Limited conventionalism and the law

For the past few years I've had an on-going research project of trying to use the framework David Lewis developed for analysing conventions in the interesting meta-ethical case where whatever basic principles we might have (for this purpose it doesn't matter what they are - one problem at a time!) don't give us enough guidance and we end up with equally attractive but mutually exclusive options and no principled way to choose between them. By now I've polished my approach down quite a bit, so here is a short sketch of it I've written today applied to a few examples from the literature and a sketch to how it might account for at least some instances of the origins and authority of the law.

Limited Conventionalism and the Law

Introduction

In this essay I introduce my ‘limited conventionalism’ as a naturalistic model for the derivation of moral obligations. Limited conventionalism is the application of David Lewis’s analysis of conventions applied to the ethical case where our moral code fails to give us clear guidance. The problem is that almost any moral standard, and all of those putatively derived from natural facts about human beings, lack the detail to specify unique best responses to every situation, but instead leave us with a set of equally attractive but mutually exclusive options and no way to choose between them. Limited conventionalism is the claim that in such cases we can establish a convention recommending one of these best candidates over the others, that we would be justified in doing what the convention recommends and morally unjustified in not following it. Those features of human beings on which naturalists hope to construct an account of ethics would, on limited conventionalism, be the criteria by which the best candidates get picked out would be. In this manner we are able, I argue, to derive an adequate moral system from purely naturalistic grounds.

As an illustration of this point, I apply my model to the ‘pluralistic relativism’ of David Wong, whereby there are natural constraints on the type of society in which humans could flourish, but that these limitations radically underdetermine the type of moral code people can follow, leaving room for incompatible but equally good moral codes specific to a society. I also sketch out how limited conventionalism would do with other approaches, like the more thoroughgoing anti-realism of John Mackie or more modest views where what conventions offer aren’t new principles but only responses to particular problem situations.

Lewisian Conventions and Limited Conventionalism

A convention is a structure of expectations about a recurring co-ordination problem such that people in such-and-such situations do this rather than that. Because you have justified expectations of how others will act, and they of you, you can reason towards mutually satisfactory ends. The set of best candidates come from comparing the preferences of everybody in the situation and choosing the alternatives where everybody can do no better if all other parties act as expected. For instance, in the prisoner’s dilemma the two prisoner’s both confessing or both staying silent are the two best candidates, while one confessing and the other not isn’t, and if two of us are trying to arrange a meeting, us both being at some particular place is a best candidate while one of us being at one place and the other somewhere else isn’t. For a convention to arise, these best candidates need to be more attractive to those involved than having the co-ordination problem continue. An interesting feature about Lewisian conventions, which carries over to limited conventionalism, is that if you end up choosing one of the best candidate options, it makes no difference how that choice is made. What matters is that it is common knowledge which course of action gets recommended. Two other pertinent features of Lewisian conventions is that none can arise which aren’t mutually beneficial, and once a convention exists, you are obligated to follow it.

To apply Lewisian conventions to the moral underdetermination case, we first arrange the available options based on how well they conform to some shared moral standard. Then we separate off a class of best candidate options which perform no worse than any other options in light of that shared standard. The convention then gets established to recommend one of these candidates rather than the others. Once again, the manner in which one gets chosen doesn’t matter, as long as it is one of the best candidates and the recommendation becomes common knowledge. Thus, limited conventionalism is a way to extend the set of shared moral obligations within a community.

Drawing up a convention is thus a two stage process: first at least some of the best candidate options are identified, and then (through whatever method) one of them is chosen and that choice is made common knowledge. This leads to an epistemic structure which allows individuals to navigate the underdetermination problem case: given that the chosen option is so as a matter of common knowledge, everybody expects everybody else to follow it, everybody knows that everybody has that expectation and that they are also expected to conform, and so on. Following the conventional option is thus something which can be done as a matter of course, thus avoiding the uncertainty which threatens underdetermination problem cases.

Why we are obligated to follow these conventions

The normative force of these moral conventions come from the fact that they are benign in light of the existing obligations, no individual can have a moral reason to go against the convention, and by going against the convention you would undermine other people’s depending on your co-operation in order to reason towards their desired ends. Conventions are benign respective to the existing moral standard because the candidates among which get chosen are themselves the most attractive in light of that that standard. This means that we can’t arrive at a convention which goes against our existing moral standard. Furthermore, nothing moral is to be gained by disregarding the convention, because no other option can appear more attractive respective to the moral standard. Finally, since the conventions are common knowledge, every party has the well-established expectation that everybody else will conform to the convention, and reason accordingly. To go against the convention would be to undermine others’ ability to reason to their desired ends, dumping everybody back in the less preferable, pre-convention co-ordination problem. In this respect the harm to others is very much like that which follows from lying, and not conforming is similarly unjustified, whatever the content of the convention (if it is a genuine Lewisian convention).

Applying limited conventionalism to examples in the literature

A position in the literature favourable to such an analysis is David Wong’s pluralistic relativism. Wong holds that there are certain natural constraints on the type of societies we could live in, with concomitant constraints on moral standards. However, these constraints radically underdetermine the content of morality. To model Wong’s relativism as an example of limited conventionalism, take the shared moral standard of some community to track those natural constraints. There are now a range of best candidate options corresponding to all the moral codes which fit within those constraints. The choice of any such a code counts as a Lewisian convention. Considering the case where there are many societies each facing the same underdetermination problem, which Wong plausibly argues is the actual case, the possibility of different codes being chosen by different societies cements the possibility of relativism. Notice that it is possible that single convention could establish an entire moral code in one go, but that it is far more likely that the code is constructed piecemeal, each new obligation derived conventionally limiting the ones that follow.

We can model more radical theories like J.L. Mackie’s and others wherein all moral obligations are conventionally determined by considering the case where there are no pre-existing moral obligations. Then the set of best candidates would be all the possible candidates. We could establish a moral code by choosing a starting point on some indeterminate standard of salience, most likely something basic and immediately useful like a limitation on killing, and then choose a best candidate limited by that one obligation, and then one by the set of two conventionally established obligations, and so on. We can also account for less thoroughgoing conventionality by considering the case not where we use conventions to choose new general principles, but rather responses to particular co-ordination problems. An example might be the choice between an adversarial or inquisitorial court system. It is in this weaker application, addressing examples of underdetermination case-by-case, that I believe conventions might be the most prevalent and useful.

