Reasons and Persons: Moral Immorality

(by Joe)

First off, a quick bit of background. I've decided to try and read Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) over the summer. It's a thick book, and densely written, so it's going to take me a while. To keep me going I thought I'd blog about each chapter here, at least when I think that there's something the interesting to say. The book isn't really about the mind, or at least not its biological aspects, but I still think it's relevant to this blog. Parfit investigates ethics, rationality, and personal identity, all of which I consider to be closely related to cognition and the philosophy of mind. In fact, I think a lot of what Parfit's saying could maybe benefit from a closer interaction with the scientific study of the mind-brain-body(-environment?), which is part of what I'm going to try and discuss here.

Derek Parfit

Anyway, on with the show. I've just finished reading the first chapter, "Theories That Are Indirectly Self Defeating". One thing that particularly caught my attention was Parfit's notion of "moral immorality, or blameless wrongdoing" (1984: 32). I'm not entirely convinced that the notion is coherent, but he argues that one possible outcome of consequentialism could be that we are morally obliged to make ourselves disposed to act in an immoral manner. He gives the example of Clare, who faced with the choice of saving her child's life or the life of several strangers, will choose to save her child. Under most consequentialist frameworks, she will have acted wrongly - instead of one person dying, several have died - but she only acts this way because she loves her child, and in coming to love her child she may well have acted rightly. Thus we get a situation where she has done wrong, but not in any way that we would blame her for.

The reason that I'm not sure whether this is coherent is that whilst consequentialism might say that, broadly speaking, it is better to save several lives than save one life, it might also say that in this particular situation it is better to act in a way that preserves the possibility of love than to act in a way that does not. So perhaps Clare hasn't acted wrongly? However, coming back to something that I mentioned in my last post, I suspect that it might be more accurate to say that Clare has committed the action that is least wrong. Practical ethics isn't as simple as a binary choice between right and wrong, and often we will have to make extremely difficult moral decisions. In a sense it is this difficulty that characterises truly moral decisions, rather than simply doing what is obviously right. So whilst I wouldn't necessarily choose to use the precise terminology that he does, I think Parfit is on to something quite meaningful when he talks about moral immorality.

He goes on to make a distinction between what we ought morally to believe and what we ought intellectually to believe (Parfit 1984: 43). So whilst Clare ought morally to believe that her love for her child comes before preserving life (as will in fact result in the best possible world), she ought intellectually to believe that what is best is to save the most number of lives. This is a very similar distinction to that made by Joyce (2001), between moral truth and moral fiction. The distinction is that whilst Parfit retains a consequentialist moral realism on both sides, Joyce's dichotomy is between the apparent truth of moral irrealism, which means we should be error theorists about morality, and our pragmatically assenting to some kind of moral fictionalism in order gain some social advantage for ourselves. Joyce characterised the latter as assent rather than belief, but I suggested here that we might be better off viewing it as a separate system of belief, one which we only come to question under certain special circumstances. This would make Joyce's position even more similar to that of Parfit: we ought to convince ourselves to hold certain moral beliefs, even though we consider them intellectually flawed. The only difference is that whilst Parfit thinks we should do this in order to bring about the best possible world (whatever that is), Joyce thinks we should do it to benefit ourselves. In fact, earlier in the chapter Parfit makes precisely this claim, in discussing whether rational egoism might be indirectly self-defeating; he concludes that it is, because it tells us to act irrationally, but that this is not necessarily an argument against it. So Joyce's moral fictionalism is well supported by Parfit's account of rational egoism, even if Parfit doesn't think that, morally speaking, that is the position that we ought to hold.

Joyce, R. 2001. The Myth of Morality. Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge.

 

Parfit, D. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: OUP. (All references from the revised 1987 edition.)

Accepting Without Believing, or Two Systems of Belief?

(Joe)

In the last few chapters of The Myth of Morality (2001), Richard Joyce lays out a potential system of "moral fictionalism", whereby we could accept moral premises without truly believing in them. This follows a lengthy argument for why we should be "error theorists" about morality, which means that we should consider moral realism to be false. If this is the case, then the most obvious conclusion would be that we should discard morality entirely, whatever that might mean. Instead Joyce wants us to take a fictionalist stance towards morality. By doing this he hopes that we will be able to continue making use of moral discourse, with all the advantages that it brings in terms of social cohesion, but without compromising our epistemological integrity.

This is Richard Joyce. Unfortunately I couldn't think of a better picture to accompany the post.

In Joyce's words, "to make a fiction of p is to 'accept' p whilst disbelieving p" (2001: 189). Without going in to too much detail, Joyce thinks that merely accepting a proposition means something like assenting to it, and employing the discourse that it facilitates, without believing it to be true. In the case of moral propositions, this will retain some of the useful imperative that they impart to our actions, in what Joyce seems to characterise as an almost unconscious manner. So when I, as a moral fictionalist, say "It is wrong to harm another", I am not expressing a belief in some moral truth, but rather in a sense reminding myself that harming others is usually bad for me in the long, despite any apparent short term benefits.

In fact, it may be the case that at the time I make that statement, I do truly believe it - what makes me a fictionalist is that when I'm questioned under serious philosophical pressure ("Do you really believe that?"), I will express my disbelief. This leads me to think that we might be able to more accurately model a possible moral fictionalism by talking about in terms of two seperate belief systems. Rather than saying that accept something without believing it, we could say under x-conditions we do believe something, but under y-conditions we don't. This seems to me to reflect my own attitude to morality fairly well - most of the time I'm a kind of libertarian-utilitarian, but when I sit down and think hard about morality I find it impossible to truly justify that position.

Humans aren't particularly good at logic, and our irrationality is fairly well documented, so this kind of holding of contradictory beliefs might not be uncommon. Furthermore, I currently believe that consciousness is a fragmentary and dis-unified process, which (if true) could make it even easier to hold radically different beliefs under different circumstances. It might be possible to design experiments that test this kind of two-belief structure, perhaps by looking at how the brain behaves when different kinds of belief are being expressed.

For the most part I agreed with Joyce's book, and on the whole I think that some kind of moral fictionalism will be necessary if we are to retain any kind of morality in the future, but I'm still not sure how exactly that might be realised, and what it might look like.

Joyce, R. 2001. The Myth of Morality. Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge.