Abstract
By focusing on the practices of morally justifying actions and moral judgements, it has been possible to support the view that justification is required only for that which seems to be morally problematic. I shall now return to those judgements which seem to be anything but problematic, the justification of which however has worried moral philosophers. I shall start by presenting Bambrough’s proof of moral knowledge, which he intends to construct in an analogous manner to Moore’s proof of the external world. Bambrough’s defence of common sense in the moral realm raises the question as to whether we can respond to it along the same lines as Wittgenstein responded to Moore. It seems to me that we can. Thus, Bambrough’s proof provides a good starting point for this study’s attempt to draw an analogy between certainty regarding the empirical world and (objective) moral certainty.1 It will be argued that we encounter cases with some or all of the following features also in the moral domain:2
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Reasonable doubt is impossible.
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Everyone seems to know the issue in question.
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Attempts to doubt or justify suggest a lack of seriousness, competence or even sanity.
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Mistake is impossible.
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There are no supporting reasons that are more certain.
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That which is certain cannot be meaningfully uttered in ordinary contexts.
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Notes
Renford Bambrough, Moral Scepticism and Moral Knowledge (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 12 and 15.
Nigel Pleasants, ‘Wittgenstein, Ethics and Basic Moral Certainty,’ Inquiry 51, no. 3 (2008): p. 262.
As will be argued in Chapter 6, what we refer to when we say of a child that it does not yet know the difference between right and wrong is first and foremost a complex competence, not propositional knowledge. Likewise, knowing the difference between right and left is a matter of competence. Hanna and Harrison give a detailed account of what knowing that difference amounts to. Patricia Hanna and Bernard Harrison, Word & World. Practice and the Foundations of Language (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 169 ff.
See Judith Lichtenberg, ‘Moral Certainty,’ Philosophy 69, no. 268 (1994): p. 193.
Peter Singer, ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (1972): p. 231. Singer argues that we as citizens of affluent countries are in a parallel situation with regard to the people who are dying of starvation far away from us.
See Oswald Hanfling, ‘Learning about Right and Wrong: Ethics and Language,’ Philosophy 78, no. 303 (2003): pp. 27 f.
Stefan Rummens, ‘On the Possibility of a Wittgensteinian Account of Moral Certainty,’ The Philosophical Forum 44, no. 2 (2013): p. 145. The issue of moral agreement will be addressed in greater detail in Chapter 7.
Nigel Pleasants, ‘Wittgenstein and Basic Moral Certainty,’ Philosophia 37 (2009): p. 678.
Pleasants, ‘Wittgenstein and Basic Moral Certainty,’ p. 676. A philosophical attempt to doubt or justify a moral certainty such as the fact that killing is wrong is just as pointless as such an attempt by a non-philosopher. I disagree with Timmons, who argues that basic moral beliefs that do not require justification in ordinary contexts require justification in philosophical contexts. Mark Timmons, Morality without Foundations: A Defense of Ethical Contextualism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 210 ff.
Yaniv Iczkovits, Wittgenstein’s Ethical Thought (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 166.
Thomas, M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 200.
Nigel Pleasants, ‘Moral Argument Is Not Enough: The Persistence of Slavery and the Emergence of Abolition,’ Philosophical Topics 38, no. 1 (2011): p. 152.
However, although it was unimaginable for Wittgenstein that human beings could go to the moon, this was no longer excluded by the physical knowledge of his time. See Avishai Margalit, ‘Was Wittgenstein Moon-Blind?,’ in Wittgenstein. Eine Neubewertung/Towards a Re-Evaluation [Akten des 14. Internationalen Wittgenstein-Symposiums 1989] (Wien: Hölder-Pilcher-Tempsky, 1990), p. 209 f. I shall return to this example in my discussion of moral change in Chapter 7.
See Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
See Timothy O’Connor, ‘Free Will,’ in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (2014).
For an argument against the crucial role of this belief see for example R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 7 f.
I am not claiming that we in fact have the capacity to do otherwise (understood in the libertarian sense), but that it is certain for people that human beings have that capacity. I admit that this view is disputed and that a compatibilist might argue that, while people indeed take for granted in practice the ability to do otherwise, the content of what they take for granted should be seen in the counterfactual and not the categorical sense. I thank Nigel Pleasants for pointing this out to me. This whole debate is highly complex and addressing it in detail would go beyond the scope of this book. For a good anthology of the topic of free will see Gary Watson, ed. Free Will, 2nd ed., Oxford Readings in Philosophy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
See Thomas Nagel, ‘Concealment and Exposure,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 27, no. 1 (1998): p. 6.
Jay Garfield, ‘Particularity and Principle: The Structure of Moral Knowledge,’ in Moral Particularism, ed. Brad Hooker and Margaret Little (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 198 f. Garfield is explaining and defending John McDowell’s Wittgensteinian framework. McDowell is a famous example of a moral particularist who seeks support from Wittgenstein.
See John McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason,’ in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998);
John McDowell, ‘Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following,’ in Wittgenstein: to Follow a Rule, ed. Christopher M. Leich Steven H. Holtzman (London et.al.: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). Unlike Dancy, who defends a more radical version of particularism, McDowell and Garfield ascribe a role to moral principles. Garfield, ‘Particularity and Principle: The Structure of Moral Knowledge,’ pp. 181 and 198.
Robert L. Arrington, ‘A Wittgensteinian Approach to Ethical Intuitionism,’ in Ethical Intuitionism: Re-evaluations, ed. Philip Stratton-Lake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 278 f.
See Andreas Krebs, Worauf man sich verlässt (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), p. 112.
Meredith Williams, Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 169.
Russell B. Goodman, ‘Wittgenstein and Ethics,’ Metaphilosophy 13, no. 2 (1982): p. 145.
Cora Diamond, ‘Wittgenstein, Mathematics, and Ethics: Resisting the Attractions of Realism,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans Sluga and David G. Stern (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 239.
For the influence of evolutionary forces on our basic evaluative tendencies see Sharon Street, ‘A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,’ Philosophical Studies 127 (2006): pp. 113 ff. I shall address evolutionary explanations of morality in Chapter 7.
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© 2015 Julia Hermann
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Hermann, J. (2015). Moral Certainty. In: On Moral Certainty, Justification and Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137447180_5
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