Relativism II: Simple Ethical Subjectivism

Readings

Texts

• David Hume, "Moral Subjectivism"

Notes

• Simple Ethical Subjectivism
• Ethical Objectivism

Synopsis

We began today by taking the first of five extra-credit pop quizzes we will take this semester. Let me emphasize that these are extra credit. Even a few points earned on them help you and might well make a letter-grade difference at the end of the semester as we saw with the practice "how to be responsible for your own grades" section on the pop quiz. At the end of the semester I simply tally them up and add them to your total exam score. My hope is that these pop quizzes both reward your diligent attendance and help you touch base with how you're doing with the material and use them to see where you need to spend more time.

Now, permit me to further preface this synopsis of our discussion of Simple Ethical Subjectivism today with a word about how to get through this course. That is, let us ask and hopefully answer a few relevant questions about mastering the course.

How much time should I expect to spend on the course to do well in it?

The obvious answer is that it depends in large part on how difficult a time you're having keeping all the arguments and theories straight. But there is a rule-of-thumb to gauge whether or not you're spending enough time studying. For most courses, expect to spend two hours outside of class for every hour in class. For more difficult courses--math or physics or philosophy, say--expect a three to one ratio. I would say for an introductory course like this one, two-to-one is about right. The upshot is that you should expect to spend about six hours every week outside of class studying. I know that may sound like a lot. Suppose you apply the same rule to all your classes, and you're taking 15 hours. Then 30 hours is to be spent outside of class studying, with 15 hours in class discussions, lectures, labs, etc. That makes the total 45 hours a week, which of course is why it is called being a 'full time' student. Now, many of you also work, some full time. In that case, you're looking at 80-90 hours each week involved in school and work. (You can see why it is so much more difficult for those who work to get through their coursework and successfully earn a degree.)

Please note that I am not here to sugarcoat this for you. I myself would absolutely not want to be in the awful position bearing all the burdens you now are expected to bear by an at best indifferent, but all too frequently callous, cruel, and sometimes malicious society. Such was not the case even recently. Those who accuse later generations, including yours, of just being entitled and lazy must be ignored, their very accusation merely serving to underscore their astonishing ignorance and lack of empathy.

Yet I digress. In summary, you should expect to spend approximately one hour almost every day of the week outside of class studying.

Wait, what exactly am I supposed to be doing during this daily hour studying for class?

You have a veritable firehose of theories and arguments deluging you almost from the first day. It is daunting, to say the least. It might be tempting to give up without even trying. Note, however, that I provide i) lectures on the material, ii) readings on the material, iii) handouts and notes on the material, and iv) these synopses on our discussions about the material.

The upshot is that you have your lecture notes, my course notes, the readings, and these synopses all for you to study. A plan for studying might look like this (spread out, of course, over the hour a day you spend outside of class work on the course.)

That is a lot to do each week. It may be too much for six hours, but if it is, you'll just need to set aside more time for the course. Hopefully that will not be the case, as I've carefully designed the course in such a way that the material can be mastered going by the 6-hour/week rule.

What should go on our flashcards, exactly?

Each theory and argument, whether for or against the theory, has a unique name to help you keep everything straight. The names are also supposed to help you in recalling the material. So it would seem reasonable, for example, to have a card with, say, "Cultural Ethical Relativism" on one side with the two principles of the theory on the other. Or you might have a card with "Validity" on one side with the two definitions of validity we gave on the other, along with an example of a valid argument and some of the facts about valid arguments ("a valid argument with all true premises cannot have a false conclusion", for example, and "a valid argument with a false conclusion must have at least one false premise", and so on.)

In other words, each card helps you to boil down all the information into digestible bits which you can then put together to help navigate the examinations and the essays.

How exactly do I go about forming a study group?

What you should not do, if you happen to have friends in the class, is study with them. Study groups of friends rarely get anything done. Better to start a group with people you don't know. Ask before or after class. Get names and numbers. Use an app like GroupMe to get organized.

All this will get you started successfully mastering the course material. Above all, though, don't be shy contact me to arrange to meet during my student hours (M 12:00-2:00 and TR 11:00-12:30, FC-280--upstairs from Starbucks). I am happy to clarify any points you find perplexing, and of course I love to discuss these issues, finding them endlessly fascinating as I do.

