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Contributors
Sarah Buss is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. She is interested in issues at the intersection of the philosophy of action and ethics.
Garrett Cullity is Hughes Professor of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide. He is the author of The Moral Demands of Affluence (2004) and Concern, Respect and Cooperation (2018), and a co-editor (with Berys Gaut) of Ethics and Practical Reason (1997).
Alison Hills is a Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University and Fellow and Tutor at St John’s College. Her recent research has focused on the intersection between ethics and epistemology. Her book, The Beloved Self, was published by Oxford University Press in 2010.
Karen Jones is Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne. She has written extensively on trust, what it is, and when it is justified. She also writes on rationality and the emotions. Much of her work is from a feminist perspective.
Tristram McPherson (Ohio State) works on philosophical questions in and about ethics, including the semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology of normative realism, methodological and metaphilosophical questions about ethics, and ethical questions that arise in our relations to animals, food, and climate change.
Julia Markovits is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. She has written about questions concerning the nature of moral reasons and about moral praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. Her book, Moral Reason, which develops an internalist, Kant-inspired argument for universal moral reasons, was published by Oxford University Press in 2014.
Joshua May is Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His book Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind (Oxford University Press) draws on empirical research to show that ordinary ethical thought and motivation are fundamentally rational activities.
Ram Neta is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he has taught since 2002. He has published dozens of articles, primarily in epistemology. He is primarily interested in understanding the nature of rationality, and its relation to knowledge.
Karl Schafer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine and currently co-edits Hume Studies. He works primarily on ethics, epistemology, and the history of modern philosophy (especially Hume and Kant).
François Schroeter is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. His work focuses on metaethics and moral psychology.
Laura Schroeter is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses primarily on concepts, reference, two-dimensional semantics, and metaethics.
Michael Smith is McCosh Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, and Distinguished Visiting Focus Professor in the Focus Program on Belief, Value, and Mind at Monash University’s Department of Philosophy. He is the author of The Moral Problem and Ethics and the A Priori, and he is the co-author with Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit of Mind, Morality, and Explanation.
Nicholas Southwood is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. He works primarily in moral and political philosophy and is author of Contractualism and the Foundations of Morality (Oxford University Press, 2010) and co-author of Explaining Norms (Oxford University Press, 2013). His current research investigates the nature and proper role of feasibility in politics.
Mark van Roojen is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska— Lincoln. He has relatively broad philosophical interests but writes mostly about metaethics and normative ethics.
Acknowledgments
Our work on this project was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council (DP110102445). Thanks to the participants in workshops at Melbourne, Princeton, and Fribourg for contributing to the development of the rationalist positions explored in this volume. Special thanks to Paul-George Arnaud for editorial assistance, to Tristram McPherson for practical, philosophical, and editorial advice throughout the project, and to Michael Smith, whose work on moral rationalism inspired this project and whose participation made it possible.
1 Introduction
François Schroeter, Karen Jones, and Laura Schroeter
Traditionally, moral rationalists take reason and rationality to be the key elements in an explanation of the nature of morality, moral judgment, and moral knowledge. Whereas sentimentalists emphasize the emotions in an account of morality and of our cognitive access to it, rationalists take the intellectual and reflective capacities of the mind, rather than feelings, to be the key to morality. Rationalism has been a major approach to morality throughout the history of philosophy (Plato, the British rationalists, Kant) and it continues to exert a powerful influence over contemporary ethical debates. Leading ethical theorists like Michael Smith (1994, 2004), Christine Korsgaard (1996), T. M. Scanlon (1998), and Derek Parfit (2011)—to name just a few—see their own work as contributing to this tradition.
Despite its continued popularity, moral rationalism faces serious challenges. A growing contingent of philosophers endorse a naturalistic approach to philosophy, which seems prima facie to conflict with core commitments of moral rationalism. Naturalists insist that if normative and evaluative phenomena are real, they must ultimately be located within the natural world investigated by natural and social sciences such as biology and psychology. They also hold that a plausible account of human cognitive and motivational capacities must explain how these capacities have emerged from the less sophisticated mental capacities of our distant animal ancestors. In particular, there must be significant continuity between humans’ capacity to make moral judgments and the proto-moral patterns of behaviour in primates and other mammals (Gibbard 1990; Joyce 2006; Prinz 2007).
Moral sentimentalists—the traditional opponents of rationalists—have no problem meeting the “continuity constraint” advocated by naturalists. The emotions sentimentalists typically emphasize in their account of moral judgment (empathy, anger, disgust, etc.) play a crucial role in the regulation of pro-social behaviour among animals. However, the rationalist model of morality seems not to fit so well with naturalism. Rationalists typically endorse a form of human exceptionalism that sharply distinguishes the deliberative and reflective capacities constitutive of human rationality with the more immediate and unreflective cognitive capacities of non-human animals.
This focus on the exceptional nature of human reason led many rationalists to dismiss the “continuity constraint” and to give short shrift to the empirical work on the psychological connections between moral emotions and moral judgment. In general, rationalists have neglected the project of situating moral judgments and moral properties within a naturalistic picture of the world. Indeed, in recent years many selfprofessed advocates of rationalist themes have come to explicitly endorse forms of non-naturalism in the ethical domain (Scanlon 1998, 2014; Shafer-Landau 2003; FitzPatrick 2008; Enoch 2011; Parfit 2011).
The rise of philosophical naturalism and new empirical work on the role of emotions in moral judgment provide an exciting opportunity for moral rationalists to update their approach and explore new avenues for defending their claims. The main aim of this volume is to investigate the prospects for moral rationalism in this context and to explore new forms of rationalism, forms that sit more comfortably with naturalism than traditional versions of moral rationalism.
