By Branch / Doctrine > Ethics > Moral Anti-Realism

Introduction

Moral Anti-Realism (or Moral Irrealism) is the meta-ethical doctrine that there are no objective moral values.
It is usually defined in opposition to Moral Realism, which holds that there are indeed objective moral values, that evaluative statements are factual claims which are either true or false, and that their truth or falsity is independent of our perception of them or our beliefs, feelings or other attitudes towards them. Thus, Moral Anti-Realism can involve either a denial that moral properties exist at all, or the acceptance that they do exist, but that their existence is mind-dependent and not objective or independent.

Types of Moral Anti-Realism

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There are several different forms, depending on whether ethical statements are believed to be subjective claims (Ethical Subjectivism), not genuine claims at all (Non-Cognitivism) or mistaken objective claims (Moral Nihilism or Moral Skepticism):

Ethical Subjectivism, which holds that moral statements are made true or false by the attitudes and/or conventions of the observers, or that any ethical sentence implies an attitude held by someone.
- Moral Relativism (or Ethical Relativism): the view that for a thing to be morally right is for it to be approved of by society, leading to the conclusion that different things are right for people in different societies and different periods in history.
- Divine Command Theory: the view that a thing is right if it is approved of, and commanded by, God. William of Ockham, a strong proponent of the theory, went so far as to argue that if God had commanded murder, then murder would indeed have been morally obligatory, and indeed that that God could change the moral order at any time.
- Individualist subjectivism: the view (put forward by Protagoras) that there are as many distinct scales of good and evil as there are individuals in the world.
- Ideal Observer Theory: the view that what is right is determined by the attitudes that a hypothetical ideal observer (a being who is perfectly rational, imaginative and informed) would have.
Non-Cognitivism, which holds that ethical sentences are neither true nor false because they do not express genuine propositions, thus implying that moral knowledge is impossible. Again there are different versions:
- Emotivism: the view, defended by A.J. Ayer and C. L. Stevenson (1908 - 1979) among others, that ethical sentences serve merely to express emotions, and ethical judgements are primarily expressions of one's own attitude, although to some extent they are also imperatives meant to change the attitudes and actions of other listeners.
- Prescriptivism (or Universal Prescriptivism): the view, propounded by R.M. Hare (1919 - 2002), that moral statements function as imperatives which are universalizable (i.e. applicable to everyone in similar circumstances) e.g. "Killing is wrong" really means "Do not kill!"
- Quasi-Realism: the view, defended by Simon Blackburn (1944 - ), that ethical statements behave linguisticallylike factual claims, and can be appropriately called "true" or "false" even though there are no ethical facts for them to correspond to. Blackburn argues that ethics cannot be entirely realist, for this would not allow for phenomena such as the gradual development of ethical positions over time or in differing cultural traditions.
- Projectivism: the view that qualities can be attributed to (or "projected" on) an object as if those qualities actually belong to it. Projectivism in Ethics (originally proposed by David Hume) is associated by many with Moral Relativism, and is considered controversial, even though it was philosophical orthodoxy throughout much of the 20th Century.
- Moral Fictionalism: the view that statements of a certain sort should not be taken to be literally true, but merely a useful fiction.
Moral Nihilism, which holds that ethical claims are generally false. It holds that there are no objective values (that nothing is morally good, bad, wrong, right, etc.) because there are no moral truths (e.g. a moral nihilist would say that murder is not wrong, but neither is it right).
Error Theory is a form of Moral Nihilism which combines Cognitivism (the belief that moral language consists of truth-aptstatements) with Moral Nihilism (the belief that there are no moral facts).
Moral Skepticism, which holds that no one has any moral knowledge (or the stronger claim that no one can have any moral knowledge). It is particularly opposed to Moral Realism (see above) and perhaps its most famous proponent isFriedrich Nietzsche.

By Branch / Doctrine > Ethics > Moral Anti-Realism Ockham

William of Ockham

Introduction

William of Ockham (or William of Occam) (c. 1285 - 1348) was an EnglishFranciscan friar, philosopher and theologian of the Medieval period.
Along with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus and Averroës, he is one of themajor figures of late medieval Scholastic thought, and was at the centre of the majorintellectual and political controversies of the 14th Century. He is sometimes called the father of Nominalism, strongly believing that universals are merely mental concepts and abstractions which do not really exist, except in the mind.
In addition to formulating his famous methodological principle commonly known asOccam's Razor, he produced significant works on Logic, physics and theology. His philosophy was radical in his day and continues to provide insight into currentphilosophical debates.

