Introduction
While normative ethics asks questions such as “is animal testing morally acceptable” or “is it okay to steal in order to help a family member”, the meta-ethicist climbs a ladder and watches the ethicist from above. asking questions such as “what is it to be morally acceptable?” and “how can we have knowledge of what morality is?”. In other words, the meta-ethicist is concerned with second order questions about morality that form the foundations upon which normative ethical questions are answered (Crisman, 2017; McPherson and Plunkett, 2018, pg 2; Fisher, 2011, pg 3). This includes questions such as:
Are moral properties real?
How do we access knowledge about moral properties?
What is the meaning of the word “moral”?
These metaethical discussions then inform our decision on whether animal testing, or stealing is considered acceptable. To clarify with an example: if it is decided that moral properties are real and natural properties, it can be concluded that animal testing is morally unacceptable because our empirical methods show that animals perceive pain in a similar way to humans. If moral properties were classified in some other way, the normative conclusion would then also differ.
Metaethical standpoints are largely grouped into 3 (sometimes 4) categories: moral ontology, moral semantics, and moral epistemology, with the addition of moral psychology in some places (McPherson and Plunkett, 2018, pg 3; Fisher, 2011, pg 3). Each of these subdisciplines play an important role in understanding the nature of morality, and the discussions must be clearly distinguished. Often, the downfall of a moral philosopher is to have a metaethical standpoint that is coherent from an ontological perspective, but whose epistemological conclusions cannot be accepted. One of the causes of this is a confusion as to the role or remit of each subdiscipline, as well as the relationships between them. Thus, it is the purpose of this paper to elucidate the aforementioned remit of each subdiscipline, with reference to the main positions in the field.
Moral Ontology
Logically, an enquiry of a subject begins with an understanding of ‘what’ the subject is. In other words, the ontology or ‘being’ of that subject. Until it is not understood what the subject matter is, no questions can be asked of it; it cannot be used as a predicate for a sentence about that subject matter. For example, the question “how do we gain access to knowledge of what is moral” logically cannot be asked until the existence of “morality” itself has been established, as well as its nature.
Ascertaining the nature of the existence of an entity is no easy task, particularly one that has gained much traction in philosophical thought for hundreds of years. To even begin to do so assumes a minimal realist position, consisting of 3 main premises:
- Moral sentences are representative of the world around them.
- The predicates used in moral sentences refer to properties that are representative of the world around them. E.g. “honesty is good” refers to the existence of some property that is instantiated by honesty.
- At least some of these sentences are true. (van Roojen, 2015, pg. 14)
This minimal realist position holds few illusions of grandeur; it does not assume that moral properties exist outside of the mind of the human (the objectivity clause), nor that these moral properties are epistemically accessible, nor that they are natural properties, as some realists do (Ibid; Katz, 2018). It simply assumes the existence of something that can be talked about in some meaningful way, and is described as ‘moral’ or ‘good’. This gives the term “property” a very wide berth, including natural, non-natural, epistemically accessible, epistemically inaccessible, supernatural, pragmatic, socially constructed, mind dependent, and… properties. The main categories and subcategories of properties will be discussed to survey the field and its main camps.
Natural Properties
Natural properties are those understood to be verifiable by scientific methods. A keen eye will notice the strangeness of a ontological category that defined by its epistemological method of enquiry: this points to the close relationship between moral ontology and epistemology, but has also been the catalyst for the redefinition of ‘natural’ properties; see Ridge (2019) for an extensive review. In any case, this view of morality is attractive to those who want to explain the world in quantifiable and measurable terms, and believe the world to be explainable in scientific terms.
Often, Aristotelian ethics is understood to be based on natural properties, particularly the neo-Aristotelian (Crisman, 2017, pg 69; Kristjansson, 2015, pg 24). In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle talks about the function of an existent being its ultimate goal (Nicomachean Ethics 1097b), and similarly, a human must accrue virtues that are constitutive of its function (Yu, 2001, pg 117), and thus, the neo-Aristotelian assumes the role of empirically determining the nature of the human, their function and thus the moral actions that they must undertake to realise their function. A strong case can be made against this naturalist reading of Aristotelian ethics from Aristotle’s own texts, including an eloquent piece by Berryman (2019).