Conventional Law

We can perhaps extend limited conventionalism informatively to cover some instances of law-making. Examples of underdetermination abound in legal scenarios, and there exists a range of mechanism to try and cut down their scope, like guidance for judging the intent of legislation when the letter of the law allows ambiguities. Nonetheless, it seems clear that there are vast arrays of cases where there is genuine uncertainty about what the appropriate judgement would be, whether it be a verdict, a judgement on some point of law, or passing sentence. Given the weighty reasons we have to the law be applied consistently, legal judgements have a dimension wherein they are co-ordination problems. The system of widely publicising court judgements and ensuring that practicioners of law are expected to know of relevant precedents does as much to establish common knowledge as could be in any such technical and contingent domain. As discussed above, given the shared interest in avoiding co-ordination problems (here, manifest in the inconsistent application of the law) and the fact that only conventions could prevent them (since any effort at co-ordination would necessitate the strcture of expectations which constitutes a Lewisian convention) the laws would have the necessary normative force to not be dead letters, as long as all the preconditions are met (especially that the option chosen is genuinely one of the best candidates and thus as consistent with the principles as any other). Correspondingly, in at least some significant cases, the law could be conventional in the Lewisian sense, and thus be examples of limited conventionalism in my sense.

Conclusion

Limited conventionalism provides a robust and informative model for the forming of moral obligations. Many significant applications of the model can be made to positions in the literature and in actual life. This mechanism carries the necessary normative weight to give us the reasonable expectation

Robert Paul Wolff replies re: the prisonder's dilemma.

A couple of days ago I posted a criticism of Robert Paul Wolff's dismissal of the prisoner's dilemma . Wolff has now posted a reply on his blog (quoting the version of my post I had emailed to him). He is pressing the fact that game theory is only properly-speaking a study of decision under certainty, while the problem I identify (which is hardly original on my part!) is to do with decision theory, etc, regarding  decisions under uncertainty. He thinks I'm not really addressing decision theory head-on, and in turn I think he's not really addressing the concern head-on (as I have said in my response there). That's how philosophy works: round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows. But every iteration hopefully we know more than at the beginning: I certainly find exchanges like my current one with Prof. Wolff to be very helpful.

What to make of the prisoner's dilemma

About a year ago, when I was making my first serious inroads into the technical underbelly of my field, following my utilitarian opponents into a futurist landscape of backwards Es and upside-down As, Robert Paul Wolff (who seems to be entirely incapable of stopping writing, bless his soul) ran a tutorial on formal methods in political philosophy which I found very useful, especially its introduction to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem concerning social choice theory. (The tutorial is archived along with his autobiography, which I heartily recommend, and some other bits and pieces here.) However, I thought that Wolff was rather harsh on the prospects of the prisoner's dilemma as a topic for serious philosophy, largely because the suppositions behind the case are harshly disconnected from the conditions of the actual world. Contrary to Wolff's harsh evaluation, I think there is something to be said for the prisoner's dilemma as an analytic tool. Heaven knows a lot of people make ridiculous claims regarding it (for instance, I was told once that it shows that ethics is impossible), but there are at least two reasons to take it seriously, if only as an analytical device. The prisoner's dilemma might be a good tool for cutting to the heart of various hypotheses, even if we agree with what Wolff has said about its limitations (as we should).

If I may remind the reader of what the prisoner's dilemma (hereafter, PD), I'll quote the description from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry:

Tanya and Cinque have been arrested for robbing the Hibernia Savings Bank and placed in separate isolation cells. Both care much more about their personal freedom than about the welfare of their accomplice. A clever prosecutor makes the following offer to each. “You may choose to confess or remain silent. If you confess and your accomplice remains silent I will drop all charges against you and use your testimony to ensure that your accomplice does serious time. Likewise, if your accomplice confesses while you remain silent, they will go free while you do the time. If you both confess I get two convictions, but I'll see to it that you both get early parole. If you both remain silent, I'll have to settle for token sentences on firearms possession charges. If you wish to confess, you must leave a note with the jailer before my return tomorrow morning.”

We can represent the options in a little pay-off matrix, mapping out all the possibilities:

	Cinque stays silent	Cinque confesses
Tanya stays silent	Tanya is jailed very briefly / Cinque is jailed very briefly	Tanya is jailed for a long time / Cinque goes free
Tanya confesses	Tanya goes free / Cinque is jailed for a long time /	Tanya is is jailed for a short time/ Cinque is jailed for a short time

Each of the pair can see that, whatever the other does, they get less time in jail if they confess and hang the other prisoner out to dry. But, that would lead both of them confessing, leading to a situation that is worse for both than if they had stayed silent. That is the prisoner's dilemma.

Wolff complains that discussing the PD in terms of this story distorts our understanding of the picture, because there are a number of assumptions about how players in such a game would act which maps very badly indeed with how actual people in real situations act. For instance, it is very hard indeed to imagine someone only caring about how little time they spend in jail, with no regard for the other's welfare, and any other concern. Wolff's point is well-taken, but I want to say that even if we accept what he says, we can mine some interesting results from using this scenario as an analytic tool: in particular, in seeing what it tells us about the types of reasoning decision-theorists and the like would like us to do (Perhaps I am better disposed towards the PD than Wolff is because I didn't need to wade through the thousand-odd journal articles written on this subject in the 60s and 70s, when nobody could shut up about this thing). To that end, it is useful to consider the in its most general and useful form the PD as game described by the following pay-off matrix (one agent choosing a row, the other choosing a column, like Tanya and Cinque had above) where the options are either to co-operate with the other agent (staying silent, in the prisoner's case) or defecting (confessing to the crime and selling the other prisoner up the river):

	Co-operate	Defect
Co-operate	Good / Good	Worst / Best
Defect	Best / Worst	Bad / Bad

Any situation which has a pay-off matrix like this in it can be analysed in terms of the prisoner's dilemma.

Having done the throat-clearing, let me now present the two reasons why I think we should pay attention to the PD. The second is far and away the most important, but the first helps to lead us there.

The first reason is that there are simply so many theoretically interesting cases which can be modelled as some variation of the PD, that is, where situations arise with the payout matrix I described above. There are traveller's dilemmas, the centipede game, the ultimatum game, etc. I'll leave it up to the reader to investigate these cases, and their link to the PD, on their own. But note that understanding any situation which can be modelled in this way is going to necessitate understanding the implications of the PD (which includes, as Wolff stresses, knowing what it doesn't entail).

