Overhauling Chapter 6

That's a very harsh conclusion drawn at the end of the last section. Surely it is still appropriate to ask the question 'Why be moral?' and look at some of the extramoral reasons for being moral without implying that one can reduce morality to any of the extramoral reasons that one finds. You already know that I do anything but reduce ethics to sociological functionalism in my thesis. We also agree that the moral supervenes on the natural, which is very plausible as James Dreier of Brown University notes. But this still leaves open exactly what it is over which morality does in fact supervene. Certainly, it seems reasonable that extramoral justifications of morality will give us some clues about exactly what this is, such as Lord Patrick Devlin's answer, which suggests that, at least to some extent, social functioning is one such property.

Not entirely. We have been led to believe that an established moral system is an essential of social functioning, but this implies at most that morals are a necessary but insufficient condition of social functioning. In particular, it does not follow that social functioning is a necessary but insufficient condition for morality, which was what you stated in your moral hypothesis. You might not like it, but I think that the external reviewer was at least right that chapter 6 needed more work. But he was dead wrong that you were ever trying to reduce ethics to sociological functionalism; that was simply the product of his "axe to grind", as my supervisor said.

I think it's pretty clear that morality cannot reduce to natural phenomena. Moore, however, actually denied that morality even supervened over natural phenomena, which seems strange. But this raises a very interesting question, namely what is it over which morality supervenes in the first place?

First, let's clarify that to say that morality supervenes over natural phenomena, it must be the case that for every pair of natural phenomena:

• If they have the same natural properties, then they will also have the same moral status.
  
• If they have different moral statuses, then they must also have different natural properties in some way.
  
• If they have the same moral status, then they might still have different natural properties.
  
• If they have different natural properties, then they might still have the same moral status.
  

Now let's look at whether morality supervenes in any way over social functioning. My main concern, prima facie, is with the example of slavery. It seems like slavery can prima facie benefit an economy and be an integral part of a viable society, but that it can still be absolutely wrong.

Okay, I think I need some research input here. I am currently aided by the article "Timeless Moral Imperatives in Causal Analysis of Social Functioning" by Emanuel Smikun in the Electronic Journal of Sociology:

Within the latter mode, I highlight the importance of moral functional imperatives as responsible for all social structural change.

I think that this quote is of very great value. Looking back on my thesis, I would say that the greatest problem for sociological functionalism as I learned it, is that it did not take into account social reform performed for moral reasons. I take it that, every now and then, some immorality will actually be functional towards a society, or at least not dysfunctional. But if social functioning were all that mattered to morality, then it would only ever be either wrong, or else completely arbitrary to initiate a reform to change a social practice that was not dysfunctional. Yet the reason for such a reform might have nothing to do with social functioning; it might occur purely on principled grounds. If a neo-functionalist theory of sociology could adequately explain social reform in functionalist terms, then this would enrich my original view considerably.

If sociohistoric continuity is not located in ever-changing social structures, then it must be in certain enduring moral values capable of creating and maintaining social bonds.

Fascinating! Here he is arguing that there are timeless moral imperatives of normal social functioning, which necessitate adaptations of social institutions and behavior patterns from time to time to better fulfill them. Depending on how much work has been done in this area, this could be the quickest way yet to provide some content to your empirical theory of ethics.

This all sounds very promising--but I am a bit concerned here about another difficulty that the external reviewer raised. He said that this material seemed to depend on the claim that society and its practices could be specified independently of a constitutive reliance on moral terms. My supervisor claimed as part of his rebuttal to the external reviewer that I thought it could. I did not consider that the issue had actually ever come up in any of my discussions with the supervisor, and certainly never would have occurred to me one way or the other. Consequently, I didn't fully appreciate being told what I thought about it, and indeed, I'm still not sure that I fully understand the objection in the first place. For my supervisor's part, he said that over time he came to see my view as reasonable--but if the external reviewer wanted more argument, that seemed fair enough. Still, to do this issue justice, I am clearly going to have to cover it in a new section.