Thanks for the long reply. I feel like our conversation becomes more meaningful as it goes on.
Thanks for clarifying. This doesn’t change my response though since I don’t think there’s a particularly notable convergence in emotional reactions to observing others in pain which would serve to make valenced emotional reactions a particularly central part of the meaning of moral terms. For example, it seems to me like children (and adults) often think that seeing others in pain is funny (c.f. punch and judy shows or lots of other comedy), fun to inflict and often well-deserved
Yes, it’s hard to point to exactly what I’m talking about, and perhaps even somewhat speculative since the modern world doesn’t have too much suffering. Let me highlight cases that could change my mind: Soldiers often have PTSD, and I suspect some of this is due to the horrifying nature of what they see. If soldiers’ PTSD was found to be entirely caused by lost friends and had nothing to do with visual experience, I would reduce my credence on this point. When I watched Land of Hope and Glory I found seeing the suffering of animals disturbing, and this would obviously be worse if the documentary had people suffering in similar conditions to the animals. I am confident that most people have similar reactions, but if they don’t I would change my view of the above. The most relevant childhood experiences are likely those which involve prolonged pain: a skinned knee, a fever, a burn etc. I think what I’m trying to point at could be described as ‘pointless suffering’. Pain in the context of humor, cheap thrills, couch-viewing etc. is not what I’m referring to.
there’s a good case that people (and primates for that matter) have innate moral reactions to (un)fairness
This seems plausible to me, and I don’t claim that pleasure/pain serve as the only ostensive root grounding moral language. Perhaps (un)fairness is even more prominent, but nevertheless I claim that this group of ostensive bases (pain, unfairness, etc.) is necessary to understand some of moral language’s distinctive features cf. my original post:
When confronted with such suffering we react sympathetically, experiencing sadness within ourselves. This sadness may be both attributable to a conscious process of building empathy by imagining the others’ experience, or perhaps an involuntary immediate reaction resulting from our neural wiring.
Perhaps some of these “involuntary immediate reaction”s are best described as reactions to unfairness. For brevity let me refer below to this whole family of ostensive bases by Shared Moral Base, SMB.
Notably, it seems like a very common feature (until very recently in advanced industrial societies anyway) of cases of children’s initial training in morality involved parents or others directly inflicting pain on children when they did something wrong and often
Let me take this opportunity to emphasize that I agree: The subsequent tendency to disapprove following use of moral language is an important feature of moral language.
that I think others should disapprove of you and I would disapprove of them if they don’t
This is the key point. Why do we express disapproval of others when they don’t disapprove of the person who did the immoral act? I claim it’s because we expect them to share certain common, basic reactions e.g. to pain, unfairness, etc and when these basic reactions are not salient enough in their actions and their mind, we express disapproval to remind them of SMB. Here’s a prototypical example: an aunt chastises a mother for failing to stop her husband from striking their child in anger. The aunt does so because she knows the mother cares about her children, and more generally doesn’t want people to be hurt unreasonably. If the mother were one of our madmen from above, then the aunt would find it futile to chastise her. To return to my example of “a world filled with people whose innate biases varied randomly”, in that world we would not find it fruitful to disapprove of others when they didn’t disapprove of you. Do you not agree that disapproval would have less significance in that world?
It doesn’t seem to me that learning what it means for them to say that such and such is morally wrong vs what it means for them to say that they dislike something requires that we learn what specific things people (specifically or in general) think morally wrong / dislike.
True, the learner merely has to learn that they have within themselves some particular disposition towards the morally wrong cases. These dispositions may be various: aversion to pain, aversion to unfairness, guilt, etc. The learner later finds it useful to continue to use moral language, because others outside of her home share these dispositions to morally wrong cases. To hyperbolize this point: moral language would have a different role if SMB were similar to eye color i.e. usually shared within the family, but diverse outside of the family.
What seems to matter to me, as a test of the meaning of moral terms, is whether we can understand someone who says “Hurting people is good” as uttering a coherent moral sentence and, as I mentioned before, in this purely linguistic sense I think we can.
I agree that it would be natural to call “Hurting people is good” a use of moral language on the part of the madman. I only claim that we can have a different, more substantial, kind of disagreement within our community of people who share SMB than we can with the madman. E.g. the kind of disagreement I describe in the family with the aunt above.