Secondly, the most important reason to look at the PD (which I was surprised to see get no mention at all in the tutorial) is that it gives a very embarrassing and problematic result for the mass of people who believe that decision theory, etc., provide the gold standard for human reasoning. That is, the PD shows that utility maximisation doesn't lead to Pareto-optimal situations (which was a bit of a surprise, since under similar suppositions the free market, which is driven entirely by utility-maximisation, does lead to Pareto-optimal distributions of resources – a bit more on that later in this paragraph). Utility maximisation is the procedure whereby at each point you need to make a procedure you take whatever course of action has the best prospects for getting you what you want (after taking into consideration all the likely future effects of your actions), and Pareto-optimality is the idea that one situation is preferable to another if every person involved finds the first one to be at least as good as the latter. In non-wonk terms, the PD demonstrates that if everybody tries at every step to take the action with consequences they'd most prefer, they are quite likely to end up in a situation they find less preferable than one they would have reached had they acted differently. It in fact does even more, in that the situation of the two prisoners if both defect is worse for both of them, whereas it's Pareto-suboptimal if only one person reaches a situation they don't prefer. This is embarrassing and problematic to the decision theorist, because Pareto-optimality is a very low bar indeed. There are a range of terrible situations that are Pareto-optimal – for instance, a fiefdom with its range of landlords and impoverished serfs is a Pareto-optimal distribution of land, since to give any land to a serf you need to take it away from a landlord, which means that changing the distribution of land would always be against the preferences of at least one person. If utility-maximisation can't even ensure reaching situations with that low level of goodness, then the decision theorist has reason to worry.

It's this feature of the PD which gives force to the tragedy of the commons (as Garrett Hardin described it in 1968, though only later was this analysed as a PD). Each member of a community who tends sheep and has access to the common pasture always has the incentive to put one more sheep in the field: though this lowers the total productivity of the commons through being overloaded, the individual's gains of having the extra sheep outweigh the marginal loss to each sheep. But if everybody follows this incentive (as utility-maximisation demands) then the commons will soon be exhausted and every farmer will be worse off in the end. The lesson to be learn here isn't that co-operation in such situations is impossible (as some people bizarrely claim, showing off a staggering confusion about the structure of human purposive action) but that utility-maximisation – the hard-nosed pragmatism which makes the prisoner defect every time – is untenable as a general guide to action. In scenarios with PD pay-offs (and the insights of the countless writers on this topic indicate just how many there might be) utility-maximisation turns out to lead us by the nose to our downfall. And that is what we should learn from the prisoner's dilemma.

Resilience to counterfactuals

One project that I have been pottering away at recently is an attempt to cash out what could be meant with something like Phillip Pettit's theory of 'freedom as non-domination' (meaning that we are free to the extent in that we can do what we go about our affairs without the arbitrary intervention of another party). To do so I develop a framework for highlighting some important modal considerations that are involved in our political deliberation. One of the dimensions on which we evaluate courses of action is on how likely they are to achieve their aims. I believe that we could provide a framework, perhaps even a semantics, of this evaluative dimension. My proposal is to discriminate amongst courses of action according to their 'resilience to counterfactuals' (as I call it), meaning the range of contingencies wherein they would succeed. One course of action is more resilient to counterfactuals than another if there are more possible worlds (within some specified degree of similarity to the actual world) where that course could successfully be pursued. The idea is that this might be a useful way to articulate how we distinguish between secure state of affairs and precarious ones – in the secure state of affairs, there are more contingencies in which we can accomplish what we might set out to do. Secure state of affairs lead to plans with greater resilience to counterfactuals.

An application of the project, a straightforward and I hope informative one, is that it would allow us to discriminate between the status of different political rights based on how secure those rights are (meaning, how resilient to counterfactuals they are). I also think, and am willing to defend, that considerations of this type is one of the reasons why political rights are such a central feature of our social lives (and would be even if there were no natural rights): legal protections of those kind cut down the range of contingencies that you need to secure yourself against, and thus gives you a greater safety margin within which to deliberate towards your chosen end.

This approach has important advantages over the decision-theoretic approach for judging among possible courses of action. Attempts to do feasibility studies in the usual decision-theoretic way -- looking at the probability that certain situations would arise, assigning outcomes to the situations and deriving their expected utilities -- run into serious problems, given that the result of such studies depends on what people intend to do, but that people very often radically change their courses of action given the circumstances. This means that you have to redo the feasibility study for each change in plan of anybody in the environment, leading to a combinatorial explosion of things to consider (if re-doing the sums is even possible at all), very quickly making the results of such a study intractable. The resilience-to-counterfactuals approach handles this feature of situations much better, since the fact that there are a number of different ways someone could try to achieve their goals is a premise of the analysis.

There is more to be said here, like how a formal semantics for such a framework might look -- a possible-worlds semantics is very suggestive here, but there are kinks to work out. I also want to see how this compares to other approaches in the literature. I have a decent idea of how it relates to Pettit's proposal, but given the influence of the 'freedom as non-domination' theory, there is a lot of different ways this gets cached out in the literature. One development in particular I want to take a closer look at is Dowding and Van Hees on 'counterfactual success', which seems similar but importantly different. There is also the question of how much we can conclude about some particular plan's resilience to counterfactuals. If A has a plan to acquire X that is relatively resilient to counterfactuals, does this have significance beyond just that particular plan? Does it tell us something about all A's possible X-involving plans? (I would hope so.) Does it tell us something about A's security in general? Or, perhaps only of A's security in his or her X-involving domains. (What is an X-involving domain, then?) These questions are so suggestive to me that I've proposed this as a possible PhD project. However it might turn out, this is something I've spent some time thinking on in the past, and I'm likely to keep coming back to this issue for the foreseeable future.

Distinguishing Moral Theory and Anti-Theory Through Intuitionistic Logic

My purpose here is to present a formal framework for the relationship between intuitions and concrete particular judgements in moral cases and the general theories which are supposed to capture them. This framework is to give that relationship a suitable interpretation in intuitionistic (or constructivist) logic, with which I hope to give an interesting way to articulate the difference between theoretical and anti-theoretical approaches to ethics. On this interpretation, the propositions to be evaluated are particular moral judgements, and they are evaluated in terms of whether they are endorsed by the general theory in question. What the particular judgements or the theory are is unimportant for my present purposes, since what I am after here is to make a general point about the way these things might relate.

The feature of intuitionistic logic which interests me here is that it gives a way to articulate how theories might only imperfectly account for the particular cases they are supposed to address. On intuitionistic logic, a theory is gradually constructed over successive stages of reasoning, where there are conclusions you can reach at later stages which would be unwarranted at earlier ones. In the paradigmatic interpretation, concerning mathematical reasoning, propositions stand for mathematical theorems are mathematical propositions, and to assert a proposition is to claim that there is a mathematical proof of it (and asserting a negation means that there is a proof that the theorem proposition can't be true). The theorems proved at stage n can then be used to prove further theorems at stage n+1 which could not be proved or disproved with the resources of stage n-1. Of particular interest here is that intuitionistic logic allows for a final stage of reasoning, where there exists either a proof or disproof for every theorem. At this final stage intuitionistic logic is equivalent to classical logic (for instance, the law of excluded middle then holds, and, more importantly, the logic becomes complete, but only at the final stage).

