Moral Nihilism and Defining Morality

Home > Philosophy > Ethics and Morality

Moral Noncognitivism

Moral nihilism denies the existence of moral facts and properties, thus denying that there are such properties as morally right/wrong/good/bad. One form of moral nihilism is moral noncognitivism and says that ethical statements like “torturing puppies just for fun is morally wrong” or “kindness is morally good” are neither true nor false but are instead e.g. expressions of imperatives (commands) or of approval/disapproval.

Two varieties of noncognitivism are prescriptivism and emotivism. Prescriptivism (also called imperativism) is the view that moral statements express commands, e.g. “torturing puppies just for fun is morally wrong” expresses “don’t torture puppies just for fun.” Emotivism disagrees with prescriptivism and says that moral statements are expressions of approval/disapproval, e.g. “kindness is morally good” expresses something like “Hurrah for kindness!” and “cruelty is morally bad” expresses something like “Cruelty, Boo!” Emotivism is sometimes called the boo-hurrah theory of ethics.

Depending on the noncognitivist, this could lead to some interesting conversations.

“Torturing puppies for fun is morally wrong.”
“When you say torturing puppies for fun is morally wrong, what you really mean by that is that you don’t approve of such torture.”
“Um, no, that’s not what I mean when I say that torturing puppies just for fun is morally wrong.”
“Yes it is!”
“I’m pretty sure I know the meaning I intended to convey better than you do.”
“No you don’t! I know because I read some philosophy on the internet!”

The result is some pretty stubborn misrepresentation of an opponent’s position. Fortunately, the noncognitivist need not stoop to this level. The noncognitivist can say “torturing puppies just for fun” expresses disapproval even though that’s not what the utterance means. As an analogy, the utterance “Ouch!” expresses pain but that’s not what the utterance means (as an interjection, the word “ouch” means, well, nothing really).

By my lights, noncognitivism is still a ridiculous theory of ethics, even for the moral nihilist. We can conceive of a greedy thief who approves of his own thievery even though he believes it to be morally wrong (with the unscrupulous thief not caring about whether his action is morally wrong), but this seems to suggest that moral statements aren’t necessarily expressions of approval/disapproval. Moreover, we can conceive of people making moral judgments without making commands, e.g. a person forming the judgment “pre-marital sex is wrong” without commanding anything (e.g. a libertine person who believes pre-marital sex is wrong but not only approves of pre-marital sex, he also commands it). There are other problems with noncognitivism, but for the nonce this will suffice for this little blog post.

When you think about it, emotivism is an easy assumption for the moral nihilist to make. We almost always do approve of things we believe to be morally good, and we almost always do disapprove of things we believe to be morally bad. But it’s still a mistake to think that approval/disapproval is all that moral judgments express, particularly since it’s possible for people to approve of an action they think is morally wrong (e.g. the case of the selfish and unscrupulous thief). Prescriptivism is also an easy assumption to make, since moral statements of what is right and wrong are strongly related to imperative statements, e.g. a society believes stealing is wrong and thus commands its citizens not to do it.  Still, not all moral statements express commands.

Defining Morality (sort of)

But if neither emotivism nor prescriptivism quite capture what it means for something to be morally wrong, what does it mean for something to be morally wrong? One thing to recognize is that the property of moral wrongness has an “ought” component, and to unpack that we should distinguish between two types of “ought.”

A conditional ought takes the form of something sufficiently like “If you want to do X, you ought to do Y” and says what conditions help accomplish a particular goal without saying whether one should aim for the goal in the first place, e.g. “If you want to poison your teacher to death, you should use a sufficiently strong toxin.” An unconditional ought says what ought to be simpliciter and is the sort of ought found in “You should not poison teachers to death” and “the worst possible misery and suffering for everyone for all eternity is a state of affairs that ought not to be,” and is thus goal-independent in a way that a conditional ought is not. When applied to a person’s actions, an unconditional ought refers to a genuine obligation for that person (e.g. “you should not torture infants just for fun”) rather than merely stating what actions help bring about some descriptive state of affairs (like a dead teacher or having more money). An unconditional ought is not to be confused with an “ought” that doesn’t rely on any circumstances whatsoever; e.g. one could believe the unconditional ought with respect to not killing applies in some circumstances but that this obligation does not exist in certain other situations (some self-defense cases perhaps).

Moral wrongness is a type of unconditional ought. An action is morally wrong for subject S only if S ought not to do it. The property of moral wrongness is universalizable in that applies equally to all relevantly similar situations, and the property is supremely authoritative, overriding any other “ought” (e.g. legal rules). If we think of “moral rightness” as the property of following some moral obligation, we get the same thing as “moral wrongness” but in the opposite direction. An action is morally right for S only if S ought to do it etc.