I also agree that moral language is often used to persuade people who share some of our moral views or to persuade people to share our moral views, but don’t think this requires that the meaning of the moral terms depends on or involves consensus about the rightness or wrongness of specific moral things. For moral talk to be capable of serving this practical purpose we just need some degree of people being inclined to respond to the same kinds of things or to be persuaded to share the same attitudes. But this doesn’t require any particularly strong, near-universal consensus or consensus on a particular single thing being morally good/bad.
Yes, I agree. However, cases in which our conversations are founded on SMB have a distinctive character which is of great importance. I agree that the view described in my original post likely becomes less relevant when applied to disagreements across moral cultures i.e. between groups with very different SMB. I’m not particularly bothered by this caveat since most discussion of object-level ethics seems to occur within communities of shared SMB e.g. medical ethics, population ethics, etc.
Yes, it’s hard to point to exactly what I’m talking about, and perhaps even somewhat speculative since the modern world doesn’t have too much suffering. Let me highlight cases that could change my mind: Soldiers often have PTSD, and I suspect some of this is due to the horrifying nature of what they see. If soldiers’ PTSD was found to be entirely caused by lost friends and had nothing to do with visual experience, I would reduce my credence on this point.
Let me note that I agree (and think it’s uncontroversial) that people often have extreme emotional reactions (including moral reactions) to seeing things like people blown to bits in front of them. So this doesn’t seem like a crux in our disagreement (I think everyone, whatever their metaethical position, endorses this point).
This seems plausible to me, and I don’t claim that pleasure/pain serve as the only ostensive root grounding moral language. Perhaps (un)fairness is even more prominent, but nevertheless I claim that this group of ostensive bases (pain, unfairness, etc.) is necessary to understand some of moral language’s distinctive features… Perhaps some of these “involuntary immediate reaction”s are best described as reactions to unfairness. For brevity let me refer below to this whole family of ostensive bases by Shared Moral Base, SMB.
OK, so we also agree that people may have a host of innate emotional reactions to things (including, but not limited to valenced emotions).
This is the key point. Why do we express disapproval of others when they don’t disapprove of the person who did the immoral act? I claim it’s because we expect them to share certain common, basic reactions e.g. to pain, unfairness, etc and when these basic reactions are not salient enough in their actions and their mind, we express disapproval to remind them of SMB… To return to my example of “a world filled with people whose innate biases varied randomly”, in that world we would not find it fruitful to disapprove of others when they didn’t disapprove of you. Do you not agree that disapproval would have less significance in that world?
I think I responded to this point directly in the last paragraph of my reply. In brief: if no-one could ever be brought to share any moral views, this would indeed vitiate a large part (though not all) of the function of moral language. But this doesn’t mean “that the meaning of the moral terms depends on or involves consensus about the rightness or wrongness of specific moral things.” All that is required is “some degree of people being inclined to respond to the same kinds of things or to be persuaded to share the same attitudes. But this doesn’t require any particularly strong, near-universal consensus or consensus on a particular single thing being morally good/bad.”
To approach this from another angle: suppose people are somewhat capable of being persuaded to share others views and maybe even, in fact, do tend to share some moral views (which I think is obviously actually true), although they may radically disagree to some extent. Now suppose that the meaning of moral language is just something like what I sketched out above (i.e. I disapprove of people who x, I disapprove of those who don’t disapprove of those who x etc.).* In this scenario it seems completely possible for moral language to function even though the meaning of moral terms themselves is (ex hypothesi) not tied up in any way with agreement that certain specific things are morally good/bad.
*As I argued above, I also think that such a language could easily be learned without consensus on certain things being good or bad.
I agree that it would be natural to call “Hurting people is good” a use of moral language on the part of the madman. I only claim that we can have a different, more substantial, kind of disagreement within our community of people who share SMB than we can with the madman
cases in which our conversations are founded on SMB have a distinctive character which is of great importance.
Hmm, it sounds like maybe you don’t think that the meaning of moral of moral terms is tied to certain specific things being judged morally good/bad at all, in which case there may be little disagreement regarding this thread of the discussion.
I agree that moral disagreement between people who share some moral presuppositions has something of a distinctive character from discourse between people who don’t share any moral presuppositions. In the real world, of course, there are always some shared background presuppositions (broadly speaking) even if these are not always at all salient to disagreement.
