By “moral skepticism,” I shall mean the view that there are no objective moral ‘facts’ or ‘truths.’ Moral skeptics from Friedrich Nietzsche to Charles Stevenson to John Mackie have appealed to the purported fact of widespread and intractable moral disagreement to support the skeptical conclusion. Typically, such arguments invoke anthropological reports about the moral views of exotic cultures, or even garden-variety conflicting moral intuitions about concrete cases (such as abortion or the death penalty). How, it is claimed, could such disagreements persist if there were really objective moral facts? Nietzsche, I will argue, suggests a different kind of argument from moral disagreement that deserves more attention than it has received to date.
Nietzsche calls attention not to “ordinary” or “folk” moral disagreement, but rather to what should be the single most important and embarrassing fact about the history of moral theorizing by philosophers over the last two millennia: namely, that no rational consensus has been secured on any substantive, foundational proposition about morality. Is the criterion of right action the reasons for which it is performed or the consequences it brings about? If the former, is it a matter of the reasons being universalizable, or that they arise from respect for duty, or something else? If the latter, is it the utility it produces or the perfection it makes possible? If the former, is utility a matter of preference-satisfaction (as the economists often believe) or preference satisfaction under idealized circumstances—or is it, rather, unconnected to the preferences of agents, actual or idealized, but instead a matter of realizing the human essence or enjoying some ‘objective’ goods? And perhaps a criterion of right action isn’t even the issue, perhaps the issue is cultivating dispositions of character conducive to living a good life. And here, of course, I have merely canvassed just some of the disagreements that plague Western academic moral theory, not even touching on non-Western traditions, or radical dissenters from the mainstream of academic moral theory, such as Nietzsche himself.
Notice, too, that the disagreements of moral philosophers are amazingly intractable. Nowhere do we find lifelong Kantians suddenly (or even gradually) converting to Benthamite utilitarianism, or vice versa. Nietzsche thus locates disagreement at the heart of the most sophisticated moral philosophies of the West, among philosophers who very often share lots of other beliefs and practices. Yet what we find is that these philosophers remain locked in apparently intractable disagreement about the most important, foundational issues about morality. This persistent disagreement on foundational questions, of course, distinguishes moral theory from inquiry in the sciences and mathematics, not, perhaps, in kind, but certainly in degree. In the hard sciences and mathematics, intellectual discourse regularly transcends cultural and geographic boundaries and consensus emerges about at least some central propositions. How to explain the failure of moral theory to achieve anything like this?
Let us start with Nietzsche’s version of this argument. This passage is representative:
It is a very remarkable moment: the Sophists verge upon the first critique of morality, the first insight into morality:–they juxtapose the multiplicity (the geographical relativity) of the moral value judgments [Moralischen Werthurtheile];–they let it be known that every morality can be dialectically justified; i.e., they divine that all attempts to give reasons for morality are necessarily sophistical—a proposition later proved on the grand scale by the ancient philosophers, from Plato onwards (down to Kant);–they postulate the first truth that a “morality-in-itself” [eine Moral an sich], a “good-in-itself” do not exist, that it is a swindle to talk of “truth” in this field. (WP:428; KSA 13:14).
This is a Nachlass passage, but it has many analogues in the published corpus and is consistent with a general picture Nietzsche has of the discursive pretensions of philosophers. Consider his derisive comment in Beyond Good and Evil about Kant’s moral philosophy, which he describes as “[t]he…stiff and decorous Tartuffery of the old Kant, as he lures us on the dialectical bypaths that lead to his ‘categorical imperative’—really lead astray and seduce” (BGE: 5). Kant’s “Tartuffery” and Spinoza’s “hocus-pocus of mathematical form” in his Ethics are simply, Nietzsche says, “the subtle tricks [feinen Tücken] of old moralists and preachers of morals [Moralisten und Moralprediger].” As Nietzsche explains it:
They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic…while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, a kind of “inspiration”—most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract—that they defend with reasons sought after the fact. They are all advocates who don’t want to be called by that name, and for the most part even wily spokesman for their prejudices which they baptize “truths.” (BGE 5)
Later in the same book, Nietzsche notes that moral philosophers “make one laugh” with their idea of “morality as science,” their pursuit of “a rational foundation for morality,” which “seen clearly in the light of day” is really only a “scholarly form of good faith in the dominant morality, a new way of expressing it.” Pointing at Schopenhauer’s attempt to supply a rational foundation for morality, Nietzsche says “we can draw our conclusions as to how scientific a ‘science’ could be when its ultimate masters still talk like children” (BGE 186). The real significance of the claims of moral philosophers is “what they tell us about those who make them” for they are “a sign-language of the affects” (BGE 187), betraying the psychological needs of those who make them.