A fully rigorous definition of morality is beyond the scope of this blog entry and possibly beyond the ability of even the best philosophers, but this partial sketch at least helps us to understand e.g. how a selfish thief can approve of his thievery while also believing it to be morally wrong (he realizes he ought not to steal but doesn’t care). It also allows us to get a better idea of what morality really is and perhaps be in a better position to give the moral nihilist an alternative to noncognitivism.

A Better Solution for the Moral Nihilist

Cognitivism is the more sensible claim that moral statements do indeed have truth-values. A moral nihilist could grant that the statement “Dr. Evil’s action of torturing puppies just for fun has the property of moral wrongness” has a truth-value, and conclude that because the property of moral wrongness doesn’t exist, the statement is false. Moral properties do not exist, ergo it is false that Dr. Evil’s action has the property of moral wrongness. The idea that moral nihilism is true and that moral judgments have truth-values but that they’re all false (hence no moral facts) is a form of error theory. If I were a moral nihilist, I would be an error theorist.

And yet error theory is a form of moral nihilism, which implies that it suffers all the intellectual weaknesses that moral nihilism is heir to. For example, an error theorist would still believe that there is nothing morally wrong with raping and abusing small children, which surely seems implausible. Most of us intuitively recognize that there is something in reality, transcending human opinion, that says people shouldn’t behave that way. We have no more reason to doubt the reality of moral properties than to doubt our intuition of the external world being real. I think then we are justified in saying “Boo!” to moral nihilism.

Should Catholic Institutions (like Catholic Hospitals) Be Forced to Pay for Employee Contraception?

Home > Politics > Religious Liberty

As the title of the blog suggests, I’m a maverick Christian, and in my maverick maverickhood of maverickness I have a maverick view on the separation of church and state.[1] I don’t believe we should have “In God We Trust” on dollar bills any more than we should have “Atheism is Factually Incorrect” on them. Of course, I believe atheism is factually incorrect and that we should trust in God, yet I also believe in applying what Thomas Jefferson called a “wall of separation between Church & State,” possibly to a greater extent than Jefferson himself did.

But that wall of separation blocks both sides. When it comes to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, if some political conservatives forget that government should not be “respecting an establishment of religion” some political liberals forget the government should not be “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” For example, if we have two religious groups on a public university where one supports gay sexuality and the other says gay sex is immoral, the government should not treat them unequally on the basis of their religious views on sexual morality (e.g. when it comes to the groups requiring voting members to subscribe to their religious values), whereas some liberals would disagree.[2] On that note we get to the topic of this blog entry: whether to force Catholic institutions like Catholic hospitals to pay for contraceptives via health insurance coverage in cases where the contraceptives serve no purpose beyond birth control.

For those of you who were unaware, at one point the Obama administration advocated a law that would require some Catholic institutions, like hospitals, to pay for employee contraceptives. Some other politically liberal entities, such as the ACLU, supported this decision. The Catholic church thinks contraception, at least when used for the purpose of birth control (in some cases it can be used for some other medical reason, e.g. for polycystic ovarian syndrome), is immoral, and are less than pleased with the idea of the government forcing Catholic institutions to pay for it. I believe there’s nothing immoral with contraception and I think that a Catholic institution’s health insurance plan should indeed pay for employee contraceptives. I’m just not in favor of the government forcing Catholic institutions to do that when it violates their religious convictions.

At some point of course we have to curtail religious liberty. If a man killed infants as a sacrifice to the god Moloch, such a person obviously ought to be arrested even if his religion required him to do the killing. Shouldn’t we thus be careful about to what extent a religious institution be allowed to neglect health care? If we allow the employee health insurance of Catholic hospitals to not to pay for contraception, where does it end? If we allowed a religious institution to refrain from any health coverage they pleased, we could conceive of this yielding some rather undesirable results. Suppose a faith-based store said they didn’t want to provide any health care at all on the grounds that they believe God wants us to just trust in God and avoid medical care altogether. Shouldn’t we prevent things like this from happening?

Valid concerns as these may be, we should also be careful about going the wrong way in the other direction. At some point it becomes not OK to force a religious institution to pay for some bodily procedure that is against their religious convictions. For example, what about forcing Catholic institutions to pay for abortions? If a religious institution is religiously opposed to tattoos, what about forcing them to pay for tattoos? Both of these seem to go too far; clearly there ought to be limits as to what degree the government should be allowed to infringe upon religious freedom.