That said, I don’t know whether I endorse your view about the role of the Shared Moral Base. As I noted above, I do think that there are a host of moral reactions which are innate (Moral Foundations, if you will). But I don’t think these or applications of these play an ‘ostensive’ role (I think we have innate dispositions to respond in certain ways intuitively, but our actual judgements and moral theories and concepts get formed in a pretty environmentally and socially contingent way, leading to a lot of fuzziness and indeterminacy). And I don’t privilege these intuitive views as particularly foundational in the philosophical sense (despite the name).
This leads us back into the practical conclusions in your OP. Suppose that a moral aversion to impure, disgusting things is innate (and arguably one of the most basic moral dispositions). It still seems possible that people routinely overcome and override this basic disposition and just decide that impurity doesn’t matter morally and disgusting things aren’t morally bad (perhaps especially when, as in modern industrialised countries, impure things typically don’t really pose much of a threat). It doesn’t seem to me like we have any particular reason to privilege these basic intuitive responses as foundational, in cases where they conflict with our more abstruse reasoning.
For moral talk to be capable of serving this practical purpose we just need some degree of people being inclined to respond to the same kinds of things or to be persuaded to share the same attitudes. But this doesn’t require any particularly strong, near-universal consensus or consensus on a particular single thing being morally good/bad. [...] This seems compatible with very, very widespread disagreement in fact: it might be that people are disposed to think that some varying combinations of “fraternity, blood revenge, family pride, filial piety, gavelkind, primogeniture, friendship, patriotism, tribute, diplomacy, common ownership, honour, confession, turn taking, restitution, modesty, mercy, munificence, arbitration, mendicancy, and queuing”
Sorry, I should’ve addressed this directly. The SMB-community picture is somewhat misleading. In reality, you likely have partial overlap in SMB and the intersection of your whole community of friends is less (but does include pain aversion). Moral disagreement attains a particular level of meaningfulness when both speakers share SMB relevant to their topic of debate. I now realize that my use of ‘ostensive’ was mistaken. I meant to say, as perhaps has already become clear, that SMB lends substance to moral disagreement. SMB plays a role in defining moral disagreement, but, as you say, SMB likely plays a lesser role when it comes to using moral language outside of disagreement.
It doesn’t seem to me like we have any particular reason to privilege these basic intuitive responses as foundational, in cases where they conflict with our more abstruse reasoning.
If we agree that SMB plays a crucial role in lending meaning to moral disagreement, then we can understand the nature of moral disagreement without appeal to any ‘abstruse reasoning’. I argue that what we do when disagreeing is emphasizing various parts of SMB to the other. In this picture of moral language = universalizable preferences + elicit disapproval + SMB subset, where does abstruse reasoning enter the picture? It only enters when a philosopher sees a family resemblance between moral disagreement and other sorts of epistemological disagreement and thus feels the urge to bring in talk of abstruse reasoning. As described in the OP, for non-philosophers abstruse reasoning only matters as mediated by meta-reactions. In effect, reasoning constraints enter the picture as a subset of our universalizable preferences, but as such there’s no basis for them to override our other object-level universalizable preferences. Of course, I use talk of preferences here loosely; I do believe that these preferences have vague intensities which may sometimes be compared. E.g. someone may feel their meta-reactions particularly strongly and so these preferences may carry more weight than other preferences because of this intensity of feeling.
This leads us back into the practical conclusions in your OP. Suppose that a moral aversion to impure, disgusting things is innate (and arguably one of the most basic moral dispositions). It still seems possible that people routinely overcome and override this basic disposition and just decide that impurity doesn’t matter morally and disgusting things aren’t morally bad.
I’m not sure if I know what you’re talking about by ‘impure things’. Sewage perhaps? I’m not sure what it means to have a moral aversion to sewage. Maybe you mean something like the aversion to the untouchable caste? I do not know enough about that to comment.
Independently of the meaning of ‘impure’, let me respond to “people routinely overcome and override this basic disposition”: certainly people’s moral beliefs often come into conflict e.g. trolley problems. I would describe most of these cases as having multiple conflicting universalizable preferences in play. Sometimes one of those preferences is a meta-reaction, e.g. ‘call to universality’, and if the meta-reaction is more salient or intense then perhaps it carries more weight than a ‘basic disposition’. Let me stress again that I do not make a distinction between universalizable preferences which are ‘basic dispositions’ and those which I refer to as meta-reactions. These should be treated on an equal footing.
I’m afraid now the working week has begun again I’m not going to have so much time to continue responding, but thanks for the discussion.
