Earlier, I summarized a debate between Massimo Pigliucci and Julia Galef on the nature of morality.
Massimo’s route to moral realism was to define morality in terms of human flourishing:
I define ethics/morality as concerned with exploring the sort of behaviors that augment human (and possibly beyond human) welfare and flourishing. Since this is a definition, it cannot be argued for, only either accepted or rejected.
Julia protested, saying that Definitions Don’t Prove Anything. She reminds us:
A definition is simply the act of setting some symbol equal to some concept, so that you have an easy way of referring to that concept…
But you have to be careful when you establish that definition, the SYMBOL = CONCEPT relationship, that you’re not implicitly thinking of the symbol as having another, hidden concept inside it already. Because if you are, then what you’re doing is actually equating one concept with another, different concept. That’s not a definition, that’s a claim, and it can be incorrect.
…if you really, truly are just defining the word “moral,” then all you are doing is assigning a symbol (“moral”) to a concept (increasing human flourishing). You have not proven anything about that concept; you’ve just given it a new name. One has to wonder what the point is…
And if it feels like you’re doing more than just re-naming something, that’s probably because you haven’t sufficiently scrubbed the symbol “moral” clean of its other associations before you defined it.
…You can’t use definitions to prove a point, only to make clear what you mean by your words. You can’t use them to prove that something doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously. You can’t use them to prove that people should behave in a certain way.
As usual, Julia has done a good job of clarifying a very common confusion. This one type of confusion goes at least as far back as Parmenides (5th century BCE) and his arguments that nothing ever changes, and has served as the basis for thousands of years of bad metaphysics.
Massimo replied: Proving things isn’t the point of definitions. Massimo says his definition of morality – his axioms of moral theory – are open to debate. But then, you could do the same thing with any axiomatic system. Induction, a long-standing axiom of scientific progress, is notoriously difficult to justify – and yet this does not move us to throw out science. Likewise, one cannot “prove” the axioms of logic or mathematics, and yet we do not throw out logic or mathematics. So just because the axioms of moral theory are open to debate does not mean morality is bunk.
Massimo’s reply calls into question the strength of Julia’s attack, but it does not yet give a positive case in favor of his axioms. As far as I can tell, his positive case can be found in an earlier post, where he discusses
the universal understanding of morality. People might not agree on the meaning of terms like “well-being” and “flourishing,” but perhaps they can agree that these concepts, however they are used, are the very concern of morality itself in its broadest sense.
…all moral systems, beliefs, and values – religious or secular – are generally about how to best treat other beings and how to form a better society.
If this is Massimo’s positive argument for using his definition of morality, then I simply disagree with it. The reason people might agree that “well-being” and “flourishing” are the concern of morality is because these are question-begging terms. They are “value-laden” terms. So are phrases like “how to best treat other beings” and “how to form a better society.”
But these words say nothing concrete about morality at all – they just serve to restate the problem with different words, as Julia pointed out. Or, as Alonzo put it:
“Health”, “flourishing”, “unnecessary suffering”, “harm”. These are all value-laden terms. These are all good (or bad, respectively) by definition because a value judgment is a part of the definition of the terms. Harm is always bad (in some sense) for the same reason that bachelors are always unmarried males.
But maybe the post I’ve quoted from is not meant to be Massimo’s argument in favor of using his definition of morality instead of some other.
Or, perhaps by saying the definitions of morality are open to debate, Massimo means to say there is no particular reason to accept his definition instead of another. We shall see!
Let us hope this does not devolve into a name-calling match, but instead rises to a debate that lives up to the header text of the blog on which Massimo and Julia publish, which reads:
Truth springs from argument amongst friends.
I, for one, have benefited from the debate already.
Previous post: News Bits