Moving back in the sociological direction
Further down on page 10, Wright starts to get more and more into philosophical ramifications of his book. However, he makes it clear on page 11 that its philosophical ramifications are treated as secondary to its scientific ramifications, and he has taken pains to keep these things separate. Many people may accept the scientific implications of the book while rejecting Wright's own philosophical and political conclusions. But he thinks that few people who buy the science will deny its relevance to philosophy, because of the light that it throws on the human condition.
I also note that he makes the same observation on page 10 that I did in 4.1 of my Masters thesis, that one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is". He actually uses the term "naturalistic fallacy", thereby mixing Moore's language with Hume's, but the point remains clear. I have already argued in 5.2 that ethics cannot reduce to anything but ethics--but this still does not mean that it cannot supervene over the natural. In this case, Wright is attempting to ground morality in human nature.
You were considering grounding morality in social nature, weren't you? The obvious counterexample to such an approach is that an entire society may in some ways be unjust, but I spent over three chapters exploring that very notion. Another alternative is to ground morality in human nature, but it begs the question of the moral orientation of human nature. One of the perceived values of this book at the outset is that it purports on page 10 to help us decide, via evolutionary psychology, which of our impulses are legitimate and which are not.
I can see that your approach to the empirical theory of ethics has already changed a bit. You started out trying to ground ethics in moral observations, but because of the theory-ladenness of observation, this proved to be too open-ended an approach. It still left an enormous number of moral theories, not all of which could be true, yet all of which one could quite legitimately claim were grounded in "observations". Observation cannot be the primary epistemological source for an empirical theory of ethics.
I think I see where you're going with this empirical theory of ethics now. First, you argue for the irreducibility of ethics, not only to statements of fact, but also to statements of other kinds of value, such as aesthetics or prudence. Next, you show how morality will still supervene over the natural, which already is all you need to justify the characterisation of your theory as empirical, or at least naturalistic. Finally, by teasing out exactly what it is over which morality does supervene, you can gain the insights you require to form more robust moral hypotheses.
During the Masters thesis, I was originally moving in a sociological direction with my theory of ethics. If I were still moving in that direction today, then under my new understanding, I would be looking for how ethics supervenes over social functioning. However, based on the conclusions of the later chapters of my thesis, it seems clear enough that this link would be fairly tenuous. There are too many feats of conceptual gymnastics that have to be performed to explain away how entire societies can in some ways be unjust.
On the other hand, Smikun's article "Timeless Moral Imperatives in Causal Analysis of Social Functioning" is fairly striking. It proposes that moral imperatives, which do not change over time, help to shape the structures of social institutions themselves. Smikun writes that sociohistoric continuity is located in "certain enduring moral values capable of creating and maintaining social bonds." If you could identify such timeless moral imperatives, then it seems that any "human nature" underpinning them becomes of merely academic interest.
What of the notion, then, that this presupposes that "society and its practices" can be specified without a constitutive reliance on moral terms? The external reviewer said that "the notion of some premoral(?) kind of 'social order' to which a moral system must(?) contribute needs to be spelt out." I have no idea what this means, because I never talk about any kind of premoral social order. In fact, if an established moral system is an essential of social functioning, then it should be clear enough that a premoral social order is impossible by definition.
Maybe it's simply that you need to spell out what the relationship actually is between morals and society. It seems fair enough to claim that in the thesis, you do seem to treat these two entities as different things, and what the external reviewer is arguing is that they are not. As such, he has probably identified a genuine difficulty here, but I should be able to redress it by elucidating the relationship between morals and society. There is obviously a great deal of confusion on this subject.
The first difficulty, I think, concerns ambiguity in the term 'moral' itself. To call a judgement a moral judgement typically is to contrast it with an aeshetic or rational judgement. But there is already a difficulty here, which I addressed in chapter 5, about how we may actually characterise a moral judgement independently of whether we happen to agree with that judgement. In other words, how do we distinguish between 'a' moral code and 'the' moral code, or the right moral code?
