Defining our way into ethics

Luke at Common Sense Atheism comments (twice!) on a debate between Julia Galef and Massimo Pigliucci over the nature of morality. The most recent installments are here and here.

The debate appears to have reduced to a question of definitions. Pigliucci wants to stipulate a kind of axiom – morality is concerned with achieving human flourishing – and give a parity argument for why this is justified. Foundational axioms are stipulated in math, he says, and while they are open to question, we are welcome to proceed with math. If morality is not okay, then math is not okay. But math is okay, so morality is okay. Galef is frustrated by this approach, suggesting that while definitions clarify terminology, they don’t do more work than that. They don’t for example, show that the concept in question really is picked out by your definition, nor that (in the case of morality) your definition picks something out that we should care about.

While it is hinted at in various ways, I feel like this discussion is lacking a clear statement of what the problem is with Pigliucci’s approach. The question of how we increase human welfare, if answered, gives us an “instrumental ought” – namely, we ought to do X (e.g. cure cancer) if we want to work our way to Y (human welfare). But the distinctively moral ought has characteristics other than the instrumental ought. Moral oughts, for example, are overriding. Something makes them more important than instrumental oughts, for example. The question for Pigliucci, then, is why is “human welfare” a normative concern? If I want to have spaghetti, but by eating spaghetti I will murder a child, why does the latter concern outweigh the former? Whatever fills in for “morality” has to satisfy the conditions of morality – at the very least, overriding importance. Arguably there are other conditions, such as universality, objectivity, etc., but there is no need to multiply controversies.

So the question for (meta)ethics is not just something like, What is the chief concern of morality? It is something more like, Whence morality’s ought-ness? What makes an “ought” distinctively moral?

This is a very hard question. The discussion on Rationally Speaking will fail to solve it. But hopefully Pigliucci can at least begin to address the right questions.