4. Analysis
4.3 The Form of Moral Concepts
4.3.11 Gradable Concepts
and everything else is a wrong
(Morality Is Black And White: There Is No Gray – THE ROAD TO CONCORD, n.d.) https://theroadtoconcord.com/natural-law/derevation/rights-bubbles-the-origin-of-universal- morality/morality-is-black-and-white-there-is-no-gray/)
Hence, it is evident from the use of the adjectives right/wrong, together with the explicit content of the text, that the writers of (73), (74), (75) and (76) understand
RIGHT and WRONG as being mutually exclusive concepts.
lowest levels of animal suffering; the second farm moderate levels of suffering; and the third, very high levels of animal suffering. We might imagine that an agent who assents to moral judgement (77), when comparing the farms, would judge the agricultural practices of the first farm to be morally right, the third farm to be wrong, and the second farm to be neither right nor wrong, but ‘right-er’ (better) than the third. Here, we see a conceptual moral middle-ground where the moral status of the agricultural practices on the second farm are not adequately covered by either RIGHT or WRONG which is conceivable only if moral concepts are not represented as mutually exclusive. Hence, an individual who assents to (77) sees a moral middle-ground, which is not conceptually accessible to the agent who assents to (72).
This example suggests that right/wrong can also be used as gradable antonyms when agents mentally represent RIGHT and WRONG as gradable concepts, but we have also seen, from the initial grammatical analysis above, that right/wrong resist being morphologically modified with the comparative and superlative suffixes ‘er’ and ‘est’. It remains to be shown, then, that RIGHT and WRONG can indeed be used in a gradable way.
This can be shown, as I will proceed to do, and an interesting observation can be made:
the linguistic restriction which prevents the morphological modification of right/wrong, forces speakers to use alternative lexical items when expressing moral concepts as gradable. We can see this effect happening in a range of contexts; take the following text from Vox.com for instance:
(70) [N]early 400 companies, including Hyatt and Marriott, committed themselves to better conditions for animals. […] From one perspective, factory farming of animals is one of the few social problems in the world today that, rather than getting better, gets worse each year, as we continue to breed animals in terrible, even monstrous conditions. (Animal Rights: 2018’s Big Wins — and Big Losses — for Animals - Vox, n.d.) https://www.vox.com/2018/12/24/18148698/2018-year-in- review-for-animals - emphasis added)
As pointed out above, in discussion on animal welfare, it is often assumed that the level or degree of suffering those animals endure is correlated with the moral status of the action, meaning that actions which cause more suffering are seen as ‘wrong- er’. In (78), the writer is using the words ‘better’ and ‘worse’ to describe the moral status of the conditions in which farm animals are kept and this phenomenon is widespread.
Speakers regularly turn to phrases such as ‘morally better’, ‘morally worse’, ‘morally superior’ or ‘morally preferable’ when describing the moral status of a state of affairs which are gradable, which can also be seen in the following examples:
(71) Eating chicken is morally worse than killing Cecil the lion (Eating Chicken Is Morally Worse than Killing Cecil the Lion - Vox, n.d.) https://www.vox.com/2015/7/30/9074547/cecil-lion-chicken-meat - emphasis added)
(72) [I]t is morally preferable that a just warrior be better protected from unnecessary harm, other things being equal. Wouldn’t it have been morally better, for example, if Allied pilots in World War II could have remotely flown planes to defeat the Nazis rather than risk being shot down?
(Coming to Terms With How Drones Are Used - NYTimes.Com, n.d.) https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/09/25/do-drone-attacks-do-more-harm-than- good/coming-to-terms-with-how-drones-are-used - emphasis added)
(73) Most People Consider Themselves to Be Morally Superior
(Most People Consider Themselves to Be Morally Superior - Scientific American, n.d.) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/most-people-consider-themselves-to-be-morally- superior - emphasis added)
(74) Is wearing fur morally worse than wearing leather?
(Is Wearing Fur Morally Worse than Wearing Leather? | Ethical and Green Living | The Guardian, n.d.) - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/15/is-wearing-leather-less-moral-than- wearing-fur - emphasis added)
The above examples show how speakers are forced to express degrees of rightness and wrongness by using ‘better’ and ‘worse’ instead of using the modified forms ‘right-er’ or ‘wrong-er’ which makes manifest a tension between the conceptual and linguistic levels. This tension is apparent in the work of Richard Arneson who uses the ungrammatical forms ‘right-er’ and ‘wrong-er’ in order to more accurately reflect his nuanced view of morality:
(75) [T]he act consequentialist should downplay the distinction between acts that are right and wrong. Her more important task is to grade acts as “righter” and “wronger” depending on the extent of the shortfall between the act being evaluated and the best that could have been done in the circumstances… We can think of the acts an agent could do on some occasion as ordered in an array of groups of acts that have consequences that range from very close to the consequences of the best act to very close to the very worst one could have done. With this picture in view, we can see that options of a sort have an important role in moral life and moral assessment. Far more important than determining whether one’s act on an occasion was right or wrong would be fixing the degree of wrongness if it is not the very best one could have done. (Arneson, 2009)
It can be concluded, in light of the above, that the conceptual nature of RIGHT and WRONG, can be mentally represented as both mutually exclusive and gradable in
nature, and that the form of representation varies with context. The conceptual form, as either gradable or mutually exclusive, is determined by the perceived nature of the states of affairs to which the concepts are applied. It is also apparent that when states of affairs dictate a gradable understanding of RIGHT and WRONG, agents resort to using typically non- moral evaluative language to express this gradeability – such as ‘better’ and ‘worse’. This is due to the adjectives right/wrong being resistant to morphological modification.
Explaining this resistance is beyond the scope of the current work, however, I might conjecture that it is plausibly due to linguistic convention based on culturally engrained views about morality. Notwithstanding, it is clear from the above that speakers do use language which reflects a gradable conceptualization of morality. Moreover, an important observation can be made: linguistic conventions appear to limit the expression of certain concepts, suggesting the link between concepts and words is not a straightforward relationship.