My answer to this question in Chapter 5 no longer satisfies me. It was deeply influenced by my supervisor at the time, but I know that my associate supervisor did not like it, and it now just seems wrong. I was arguing that to call a prescriptive code of behaviour a moral code presupposed a consonance with our own values (at the time I used the word "commensurability" instead of "consonance"). But I now think that a more objective approach is, if not possible, then at least worth a try--in another section!
I also note that he makes the same observation on page 10 that I did in 4.1 of my Masters thesis, that one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is". He actually uses the term "naturalistic fallacy", thereby mixing Moore's language with Hume's, but the point remains clear. I have already argued in 5.2 that ethics cannot reduce to anything but ethics--but this still does not mean that it cannot supervene over the natural. In this case, Wright is attempting to ground morality in human nature.
You were considering grounding morality in social nature, weren't you? The obvious counterexample to such an approach is that an entire society may in some ways be unjust, but I spent over three chapters exploring that very notion. Another alternative is to ground morality in human nature, but it begs the question of the moral orientation of human nature. One of the perceived values of this book at the outset is that it purports on page 10 to help us decide, via evolutionary psychology, which of our impulses are legitimate and which are not.
I can see that your approach to the empirical theory of ethics has already changed a bit. You started out trying to ground ethics in moral observations, but because of the theory-ladenness of observation, this proved to be too open-ended an approach. It still left an enormous number of moral theories, not all of which could be true, yet all of which one could quite legitimately claim were grounded in "observations". Observation cannot be the primary epistemological source for an empirical theory of ethics.
I think I see where you're going with this empirical theory of ethics now. First, you argue for the irreducibility of ethics, not only to statements of fact, but also to statements of other kinds of value, such as aesthetics or prudence. Next, you show how morality will still supervene over the natural, which already is all you need to justify the characterisation of your theory as empirical, or at least naturalistic. Finally, by teasing out exactly what it is over which morality does supervene, you can gain the insights you require to form more robust moral hypotheses.
During the Masters thesis, I was originally moving in a sociological direction with my theory of ethics. If I were still moving in that direction today, then under my new understanding, I would be looking for how ethics supervenes over social functioning. However, based on the conclusions of the later chapters of my thesis, it seems clear enough that this link would be fairly tenuous. There are too many feats of conceptual gymnastics that have to be performed to explain away how entire societies can in some ways be unjust.
On the other hand, Smikun's article "Timeless Moral Imperatives in Causal Analysis of Social Functioning" is fairly striking. It proposes that moral imperatives, which do not change over time, help to shape the structures of social institutions themselves. Smikun writes that sociohistoric continuity is located in "certain enduring moral values capable of creating and maintaining social bonds." If you could identify such timeless moral imperatives, then it seems that any "human nature" underpinning them becomes of merely academic interest.
What of the notion, then, that this presupposes that "society and its practices" can be specified without a constitutive reliance on moral terms? The external reviewer said that "the notion of some premoral(?) kind of 'social order' to which a moral system must(?) contribute needs to be spelt out." I have no idea what this means, because I never talk about any kind of premoral social order. In fact, if an established moral system is an essential of social functioning, then it should be clear enough that a premoral social order is impossible by definition.
Maybe it's simply that you need to spell out what the relationship actually is between morals and society. It seems fair enough to claim that in the thesis, you do seem to treat these two entities as different things, and what the external reviewer is arguing is that they are not. As such, he has probably identified a genuine difficulty here, but I should be able to redress it by elucidating the relationship between morals and society. There is obviously a great deal of confusion on this subject.
The first difficulty, I think, concerns ambiguity in the term 'moral' itself. To call a judgement a moral judgement typically is to contrast it with an aeshetic or rational judgement. But there is already a difficulty here, which I addressed in chapter 5, about how we may actually characterise a moral judgement independently of whether we happen to agree with that judgement. In other words, how do we distinguish between 'a' moral code and 'the' moral code, or the right moral code?
My answer to this question in Chapter 5 no longer satisfies me. It was deeply influenced by my supervisor at the time, but I know that my associate supervisor did not like it, and it now just seems wrong. I was arguing that to call a prescriptive code of behaviour a moral code presupposed a consonance with our own values (at the time I used the word "commensurability" instead of "consonance"). But I now think that a more objective approach is, if not possible, then at least worth a try--in another section!
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