My claim here is that theoretical approaches to ethics are ones where, if we give a suitable a intuitionistic interpretation to the field of particular judgements and the general theory, the approach asserts that there is some (actual or possible) final stage of theory construction where every particular judgement is comprehensively captured in the theory. Anti-theoretical approaches deny this. The interpretation would be as follows: there is some theory T at stage s which validate inferences to certain moral judgements (A,B,C, etc.) – this is meant as a straightforward analogy to the mathematical case. This allows for an interesting contrast between approaches which allow for a final stage of theory construction, and ones that don't. If we were at the final stage of our theory T (let's call it T_Ω), then the content and import of every particular judgement would be accounted for by T. In contrast, if we aren't (and might never be) at T_Ω, then there remains some particular judgement on the strength of which T can be modified, and needs to be if T is to be a comprehensive guide to our moral lives. This seems to me to be equivalent to the anti-theoretical claim in ethics: that there is no systematisation of our ethical practice which can hope to capture the variety and complexity of that practice, but that there will always be a remainder which is not accounted for in the theory.

My claim is very limited – I am not proposing something like a logic in which to couch our moral reasoning. But, even in the limited role as a way to make an important distinction, my proposal here has its virtues. Casting the developing of an ethical theory as a series of constructive stages matches very well with the view, for instance, of our understanding of ethics as an expanding circle of moral concern, where as we develop our moral sensibilities we see duties to things we hadn't considered important earlier. It also is a natural ally of something like the reflective equilibrium to approach to moral reasoning, where we have a to-and-fro between general theories and particular moral judgements, each being revised on the strength of the other. But intuitionistic logic is not the same as reflective equilibrium: for one thing, the latter isn't a logic; another, more troubling point is that intuitionistic logic doesn't allow for the type of oscillation between different versions of particular claims that reflective equilibrium requires.

What I mean is that, once we reach some stage T_n where moral claims A, B and C are validated (given comprehensive and convincing support by T), then at no T after T_n will A, B and C fail to be validated. Reflective equilibrium isn't like that: up until the final equilibrium is reached, everything is up for modification. This leads to what I see as the greatest problem for my proposal: interpreting particular moral claims in the way we do theorems in mathematics might not be very convincing, especially because we are often very willing to give up particular judgements or intuitions which seemed certain to us earlier.

I have two replies to this worry, one ambitious and another more modest. The ambitious reply would try to dodge this problem by being very careful about what the scope of the particular moral claims are. Instead of having a proposition A like 'intentionally killing another human being is always wrong', which we might believe to a greater or lesser extent given variations in our background theories and our moral theory as a whole, we can see the pronouncements at earlier stages of T to be on propositions like B = 'intentionally killing of a human being without special societal sanction is always wrong' and C = 'there is some appropriate societal sanction which would allow for the intentional killing of another human being', where T₁ might validate B but not C, whereas T₂ might also validate C's negation (if our moral theory ended up being a pacifist one, for instance). Having finer-grained judgements of this type makes it far more believable that we can at some stage of the reasoning set some of them in stone (at least regarding the further development of T). The more modest reply, in contrast, would be to point out that the distinction I'm trying to make between theory and anti-theory holds even if there are just two or three stages of reasoning, where when we go to T_Ω we settle almost every moral question in one bound. This is not a fantastic state of affairs, since if we take many defenders of various theories at their word, when we carefully and conscientiously apply the theory in question, we at least have a procedure for answering any moral question (difficult to apply as it might be).

There is a further worry, about whether the claim that a theoretical approach to ethics would entail asserting that there is some final stage for the theory in question is too strong a claim – it at least seems to assert the existence of a complete decision procedure which either asserts or denies any possible particular moral judgement, which many people who see themselves as opposing moral anti-theory would also deny. But I will leave that question unanswered at the moment.

The moral life of babies?

In the New York Times magazine a psychology researcher, Paul Bloom, has published a report of research into some signs that very young children show some inklings of a moral sense, distinguishing between mean and nice actions and preferring the latter to the former.

I'm afraid I can't agree with Bloom's conclusions. The article gestures at psychological research which shows that babies sometimes predictably and spontaneously behave in ways we'd expect moral beings to. There are two large problems it doesn't address: which responses are supposed to count as moral and why; and, how the sentiments which underlie the babies' actions are supposed to relate to morality as a whole.

On the first point: why should we take those baby responses to be moral ones? For instance, the studies record the babies' interests by tracking their eye movement. But by that measure, babies prefer human faces (and other objects) with symmetrical features, or anthropomorphic figures to non, in just the same way they prefer 'nice' to 'mean' actions. You and I know that the first group are aesthetic rather than moral preferences, but we have reason to believe the babies don't (and no reason to believe otherwise). Making these types of distinctions is crucial to moral action (though we need not conclude from that, as many have, that moral preferences have no links to non-moral ones). Secondly, whatever morality is, it is not just the expression of sentiments. There are sentimentalist moral theories which are serious candidates (Michael Slote's comes to mind), but even in them there is a lot of ground to cover between having a sentiment which is broadly compatible with moral action, and having a moral life. For one thing, there must be some way to seperate the appropriate sentiments from the inappropriate ones. And we have no reason to believe that children, even well past infancy, are able to do so.

The conclusion that there is some, if even a rather impoverished, moral life at work with babies is likely to be a case of the over-analysis of results. The quickest way to point this out is to gesture at a confusion and its converse. It is a mistake to believe that if babies (or anyone else) doesn't have a moral life, properly construed (whatever that turns out to be), that no action they take would be moral. This is like believing that because dice themselves can't know or care how they land, they will never roll the numbers we like. The article goes the other way: because babies act in ways we see as moral, they actually are moral, at least in some way. But it is quite likely that babies would occasionally do things we would look upon as moral, even do so reliably and spontaneously, for reasons of their own. That is, for non-moral reasons. And that possibility is never discussed in the article.

The experience machine objection as a wrong order problem

This is the first of a planned series of posts wherein I try to place attacks on utilitarianism within a more general framework I'm developing, the wrong order problem: properties that could work to aggregate all our morally relevant concerns, like happiness or desire satisfaction, are too high an order of property to count as good-making features, and can instead only indicate goodness.

There is a long-standing and enticing tradition of considering happiness as the most valuable good that a human life can attain. It can hardly be denied that a life containing happiness seems better than one without. There have been no shortage of people who try to build an ethical viewpoint from this foundation in one way or the other. One popular and influential approach is to consider happiness to be the only good, from which everything else draws its value, and therefore what we should do is to maximise the amount of happiness in the world. This is hedonism in a straight-forward and non-perjorative sense.

