantics might work. It’s something like John MacFarlane’s paper in the most recent Phil Quarterly, “Future Contingents and Relative Truth.”
Jimmy Doyle 07.28.03 at 6:44 pm
Brian:
Don’t understand what you envision when you talk about the subjectivist opting for an error theory. In fact, I thought that what little point there is to subjectivism is derived largely from its enabling one to avoid an error theory. For it gives (seemingly) robust truth-conditions to moral judgments — the approval or disapproval (standardly) of the speaker — which are furthemore (seemingly) often satisfied: whenever, in fact, we approve or disapprove in the way expressed by the judgment. And we seem often to know that such judgments (so conceived) are true,
and not only when we play the role of speaker. (We can have knowledge of others’ attitudes, as well as of our own.) So I thought that subjectivism was a natural home for someone aspiring to a pretty chunky realism about the meaning and truth of moral discourse.
Brian Weatherson 07.29.03 at 1:34 am
I should have been more careful in my choice of terms. ‘Error theory’ traditionally means that there aren’t any ethical truths. I meant to pick out a kind of theory where people are massively misguided about the semantics of their own language. It’s very sloppy of me to call this an error theory, because that term is already taken.
But the subjectivist really does have to mess with a fair bit of our semantic theory. Consider the following little toy dialogue.
A: Murder is wrong.
B: That’s right.
C: I agree.
D: Yeah, that’s true.
I’d like to see a simple subjectivist theory where B, C and D end up (a) saying something plausible and (b) don’t end up talking about A. The most natural theory has them all agreeing that A disapproves of murder.
Vates 12.11.03 at 7:32 pm
Hello,
I deem, that there’s one more mistake in the text (sorry, if repeating anything, cuz I haven’t read the comments).
Quoting:
———
“Brian: Murder is wrong.
Mr Bigot: So is homosexuality.
The subjectivist wants to say that by that statement Mr Bigot is saying that he disapproves of homosexuality. But if moral terms are indexicals like the subjectivist says they are, then Mr Bigot’s statement should mean that Brian disapproves of homosexuality, just like Jill’s statement means that she lives where Jack is pointing”
———
I think, there should stand “Mr. Bigot’s statement mean, that he approves of murder being wrong [not Brian disapproval of homosexuality]”.
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