So where should we draw the line? Wherever that line is, it seems to me that it would stop short of forcing Catholic institutions to subsidize people’s sex lives when the sexual activity in question violates the institution’s religious convictions. While a health insurance system paying for contraceptives would be nice and I would prefer that Catholic institutions support it, the fact remains that contraceptives are inexpensive and going without them is hardly life-threatening. Contraceptives also have a free, non-medical alternative: not having sex. It may be displeasing to use that alternative, but is sexual activity really something that religious institutions should be forced to financially support, particularly when the sort of sexual behavior in question is against their religious beliefs? Disagree with the Catholic institutions if you wish, but forcing them to financially subsidize such sexual behavior seems to be going too far. At some point religious liberty has to be respected, even when it comes to religious beliefs we don’t agree with.

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[1] It’s possible that my critics will say that I like the word “maverick” too much. Such critics are probably right, and in my mavericky maverickness I will continue to maverick my maverickhood and maverick maverick maverick...

[2] Suppose we had two groups that wanted to be student organizations at some public university: “Religious for Sexual Morality” (RSM) and “Religious for Free Love” (RFL). RSM allows its voting members to be gay but requires all voting members to believe that gay sex is wrong (so if a person engaged in gay sex, that person couldn’t be a voting member if they also believed there was nothing wrong with the sexual activity). RFL requires its voting members to believe gay sex is morally permissible. In the CLS v. Martinez Supreme Court case, Hastings College of the Law gave three different reasons for excluding the Christian Legal Society (CLS) from a “registered student organization” (RSO) status (which basically relegated the group to kind of second-class status), but one was a Nondiscrimination Policy (endorsed by Justice Stevens in a concurring opinion) that would permit RFL but ban RSM on the grounds that RSM discriminated against homosexuals, even though RSM actually allows all its members to be gay. How does that work? In the actual court case, CLS, like the fictitious RSM, did not allow people who engaged in gay sex become voting members if those people believed there was nothing morally wrong with it, and permitted voting members to be gay. Naturally enough, CLS argued they did not exclude individuals on the basis of sexual orientation but rather “on the basis of a conjunction of conduct and the belief that the conduct is not wrong.” Remarkably, the Opinion of the Court dismissed this, basically saying that this restriction is close enough to be properly called discrimination. Disagreeing with Justice Stevens, in the dissenting opinion Justice Alito wrote that regarding CLS’s viewpoint on sexual morality (viz. that sexual conduct outside marriage between a man and a woman is wrongful),

Hastings would not allow CLS to express this viewpoint by limiting membership to persons willing to express a sincere agreement with CLS’s views. By contrast, nothing in the Nondiscrimination Policy prohibited a group from expressing a contrary viewpoint by limiting membership to persons willing to endorse that group’s beliefs. A Free Love Club could require members to affirm that they reject the traditional view of sexual morality to which CLS adheres. It is hard to see how this can be viewed as anything other than viewpoint discrimination.

One last thing: I mentioned the college gave three different reasons to deny RSO status to CLS, but that’s because the reasons for excluding CLS from being an RSO changed twice, hence three different reasons. Alito noted the shifting reasons and cited other evidence suggesting that the policies were used as a pretext to unlawfully exclude CLS, concluding “If the record here is not sufficient to permit a finding of pretext, then the law of pretext is dead.” If this case has captured your interest (as indeed it did mine) you might be interested in seeing the full decision, including Alito’s scathing dissent.

Crazy Idea #2: Quasi-Marriage

Home > Philosophy > Ethics and Morality

I call this crazy idea #2 due to a previous blog entry where I came up with an arguably crazy solution for the controversy over whether we should legalize same-sex marriage. The crazy idea of this blog entry is “quasi-marriage.” This idea is a solution (and arguably a crazy one) to the following problem. In a large percentage of marriages, the “for better or for worse” marriage vow is kind of a lie, because when the worst reveals its ugly head people often get divorced. If you really don’t mean the “better or for worse” part of your vow you shouldn’t say it. So here’s my crazy idea: quasi-marriage. Quasi-marriage is similar to a regular marriage except that the “for better or for worse” is replaced with “for better but not necessarily for worse” and is designed so that when the worse happens the divorce process is for the most part legally painless, e.g. the government says “you’re no longer married” and that’s that. If you’re thinking, “this is a terrible idea; nobody should enter into a quasi-marriage!” I agree, but if I’m right about this making more sense than making the marriage vows meaningless, I think this exposes the problem of how we don’t treat marriage sufficiently morally or even rationally. A world where vows are easily and routinely broken with social acceptance is not only ethically objectionable it also just doesn’t make sense; it renders vows meaningless and pointless. So give me quasi-marriage, or give me a world where marriage vows make moral and rational sense.