I’m not sure if I know what you’re talking about by ‘impure things’. Sewage perhaps? I’m not sure what it means to have a moral aversion to sewage. Maybe you mean something like the aversion to the untouchable caste? I do not know enough about that to comment.
I’m thinking of the various things which fall under the Purity/Disgust (or Sanctity/Degradation) foundation in Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory. This includes a lot of things related to not eating or otherwise exposing yourself to things which elicit disgust, as well as a lot of sexual morality. Rereading the law books of the Bible gives a lot of examples. The sheer prevalence of these concerns in ancient morality, especially as opposed to modern concerns like promoting positive feeling, is also quite telling IMO. For more on the distinctive role of disgust in morality see here or here.
Let me stress again that I do not make a distinction between universalizable preferences which are ‘basic dispositions’ and those which I refer to as meta-reactions. These should be treated on an equal footing.
I’m not sure how broadly you’re construing ‘meta-reactions’, i.e. would this include basically any moral view which a person might reach based on the ordinary operation of their intuitions and reason and would all of these be placed on an equal footing? If so then I’m inclined to agree, but then I don’t think this account implies anything much at the practical level (e.g. how we should think about animals, population ethics etc.).
I argue that what we do when disagreeing is emphasizing various parts of SMB to the other.
I may agree with this if, per my previous comment, SMB is construed very broadly i.e. to mean roughly emphasising or making salient shared moral views (of any kind) to each other and persuading people to adopt new moral views. (See Wittgenstein on conversion for discussion of the latter).
If we agree that SMB plays a crucial role in lending meaning to moral disagreement, then we can understand the nature of moral disagreement without appeal to any ‘abstruse reasoning’… In this picture of moral language = universalizable preferences + elicit disapproval + SMB subset, where does abstruse reasoning enter the picture? It only enters when a philosopher sees a family resemblance between moral disagreement and other sorts of epistemological disagreement and thus feels the urge to bring in talk of abstruse reasoning.
I think this may be misconstruing my reference to “abstruse reasoning” in the claim that “It doesn’t seem to me like we have any particular reason to privilege these basic intuitive responses as foundational, in cases where they conflict with our more abstruse reasoning.” Note that I don’t say anything about abstruse reasoning being “necessary to understand the nature of moral disagreement.”
I have in mind cases of moral thinking, such as the example I gave where we override disgust responses based on reflecting that they aren’t actually morally valuable, (I think this would include cases like population ethics and judging that whether animals matter depends on whether they have the right kinds of capacities).
It now sounds like you might think that such reflections are on an “equal footing” with judgments that are more immediately related to basic intuitive responses, in which case there may be little or no remaining disagreement. There may be some residual disagreement if you think that such relatively rarefied reflections can’t count as meta-reflections/legitimate moral reasoning, but I don’t think that is the view which you are defending now. My sense is that more or less any moral argument could result from a process of people reflecting on their views and the views of others and seeking consistency, in which case it doesn’t seem to me like any line of moral argument is ruled out or called into question by your metaethical account. That is fine in my view since I think that it’s appropriate that philosophical reflections should ‘leave everything as it is.’
Thanks for the lively discussion! We’ve covered a lot of ground, so I plan to try to condense what was said into a follow-up blog post making similar points as the OP but taking into account all of your clarifications.
I’m not sure how broadly you’re construing ‘meta-reactions’, i.e. would this include basically any moral view which a person might reach based on the ordinary operation of their intuitions and reason and would all of these be placed on an equal footing?
‘Meta-reactions’ are the subset of our universalizable preferences which express preferences over other preferences (and/or their relation). What it means to be ‘placed on equal footing’ is that all of these preferences are comparable. Which of them will take precedence in a certain judgement depends on the relative intensity of feeling for each preference. This stands in contrast to views such as total utilitarianism in which certain preferences are considered irrational and are thus overruled independently of the force with which we feel them.
more or less any moral argument could result from a process of people reflecting on their views and the views of others and seeking consistency
The key point here is ‘seeking consistency’: my view is that the extent to which consistency constraints are morally relevant is contingent on the individual. Any sort of consistency only carries force insofar as it is one of the given individual’s universalizable preferences. In a way, this view does ‘leave everything as it is’ for non-philosophers’ moral debates. I also have no problem with a population ethicist who sees eir task as finding functions which satisfy certain population ethics intuitions. My view only conflicts with population ethics and animal welfare ethics insofar as ey take eir conclusions as a basis for language policing. E.g. When an ethicist claims eir preferred population axiology has implications on understanding everyday uses of moral language.