We began today by briefly revisiting our discussion of Cultural Ethical Relativism. In particular, we find that the theory so mutilates our pre-theoretic conception of morality--making, for example, it impossible to object to current injustice or, indeed, rendering the very concept of moral progress vacuous--that we end up siding with intuition against theory and rejecting the theory on Reflective Equilibrium grounds, to say nothing of having already rejected it on Clarity and Coherence grounds. Our critique of Cultural Ethical Relativism is thus devastating. However popular the theory may be, rigorous philosophical analysis demonstrates it to be fatally flawed.

Now, having discarded Cultural Ethical Relativism as a possibly true theory, we turned next today to another version of relativism in ethics: the thought that morality is just a matter of opinion.

There are, it seems, good reasons for thinking that ethical judgments cannot be objectively true in the same way that the proposition "snow is white" is objectively true. We don't experience the properties of being evil or being right in the same way we experience the properties of being green or being round, a point made clear by none other than David Hume.

Hume's theory, Simple Ethical Subjectivism, takes seriously the view that morality is nothing more than a matter of one's own personal approvals or disapprovals--opinions, in short.

Unlike CER, Simple Ethical Subjectivism (SES) passes the standards of clarity and coherence. But it fails to pass reflective equilibrium. There are generally lots of ways a theory can fail to pass reflective equilibrium. A theory might fail to pass reflective equilibrium because it has implications for types of actions which collide with our (reasoned, experienced, etc.) intuitions about those kinds of actions. So, for example, an ethical theory might imply that homosexuality is morally wrong. Such a theory fails reflective equilibrium, but only weakly. That is, it may be that homosexuality is in fact morally wrong despite my (strong) intuition that it is not. There are certainly many people who are willing to give arguments to the effect that homosexuality is morally wrong. So in all humility I have to allow that my intuition could be mistaken (it's not), and I err in rejecting the ethical theory on those grounds. Of course, I can give very good reasons for thinking that homosexuality is not morally wrong. But that is an issue for later. My point here is that a theory can fail reflective equilibrium weakly. In such a case we would say that the theory arguably fails reflective equilibrium, since counter-arguments can presumably be given to the effect that the theory has the correct implications for action.

But there are theories which completely and utterly fail reflective equilibrium. The strong sense of failing equilibrium is this: an ethical theory has implications about the nature of morality itself which undermine or contradict the core features of morality it must intuitively have. SES is an excellent example of this.

According to the Infallibility Argument, if SES is true, then it follows that we are infallible in our moral judgments. But it is a key feature of our intuitive, pre-theoretic intuitions about morality that it is possible to be mistaken in our moral judgments. We might, for example, judge that a killing is morally wrong only to find out that the killing was done in self-defense and thus is morally permissible. We can be mistaken. It would be the height of arrogance to think that we are infallible in our moral judgments.

The Infallibility Argument is deeply problematic for SES since it shows that SES is a theory sharply and significantly at odds with reasoned intuitions about morality. But, as if that weren't enough to reject SES outright, we have the additional problem of the Disagreement Argument. According to the Disagreement Argument, it is an implication of SES that there cannot in principle by any moral disagreement. We are mistaken when we argue over whether or not abortion is morally permissible or whether or not euthanasia is morally permissible since, according to SES, our argument is really just a matter of differences of attitude and there is no basis for any real or factual differences. This implication, that there cannot be any moral disagreement if SES is true, is radically at odds with reasoned and experienced intuition about morality. At root our intuition about morality is that, just as we can be mistaken in our moral judgments, it is possible to disagree about the morality of an action. There is a fact of the matter about whether an action is morally right or morally wrong. Morality is not, then, a matter of opinion as SES would have it.

Following the Infallibility Argument and the Disagreement Argument through to their gruesome conclusions--gruesome for SES, that is--philosophers have almost universally rejected SES.

Next Thursday (Tuesday we have our first examination!) we will explore the concept of truth in ethics before turning to moral theology to see if that alternative has a way to answer the challenge of moral relativism.