THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN FACTS AND VALUES REFUTED By Christopher Eddy

 THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN FACTS AND VALUES REFUTED

By Christopher Eddy

Part One

The distinction between statements of fact and judgments of value has been central to moral philosophy for the last 250 years, ever since it was first formulated by David Hume. The distinction is between “factual” or “descriptive” statements, i.e., statements which make claims about what is the case (e.g., about what a person actually did) and “evaluative”, “prescriptive” or “normative” statements, i.e., statements about what ought to be the case (e.g., about what he ought or ought not to have done).

Hume claims that prescriptive conclusions can never validly be inferred from merely descriptive premises alone, which is probably true. For example, it may be a fact that everyone does tell lies from time to time, but from this descriptive premise we cannot validly infer the prescriptive conclusion that everyone ought to tell lies from time to time.

But Hume also implicitly claims that the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive statements is absolute, so that there is no kind of descriptive statement that could ever have the force of a prescription, and no kind of value-judgment that could ever have the status of a fact. This doctrine has had enormous importance in moral philosophy because it has been taken as implying that moral judgments can have no value in terms of truth, but must be regarded ultimately as expressions of subjective will rather than descriptions of objective reality.

Hume’s claim seems convincing as long as we consider only the explicit logical content of statements and ignore the relations of authority and responsibility they implicitly invoke between interlocutors in real exchanges, - relations recognized through recent developments in the philosophy of language involving the commitments assumed and entitlements claimed and conferred when one speaker makes a statement, whether descriptive or prescriptive, in the presence of others. In this connection I would mention particularly the work of Robert Brandom, which I think provides a basis for refuting the claim that the distinction between descriptive and evaluative statements is absolute, as follows.

If I say to you that “Everyone tells lies from time to time”, my doing so is an exercise of authority. I exert my authority as a speaker in calling on you to agree to that statement or at least not contradict it, and in doing so I implicitly make myself responsible, if you challenge me, for justifying that statement to you, i.e., giving reasons why you ought to agree to it or at least not contradict it.

We both take it for granted that, when I make a statement, I am exerting authority and assuming responsibility in relation to you: it is the basic understanding that all speakers have of what is implicit in relations between them. This is the grammar of interlocutory relations which we employ intuitively, as an essential part of our linguistic competence, just as we intuitively employ our grammatical sense of the difference between questions, statements and commands.

Thus we can see that the descriptive statement, “Everyone tells lies from time to time”, is not properly recognizable as the meaningful utterance of one speaker to another unless it is understood as implicitly establishing a range of commitments and entitlements between the interlocutors. In saying that everyone tells lies, I implicitly commit myself to justifying that statement if asked to do so, i.e., to giving you reasons for agreeing with it, so that, if I cannot supply a meaningful reason when asked, I am implicitly committed to withdrawing the statement, and, if I then refuse to withdraw it, I stand in breach of my implicit commitments as a speaker. The fact that I uttered the statement implicates me necessarily in commitments and entitlements from which certain conclusions follow which are unmistakably evaluative, prescriptive or normative. In other words, Hume’s distinction is not absolute: there are normative facts.

This analysis may seem trivial when applied to descriptive statements, but it has very powerful implications when applied to prescriptions. If I propose a course of action, I implicitly ask for your consent to it, which means that there are certain types of action which I could not propose to you without implicit self-contradiction, namely, those which could occur, by definition, only without your consent, e.g., that you be “raped, enslaved, tortured or murdered”; and this entails that these are types of action which can never meaningfully be justified, because there could never be a reason for your consenting to a proposal which could be acted on only without your consent. I call this the Consent Principle.

It is a logical fact that acts of rape, enslavement, torture and murder are, in this sense, absolutely unjustifiable, but “unjustifiable” is an evaluative, prescriptive or normative term, so it is clear that there are evaluative, prescriptive or normative statements which are also statements of descriptive fact, but ones from which prescriptive conclusions can validly be drawn, and therefore that the absolute distinction between facts and values stands refuted.

Part Two

Various kinds of objection have been advanced to counter the Consent Principle, as follows:

First Objection: The use of punishment, - i.e., the compulsory enforcement of legal penalties for breaches of the law, - is necessary for the maintenance of social order and is therefore justifiable in every sense that matters, but, if that is so, then it cannot be the case that the contradiction involved in consenting to be penalized without one’s consent would render punishment absolutely unjustifiable.