Other schools of thought that fall under naturalist morality can include the constructivist or instrumentalist readings of morality, where “good” is better understood as “good for”; i.e. moral actions such as honesty or justice have the property of being “good for” achieving a certain goal. Cristine Korsgaard is a frontrunner in this field, and although is a self-proclaimed and vocal irrealist (Korsgaard, 2009), many philosophers believe she does not meet all the conditions for non-realism (as per minimal realism) and is better labelled as a procedural realist (Bagnoli, 2011). Having herself rejected realism for an inadequate motivational capacity (i.e. the sentence “lying is bad” is not sufficiently motivating to prevent the agent from lying), she then looks towards morality being a series of pragmatic solutions for day to day problems (Ibid). This is arguably a realist position, as in this case, ‘goodness’ has the property of being a ‘solution’ or ‘useful act’ that is representative of the world around us. And with pragmatism resting on solutions that ‘work’ in day to day life, this is arguably a naturalist realist position.
On the other hand, Mutahhari, although also advocating for a constructivist conception of morality based on the works of his teacher, Muhammad Hossein Tabattabai, is not necessarily a naturalist as his argument rests on the existence of the soul (Mutahhari, 1981). In other words, moral or good actions are those that lead to a perfection of the soul. If those perfections can be perceived by natural methods (as the neo-Aristotelian suggests) then this form of constructivism falls under a natural moral ontology. However, typically Islamic philosophers view the soul as a metaphysical being that, although is linked to the body and supervenes on its behaviours, knowledge of it cannot be accessed naturally.
Finally, there are those who see morality as a social construct; i.e., those things that are moral are those that keep society functioning and prevent anarchy. To ground this in some examples, this would include morals such as respect, justic and tolerance. Arguably, this conception of moral properties would cause this camp to fall under the constructivist camp – seeing “good” as “good for” society.
Supernatural Properties
There is a subset of philosophers who take the view that morality and goodness are supernatural properties – in other words, created and dictated by God. In the Muslim world, this is held by the Ash’arite camp out of deference to God’s Ultimate Power and Will (Javadi, 2004), and in the Christian world, by famous thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and Philip Quinn. The main motivations behind this school is the preservation of God’s attributes; to see morality as independent of God’s creation of them is seen as an insult to His Grandeur and unlimited Power.
An important note here, which exemplifies the importance of the present work in separating the 3 subdisciplines, is that DCT also has epistemological and semantic formulations that don’t necessarily fall into the category of morality being a supernatural ontological property. For example, an epistemological formulation of DCT says that knowledge of morality is only possible through God’s command (Simkani, 2012, pg 72) but is silent on whether the property of goodness is the property of being God’s command or some other natural or nonnatural property. Thus, it is important to distinguish the various formulations for DCT and categorise them under moral ontology, epistemology or semantics to avoid unsound conclusions.
Non-Natural Properties
The strongest claim for moral properties being non-natural properties is G E Moore (1903)’s famous attack on the naturalists (which can also be applied to those that consider moral facts as supernatural facts (Verbeek, 2011)). Moore proposes that any conceptualisation – natural or supernatural – that we have of ‘goodness’ is inadequate, as goodness is a simple unanalysable property, and any predication of ‘good’ is attributing goodness to that subject rather than defining what goodness is. To give an example, if ‘goodness’ was attributed to ‘what brings pleasure’, this formulation would always leave the agent questioning ‘why is the bringing about of pleasure, good?’ This means that a) ‘goodness’ cannot really be defined as ‘what brings pleasure’ otherwise there would be no need to ask why bringing pleasure is ‘good’ and b) that any definition only opens another question about ‘goodness’ to be answered by another definition. This is known as the Open Question Argument and leads one to the conclusion that the idea that ‘good’ is a natural (or supernatural) property leads to an endless regress of asking ‘why is property X good?’
Although not without its own criticism (see van Roojen, pg 28; Verbeek, 2011; Katz, 2018), Moore’s argument is for sui generis moral properties – that moral properties are so unalike any other types of properties that they cannot be equated and so must be a unique type of property. The idea of moral properties being non-natural properties is a bitter pill for the positivist to swallow, as it brings about questions of the epistemology of such properties i.e. if they are not empirically accessible, how do we come to know of them? Thus, this topic will be further discussed in the section on moral epistemology; although this leaves the precise ontological nature of non-natural properties ambiguous, it cannot be understood without the corresponding epistemological discussion.
Part 1 Conclusion
The present work tries to demonstrate the importance of moral ontology, a key subdiscipline in meta-ethics. To enter into this ontological discussion, one must assume a minimal realist position as earlier discussed. Until one has understood the nature of the existence of moral properties, one cannot ascertain where to take knowledge of those moral facts from (moral epistemology) or speak about them in day to day conversation (moral semantics).
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