1. Four Core Rationalist Theses
Moral rationalists and their opponents often assume that rationalism is a familiar and well-defined philosophical position. But in fact “rationalism” covers a number of distinct philosophical theses, each of which can be interpreted in a variety of different ways. And although it is generally assumed that the various rationalist theses form a natural, internally coherent package of views, it is far from obvious that this is true. So the first step in assessing the prospects for moral rationalism is to isolate the different theses that make up the traditional rationalist approach to the moral domain. This will facilitate the search for new and more sophisticated interpretations of core rationalist claims and new ways of packaging them that engage with the project of locating human moral capacities in the natural world.
We see the traditional rationalist approach to morality as combining four core theses:
1. The psychological thesis: reason is the source of moral judgments.
2. The metaphysical thesis: moral requirements are grounded in the deliverances of practical reason.
3. The epistemological thesis: moral requirements are knowable a priori.
4. The normative thesis: moral requirements entail valid reasons for action.
All four theses are endorsed by early modern advocates of moral rationalism such as Kant and this contingent historical fact is largely responsible for the traditional association of moral rationalism with this particular alignment of philosophical views. Kant made a host of substantive assumptions about the nature of practical reason that helped bind together these different theses into a coherent whole. In particular, his view depends on positing sharp dichotomies between the noumenal and the phenomenal realms, and between pure reason and inclination in psychology. These sharp
dichotomies are nowadays viewed with suspicion, especially among theorists who are sympathetic to naturalism. Thus, an important project for contemporary advocates of moral rationalism is finding new ways to bind these core theses into a coherent and theoretically attractive package.
In this introduction, we consider the viability of these different rationalist theses in isolation. Relying on recent developments in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology, we’ll sketch different interpretations of the core theses. The aim is not to provide a full mapping of all possible interpretations— but rather to provide a sense of the range of different interpretations of the core rationalist theses available to contemporary theorists. More tentatively, we will also try to point to ways different versions of the core theses could be recombined into attractive rationalist packages. Our hope is that this project of decomposition and recomposition can help overcome some of the theoretical myopia found in contemporary debates over moral rationalism. Taking these many faces of moral rationalism seriously, we believe, can lead to fruitful new directions in moral theorizing.
A. Psychology: Reason is the Source of Moral Judgment
In recent years, empirical study of the links between moral judgment and moral emotions purports to challenge moral rationalism and to provide significant support for sentimentalism. For instance, neuro-imaging studies show that areas of the brain that are central to emotional responses are activated during moral judgment (Greene et al. 2001; Moll et al. 2002), psychological studies reveal correlations between the strength of moral judgments and the activation of disgust (Haidt 2001), and studies of people with affective deficits including psychopaths, autistics, and brain-damaged patients suggest that moral emotions play a crucial role in normal patterns of moral reasoning (Patrick et al. 1993; Damasio 1994; Blair et al. 2001; Dapretto et al. 2006). Taken together, this research provides empirical support for the claim that normal moral judgment is strongly correlated with certain emotional capacities and affective responses. But it’s not as clear whether the empirical evidence supports the stronger claim that there is a constitutive relation between moral judgment and the emotions posited by sentimentalists. Indeed, many philosophers have challenged any direct argument from the presence of emotional responses in normal moral reasoning to sentimentalist views of the nature of moral judgment (e.g. Jones 2006; Kennett 2006; Joyce 2008). Nevertheless, the intimate connection between moral capacities and affective capacities in normal humans revealed by this research raises important questions about the viability of the traditional rationalist approach, which treats reason as a wholly independent faculty that is entirely distinct from emotional and motivational responses. Rationalists need to rethink traditional claims about the nature and role of reason in moral judgment in the light of these empirical findings. The key question is whether there are ways of vindicating the core rationalist thesis that moral judgment is ultimately grounded in reason, while at the same time acknowledging the empirical facts about the nature of human reasoning capacities.
If we want to understand the role of reason and the emotions in moral judgment, we must get clearer about what it is to make a moral judgment. To get traction on this problem from a rationalist perspective, it can help to focus on shortcomings in leading sentimentalist accounts of moral judgment. Jesse Prinz, for instance, suggests that “to believe something is wrong in a non-deferential way is to have a sentiment of disapprobation toward it” (2007, 94). In defence of this sentimentalist reduction of a moral judgment to a simple emotional response, Prinz argues that emotions, like judgments, can attribute evaluative properties to objects and states of affairs in the world. A brute emotional response, such as your fear of a bear, attributes an evaluative property to that animal: your fear of the bear just is a judgment or representation with the content [that’s fearsome!]. The key idea, then, is that sentimentalists can appeal to the representational function of emotions to characterize moral judgments (and the moral beliefs they express) without needing to invoke the more intellectual aspects of cognition emphasized by rationalists.
Rationalists will deny that brute emotions, by themselves, have the representational properties Prinz posits (Schroeter et al. 2015). But the crucial point is that even if they do, brute emotions lack the distinctive cognitive profile essential to judgment. There is a fundamental distinction at the level of thought between representing the same and representing as the same. If you see the same individual person on two separate occasions, you may register exactly the same visual details, and thereby represent the same object twice. Even so, you may not register the individual as the same on the second occasion. Yet when you deploy a concept of that person on both occasions, seeing him as Barack Obama, say, your thoughts eo ipso present themselves to your conscious attention as about the same individual. Similarly, if you now judge that your little brother acted in a way that is morally wrong, your thought will immediately present itself as pertaining to the same topic as your next moral judgment—that stealing is morally wrong. This immediate recognition of sameness of subject matter is the mark of conceptually articulated thought. However, brute emotional responses, such as disapproval of your brother and of stealing, do not involve any such automatic recognition of sameness of subject matter.1
We can appreciate the importance of this aspect of conceptually articulated thought if we focus on logical relations like validity, consistency, and contradiction. An inference of the following form, for instance, is not logically valid even if we assume that the two expressions “morally right” and “maximizes utility” are co-referential:
1. Keeping this promise maximizes utility.
2. So keeping this promise is morally right.
1 On the role of concepts as keeping track of sameness of topic, see for instance: Perry 1980; Kaplan 1990; Millikan 1994, 2000: ch. 9; Fine 2007. See also Schroeter and Schroeter 2014 for a discussion of this tracking role in the case of normative concepts.