Against hedonism, Robert Nozick asks us to consider the possibility of an 'experience machine', to which a person could be connected and then live through exact and entirely convincing replicas of whatever experience they like. The question is whether these ersatz experiences, which perfectly recreate all the sensations you would have had if it really happened, make somebody as well-off as the real counterparts would. They would if hedonism is true. If that is the case, the experience machine would be a key to a perfect life, seeing as how you could undergo any experience you like, believing all the time that these things are really happening to you. But, as Nozick presses us to admit, plugging up to such a machine for life would be uncomfortably close to suicide: the pleasures might be real, but the events they relate to aren't, and by plugging into the experience machine you give up engaging with the world.

The problem that the experience machine objection latches on to is that happiness stands in the wrong relationship to the facts of someone's life to be identical with well-being. A judgement of how well someone's life is going is a judgement on the state of affairs that person finds themselves in. But happiness isn't a part of that state of affairs, it's what I call a *reflective stance* towards it, and like any reflection you can have towards something, it can be misled, as the experience machine tries to show. The problem is that any reflective stance property, like 'brings happiness', is a higher order property of what is being judged, the condition of someone's life, that is, it's the wrong order of property to count as what is being judged. There is a relationship between the two, but it's not an identity relationship. This means that we should consider reflective stance properties like happiness as part of the epistemology of good-making features, rather than the ontology. That is, happiness indicates a good life, it's not what makes a life good life. This doesn't mean we should discount happiness – it can be a good indication, perhaps even a perfect one (but were that the case, there must be something wrong with the experience machine case) – but it means that we must look for the good-making features elsewhere.

The Euthyphro problem as a wrong order problem

Lately I have given a lot of thought to and become tremendously impressed by the Euthyphro problem, presented by Plato in the dialogue of that name, which makes life distinctly uncomfortable for a particular kind of moral view. The Euthyphro problem drives us to distinguish what makes something good from how we know that it is good. I want to suggest that this points to a general problem, to do with what type of property could count as a good-making feature. I think problems of the Euthyphro form give reasons to believe that many higher order properties of the targets of a moral theory. I have in mind what I call 'reflective stance properties', like attitudes toward something, some function you have in mind for something, and so on. I want to suggest that they can only indicate goodness, not be good-making features, and the Euthyphro problem is a paradigmatic example.

The Euthyphro problem simply is a knockout objection against divine command theory, and can be usefully introduced as such. Divine command theory claims that everything that is ordained by the divine are by that fact things we should do, setting aside all questions of what counts as 'ordained by the divine'. As Plato remarks, there are two ways this could go: either those acts ordained by the divine are good just because they are so ordained, or they are good independently of what the divine might have to say on them. But the first options is simply crazy: how could it be that anything, anything at all the divine might say goes, and not only goes but is demanded by morality? There are simply too many things a divinity might conceivably ask of us for that to be the case. There is no shortage of people who try to find ways in which 'divine sanction' is necessarily a good-making feature, but we must conclude that this is an industry of piety rather than good judgement. It must be that divine sanction indicates goodness, rather than ordains it. Not that managing 'mere indication' is a small feat: we value a compass even if the needle tracks north rather than north the needle. Believers should do as their divinity proclaims because it is so wise and compassionate and smart and so on that it will never be mistaken. But there is a lot of ground to cover between never being mistaken and the fact of the matter being at your behest. What the Euthyphro problem does, and does with great force, is make us distinguish between moral ontology and moral epistemology: divine sanction can't make good, it can only indicate the good.

The question is: what is it about the Euthyphro problem that delivers this result? Notice that divine saction of X is an attitude towards X – this is clearer in Plato's formulation, where the target of the attack is the view that the good things are those 'loved by the gods'. The fact that some party A has an attitude towards X is a higher order property than those aspects of X that invite the attitude. That is, there is some properties P, Q etc. of X which leads to A having that attitude towards X for the reason of it having P, Q, etc. This relfective stance property R, 'being the target of some attitude of A's' (for reasons of having P, Q, etc.) , is a product of properties of X (P, Q, etc.) and is thus a higher order property than P, Q, etc. To apply this schema to the Euthyphro case: For R 'is loved by the gods' there are the properties P,Q, etc, that the gods love X for, whatever they might be, and R is of a higher order than P,Q, etc. The problem is that R isn't the good-making feature, P,Q, etc. are: R indicates their presence in some way or the other, and P,Q,etc. constrain R's application – in this case, what the gods could rightly love. R is a property of the wrong order to count as a good-making feature. This shouldn't be a surprise. 'Loved by the gods' tells us more about the gods than it does what it attaches to, and this is the same for all reflective stance properties. But discovering which items in the world are moral goods isn't a project to do with us or any other audience, it is a project to do with the goods. If such unanchored properties such as attitudes we have toward something were to be the good-making features, without any restriction, then we would find such absurdities such as intractable moral disagreement about whether or not to run around trees clockwise, as Phillippa Foot points out. And if there are such constraints on what these reflective stance properties could rightly attach to, then the wrong order problem kicks in, and these reflective stance properties aren't the good-making features, but merely indicate them.

More can be said, and a lot more needs to, but I believe that this problem has some power and can tell us a great deal about how we should go about ethical reflection. A strong consequence is that the wrong order problem makes a nonsense of almost any utilitarianism, especially ones concerned with happiness, desire satisfaction, and so on. This I'm sure is the right result, and in the near future I will give a few examples where I cast famous objections to utilitarianism as cases of the wrong order problem. Because the wrong-order problem concerns moral goods, the objections I have in mind are to do with the aims that various forms of utilitarianism aim at: Nozick's 'experience machine' objection attacking hedonism and Sen's 'dominated housewife' example against desire satisfaction in particular. I also want to work up to Williams's subtle and devestating attack on utilitarianism for being unable to make sense of what it is for someone to have a project. The reader might anticipate how these might go, and this is right and good.

Verweij - 'Moral Principles and Justification in Applied Ethics'

As is usual in this introductory collection, this entry by Marcel Verweij is very compressed and yet covers a lot of ground, so I'll do what I've done mostly and offer a comment on a particular aspect of the discussion I think can do with some expansion. Verweij concerns himself with laying out some reasons to believe that general principles can't do all the work that needs to be done in applied ethics. Be that as it may, I believe that there is some work which principles of the most straightforward and forceful sort can accomplish, and that is to put constraints on what courses of action we could rightly pursue. Vermeij's presentation gives the impression that this wouldn't be the case, because principles are supposedly too abstract to give clear guidance in concrete cases. However, a thickly developed concept like 'always be honest' can do exactly that, I argue.

