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Chapter 3: Big Scary Words Made Up By Dead Guys- An Introduction to Moral Philosophy

The Heavy Artillery

In order to breach the hull of the depressing arguments I discussed in the last chapter, we’re going to need better ammunition than our everyday language. We’re going to need some big philosophical-sounding words! In this chapter we’ll lay some groundwork for discussing my answer to the Questions, which we’ll be able to tackle in the next chapter.

Jectivities

Let’s start by defining two words that will come up later on: objective and subjective. These terms can mean slightly different things in different situations, so it is important to know exactly what they mean for this essay. For now, objective and subjective refer to whether something is true for everybody, or just some people.

Math is a good example of objective truth. 2+2=4 for me. 2+2=4 for you. It is true for everybody. Imagine a world in which there were no people, or thinking beings of any kind. A tree has two apples, and two more lie on the ground. A gust of wind makes the apples on the tree fall. Even without anybody to see the situation, we are certain that there are now four apples on the ground. If a statement about something mathematical is true, it is true for everybody. A statement that has this property is objectively true.

If a statement is subjectively true, then it might not be true for everybody. Consider the statement "Vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate." I happen to agree with this sentence, but you might not. It is true for me, but not true for you. Even if everybody on earth preferred vanilla to chocolate, the sentence would still be subjective, because it does not automatically have to be true for everybody. Somebody might change their mind, or some newly born child might be the first to prefer differently.

Why talk about math and ice cream in an essay on ethics? Because people do not agree on whether moral sentences are objective or subjective. Suppose I say "stealing is wrong." Most people would agree with this sentence, but are there exceptions? What if you were never taught that stealing was bad, and so you steal something. Have you done something wrong, when do didn’t know any better? What if you are a secret agent, and a nuclear war will start unless you steal a secret code? So far, it sure seems like morals are subjective.

But on the other hand, morals seem to have an objective side to them as well. Suppose I said, "well, it may be wrong for you to take candy from babies, but it's perfectly okay for me to do so. Since morality is subjective, what is true for me does not have to be the same as what is true for you." This seems pretty absurd, no? We cannot just make up whatever morals we feel like for ourselves. There do seem to be rules that apply to everybody.

It might be wrong for me to steal but right for the secret agent, but maybe we have just guessed at too simple a rule when we said, "stealing is wrong". If we say instead, "stealing is wrong unless something big is at stake," this new rule seems to work for both me and the secret agent. But when exactly are the stakes big enough to make stealing okay? Will people ever be able to write down a rule that always works for deciding when stealing is okay?

Stop and think for a moment. How do objectivity and subjectivity relate to the Questions? How would you act differently if you learned for sure that morals were objective? Subjective?

Daddy, Can I Drive?

And now, something completely different. Trust me, this will be very important later on. I am going to tell two stories of how a person makes a decision. Compare them, and see which one seems better.

The first story is the One Driver Story (another term I made up.) Imagine a family driving in a car, with one driver and several passengers. The passengers each have their own idea about where they want to drive. They each are yelling to the driver, "Go to the toy store!" "Go to the mall!" "Go to the office!" The driver listens to each of these suggestions. However, he or she might have another idea about where to go. The driver is the only one with a steering wheel, so the driver makes the final decision. Sometimes, the driver lets one of the passengers get their way. Sometimes, the driver overrides all of the suggestions.

In the One Driver Story, our minds are like the car. The passengers are our many desires. We are hungry, and want to eat. We are tired, and want to sleep. We want to show off the good grade we received on our philosophy paper. Each of these desires pushes us to act a certain way. However, we can choose whether or not to listen to our desires. It seems reasonable to eat, so we eat. However, if dinner is in an hour, we might restrain ourselves and wait. We can use reason to decide whether our desires should be listened to or not. This decision-maker in our minds, where we use reason, is like the car's driver. It makes the final decision about what we do.

Sometimes, little Billy in the passenger seat might reach over and grab the steering wheel from Mommy. Mommy is supposed to drive the car, but in this case she lost control. Similarly, our desires can get the best of us. Consider the sentence, "I knew I shouldn't have had so much candy right before dinner, but I couldn't help myself." If we stop listening to reason then little Billy is driving the car, and we end up doing something we shouldn't.