How do these considerations, elliptical as some of them are, support a skeptical conclusion about the objective existence of moral facts? The Sophists, on Nietzsche’s account, advance two related claims: (1) that “every morality can be dialectically justified” and; (2) that “all attempts to give reasons for morality are necessarily sophistical,” where “sophistical” is obviously meant to have the pejorative connotation that the apparent dialectical justification does not, in fact, secure the truth of the moral propositions so justified. The purported dialectical justification can fail in this way if either it is not a valid argument or some of the premises are false. But, then, what is the force of the claim that “every morality can be dialectically justified”? It must obviously be that every morality can have the appearance of being dialectically justified, either because its logical invalidity is not apparent or, more likely in this instance, because its premises, while apparently acceptable, are not true.
Yet Nietzsche goes further when he asserts that the second claim—namely, that “all attempts to give reasons for morality are necessarily sophistical”—is established (“proved” [bewiesen] he says) by the work of the philosophers from Plato through to Kant. But in what sense do the moral philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Hutcheson, Mill, Kant, and Schopenhauer et al. establish or “prove” that “all attempts to give reasons for morality are necessarily sophistical”? Nietzsche’s thought must be that all these philosophers appear to provide “dialectical justifications” for moral propositions, but that all these justifications actually fail. But that still does not answer the question of how the fact of there being all these different moral philosophies proves that they are sophistical, i.e., that they do not, in fact, justify certain fundamental moral propositions?
Here’s how the Nietzschean explanation might go. The existence of incompatible moral philosophies providing dialectical justifications for moral propositions is best explained as follows: (1) there are no objective facts about fundamental moral propositions, such that (2) it is possible to construct apparent dialectical justifications for moral propositions, even though (3) the best explanation for these theories is not that their dialectical justifications are sound but that they answer to the psychological needs of philosophers. And the reason it is possible to construct “apparent” dialectical justification for differing moral propositions is because, given the diversity of psychological needs of persons (including philosophers), it is always possible to find people for whom the premises of these dialectical justifications are acceptable.
The alternative, “moral realist” explanation for the data—the data being the existence ofincompatible philosophical theories about morality—is both less simple and less consilient. First, of course, it posits the existence of moral facts which, according to the more familiar best-explanation argument I have defended elsewhere (“Moral Facts and Best Explanations” in E.F. Paul et al. (eds.), Moral Knowledge [Oxford: Blackwell, 2001]), are not part of the best explanation of other phenomena. Second, the moral realist must suppose that this class of explanatorily narrow moral facts are undetected by large number of philosophers who are otherwise deemed to be rational and epistemically informed. Third, the moral realist must explain why there is a failure of convergence under what appear (and purport) to be epistemically ideal conditions of sustained philosophical inquiry and reflective contemplation across millennia. We can agree with Peter Railton that we lack “canons of induction so powerful that experience would, in the limit, produce convergence on matters of fact among all epistemic agents, no matter what their starting points” (“Moral Realism,” Philosophical Review ), and still note that there exists a remarkable cross-cultural consensus among theorists about fundamental physical laws, principles of chemistry, and biological explanations, as well as mathematical truths, while moral philosophers, to this very day, find no common ground on foundational principles even within the West, let alone cross-culturally.
Moral realists—who, for purposes here, will just mean those who deny skepticism about moral facts—have developed a variety of “defusing explanations” (I borrow the phrase from John Doris and Alexandra Plakias) to block the abductive inference from apparently intractable moral disagreement to skepticism about moral facts. Moral disagreement is, after all, an epistemic phenomenon, from which we propose to draw a metaphysical conclusion. The ‘defusing’ explanations of moral disagreement propose to exploit that fact, by suggesting alternate epistemic explanations for the disagreement, explanations that are compatible with the existence of objective moral facts. I want to consider here the most promising response.
The standard optimistic refrain from philosophers ever since “moral realism” was revived as a serious philosophical position in Anglophone philosophy in the 1980s has been that under improved or idealized epistemic conditions—conditions of full information and rationality—there would be convergence on the objective moral facts.
