Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 5)

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John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part V, Error Theory

David Baggett

The second expressivist concession is made by the error theory of J. L. Mackie. Hare says that although the prescriptivist is right to stress the prescriptivity of value language, he is wrong about what ordinary people mean when they use the value terms. Mackie’s view is that ordinary value judgment does not merely claim to be “objective” in a Kantian sense; it also claims to pick out features that are parts of the fabric of the world, and are there independently of us. This is the second concession. But he goes on to argue that nothing can be both prescriptive and objective in this sense at the same time. This is why his theory is an error theory.

The reason why we fall into this error is that we project or objectify. As Hume says, the mind spreads itself on external objects. Mackie says that we have the experience of desiring things, and calling “good” what satisfies the desires. But we reach the notion of something being objectively good, or having intrinsic value, by reversing the direction of dependence here, by making the desire depend on the goodness, instead of the goodness on the desire.

Mackie thinks the idea of objective prescriptivity did make sense when people believed in a divine lawgiver, who both existed independently of us and gave us authoritative commands. But this belief has now faded out, and the idea of objective prescriptivity deserves to fade with it. Whereas Mackie rejects objective prescriptivity, Hare makes it the center of his view.

Mackie gives two main arguments why nothing can be both prescriptive and objective in his sense at the same time. The first is the argument from relativity, that people’s moral beliefs are just too different from each other for us to think they have a single source in some objective good. The second argument is that objective prescriptivity makes values into a very odd kind of entity. Mackie finds such things metaphysically peculiar. Plato’s Form of the Good both tells the person who knows it what to do and makes him do it. What is mysterious is not so much that the good authoritatively tells a person what to do, or that it causally makes a person do something, but it is the conjunction of these two powers in a single item that mystifies him. How can the telling and the making (overriding motive) go together in this way?

Hare proposes that we lose the sense of strangeness Mackie felt if we separate the two features of “objective prescriptivity” he combined together. Hare thinks both features (the telling and the making) operate in a value judgment, but at different moments. And this will enable him to mark out a middle ground between expressivism and realism. On this middle ground we can say, first, that there is a “magnetic” or “repulsive force” attaching to things that is itself part of the fabric of the world (this is Mackie’s making). We are given motivation by certain features of what we experience. By “motivation” Hare means desire and concern and emotional attraction and repulsion in general. The search for a single simple property here to explain all such experience is probably a mistake, and has led to a bogus sense of mystery about what this property could possibly be. There may be many qualitatively different complexes of “magnetic” or “repulsive” properties in the thing and different qualities of response in us.

Value judgment expresses, on Hare’s view, not just an affective response, but separately the element that he calls endorsement (Mackie’s telling). To judge something good is not just to report the magnetic force, but to judge that the thing deserves to have that effect on us. We are deliberately submitting to what we are claiming as authoritative. Endorsement is an autonomous submission.

A good analogy here is Kant’s remark that we should recognize our duties as God’s commands. Submission to God’s commands can be autonomous if God’s authority is seen to make possible a kingdom of ends in which all members are respected as ends in themselves. We can acknowledge autonomously the force of some value recognized as external to us.

Murdoch’s postulation of a magnetic center is germane here. To endorse a response to some felt attraction is to acknowledge a consistency between this magnetic force and the force of the Good as a whole. Endorsement is expressed most clearly in the judgment that the emotion or desire fits the situation that occasioned it (which distinguishes endorsement from the way those in the Milgram experiments were in the grip of a norm without full-fledged endorsement). An agent can endorse or withhold endorsement at different stages of reflective distance form her initial affective response.

Prescriptive realism is like the other forms of expressivism in that it insists on the prescriptive character of moral judgment. Standardly I am, in making such a judgment about an action, telling myself to do something, and expressing my will. But the view is also realist, in that it holds there is a pull from outside me that I acknowledge in such a judgment. Most of the realists Hare refers to in this chapter deny themselves this middle ground, embracing a more rigid dichotomy between cognitivism and noncognitivism. As Hare sees it, such a dichotomy is arbitrary.

 Part 4

Part 6

Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 4)

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John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part IV, Humble Platonism

David Baggett

In this section, Hare discusses the first concession on the realist side: that of Iris Murdoch, a Platonist about ethics who moves some distance from Moore. The concession is that human beings are by nature selfish. Hare calls this “the first realist concession.” It’s a concession to subjectivity in that she recognizes that accurate moral perception needs obedience, a selfless attention, a pure heart, but a root inclination of ours is to favor ourselves unjustly. She is a Platonist about value, but with an Augustinian rather than a Platonist view of the heart.

Murdoch refers to the “fat relentless ego,” which corrupts our nature at its root. It means that our access to the good is always precarious and incomplete, and we are always fatally prone to self-deception. It also motivates her central objection to prescriptivism, which is that if the will is corrupt in this way, then it can’t be the creative source of the good.

She reads Kant in a way with which Hare disagrees. But as she sees it, Kant has abolished God and made man God in His stead. Murdoch sets up a contrast between pride and humility. The existentialists and Anglo-Saxon heirs of Kant (such as Sartre and R. M. Hare in England) make the human will the creator of value, which was previously seen as inscribed in the heavens. Murdoch thinks this is merely a surrender to self-importance.