The main difficulty with working with principles, as Verweij rightly points out again and again, is that it isn't always straightforward to see what they would entail. However, this is a problem of vagueness rather than one concerning a principle's normative force: if you could be clear about exactly what the content of a principle is, this problem would disappear, or it would become clear that it wasn't as useful as it at first appeared. Perhaps the latter turns out to be true of every principle, but we should hesitate before we conclude as much. If we could determine what would count as fulfilling the demand of a principle, and what a clear failure would be like, that would meet the challenge to provide concrete guidance. Perhaps the principle wouldn't tell you which course of action would be uniquely right, but it would filter the options by rejecting a number of candidates which would simply be unacceptable on account of that principle: that is what I mean with principles placing constraints on what we should consider right action.

The principle of 'be honest', by which I mean 'never intentionally deceive someone so that on your account they reason from false grounds' is an excellent example of how this can be done, because it is a principle which is established in a number of independent ways. Firstly, it is a principle with enormous standing. It is the one clear success of Kant's categorical imperative, for instance: it is simply inconceivable to have a situation in which people communicate without most things they say being true, because that would only lead to a failure in communication. Doing the same but in an entirely different way, David Lewis gives an analysis and vindication of a convention of truth-telling, that is, the regularity of people telling the truth and expecting others to do so, on game-theoretic grounds. And, different again, Elizabeth Anscombe held that there simply are no situations in which it is right to lie, though not as an absolute prohibition, but as a matter of fact which drops out of the fact that each of us rely so heavily on what we tell each other that the goods we might gain from deceit could hardly be goods of moral worth. Secondly, what honesty demands of us is perfectly clear in almost every case. We know very well what it means to tell the truth, and because deceitfulness is predicated on deceitful intent, we can't help but know when we lie. That is, there are clear success conditions on being honest, and a precise way to tell when you're being deceitful. There are debates and difficult questions about how far you should pursue it: Kant's insistence that you should tell the truth even to an enquiring murderer might not impress most people, but everybody can (or damn-well should) agree that it is not good in itself to deceive other people, and that it is not bad in itself to furnish people with the truth. The degree to which a course of action demands deceit is the degree to which it is to be avoided, and the contrary: this isn't a complete decision procedure, but it is an informative and concrete constraint on action.

Perhaps it is a mistake to appeal to principles to settle the question of what you should do in such-and-such a situation, but it would be too quick to move from that to a conclusion that principles can't offer guidance in real cases. They might not tell you everything, but given the appropriate success and failure conditions, principles can tell you to some extent at least what it is you should do.

Thorseth - 'Ethical Pluralism'

May Thorseth's contribution to the collection is a piece on ethical pluralism, which she presents as a more substantive alternative to relativism. I agree that distinguishing the two positions is a very worthwhile thing to do, but here I will quickly argue that teasing pluralism apart from relativism is probably harder than Thorseth's piece makes out. Like the other pieces in the collection, this one is very compressed and covers a lot of ground quickly, and I don't imagine it's meant as the least word on the subject. Still, as presented I believe there is a form of relativism which can manage everything Thorseth gives as a reason to prefer pluralism. Then I make a suggestion which I hope can serve as a way to pin down the difference Thorseth is gesturing at.

Her case, following Charles Taylor, is that a purely formal approach such as relativism can't pick out the goods which are connected to import-attributing feelings, for which only a substantive engagement with a position can suffice. I will make the rather obvious reply that you can conceive of a relativism which is up to task, one of the form 'it is right for X to pursue those goods which promote import-attributing features'. Because this is really boring I want to instead say something about why I think it is a mistake to place too much weight on what someone might feel when you're trying to pin down concrete goods.

The idea behind import-attributing feelings is that not everything a person does is something they consider a matter of integrity: people often feel that it is of critical importance that they get to practice their religion or live a particular lifestyle, while it is decidedly odd for someone to tie how well their life is going to whether they around trees clockwise. The challenge for relativism is supposed to be that, from all the candidate goods available, a purely formal approach can't see whether some good is the target of import-attributing feelings. For instance, cultural membership is very important for many people, but there are others who attach no importance to it, so a relativism which makes cultural membership be the deciding factor in what is and isn't moral is inappropriate.

However, there is nothing that stops a relativism which determines rightness by way of which goods are the targets of import-attributing feelings. It would go something like: if X is the target of an import-attributing feeling of A's, then it is right for A to pursue X - let's call this relativism from import attribution (RIA). This is no different in form to the paradigmatically relativist position 'if members of A's culture typically pursues X, then it is right for A to pursue X'. You could complain that you can't determine what those feelings target without a substantial engagement, but nor could you see what someone's culture membership is. Furthermore, there is something right about RIA: cultural membership is a paradigmatic concern of relativism, but only because people typically consider it to be a central feature of your identity, and likewise for other candidates of the formal property that the relativism concerns itself with.

Concentrating on feelings leaves the door open for relativism, because feelings are feelings about things, that is, they are higher-order properties which can attach in various ways to more immediate goods. The problem, which RIA shares, is that such feelings can attach to almost anything, leading to Phillipa Foot's complaint that even a sophisticated relativism like Richard Hare's can lead to such absurdities as irresolvable moral disagreements about running around trees clockwise. To prevent this, there needs to be some restrictions on what could rightly be a target of such feelings, that is, propriety conditions, like which Foot's own 'natural goodness' account tries to deliver. However, doing so is very difficult, and Thorseth makes no attempt to do so, so pluralism as she presents it is in the same muddle as RIA because anything could potentially count among the variety of goods.

Nonetheless, we can establish that there must be such propriety conditions through the use of the Euthyphro problem, much like I presented in an earlier post (such uses of the Euthyphro problem are something I've written about and continue to work on). The dilemma goes as follows: either the feelings are just a way to know what goods are involved (how Thorseth, Taylor et al present it), or being the target of such a feeling is the good-making feature (as RIA has it); but it can't be a good-making feature, because then anything whatsover can be an ethical good, such as looking at rabbits under moonlight (another example of Foot's), which is just absurd; thus, the targets of these feelings are good independently of the feelings; thus, those feelings are only appropriate when they rightly target those things which are good. And now we have the task laid out clearly: to identify what the things are to which one rightly assign importance.

Futher comment re: reflective equillibrium

Thinking back on my previous post, a comment on Collste's introduction to applied ethics, I've decided my treatment suffers from the same problem I see in Collste's piece. The discussion is too short to clearly distinguish two different uses of reflective equillibrium, one where RE serves as a structure for argument, the other where it acts as justification. So let me try that again.

