Moral semantics, intuitions, reflective equilibrium, and hard cases

4.1 Moral semantics, intuitions, reflective equilibrium, and hard cases

Some philosophical opportunities are too good to pass up. For many of the more abstract challenges to moral realism, recent realistic and naturalistic work in the philosophy of science is suggestive of possible responses in its defense. Thus for example, it has occurred to many philosophers (see, e.g., Putnam 1975b) that naturalistic theories of reference and of definitions might be extended to the analysis of moral language. If this could be done successfully and if the results were favorable to a realist conception of morals, then it would be possible to reply to several anti-realist arguments. For example, against the objection that wide divergence of moral concepts or opinions between traditions or cultures indicates that, at best, a constructivist analysis of morals is possible, the moral realist might reply that differences in conception or in working definitions need not indicate the absence of shared causally fixed referents for moral terms.

Similarly, consider the objection that a moral realist must hold that goodness is a natural property, and thus commit the “naturalistic fallacy” of maintaining that moral terms possess analytic definitions in, say, physical terms. The moral realist may choose to agree that goodness is probably a physical property but deny that it has any analytic definition whatsoever. If the realist’s critique of the syntactic analysis of reductionism in science is also accepted, then the moral realist can deny that it follows from the premise that goodness is a physical property or that goodness has any physical definition, analytic or otherwise.

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If the moral realist takes advantage of naturalistic and realistic conceptions in epistemology as well as in semantic theory, other rebuttals to antirealist challenges are suggested. The extent of the potential for rebuttals of this sort can best be recognized if we consider the objection that the role of reflective equilibrium in moral reasoning dictates a constructivist rather than a realist conception of morals. The moral realist might reply that the dialectical interplay of observations, theory, and methodology which, according to the realist, constitutes the discovery procedure for scientific inquiry just is the method of reflective equilibrium, so that the prevalence of that method in moral reasoning cannot by itself dictate a non-realist conception of morals.

If the response just envisioned to the concern over reflective equilibrium is successful, then the defender of moral realism will have established that —in moral reasoning as in scientific reasoning—the role of culturally transmitted presuppositions in reasoning does not necessitate a constructivist (or non- cognitivist) rather than a realist analysis of the subject matter. If that is established, then the moral realist might defend the epistemic role of culturally determined intuitions in ethics by treating ethical intuitions on the model of theory-determined intuitions in science, which the scientific realist takes to be examples of epistemically reliable trained judgments.

Finally, if the moral realist is inclined to accept the anti-realist’s claim that the existence of hard cases in ethics provides a reason to doubt that there is a moral fact of the matter which determines the answer in such cases (more on this later), then the scientific realist’s conclusion that bivalence fails for some statements involving homeostatic cluster kind terms might permit the moral realist to reason that similar failures of bivalence for some ethical statements need not be fatal to moral realism.

In fact, I propose to employ just these rebuttals to the various challenges to moral realism I have been discussing. They represent the application of a coherent naturalistic conception of semantics and of knowledge against the challenges raised by the critic of moral realism. But they do not stand any chance of rebutting moral anti-realism unless they are incorporated into a broader conception of morals and of moral knowledge which meets certain very strong constraints. These constraints are the subject of the next section.