does the Evaluria hypothesis suffer the same fate as relativism?

In class the other day Charlotte asked a profound question and I didn’t have time to give an answer.  So I wanted to say a bit more about it here. 

I don’t recall the exact question, but it pertained to a part of the “Evaluria” hypothesis.  According to that hypothesis there is a non-coincidental correlation between, roughly, our strongly disliking actions of a certain sort and their being morally wrong (e.g., brutality, betrayal, neglect, hogging, and shirking).  When actions are targeted by the relevant attitudes and practices, they are morally wrong, and vice-versa.  But this seems to open up the hypothesis to the sort of objection faced by relativism.  For if the theory is committed to a correlation between actions being targeted by con-attitudes and their being morally wrong, isn’t it committed to saying that if we have con-attitudes to certain actions, then they are morally wrong, but if we don’t have con-attitudes to those actions then they aren’t morally wrong, even if they are otherwise exactly the same?  And that seems problematic: the mere fact that we feel a certain way about actions can’t itself make the difference between their being morally wrong and not (this is what is meant by the attitude- and practice-independence of morality).  So isn’t the Evaluria hypothesis undercut by just what undercut relativism?  I believe that Charlotte’s question was something like this.

I will reply in two stages. 

First, let’s consider this question: does the Evaluria hypothesis imply that if our con-attitudes were differently directed – if we disliked different actions in the way that we actually dislike brutality, betrayal, etc. – then those other actions would be morally wrong?  For instance, if we had disliked (and opposed in a socially coordinated way) finger-snapping or nose-scratching or dancing as such – not because we think they lead to death or pain or some recognizable bad but just in themselves – would those actions have been wrong? 

The answer is that the Evaluria hypothesis denies this.  It says that even if we had disliked those other things, the familiar wrongs – brutality, etc. – would still have been wrong.  (I take the fact that it has this implication to be a good feature of the theory; if a theory didn’t have this implication – like the version of relativism we considered – it would thus be problematic.)  This was the point of contrasting two things the word “Evaluria” might mean.  It could be the name of a location, like “San Francisco” or “Olduvai Gorge”.  Or it could be shorthand for a description, like “the place which makes us feel bad” or something like that (is “the North Pole” the name of a location?  Or is it shorthand for a description?  I think it’s the latter but I’m not sure what the description is exactly.)  If it meant the latter, then had different locations made them feel bad, those different places would have been Evaluria (just in virtue of their being the places that make them feel bad).  So if “morally wrong” meant something like “action of a sort we dislike and oppose” then if we had disliked and opposed different actions, different actions would have been wrong.  That’s the relativist idea, and it has an embarrassing result: it means that moral statuses turn out to depend on our attitudes and practices, which means that the mere fact that we're all against some kind of action -- even charity, rescue, etc. -- makes it wrong, even if nothing else is different about it.  That's implausible.

The Evaluria hypothesis is that moral terms like “morally wrong” are like "Evaluria" in having the former kind of meaning.  That is, just as “Evaluria” is simply the name of a location, “morally wrong” is just a term for a way of behaving; a way exemplified by such things as brutality, betrayal, and so on.  (Think of "doing wrong" or "wrongdoing", on this view, as like "dancing" or "repairing", the name of a type of behavior.  Which?  At very least we can suggest that it's what brutality, betrayal, hogging, and shirking have in common.  It takes work to give a more precise account.  Notice that it's also not easy to give an account of "dancing"; just try; or try "playing" or "joking".)  Given this, the implication is that, even if different places had made them feel bad, Evaluria would still be in the same place; and even if we had disliked different behaviors, the same old behaviors would have been wrong (because being morally wrong just is being behavior like that).  Olduvai Gorge is where the Leakeys made major discoveries, but “Olduvai Gorge” doesn’t mean “the place where the Leakeys made their discoveries”, and if they had made those discoveries elsewhere, Olduvai Gorge would have been exactly where it is, not where they made those discoveries.) 

I should add that if we had disliked different behaviors, then although those behaviors wouldn’t therefore have been wrong, we would have talked about them as if they are.  That is, we would have called them “wrong”, or used some word for them, and the word would have taken on the social function of “wrong”: we would have used it to display, guide, and mobilize our dislike of the actions to which we apply it.  But the fact that we would have called those actions “wrong” doesn’t mean they would have been; it just means we would have used “wrong” with a somewhat different meaning, even if it played the same social role.  (Trick question: if we had called tails “legs”, how many legs would horses have had?  Possible answers: one, four, or five.  The correct answer is four: our calling tails “legs” would not make tails legs, it would make us be using “legs” with a different meaning.  Likewise, just because we would have called finger-snapping “wrong” it would not have been wrong.)