This objection fails because the use of punishment is not necessary to the preservation of social order. A person convicted of an offence could be asked whether he consented to the penalty provided for it by law: it would then be open to him either to consent to it and freely accept it as a voluntary penance or to refuse it. If he didn’t consent, - like a player in a game who refused a penalty awarded against him and left the field of play, - he would be placing himself in an attitude of hostility to the law, which would then entitle society to act in self-defence by interning him, as if he were a prisoner of war, until the cessation of hostilities, i.e., until either his conviction or sentence was quashed on appeal or his refusal was withdrawn.

This procedure presents no practical problems and would have more than one advantage. It would enable the state to acknowledge three important kinds of possibility without prejudging them: that the conviction might be false, even though the appeals procedure had been exhausted; that the constitutional order defended by the law might be unjust, e.g., by excluding women or some other group from the franchise; or that the law might be driven by the irrational prejudices of a majority, as with laws against gay sex. Also, if the convict is given the option to accept or reject his sentence, then, if he accepts it, he takes the first step, - however reluctantly, - towards reconciliation with society.

Finally, the American Declaration of Independence asserts that the authority of government, which necessarily includes the right to impose legal penalties, derives only from “the consent of the governed”, and the arrangement I have proposed enables the state to make that principle explicit every time a convict is sentenced and thereby to acknowledge that punishment, - penalizing without consent, - is an exercise not of responsible authority, but only of arbitrary power.

Of course it is true that being “interned” under Geneva Convention conditions is very similar to being “imprisoned”, but it is very different from being compelled to suffer death, mutilation, physical pain or the mental torments of humiliation or solitary confinement, and having it as an option completely destroys the claim that punishment is necessary to the preservation of social order on which this objection depends.

Second Objection: Soldiers defending their country against invasion are justified in killing enemy soldiers intentionally, even though those enemy soldiers do not consent to be killed, and if it is justifiable to kill people intentionally without their consent in defensive war-fighting, then it may be justifiable in a defensive campaign against crime to kill intentionally and without their consent people convicted of murder; so consent cannot be the basis of a rigid distinction between what is and what is not justifiable.

This challenge can succeed only if we ignore the glaringly obvious difference between the intentions of a soldier on the battlefield in a defensive war and those of the executioner when he carries out the sentence of death on a convict, - intentions which are made explicit in the orders on which each is authorized to act. The soldier is ordered to “advance” or “retreat”, to “take”, “hold” or “bombard” particular positions, and he is trained to use his weapons in defence of himself and his comrades when acting on those orders, but he is never ordered specifically to “injure” or to “kill” anyone. It may be that his actions will result in death or injury to enemy soldiers, but, on condition that he is acting on legal orders in a genuinely defensive campaign, he cannot be said to intend those deaths and injuries, and he cannot therefore be asked to justify proposing to cause them.

As conclusive proof that defensive military action is not intended to cause death, we may observe that, when an army has prevailed on the battlefield in a defensive action, the medics will be sent in to save as many lives as possible on both sides; indeed, it is conceivable that a defensive military action might be successful without anyone on either side being actually killed or injured, e.g., if one side surrendered or ran away.

In vivid contrast, the executioner receives an explicit order from the court to kill a specified individual at a specified time on a specified day. When the executioner sets out to comply with that order, the convict presents no threat to him against which he could claim to be acting in self-defence, because the convict is bound hand and foot and helpless in his power, - as is also true of the relation between a torturer and his victim. Furthermore, if the executioner fails in his first attempt to kill the convict, - for example, by electrocution, - he is required to administer repeated charges of electricity until the convict is dead. If a soldier treated a prisoner of war the way the executioner treats the convict, he would be guilty of a war-crime and would stand in danger of a court-martial.

It follows that the way deaths are caused in defensive war-fighting provides no moral precedent or parallel justification for the use of capital punishment, and this is so perfectly clear that anyone who maintains the contrary must be suspected of willful self-deception.