This inference isn’t valid because, from the perspective of the thinker, the two topics are not automatically presented as the same: it seems possible that what is morally right isn’t what maximizes utility. Logical relations depend on more than co-reference: they also depend on the conceptual structure of the propositions entertained. Automatic subjective appearance of sameness of topic is the hallmark of when the same concept is redeployed in thought. Conceptual structure is thus central to both moral judgment and practical reason, understood as involving, inter alia, a capacity to discern and respect logical relations among thoughts.
Given that moral judgments deploy moral concepts, getting clearer about what it is to make a moral judgment means getting clearer about moral concepts. Here, the important distinction between conceptual competence and reference can help reveal new strategies for moral rationalism (Peacocke 1992).2 Competence conditions specify necessary and sufficient conditions for an individual to possess a particular concept. Conceptual competence, moreover, is a precondition for competence with the public word meanings that express the concept. An account of competence conditions for moral concepts is crucial to specifying the psychological nature of moral judgments. An individual who fails to satisfy the competence conditions for moral concepts cannot make a moral judgment. When such a person uses moral terms, she may be making a judgment involving other, non-moral, concepts or she may fail to make any conceptually articulated judgment at all.
Sentimentalists point out that the deployment of evaluative concepts such as [danger] is typically associated with an emotional state of fear, and that fear plays a major role in the normal acquisition of the concept. But this tight correlation does not establish that the emotional state of fear is necessary for competence with the concept [danger]. A rationalist could still hold that someone who took the property of being dangerous to be the property of being likely to cause significant harm would count as fully competent with the concept expressed by “danger”, even if they had never felt any fear.
There is, however, an important complication in an account of conceptual competence. Traditionally, conceptual competence is thought of as fully determined by a subject’s current internal states, irrespective of the existence of other objects in their environment. But many theorists have argued that this approach is too restrictive. Someone could count as competent with the concept standardly expressed by “arthritis”, even if he would reject its standard dictionary definition—provided he was related in an appropriate way to our linguistic community (Burge 1979). According to anti-individualists, competence with a particular concept may depend in part on the properties of other individuals or objects in one’s environment.
2 Most theorists now agree that judgments involving moral concepts like [is morally wrong] pick out properties. For a contemporary expressivist who acknowledges the referential function of moral judgment, see Gibbard 2003. For ease of presentation, we will assume here that moral judgments are referential. However, the distinction between competence and semantic value will apply even to purely expressive accounts of the semantic values of moral concepts.
So conceptual competence is not fixed by an individual’s internal states and dispositions considered in isolation.
This means that rationalists should be cautious in drawing conclusions from intuitions that an individual can count as competent with a concept like [danger] without associating it in the normal way with fear. For a sentimentalist might argue that such an individual counts as competent with our ordinary [danger] concept only in virtue of being appropriately related to a linguistic community where the word “danger” is associated with fear. In that case, fear may still play a role in the anti-individualist competence conditions for the concept expressed by “danger”: an individual would not count as competent with the concept if no one in her community was disposed to feel fear in reaction to judging something dangerous.
The other aspect of moral judgment is its content—its distinctive moral subject matter. Specifying the reference of moral concepts (the property they attribute) is crucial for assessing the truth of judgments involving those concepts. It is important to sharply distinguish between competence conditions and reference: competence conditions are psychological states (perhaps characterized anti-individualistically) whereas reference is the (putative) features of the world those states represent.
Although competence conditions and reference belong to starkly different ontological kinds, there are, of course, important connections between them (Schroeter and Schroeter 2017). For our purposes, the key point is that factors that figure in the competence conditions need not figure in a metaphysical account of the reference, and vice versa. Consider the concept expressed by “red”. Many theorists hold that reddish phenomenal experiences play an essential role in competence with this concept: to count as fully competent with the concept, you must be disposed to apply it on the basis of reddish experiences (or defer to others in your community who do). But this claim about conceptual competence is perfectly compatible with the view that the property of redness is simply a pattern of microphysical features. Similarly, many theorists hold that to count as competent with the concept expressed by “danger”, one’s application of the concept must be appropriately connected with the emotion of fear. But this claim about conceptual competence is compatible with an analysis of the property of danger that makes no mention of fear: for example to be dangerous is simply to be likely to cause harm.
Such examples illustrate the complexity of the debate between rationalists and sentimentalists about moral judgment. Moral judgment involves the application of moral concepts and not just a simple emotional response. This means that sentimentalists can agree with rationalists that an individual can judge an act to be morally wrong without actually feeling any negative emotional response. What’s crucial to a sentimentalist account of moral judgment is the claim that the judge’s own emotions figure in the competence conditions for moral concepts and/or the truth conditions of moral claims. Traditional rationalists will deny both of these claims: emotions play no essential role in conceptual competence and moral properties do not depend on emotional responses. But there are intermediate positions available. A rationalist about individual
conceptual competence may agree with sentimentalists that competence with moral concepts involves moral emotions at the level of the whole linguistic community, while resisting sentimentalism at the level of individual competence. Alternatively, a rationalist about moral properties may accept sentimentalism at the level of conceptual competence while rejecting sentimentalism as an account of moral properties. Getting clear about the role of concepts in moral judgment opens the way for a more sophisticated debate about the role of emotions in an account of moral judgment.
B. Metaphysics:
Moral Requirements are Grounded in the Deliverances of Practical Reason
Traditional rationalists endorse a constructivist metaphysics: moral requirements are constitutively dependent on practical reason.3 Kant defends a robust version of the constructivist thesis, proposing a particularly ambitious reductionist program: he hopes to show that moral requirements are grounded in the formal principles of practical reason.