I have in mind cases of moral thinking, such as the example I gave where we override disgust responses based on reflecting that they aren’t actually morally valuable.
Within my framework we may override disgust responses by e.g. observing that they are less strong than our other responses, or by observing that—unlike our other responses—they have multiple meta-reactions stacked against them (fairness, ‘call to universality’, etc.) and we feel those meta-reactions more strongly. I do not endorse coming up with a theory about moral value and then overriding our disgust responses because of the theoretical elegance or epistemological appeal of that theory. I’m not sure whether you have in mind the former or the latter case?
Thanks for the long reply. I feel like our conversation becomes more meaningful as it goes on.
Yes, it’s hard to point to exactly what I’m talking about, and perhaps even somewhat speculative since the modern world doesn’t have too much suffering. Let me highlight cases that could change my mind: Soldiers often have PTSD, and I suspect some of this is due to the horrifying nature of what they see. If soldiers’ PTSD was found to be entirely caused by lost friends and had nothing to do with visual experience, I would reduce my credence on this point. When I watched Land of Hope and Glory I found seeing the suffering of animals disturbing, and this would obviously be worse if the documentary had people suffering in similar conditions to the animals. I am confident that most people have similar reactions, but if they don’t I would change my view of the above. The most relevant childhood experiences are likely those which involve prolonged pain: a skinned knee, a fever, a burn etc. I think what I’m trying to point at could be described as ‘pointless suffering’. Pain in the context of humor, cheap thrills, couch-viewing etc. is not what I’m referring to.
This seems plausible to me, and I don’t claim that pleasure/pain serve as the only ostensive root grounding moral language. Perhaps (un)fairness is even more prominent, but nevertheless I claim that this group of ostensive bases (pain, unfairness, etc.) is necessary to understand some of moral language’s distinctive features cf. my original post:
Perhaps some of these “involuntary immediate reaction”s are best described as reactions to unfairness. For brevity let me refer below to this whole family of ostensive bases by Shared Moral Base, SMB.
Let me take this opportunity to emphasize that I agree: The subsequent tendency to disapprove following use of moral language is an important feature of moral language.
This is the key point. Why do we express disapproval of others when they don’t disapprove of the person who did the immoral act? I claim it’s because we expect them to share certain common, basic reactions e.g. to pain, unfairness, etc and when these basic reactions are not salient enough in their actions and their mind, we express disapproval to remind them of SMB. Here’s a prototypical example: an aunt chastises a mother for failing to stop her husband from striking their child in anger. The aunt does so because she knows the mother cares about her children, and more generally doesn’t want people to be hurt unreasonably. If the mother were one of our madmen from above, then the aunt would find it futile to chastise her. To return to my example of “a world filled with people whose innate biases varied randomly”, in that world we would not find it fruitful to disapprove of others when they didn’t disapprove of you. Do you not agree that disapproval would have less significance in that world?
True, the learner merely has to learn that they have within themselves some particular disposition towards the morally wrong cases. These dispositions may be various: aversion to pain, aversion to unfairness, guilt, etc. The learner later finds it useful to continue to use moral language, because others outside of her home share these dispositions to morally wrong cases. To hyperbolize this point: moral language would have a different role if SMB were similar to eye color i.e. usually shared within the family, but diverse outside of the family.
I agree that it would be natural to call “Hurting people is good” a use of moral language on the part of the madman. I only claim that we can have a different, more substantial, kind of disagreement within our community of people who share SMB than we can with the madman. E.g. the kind of disagreement I describe in the family with the aunt above.
Yes, I agree. However, cases in which our conversations are founded on SMB have a distinctive character which is of great importance. I agree that the view described in my original post likely becomes less relevant when applied to disagreements across moral cultures i.e. between groups with very different SMB. I’m not particularly bothered by this caveat since most discussion of object-level ethics seems to occur within communities of shared SMB e.g. medical ethics, population ethics, etc.
Let me note that I agree (and think it’s uncontroversial) that people often have extreme emotional reactions (including moral reactions) to seeing things like people blown to bits in front of them. So this doesn’t seem like a crux in our disagreement (I think everyone, whatever their metaethical position, endorses this point).
OK, so we also agree that people may have a host of innate emotional reactions to things (including, but not limited to valenced emotions).