Third Objection: There are certain circumstances in which our consent, once given, cannot subsequently be retracted, so that, even if we subsequently declared that we withdrew our consent, the subsequent declaration would have no meaning, - no logical force, - because we would remain logically bound by our initial consent. Any subsequent attempt to retract would be merely apparent and therefore could not in reality contradict the initial consent, so that no contradiction would be involved in consenting initially to be disposed of subsequently, e.g., punished, without our consent; and the circumstances in which this applies occur when our consent is given contractually, i.e., when each party gives his consent irrevocably on condition that every other party also gives his consent in a similarly irrevocable manner.

This objection must fail because it entails the contradiction that we could responsibly renounce in advance the responsibility to choose thereafter, abolishing our status as responsible agents by turning ourselves into automata logically programmed by contract. This idea is so obviously absurd that those who have espoused it must ask themselves what kind of motive could have been strong enough to lead them into such an egregious error.

Fourth Objection: Actions of rape, enslavement, torture or murder could be justified as the “lesser of two evils” if refraining from them would risk consequences which were disproportionately bad, e.g., in terms of the numbers of individuals harmed, but, if this is so, then consent cannot be the basis of a rigid distinction between what is justifiable and what is not.

This challenge merely states the well-known “consequentialist” position, and its credibility derives from the fact that it is common sense to evaluate actions in terms of their foreseeable consequences: if one action is likely to cause less harm than the alternatives, common sense says that we ought to choose it. It is common sense to reason consequentially, but the central point at issue is whether there is a logical limit to the application of consequential reasoning, and, on the theory for which I am arguing, there is just such a logical limit in the facts of interlocutory grammar, the rules which all speakers intuitively recognize as implicitly governing the relations between them.

It is a fact of interlocutory grammar that whoever proposes a course of action implicitly solicits consent to it and therefore implicitly makes the factual claim that it is the kind of proposal to which everyone could without self-contradiction give their consent. Because this is a claim about logical facts, - i.e., about whether consenting to it would be self-contradictory or not, - it is open to conclusive refutation by demonstrative argument, and, if it is refuted, the proposer is thereby implicitly committed to withdrawing the proposal. This sets a limit to what can meaningfully be proposed and therefore to the kinds of proposal that can meaningfully be justified.

Fifth Objection: The so-called facts of interlocutory grammar are open to question. It is reasonable to believe that proposals are addressed not to everyone, but only to those for whom consenting would not entail a contradiction: to what we might call “coalitions of the willing”. There is then no contradiction entailed in some consenting to punish others without having to seek their consent.

If this were so, then any group which had the power to do so in a particular situation might be justified in subjecting to its collective will any other group from which it was distinguished in terms of sex, class, race, language, religion or legal status without recognizing any requirement to seek the consent of the members of the subjected group; but this perspective, which would make genocide justifiable, is in violent conflict with the universally recognized demands of justice, which require that what is done to any person be justifiable to that person, and “justice” is simply another word for the implicit rules of interlocutory grammar.

Sixth Objection: Taxation is necessary to the functioning of a complex society, so taxation must be justifiable; but some people pay their taxes not by consent, but only under compulsion: they deny that the state is justified in confiscating their property by taxation. So, if taxation is justifiable, justifiability cannot be subject to the Consent Principle.

This objection fails because, as David Hume also pointed out, property is not a natural fact, but a legal convention with rules which specify the conditions under which an individual may claim property in goods of any kind, whether it be land, livestock or money; and the laws under which people are taxed are a part of those rules, so that, to claim “property” in anything is to invoke the rules which determine what shall be regarded as the claimant’s property, and these include the tax laws. To repudiate the tax laws is to repudiate the conventions of property as such and thereby forfeit any basis for claiming that what the taxman demands of you is “yours”. We consent to be taxed by consenting to the conventions of property ownership, so taxation is always by consent.

Seventh Objection: Under the Consent Principle, a proposal would be absolutely unjustifiable only if there were at least one speaker who could not meaningfully consent to it, but this means that some kinds of proposal which most people would regard as absolutely unjustifiable, for example, torturing non-linguistic animals or pre-linguistic infants, could be justified to all speakers, because there would be no speaker for whom consenting to it involved a contradiction, and such actions would therefore have to be permitted This suggests that what most people mean by “justifiable” has no necessary relation to consent.