First, RE as a formal tool: If a suitable course of action has been picked out, or one that you believe is suitable, you can try to explain why by showing how that action sits in a reflective equillibrium. That would consist in stating the various relevant factors, drawing out the conflicts between them, staking out a suitable give-and-take between these factors and indicating how the chosen course of action fits appropriately between them. To say it in a different but equivalent matter: for relevant facor X, determine how the other relevant factors Y, Z, etc. impact on the demands of X to determine X', being the demands X makes in this case compared to Y, Z, etc, and do so for Y, Z, etc. as well; the appropriate course of action C is one which fits X',Y',Z' and so on. The fact that the appropriate course of action is so is explained by it respecting all the demands of the relevant factors as measured against the others.

Of course, not every candidate course of action can fit in such a reflective equillibrium. If it doesn't, you could try to use RE as a method to find the right course of action. Let us say the most attractive candidate course of action C meets demands X' and Y', but not Z or even an appropriately modified Z'. There could be a change to C to make a C' which might fit the bill, or if no such change is forthcoming, perhaps a further modification to the apparent demands of the various factors, maybe making a X'' which leads to changed demands on Y' which makes a Y'' and a Z'' which a C or C' could meet. Because you have made moves to change your approach to the case, and have done so based on RE, RE has done substantive work here. This is different from the former case, where RE does just formal work.

So, to sum up in conclusion: where the course of action one picks is picked independently of RE, and RE is used to explain why that is the right thing to do, there RE only does the formal work of structuring the argument; however, you might be tempted to change your approach based on what would bring about an RE, and that would be to use RE substantively, to choose to do this rather than that, and even (in what Rawls calls cases of 'wide reflective equillibrium') to modify your approach in other relevantly similar cases.

Collste – 'Applied and Professional Ethics – an Introduction'

Göran Collste contributes to the MAE handbook with a bit of an overview off the field of applied ethics. There is a point about reflective equillibrium I am a little uncertain about, which I'll discuss here.

In discussing RE, Collste remarks that it can be used either as a structure for debate, or a form of justification, but not both. As I understand it, this is because if it is used as an organisational schema, anything contributed by RE to the argument can't be informative, but can only be a different way to portray the content of the various positions. I don't think that Collste's severely compressed discussion distinguishes the two positions sufficiently, so for my purposes I'll try to do so. From what little I know of him, RE in applied ethics seems to be a particular interest of Collste's, but I have only this short article of his to work from, so that is all I'll try to engage.

Collste's example is of introducing an expert opinion (a doctor's considered judgement) and a general principle (the principle of utility) into a discussion of how to respond to a particular problem (suitable treatment for neonates). He chose an intuitionist and principlist disagreeing with eachother to bring out RE's features, he tells us. I'm a little worried about his characterisation of the intuitionist approach and what that entails, which is the point I'll work from towards my characterisation of the two different uses of RE.

Collste first introduces the doctor's judgement as an intuition, and then as a considered judgement, but there is a lot of ground to cover between the two. A considered judgement is a mere intuition (a snap judgement) that has been supplemented with careful attention to the specifics of the case and what the various options entail, and so on. A considered judgement is the type of thing you can have in hindsight, whereas a mere intuition is the product of a moment's sensation. Collste is welcome to pick out considered judgements, the least flighty type of intuition, as what he means to contrast with a deduction from a general principle, but he then proceeds to give them short shrift in what follows. He states that if the doctor were asked to back up his conclusion, there would be nothing to point back to other than their own “intuition and practice, but not much more” (p. 80). But more than intuition and practice goes into a considered judgement. 'Intuition' in the sense of 'sensation' can pick out salient dimensions of the case (the quality which intuitionists claim makes expert intuition indispensable), but what makes an intuitive judgement considered is exactly the careful attention that is given to the possibilities along those dimensions. The precedents an expert can draw upon have content, after all: in a similar case this happened when such-and-such was attempted; thus, in our case, this or something relevantly similar will happen again; and so on. If nothing else, it includes the weighing up of consequences that experience has taught one to expect. When deciding between uncertain consequences, it's hard to deny the power of an appeal to a precedent, especially one where the implications are drawn out with an expert's sensitivity. Knowing what will happen in such-and-such cases is after all exactly what we have doctors for.

On my view there is still a clear difference between an intuitionist line and a principlist one. An intuitionist one is a product of the specifics of the case, whereas a principlist one abstracts over specifics and makes proclamations of general scope. For the utilitarian of Collste's example, no other dimension other than expected happiness is relevant, whereas the doctor's intuition can draw on every aspect of every suitable precedent. When both views are given a place at the table, then, they pull in different directions: the principlist insistence that everything can be decided on some general considerations, while the intuitionist brings the intricacies of the case to bear. One can see the different sides being argued as a gauntlet that some candidate response to the problem has to run through. As I see it, if the response can satisfy every side, then RE functions as an organisational schema, and if it doesn't, it serves as a decision making procedure. In the former, the response is cast as the product of an equillibrium between the demands of ones principles and the realities of the case, and in the latter, the promise of an equillibrium motivates revisions to the candidates and the various sides to the debate until an equillibrium is reached.

Pettersson – 'A Beginning' / van Tongeren – 'On the Beginning of Ethics'

To start off proceedings, we have a little piece of meta-ethics: Paul van Tongeren writing on the birth of ethics in ancient Greece with Socrates, looking in particular to the first book of Plato's Republic, and Bo Pettersson trying to come to grips with what van Tongeren is saying. Pettersson's article is the important one (that is, it's the one that the course administrators took the trouble to print in a collection and mail to me), but it spends all of its time attempting to make sense of exactly what van Tongeren is saying, and I'll do the same. van Tongeren is doing meta-ethics in that he is investigating the conditions needed for ethical reflection to start in earnest. However, I'm unconvinced by his attempts to present two approaches as ones which end ethical reflection if we accept them. I find both of his targts, traditionalism and relativism, to have versions which contribute to rather than strangle ethical reflection.

van Tongeren's line as I understand it is as follows: the practice of ethics properly-so-called is ethical reflection; reflection is needed to navigate through uncertainty to some appropriate end; thus, for something to count as doing ethics, it needs to convincingly question whether some course of action is the right one. This requires the rejection of at least two approaches which could be taken to answer the question 'is this the right course of action?': traditionalism, which responds 'the right course is that which our ancestors would follow'; and relativism, which goes 'there is no matter of fact which course is right'. Keeping with his focus on the Republic, he identifies the former with Polemarchus, and the latter with Thrasymachus. He rejects the former because it denies that there is ethical uncertainty, and the latter because it gives up on seperating the right course of action from the wrong.

