Section 1.1 of Hausman & MacPherson --
1.1 What AreMoral Questions and How Can They Be Answered?
Moral questions and moral reasoning can be difficult to understand, and
we have found that students often hold very skeptical or even cynical views.
One hears claims such as, “It’s just a matter of how you feel.” “There’s no
rational way to resolve moral disputes. One can only fight.” “Moral claims
cannot be true or false.” “Morality is just a matter of social convention or
prejudice.” These views seem to have some foundation.
• It might seem that morality is just a matter of individual feeling and that
moral disagreements cannot be rationally resolved, because it is hard to
understand how moral claims can be tested, confirmed, or disconfirmed.
• It might seem that moral claims cannot be true or false, correct or incorrect,
because moral claims are often prescriptions and concern how
things ought to be rather than how they in fact are.
• It is tempting to believe that moral claims are social conventions or relative,
because members of different societies disagree about morality.
Yet these skeptical conclusions are exaggerated, and they yield implications
that are hard to accept. To see why, let’s be more concrete and focus
on an example of a genuine moral question that might face an individual.
A young woman attending college becomes pregnant and is trying to decide
whether to have an abortion. This young woman might not regard this as a
moral problem. She might have no doubt that abortion is morally permissible
and be concerned instead about whether it would be advantageous for
her to continue the pregnancy. But let us suppose that she is genuinely in
doubt about whether abortion is morally permissible.
1.1 What Are Moral Questions and How Can They Be Answered? 5
Notice first that hers is not a legal problem. She knows that abortion is
in fact legal. But this doesn’t tell her whether it is morally permissible. It’s
legal to be rude to your parents or to pretend to love somebody in order to
seduce them, but that doesn’t mean these actions are morally permissible.
Second, notice that this young woman’s question is not one that a sociologist
can answer. Even if she reads that 62.37% of her fellow citizens think
that an abortion is permissible in circumstances like hers, her problem has
not been solved. She still needs to decide whether she ought to have the
abortion or not. The third thing to recognize is that hers is a real question.
It is something that she might agonize over. Whether reflecting by herself
or talking over her dilemma with friends or family or counselors, she will
be thinking about reasons why she should conclude that abortion is or is
not morally permissible. Whether or not one believes that morality is subjective
(in some sense of this ambiguous term) or that morality depends in
some sense on feelings, there is unquestionably a huge potential role here
for argument and judgment. It seems that her moral question is real, that
some answers to it are better than others, and that it is possible to think
rationally about which answers are better and which are worse.
There are genuine moral questions about social policy, too. For example,
the question about whether abortions should be legal cannot be decided by
ascertaining what the law is. The moral question of what the law concerning
abortion ought to be must also be distinguished from questions about
whether laws permitting or banning abortion are constitutional. Before the
Thirteenth Amendment was passed, the constitution specifically permitted
slavery. That made slavery constitutional, but it didn’t make it just. Questions
about what the constitution ought to say are moral questions. One
also cannot decide whether abortions ought to be legal by means of sociological
research, such as taking a poll. A poll can determine what most
people believe, but it won’t say whether they’re right. Those who believe
that abortions ought not to be legal cannot be refuted by results of polls
showing that most people believe that they should remain legal. One addresses
moral questions instead by making arguments.
Once we recognize these truisms – that moral questions have better and
worse answers, and that arguments can sometimes help people find out
which answers are better – we can see that the cynical or relativistic conclusions
concerning morality are exaggerated and unjustified.
• It is not true that there’s no method of resolving moral disagreements and
that consequently all one ever gets in morality is disagreement. There is
a method: One can make arguments; that is, one can look for premises
6 Ethics and Economics?
that others agree on and then use logic to try reaching agreement on
the issues in dispute. When people stand to benefit from doing evil,
they may be deaf to rational argument. It took a civil war – in addition
to the arguments of abolitionists – in order to eliminate slavery in
the United States, but without those arguments (to which there were, in
fact, no good responses) there wouldn’t have been a movement opposing
slavery.
• The fact that moral judgments are prescriptive – that they say how things
ought to be rather than how they are – may imply that moral judgments
cannot be literally true or false, but it does not follow that one
cannot sensibly consider whether some moral judgments are mistaken.
