Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 8)

John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part VIII, Norm-Expressivism

David Baggett

Allan Gibbard denies the new-wave realist claim that value properties have causal effects on the world, but he does think that a causal process operates in the world to produce our affective response mechanisms, and that this causal process results in our good. This is what Hare calls the “third expressivist concession.” Gibbard thinks that the moral emotions such as guilt and resentment are themselves the fruit of a beneficent causal process, though the process is not benevolent because it is not personal (it is evolutionary). The emotions are good for us because they enable coordination, broadly conceived.

God's Call: Moral Realism, God's Commands, and Human Autonomy: Moral Realism, God's Commands and Human Autonomy

By Hare, Mr. John E.

His view is that evolution selected in favor of affective dispositions in us which promote coordination, and hence the human goods that are available only through coordination. In particular, evolution gave us specifically human kinds of anger such as outrage and resentment, and it gave us the feeling of guilt, which is an adaptive response to anger because it invites reconciliation, and thus promotes cooperation instead of conflict between the parties. In the case of such emotions, Gibbard thinks that it is good for us that we have them. This is the first kind of causal process he discusses, the process by which we have been given through the emotions a route to coordination.

A second kind of causal process connects these emotions to the stimuli to which they are responses. Gibbard wants to find an account of practical rationality in a broad sense, which will give us the kind of objectivity we want. For an agent to judge that her action is morally reprehensible, he says, is for her to express her acceptance of norms that impartially prescribe, for such a situation, guilt on the part of the agent and resentment (or anger) on the part of others.

There is an important truth here that prescriptive realism can incorporate. The truth is that a value judgment endorses not just the particular response but the whole causal network of typical situation and emotional response to the situation invoked by the evaluative term. When judging something to be wrong, she is expressing her acceptance of the whole structure in which she is embedded, in which people respond in this way to this kind of action. What Gibbard has added is the widening of the scope of the evaluation to include this whole structure.

Hare wants to do something different from Gibbard, but faithful to the concession as just formulated. He’s going to give a Kant-style argument for what he will call a “postulate of prudence,” that an agent has to assume that the world is such that her evaluation of something as good to pursue is consistent with her happiness. The connection with Gibbard is that Gibbard uses evolution as a substitute or improvement on the doctrine of providence, but the realist implications are the same in either case.

The argument for the postulate of prudence proceeds by pointing out how many assumptions are required by an evaluation of something as good to pursue. Hare will mention five: (1) I have to assume that the good I pursue can be achieved. My emotions and desires have to be coordinated with the way the world is such that my basic concerns fit at least roughly what the world allows. (2) I have to assume that the good I aim at is possible as a result of my effort. (3) I have to assume that I can will my good not merely at the moment but consistently. (4) The goods I pursue are at least by and large consistent with one another. (5) I have to make assumptions about other people, that what they evaluate as good to pursue is at least roughly consistent with what I evaluate as good to pursue.

When Hare adds these five assumptions together, and supposes the world is such that they are all justified, then he will have postulated, when one evaluates something as good to pursue, this evaluation and pursuit is consistent with one’s happiness. But there are challenges to such a moral postulate. In the face of the ever-present possibility of a pessimistic outlook, we need a kind of realist faith, that the world and we ourselves in it are in fact governed in such a way that these five assumptions are legitimate, and our pursuing some good is consistent with our happiness.

We can then interpret the hints of fit we get as signs of the truth of a larger picture in which the good is, so to speak, more fundamental than the evil. There’s no inconsistency between such a faith, realist though it be, and expressivism as Hare’s defended it. What expressivism adds is that in an evaluative judgment I have to put that faith into practice in my decision about when to endorse and when to withhold endorsement.

Part 7

Part 9

Chapter 5, Part I, C. Stephen Evans’ God and Moral Obligations, “Alternatives to Divine Command Theory”:

God and Moral Obligation by C. Stephen Evans

In this chapter Evans looks at metaethical views that some will see as a rival to a divine command theory (DCT) to see what strengths and weaknesses they have. Some aren’t really competitors, and for those that are Evans will try to show that they face serious objections that a DCT does not face. He will try to select examples of each view that are prominent and representative, without claiming that such views exhaust the territory.