There are two obvious broad strategies for weakening Kant’s ambitious constructivist thesis, while retaining the metaphysical dependence between moral requirements and practical reason. One strategy is to weaken the grounding relation, making it a partial grounding rather than full. A second strategy is to strengthen the conception of practical reason: one could make the practical reason from which morality can be derived substantive, rather than formal (for this strategy see Scanlon 1998), or one could claim that practical reason includes affective capacities, or both. On some of these strategies, there is a real danger that the resulting form of rationalism will be so anaemic that rationalism will all but have merged with sophisticated sentimentalism. For example, in the light of empirical work showing that emotion is essential for human practical rationality (Damasio 1994; Prinz 2007), the rationalist might say that practical reason comprises both emotional and reflective capacities. But the resulting position may be a mere notational variant of versions of sentimentalism that claim what is morally right depends on both our reflective and our affective capacities (Wiggins 1987; McDowell 1998).
Contemporary rationalists need to look for strategies that avoid trivializing the rationalist/sentimentalist debate, while still taking empirical work on the contribution of emotion to practical reasoning seriously. There is conceptual space for further interesting lines of approach: hold onto the strong thesis that moral requirements are grounded in the principles of practical reason understood as reflective and not affective, but find some other role for the emotions. Emotions might be, for example, important heuristics that enable real-world practical reasoning while not playing a role in determining what is morally right. Alternatively, one could claim that moral
3 Constructivism is well explored in the metaethical literature. For an excellent overview, see Bagnoli 2016; for a recent collection of essays on the topic, see Lenman and Shemmer 2012. See Southwood (Chapter 5, this volume, fn. 1) for a discussion of alternative characterizations of metaethical constructivism.
requirements are partly constituted by the deliverances of practical reason narrowly understood, and that emotion plays an ancillary role in fine-tuning the boundaries of rightness. For example, the rationalist could claim that we need to appeal to our normal guilt responses in order to differentiate between those offenses that are important enough to count as morally wrong from those that are just too trivial. Nonetheless, the core shape of moral wrongness would depend on the deliverances of practical reason, narrowly construed: what counts as morally wrong is not simply determined by our guilt responses or even our appropriate guilt responses but by, for example, norms requiring equal treatment among persons.
Both the “partial grounding” strategy and the strategy of finding alternative nongrounding roles for the emotions can be developed in different ways, so there is much fertile terrain for the rationalist to explore here.
C. Epistemology: Moral Requirements are Knowable A Priori
According to traditional rationalism, most clearly exemplified in Kant, the claim that moral requirements are knowable a priori can be decomposed into a package of several sub-claims, including (i) the capacity for moral reasoning is innate; (ii) moral propositions can be conclusively justified a priori (i.e. independently of contingent empirical information), and (iii) moral reasoning about hypothetical cases can afford a priori knowledge of what is morally right in any possible situation. Most theorists nowadays reject a simple innateness claim like (i), which seems incompatible with a naturalistic perspective on the emergence of moral capacities. For instance, the capacity to form true moral beliefs depends on the possession of moral concepts, which agents with normal rational capacities could fail to acquire. Rejecting this simple innateness claim, however, need not undermine rationalist claims in the spirit of (ii) and (iii). Rationalists can insist that once enabling conditions like the acquisition of moral concepts are met, the subject’s reasoning capacities can yield a priori moral knowledge.
( A) Constructivism
One straightforward way to vindicate the a priori rational justification for moral verdicts is to embrace a strong form of metaphysical constructivism about the moral domain. If the property of being morally right just is the property of being endorsed by moral reasoning (under suitable idealization), then sound moral reasoning is metaphysically guaranteed to issue in true verdicts about what is morally right in all possible circumstances. On a constructivist account of moral properties, moreover, empirical information about one’s actual environment seems to play no essential role in justifying one’s moral verdicts about possible cases. One’s moral judgments about cases can be based on purely hypothetical reasoning: one need not know that trolley cases actually exist to know which actions would be morally right in those circumstances. If the constructivist holds that the moral facts about trolley cases are entirely determined by ideal reflective verdicts about hypothetical cases (described in sufficient detail), verdicts about such cases can be conclusively justified solely on the basis of
one’s competence with moral concepts and one’s responsible exercise of moral reasoning capacities. So metaphysical constructivism can vindicate both (ii) and (iii).4
(b) The conceptual approach
One important recent development of the rationalist paradigm exploits a new conceptual strategy for making a priori moral knowledge compatible with metaethical realism—a view which, unlike constructivism, takes moral facts to be mind-independent (Jackson 1998; Peacocke 2004). The strategy posits a tight link between conceptual competence and reference determination. The first element of this strategy is a conceptual-role theory of conceptual competence: to count as (fully, non-deferentially) competent with a particular moral concept a subject’s conceptual dispositions must conform to a particular core pattern of attitudes and inferential dispositions that constitutes one’s implicit conception of the reference. The second aspect of the strategy is an account of reference determination: reference of a concept (if any) must vindicate the pattern of attitudes and dispositions that figures in the competence conditions. Together, these two views entail that conceptually competent thinkers have an implicit conception that is guaranteed to correctly specify the reference of their concept. It is a short step from there to the claim that simply making one’s implicit conception explicit via reflection on hypothetical cases is guaranteed to yield a true conceptual analysis that uniquely specifies the moral properties picked out by one’s moral concepts. Such analysis yields judgments that are a priori in the sense that they cannot be empirically falsified. Further assumptions are needed to explain why judgments formed in this way are also epistemically justified (see e.g. Peacocke 1993, 2004; Bealer 2000). But the key point for our purposes is that this conceptual approach to apriority involves no commitment to the metaphysical mind-dependence of the properties picked out by our concepts. The very same concept-based account of a priori knowledge is supposed to apply across the board to any concept, including names and natural kind concepts, regardless of the metaphysical nature of the reference. In the case of natural kind concepts, for instance, your implicit conception for such concepts determines how the reference would vary depending on empirical facts about your environment. But again, your implicit reference-fixing criteria cannot be wrong. In effect, then, the conceptual approach to a priority proposes a constructivist constraint on referencedetermination, rather than a constructivist constraint on the nature of the reference picked out.