However, Thrasymachus does have a way to seperate right from wrong, as Pettersson rightly notes: what is right is what is to the advantage to the stronger party. I say he confuses a descriptive state of affairs for a normative one. I'm sure we can all agree that there is no end to situations where what people call justice is in fact that which is in the interest of the stronger party. The mistake is to think that what gets called justice actually is justice. People can be wrong, of course, and are perhaps especially likely to be wrong when those calling the shots have a conflict of interest, as it is if what gets called justice is what is in favour of the most powerful. But there is scope for an alternative, which Thrasymachus misses. Socrates refutes his position exactly by developing the alternative, that there are constraints of justice on what interests the powerful can pursue, and Thrasymachus leaves in a huff.

It is worthwhile to point out one version of relativism which is simply confused and would render ethics to nonsense were we to accept it: what counts as right for some group is what is considered right by that group. As Bernard Williams points out, this is simply a contradiction: if what is right for A is what A believes is right, then it is wrong for B to interfere with A, but this is an equivocation on 'right', because from the former relative use for A we have moved to a non-relative, inter-group use for B. This vulgar relativism is a contradiction because it gives both relative and non-relative scope to 'right'. Notice the difference between this position and that of Thrasymachus: he gives a way to pick out what would count as justice, and thus the correctness conditions for calling something right, whereas in vulgar relativism there are none. Because Thrasymachus's position makes an informative and falsifiable claim, it is a substantial ethical position. I must conclude that van Tongeren mischaracterises his target.

Matters are a little more interesting for van Tongeren's other target, traditionalism. I find van Tongeren's claim, that ethical reflection wasn't done in archaic conditions of extreme conservatism and a rigid caste system, simply incredible. I contend that you can accept the premise of van Tongeren's argument, that under a traditionalism every ethical question is answered by reference to established practice, and deny the conclusion, that accepting traditionalism makes an end to ethical enquiry. This is because I believe that there remains a question for ethical reflection if you accept traditionalism, and that is extending the traditional courses of action to novel situations. The type of widespread upheaval through war and intercultural contact van Tongeren points to would count as novel situations, but so would any state of affairs which isn't identical to some previous one which one's ancestor's faced and their response to which you do not explicitly know, thus, even under the archaic conditions of an entrenched caste society that van Tongeren considers, there still remain ethical questions which demand attention.

Traditionalism must be a theory about how to discover what is right rather than a theory of what rightness consists in: van Tongeren seems to say as much, and Pettersson is clear about it, but most strikingly, the Euthyphro problem makes it impossible for it to be otherwise. The Euthyphro problem concerns moral authority, and motivates this split between moral ontology and moral epistemology, so it is strikingly relevant: if some authority A says that X is right, it either is that A saying so makes X right, or that X is right independently of A saying so. In this case, as I imagine it is in every Euthyphro case, taking the first option is untenable: that would make traditionalism out to say 'whatever your ancestors did counts as right', which is a vulgar relativism and liable to the same objection. So considering what your ancestors did must be a way to learn what is right, rather than definitive of right.

What you learn through this traditionalist method is a list of actions which have been identified as right in virtue of your ancestors having done them. Let us set aside the issue that not everything your ancestors did would carry their seal of approval, because it is easy to make a set of traditionally approved actions, which would include the considered judgement that some things done by your ancestors turns out to have been wrong. I think this considered traditionalism gets much closer to what the view is supposed to be. An obvious consequence of this position is that if you ever are in a situation just like one your ancestors faced, you should do what they did. This, however, doesn't go very far. You never come across a situation exactly like a previous one, simply because your situation is later and thus has a different history at the very least. So there remains the question of what counts as similar in all the relevant ways. That is a tremendously weighty question. Any attempt to answer it means settling issues about what counts as morally salient facts, what dimensions those facts are found on, how to measure significant differences on those dimensions, and so on. Remember that it isn't that your ancestors had the power to make something right or wrong by fiat, it is just that you trust their judgement. What you need to do to make use of the store of precedents they gave you is to recreate, to some degree, the judgements they made, and see how your situation is relevantly similar and different from that of the precedent. Not only is this to embark on ethical reflection, it quite likely is paradigmatic of what ethical reflection consists in.

In entertaining traditionalism there is again an opportunity to slip from descriptive to normative states of affairs,which again would be a mistake. It isn't just that whatever your ancestors might have done, it is right, it is that there were constraints on their actions, and that in deciding on whether this or that is the right course of action, we are trying to decipher what those constraints are. This, again, is paradigmatic of ethical reflection.

There is of course a way in which Socratic debates show an innovation, but that seems to me to be in how ethical reflection is articulated, rather than the rather bizarre idea that only the type of questions Socrates asked counts as being reflective. Such articulation sharpens the debate, but it can't be all there is to the debate, because ultimately what is judged in ethics isn't what we say, but what we do.

In conclusion, regarding van Tongeren I believe that he has made a mistake in how he characterises Socrates's opponents in the first book of the Republic: he thinks there is a difference in kind between the type of position Socrates is after and the type his opponents offer, that only the Socratic one counts as suitably reflective; but instead I think that what is happening is that Socrates takes these commonly held views seriously and tests their mettle exactly as products of reflection. They turn out to fail, but no matter: almost every theory is false, after all. I think that relativism and traditionalism are not necessarily threats to ethics, but are to be entertained seriously. We can learn valuable things from considering them, like seeing the inconsistency of vulgar relativism which points to impotant issues about the scope of our judgements, and reflecting on the difficulties in following precedents even if we accept their authority.

There is one point in Pettersson's piece that I want to quickly draw attention to, where he admirably draws out certain tenets of the traditionalist and relativist strategies. Pettersson's conclusion is that there are two relativist tenets we should reject: we must deny that there are no true and definitive answers to ethical questions, and also deny that there is no method to discover such truths. I think relativism can get off the hook here, because it can join Petterrson in rejecting the former and still consistently maintain that there is no method to discover truth in ethics. To make this point, I want to distinguish between first- and second-level ethical concepts, much like Gottlob Frege does in his logic. The rightness and wrongness of actions and other such typical objects of ethics are first-level concepts for my purposes, and concepts which concern ones on the first level are second-level concepts. We can consistently embrace relativism as a second-level concept: it is an informative claim about the status of first-level concepts, that is, rightness and wrongness, which says that there is no fact of the matter about being right. It is informative, because it has implications and there are ways you could show it to be false. It is also a definitive answer to an ethical question. Given relativism, it is true that there is no fact of the matter on what counts as right and wrong. Thus, it's a substantive position which is appropriate to ethical reflection.

There are objections I can consider, but this post is already very long, so I'll rather stop here, and address further issues as they might arise in comments.