What we need to recover, she says, is the sense of value as a magnetic source outside our wills, to which our wills respond if we are disciplined in virtue and especially in the virtue of humility. There’s a freedom that comes from humility involving selfless respect for reality. An example for Murdoch, as for Moore, is the contemplation of something beautiful, which can have the effect of “unselfing” the contemplator, so that she attends entirely to the object.

The Good, Murdoch says, unifies our fragmentary experiences of value into a whole that transcends us. It is a “magnetic center,” to which we feel the attraction but which we never reach.

An aspect of Murdoch’s view that’s hard to square with her talk of a “magnetic center” is that she holds that human life has no external point or telos. She thinks Christianity panders to us by claiming to give us a guarantee that the good will in the end prevail. But the effect of her denial is to make the Good completely inert, contrary to Plato, for whom the human world is neither aimless nor self-contained. The Forms for him, and especially the Form of the Good, have a causal role as well as an epistemological one.

Aristotle is not wrong to say that we do naturally pursue such things as power and prestige, but he is wrong to argue that because we naturally pursue them they are good. If we try to argue to the character of the good from the character of our emotions and desires, we are likely to fall into this danger that Murdoch identifies as mistaking the fire for the sun, or mistaking self-scrutiny for the discovery of goodness.

Murdoch says that humans are by nature selfish, and she therefore holds that our evaluative knowledge is precarious and incomplete. For Murdoch, the process of apprehension is one of lifelong obedience, mortification, and self-discipline. The reason this is needed is our tendency to self-indulgence, and the attendant corruption of even our reflective processes by self-gratifying fantasies.

But neither Kant nor the prescriptivists are creative anti-realists in the way Muroch proposes, Hare claims. Prescriptivism, he thinks, is more correctly seen as an additional reason for the humility Murdoch extols. Our evaluations involve the experience of the magnetic force Murdoch describes, and then an endorsement of this response. Recall how Moore distinguished between something cognitive, something noncognitive (like an emotion), and separately from both of these, the judging that a thing is good.

Hare thinks this is essentially right, though he supplements it with Robert Roberts’ account of emotion understood as a concern-based construal, a “seeing-as.” To see something as bad requires caring about what’s at stake. So there’s the seeing-as, the caring, plus the judgment that endorses them. Without the endorsement, emotion is not what Hare calls a full-blooded value judgment.

Returning to Murdoch’s humility, separating the construal, the desire, and the endorsement enables us to see how expressivism can give us an additional reason for humility. Because of our selfishness, the construals and desires present in emotion are biased towards the self. But value judgment according to the expressivist also requires endorsement, and our selfishness will also incline us to endorse what is not impartially good. The central expressivist point is that to make a value judgment is not merely to respond to something out there in the world, but to endorse or deliberately to withhold endorsement from such a response. What we are inclined to endorse will depend on our fundamental reflective loyalties.

Worth noting is that in his review of Hare’s book, Thomas Williams thinks that, though moral realism is a position in moral ontology, Hare’s account of moral expressivism is (potentially) a position in moral semantics, psychology, or epistemology, so they’re not really in the same domain of question. Williams thinks the “concessions” Hare discusses involve further confusion between questions of different types. So the whole framework of the discussion, Williams argues, is vitiated from the outset by Hare’s failure to keep distinct kinds of question separate. And, inevitably, the story of the particular “concessions” that each side is said to have made to the other involves further confusion between questions of different types.

One such confusion, Williams thinks, can be seen in Hare’s discussion of this “first realist concession”: Iris Murdoch's concession that human beings are by nature selfish. Contra Hare, Williams asserts that it is no more a concession to subjectivity about morals to say that our moral perception might be obscured by perverse desire than it is a concession to subjectivity about astronomy to say that our perception of the moon might be obscured by clouds. The ontological question is one thing; the epistemological question is quite another.

I suppose I read Hare’s concessive point as an effort to texture the discussion by pointing to elements of both ontology and epistemology, all of which are needed for a more robust analysis. Likewise in Hare’s problematizing of Murdoch’s reading of prescriptivism and Kant.

Part 3

Part 5

Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 3)

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John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part III, Prescriptivism

David Baggett

John Hare introduces prescriptivism as the first concession on the expressivist side of things. The representative discussed is John’s father R. M. Hare (RMH), a longtime professor at Oxford. RMH’s prescriptivism preserves the emotivist distinction between moral judgment and statement or assertion, but he insists that this distinction is consistent with the objectivity of moral judgment. It was important for RMH to find a way of talking about morality that allowed both disputes about questions of moral value and then rational agreement about them.

His idea was to hang on to the kind of objectivity that Immanuel Kant described. The idea is that the person making the moral judgment can abstract from any partiality towards herself, by eliminating all references to individuals, including herself, from the judgment. If moral judgments, like scientific laws, are always about a type of situation, then she is not allowed in making such a judgment to make essential reference to herself.