This conceptual approach to apriority promises to vindicate the strong rationalist claim that one can know what it takes for any possible action to be morally right on the basis of conceptual competence and a priori reflection alone. Mere reflection on hypothetical cases will suffice to determine which factors are relevant to determining
4 Of course, one’s initial acquisition of moral concepts and of moral reasoning capacities may causally depend on contingent empirical facts. But this dependence on empirical facts may just play an enabling role, not a justificatory one.
the applicability conditions of one’s moral concepts—and ultimately instantiation conditions of moral properties vary depending on descriptive features of one’s environment. Thus, the conceptual approach promises to vindicate the strong rationalist claims (ii) and (iii) by appealing to a priori conceptual analysis. But it is worth noting that a proponent of the conceptual approach could also weaken these a priori accessibility claims. For instance, a moderate conceptualist might hold that armchair reasoning suffices for a priori knowledge of what is morally right in ordinary empirical circumstances, but not all possible circumstances (weakening (iii)). Or she might hold that a priori reasoning affords defeasible, or prima facie, rather than conclusive justification for accepting moral propositions (weakening (ii)).
(c) Ethical intuitionism
Weakened a priori accessibility claims are ubiquitous in the ethical intuitionist tradition. (For contemporary versions of intuitionism see, for instance: McNaughton 1988; Audi 2001, 2015; Huemer 2005; and for an excellent overview, Stratton-Lake 2016). For intuitionists, the human intellect has the power directly to apprehend or intuit basic ethical truths, without any basis in sensory experience. Although the justification they provide may be defeasible, these intellectual intuitions can yield a priori knowledge of a whole range of ethical truths: they allow us to “see” and know, for instance, that enjoyment is better than suffering, and that it is unjust to punish a person for crimes she did not commit (Huemer 2005: 102).
According to a recent, direct realist development of the intuitionist approach, intuitions should be understood as intellectual seemings akin to perceptual seemings (Bealer 1998; Huemer 2005; Chudnoff 2013; Bengson 2015a, 2015b). More specifically, intellectual seemings have a presentational phenomenology similar to that of ordinary sensory experiences. Different authors propose slightly different accounts of presentational phenomenology, but a key idea is that when you have a visual experience of a green apple, you seem to be directly aware of the apple itself. Similarly, when you have the intellectual intuition that two circles can have at most two common points, or that punishing a person for crimes she did not commit is unjust, you seem to be directly aware of the abstracta (circularity, justice) in virtue of which your intuitions are true. This presentational phenomenology suggests a naïve form of direct realism. In the same way as we can “see through” visual experiences to reality itself, we can “see through” intellectual intuitions to mathematical or moral reality.
Direct realists can then extend the account of justification and knowledge developed in the familiar case of sensory perception to the case of beliefs based on intellectual seemings. As in the case of sensory perception, justification based on intellectual seemings is defeasible. Yet, if intuitions based on intellectual seemings are understood along direct realist lines, their justificatory power will be much greater than if they are reduced to mere dispositions to believe (prior to reasoning). In Huemer’s view, they will “provide the sort of constraint needed to adjudicate between competing moral theories” (2005: 104).
One immediate worry about the direct realist proposal is that it glosses over a central asymmetry between the sensory and the intellectual cases. Unlike the objects of sensory perception, abstracta are causally inert. The proposal to take the alleged presentational properties of intellectual seemings at face value, and to construe these seemings as allowing a priori knowledge of an abstract reality, will thus face familiar Benacerraf-type worries. If there is no causal informational link between our psychology and the domain of abstracta, it seems mysterious how we could form nonaccidentally true beliefs about that domain. In response, Chudnoff and Bengson suggest that we should conceive of the relevant intellectual seemings as constitutively dependent on the abstracta which figure in their content (Chudnoff 2013, ch. 7; Bengson 2015a). On this view, moral properties themselves figure as constituents of our moral judgments. Many theorists will be reluctant to accept the metaphysical commitments carried by this crucial additional argumentative step. It should be uncontroversial, however, that the direct realist approach provides interesting new resources to clarify and defend Platonist versions of moral rationalism. Intellectual seemings may put us in a position to have a priori knowledge of a realm of causally inert abstracta.
D. Normative Reasons: Moral Requirements Entail Valid Reasons for Action
As Kant claims, moral requirements present themselves as categorically valid. They are not just inescapable in the sense that they apply to all human beings, or to all rational beings. Requirements of etiquette may also be inescapable in this sense. The inescapability of moral requirements is deeper: they seem to provide valid reasons for action, independently of the contingent desires of those to whom they apply. According to Alison Hills (2010) and Michael Smith (2013), the “Holy Grail” of moral philosophy is an argument establishing that moral requirements are indeed categorically valid in this sense—so that an egoist has a genuine reason to be moral (Hills), and would act morally if she were to exercise her capacity to respond rationally to the circumstances in which she finds herself (Smith).
In the eyes of many theorists, an intuitive “internalist” constraint on the existence of reasons constitutes a major objection to the categoricity of moral reasons. For the internalist, normative reasons must make sense from the perspective of the agent herself—at least after ideal deliberation suitably grounded in her prior attitudes (Williams 1979; Markovits 2011). This constraint makes the validity of reasons hostage to psychological contingency in a way that is incompatible with the categorical validity of moral reasons.