It may be that Charlotte had in mind a different and somewhat deeper worry, to which I haven’t yet spoken.  And that brings us to the second stage.

Above I asked whether the hypothesis implies that if we had disliked different actions than those we do, whether it implies that those other actions would then have been wrong.  I said that it doesn’t.  But now let us consider – not counterfactual scenarios in which our feelings are different than our actual feelings – but the possibility that our actual feelings are quite different than we take them to be.  For it is possible that they are.  For an extreme example, we might imagine that you and I are utterly deluded – we are the only ones who dislike things like brutality, betrayal, hogging, etc. Everyone else really dislikes finger-snapping and such.  We’ve just been deluded, maybe by aliens conducting an experiment on us, manipulating our perceptions so that we seem to experience other people disapproving of murder when they really disapprove of dancing, and so on.  If that is so, then the hypothesis does seem to imply that, in fact, murder isn’t wrong, and finger-snapping and dancing is wrong, etc.  And that seems problematic. 

Before replying, I want to point out that there are possible cases of this sort, where our actual feelings about things may not to match up with morality in the way the theory suggests.  Let me give two examples, both controversial (for different reasons). 

First, consider adult, consensual, genuinely enjoyable, mutally beneficial-over-the-long-run incest (e.g., adult siblings falling in love and living a happy life together).  Perhaps you can’t believe in such a thing, but I think it’s possible, although common psychological processes make it unlikely.  Very many people think that incest is wrong no matter what.  And they have negative feelings about it.  I myself have had those feelings.  However, on reflection, it seems to me that there is nothing wrong with incest as such.  This is to say that it is not itself a normative factor, and so if cases of incest are wrong, it’s not ultimately because they’re incest but because they make the world a worse place, or involve doing or intending harm, failures to fulfill special obligations, etc.  So it seems to me possible that from the standpoint of our attitudes and practices, incest is on the side of brutality, betrayal, etc., and not on the side of finger-snapping, etc. So if it isn’t morally wrong, the case is a counterexample to the posited correlation between our strongly disliking actions of a certain sort and their being morally wrong.  (this is controversial, mostly because I’m assuming there’s nothing morally wrong with incest as such.  bear in mind that by “incest” I mean sex among the closely consanguineous (blood-related) as well as among those who lived together for extensive periods during at least one of their developmental stages – one or both of them became an adult in the presence of the other, basically.  When I say incest isn’t wrong as such, I mean the mere fact of one of these.  I’m not at all discounting the wrongness of rape, undue pressure, toxic secrets, subtle threats, or other ways real-life cases of incest can be morally terrible.)   

Second, consider homosexuality.  It seems that quite a few people seem to have feelings about it similar to those they have about paradigmatically wrong actions like brutality, etc.  Some suggest that this may largely be a disgust reaction due to things like imagining anal penetration – more like the disgust we might feel witnessing extensive rectal surgery than indignation at murder.  (The theory doesn’t posit a correlation between every negative feeling and wrongness, just moral feelings like indignation and guilt.)  Some suggest that negative feelings about homosexuality are just cultural by-products of outdated supernaturalistic assumptions.  However, suppose these and similar ideas are mistaken and that there really are negative moral feelings about homosexuality which are a natural human (robustly cross-cultural) tendency.  If so, then assuming that homosexuality isn’t itself wrong, here too would be a counterexample to the posited correlation between negative moral feelings and wrongness.  (this is controversial, mostly because i'm assuming it might turn out that homosexuality is disliked nearly as much as brutality, betrayal, and other paradigmatic wrongs)

These are interesting examples.  Ultimately I think there are differences between our feelings and practices regarding incest and homosexuality and those about brutality, betrayal, and so on.  The latter are in certain ways deeper, stronger, and more pervasive.  The differences, I say, makes it possible to simultaneously hold on to the hypothesis and think that there’s nothing remotely morally problematic about incest or homosexuality as such.  The fact that they aren’t morally wrong (as such) isn’t a counterexample to the correlation posited by the hypothesis. It’s only the brutality, betrayal, etc. feelings which are so correlated.  However, that’s a significant empirical guess which I’m not in a position to document – it would require major social scientific work, involving cross-cultural observations, experiments, and consideration of complex explanatory hypotheses. 