With respect to very particularized moral disagreements — e.g., about questions of economic or social policy — which often trade on obvious factual ignorance or disagreement about complicated empirical questions, this seems a plausible retort. But for over two hundred years, Kantians and utilitarians have been developing increasingly systematic versions of their respective positions. The Aristotelian tradition in moral philosophy has an even longer history. Utilitarians have become particularly adept at explaining how they can accommodate Kantian and Aristotelian intuitions about particular cases and issues, though in ways that are usually found to be systematically unpersuasive to the competing traditions and which, in any case, do nothing to dissolve the disagreement about the underlying moral criteria and categories. Philosophers in each tradition increasingly talk only to each other, without even trying to convince those in the other traditions. And while there may well be ‘progress’ within traditions — e.g., most utilitarians regard Mill as an improvement on Bentham—there does not appear to be any progress in moral theory, in the sense of a consensus that particular fundamental theories of right action and the good life are deemed better than their predecessors. What we find now are simply the competing traditions — Kantian, Humean, Millian, Aristotelian, Thomist, perhaps now even Nietzschean — who often view their competitors as unintelligible or morally obtuse, but don’t have any actual arguments against the foundational principles of their competitors. There is, in short, no sign — I can think of none — that we are heading towards any epistemic rapprochement between these competing moral traditions. Are we really to believe that hyper-rational and reflective moral philosophers, whose lives, in most cases, are devoted to systematic reflection on philosophical questions, many of whom (historically) were independently wealthy (or indifferent to material success) and so immune to crass considerations of livelihood and material self-interest, and most of whom, in the modern era, spend professional careers refining their positions, and have been doing so as a professional class in university settings for well over a century — are we really supposed to believe that they have reached no substantial agreement on any foundational moral principle because of ignorance, irrationality, or partiality?
Does this line of argument prove too much? Is not the apparently intractable disagreement among moral philosophers regarding foundational questions mirrored in many other parts of our discipline? Are not metaphysicians and epistemologists also locked in intractable disagreements of their own? Think of debates between internalists and externalists in epistemology, or between presentists and four-dimensionalists in the philosophy of time. If disagreement among moral philosophers supports an abductive inference to denying the existence of moral facts, what, if anything, blocks that inference in all these other cases?
Some recent writers (such as Paul Bloomfield and Russ Shafer-Landau) think this kind of “companions in guilt” consideration defeats the argument from disagreement. It is not entirely clear why they rule out, however, the other natural conclusion. Nietzsche, as far as I can see, has no reason to resist it, since he believes that, as an explanatory matter, the moral commitments of the philosopher are primary when it comes to his metaphysics and epistemology. Nietzsche writes:
I have gradually come to realize what every great philosophy so far has been: namely the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; in short, that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constitute the true living seed from which the whole plant has always grown. In fact, to explain how the strangest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really come about, it is always good (and wise) to begin by asking: at what morality does it (does he–) aim? (BGE 6)
Since the “morality” at which the philosopher aims is to be explained in terms of his psychological needs and drives, and since these differ among philosophers, it will be unsurprising that there are a diversity of moral views, and philosophical systems purportedly justifying them—and it will be equally unsurprising that this same diversity, and intractability, spills over into metaphysical and epistemological systems, since they are just parasitic on the moral aims of the philosophers! Nietzsche, at least, then has good reason to bite the skeptical bullet about much philosophical disagreement. (Of course, we would need to think carefully about individual cases of philosophical disagreement, since not all of them, in all branches of philosophy, are as intractable or as foundational as they are in moral philosophy.)
That still leaves a slightly different version of the worry that the argument “proves too much.” For surely most philosophers will not conclude from the fact of disagreement among moral philosophers about the fundamental criteria of moral rightness and goodness that there is no fact of the matter about these questions, as I claim Nietzsche does. But why not think that this meta-disagreement itself warrants a skeptical inference, i.e., there is no fact about whether we should infer moral skepticism from the fact of disagreement about fundamental principles among moral philosophers, since philosophers have intractable disagreements about what inferences the fact of disagreement supports?
Again, however, we need to be careful about the data points and the abductive inferences they warrant. The question is always what is the best explanation for the disagreement in question, given its character and scope. The “meta-disagreement”—about whether disagreement in foundational moral theory really warrants skepticism about moral facts—is, itself, of extremely recent vintage, barely discussed in the literature. Don Loeb raised it in its most explicit form in an important 1998 paper (“Moral Realism and the Argument from Disagreement,” Philosophical Studies).
Even if, after extended critical discussion, the meta-disagreement continues to persist, that still would not support the meta-skeptical conclusion that there is no fact of the matter about whether or not disagreement in foundational moral theory supports skepticism about moral facts. For before we are entitled to that conclusion, we would have to ask what the best explanation for the meta-disagreement really is? Surely one possibility—dare I say the most likely possibility?—is that those who are professionally invested in normative moral theory as a serious, cognitive discipline—rather than seeing it, as Marxists or Nietzscheans might, as a series of elaborate post-hoc rationalizations for the emotional attachments and psychological needs of certain types of people (bourgeois academics, ‘slavish’ types of psyches)—will resist, with any dialectical tricks at their disposal, the possibility that their entire livelihood is predicated on the existence of ethnographically bounded sociological and psychological artifacts. Nothing in the argument here establishes that conclusion, but nor is there any reason to think it would not be the correct one in the face of meta-disagreement about the import of fundamental disagreement in moral philosophy.