Of course, a defender of the categoricity of moral reasons could simply bite the bullet and reject any internalist constraint on the existence of reasons (ShaferLandau 2003; FitzPatrick 2004; Enoch 2011). The claim that moral requirements entail valid reasons for action would then be divorced from the claim that amoralists—those who make moral judgments but don’t care about them and are not disposed to follow them—are necessarily irrational. Rationalists have, however, hoped for a more ambitious
reading of the categoricity claim that cashes out “valid” in such a way that the amoralist can be criticized as irrational, a criticism that is thought to cut deeper than simple moral condemnation, which may lack any “anchoring” in the first-person subjective perspective of the agent.
One interesting option for the rationalist is to explore modest deflationary readings of the categoricity thesis, which lie somewhere between standard internalist and externalist accounts of reasons. One possibility might be to inject an interpersonal dimension into the assessment of an individual agent’s rationality. If we think of critiquing an agent’s rationality as a fundamentally dialogical practice that regulates action and belief through the social processes of giving and demanding reasons, there would still be a point in saying that someone who ignored moral requirements was rationally criticizable even though that critique is not grounded in her failure to act on her current motivational states. A rational agent, on this social conception, has reasons to act in ways that reflect what would be mutually justifiable within her epistemic and practical community.
More standard rationalist approaches seek to establish the categorical validity of moral requirements in a way that respects the internalist contraint. The leading rationalist strategy is to forge constitutive links between moral reasons and the nature of practical reason and practical rationality. Constitutivists like Christine Korsgaard (1996, 2008) and David Velleman (1989, 2000) highlight what they take to be core agency-constituting goals such as self-unification, or self-awareness and selfunderstanding, and then argue that a core function of practical reason is to constitute the agent by realizing these core goals. A constitutive account of agency thus yields a richer set of fundamental principles of practical reason than mere means–end rationality. Korsgaard, for instance, argues that Kant’s categorical imperative plays a crucial role in unifying oneself as an agent. The goal is then to rely on principles like the categorical imperative, perhaps together with additional resources, to help explain the categorical validity of moral requirements.
For theorists with a naturalistic bent, the attempt to forge links between moral reasons and the nature of practical reason may have received a recent boost from unsuspected quarters. Advances in evolutionary anthropology have highlighted the cooperative dimensions of practical and theoretical reason in modern human beings (Sterelny 2012; Tomasello 2014, 2016). Early humans were forced by ecological circumstances into highly cooperative lifeways, involving extensive coordination and sharing in foraging, hunting, childcare, communication, and teaching. Engaging in such activities required collaborative partners to develop a range of sophisticated intellectual and regulative/executive capacities, such as the capacity for impulse control, joint attention, perspective-taking, and “group-mindedness” (the capacity to assess the contributions of all collaborative partners from a role-neutral perspective, and to monitor one’s own contribution according to that perspective).
This type of evolutionary story throws important new light on the structure of modern humans’ capacity for normative self-governance. Unlike other higher mammals
such as great apes, we are able to reflectively regulate our own thoughts and actions in accordance with an authoritative, subject-transcendent normative perspective. Cooperation seems to be the key to the emergence and maintenance of normative selfgovernance. It is not just that cooperation forms the genealogical background which led to the development of our self-governing minds. From an evolutionary perspective, engaging in joint projects and joint communication appears to be a core function of normative self-governance: normative reflection and regulation were not selected for individualistic goals, but rather to make us skilled participants in joint social activities.
Traditional attempts to ground the categorical validity of moral requirements in the nature of practical reason assume a more individualistic conception of practical reason, as more competitive than cooperative.5 If the evolutionary story just sketched is on the right track, this conception of practical reason is better suited to characterizing the minds of the great apes, our closest evolutionary relatives, than our own.
Can appeal to the cooperative dimensions of modern human reason help vindicate the categorical validity of moral requirements? Of course, any attempt to provide a direct derivation of normative conclusions from evolutionary premises would commit the genealogical fallacy. Naturalists, however, typically hold that normative inquiry needs to be informed and constrained by empirical information about the nature of human cognitive, volitional, and emotional capacities. Just as norms for beliefs should fit with our actual belief-forming capacities, norms for action should fit with our actual practical reasoning capacities. For naturalists, then, the cooperative function of modern humans’ practical reason might afford additional resources for vindicating the categorical validity of moral requirements for modern human agents.
Whether this naturalistic strategy will succeed remains to be seen. But the strategy raises important foundational questions for the rationalist program. What is the intended scope for the rationalist’s categoricity claim? Do moral requirements entail valid reasons for action for all rational creatures, or just for those endowed with modern human reason? Would restricting the scope of categoricity to modern humans yield a position that is too modest to count as truly rationalist? And would this reduced scope deflate the putative normative force of categorical reasons in an unacceptable way?
E. Recombining after Dividing
Should we attempt to recombine the four core theses of traditional rationalism once they have been examined individually? On some interpretations these core theses might turn out to be mutually incompatible or their defence might rest on conflicting philosophical assumptions. We expect that other interpretations of the theses will be mutually reinforcing and form stable and coherent “packages”.
5 However, see Darwall 2006 for a social and dialogical approach to practical reason congruent with the cooperative conception of human reason advocated by evolutionary anthropologists such as Michael Tomasello.
The kinds of packages worth looking for must go beyond mere consistency. In order to count as a viable rationalist position, an interesting package of rationalist views should meet three desiderata:
1. It should preserve a robust and interesting divide between rationalism and sentimentalism. The attempt to reconcile rationalism with naturalism must not give rise to versions of rationalism so deflated that they are mere notional variants of sentimentalism.
2. It should be sufficiently similar in spirit, if not in letter, to traditional rationalism to count as a legitimate heir to that tradition, if it is to merit the name “rationalism”.
3. It should be animated by an underlying philosophical framework capable of explaining the conceptual relations between the theses, and why they are both plausible and mutually reinforcing.