Now, let's listen to story number two: the Many Driver Story. Ford comes out with a new car that has five steering wheels. The car can only go one direction at a time, so all the steering wheels are connected and all turn right or left together. Every passenger gets a steering wheel. No one person gets to decide where to go, as Mommy did in the One Driver Story. In this new car, whoever is strongest can pull the wheel to their side. If Sally in the back seat really wants to go to the toy store, she can summon up all her strength and turn the wheel right, even if Mommy is trying to turn left.

Going back to the real mind now, the Many Driver Story says we do not have a central reasoning decision-maker. We just have lots of desires. The strongest desires overcome the others, and we act.

In the Many-Driver Story, reason is not something separate from our desires. It helps out each desire individually, but is not itself part of the decision-making process. Reason in this story is like a map. It tells Sally, "If you want to go to the toy store then turn left here." It tells Mom, "Go straight ahead in order to get to the office. But the map itself does not steer the car. People use the map, but steer the car themselves.

Back to the mind now. We are hungry. Reason turns this general desire into a specific chain of actions: "If you are hungry, then go to the kitchen, open the refrigerator, take out the lasagna, and eat it." We also want to enjoy dinner later. Reason supplies some details: "Dinner is enjoyed more when hungry." But reason does not make any decisions itself. In our minds, either the neuron pattern for eating or waiting is stronger and takes over our behavior.

Which of these Stories seems to better fit your experience of decision-making? I much prefer one to the other, but I won’t say which just yet. These Stories will come up again when we discuss my solution to the Questions.

Just What Are Moral Judgements?

Philosophers have come up with three main ideas about what morals are. Of course, they gave these theories scary big words for names, so we’ll make up our own. Let’s look at each of the three, and then discuss what seems to make sense and what doesn’t make sense about each theory. We’re going to cover a lot of ground very quickly, so don’t worry if you have trouble at first; these ideas are not easy. Also, each philosopher has his or her own slightly different version of one of the three main theories. There is no room here to really get into the small differences between versions of the same theory. For now, we’ll just see an overview of the debate.

The first theory of what morals are is usually called "naturalism," but we’ll call it "happy-ism". This idea says that "good" is really just another name for some other property, like "making the most people happy". Different happy-ists have different ideas about just which other property means the same as "good," but they all agree that there is one. [4] When we say an act was good or bad, we’re really just substituting in moral words for the non-moral ones. Both words mean exactly the same thing. Suppose I wanted to know if it was better to do A or B, and I thought "good" meant "makes the most people happy". I could predict whether A or B would make more people happy, and whichever did would be the "good" thing to do. If we wanted to, then, tomorrow everybody could stop using the words "good," "bad," "right," "wrong," "duty," "obligation," and every other word that means something about ethics. We have a second copy of all the words we need!

This idea seems to do the job, doesn’t it? Usually when we explain why some action is right or wrong, we give a reason such as whether the act makes people happy or unhappy. But can you always explain rightness or wrongness this way? It is good for Mom to give little Jimmy a time-out not because it makes him happy; it is for his own good, even though he doesn’t realize it. Maybe, then, good isn’t about happiness exactly, but rather some kind of long-term satisfaction that is difficult to describe. Do you think you can name some property like "makes the most people happy" that always means the same as "good"? People who support the second theory think that you can’t.

Philosophers call the second theory "non-naturalism," although I think a better name is "sixth-sense-ism." (That’s a tongue-twister, isn’t it!). A sixth-sense-ist thinks that goodness is like smell or color; it is a property we can experience. However, "goodness" can not be measured by any of the usual five senses, so we must have a sixth sense for right and wrong. When we see somebody steal a candy bar from a grocery store, we can feel from our sixth sense that they are doing something bad. We learn whether things are good or not by what our conscience or intuition tells us.

Hmm… Both happy-ism and sixth-sense-ism seem be right. It sure seems like good is the same as making people happy, but I also feel like I have a sense that tells me what is right and wrong. One problem with happy-ism is that whenever I think I’ve found something that means the same as "good," there always seem to be exceptions. For example, is it right to be totally ignorant of wars and poverty, just because we will be happier if we do not know there is so much suffering in the world? It seems that whenever we try to say "good is the same as X," we can always ask "But is it always good to work for X?" [5] But sixth-sense-ism has a big problem too: nobody has found a moral sense organ anywhere in the body. How can we know about this mysterious property of the world, when scientists have detected nothing like it in nature? As we discussed earlier, we cannot build a value-measuring machine to detect right and wrong.