Although there are subtle philosophical questions one might ask about
the sense in which prescriptions can be correct or mistaken, clearly some
prescriptions are better than others, and there is room for rational argument
concerning which are better and which are worse. Moreover,
even if moral judgments are not descriptive assertions, the reasons for
those judgments often include empirical claims that can be criticized and
investigated.
• Though moral questions are not always easy to answer and though difficult
questions give rise to persistent disagreement, there is also a lot of
agreement in ethics. Few people approve of torture for any purpose, and
even fewer approve of it for entertainment.
The claim that morality is “relative” can be confusing, because in one
sense morality clearly is relative: what’s right depends on (is relative to)
what the facts are. Whether it is permissible to knock over a frail old man
depends on whether one knocks him over to see whether his bones are brittle
or whether one knocks him over to prevent him from being run down
by a truck. But to recognize that one does not have a well-defined moral
question until one has specified all the facts is perfectly consistent with the
idea that well-defined moral questions have better and worse answers.
What people mean by claiming that morality is relative is often something
altogether different: that whatever a person (or a society) believes is right is
automatically right (“for that person or society”). But when the woman in
our previous example is trying to decide whether it is morally permissible
to have an abortion, she is not trying to find out what her beliefs already
are; she is trying to find out which answer to her question is correct. Similarly,
when thinking about whether abortion should or shouldn’t be legal,
people are not trying to find out what they (or others in their society) already
believe but instead what the law concerning abortion should be.
1.1 What Are Moral Questions and How Can They Be Answered? 7
If whatever people believed about ethics were automatically right, then
there could be no moral disagreement. To disagree with someone about a
moral question commits you to believing that people’s ethical beliefs can
be incorrect. Similarly, if a social consensus guaranteed its own correctness,
then defenders of unpopular views would automatically be mistaken.
One wouldn’t need to argue with defenders of minority views, since they
couldn’t possibly be right. But iconoclasts cannot be refuted with polls, and
social consensus is not proof of correctness.
We recognize how tempting it is to think that there is no fact of the matter
about morality and that, even if there were, people could not know it.
Morality seems in large part a human construction, so it is easy to jump to
the conclusion that it is mere social convention or, more radically, that individuals
determine what is right or wrong by what they believe or feel. But
these temptations lead either to moral nihilism – the complete rejection of
morality – or to views that cannot be sustained. If you think that anything
is right or wrong, good or bad, morally praiseworthy or blameworthy, then
you are not a moral nihilist. And if you take any moral claims seriously,
wonder if they are correct or incorrect, and sometimes disagree or argue
with others, then you cannot believe that all moral views are on a par and
that there can never be any reason to accept some and reject others.
Sometimes people feel that it is intolerant or dogmatic to believe that their
moral convictions are correct. In some cases they are right, because some
systems of morality are dogmatic in maintaining that there is nothing to be
learned or debated concerning the one true moral code. But whether tolerance
is a virtue and what views and actions should be tolerated are questions
within morality. Some moralities are tolerant while others are intolerant,
just as some people – whether the subject matter be morality, sports, or
deodorants – are dogmatic and others are ready to listen and learn. Short
of giving up morality altogether, including all concerns about tolerance,
there is no alternative to taking one’s moral beliefs seriously. People who
are genuinely tolerant are not moral skeptics: They believe that tolerance
is (nonrelativistically) good and that those who are intolerant are wrong to
be intolerant. Tolerance is tied to an appreciation of the richness of different
cultures and different life experiences, to a respect for others, and to a
willingness to take their perspectives and arguments seriously. It is not a
form of skepticism. Furthermore, to believe that there are better and worse
answers to moral questions does not imply any unwillingness to listen to
the arguments of others or an inability to see one’s own limitations. A serious
moral commitment to tolerance is a better remedy for dogmatism than
is an impossible skepticism.
8 Ethics and Economics?
There is nothing suspect or intolerant about believing that some answers
to moral questions are better than others and that rational argument can
help one to judge which answers are better. These beliefs are implicit in
individual moral judgments and in policy making, and it is hard to deny
them without denying that there is any such thing as morality.