There is no guarantee that the best interpretation and defence of the core rationalist theses will hang together in a philosophically well-grounded way. But there is reason to be optimistic that some of them will. For example, the following combination of rationalist claims seems coherent, naturalist in spirit, and compatible with recent empirical work on the role of emotions in moral judgment:
a. Psychological thesis: The core requirement for competence with moral concepts is procedural reasoning capacities together with sufficient theoretical commitments about the moral domain to allow for smooth coordination with one’s linguistic community’s use of moral terms. However, for these terms to express moral concepts (and pick out moral properties) associated affect is required, either in the individual herself or her community. On this view, then, highfunctioning autistics may be competent in virtue of their epistemic coordination with those who feel normal moral emotions.
b. Metaphysical thesis: Moral requirements are partly grounded in the deliverances of practical reason, but emotions play an important ancillary role in fine-tuning the boundaries of rightness.
c. Epistemological thesis: Normal competence with moral concepts puts one in a position to acquire a priori knowledge of highly general moral principles (for instance “Other things being equal, it’s wrong to kill people”). But, pace Kant, these principles are not powerful enough to determine what is morally right in all circumstances, and are defeasible.
d. Normative thesis: Moral requirements provide reasons and can ground a charge of irrationality toward the amoralist. Although the amoralist may have no motivational disposition to act in accordance with the categorical requirements of rationality, there is still a point to such a critique. It aims to elicit and affirm the pro-social commitments intrinsic to human practical reason.
One interesting feature of this package is that while rationalism has traditionally been individualistic, this package is not: it recognizes the systematic significance of social
phenomena for reference-determination, moral epistemology, and moral motivation. Nonetheless, the package remains distinctively rationalist, according a dominant role to rational capacities in characterizing all levels of the moral domain. Moreover, the account is naturalist in spirit, in that it seeks to reconcile the core rationalist claims with the empirical discoveries about human rationality. The psychological capacities deployed in moral judgments, and the reflective capacities that allow us to refine initial moral judgments through normative discussion are both shaped by distinctively human cooperative dispositions. And the standards that ground a charge of irrationality must be appropriate for the kinds of reasoners that we are. This sample package of rationalist theses thus modifies traditional rationalism so as to better fit with a naturalistic picture of ourselves as agents and reasoners.
Of course, much more work would be needed to defend the coherence and naturalistic credibility of this view. However, the possibility of such a view illustrates the value of the sort of systematic attention to contemporary debates over the four dimensions of rationalism advocated here. We think there is every reason to believe that careful attention to the type of issues sketched here could lead to a striking rationalist renaissance, featuring a variety of novel and powerful ways to understand the intimate connection between morality and reason.
2. The contributions to this volume
The five chapters in Part I (“Normativity”) offer contemporary defences or reconstructions of Kant’s attempt to ground the normative thesis, that moral requirements entail valid reasons for action, in the nature of practical reason and practical rationality. Some of these chapters rely on explicit constructivist commitments about the metaphysical dependence of moral requirements on practical reason (see for instance Nicholas Southwood’s contribution, Chapter 5), but others are less committal on these metaphysical issues.
In her contribution, “Humanity as an End in Itself”, Julia Markovits articulates and defends Kant’s derivation of universal categorical moral reasons from a procedural conception of rationality. In the Groundwork’s discussion of the Formula of Humanity, Kant argues that the value of humanity as an end in itself is the ultimate source of the value of our contingent ends. Elaborating on Kant’s suggestions, Markovits argues that it would be irrational to value my contingent ends without valuing the rational nature that sets them and provides the source of their value. One major virtue of Kant’s argument, as elaborated by Markovits, is that it makes the normative force of moral requirements recognizable from the perspective of any rational agent, while not building controversial substantive ends into the nature of rationality. All it takes for rational agents to recognize the normative validity of moral requirements is to reflect on the formal conditions of the activity of valuing contingent ends.
Though he doesn’t frame his discussion in terms of the tension between moral rationalism and naturalism, Michael Smith in “Three Kinds of Moral Rationalism” may
help us better understand that tension. Smith makes a distinction between three ways in which moral rationalism can be formulated. Two of these, the Reasons-First View and the Desirability-First View, both commit the moral rationalist to the existence of non-natural properties. The Reasons-First View commits the moral rationalist to the existence of non-natural properties because it holds that there is a primitive reasonrelation, over and above the natural features available to be instantiated in a world, and it further holds that the moral features of a world are constituted by a pattern in the holding of this primitive relation. The Desirability-First View commits the moral rationalist to non-naturalism because it holds that there is a primitive property of being desirable, over and above the natural features available to be instantiated in a world, and it further holds that moral features are constituted by a pattern in the instantiation of this primitive property. Smith argues that neither of these formulations of moral rationalism is credible, and that the objections to them suggest an alternative formulation. According to the Function-First View, we can define moral features in terms of the optimal functioning of an agent’s beliefs and desires. Smith illustrates how a moral rationalist might try to argue from such a definition of moral features to the existence of such features, and the moral features that emerge from that argument, if it succeeds, certainly seem to be naturalistic. However, as Smith points out, the argument does not succeed as it stands, so the outstanding question at the end of Smith’s chapter is whether a more plausible argument of the kind required by the Function-First View for the existence of moral features can be found. If so, then there is no tension between moral rationalism and naturalism. But if not, then Smith’s chapter provides us with a candidate explanation of why that tension exists. The tension exists because the naturalistic functions of an agent’s beliefs and desires are insufficient to guarantee the existence of moral features.
Constitutivists typically start from a conception of agency, from which they hope to derive facts about reasons and about the normative validity of moral requirements. In his “Constitutivism about Reasons: Autonomy and Understanding”, Karl Schafer argues that constitutivists should instead focus on the notion of rationality, of which rational agency is a species. Schafer suggests that understanding—both theoretical understanding of what is the case and practical understanding of what is to be done— is the aim of rational reflection. Adopting the constitutivist strategy of deriving normative conclusions about what we ought to do from the aim of rationality, Schafer shows how genuine understanding requires the grasp of explanatory relations, and the ability to transcend one’s particular subjective point of view. These constitutive features of understanding can help explain why reasons for belief and reasons for action must fit into explanatorily unified frameworks and be intersubjectively shareable.
