Abstract
The first three chapters get us clear about what basic certainty and what morality is. In these next two chapters I go on to develop a key distinction (put forth by Daniele Moyal-Sharrock) between different kinds of basic certainty, the local and the universal. I apply this distinction to basic moral certainty, in order to explain both the underlying unity and the sometimes interminable conflict between different moral systems. In exploring the universal side of the distinction, I defend two examples of basic moral certainties that must be held by all functioning moral agents. My examples are the belief (i) that some killings are wrong (K); and (ii) that some wrongs are more serious than others, or that there is some hierarchy between morally evaluable actions.
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Notes
- 1.
Even if we accept what I’ve said in Chapter 2 about primary recognition the problem in this form still stands, given that primary recognition does not tell us what we have to do, only that we must do something. No particular moral claims follow directly from it (see Sect. 2.3). It is true that certain responses are ruled out by the nature of primary recognition, in that one must act with concern, and help rather than really harm. But that is not the same as establishing what is to be done. Certainly no general moral directives follow from this, as even to hurt someone might in the end be the right thing, so that even the claim ‘Do not hurt the other’ rendered so generally is not implied by primary recognition. For example, in cases of mercy killing we may even be morally required to kill the other. One might object that at least we cannot ignore the other, that primary recognition implies at least that specific demand. But we can imagine cases where to ignore someone’s suffering, perhaps to save their dignity, is precisely what is required of us for their good. Yes, what is done must be done with concern—this follows from the fact of primary recognition. But the form this concern takes, what is specifically required of us, is as various as each new moral situation (this again is a good reason why moral principles can’t be flexible enough to act as foundations for morality).
- 2.
It should be borne in mind that empirical certainties are not derived from experience, in the sense that they are not justified by experience, though they are conditioned by it. See Sect. 1.6 above or for a more extensive discussion Moyal-Sharrock (2005, 82–5). Also, it should be remembered that though empirical and moral thought are grounded in basic certainties, those basic certainties are themselves ungrounded.
- 3.
Except in cases involving pathology.
- 4.
There is some exegetical controversy over whether Wittgenstein used the term ‘Lebensform’ or ‘form of life’ to indicate a singular human form of life or a plurality of human forms of life. I will here work on the assumption that it is possible to speak of both (see Moyal-Sharrock (2015, 26–32) for a defence of this view), and hope that my discussion of examples of universal and local moral certainties adds further plausibility to that assumption. The issue has been very fully discussed in a special issue of the Nordic Wittgenstein Review (2015) (in which Moyal-Sharrock ’s paper just cited features).
- 5.
I will discuss the existence of interminable cross-cultural disagreement on moral matters at Sect. 6.4.1.
- 6.
That is, irresolvable as long as the relevant, contending local moral certainties remain in place. I will say more about the possibility of changes in local moral certainties in Sect. 5.5.
- 7.
It can be hard to keep up with the different uses of the terms, like ‘basic certainty’ and ‘hinge certainty’, as various commentators use them as technical terms, each in their own way, sometimes distinguishing between the two sometimes not. It seems to me more perspicuous to follow Moyal-Sharrock ’s usage of taking ‘basic’ certainty and ‘hinge ’ certainty as synonyms, and adding qualifiers such as ‘local’ and ‘universal’, ‘personal’ and ‘linguistic’ (ibid., 117–35) etc. It should also be noted that Rummens ’ ‘hinge certainty’ is close to but not identical with Moyal-Sharrock ’s ‘local moral certainties ’. For example Rummens ’ ‘hinge certainties’ are bounded within a practice or system, whereas local moral certainties are also sometimes bounded more widely within historically located communities.
- 8.
For our purposes we don’t need to explore too deeply what Rummens says about hinge certainty—his claim in that regard is that there are certain beliefs that cannot be doubted from within a practice e.g. that one cannot do arithmetic as we do if one doubts things like 2 + 2 = 4. While not wanting to accept his distinction, this half of it is not the most problematic or pressing for our purposes here.
- 9.
I will offer, and argue for, such an account at Sect. 6.4.
- 10.
It is worth noting that Rummens ’ discussion seems to presuppose a view of moral systems as having more or less impermeable boundaries. Perhaps in some very isolated contexts there can be a more defined boundary between one culture’s moral system and those surrounding it, but I suspect that in most cases such boundaries are more fluid and permeable than is generally acknowledged.
- 11.
In the moral case, it might be helpful also to talk in terms of having similar dispositions. I know both my cross-cultural counterpart and myself have the same concept (which I call ‘morality’) if we are disposed to react in similar ways to certain instances of wrongdoing or goodness (e.g. we both react to the killing of innocents with horror rather than joviality).
- 12.
In fact, Stephan Rummens made just this objection to a slightly more contentful version of the certainty (‘That killing (per se) is wrong’) in response to a paper given by Nigel Pleasants at the conference Wittgensteinian Moral Philosophy in Leuven (2013).
- 13.
That is to say, first-order moral discussions. The nature of moral certainty can of course be discussed at the meta-ethical level (as I am doing here).
- 14.
In both of these examples, that of abortion and the assassination of tyrants, I aim to show that neither our moral intuitions, nor our moral practices are hinged on a certainty about the wrongness of killing per se—the question of their wrongness is an open one.
- 15.
This example comes from Jonathan Dancy , given during an interview on the radio programme Philosophy Bites where he was explaining, in line with his moral particularism, that there were no acts about which the moral value is unchangeable. He gave this as a possible (for him presumably somewhat isolated) counter-example.
- 16.
There is some reason to believe that morally good and morally evil are not simply flip sides of the same coin, but are conceptually distinct. Some findings on psychopathy (Blair et al. 1995, 746–8) suggest that an inability with the concept ‘wrong’ does not necessarily imply a corresponding inability with ‘right’ or ‘morally good’.