The objection is correct that the proposal to torture non-linguistic animals or pre-linguistic infants is not absolutely unjustifiable, but this does not mean that it must therefore be permitted by law. For example, no contradiction is involved in proposing that someone be assisted to commit suicide, but it does not follow necessarily from this that the act of assisting suicide ought to be permitted by law, because, although there are reasons for permitting it, there are other reasons which would justify prohibiting it, as there are for prohibiting cruelty to animals: in matters like this, consequential arguments must be allowed to decide the issue.

Conversely, the fact that proposing to “insult” someone would be absolutely unjustifiable (since nobody could meaningfully consent to be insulted) does not mean that insulting people ought absolutely to be prohibited by law: of course there are situations in which a certain (e.g., racial) type of insult could have socially disruptive consequences, and the law might be used to prevent that, because that is the law’s raison d’etre. The law’s purpose is to minimize harm, not to make people virtuous; but even in minimizing harm, the law is subject to the limits of the Consent Principle.

Eighth Objection: To propose a law which prohibits a type of act, like assisting a suicide, which is not absolutely unjustifiable under the Consent Principle, and which many people do passionately advocate, is to ask those advocates to consent to what they do not consent to, i.e., a law which prohibits what they advocate, and doing that seems to violate the Consent Principle; but, if that is the case, and proposing such a law is justifiable, then the Consent Principle must be rejected. Indeed, the very idea of a legal system raises the possibility that individuals will be subject to constraints to which they do not consent, so that law as such becomes unjustifiable.

This objection fails because to prohibit a type of act is not to do anything which anyone is logically unable to consent to. Even if I advocated a law which permitted assisted suicide, there would be nothing self-contradictory in my consenting to obey one which prohibited it; because, as David Hume pointed out, none of the reasons I could offer in favour of doing that or any other type of action could ever irresistibly compel me to do it and thereby force me to endure without my consent the consequences of violating a legal prohibition; besides, consenting to obey a law which prohibits a particular act does not entail consenting to be punished if convicted of breaking it.

The idea that systems of law as such could be unjustifiable makes no sense: to propose a legal system is to ask others to agree with you on a set of laws, but to propose that there be no legal system is to ask others to agree that there be no agreement, which is absurd.

This concludes my defence of the Consent Principle and my refutation of the distinction between facts and values.

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Copyright © Christopher Eddy 2011

(3237 words, including title)

In my paper, A Theory of Moral Intuition, I make the claim, "THAT HUMAN SPEAKERS CAN GRASP MORAL QUALITIES, I.E., GOOD AND EVIL, INTUITIVELY.” The argument may be summarized as follows:

1.0. INTUITION.

1.1. A quality is grasped "intuitively", by definition, when the quality is self-evident and the grasp is direct (but not necessarily infallible).

1.2. For a quality to be "self-evident" it is necessary that, like sensory qualities such as colour or taste, it not be determined by the preferences of the individual subject.

1.3. A quality is grasped "directly" (but not infallibly) when, as in seeing or tasting, the grasping is not mediated by a reasoning process.

2.0. INTENTIONS & PROPOSALS.

2.1. "Moral" qualities are qualities of actions, by definition.

2.2. Actions are, by definition, events characterized by intentions, both positive and negative.

2.3. The intention that characterizes an action can be explicitly stated, before or after the event, in the form of a proposal.

2.4. To justify an action, before or after the event, reasons must be given why others should consent to that proposal.

2.5. So moral qualities are qualities of the intentions-expressible-as-proposals whereby events are recognized as actions.

3.0. RECOGNIZING CONTRADICTIONS.

3.1. If a proposal is self-contradictory, its being so is not determined by the preferences of the individual subject: self-contradictoriness is in this sense self-evident.

3.2. Reasoned argument can be used to show that a proposal is self-contradictory, but the absurdity of proposing a contradiction is not demonstrable by argument: it can only be recognized directly.

3.3 If the self-contradictoriness of a proposal is recognized, it can be only by that kind of intuition which is involved in the recognition of linguistic meaning.

4.0. MORAL QUALITIES.

4.1. The meanings of the words "good" and "evil" derive from their role in the linguistic practices of proposing and justifying.

