Gripped by authority

Abstract

Moral judgments are typically experienced as being categorically authoritative – i.e. as having a prescriptive force that (i) is motivationally gripping independently of both conventional norms and one’s pre-existing desires, and (ii) justificationally trumps both conventional norms and one’s pre-existing desires. We argue that this key feature is best accommodated by the meta-ethical position we call ‘cognitivist expressivism’, which construes moral judgments as sui generis psychological states whose distinctive phenomenological character includes categorical authoritativeness. Traditional versions of expressivism cannot easily accommodate the justificationally trumping aspect of categorical authoritativeness, because they construe moral judgments as fundamentally desire-like. Moral realism cannot easily accommodate the aspect of inherent motivational grip, because realism construes moral judgments as a species of factual belief.

Keywords:

• Categorical authoritativeness
• expressivism
• moral judgment
• motivation
• phenomenology

Notes

1. We address embedding in Horgan and Timmons (2006); negation in Horgan and Timmons 2009; and the possibility of deep moral error in Horgan and Timmons 2015.

2. We are using ‘moral reasons’ in a broad sense to refer not only to reasons whose characterization involves moral terms (e.g. that such and so action is wrong), but also to non-normative reasons (e.g. that such and so action would cause much harm) of the sort that purport to explain why actions, attitudes, and other objects of moral evaluation have the moral status they have, and which one appeals to in supporting a moral judgment.

3. Horgan and Timmons 2018 (forthcoming).

4. We understand phenomenology to be a largely descriptive field of study whose methodology is introspection and whose subject matter is the concrete ‘what-it-is-likeness’ of experience. So, we do not include (as some do) within the scope of phenomenological inquiry all of the deeply embedded aspects of ordinary moral thought and discourse.

5. Hampton’s discussion is actually broader in scope than morality; her description also is meant to capture the authoritative grip of epistemic reasons.

6. As we use the germ ‘grip’ here and throughout, being ‘gripped’ by the experienced authority of a certain consideration C, as a reason for (or against) performing act Φ, constitutes being in a state of judging, on the basis of C, that one ought to (or ought not to) perform Φ. When one is thus gripped, one experiences the reason as moral-normatively decisive; but it need not be also motivationally decisive (and in Clive’s case, is not). The judgment need not be consciously explicit; instead, its content might be implicit in the specific phenomenological character of one’s current experience – in much the same way that appreciation of pertinent background information often is implicit in the specific phenomenological character of the experience of understanding a culturally topical joke, even though that information is not being explicitly consciously rehearsed. ‘Chromatic illumination’ is our expression for such implicit conscious appreciation of content that is not being explicitly represented in consciousness. In Horgan and Timmons (forthcoming) we discuss chromatic illumination at length, with specific attention to its operation in moral experience. The notion of chromatic illumination was originally introduced, in connection with the contention that the justification-status of a belief often depends in part upon implicit conscious appreciation of pertinent background evidence, in Horgan and Potrč (2010).

7. Moral-reasons experiences need not include an explicit judgment that such-and-such considerations constitute moral reasons for thus-and-such action. Often enough, it seems, one experiences certain considerations as moral reasons for a certain action Φ – one experiences those considerations ‘moral-reasonishly vis-à-vis Φ,’ so to speak – without forming such an explicit conscious judgment whose content is that considerations C constitute moral reasons for action Φ. Indeed, much might be operative in consciousness only implicitly, by way of chromatic illumination (cf. note 6): perhaps certain considerations that are figuring as authoritative moral reasons, perhaps one’s appreciation of those considerations as authoritative moral reasons, and perhaps even one’s being gripped by that appreciated authority. The phenomenology to be described below comports with these observations.

8. Hampton does provide a conception of norms on pp. 49–53 of her book.

9. The irreducibility of such experience is nicely put by David Enoch when he observes that with regard to normative facts generally, ‘Normative facts are just too different from natural ones to be a subset thereof’ (2011, 4), moral reasons being a special case.

10. One can easily add to this list. In our Forthcoming, we discuss the phenomenology of moral deliberation which, as Nagel (1986, 49) rightly observes, often includes the thought that whatever decision one comes to on the basis of such deliberation, one might still be mistaken.

11. We acknowledge that an advocate of metaethical error theory might challenge the contention that Preservation is a legitimate theoretical desideratum – perhaps by claiming that the goal of preserving the practice of morality is the ‘wrong kind of reason’ for accepting a metaethical theory. But at the very least, this goal constitutes a legitimate and important reason to seek a credible metaethical theory that preserves morality while also satisfying the desiderata Acknowledgement and Metaphysics. And of course if such a theory can be found, then its availability will undermine the principal motivation for error theory – viz., the contention that moral-authority experience purports to represent putative ‘do-be-done-ness’ facts and properties that are metaphysically queer.

12. Here and throughout, we use the modifier ‘metaphysically robust’ to signal that the contextually operative use of the terms ‘property’ and ‘fact’ is not a minimalistic use. Although we recognize that these terms are sometimes used minimalistically – in which case, for instance, asserting ‘Abortion is morally wrong’ is essentially equivalent to asserting ‘That abortion is morally wrong is a fact,’ or to asserting ‘Abortion has the property of moral wrongness’ – we deny that such minimalistic uses are the only ones that are ever contextually operative. We also deny that they have any privileged ‘default’ status.