So for all I’ve said, the hypothesis might be refuted by these sorts of cases.  But let me just point out that the possibility of that sort of refutation is very different than the worry that the hypothesis implies that moral statuses are influenced by our feelings in ways which conflict with the attitude- and practice-independence of morality.  If it turns out that our feelings are very different than I think they are – that we actually really morally hate incest, homosexuality or even finger-snapping, dancing, and such – the conclusion I would draw is not that those things are wrong but that the hypothesis is mistaken.  I don’t arrive at my moral views by applying the hypothesis – it’s way too speculative for that.  Rather, I start with certain moral views – like that brutality, betrayal, hogging, and shirking are morally wrong – and I try to understand why we think, talk, and care about those behaviors in those ways -- and what those behaviors and ways really involve.  Part of my current hypothesis is the correlation we’ve been discussing – that, between our disliking and opposing behaviors in certain moralistic ways and their being wrong, when one exists, so does the other.  If I find counterexamples to that correlation, I won’t therefore change my moral views (though I’ll re-think them).  Rather, I’ll conclude that the hypothesis is incorrect as it stands. 

(Two final clarificatory comments.  First, when I say there’s a correlation between dislike and wrongness, I do mean a certain kind of dislike.  In particular, it’s widespread, strong, underwrites oppositional practices, is non-ulterior; and last but not least it is negative, paradigmatically, forms of anger, revulsion, aversion, self-dislike on performance, and so on.  And of course I talk of wrongness to illustrate but the hypothesis generalizes to all moral statuses, with relevant shifts in the accounts of the correlated feelings; e.g., pro-attitudes for judgments of rightness, goodness, virtuousness, and so on.  Second, I don’t think every wrong act is widely disliked; many aren’t widely known; for some, everyone who will ever know about them doesn’t dislike them at all (e.g., murderers who get away with it are glad they did it).  However, I do say that these actions will all be of some type which is correlated with dislike, at least in the sense that if we were to become aware of it, we’d dislike it.  It might help to think of these as the sorts of properties which might be normative factors, like making the world a better or worse place, or doing or intending harm, or brutality, betrayal, neglect, hogging, shirking, perhaps.)  

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Open thread on relativism

This thread is meant for questions and thoughts about relativism.  I mean it to be helpful generally, so there are no relevance constraints, but I'm expecting (hoping) that the discussion will be helpful for your understanding of the material that you'll eventually be asked about on the exam.  Please feel free to comment on or ask questions about what others have said, and I will as well.

relativism, pros and cons

In class we’ve looked at a particular version of moral relativism.  To quickly review, the idea is that judgments about morality are in certain ways like judgments about law or attractiveness.  What makes it “relativistic” is that it allows that the very same moral sentence can have different truth-conditions in different circumstances.  This means that the very same sentence can in certain circumstances be true and in others false.  For instance, “infanticide is morally wrong” might be true as uttered by people in the USA but false as uttered by Eskimos.

It may seem like a contradiction to say that the very same sentence can be true in one place but false in another, but actually it’s a familiar phenomenon.  As I pointed out in class, “I am hungry” is like this. That sentence may be true as uttered by Jones but false as uttered by Smith, if Jones is hungry and Smith isn’t.

More to the point, sentences like “smoking marijuana is illegal” or “Jones is attractive” seem to be like this as well.  As discussed in class, those sentences can be true in one context but false in another.  The sentences don’t make explicit reference to a particular community.  But when we use them, we seem to have such a community in mind.  Usually it’s clear from the context.  For instance, typically when we talk about what’s legal or not, we mean according to the legal code which has jurisdiction over the action we’re talking about.  If we’re talking about a type of action which can occur anywhere it’s still usually obvious from the conversational context where we’re interested in.  If we’re talking about a trip we’re going to take to Morocco and I say “smoking marijuana is illegal”, you know that I’m talking about there without me having to say it.  Similarly, when we talk about what’s attractive, we usually know without having to say it who we’re talking about (i.e., attractive to whom).

So judgments about legality and attractiveness are in this sense relativized to particular communities or groups.  The idea behind the version of moral relativism we’ve been exploring is that that’s true of moral judgments as well.  When we say “infanticide is immoral”, on this view, we’re implicitly relativizing our comment to a particular community’s moral code, usually our own.  As suggested in class, the idea is that sentences of the form “x-ing is immoral” mean something like “x-ing is of a type which violates the [typically, our] moral code”.  Or, spelling it out a bit more, “x-ing is of a type which is the object of widespread, non-ulterior con-attitudes” (con-attitudes of the sort we discussed on the first day).

