We are all naturalists now!

Naturalism has taken on the role
previously filled at different times by realism and by empiricism as the mark
of seriousness in academic philosophy. On the current orthodoxy, philosophical
analysis should be undertaken naturalistically and aim to naturalize complex or
puzzling concepts or properties. Of course, all hangs on what is meant by
naturalism and this is not an uncontested concept.

Railton’s collection of essays, Facts,
Values and Norms is naturalistic in a traditional and influential way
reflected in each of its three sections: on realism about value and morality;
on normative moral theory; and on the authority of ethics and value. But the
first is perhaps the most important and sets the tone for the rest. In this
first group of essays, Railton aims to connect naturalism and realism.
Naturalism, he argues, supports realism.

Railton characterizes the aims of a
philosophical naturalist as follows.

First, [the naturalist] seeks
to provide an analysis of epistemology or ethics that permits us to see how the
central evaluative functions of this domain could be carried out within
existing (or prospective) empirical theories. Second, he attempts to show how
traditional non-naturalist accounts rely upon assumptions that are in some way
incoherent, or that fit ill with existing science. And third, he presents to
the skeptic a certain challenge, namely, to show how a skeptical account of our
epistemic or moral practices could be as plausible, useful, or interesting as
the account the naturalist offers, and how a skeptical reconstruction of such
practices — should the skeptic, as he often does, attempt one — could succeed
in preserving their distinction place and function in human affairs. [ibid: 4]

Railton thus aims to show how
ethical judgment fits within a scientifically reputable world-view. Ethical
properties are naturalized by showing how they fit within that world-view and
thus showing, despite whatever appearance they have, that they are not
unnatural or unreal. That claim is a central aspect of the ontological or
substantive dimension of naturalism. But there is also a methodological aspect
(popularized by Quine) which takes philosophy to be continuous with the
empirical sciences. This contrasts with the view that it has a special
(paradigmatically analytic) method. Railton’s model of value judgments is
offered not so much as unpacking evaluative concepts as being part of an
empirical theory of the nature of values which may, in part, revise our
pre-philosophical intuitions. (Grasping the consequence of denying a special
method for philosophy Railton delightfully comments at one point: ‘But the
reader will for once be spared more armchair social science’ [ibid: 29].)

As noted, Railton’s naturalism
lends support to a form of value realism. In a useful summary in the first
essay in this collection he says:

I will argue for a form of
moral realism that holds that holds that moral judgments can bear truth values
in a fundamentally nonepistemic sense of truth; that moral properties are
objective, though relational; that moral properties supervene upon on natural
properties, and may be reducible to them; that moral inquiry is of a piece with
empirical inquiry; that it cannot be known a priori whether bivalence holds for
moral judgments or how determinately such judgments can be assessed; that there
is reason to think we know a fair amount about morality, but also reason to
think that current moralities are wrong in certain ways and could be wrong in
quite general ways; that a rational agent may fail to have a reason for obeying
moral imperatives, although they may none the less be applicable to him; and
that, while there are perfectly general criteria of moral assessment
nonetheless, by the nature of these criteria no one kind of life is likely to
be appropriate for all individuals and no one set of norms appropriate for all
societies and all times. The position thus described might well be called ‘stark,
raving moral realism,’ but for the sake of syntax, I will colorlessly call it ‘moral
realism’. [ibid: 5]

Although he describes this position
as realist, it is less realist in one sense than other influential contemporary
positions such as Cornell Realism or the particularist realism of McDowell or
Dancy. The emphasis in these essays is not on the sui generis reality of
values or morals in any way that they could make up part of the fabric of the
world. Rather, Railton’s model of value is also reductionist and turns more
directly on the role of the subjects who frame value judgments and who have
interests and sentiments.

Centrally, it turns on the
following thought experiment.

