moral knowledge 141 to speak to other people (who are different only in their cultural background) and discover that they have very different moral views, we realise that the ‘objectivity’
of moral statements is in fact just a locally shared subjectivity in disguise.
We are thus back where we started with the idea that moral statements don’t express objective facts but rather subjective sentiments. Note, however, that if there are no moral facts, then there is nothing to be known in the first place, and hence moral knowledge is impossible. This philosophical position is known as moral expressiv- ism, and it is quite a radical thesis to hold. The reason for this is that if you hold that there are no such things as moral facts, then you need to offer an explanation of what it is that we are doing when we confidently put forward moral claims. The explana- tion offered by the expressivist is that what we are doing is not asserting (something which we take to be) a fact – as one would do when one asserts that water boils at roughly 100ºC – but rather merely expressing a sentiment. For example, to claim that kicking a small child for fun is wrong is to express one’s own feeling that one shouldn’t do such a thing. In effect, then, such a claim is equivalent to saying that one feels that one shouldn’t kick babies for fun. Crucially, though, expressions of feelings are not normally thought of as assertions of fact at all.
A good analogy in this regard is with injunctions, such as ‘Shut that door’. Although a statement of an injunction might superficially look like an assertion, no one would on reflection regard this statement as an assertion. One is, after all, clearly not trying to say something true, but rather simply trying to make something happen (i.e. to get the door to close). Some expressivists have thus argued that moral claims should be interpreted as injunctions rather than assertions. On this proposal, in saying that kicking small children for fun is wrong, one is in effect saying something like ‘Don’t kick small children for fun’. Rather than trying to say that something is the case (i.e.
that kicking small children for fun is morally wrong), one is simply registering one’s displeasure at this sort of thing and trying to ensure – by, in effect, issuing an order – that others do not act in a fashion that would generate this displeasure.
An advantage of thinking about moral claims in this way is that the expressivist can explain why we might initially suppose that we are committed to the existence of moral facts even though (according to the expressivist anyway) they don’t exist. We have, as it were, been misled by language, in that we think we are making a factual assertion when we put forward moral claims, when in reality we are just expressing our feelings. If there are no moral facts, then one obviously doesn’t need to engage with the above issue of explaining why moral facts, were they to exist, are so different to normal empirical facts. The challenge to those who believe in the existence of moral facts is thus to explain why we shouldn’t think of moral statements along expressivist lines.
know. One issue here is the diversity of moral opinion that we noted above. Some people think that abortion can sometimes be morally permissible, while others think that it is clearly immoral. Some think that animal experimentation can sometimes be morally permissible, while others think that it is always immoral. Some think that taxation is a form of theft and hence immoral, but many others disagree. And so on.
Now of course one can find disagreements occurring in lots of different domains.
Even among the best scientists, for example, there can be disagreements, and yet scientific inquiry (as conducted by the best scientists at any rate) is meant to be a paradigmatically good way of acquiring knowledge. But if the existence of such disagreements in science does not undermine our confidence that there is scientific knowledge, then why should the existence of disagreements about morality make us sceptical about moral knowledge?
A. J. Ayer (1910–89)
The propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character – that is, they do not describe the behaviour of physical, or even mental, objects; they express definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions.
A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic In his seminal book, Language, Truth and Logic (published in 1936, when he was only 26 years old), the British philosopher A. J. Ayer put forward a philosophical position that entails a robust form of scepticism about moral facts. Ayer was a logical positivist, and as such he argued that for a propo- sition to be meaningful, it had to be capable of being empirically verified.
This meant that you needed to have some way of demonstrating, through experience, that the proposition was either true or false, at least in principle.
Moral ‘facts’, however, do not meet this requirement, or so argued logical positivists like Ayer. For how would one go about empirically demonstrat- ing that a moral statement was true or false? Accordingly, on this proposal moral statements are strictly speaking nonsense. Note, however, that it is not just moral facts that are under threat by the lights of this view. Think, for example, of the kinds of statements made in aesthetics (e.g. that Woody Allen has made some good films). Aren’t these statements equally immune to empirical verification? In fact, much of philosophy gets called into ques- tion as well – logical positivists were particularly suspicious of metaphysical claims, for example. Indeed, embarrassingly for logical positivism, the very statement of the view fails to satisfy its own criteria, for how would one go about empirically verifying the statement that all meaningful statements are empirically verifiable? Hence the very statement of logical positivism is by its own lights nonsense too.
moral knowledge 143 Notice, however, that the disagreements one finds in science are very different from those found with regard to morality. To begin with, the extent of the disagreement is not the same; there are far more moral disagreements than there are scientific disagreements. That this is so reflects two further differences between science and morality. First, morality is, as we noted above, very much culture-relative in that one’s moral views tend to be shaped by the culture that one was raised in and yet different cultures can have strikingly different moral codes. In contrast, there is no analogue to this in science, which is arguably not at all culture-relative. To return to our example of the boiling point for water, for instance, while two distinct cultures might have a different system of measurement that they apply in this case, so long as they are carrying out their experiments properly, then they will reach equivalent conclusions.
Second, in the scientific case, it is usually clear to both parties what would resolve the dispute (e.g. what evidence would be required to settle the issue one way or the other). If a scientist were for some reason sceptical that water boils at 100ºC, then we could convince her by doing the appropriate experiment to illustrate this fact.
When it comes to morality, however, this is rarely the case. Indeed, both parties to a moral dispute might agree on all the relevant empirical facts yet still have opposing moral opinions. In the debate about the morality of abortion, for example, both par- ties might agree on such issues as the nature of conception, what the foetus is able to experience at different stages of development, and so on, yet still disagree about whether abortion can be morally permissible. If that’s right, then it is very unclear how one could ever settle an entrenched moral dispute.
A natural way to respond to at least the first point is to argue that some cultures have better moral codes than others. We might regard some cultures as being mor- ally inferior, for example, on account of how a greater number of their moral beliefs are false. Indeed, if there are moral facts, then on the face of it there seems no reason why there couldn’t be moral progress (just as there is scientific progress). As we progress as a society, we shake off prejudices of old and become more enlightened, thereby enhancing our body of moral knowledge. Some cultures might thus simply have moral codes that are more developed down the road of moral progress than other societies.
The worry about this response, however, is how to defend it without slipping into a narrow moral parochialism. The problem is that every culture tends to suppose that its moral code is superior to all others, so how are we to be sure that our moral code really is the ascendant one that we take it to be? In short, how can we be sure that it isn’t us who employ the ‘primitive’ moral code while the culture that we look down upon from a moral point of view is the one employing a progressive moral code?
This point highlights that the really important consideration that counts against moral knowledge is the second worry just raised regarding the difficulty of resolving moral disagreements. After all, if there were an objective way of resolving moral dis- agreements, then we wouldn’t need to worry about the problem of moral parochi- alism. Like the scientist, we could just put our moral code to the objective test and find out whether it really is superior to the alternative moral codes offered by other
cultures. That there is no objective test of this sort that we could subject our moral beliefs to means that we are cast adrift on this score, with no sure way to guide us through the moral challenges posed to us by alternative moral codes.