This is what Hare calls “the first expressivist concession,” that morality is objective in this Kantian way. RMH also emphasizes that moral judgment is prescriptive, expressing the will. He observes that not all utterances that have the surface grammar of assertions are in fact to be analyzed as such. He calls “descriptivism” the mistake of being misled by the surface grammar into thinking of evaluative judgment as a species of assertion.

Prescriptivism is helpfully seen as a response to Moore’s claim that goodness is indefinable. He thinks Moore did not see clearly what he needed to see about the word “goodness.” Namely, we use the word “good” to commend. To commend something is always to commend it for having certain characteristics, which give us what RMH calls the “criteria” of the judgment. RMH introduced into 20th century discussion the term “supervenience” to describe the relation between commending something and the facts on which the commending relies.

Value properties supervene on non-value properties and that means that things have their value properties because they have the non-value properties they do. For example, a strawberry is good because it is sweet. But the value property is not the same as the non-value property, and ascribing the second does not entail ascribing the first.

Now, prescriptions can conflict. If two people disagree about the criteria for goodness in strawberries, they can agree that a strawberry is sweet and disagree about whether it is good. Two people can make opposite prescriptions about the same subvening base.

Moreover, prescriptivism allows for the disputes to be rational. The prescriptivist account of moral judgment requires a kind of rational screening of what we are thinking of doing. We can think of this screening as required for endorsement from a particular vantage point, what Hare calls the position of the archangel, who has complete information and complete impartiality. It’s not that we in fact occupy this position, but this is the vantage point we are trying to approximate in making moral judgments. This is how we can be rational in our moral decisions. The archangel is a model of objectivity in the sense that the prescriptivist wants to preserve it.

 Part 2

 Part 4

Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 2)

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John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part II, 1.1 (Platonism & Emotivism)

David Baggett

The first chapter of John Hare’s God’s Call is entitled “Moral Realism,” and here Hare wishes to present an account of the twentieth-century history of the debate within the Anglo-American philosophy between moral realists and moral expressivists. Moral realists emphasize the reality of value properties such as moral goodness, a reality which is in some sense independent of our attempts at evaluation. (Hare’s focus in the chapter will be on values more broadly and not moral values in particular.) Moral expressivists emphasize the role of moral (or value) judgment in expressing the will or emotion or desire. He will end up with a kind of merger of the two approaches.

Hare construes the debate as a whole in terms of a structure in which both sides have made progressive concessions until there’s a synthesis of sorts. That point of merger is Hare’s own position of “prescriptive realism,” a view that preserves, he claims, the surviving merits on both sides. He argues that we will also have a position that will help us understand God’s role in human morality.

The least concessive realist option is Platonism, so Hare begins with G. E. Moore’s 1903 Principia Ethica. Intrinsic goodness is, Moore thinks, a real property of things, even though it does not exist in time and is not the object of sense perceptions. Moore aligns himself with Plato. Goodness is objective, in the sense that it is there independently of us (though not in space and time).

Moore thinks his predecessors have all committed the “naturalistic fallacy” of trying to define this value property by identifying it with a non-evaluative property. But whatever non-evaluative property we try to say goodness is identical to, we will find that it remains an open question whether that property is in fact good—whether the property in question is natural or supernatural. If the questions are different (one open, one closed), then the two properties can’t be the same. Intrinsic goodness, Moore says, is a simple non-natural property and indefinable. To say that it is non-natural is to distinguish it both from natural properties (like producing pleasure) and supernatural ones (like being commanded by God).

How can humans have access to non-natural properties? Moore thinks we can know what is good by a special form of cognition, which he calls “intuition.” Access is not based on an inference or argument, but it is self-evident (though we can still get it wrong, just as with sense perception). Moore thinks that the way to determine what things have positive value intrinsically is to consider what things are such that, if they existed by themselves, in absolute isolation, we should yet judge their existence to be good. He thought the most valuable things are certain states of consciousness like the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects.

Moore thinks that usually our wills join together organically the cognition or intuition of goodness and something non-cognitive like a desire. Besides the cognition and emotion, there’s also the judgment of taste—that something deserves to cause the emotion.

The least concessive expressivist position is that of A. J. Ayer’s 1936 Language, Truth, and Logic. Ayer starts from a logical positivist criterion for meaningful statements, which entails that ethical statements are not meaningful, a view Hare obviously rejects. To get at what he thinks we are doing in making ethical judgments, Ayer focuses on the non-cognitive ingredient in evaluation that Moore identified. Ethical judgments merely serve to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker. The function of the ethical words is merely “emotive,” meaning that they are used to express feeling about certain objects, not to make any assertion about them.

Ayer says this account is a kind of subjectivism. It is not the kind of subjectivist view that sees moral judgments are reports of our feelings, but as expressions of our feelings. Ayer departs from Moore in having to admit that we don’t really disagree about questions of value. On Ayer’s view of moral judgment, “Eating people is bad” and “Eating people is good” do not express propositions at all, and therefore can’t express inconsistent propositions. The most Ayer can say is that when we think we are disputing questions of value, we are actually disputing about the non-evaluative facts of the case that lie behind our attitudes.

 Part 1

Part 3