Let me briefly address a few lingering worries about my view before returning in the next, and final, chapter to the skeptical arguments of Greene, Street, Nichols, and Sinnott- Armstrong. The first of these worries has to do with the objectivity of moral judgment. I’ve attempted in this chapter to give an account of moral judgment according to which the products of moral judgment are (or can be) justified beliefs about objective moral values. But, it is natural to wonder, if moral judgment ordinarily goes the way of the emotions, and my emotions are to a significant degree determined by my concerns, then how could the products of moral judgment be anything but subjective? And, one might add, it is not enough for me to say that our emotions are sensitive to an objective moral reality as long as they are rooted in a concern for the good, for conceptions of the good
27
Looking back at the argument in §2, we might understand the term ‘sensitive’ in premises 3-5 in terms of kind of tracking relation of the sort described here—i.e., the effect of virtue upon moral judgment is that of ensuring that emotional responses track moral values, even if they are not caused, in any sense, by moral values. It is in this way that our emotions can be sensitive to moral values.
are likely every bit as varied and subjective as anything else.
As I mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, one way to avoid this worry might be to conceive objective moral values as secondary, or response-dependent, qualities. If being able to cause negative emotions (under certain circumstances) is all it is for φ-ing to be morally wrong, for instance, then it should be pretty easy for my moral intuitions about the wrongness (or not) of φ-ing to count as beliefs about objective moral values, even if they are grounded in nothing but emotion. But as I noted earlier, there may be reasons for preferring an account that does not depend upon a secondary quality view of moral values.
In response to this worry about objectivity, then, I’ll say this: when I claim that moral virtue consists in being excellently concerned for the good, what I mean to say is that virtue consists not in being concerned for what one takes to be the good (or even what one would take to be the good under ideal conditions), but rather in being concerned for what is in reality the good. So for instance, if a utilitarian exhibits excellence in his concern for maximizing happiness, he will only count as virtuous on this view if it turns out that goodness and the maximization of happiness are one and the same. On the assumption that there are objective moral values in the world, moral virtue consists in being excellently concerned for what is objectively the good. And to the extent that someone’s concerns are aligned with it (regardless of whether or not she is aware of this alignment), I contend, she will be disposed to respond emotionally to objective moral values.
A second worry stems from the obvious and unfortunate fact that we are not maximally virtuous. It might be easy to concede that someone like the MVP is attuned to morality in the way that I describe, but what about the rest of us? Should the disparity between the MVP and ordinary people like us not inspire some doubt as to the trustworthiness of our moral intuitions?
Now, in one sense, it simply does not matter that we are not maximally virtuous. Skeptics like Nichols and Sinnott-Armstrong argue that moral intuitions are probably not trustworthy if they are grounded in emotion—that is, there is supposed to be something about emotion that is incompatible with the production of trustworthy moral intuitions. The MVP is a counter-example to their arguments: his moral intuitions are trustworthy because they are grounded in emotion. What these skeptics will have to add to their arguments, then, is a further argument to the effect that the disparity between the MVP and the rest of us is large enough to render our moral intuitions untrustworthy. But I should say that it is hard to even imagine what such an argument would require. These skeptics would presumably need to support their disparity claim with empirical evidence, but as far as I can tell, none of the evidence currently on offer is adequate to the task. There is, of course, plenty of evidence—empirical and anecdotal—for thinking that our emotions sometimes cloud moral judgment. But then, there is also plenty of evidence for thinking that our perceptions sometimes cloud perceptual judgment—think, for instance, of cases of illusion, hallucination, and the like. If our ordinary perceptual beliefs are no less trustworthy because of this, why think any differently of our moral intuitions? (In the next chapter, I discuss cases of so-called ‘moral illusion’.)
Recall the analogy that I drew between the MVP and someone with a “musical ear.” It is surely true that my wife exhibits a greater sensitivity to features of music and musical performances than those of us who are not as highly trained. But if you were simply to hammer away at any adjacent keys on a tuned piano, probably everyone within earshot would cringe. With respect to a great many breaches of melody, harmony, etc., it doesn’t take an expert musician to hear them. Likewise, with respect to many moral matters, it doesn’t take a maximally virtuous person to feel them. We all react with horror to stories of such things as child abuse, torture for pleasure, genocide, and other obvious moral wrongdoings. And apparently, in light of the evidence from chapter III, these emotional reactions play an important role in causing us to believe the things we do about such actions. We know the answers to a lot of moral questions, and, I’d argue, we have our emotions to thank for this.
If there is a lesson to be learned from the fact that we are not maximally virtuous, I think it is primarily a practical one. Rather than systematically doubting the deliverances of our moral sense, we should simply proceed with caution, and do what we can to sharpen our sense of the good.28 It may be perfectly reasonable to recognize in oneself tendencies for specific concerns to be otherwise than they should—e.g., perhaps it’s been brought to your attention that you have an insufficient degree of self-respect. And consequently, one may reasonably doubt the moral intuitions that one has related to these misplaced or misguided concerns—e.g., you begin to doubt intuitions to the effect that it is morally okay for your boss to treat you in this or that way. But this doubt will,
28
Of course, selecting a strategy for doing so will likely require us to regard some moral intuitions as incorrigible. As far as I can tell, this is not a problem for the point that I am making here.
or should, always be localized to the area of concern, and should not be cast over all of our moral intuitions—unless one somehow recognizes in oneself serious and widespread defects in either emotion or moral character.
Finally, rather than worrying that we are not virtuous enough for our moral intuitions to be trustworthy, one might wonder if anyone is virtuous at all. Here I have in mind another area of research in empirical moral psychology—i.e., research into the psychological reality of traits (e.g., traits of virtue and vice). According to some so- called situationists, there really is no such thing as moral virtue, if by ‘virtue’ we mean to denote a particular class of traits. And this is because, they argue, there is insufficient empirical evidence to support our ordinary, everyday attribution of traits to people. As Gilbert Harman puts it, “Empirical studies designed to test whether people behave differently in ways that might reflect their having different character traits have failed to find relevant differences.”29 What do seem to make noteworthy differences to a person’s behavior are features of his situation that often seem to have little or nothing to do with virtue—e.g., people are apparently significantly more likely to engage in helping behavior if they’ve just found a dime in the coin-return slot of a pay phone.30
Thus, Harman continues, “ordinary attributions of character-traits to people may be deeply misguided, and it may even be the case that there is no such thing as character.”31
And of course, if there is no such thing as character, then the view of moral judgment that I defend in this chapter will fall flat on its face, since there will be nothing to ensure that
29 Harman 1999: 316. See also Doris 2002. 30 Isen and Levin 1972.
our emotional responses are tracking moral truths in the sort of justification-conferring way that I describe.
As interesting as I find the literature on the psychology of moral character, a full response to the situationist would take me too far away from the focus of this chapter, which is the trustworthiness of moral intuitions. Suffice it to say, for now: situationists typically conceive of traits of virtue as direct dispositions to particular behaviors, and I agree with those who argue that this is a very problematic conception of virtue and moral character.32 (Notice that the view of moral virtue that I take up in §1 does not obviously commit me to anything whatsoever with respect to the connection between virtue and behavior. To say that a morally virtuous person is someone who is excellent in her concern for the good is to say nothing at all about how she’ll behave in a given situation.) If something like this response is on point, then we may be be free to grant that situationists have established the non-existence of something, just not moral virtue.