I talked about various pros and cons of this relativistic theory.  The pros were:
1. It predicts at least pretty well the moral judgments we make (e.g., why we judge it wrong to hurt people, break promises, defraud, and so on).
2. It explains why we make moral judgments in the first place (although it doesn’t explain why we have moral attitudes).
3. It explains why there is a correlation between moral judgments and moral attitudes (= moral emotions and moral motivations).

The potential cons I mentioned, following Rachels, were:
1. It seems to imply that we can never appropriately or correctly judge other cultures as inferior.  [I argued that this isn’t true.  For instance, we can truly say that the actions their moral code endorses as morally good are actually evil.  That is to say, those actions violate our moral code.  Of course, they can truly say the same about us – this may be a problem, but if so it’s a different problem – which I will discuss later.]
2. It seems to imply that there’s no such as moral progess.  I should note that “moral progess” could be understood in one of two ways.  It could mean that we’re getting morally better.  Or it could mean that we’re gaining a more accurate view of which things have which moral statuses (e.g., what’s morally right, wrong, etc.).  Rachels seems to be understanding it in the former sense, and that’s how I was understanding it.  [In reply, I argued that we can judge our own society’s past judge as much as we can judge other societies.  Relativism implies that slavery was evil – which means it’s a type of action which violates our moral code.  Perhaps it didn’t violate their moral code, but we don’t have to make judgments relativized to other people’s moral codes, just as we don’t have to judge the attractiveness of people according to the standards they accept.]
3. It seems to imply that we can’t criticize our own culture’s current moral code.  [This I suggested is a much more serious worry, although we considered two ways in which we might be able to do this.  First, we might criticize shallower parts of our moral code by relying on deeper parts.  For instance, our moral code seems to allow factory farming which involves causing great pain to animals for the purposes of profit and pleasure.  But a deep part of our moral code is against causing great pain to innocent beings for reasons like profit and pleasure.  This could be used to criticize factory farming practices.  Someone who was around when slavery existed could have criticized its acceptance by calling upon the deeper part of the moral code which favored liberty for ordinary human beings.  Second, we might criticize the moral code of a broader group by calling upon the moral code of a narrower group, including at the limit our own personal moral code.  I suggested that someone who has very high standards when it comes to helping those in need might criticize our society’s moral code when it comes to people who have great wealth allowing people to suffer from lack of basic needs.]

Tomorrow we’ll consider further worries.  Prominently, we’ll consider the worry that relativism implies that moral codes determine the moral truth.  This is problematic because moral codes consist in attitudes and practices.  That is, if we’re against something (in the relevant way, in our emotional and motivational opposition to it, and in the social practices underwritten by those attitudes) then that is a fact about our moral code.  The problem is that in principle it seems that our attitudes and practices could be misguided.  Not just other people’s attitudes and practices but our own.  The mere fact that I and everyone else is against some action doesn’t seem enough to show that it is morally wrong.

Suppose for instance that our moral code had developed differently.  Here’s an example.  Suppose that racists had won either the Civil War or WWII and taken over the world (just pretend).  Suppose they had inculcated racist attitudes in children and kept doing this so that now the world is filled with people who approve of racism and are against treating race as fundamentally irrelevant.

If that had happened would racism have been morally good?  Intuitively not.  The right thing to say about that scenario is not that racism would have been good but that we would have been morally worse.  Our moral code would have approved of something bad.

But the relativist theory we’ve been looking at seems to imply that in that scenario racism would have been morally good.  Similarly, in the scenario described, certain things would have been legal which aren’t legal, like discriminating on the basis of race.  Or if our history had gone very differently different things might be attractive.

The point can be made in a way that’s a bit more logically rigorous, although I’m going to leave out some of the details for simplicity.  Suppose that “x is morally good” means “x is favored by our moral code”, where “favored by our moral code” means “is the object of widespread, non-ulterior pro-attitudes”.  If so, then “x would have been morally good” means “x would have been favored by our moral code”.  But if so, then if racism had been favored by our moral code, racism would have been good.  That’s just a matter of plugging in the definition of “morally good”.

This seems to be a problem for the theory.  And it’s not obvious how the theory can avoid the problem.  It doesn’t help to distinguish between one’s own personal code and the social code.  Because in the scenario described, we can suppose that each of us would have had a pro-racism moral code.  So even if “x is morally good” means “x is favored by *my* moral code”, it still follows that if I had been raised in such a way that my moral code favored racism, then racism would have been morally good.  But isn’t that untrue?  How could the way I (or anyone else) was raised make racism morally good?

Again, the right thing to say about these scenarios is not that racism would have been good, but that our moral codes would have favored something bad.  And that seems to be a problem with relativism.

welcome/test post

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