4.2. A type of action which absolutely cannot be recommended as "good" is evil, by definition.

4.3. "Good" and "Evil" are words used to distinguish moral qualities, i.e., the qualities of self-evidently distinct and mutually exclusive types of intention.

5.0. CONSENT & IMPLICIT SELF-CONTRADICTION.

5.1. It is self-evident that the act of proposing a particular course or general rule of action expresses the agent's intention to obtain for it the consent of other speakers.

5.2. There are types of action, such as rape, which can occur, by definition, only in the absence of the consent of the person on whom they are inflicted.

5.3. Proposing actions of that type, i.e., seeking consent to what can occur only without it, is implicitly self-contradictory and therefore absurd: this is “the Consent Principle”.

5.4. A type of action which cannot be proposed without absurdity cannot without absurdity be justified.

6.0. CONCLUSION

6.1. The self-evident difference between actions which can and actions which cannot be proposed and justified without implicit self-contradiction can be grasped directly, and therefore intuitively, though not infallibly, by all human speakers through the exercise of that faculty which makes them able to understand speech.

6.2. That difference is between actions which can without absurdity be called "good" and those which cannot, and which can therefore only be called "evil".

6.3. THEREFORE: Human speakers can grasp moral qualities, i.e., good and evil, intuitively.

A THEORY OF MORAL INTUITION by Christopher Eddy

"Intuition" implies a relation, like that of sense perception, between a perceiving subject and an independent reality which is the object of perception, so "moral intuition" is problematic in two closely related ways: the first is that philosophers have found it difficult to show irrefutably that there is a moral reality independent of the will of the experiencing subject; and secondly, that scientists have identified no organ in the human body which is recognized as being attuned, as it were, to the wavelength of that reality; and the two aspects of the problem are inter-dependent, because we cannot know that there is an independent moral reality unless we have some means of apprehending it, and we cannot believe in a "moral sense" unless we believe that there exists an independent moral reality for us to apprehend.
My aim in this essay is to provide a theory of moral intuition which establishes what "moral reality" is and how we have our intuitions of it. The account I shall give is very much my own, but it is inspired by my readings in the work of Iris Murdoch and later in the philosophy of language, particularly that of Robert Brandom, which enables us, I believe, to speak in an objective way about things Murdoch thought of as entirely subjective.
1. INTUITION
The aim of the argument offered here is not to make moral intuition possible or to teach anyone how to perform acts of moral intuition, because it is central to the idea of moral intuition that it is something you can do without understanding how you do it. The aim of the argument is only to show that a particular type of cognitive process does occur and to explain why it is right to see it as an intuitive grasping of moral facts.
The first step in this demonstration is to get some clarity about what we mean by "intuition", and I want to begin by proposing that sense-perception is our model for intuition, because when we speak of intuition we often refer to it as a "sixth sense", which implies that it shares certain important features with our senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing and vision. When we see something as red, feel it as hot to the touch, taste it as bitter, hear it as high-pitched or smell it as sweet, those sensory qualities, - redness, heat, bitterness, high pitch and sweetness, - are self-evident, in the sense that they are themselves the only evidence we have for the claim that they are red, hot, bitter, high-pitched or sweet. If others question our claims, we can only point them to the sources from which we received those sensations and ask them to apply the descriptive terms in the normal way.
We can consider sense-perception (or sensory intuition) in two ways: we can think about the object, i.e., the quality that is grasped, and we can think about the action, i.e., the grasping of a quality. I have said that the quality grasped in sense-perception is "self-evident", and now I want to propose that the act of grasping that quality be seen as direct; by which I mean that the act of grasping a sensory quality is not mediated by a process of reasoning, i.e., that the claims we make about sensory qualities are not inferences: they are not conclusions drawn from premises. It may be that, in calling the quality grasped "self-evident" and calling the act of grasping it "direct", I am just saying the same thing in different ways, but there is no harm in that as long as doing so helps to clarify what we mean when we speak of sense-perception as a form of "intuition".
Our senses are not, of course, an infallible source of knowledge, and there are three important ways in which they can fail us: firstly, they are directed by our attention, so that, if we are looking fixedly in another direction, we may fail to notice fairly obvious sensory clues right under our noses, and thereby deceive ourselves; secondly, our nervous systems may produce sensations internally, which lead us wrongly to imagine some external phenomenon as their source; and thirdly, we may thoughtlessly combine different sensory cues in ways which lead to an incorrect identification of their source. Infallibility, then, is not a feature of sensory intuition so we must not expect it to be a feature of moral intuition either.
