Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 6)
/
John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part VI, Disposition Theory
David Baggett
The second realist concession is that values do not have to be seen as real independently of general human dispositions to respond to them in a certain way in appropriate circumstances. McDowell’s view of color is that an object’s being red should be understood as its having the disposition to look red to us in appropriate circumstances. Here we have a new account of objectivity. We could correctly call color, on this view, subjective and objective.
We can make an analogy with values. We can understand an object’s having value as its having the disposition to produce responses of a certain kind in us in appropriate circumstances. Values can be called subjective and objective with equal correctness, in the same way as colors.
McDowell also wants to deny the strict distinction between cognitive capacities and non-cognitive ones like desire, and hence to deny that “pure facts” and values can always in principle be disentangled. (Altham coins the term “besire.”) The central cases are content-full (“thick”) value terms like “gentleman.” McDowell proposes that we can only know how to apply a value concept through a criterion if we are inside the evaluative framework or the form of life that places value on it. Then our confident use of the value concept is natural to us; it becomes “second nature” by enculteration and habit. McDowell wants to deny that seeing the value in this kind of case has to be distinguished as a desire rather than a belief, something non-cognitive rather than something cognitive, a state of the will rather than of the intellect. He thinks we should see values as being there in the world, making demands on our reason, but not there in the world independently of our dispositions to be moved by them.
But this raises a relativistic challenge. Remember Mackie’s concern about variability in ethical belief, which he attributes to people being involved in different ways of life. McDowell tries to answer this by appeal to Aristotle, but if our second nature is allowed to be culturally variable, then values tied to second nature will be culturally relative and may be corrupt. The problem in Aristotle is systematic. He thinks he has a culturally mediated human universal. But his view of the chief good for human beings includes as components both power over others and prestige, both of them competitive goods. It is this, not just his application of the view to women and slaves, that is objectionable to a supporter of altruism or even impartial justice.
Aristotle isn’t wrong to say we aim at such competitive goods, but he’s wrong to derive from our naturally aiming at them the conclusion that they are good. He doesn’t make Murdoch’s (and Kant’s) concession about the corruption of human nature both at the individual level and at the level of the group. From the perspective of altruism or impartial justice our nature, including our second nature, is radically liable to endorse what is not good. So second nature does not provide the kind of guide to moral truth that McDowell needs.
On Hare’s view an evaluative judgment involves some state like a motivation, or a desire, or a concern, because the function of the judgment is to endorse or withhold endorsement of some such state. The notion of endorsement he presses acknowledges a magnetic center, in Murdoch’s term, and on the agent’s side, a sense that there is an “I” who has developed a consistent position to take in normative discussion.
