7 - Pathetic Ethics

Summary

The battle for territory between subjectivist and objectivist ideologies is ultimately global war: truth itself is under siege. One theater in which the fighting has been elegantly fierce is ethics. But it is not always clear for whom or what the troops are fighting. If your flag is just realism, for example, you could be Swiss about the engagement. But realists are reasonably suspicious of the antirealist tendencies of subjectivism (however this is ultimately defined) – it introduces a significant discontinuity between ethics and, for example, physics (which can be taken as paradigmatically real). A different realist may worry rather that objectivity in ethics will commit us to “queer” properties and lead ultimately to an error theory or to eliminativism. So realists enter the fray, on either side.

So-called sensibility theories seek to negotiate a cease-fire. They grow with the thought that ethics must have something important to do with agents and their sensibilities. And they develop on analogy with views of secondary qualities, proposing a variety of analytic connections between moral properties and subjective states. What the proposals have in common is that in them the instantiation of ethical properties is viewed as not entirely independent of human psychological reactions. Still, such instantiation, when it occurs, is there to be cognized. There is nothing queer about ethical properties: they are intelligibly rooted in ethical thought or feeling. An ethical reaction, however, is not itself merely the expression of preference or the issuance of an imperative.