Commonsense Moralists should be Idealists

Capturing the surface phenomena

We all want our philosophical theories to successfully capture some intuitive data—some important commitments about how we take things to be. Why else would you believe a theory, if not that it seemed to get things right? But there are crucial differences in which things we most care about capturing here. One of the deepest divides in philosophical disposition, I believe, is between those primarily motivated to capture the surface phenomena, and those more concerned to give a plausible account of the underlying structure.

I think this is the crux of the disagreement between consequentialists and non-consequentialists. I’ve argued that welfarist consequentialism is, contrary to common belief, actually the most intuitive moral theory—once we focus on deeper intuitions. Whereas commonsense moralists insist on a theory that accommodates everyday moral verdicts (no matter how baseless or incoherent these turn out to be), I’m more driven to find a theory that makes sense on a deeper level, and as a result am happy enough to accept something of an error theory about our everyday “morality system”.

Compare this to our ordinary judgments about the world of perception. Sensory qualities (like colour) seem to inhere in physical objects. It seems like, in perception, we reach out into the world and grasp the qualities that are “out there”, extending our minds to literally contain the objects of our perception. But that’s a difficult notion to make sense of, assuming a materialist conception of the external world. Sensory qualities aren’t material properties of objects, and external material objects can’t be literal constituents of minds. (See Helen’s naïve idealism paper for the decisive refutation of “naïve realism” about perception.)

Reaching out with a “grasping” thought

So we face a choice. Most of us seem happy enough to accept an “error theory” of sorts about perception—we’re taught that phenomenal colours are “just in our heads”, not really in the objects themselves (they merely have surface reflectance properties). We don’t directly grasp the external world, but merely represent it. And so on. We thus accept a theory of perception that is extremely revisionary about the surface phenomena, but fits with our deeper commitment to the external world’s being fundamentally material.

But there is another option. For those more committed to capturing surface phenomena, you can do that by accepting naïve idealism. There’s a perfectly coherent account available of how external objects can have (real, phenomenal) colour, of a sort that we literally grasp and bring into our minds. You just need to give up on the assumption that the external world is fundamentally material, and embrace idealism instead.

That’s not the way I’m personally inclined to go, but it seems to me that the consistent commonsense moralist should leap at the chance to capture more surface intuitions in other philosophical arenas, even if the underlying theory is more complex or weird-seeming than the alternatives. In short: if you’re OK with the messiness of commonsense morality, why not that of idealism?

(Crucially, as Helen argues in her book, there’s actually nothing incoherent or unprincipled about the larger idealist theory—it’s merely different from our usual materialist assumptions, with the extra complexity needed to accommodate more phenomena. As a result, I think idealism is actually on much firmer footing than commonsense morality. Commonsense moralists should be idealists, but there’s no obvious impetus for idealists to be commonsense moralists; they may instead share the consequentialist’s commitment to systematically coherent theorizing.)