To summarize, then: sensory intuition is a fallible act of grasping in which the quality grasped is self-evident and the act of grasping is direct, so that, if there is a grasping of moral qualities, it will not deserves the name of "intuition" unless it resembles sensory intuition in these respects.
2. INTENTIONS & PROPOSALS
We have established what kind of grasping is to be regarded as intuitive, so, if we are to demonstrate that there is such a thing as an act of "moral intuition", the next step must be to establish what it is that would have to be grasped for the act to count as an act of that kind. Clearly, we can begin by saying that it would have to involve the grasping of "moral qualities", but then we have to establish what kind of quality is moral, and it seems clear that moral qualities are the qualities of actions, by definition.
That moral qualities are the qualities of actions is clear from the generally accepted principle that, when we make judgments of moral condemnation, we condemn the act, but not the agent. We recognize that people who do bad things often also have a record of doing good things, so that, in condemning their bad deeds, we do not condemn them. If moral qualities are the qualities of actions, we need to be clear about which of the qualities of an action count as "moral". Bad actions involve many physical features that are also found in good actions; e.g., cutting people with knives is something we see in acts of therapeutic surgery as well as in acts of murder; so we need to clarify what it is about an action that is the object of moral judgment.
Actions are events, but there are many events which are not actions in the sense that is relevant to moral judgment. Actions are, by definition, events to which it is proper to assign intentions, i.e., motives, purposes, meanings, and it is only to the kind of event that is seen as directed by some kind of intention that moral judgments are applied. However many people are killed by an earthquake or a volcano, we do not apply moral judgments to those events as such, but only to the actions of individuals or institutions, e.g., property developers, local authorities, which may in some way have contributed to the size of the death-toll; unless, of course, we see the disaster as an "act of God", in which case we may have to pass moral judgment on God. So, if moral qualities are the qualities of actions, they must be qualities of what it is that defines those actions as actions, namely, the intentions by which they are directed. But what exactly are "intentions"?
The intention that characterizes an action can be stated explicitly as a proposal, and this can be done before or after the event, i.e., before or after the doing of the action. The proposal can then be justified, and no action can be justified until the proposal that characterizes it has been explicitly stated, because the justification applies to the proposal, not to the action considered simply as a material event. The action as a material event is justified only insofar as those of its material aspects that are morally questioned are explained as the unavoidable consequence of acting on a justified proposal; e.g., we regard the use of force as justified if it can be shown that it was the minimum necessary for an agent in a given situation to act effectively on the proposal "that he defend himself".
3. RECOGNISING CONTRADICTIONS
To speak of an "intention", then, is to speak of that which is both implicit in an action and able to be made explicit in the form of a proposal which defines the action; therefore, if moral qualities are qualities of actions, and actions are defined by their intentions, then moral qualities must be qualities of the intentions-expressible-as-proposals whereby events are recognized as actions. The next step in the demonstration must be to show that intentions-expressible-as-proposals exhibit differences of quality which can be apprehended by intuition, i.e., grasped directly as self-evident.
In order to deal explicitly with intentions-expressible-as-proposals we have to deal with them as proposals, but there is nothing objectionable in this, since this is what we do whenever we try to justify the intentions implicit in our actions, and what is obvious about proposals explicitly stated in sentences is that they have logical qualities. Most obviously, a proposal can be either self-contradictory or not. Furthermore, if a proposal is self-contradictory, its being so is self-evident: not in the sense that it is inescapably obvious, but in the sense that nothing is evidence for its being so other than its being so. If someone denies that it is self-contradictory, we can only appeal for evidence to the proposal itself: perhaps we shall repeat it more slowly, enunciating more carefully and emphasizing the key words, in the hope that the absurdity will then be recognized for what it is; but, if someone cannot see it, there is not a lot we can do.