ERROR THEORY

J. L. Mackie was well known for his moral skepticism and “error theory” in ethics. Ordinary morality, he thought, is best thought of as a kind of “folk theory” that turns out to be false. Mackie presents a number of arguments for this view. First, he thought a subjective account of morality accounts for the relativity and variability in moral beliefs and practices. Second, objective moral value would be “queer” in the sense of being peculiar; they have no foundation in the world as described by science. Third, it’s hard to see why moral values should supervene as they do on natural features of the world. Fourth, it’s hard to see how such objective values could be known even if they are real. Finally, a reductive explanation of beliefs about values undermines any claim to objectivity.

How should a DCT’ist respond? Well, she can join her voice with various other ethicists (Kantians, natural law theorists, utilitarians, and the like) to argue for the objectivity of ethics. Beyond that, though, she can show that several of Mackie’s arguments work well against naturalistic theories. Values and other moral properties are indeed queer in a naturalistic world, but not a theistic one. Likewise it would be strange in a naturalistic world that humans have cognitive capacities that give them understanding of the good and the bad, of right and wrong, but not in a theistic one. Interestingly, Mackie himself imagined how God could play a role in ethics much as Evans envisions. Mackie didn’t subscribe to the view, but he thought it coherent and could see how it could defuse the Euthyphro objection.

Nietzsche, another atheist, similarly saw ethics as connected with God. His scathing critique of secular ethics was based on the way it tended to assume objective morality is possible without God, which he thought ludicrous. In this way he offered the testimony of an “unfriendly witness” that objective moral obligations require God and make sense only, or at least the most sense, if God exists.

EXPRESSIVISM

Expressivism as a metaethical theory comes in a variety of forms, from the emotivism of Ayer to the sophisticated quasi-realism of Blackburn. What they hold in common is “non-cognitivism” or “anti-realism”: the rejection of the idea that moral propositions express objective truths. Instead moral statements express emotions (Ayer), attitudes (Stevenson), prescriptions as to how one should behave (Hare), plans to which one is committed (Gibbard), or perhaps a complex mix of such subjective states (Blackburn).

The strength of the expressivist view is that it appears to account for why morality matters, and why moral claims can motivate as they do. It links to our actions. But Evans wants to raise a question about whether it links morality to behavior in the right way. The question he wants to raise is not whether moral judgments can motivate, but whether on expressivist views such judgments can have the kind of authority morality ought to have.

Many early criticisms of the view were based on the claim that such views do not seem to do justice to moral disagreements and arguments. Relatedly, Geach said it couldn’t make sense of moral propositions figuring in logically valid arguments. This led to more sophisticated accounts. At the heart of such views lies the idea that even though moral statements do not express propositions with genuinely objective truth values, there is a natural human tendency to “project” our emotions, attitudes, prescriptions, plans, etc. onto the objective world. This projective theory gives a reductive explanation of why moral language has the features it does that enable moral statements to mimic propositions that have genuine representational content. Blackburn and others have in turn developed accounts of the “logic” of moral statements that explain how it can be that these statements mimic the properties of genuinely representational propositions, even though they actually don’t refer to anything.

Evans thinks the real difficulty with the view lies with the way that expressivism, even in its projectivist, quasi-realist form, undermines the authority of moral judgments, especially judgments about moral obligations. Take emotivism, for example. Why should Mary care about the approval of James? One might think the problem is that the James doesn’t mean enough to Mary, but that’s not really the point. The challenge is to account for moral authority. The more sophisticated quasi-realism of Blackburn may appear to help with this problem, but the help is illusory. For in the end moral judgments merely mimic statements that can be true or false independently of the stance of the person making the judgment.

Blackburn doesn’t think his view makes truth relative, because if we “step back into the boat,” as it were, and put back the lens of a sensibility, there’s nothing relativistic left to say. Evans replies, though, that for the person who has awakened to the truth of projectivism, even this will be difficult to do or even impossible for some. How can we get back into one particular boat and believe that it’s the “right” boat, when we know there’s no such thing as the right boat?

If we could segregate our beliefs about normative ethics from our metaethical beliefs, perhaps Blackburn’s view would work, but it is not easy to wall off our beliefs about morality from our actual moral convictions. In the end, quasi-realism is a form of moral skepticism, only Mackie’s theory is transparent and honest, while the skepticism on Blackburn’s part is disguised by the fact that he continues voicing some elements of his own moral stance as if they were objectively true judgments. But the truth on offer seems a pseudo-truth, a “semantic shadow” of the attitudes and stances taken by ordinary people.