Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 5)
/
John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part V, Error Theory
David Baggett
The second expressivist concession is made by the error theory of J. L. Mackie. Hare says that although the prescriptivist is right to stress the prescriptivity of value language, he is wrong about what ordinary people mean when they use the value terms. Mackie’s view is that ordinary value judgment does not merely claim to be “objective” in a Kantian sense; it also claims to pick out features that are parts of the fabric of the world, and are there independently of us. This is the second concession. But he goes on to argue that nothing can be both prescriptive and objective in this sense at the same time. This is why his theory is an error theory.
The reason why we fall into this error is that we project or objectify. As Hume says, the mind spreads itself on external objects. Mackie says that we have the experience of desiring things, and calling “good” what satisfies the desires. But we reach the notion of something being objectively good, or having intrinsic value, by reversing the direction of dependence here, by making the desire depend on the goodness, instead of the goodness on the desire.
Mackie thinks the idea of objective prescriptivity did make sense when people believed in a divine lawgiver, who both existed independently of us and gave us authoritative commands. But this belief has now faded out, and the idea of objective prescriptivity deserves to fade with it. Whereas Mackie rejects objective prescriptivity, Hare makes it the center of his view.
Mackie gives two main arguments why nothing can be both prescriptive and objective in his sense at the same time. The first is the argument from relativity, that people’s moral beliefs are just too different from each other for us to think they have a single source in some objective good. The second argument is that objective prescriptivity makes values into a very odd kind of entity. Mackie finds such things metaphysically peculiar. Plato’s Form of the Good both tells the person who knows it what to do and makes him do it. What is mysterious is not so much that the good authoritatively tells a person what to do, or that it causally makes a person do something, but it is the conjunction of these two powers in a single item that mystifies him. How can the telling and the making (overriding motive) go together in this way?
Hare proposes that we lose the sense of strangeness Mackie felt if we separate the two features of “objective prescriptivity” he combined together. Hare thinks both features (the telling and the making) operate in a value judgment, but at different moments. And this will enable him to mark out a middle ground between expressivism and realism. On this middle ground we can say, first, that there is a “magnetic” or “repulsive force” attaching to things that is itself part of the fabric of the world (this is Mackie’s making). We are given motivation by certain features of what we experience. By “motivation” Hare means desire and concern and emotional attraction and repulsion in general. The search for a single simple property here to explain all such experience is probably a mistake, and has led to a bogus sense of mystery about what this property could possibly be. There may be many qualitatively different complexes of “magnetic” or “repulsive” properties in the thing and different qualities of response in us.
Value judgment expresses, on Hare’s view, not just an affective response, but separately the element that he calls endorsement (Mackie’s telling). To judge something good is not just to report the magnetic force, but to judge that the thing deserves to have that effect on us. We are deliberately submitting to what we are claiming as authoritative. Endorsement is an autonomous submission.
A good analogy here is Kant’s remark that we should recognize our duties as God’s commands. Submission to God’s commands can be autonomous if God’s authority is seen to make possible a kingdom of ends in which all members are respected as ends in themselves. We can acknowledge autonomously the force of some value recognized as external to us.
Murdoch’s postulation of a magnetic center is germane here. To endorse a response to some felt attraction is to acknowledge a consistency between this magnetic force and the force of the Good as a whole. Endorsement is expressed most clearly in the judgment that the emotion or desire fits the situation that occasioned it (which distinguishes endorsement from the way those in the Milgram experiments were in the grip of a norm without full-fledged endorsement). An agent can endorse or withhold endorsement at different stages of reflective distance form her initial affective response.
Prescriptive realism is like the other forms of expressivism in that it insists on the prescriptive character of moral judgment. Standardly I am, in making such a judgment about an action, telling myself to do something, and expressing my will. But the view is also realist, in that it holds there is a pull from outside me that I acknowledge in such a judgment. Most of the realists Hare refers to in this chapter deny themselves this middle ground, embracing a more rigid dichotomy between cognitivism and noncognitivism. As Hare sees it, such a dichotomy is arbitrary.