To put it another way, the self-contradictoriness of a proposal is something we grasp not by way of a reasoning process. A proposal can be analyzed to make explicit the self-contradiction implicit in it, but, when it is explicit, the absurdity of proposing it is something that cannot be explained: it is something which, if we see it at all, we just see. In this respect it is exactly like what happens when we laugh at a good joke: if we get the point (i.e., the intention) instantly, we laugh, even though we may have great difficulty explaining why it is funny; but, if we don't get it instantly, no amount of explanation can make it work for us: our responses to jokes, which often depend upon implicit contradictions, are perfect examples of intuition in action.
4. MORAL QUALITIES
There is, then, a self-evident qualitative distinction between those intentions/proposals which are self-contradictory and those which are not, and this distinction can only be grasped directly; that is to say, in the terms established so far in this demonstration, this distinction is something grasped intuitively. But to say that this distinction is logical is not yet to say that it is moral, i.e., that it is a distinction of the kind applied by way of moral judgment to actions, namely, a distinction between good and evil; however, it will be my aim to show that this is how moral qualities have to be understood.
However the idea of a "value distinction" has been understood, it has always been recognized that the words "good" and "evil" derive what meaning they have from our attempts to apply that kind of distinction. The word "good" has a meaning in so far as it has a use in the linguistic practices of proposing and justifying: we use the word "good" of an action only when we are engaged in proposing and justifying that action, so that to say of an action that it is "good" just is to imply that it is capable of being justified without absurdity. The word "evil" is a word that we use of an action only when we wish to deny that it could be justified.
When deliberating about what to do, we typically consider various proposals, some of which we reject as less good than others, but in regarding them as "less good" or "worse" we do not regard them as "evil". There are many types of action which are inherently so trivial that they are sometimes spoken of as "morally neutral", but this category is misleading, because, if "good" just means "self-consistently justifiable", then there is no act so essentially trivial that a situation cannot be imagined in which someone might propose doing it and therefore speak of it as "good".
To be responsible is to acknowledge the requirement not to do what cannot be justified, since responsibility is by definition the requirement to respond to demands for justification. To say that an action is "evil" is to say that no reason could justify it, so that to act upon it would be absolutely inexcusable on any grounds whatsoever.
To say that we have an intuitive grasp of the difference between good and evil is to say that we have a direct grasp of the self-evident difference between a "good" action, i.e., one which can without absurdity be proposed and therefore justified, and an "evil" action, i.e., one which cannot be proposed and therefore cannot be justified without absurdity.
5. CONSENT & IMPLICIT SELF-CONTRADICTION
To construct proposals which are explicitly self-contradictory is a simple matter, but these tend to be trivial precisely because they are explicit and the absurdity is therefore so obvious that no one would be tempted to propose, justify or act on them, e.g., the proposal "That you do and do not kiss (or kill) me". The danger lies in proposals where the self-contradiction is implicit rather than explicit so that we are able to deceive ourselves about it if we have strong motives for doing so.
The next step in the demonstration is to show that there is an intention implicit in the act of proposing any action which renders certain kinds of proposal implicitly self-contradictory. That is to say, the uttering of a proposal can be seen as an action in its own right, - a speech-act, - and therefore as implying an intention-expressible-as-a-proposal; and, if this is so, then it is possible for the explicit content of certain types of proposal to be seen as contradicting that implicit intention, thereby producing an implicit contradiction.
It strikes me as self-evident that anyone who proposes any course of action thereby implicitly intends to seek consent to it, and what makes it self-evident is that whoever proposes any course of action knows that, unless he somehow signals that his proposal is intended ironically, those who hear him will automatically assume that what he is doing is seeking consent for his proposal. He knows this just because he is a speaker, the user of a natural language: it is part of the interlocutory grammar which, like the grammar of sentences, every speaker applies "intuitively".
I now come to the most important part of my argument: If proposing a particular course or a general rule of action always implies an appeal for consent, then an implicit contradiction arises if it is proposed that someone be insulted, raped, tortured, enslaved or murdered, since these types of action, by definition, cannot occur unless the object of the action withholds his consent. Actions of this type cannot be proposed without self-evident absurdity, and that which cannot meaningfully be proposed cannot be justified by any reasoning whatsoever. Such actions absolutely cannot be called good and must therefore be called "evil".
