The Limits Of Sensible Subiectivism

Sensible subjectivism provides a legitimate framework for an account of the content of moral value judgements in seeking to be consistent with both the claims that morality is a cultural artifact and that morality can provide us with knowledge of moral truths. Wiggins’s main concern is to provide moral judgements with a truth-predicate which some of them can be seen to satisfy, as a result of which his account mainly faces problems within the theory of justification. I will now briefly mention some such problems which may have an impact on the theory of content.

The crucial limitation of Wiggins’s theory is this: The definitions of truth and knowledge given by sensible subjectivism are internal to the particular point of view of a moral practice and its background of evaluative standards. As a consequence of this, moral truth fails Wright’s criterion of substantial truth (Chapter IV). Wiggins’s account does not

guarantee any external or non-moral sanction for any particular moral practice, as a result of which moral truth looks like no more than minimal truth. This fact makes it unclear whether any talk of substantial moral properties or representation can be justified, since it is a feature of minimalism that it is meant to be metaphysically neutral (Wright, 1992). Wiggins does attempt to provide a case for the existence of moral properties when he claims that moral properties and responses form an explanatory circle such that moral properties cannot be adequately explained without reference to moral responses, and moral responses cannot be adequately explained except with reference to moral properties (Wiggins, 1987(Essay V)). But this claim is explicitly denied by anti-realist non-cognitivism, which may accept that moral ‘properties’ are essentially definable with reference to moral responses, but which is committed to deny that the best, complete or adequate explanation of a moral response will mention any moral properties or facts. The non- cognitivist claims that there are independent explanations of why people exhibit moral responses (Blackburn, 1984; Gibbard, 1990). This issue can only be resolved by an overall theory of morality which includes a full account of the metaphysics of moral judgement, and is thus beyond the scope of the present essay. A full answer to the non-cognitivist challenge would require a demonstration that there is an explanatory circle in the sense Wiggins requires, and that such a circle allows one to distinguish between moral sensibilities. No such demonstration is given by Wiggins.

As regards the content of moral judgements it is not obvious that such judgements are restricted in what they claim to what Wiggins thinks is attainable in terms of justification. It is central to the notion of moral truth included in sensible subjectivism that it is internal to a moral practice or community. However, it is not clear that a claim which demands acceptance beyond such a community or practice, say of the whole community of human agents at any time, is for that reason non-moral. It may therefore be true that some moral judgements aspire beyond what Wiggins regards as justifiable from a moral point of view and that a substantial portion of our moral outlook will turn out to be misguided in principle.

A similar difficulty which faces Wiggins’s account results from his claim that moral judgements are essentially contestable (Chapter IV). If moral judgements possess this feature, then there can be no non-question- begging demonstration that the moral judgements that survive reflection are the best ones. At first sight this is evidence that moral judgements are not really cognitive and that there is an alternative explanation in the form of a theory like quasi-realism. One motivation for sensible subjectivism was the wish to provide a more substantial notion of correctness in moral issues than could be provided by the resources of consistency and instrumentalist decision theory alone. But given essential contestability there does not seem to be any non-moral or non­ circular way of showing that there is a case for such a substantial notion

of moral reasons. This is evidence that moral thinking leaves open to many sustainable positions for moral judgements to be given a substantial cognitivist account. Again, problems within a theory of justification are evidence that moral judgements should be given a non- cognitivist theory of content. This problem also faces Wright’s argument, as it is not clear how minimalism can account for normative precedence between practices of evaluation.

It is thus clear that Wiggins’s account does not show that moral truth is more substantial than minimal truth. Since minimal truth is insufficient to rule out a non-cognitivism like quasi-realism, it is clear that Wiggins’s argument cannot rule out such an account either. The account is therefore underdetermined by the evidence, a final decision as to its adequacy depending on further development or a full and explanatory theory of moral judgements.

5. Conclusion

Moral beliefs are intentional states. The ascription of such beliefs follows the general constraints of propositional attitude ascriptions. These facts place some restraints on a theory of content for moral judgements. Furthermore, the making of a moral judgement entails the grasping and the endorsement of some evaluative content which in a minimal way can be prefaced with the phrase ‘It is true that..’. This evaluative content is

subjectively dependent, but should it be explained as a subjective response, an attempt to represent the world as being a certain way, or as somehow a combination of both? One hypothesis which has now emerged is the following: The content of moral judgements is minimally cognitive. To grasp a moral judgement is not just to grasp some subjective response. But in the making of a moral judgement one endorses a moral content, and this involves the subjective responses necessary to satisfy the requirements of motivation intemalism (Chapter II). Hence, even if the acceptance of a moral judgement includes some subjective response which might not be capable of absolute non-moral or external sanction and which might be fundamentally explicable as in part a non-cognitive response, it might still be that the content of moral judgements is fundamentally cognitive in the minimal sense. In the next and final chapter I consider the evidence for non-nognitivism about the content of moral judgements and the denial of the sufficiency of minimalist truth for cognitivism about content.