13. We say ‘not pertinently different from’, rather than ‘pertinently similar to’, because our own non-reductive version of expressivism, as described in Sections 5 and 6 below, does emphasize certain pertinent similarities between moral-authority experiences and various kinds of mental state not involving morality. Even so, our brand of expressivism is neither strongly reductive nor weakly reductive, because it also emphasizes pertinent differences between moral-authority experiences and each of those other kinds of mental state.

14. Experiencing a state of mind like norm-acceptance or action-planning as voluntary, or as contingent upon one’s social circumstances, need not be a matter of an explicit higher-order judgment that attributes voluntariness or contingency to one’s first-order state of norm-acceptance or action-planning. Instead, it can be a matter of how the first-order mental state is chromatically illuminated; cf. notes 6 and 7 above.

15. Recently Cuneo and Shafer-Landau (2014); have proposed what they call ‘conceptual non-naturalism’ one aim of which is to avoid troublesome metaphysical and epistemological difficulties that arise for robustly metaphysical versions of the sort we are considering. For a trenchant critique of this view, see Copp 2018a. See also Copp (2018b), for a critique of the metaethical views of Parfit and Scanlon, whose versions of non-naturalism are also supposed to avoid these same troublesome commitments.

16. Words like ‘relation’, ‘property’, ‘fact’, and ‘true’ all have minimalistic, disquotational uses in ordinary discourse that need not be ontologically committal – a point rightly emphasized, for instance, by metaethical expressivists like Simon Blackburn who embrace ‘quasi-realism’ about ordinary moral thought and discourse. But it is a serious mistake, we maintain, to infer from this that the only actual or legitimate uses of such words are minimalistic. That mistake is a dangerous first step down a looming garden path to metaethical quietism (cf. Horgan and Timmons 2015) (As we say in that paper, Beware of becoming beHorwiched!).

17. Note that ironically, if we are right, then when it comes to the introspectible aspects of experiencing the grip of moral reasons, the moral error theory remains unmotivated. It must therefore rely on appealing to other features of moral thought and discourse in order to claim that such thought and discourse is error-ridden.

18. We acknowledge that a hybrid theory that combines aspects of naturalist moral realism with aspects of expressivism might be dialectically in the running too, insofar as it embraces a construal of moral-authority phenomenology like the one we propose below. But an advocate of such a position would bear the dialectical burden of providing an adequate theoretical motivation for the two claims (1) that moral experience and moral judgment purport to represent metaphysically robust moral properties and moral facts, and (2) that these are identical to certain natural properties and facts whose essence is non-normative (Discussion with David Copp during the ‘Representation and Evaluation’ conference prompted the present note.)

19. Nor, of course, is it a matter of construing an ought-commitment as a higher-order belief that attributes a first-order state to oneself, e.g. the psychological state regarding non-normative consideration C as a moral reason for action A.

20. The following objection arises, which was pressed upon us at the ‘Representation and Evaluation’ conference by our commentator Bruno Guindon and also by several audience members including Paul Bloomfield and Bill FitzPatrick:

Although cognitivist expressivism recognizes and accommodates the externality of the non-normative considerations that one experiences as authoritative reasons, it does not recognize and accommodate the externality of the experienced status of those considerations as authoritative reasons; and in this respect, cognitivist expressivism is really a version of metaethical error theory.

Our response is to urge that introspection alone cannot reliably ascertain whether or not the experiential externality of moral reasons, qua authoritative moral reasons, involves anything more than the further phenomenological features that we describe just below – in particular, involuntariness and independence of pre-existing desires. Our own view is that the phenomenology as we describe it already constitutes experiencing the pertinent non-moral considerations as morally authoritative.

21. This motivational role might be direct, or might be a matter of generating a new desire with the same content as the ought-commitment. We ourselves find the former possibility more plausible, phenomenologically and psychologically.

22. Concerning the phenomenological aspect External Source, the following remarks bear emphasis. Hampton’s own formulation, as expressed in the pertinent bullet point at the end of Section 2, is ambiguous. On one hand, it can be construed as including both (i) that the non-normative factual consideration which one experiences as a reason is external to oneself, and (ii) that this fact is experienced as authoritative over oneself in a categorical way, independently of one’s pre-existing desires, one’s contingent social roles, etc. On the other hand, it can be construed as including not only features (i) and (ii) but also this feature: representing a putative, external, independent, metaphysically robust, moral-reasons relation. We, of course, are construing External Source the former way in claiming that our non-reductive expressivism is compatible with what is reliably introspectible about this aspect of moral phenomenology. To contend that introspection reliably reveals that moral phenomenology satisfies the stronger construal of External Source, we contend, is to commit the non-naturalist fallacy.

24. For helpful comments and discussion, we thank the participants at the 2017 conference ‘Representation and Evaluation’ at the University of British Columbia, especially Bruno Guidion (our commentator), Paul Bloomfield, David Copp, Bill FitzPatrick, and the two conference organizers Matt Bedke and Stefan Scriaraffa.