I think I responded to this point directly in the last paragraph of my reply. In brief: if no-one could ever be brought to share any moral views, this would indeed vitiate a large part (though not all) of the function of moral language. But this doesn’t mean “that the meaning of the moral terms depends on or involves consensus about the rightness or wrongness of specific moral things.” All that is required is “some degree of people being inclined to respond to the same kinds of things or to be persuaded to share the same attitudes. But this doesn’t require any particularly strong, near-universal consensus or consensus on a particular single thing being morally good/bad.”
To approach this from another angle: suppose people are somewhat capable of being persuaded to share others views and maybe even, in fact, do tend to share some moral views (which I think is obviously actually true), although they may radically disagree to some extent. Now suppose that the meaning of moral language is just something like what I sketched out above (i.e. I disapprove of people who x, I disapprove of those who don’t disapprove of those who x etc.).* In this scenario it seems completely possible for moral language to function even though the meaning of moral terms themselves is (ex hypothesi) not tied up in any way with agreement that certain specific things are morally good/bad.
*As I argued above, I also think that such a language could easily be learned without consensus on certain things being good or bad.
Hmm, it sounds like maybe you don’t think that the meaning of moral of moral terms is tied to certain specific things being judged morally good/bad at all, in which case there may be little disagreement regarding this thread of the discussion.
I agree that moral disagreement between people who share some moral presuppositions has something of a distinctive character from discourse between people who don’t share any moral presuppositions. In the real world, of course, there are always some shared background presuppositions (broadly speaking) even if these are not always at all salient to disagreement.
That said, I don’t know whether I endorse your view about the role of the Shared Moral Base. As I noted above, I do think that there are a host of moral reactions which are innate (Moral Foundations, if you will). But I don’t think these or applications of these play an ‘ostensive’ role (I think we have innate dispositions to respond in certain ways intuitively, but our actual judgements and moral theories and concepts get formed in a pretty environmentally and socially contingent way, leading to a lot of fuzziness and indeterminacy). And I don’t privilege these intuitive views as particularly foundational in the philosophical sense (despite the name).
This leads us back into the practical conclusions in your OP. Suppose that a moral aversion to impure, disgusting things is innate (and arguably one of the most basic moral dispositions). It still seems possible that people routinely overcome and override this basic disposition and just decide that impurity doesn’t matter morally and disgusting things aren’t morally bad (perhaps especially when, as in modern industrialised countries, impure things typically don’t really pose much of a threat). It doesn’t seem to me like we have any particular reason to privilege these basic intuitive responses as foundational, in cases where they conflict with our more abstruse reasoning.
[From a previous DM comment]
Sorry, I should’ve addressed this directly. The SMB-community picture is somewhat misleading. In reality, you likely have partial overlap in SMB and the intersection of your whole community of friends is less (but does include pain aversion). Moral disagreement attains a particular level of meaningfulness when both speakers share SMB relevant to their topic of debate. I now realize that my use of ‘ostensive’ was mistaken. I meant to say, as perhaps has already become clear, that SMB lends substance to moral disagreement. SMB plays a role in defining moral disagreement, but, as you say, SMB likely plays a lesser role when it comes to using moral language outside of disagreement.
If we agree that SMB plays a crucial role in lending meaning to moral disagreement, then we can understand the nature of moral disagreement without appeal to any ‘abstruse reasoning’. I argue that what we do when disagreeing is emphasizing various parts of SMB to the other. In this picture of moral language = universalizable preferences + elicit disapproval + SMB subset, where does abstruse reasoning enter the picture? It only enters when a philosopher sees a family resemblance between moral disagreement and other sorts of epistemological disagreement and thus feels the urge to bring in talk of abstruse reasoning. As described in the OP, for non-philosophers abstruse reasoning only matters as mediated by meta-reactions. In effect, reasoning constraints enter the picture as a subset of our universalizable preferences, but as such there’s no basis for them to override our other object-level universalizable preferences. Of course, I use talk of preferences here loosely; I do believe that these preferences have vague intensities which may sometimes be compared. E.g. someone may feel their meta-reactions particularly strongly and so these preferences may carry more weight than other preferences because of this intensity of feeling.
I’m not sure if I know what you’re talking about by ‘impure things’. Sewage perhaps? I’m not sure what it means to have a moral aversion to sewage. Maybe you mean something like the aversion to the untouchable caste? I do not know enough about that to comment.
