Levels of Moral Explanation

Where does the buck stop, and why?

I always enjoy teaching Scanlon’s classic (1982) ‘Contractualism and Utilitarianism’ in my Ethical Theory seminar. It’s such a rich paper, I get something new out of it upon each re-read. Last time, I posted about how Scanlon misdefined “philosophical utilitarianism”.¹ This year, we focused more on the question of how many levels of moral explanation we should expect there to be.

Beneficence from justice and inquiry?

First- vs Second-order Ethics

Let’s say that a first order moral theory tells us what things matter, what choices we ought to make, etc., in any conceivable situation. Pretty useful information! Still, it naturally raises the further question: why is that what matters (or is worth choosing, etc.)?

There may be many different “second-order” explanations that are compatible with any given first-order normative theory.² Take normative utilitarianism: the view that, what one ideally ought to do, in any given case, is whatever would best promote overall well-being. This general verdict could be motivated in any of the following ways:

• Philosophical consequentialism: most fundamentally, we should want to make the world a better place (alternatively: promote each particular value or concrete good), and normative utilitarianism specifies what this involves.

• Philosophical egalitarianism: most fundamentally, we should respect each other’s status as moral equals, and normative utilitarianism (with its equal consideration of interests) specifies how to do this.

• Philosophical contractualism: most fundamentally, we should follow the rules that we would all agree upon (in suitably specified circumstances), and that turns out to be normative utilitarianism.

• Philosophical constructivism: most fundamentally, we should do whatever we would judge to be warranted at the end of ideal inquiry, and that turns out to be the recommendations of normative utilitarianism.

• Etc.

Except, there seems to me a pretty important difference between the first two and the latter two examples on this list. The consequentialist and egalitarian motivations both make sense to me as motivations. They point to different sorts of fundamental values (broadly speaking) that one might have. But contractualism and constructivism aren’t plausibly values at all; they’re just procedures that one might take to (in some sense) determine the correct values to have. It would seem weird to care about the procedures per se, in a way that it doesn’t seem weird to care about respecting moral equality or making the world a better place. (More plausibly, one might care about treating people fairly, and take the contractualist procedure to represent how to do that.) So this makes me wonder whether there are really two very different sorts of explanations being lumped together in this list: what we might call substantive vs procedural second-order normative explanations. (That’s a mouthful!)

Metaethical Explanations

It’s separately worth noting that some—but not all!—metaethical views place explanatory constraints on normative ethics. Most obviously, metaethical constructivism holds that what makes P true (for some normative claim P) is that you would believe P at the end of ideal inquiry. Metaethical constructivism thus seems to straightforwardly entail what I above called ‘philosophical constructivism’ as a second-order normative explanation.

Robust realism, by contrast, places no conceptual constraints on the content of first-order normative ethics (or second-order normative explanations, for that matter). Robust realism simply claims that there are primitive normative truths not reducible to any other truths, and that their status as truths is objective and not contingent on our attitudes or anything like that.

Still, for all that, the robust realist could presumably hold that philosophical constructivism happens to be the objectively correct second-order normative view. The glowing halo of non-natural goodness could, as it happens, brutely follow the process of attaching to whatever we’d judge to be good at the end of ideal inquiry. This differs from metaethical constructivism, because there’s nothing about the nature of moral truth in the abstract that made this so. It’s instead taken to be a brute, substantive fact about primitive goodness, that one might apprehend through rational intuition (or whatever).

Layered explanations

We’ve thus seen that one could have three-layered views such as:

• Robust realism + philosophical constructivism + normative utilitarianism

Or a four-layered view like:

• Metaethical constructivism + fundamental concern for fairness + philosophical contractualism + normative utilitarianism.

Or, at the other extreme, a very bare metaethics + first-order combo like:

• Robust realism + normative utilitarianism

This raises the question: how many layers of explanation should we want or expect? Is the latter view too bare? Is the four-layered view too thick? Should we prefer even more layers of explanation if we can get them?

The Problem

Many philosophers feel unsatisfied by robust realism in metaethics because they want and expect there to be an answer to the question of why the fundamental normative truths are what they are (rather than being something else entirely).

There’s something psychologically unsatisfying about positing “brute” philosophical truths; we want there to be an illuminating answer to our “why?” questions. I feel the force of that. On the other hand, we all know that explanation has to stop somewhere. And the fundamental normative truths seem like a pretty darn principled location to hit bedrock. (Would it really be more satisfying to explain the badness of suffering in terms of our mere dispositions to form this judgment at the ideal end of inquiry, rather than taking the explanation to run in the other direction? Surely, ideally we’d judge that pain is bad because it is bad, and we’re accurately picking up on this fact!)

It’s not as though other views avoid making unexplained assumptions. Why would being judged true at the end of inquiry be what makes a normative claim true? What do our cognitive dispositions have to do with the truth of what really matters? Why couldn’t we be persistently wrong about something in ethics? Or, if you prefer the contractualist story, why give such a central role to the process of agreement? And why base it all on rules rather than acts assessed individually?

Once one notices all these further questions, it becomes much less clear what theoretical virtue there is to adding an unexplained explanatory layer into our overall normative picture. If the new explanation seems right to you, then that’s fine and good. But then it should be equally fine to simply have a first-order normative theory that seems to give the right explanations for things right from the start.

Maybe we should do helpful things because individuals (and their interests) matter, and that’s the end of the story. If that seems right to you (as seems perfectly reasonable to me), then I don’t really see why you should expect any deeper explanations. The bare combo of robust realism + normative utilitarianism (or whatever first-order view you prefer) seems… fine?

Conclusion

There’s room to adopt any of a wide range of different higher-order normative (and even metaethical) explanations in ethics. But your explanations will always run out eventually. So it’s unclear what we gain from adding extra explanatory layers (that are themselves unexplained). Personally, I’d find it very unsatisfying to have no unifying explanation of what various right acts all have in common (though this doesn’t seem to bother particularists). But once we settle on a general ethical theory that seems “principled” or inherently plausible, I’m not inclined to expect any further explanation of why that moral theory is the true one.³ How about you?

1. In short: the claim that individual well-being is what fundamentally matters is not the same as claiming that “the only fundamental moral facts are facts about individual well-being”—the former has genuine appeal, whereas nobody could reasonably believe the latter claim. (For one thing, the fact that individual well-being is what matters is already a further fundamental moral fact over and above the individual well-being facts.)

2. Scanlon similarly distinguishes first-order “normative” doctrines from deeper “philosophical account[s] of the subject matter of morality.” But it’s not entirely clear what Scanlon means by the latter—he seems to vacillate between (what we’re calling) second-order normative explanations and outright metaethical questions (see, e.g., his mentions of “intuitionism” or what we’d nowadays call robust realism).

3. I may be happy to additionally endorse “philosophical consequentialism” as a kind of abstraction from my first-order answer, but it seems a bit artificial to treat it as some kind of prior truth that serves to explain the truth of the first-order normative theory.