I also insist, - and this is the most sensational implication of my argument, - that the same is true of the proposal that someone be punished. There is nothing self-contradictory in proposing that someone freely consent to be penalized (i.e., that he voluntarily accept a penalty as a penance for wrong-doing or, as players do, for infringements of the rules of a game); but to "punish" him is, by definition, to impose a penalty on him without his consent to your doing so at the time when you do it, which cannot be justified.
I am fully aware that these arguments portend a revolution not only in moral philosophy, but also in the law and I make no apologies for that. It is predictable that what I propose will be fiercely challenged, and I shall attempt to rebut the most common types of challenge in a supplementary paper, but for the moment I prefer to focus simply on the principle.
6. CONCLUSION
The demonstration is now more or less complete, in that I have explained in what sense we have an "intuitive" grasp of the difference between good and evil actions; but I have not yet named the organ through which moral intuition operates. It is the organ whereby we recognize each other's intentions in speaking, i.e., the organ which makes language possible.
Students of linguistics have spoken of a part of the central nervous system which enables us to acquire language: the so-called LAD or Language-Acquisition Device. As yet no one is entirely sure how it works, but that it does work can hardly be doubted: it enables us, on condition we have someone else to do it with, to play intuitively the game of implying and inferring that is what language is. So I propose that what is now provisionally called the LAD is to moral intuition what the five senses are to sensory intuition.
In Language, Truth and Logic, A.J.Ayer, one of the most influential voices opposing the case for moral intuition, claimed that terms of ethical evaluation such as "good" were "calculated" (i.e., intended) to "express feelings", to "arouse feelings" and to "stimulate action". In doing so he was exercising precisely the kind of LAD-ish intuition I have proposed; but, if my intuition is correct, his exercise of it was insufficiently precise. My claim that someone who proposes a course of action is appealing to others to consent to that proposal does not deny Ayer's claim, but amplifies it; perhaps my intuition just expresses more fully what is involved in Ayer's recognition that value-terms are "calculated" to "stimulate action". Seeking to "stimulate action" entails seeking consent, because acting entails intending which in turn entails consenting, so, if you want to stimulate action, the only way to do it is to appeal to the agents' consent by reasoning or by other forms of inducement.
An argument for moral intuition is an argument for moral realism and moral cognitivism; i.e., it is the claim that there are moral facts, that certain types of action just are, - and can be known to be, - absolutely unjustifiable and therefore evil. Other types of action which can be proposed without self-contradiction are more or less good in relation to each other, but there are many different ways of being good, not all of which are mutually compatible, so that choices have to be made: no practical proposal, therefore, can ever be absolutely good, i.e., the only possible good for everyone in all circumstances, but certain kinds of practical proposal can be absolutely evil.
What this demonstration has shown is what Iris Murdoch intuitively sensed, that the logical distinction between facts and values, the gap between "is" and "ought", is false. That distinction, first set out 250 years ago by David Hume, is the foundation of the dominant consensus in contemporary moral philosophy. The dogma is that judgments of value are not statements of fact and cannot validly be inferred from statements of fact alone, and therefore cannot be true in the sense in which facts are true.
My answer to Hume is that there are special kinds of fact, what we might call the facts of interlocutory grammar, - facts about what speakers recognize themselves and each other as implicitly committed and entitled to by what is said between them, - from which conclusions can be drawn which are recognizably both moral and factual. The idea that an utterance has meaning only in so far as it implicitly affects the normative status, i.e., the commitments and entitlements, of speakers in relation to each other is the central debt that I owe to Robert Brandom.
I call upon all speakers to confirm the following facts from direct observation of their relations with each other: (1) that proposing a course of action entails an appeal for consent, and (2) that appealing for consent to a proposal entails an undertaking to justify it, i.e., give reasons for consenting to it; and I call upon all speakers also to confirm that the following conclusions can be drawn from these facts: (3) that there are types of action which, by definition, cannot be consented to and which therefore cannot be proposed without implicit self-contradiction, (4) that what cannot be proposed without self-contradiction is absolutely unjustifiable, i.e., no reason could without self-contradiction be offered as a reason for consenting to it, and that (5) where its author implicitly undertakes to justify a proposal which is absolutely unjustifiable, he cannot fulfill that undertaking, and he therefore cannot responsibly refuse to withdraw it if asked to do so.

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Copyright © Christopher Eddy 2011
(3492 words)