Independently of the meaning of ‘impure’, let me respond to “people routinely overcome and override this basic disposition”: certainly people’s moral beliefs often come into conflict e.g. trolley problems. I would describe most of these cases as having multiple conflicting universalizable preferences in play. Sometimes one of those preferences is a meta-reaction, e.g. ‘call to universality’, and if the meta-reaction is more salient or intense then perhaps it carries more weight than a ‘basic disposition’. Let me stress again that I do not make a distinction between universalizable preferences which are ‘basic dispositions’ and those which I refer to as meta-reactions. These should be treated on an equal footing.
I’m afraid now the working week has begun again I’m not going to have so much time to continue responding, but thanks for the discussion.
I’m thinking of the various things which fall under the Purity/Disgust (or Sanctity/Degradation) foundation in Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory. This includes a lot of things related to not eating or otherwise exposing yourself to things which elicit disgust, as well as a lot of sexual morality. Rereading the law books of the Bible gives a lot of examples. The sheer prevalence of these concerns in ancient morality, especially as opposed to modern concerns like promoting positive feeling, is also quite telling IMO. For more on the distinctive role of disgust in morality see here or here.
I’m not sure how broadly you’re construing ‘meta-reactions’, i.e. would this include basically any moral view which a person might reach based on the ordinary operation of their intuitions and reason and would all of these be placed on an equal footing? If so then I’m inclined to agree, but then I don’t think this account implies anything much at the practical level (e.g. how we should think about animals, population ethics etc.).
I may agree with this if, per my previous comment, SMB is construed very broadly i.e. to mean roughly emphasising or making salient shared moral views (of any kind) to each other and persuading people to adopt new moral views. (See Wittgenstein on conversion for discussion of the latter).
I think this may be misconstruing my reference to “abstruse reasoning” in the claim that “It doesn’t seem to me like we have any particular reason to privilege these basic intuitive responses as foundational, in cases where they conflict with our more abstruse reasoning.” Note that I don’t say anything about abstruse reasoning being “necessary to understand the nature of moral disagreement.”
I have in mind cases of moral thinking, such as the example I gave where we override disgust responses based on reflecting that they aren’t actually morally valuable, (I think this would include cases like population ethics and judging that whether animals matter depends on whether they have the right kinds of capacities).
It now sounds like you might think that such reflections are on an “equal footing” with judgments that are more immediately related to basic intuitive responses, in which case there may be little or no remaining disagreement. There may be some residual disagreement if you think that such relatively rarefied reflections can’t count as meta-reflections/legitimate moral reasoning, but I don’t think that is the view which you are defending now. My sense is that more or less any moral argument could result from a process of people reflecting on their views and the views of others and seeking consistency, in which case it doesn’t seem to me like any line of moral argument is ruled out or called into question by your metaethical account. That is fine in my view since I think that it’s appropriate that philosophical reflections should ‘leave everything as it is.’
Thanks for the lively discussion! We’ve covered a lot of ground, so I plan to try to condense what was said into a follow-up blog post making similar points as the OP but taking into account all of your clarifications.
‘Meta-reactions’ are the subset of our universalizable preferences which express preferences over other preferences (and/or their relation). What it means to be ‘placed on equal footing’ is that all of these preferences are comparable. Which of them will take precedence in a certain judgement depends on the relative intensity of feeling for each preference. This stands in contrast to views such as total utilitarianism in which certain preferences are considered irrational and are thus overruled independently of the force with which we feel them.
The key point here is ‘seeking consistency’: my view is that the extent to which consistency constraints are morally relevant is contingent on the individual. Any sort of consistency only carries force insofar as it is one of the given individual’s universalizable preferences. In a way, this view does ‘leave everything as it is’ for non-philosophers’ moral debates. I also have no problem with a population ethicist who sees eir task as finding functions which satisfy certain population ethics intuitions. My view only conflicts with population ethics and animal welfare ethics insofar as ey take eir conclusions as a basis for language policing. E.g. When an ethicist claims eir preferred population axiology has implications on understanding everyday uses of moral language.
Within my framework we may override disgust responses by e.g. observing that they are less strong than our other responses, or by observing that—unlike our other responses—they have multiple meta-reactions stacked against them (fairness, ‘call to universality’, etc.) and we feel those meta-reactions more strongly. I do not endorse coming up with a theory about moral value and then overriding our disgust responses because of the theoretical elegance or epistemological appeal of that theory. I’m not sure whether you have in mind the former or the latter case?