- 17.
This does not mean one’s evaluation of a morally sensitive situation might not change given new information. For instance, if I find out millions have been stolen from a charity I think it seriously wrong. But if the next day I find out that those millions were going to be embezzled, and were stolen so that the money could be used to feed the poor I think the stealing a good thing. The moral value of the act hasn’t changed but what I know about it has. If things were as I initially believed I would still consider it wrong.
- 18.
That is not to say that it is always possible to so differentiate—in many cases this is extremely difficult to decide. But overall, if a person never so differentiates, especially in unambiguous cases (e.g. whether it is more wrong to kill a child or steal a penny), then they lack this certainty H (and this lack is pathological).
- 19.
I will use the phrase ‘moral system’ to refer not just to well worked-out first order philosophical systems, but also to any framework exhibiting tolerable levels of consistency, held by any practicing moral agents. That is, by moral system I mean the interconnected collection of thoughts a moral agent has about moral and meta-moral issues.
- 20.
There is a distinction between primary and secondary psychopaths , where ‘[p]rimary psychopaths are characterised by their lack of guilt ’ and ‘[s]econdary psychopaths are characterised by being more likely [than primary psychopaths ] to experience guilt’ (Blair et al. 1995, 750). Throughout I will take ‘psychopath ’ to mean ‘primary psychopath ’.
- 21.
It should be noted that we have basic beliefs that play a part in our moral thought but that are not themselves about moral value. That is to say, not all basic certainties that underpin morality are themselves basic moral certainties , for example, the basic certainty that ‘Humans feel pain’. I will discuss those basic certainties that underpin only our specifically moral ways of thinking.
- 22.
I say ‘human’ moral certainty because the wrongness of some killing could conceivably drop out of the morality of a race of immortal invulnerable beings, so K cannot be universal in an absolute sense, but only universal for human beings.
- 23.
There are some complications here. In Blair ’s findings psychopaths do not make the moral/conventional distinction but, against Blair ’s expectations (1995, 13), this is because they judge all wrongs (conventional and moral) as moral wrongs. This might make it seem as if psychopaths over moralize, rather than doubt moral certainties . However, looking at the criteria for judging a wrong moral we see that it is morality rather than conventionality that is misunderstood by the psychopath . Blair ’s study shows that while psychopaths identified even conventional wrongs as moral wrongs, they justified their claims on the fact that they were all ‘authority dependent’. Thereby they demonstrated that they equated ‘morally wrong’ with ‘authority dependent’ (i.e. that X is wrong because an authority figure says it is). And as Blair says ‘[t]hese subjects were all incarcerated and presumably motivated to be released. All wished to demonstrate that the treatments they were receiving were effective. They therefore would be motivated to show how they had learned the rules of society… The psychopaths manifest this desire on the authority jurisdiction criterion judgment, by suggesting that all transgressions are authority independent. I suggest that this is because the psychopaths lack [the ability to see others’ suffering] and thus are unable to identify the distinguishing features differentiating moral and conventional transgressions. This inability, coupled with a desire to demonstrate adherence to societal rules, results in their judgment of all the transgressions as authority independent’ (ibid., 23). Essentially, the results showed that ‘psychopaths are significantly less likely to justify items by references to the victim’s welfare’ (ibid., 18, italics mine). This correlates with our definition of morality as other-regarding thought. Psychopaths are demonstrated to be morally pathological by this study in their inability to use moral concepts understood as an inability to reason about the importance of the well-being of the other.
- 24.
To doubt in action in this case would be the same as lacking the basic belief . If I show hesitation, that is if I show doubt, in responding to cases of unambiguous murder as murder, I already demonstrate a pathological lack. If someone sitting next to me at a football match were to stick a knife into a baby, my hesitating to intervene, through doubting its wrongness, would be equivalent to not intervening at all in that both would demonstrate pathology. At this point in the argument I only need to show that not responding as if I held K with certainty is enough to demonstrate an inability with moral concepts per se. So we might state the argument like this: Psychopaths lack K, this lack demonstrates an inability with morality per se, doubting K is logically identical with lacking K (in that both are pathological), therefore doubting K too leads to an inability with morality per se, therefore holding K indubitably is necessary for moral agency per se, therefore K is a basic moral certainty .
- 25.
One of Jules Cotard ’s (the doctor from whom the syndrome is named) original patients, ‘Miss X’, experienced such a lack of sensation (1999 [1880], 275).
- 26.
There is a conceptual/definitional relationship between ‘morally wrong’ and ‘murder’, but ‘Murders are instances of the morally wrong’ is not a tautology like for example the sentence ‘Unmarried men are instances of bachelorhood’. It is true that the concept ‘murder’ defined as wrong killing already includes the concept ‘morally wrong’. But we could explain the concept ‘morally wrong’ without speaking of murder (using less striking instances of moral wrongness like telling a white lie, or stealing an apple). The point here is that because some killings are indubitable instances of wrongness, those kinds of killings can be used to identify the concept ‘morally wrong’. That is, they can be used to teach a non-English speaker the English words for that concept.
- 27.
Here I mean teaching someone who already has a comparable concept of morality the English words for that same concept.
- 28.
These are well-formed sentences and have uses somewhere (i.e. as philosophical examples, or jokes), but they can’t be properly affirmed in moral discourse.
- 29.
And also, as we have seen reason-giving is essential to rational doubt . So if doubting H destroys our ability to give reasons for our moral knowledge then without H no moral knowledge can be rationally doubted , and therefore none can be meaningfully asserted either.
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O’Hara, N. (2018). Universal Moral Certainty. In: Moral Certainty and the Foundations of Morality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75444-4_4
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