My Naturalism About Some Moral Concepts
Why I believe in it
Nearly everyone who is not a natural law theorist is some type of anti-realist about natural law based moral concepts. If one doesn’t believe in natural law theory, they will presumably think that there are no robust facts about the “proper nature” of a human. They might think that there are decent rough approximations of something’s proper nature, in much the same way that there are decent rough approximations of whether something is a chair. However, the crucial components of the view of the non-natural law theorist1 would be as follows.
1 There are no robust facts about the proper function of an organism. In Reasons and Persons, Parfit gave the analogy of a club. Suppose that there is a club that meets every Wednesday to play golf. However, one week the leaders of the club resign, and the club is renamed. Is it the same club? It very much seems like the correct answer here is “depends on how we define a club.” There are, in this case, no robust facts of the matter about whether or not it’s a club. Proper function is similar. There are decent rough approximations, but the answer to the question of whether a human’s proper function is to achieve happiness or to achieve non-hedonic flourishing is “depends on how we define proper function.”
2 All talk of proper function is reducible to talk about non-proper function based things. Consider the club case: whatever one means when they say that the club is the same can be explained without referencing it being the same club. For example, if one says that it is the same club if and only if it has the same leadership, then saying it’s a different club is merely saying the leadership is different.
This reductionist account is how I feel about a lot of moral concepts. Consider the concept of a good person. Now, no doubt, there is a technical utilitarian conception of a good person, which merely is about whether someone produces overall positive utility. There is, however, a problem: this is not what anyone means by a good person.
Imagine Hitler’s grandmother was a saintly woman, helping out at her local charity every weekend. From the standpoint of utility, she was no doubt monstrous. She was worse for the utility of the world that Jeffrey Dahmer. However, if she was, in fact, a kind woman, it would be bizarre to describe her as a worse woman than Jeffrey Dahmer.
The utilitarian technical definition of good person isn’t about what is ordinarily meant by good person. Instead, what the utilitarian conception captures is whether it is good that a person exists. It is very bad that Hitler’s grandmother existed, though this is through no failing on her part.
But when analyzing the ordinary language concept of “good person,” utilitarianism doesn’t seem to produce straightforward answers. It seems the correct answer will be very different from the hyper literal utilitarian interpretation of the question.
My analysis of the concept of good person has a lot to do with doing things that are kind, acting on one’s moral principles, and having minimally decent moral principles. And yet for this concept, it seems like there are no robust facts about whether a person is good, and goodness does seem to be scalar. There is no “good person simpliciter,” there are only degrees of personal goodness.
One might object that this is a cost of the theory—it can’t explain our talk about good people. However, this somewhat misses the point. It is still able to give a reasonably good account of whether a person is good. It, however, holds that a good person is not the most fundamental normative concept. Good people, like chairs, exist, and there are cases where it’s totally reasonable to describe someone as good.
The concept of good person has no single unified definition. However, it still is quasi objective, in that under all the overlapping definitions of “good person,” there will be some people who are clearly good. Consider a person who helps out at their food kitchen every weekend, gives away a Kidney, and hides Jews in their basement in Nazi Germany, at great personal risk. This person is, by all definitions, a good person. This statement is as objective as the statement given by Scott Alexander “Mozart’s music is better than the music of the three-year old girl who lives upstairs from me and bangs on her toy piano sometimes.”
So, my view about a moral concept like a good person is something like Cornell realism or some other form of moral naturalism. I think that the statement “Hitler was a worse person than Will MacAskill” is true. Yet I think there will be edge cases, in which there is no robust fact of the matter.
This is very different from my view about other moral concepts. I think that at any moment, there is a fact of the matter about what you should do, in the sense of having most impartial reason to do. Reasons are scalar, so in every case, there will be an objective ranking of all actions in order of best to worst.
Yetter-Chappell has given a good reduction of a few concepts, including good intentions, virtue—both intrinsic and extrinsic, and blameworthiness. He also provided a decent account of scalar consequentialism best matching the true structure of our reasons, but satisficing and maximizing representing the meaning of should in other important concepts.
I think there are robust facts about the value of particular states of affairs, and these facts give us objective reasons. Thus, from this, there are robust facts about what we have most reason to do, or in other words, what we should do. These facts are explicitly comparative between different options. There are also robust facts about which states of affairs we should hope ensue, also grounded in the value facts.
However, the types of moral concepts that are not clearly encapsulated by this are things about which we should be reductionist naturalists or anti-realists. These concepts are like bravery. Bravery is clearly partially normatively laden—it would certainly seem out of place in a list of insults. Yet there is obviously no robust, fully objective ranking of bravery.
Given the multitude of moral concepts that are like this—about which we should be naturalists—it’s not a cost of a theory if it provides a reductionist account of some more concepts. It would be a very strange thing if all our moral concepts were irreducible.
One could, in theory, think that there are facts about the proper end of a human, but they could deny that those are normative. Here, however, I’m just describing one who doesn’t think there are facts about proper function.