Unfit For Normative Theorizing: Why Fitness Isn't The Sole Normative Primitive

A response to Richard Yetter Chappell

INTRODUCING THE TOPIC AND EXPLAINING WHY IT DOESN’T MATTER

“Ibid is such a great invention; whatever came before it.”

—A joke (original to me)!

Many questions in philosophy really matter. If we, for example, incorrectly think eating meat is permissible, that causes horrible, terrible, no good, very bad outcomes. The same is true of getting the wrong normative ethical view. This article, however, is not one of those!

For those who don’t know, there’s a question of what the deepest normative primitive is. This question asks roughly, what the most basic moral concept is. For example, in the scientific domain, atoms are more primitive than cells, because cells are made up of, and have their existence explained in terms of, atoms. So the question here is what the most basic moral concept is. One who thinks that ought is most primitive — more primitive than reasons, fittingness, or value — would think that what we ought to do is not explained by what we have most reason to do. Perhaps they would, like Huemer, say that because some action is wrong — the type of thing that oughtn’t be done — we have good reason not to do it.

Now maaaaaaaaaaaybe if you really stretch you can say that taking ought as primitive makes us more deontological, so it does matter which concept we take as more primitive in our normative theorizing. Okay fine — it’s maybe sometimes slightly relevant. But this question basically doesn’t matter. It’s much more likely one takes value as primitive because they’re a consequentialist than the other way around.

EXPLAINING THE VIEWS

I have weak leanings toward a view which takes value as primitive — the thing that makes it fitting to care about things, that gives us reasons to care about things, and that makes it so that we ought to care about things is that the things possess value.

Taking reasons as primitive involves saying that reasons have the property of counting in favor of that which they’re reasons for. For example, I have good reason to believe that utilitarianism is true based on the evidence for it, which means that the evidence counts in favor of utilitarianism. Similarly, the fact that some act would cause pain gives one good reason not to take the act.

Ought, well, that’s pretty self explanatory and was explained in the previous section.

REJOICE, FOR I HAVE FOUND AN ISSUE OTHER THAN HEDONISM THAT I DISAGREE WITH RICHARD YETTER CHAPPEL ABOUT

Richard Yetter Chappell is one of my favorite philosophers and we disagree on very few things other than hedonism. Thus, it’s nice that I’ve found an area of disagreement between the two of us.

Yetter Chappell thinks that the primitive normative concept is fittingness. This seems clearly conceptually wrong — the fact that something is valuable means that it’s fitting to care about. X is valuable if and only if it has the types of properties that make it fitting to care about.

Chappell says

To get a firmer grip on the notion, we may understand a ‘conceptual framework’ to be a set of interrelated concepts, with some specified as primitives, and others defined in terms of the primitives.

But this is wrong — not everything has to be defined in terms of the primitive concepts. A water park is best defined not by the most basic primitive concepts — be it the universal wave function or something else — but instead by some higher order phenomena that emerges from the most foundational concept. Thus, as is possibly true in terms of physics, there is no reason to think that the most foundational thing will be explanatorily useful. Chappell argues that the normative primitive must

1. It must provide adequate conceptual resources for us to express any expressible normative truth.5

2. It should, so far as possible, remain neutral on the disputes of first-order normative ethics.

3. It should reflect and illuminate any natural ‘joints’ in the ontological structure of the normative domain (insofar as the normative domain is structured).

1 is ambiguous and either true or false. If 1 means that things have to be easily expressible in terms of the primitive concepts, that’s clearly false as the waterslide example shows.

2 is also false — the most primitive feature of physics won’t be non-partisan; it will clearly favor one theory, plausibly ruling out the others. This same line of reasoning applies to 3.

These desiderata are motivated by the philosophical role that we are seeking to fill. We are looking for a conceptual framework within which to conduct our first-order normative inquiry. A candidate conceptual framework will be of little use to us if we cannot use it to express the answers we seek. Gross non-neutrality in a framework similarly precludes using it for this purpose, insofar as it simply presupposes answers to the questions we wished to ask. The third desideratum is less strictly essential, but clearly a nice feature to have if possible. For example, it may help illuminate which first-order debates are genuinely significant, whereas a framework with (e.g.) redundant concepts risks encouraging terminological disputes and other confusions

But the most useful normative concept isn’t necessarily the most primitive. If this were true, the most primitive physics concept would have to be more useful than atoms, yet this is implausible.

Chappell goes on to explain why fittingness talk can explain more things that reasons talk — this is plausible but not relevant, as I argued above. I also disagree with reasons fundamentalism.

Next, Chappell says

The scope of our normative theorizing is constrained by our normative primitives. Everything there is to say can be said using the primitive concepts — otherwise we’d need additional primitives. So, if Mooreans are right to take the concept of value as their sole normative primitive, it must be that the value facts in some sense exhaust the normative facts: there’s nothing more to say — or, at least, nothing distinctively normative — once we’ve settled what’s good and bad. In particular, this means that there is no normative status of ‘rightness’ or fittingness that applies distinctively to acts or choices, as opposed to mere evaluands like eye colours and the global climate.

Well, the account is very simple here. Yetter Chappell agrees that we can account for all of our other normative talk very easily with the concept of fittingness. However, things that are valuable are the things which it’s fitting to care about. Thus, we can reduce talk of fittingness into talk about value, and fittingness explains the moral domain.

We can explain things that it’s fitting to believe in terms of epistemic value — the facts that give us epistemic reason. Then, we can explain all the other relevant epistemic talk in terms of epistemic value. While this may not be how we generally describe epistemic reasons semantically, the most primitive concept won’t necessarily fit naturally into existing language. Additionally, the things which provide reasons — and are fitting to care about — are more fundamental than the reasons or the fittingness, in both the epistemic and moral domain. The rest of the moral landscape can be explained naturalistically.

The rest of Chappell’s article is largely providing an extended defense of the usefulness of fittingness — I wouldn’t deny that. I merely dispute that fittingness is primitive. The deepest part of the moral chain is value, that explains fittingness, that explains everything else.