In addition to these problems, there is one more problem that both of these theories face. Why do I care if I’m good or not? If you convince me that it is good to do A, then that makes me want to do A. I might not actually do A, since I might choose to act wrongly. However, morals do seem to motivate me. Neither happy-ism or sixth-sense-ism can explain this. Remember, happy-ism says that good is really another word for some property. But I do not automatically want to do whichever action increases the number of pigs on the planet the most, or whichever action helps my next door neighbor learn to play the trombone. But I do want to help those in need. Why should the particular quality of "makes the most people happy" be different from the property of "helps my neighbor learn the trombone"? We can argue the same way against sixth-sense-ism. If I see that a person is wearing blue clothes, or if I hear a man with a low voice, that does not automatically cause me to do anything. But if I learn that a person is good, I want to act like him or her. If I am thinking about stealing a candy bar, and my sense tells me it would be wrong to do so, then there is a good chance I will not take the candy bar. Somehow, moral properties are not like other properties. Morals affect what we choose to do, in a way that other properties do not.

So far, we have seen two theories of what morals are: happy-ism and sixth-sense-ism. Both say that morals are just like other non-moral properties of things. Neither seems to be completely right. The third basic theory is different from the first two in that it says morals are not properties at all. This theory is probably the hardest of the three to understand, so take this section slowly. We’ll see that while it solves some problems of the first two, it also has its own problems.

The boring names for theory number three are "emotivism", "non-cognitivism," or "expressivism," but we’ll use "boo-yay-ism." (These new words are fun, eh?) Boo-yay-ism says that when we call an action good, we’re really expressing the emotion of liking that action. If I say "It is good to help people in need," it is the expressing the fact that I am motivated to help people in need. I am really saying, "Yay helping people in need!" On the other hand, when we call something "bad" we are saying we are motivated to act the opposite way. "Boo kicking babies!"

Boo-yay-ism is sort of like happy-ism; both say that morality is really something else. Both say that "right" and "wrong" are new words for something that we do not usually think of as moral. But boo-yay-ism says that "good" is a particularly special property: the property that we are motivated. With this third theory we do not have to worry about why ethics motivates us, as we did with happy-ism. We are motivated to be good precisely because good is defined by what we desire to do!

Doesn’t boo-yay-ism seem a bit ridiculous? I have to admit that on many occasions, I want to do things that are bad. But boo-yay-ism seems to be saying that as soon as I want to do something, it stops being bad! So while we have taken care of the motivation issue, we have opened up a new problem. Not all of the things we are motivated by are good. The boo-yay-ist needs to find some way to separate what-I-want-and-is-good from what-I-want-and-is-bad.

But it gets worse. There is a second major problem with boo-yay-ism. Doesn’t it seem like if something is wrong for me to do, it is also wrong for you to do? Doesn’t it seem like ethics is objective, at least somewhat? We talked earlier in this chapter about how morals seem objective sometimes and subjective sometimes. But they don’t sound as subjective as boo-yay-ism would have it. Imagine if right and wrong were only determined by what a person wanted to do. Nobody would ever have a right to scold anyone else for being bad!

Mom: It’s bad to kick your little brother, Billy!

Billy: But Mom, it’s only bad for you. I want to kick him, so it’s fine if I do it!

Mom: Well, okay. I suppose you’re right.

Ethics seems subjective sometimes, but not that subjective. People can be mistaken about their moral views, and mistaken-ness requires objectivity. How could this be if boo-yay-ism is correct?

So we have to pick the least of three evils. The happy-ist needs to find a property that everyone can agree is the same as "good." The sixth-sense-ist needs to build a moral detector and find the "moral eyeball" in the human body. Both happy-ism and sixth-sense-ism can’t explain why we are motivated to be good. Boo-yay-ism can explain this motivation problem, but it has two big problems of its own: how can we tell apart our good motivations from the bad, and how can a person be mistaken about their moral views? None of the theories seems good at all, or even slightly possible. But I can’t think of anything else that morality could be! What on earth is it? Are people just so stupid that we keep talking about this morality thing that some joker invented a few centuries ago to amuse himself? Are martyrs dying in vain? Are social workers throwing their lives away? Can you see why we should care about moral philosophy?

[4] Happy-ists who think "good" means "making the most people the happiest" are often called "utilitarians." The most famous utilitarian was John Stuart Mill, who was one of the first to write about the theory extensively.

[5] This argument is so famous it has a name: the "open question argument." Its proposal is attributed to the philosopher G. E. Moore.

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