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In this essay, I’ll try to briefly explain why I believe that the most despised theories in ethics and meta-ethics, respectively, can resolve all of ethics when combined.
I have been a utilitarian since my undergraduate days, or at least since my twelfth year of school, when we had a philosophy elective for a year. What a wonderful opportunity that was, by the way, for I may never even have considered studying philosophy otherwise.
But I’ve also been a moral nihilist. I see no reason to believe that there are moral facts. Indeed, I’ve also become a moral abolitionist—a nihilist twice over. I think that we should abandon much of moral language for it is deeply confused and would make most of us better off in the process. Yet I also think that we should organise society in broadly utilitarian ways.
This may seem paradoxical. One cannot both defend a particular view of what is morally right and good while denying that there are moral facts. So how can we square this strange combination, which I believe even Jeremy Bentham himself endorsed?
In ethics classes, I largely found utilitarian answers vastly more compelling than deontological ones—or whatever other alternatives were discussed. Whereas utilitarianism was naturalistic, grounded in the mental states of particular individuals and what makes their lives better from their own point of view, other ethical theories have always been awfully paternalistic, telling people what they should really value, and building metaphysical castles in the sky unconnected to reality to justify these intrusions into people’s own visions of the good life.
And yet, when utilitarians made the move from the fact that positive mental states or the satisfaction of preferences, the subjective values of people, to what is objectively valuable, from the point of the universe, one might say, I always found myself puzzled—hesitating for the same reason that I’ve become a moral nihilist. There are no moral facts. There are no objective values.
However, I didn’t really feel any internal tension. Of all the ethical theories one might endorse, utilitarianism still offered the metaphysically least objectionable move, simply identifying the subjective values of creatures with the objective values of the universe.
Other moral theories cast their long and cumbersome ways of generating moral facts from those subjective values, or sometimes ignoring them altogether, trying instead to justify whatever their authors find valuable for what is valuable once and for all. But the result is the same: non-utilitarian ethics sacrifices people’s real subjective values on the altar of whatever values are declared to be ‘objective’ but are, in truth, merely fictional.
From the nihilist’s point of view, these attempts can be seen as a dictatorship of allegedly objective values, not as the self-proclaimed liberation from evils and injustices that the moralist promises.
Yet, I never saw a tension here because I didn’t endorse utilitarianism as a reflection of the one true morality, but rather as a pragmatically useful answer to the inevitable problem of how to organize social life. (See also my earlier essay here.)
The moral error theory, the philosopher’s term for a set of meta-ethical theories according to which there are no moral facts (there are many reasons that would make their existence problematic rather than just one, just like arguments against God), has been steadily gaining more attention among philosophers. But the literature has, in recent years, shifted away from a defense of this kind of nihilism and towards the question of what we should do once we embrace a world without (objective) values.
Philosophers call this the Now What? Problem of the moral error theory.
Most philosophers, and the public itself, hesitate to even consider moral nihilism due to the fear of a world in which everyone just does as they please without regard for each other, entirely unrestricted by the moral law. Much like atheism was long not considered because of the fear that people would rob and kill indiscriminately once they lost their fear of God. And, of course, because atheists would be killed. Moral nihilists are also unlikely to reveal themselves, because of the negative social consequences this may have.
“You don’t believe murder is wrong?!” shouts the indignant neighbor. Americans won’t vote an atheist into office. What hope does a self-avowed nihilist have?
Alas, despite the high proportion of people who do not believe in moral facts, we are all locked into a ludicrous and unhelpful game, throwing around moralized language, all in the vain hope that we may arrive at a society we find more desirable. Often, of course, this game has the opposite result. Raging culture wars have probably not made the vast majority of lives better off in the long run. But if you were to stop coating your arguments in the magical gloss of alleged moral objectivity, what hope could you have in a debate with those who do? It’s a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma really, where it might benefit one in the moment to use that language, or so most think, but makes everyone worse off.
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But the amoral society does not need moral language. It only needs the pragmatic tools of conflict resolution, social coordination, and cost-benefit analysis.
I saw utilitarianism not as a theory of what is the one true theory of morality, but simply as the pragmatically best framework for a functioning society. I never ended up writing these ideas down, and later found to both my dismay and delight that someone else had done so first—the Harvard psychologist and philosopher Joshua Greene.
In his book Moral Tribes, he came incredibly close to the views I tried to develop in the back of my mind:
A more apt name for utilitarianism is deep pragmatism. Utilitarianism is pragmatic in the good and familiar sense: flexible, realistic, and open to compromise. But it’s also a deep philosophy, not just about expediency. Deep pragmatism is about making principled compromises. It’s about resolving our differences by appeal to shared values-common currency.
That currency is the subjective values we all have and can recognize in each other.