Give to an actual individual A
unqualified cognitive and imaginative powers and full factual… information…
A will have become A+, who has complete and vivid knowledge of
himself… We now ask A+ to tell us not what he currently wants, but
what he would want his nonidealized self A to want. [ibid: 11]

This gives a model of ‘objectified
subjective interest’, of what is good for A, and forms the basis of a
related account of moral value, of what is morally good. The account is
relational. It does not apply to all rational subjects. But that does not make
it relativistic or unreal.

Railton spends some time defending
the fruitfulness of the model quoted above and the plausibility of the
counter-factual claim at its heart. But he also stresses that that
counter-factual is made true by a complex of dispositional facts about the
subject A in the real world rather than factors in other possible
worlds. These determine what A+ would desire for A and thus form
the reduction base for what is good for A. Realism about value, for Railton, is
thus realism about these dispositional facts.

To fill out the relational model of value, Railton
invokes Hume’s work perhaps surprisingly given the anti-realist thrust of most
contemporary neo-Humean moral philosophy. But Railton suggests that Hume is
useful in characterizing ‘value’s infrastructure’: the relationship between the
contingent character of subjects’ sentiments and objective although relational
values, since ‘value has its origin in subjects’ [ibid: 91].

Although displaying disarming
modesty about his skills as a historian of philosophy, Railton also draws on
work by Hume, Kant and Locke in the second group of essays that address the
role of normative moral theory. Railton here looks to provide a more realistic
approach to their application in questioning the role of moral dilemmas in
moral thought. In part this takes the form of arguing that an over simplified —
even if this were to be historically accurate — account of such philosophers’
moral theories gives poor guidance whereas what we might call a Bloomian strong
misreading of the history of philosophy shows that moral theory is a very
useful guide to moral judgment. This approach to the history of the subject
fits with the spirit of Railton’s naturalized approach to philosophical method.
The test of the account is whether it produces plausible results that can be
integrated with a scientifically informed world-view not whether it is
exegetically accurate.

The final group of essays looks to
the normative authority of values. Railton looks both to transcendental
arguments (‘constitutive’ in his phrase) that might ground non-hypothetical or
non-conditional reasons for actions (i.e., not conditional on independent ends
or goods) and to Hume and Kant to see whether duty turns on norms going ‘all
the way down’. He suggests that Kantian work on aesthetic judgment suggests it
does not.

Railton’s work is clearly worth
study as a rival to other influential contemporary accounts of both value
generally and moral values in particular. The style is informal and makes good
use of examples. It is admirably free of technical vocabulary. But at the same
time, there is something a little disappointing about this collection and three
reasons for this are worth briefly noting.

1) Railton does not himself explicitly engage with rival
accounts in this collection. They are not in his index. Thus one has rationally
to reconstruct how rival accounts conflict with the arguments set out here and
to imagine how that conversation would progress. (Since Railton does engage
rather more in other papers this is in part the fault of the selection.)

2) Despite the stylistic strengths mentioned above, there is
still something indirect about the way business is set about in these essays.
The reader is made to work by the lack of summaries, explicit conclusions,
useful repetitions and so on. But this is not because of a breathless rush of
philosophical argument. To the contrary, the pace is slow and meditative. As a
result, the collection does not reflect the recent flurry of interest in the
metaphysics of moral philosophy.

3) Finally, and at some risk of reflecting my own prior
philosophical commitments, it seems to me that Railton shirks the most
difficult aspects of his style of naturalism as applied to the relationship of
the titular abstract nouns: facts, values, norms. Surely the main perceived
problem is fitting the extra dimension of correctness and incorrectness present
in both values and norms into the realm of facts which contains no echo of it?
How can we understand the place of norms in nature? And if this is not a real,
pressing philosophical problem, what misunderstandings of the nature of nature
give rise to it? On this family of issues, Railton is strangely silent.

Whilst we might all benefit greatly from careful study of
the essays in this collection, they are unlikely to make converts to the field
of moral philosophy.

 

© 2005 Tim Thornton

 

Tim Thornton,
Ph.D., Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, UK

Categories: Philosophical