In “Constructivism and the Normativity of Practical Reason”, Nicholas Southwood focuses on a fundamental question facing all attempts to derive normative reasons from the nature of practical reason. The norms or standards of practical reason figuring in this type of derivation must be, on pain of circularity, prior to and independent from particular reasons. But then what does the normativity of these norms or
standards consist in? Southwood rejects constitutivist answers to that question. In his view, the fact that norms or standards are constitutive of agency or even constitutive of a deliberative perspective does not suffice to establish that they are genuinely normative, in the sense of making us criticizable for failing to accept or follow them. Instead, Southwood argues that norms of practical reason have a distinctive practical necessity, in virtue of providing an answer to the very question practical reason aims to address—the question of what to do. The chapter clarifies how “the thing to do”—the answer to the question what to do—should be understood. It argues that the norms determining what to do are genuinely normative: they possess the core essential features of paradigmatic normative truths. Finally, Southwood argues that norms of practical reason are sufficiently independent of practical reasons to figure in a non-circular derivation of those reasons.
Sarah Buss’s starting point in “Moral Requirements and Permissions, and the Requirements and Permission of Reason” is the morally committed individual, not the egoistic amoralist. Buss focuses on the moral ideals of the morally committed, and examines how we gain a more determinate conception of what it takes to live up to those ideals. Buss argues that for most of us, moral ideals, unlike for instance aesthetic ideals, have an “accommodationist” structure: the specification of what it takes to live up to them needs to give other ideals their proper weight. Buss further argues that because of their accommodationist structure, moral ideals yield overriding reasons for action. She suggests that this structural feature of moral ideals can generate the rationalist appearance that moral requirements are requirements of rationality. The essay examines whether prudential ideals have an accommodationist structure similar to that of moral ideals, and whether conclusions can be drawn from this structural comparison for the question of the alleged duality of practical reason. The chapter also examines potential tensions internal to the moral ideal itself, and whether the accommodationist structure of the moral ideal can help better understand perplexing cases of supererogatory actions, whose very possibility is denied by the standard consequentialist approaches to morality. Finally, the chapter explores whether we might have reasons to tolerate some degree of incoherence when we attempt to integrate our heterogeneous ideals.
The four chapters in Part II (“Epistemology and Meaning”) consider the viability of claims to a priori moral knowledge. The authors of all four chapters are sympathetic to a realist moral metaphysics, and thus forgo the straightforward constructivist road to a priority. Three of the chapters pay special attention to questions of meaning and reference determination, which are at the core of the recent conceptual approach to a priori moral knowledge.
It is fair to say that the conceptual road to a priori moral knowledge advocated by theorists like Jackson (1998) and Peacocke (2004) has not enjoyed wide support among metaethicists. One reason for this relative unpopularity may be that the conceptual approach seems to offer no adequate response to the problem of disagreement. If the reference of moral terms is determined by the core conceptual role a subject associates
with the moral terms she uses, then the radical differences in moral conceptions we witness among competent speakers seem to mandate assigning different semantic values to different speakers’ use of moral terms. And this means that competent speakers cannot enter into direct logical agreement and disagreement in their moral discussions—a consequence many metaethicists, both in the realist and anti-realist camp, find problematic. In “Reasons and Justifiability”, Laura Schroeter and François Schroeter argue that an anti-individualistic version of the conceptual approach offers powerful resources to address the disagreement problem, at least within a given linguistic community. The key to competence with the meaning of moral terms, they argue, isn’t mastery of a specific folk theory or criterion of application. Rather, it is being appropriately connected to a linguistic community. The chapter clarifies the type of a priori moral knowledge this anti-individualistic modification of the conceptual approach may be able to yield. It also explores whether anti-individualism can help moral rationalists establish that categorical moral reasons satisfy the internalist constraint on the existence of reasons.
In previous work (van Roojen 2010), Mark van Roojen also invokes an antiindividualistic (or “reference-externalist”) approach to meaning and reference determination in order to show that a rationalist defence of categorical moral reasons can satisfy an internalist constraint on the existence of reasons. In his contribution to this volume, “Rationalist Metaphysics, Semantics, and Metasemantics”, van Roojen clarifies the basic metaphysical approach to reasons and rationality he relies on in his defence of categorical moral reasons. He then further articulates and defends his externalist account of meaning and reference determination. Following David Lewis (1983, 1984), van Roojen posits metaphysical “reference magnets” in his determination theory: in a nutshell, the idea is that the reference of moral terms is determined by a combination of (i) fit with subjective understanding (vindicating epistemic access to candidates sufficient to gain some knowledge of them) and (ii) relative “eliteness” of potential referential candidates. A consequence of this approach is that competent subjects’ best reflective judgments are not metasemantically guaranteed to be true. Pace Jackson and Peacocke, then, conceptual competence does not secure a priori moral knowledge. The chapter contrasts van Roojen’s own take on reference externalism with the Schroeters’ more a priority-friendly version of anti-individualism. It also defends the claim that reference externalism can draw support from standard responses to Moral Twin-Earth scenarios. Reference magnetism is also at the centre of Tristram McPherson’s contribution, “Naturalistic Moral Realism, Rationalism, and Non-Fundamental Epistemology”. McPherson is sympathetic to a naturalistic version of reference magnetism, which posits moral “joints of nature” as highly eligible referential candidates for moral terms. As McPherson points out, this form of naturalistic realism faces an important epistemological challenge from rationalists: armchair reasoning seems to be a more suitable epistemological method in deciding moral questions than empirical inquiry. But if there is no fundamental metaphysical difference between moral properties and the properties investigated by the empirical sciences, why aren’t the epistemologies
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