47

PROBLEMS FOR FICTIONALISTMORAL RELATIVISM I believe that this Fictionalist view of morality captures well what many have wanted to mean by the phrase ‘‘relativism about morality.’’ However, no sooner is it stated than it begins to come apart. Oneproblemseemsimmediate.Thejudgment: It would be wrong of Paul tosteal Mark’s car seems appropriately normative; but the judgment: In relation to moral code M, it would be wrong of Paul to steal Mark’s car seems just to be a logical remark about the relation between two sets of propositions. It seems to have no normative impact whatsoever: even someone who was in no way motivated to avoid stealing Mark’s car could agree with the claim that, in relation to a given moral code, it would be wrong of Paul to steal Mark’s car. So, right away, there is a difficulty seeing how we could adopt the relativist’s recommendation in this case without this being tantamount to our giving up onmoraljudgmentsaltogether, rather than merely relativizing them.⁶ It might be thought that the relativist has an easy fix to this objection. After all, it’s part of his story that although there are many possible moral codes, a particular person will accept a particular one of these while rejecting all the others. It also seems plausible that when someone makes one of the relativist’s relational judgments involving a code that he accepts, that judgment will have a special normative pull on him. Thus, the relativist would appear well-advised to revise his view to bring this acceptance of particular moral codes into the picture. He should recommendthatthereplacing proposition be not: In relation to moral code M, it would be wrong of Paul to steal Mark’s car ⁶ J. J. Thomson makes a similar point in her response to Harman.Whatis Relativism? but, rather, 25 (17) In relation to moral code M, which I, the speaker, accept, it would be wrong of Paul to steal Mark’s car. How effective is this modification in dealing with the bruited objection? It’s not clear. Whereas: It would be wrong of Paul tosteal Mark’s car is clearly normative, I believe that it would be wrong of Paul to steal Mark’s car which is, in effect, what (17) states, looks to be just a description of one’s own mental states. But whatever one thinks of the effectiveness of this patch, the deeper question is whether we are able to make sense of a thinker’s endorsing aparticular moral code, once he has accepted the guiding thought behind moral relativism. To see the problem here, let us turn our attention to the particular moral judgment: It would be wrong of Paul tosteal Mark’s car that we are supposed to relativize to moral codes. There are no absolute facts about moral prohibition or permission, we have said, so all statements of this formare condemnedtountruth. If we are tohang ontomoraldiscourse, we must reform it so that we talk not about these nonexistent absolute facts but only about the code-related relational facts. Now, there are, of course, two ways for a statement to be untrue. On the one hand, a statement may be untrue because it is false; and, on the other, it may be untrue because the proposition it expresses is somehow incomplete, so that it doesn’t specify a fully evaluable truth-condition. Let us call the first option an Error Theory about the target utterance and the second an Incompleteness Claim about it. Now, it should be fairly clear that our Fictionalist relativism about morality will work best on an Error Theory of moral utterances and not so well with an Incompleteness Claim about them. For if we are recommending that we stop judging ‘‘x is morally prohibited’’ but only make judgments of the form: Mentails that x is morally prohibited wecannotverywell bethinkingof: ‘‘x is morally prohibited’’ as expressing an incomplete, non-truth-evaluable proposition: it is not possible, I take it, for an incomplete proposition like:26 Tomistaller than … Paul Boghossian to be entailed by a set of propositions. In and of itself, though, I do not regard the commitment to an Error Theory to be a problem. As I have already indicated, I don’t regard Error Theories as intrinsically implausible. And, given a choice between an Error Theory and a Non-Factualism about a particular sentence, there is, I believe, strong reason to prefer the Error Theory, all other things being equal. The view that speakers who have been trying to make absolutist claims about motion, mass or morality, and who have developed an internally disciplined discourse about these subject matters, have nevertheless not succeeded in so much as making a complete claim is not particularly plausible. It would be far more plausible to say that they had succeeded in making such claims, but that those claims have turned out to be false in certain systematic ways. Unfortunately, though, an Error Theory of moral discourse turns out to be a problematic commitmentforFictionalist relativism in a variety of different ways. Tobeginwith,if wesay that thetarget judgments, like: It would be wrong of Paul tosteal Mark’s car are false, we will have to say that the propositions which make up the code to which this judgment is to be relativized are also false, for these are very general propositions of much the same type. Whereas an ordinary moral judgment will speak about the permissibility of stealing some particular person’s particular item of personal property, a code will speak much more generally about the permissibility of damaging anyone’s possessions. But if there are no absolute facts with which to confirm particular moral judgments, there won’t be any general moral facts with whichtoconfirmthesemoregeneralmoraljudgments. Now, however, a serious puzzle emerges for the moral relativist. Our only idea, you may recall, about how to preserve the normative character of moral judgments, on a relativist view of them, involves giving a central place to our acceptance of moral codes. But how could we be expected both to accept the relativist’s claim that the target judgments are false, which clearly implies that the propositions constituting the code are also false, and to continue accepting those codes in the way required to makesense ofthe relativist’s picture? Moral codes, we have said, are composed of general moral propositions. To accept such propositions is, presumably, to believe them and act on their basis. However, once we have come to agree with the relativist that there are no absolute moral facts, we seem committed to concluding that the propositions that make up the codes are false as well. How, at that point, are we supposed to continue believing them? How does one continue to believe a proposition that one believes to be false? Some may be tempted at this point to invoke a distinction advocated by constructive empiricists, between acceptance and belief. To believe a proposition,Whatis Relativism? 27 they may say, is to hold it to be true. But to accept it need not require that. One can accept a proposition in the sense of being willing to use it as a premiss in one’s reasoning without taking it to be true.⁷ Perhaps the relativist can help himself to this distinction, insisting that we can go on accepting codes even while we disbelieve what they say. I, myself, am quite suspicious of the cogency of this distinction. But whatever its general merits, it seems to me that a puzzle would remain even if we were allowed full use of it. The puzzle would be to explain how any particular code could continue to have any special normative authority over us, once we have come to think of all the codes as uniformly false. How could we be motivated to follow one set of precepts as opposed to another, when we have come to think of all of them as uniformly false? Of course, one remedy would be to allow that some propositions in the codes can be true. But that would not help rescue moral relativism because it would involve acknowledging the existence of some absolute moral truths and that is precisely what the relativist needs to deny. But even if we were to put this powerful point to one side, the relativist faces a further difficulty avoiding commitment to the existence of some absolute moral truths, on a Fictionalist picture. Recall that we are operating with the assumption that ordinary moral judgments express complete truth-evaluable propositions that are false, and that, as a result, so too are the propositions which make up the moral codes. But how could all codes be equally false? Suppose we have one code, M1, whichsays: M1:Slavery is prohibited. Andanothermoralcode,M2,whichsays: M2:Slavery is permitted. If we take theview that M1isfalse, doesn’t that require us to say that M2 is true? At least the way the matter is usually taught, it is an analytic truth about moral prohibitions that if it is false to say that x is morally prohibited then it must be true to say that not-x is morally permitted. But the relativist about morality no more wishes to say that there are absolute facts about moral permission than he wishes to say that there are absolute facts about moral prohibitions. And so, once again, a commitment to the falsity of one absolute moral proposition seems to commitustothetruthofsomeotherabsolute moral proposition. Now, I suppose that there have been philosophers who have denied that prohibition and permission are duals of each other in this sense. But it would be odd to think that whether a relativistic view of morality is so much as available turns on whether this widely believed conceptual claim is rejected. It would be better if ⁷ See Bastian C. van Fraassen, The Scientific Image (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).28 Paul Boghossian we could find a conception of relativism which did not depend on something so tendentious.