Life

William of Ockham was born around 1285 in the small village of Ockham in Surrey, England, although nothing is known of his parents or his early life before he joined theFranciscan order (probably in London) at the age of fourteen. He was ordained a subdeacon by the Archbishop of Canterbury in Southwark, London in 1306, and was sent to study theology at the University of Oxford in 1309 (at some point he probably studied under John Duns Scotus and derived many of his views from him).
In 1320, he completed study for his bachelor's degree, and he lectured on Logic and natural philosophy in a Franciscan school from 1321 to 1324, while he waited to return to university to study for his doctorate (although events were to overtake him and henever completed his master's degree or doctorate). During these years he wrote many deep works on philosophy and Logic, including his monumental three-part "Summa logicae" in which he lays out the fundamentals of his Logic and its accompanyingMetaphysics.
In 1324, he was summoned to the Papal court at Avignon, France, under charges of heresy (possibly levied by the Oxford Chancellor John Lutterell), and a theological commission was asked to review his "Commentary on the Sentences" (a commentary he wrote on the "Book of Sentences" of the 12th Century Italian theologian Peter Lombard, a standard requirement for medieval theology students). Lutterell made a list of 56 statements (later reduced to 49) which he deemed to beerroneous or heretical, but in fact Ockham's views were fairly conservative and his religious statements mostly had adherents among the leading Franciscans, so he was not formally condemned for his teachings.
However, while undergoing these disciplinary difficulties, under a loose form of house arrest, Ockham also became involved inanother debate, when he was asked to review the arguments surrounding "apostolic poverty" (the belief that Jesus and his apostles owned no personal property and survived by begging and accepting the gifts of others). This was the subject of anothercharge of heresy by Pope John XXII (who opposed the belief) against the Franciscan Minister General Michael of Cesena in 1327. Having weighed the evidence, Ockham sided with the Minister General, which brought them both into conflict with the Pope, whom Ockham effectively accused of heresy himself.
Fearing imprisonment and possible execution, Ockham, Cesena and other Franciscan sympathizers fled Avignon for Pisa in 1328, taking refuge with the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV of Bavaria, who was also engaged in a dispute with the papacy at the time. Ockham was excommunicated for leaving Avignon, but his philosophy was never officially condemned. When the court of the Emperor returned from Italy to Munich, Ockham went with them and he lived out the rest of his life in the Franciscan convent at Munich.
He spent much of the remainder of his life writing on political issues, especially on the relations between Church and State(notably his "Dialogue on the Power of the Emperor and the Pope"), and he continued to attack papal power, always employing logical reasoning in his arguments. After Michael of Cesena's death in 1342, he became the leader of the small band of Franciscan dissidents living in exile with Louis IV.
Ockham died some time between 1347 and 1349 (before to the outbreak of the Black Death) in the Franciscan convent atMunich in Bavaria, Germany, still unreconciled with the Catholic Church. He was officially rehabilitated by Pope Innocent VIin 1359.

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As a Scholastic, Ockham was strongly committed to the ideas of Aristotle, and advocated reform both in method and in content, the main aim of which was simplification. He was strongly influenced by John Duns Scotus, from whom he derived his views ofdivine omnipotence, grace and justification, as well as much of his epistemological and ethical convictions, although he alsodisagreed with Scotus in the areas of predestination, penance, his understanding of universals and his view of parsimony.
The French Franciscan philosopher Peter John Olivi (1248 - 1298), an extremely original thinker and pioneer of many of thesame views that Ockham defended later in his career, was clearly an important influence on Ockham, although he never acknowledged it (possibly because Olivi himself was condemned as a heretic). Ockham has often been cast as the outstandingopponent of Thomism and St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Medieval "synthesizer” of faith and reason, although in reality he did not criticize Aquinas any more than he did others.
Ockham was a pioneer of Nominalism, and he argued strongly that only individuals exist (rather than supra-individualuniversals, essences or forms), and that universals are the products of abstraction from individuals by the human mind and haveno extra-mental existence. However, his view is perhaps more accurately described as Conceptualism rather thanNominalism, as Ockham held that universals were mental concepts (i.e. mental substitutes for real things, which do exist, even if only in the mind) rather than, as Nominalists would have it, merely names (i.e. words, rather than existing realities). He even extended this belief to mathematics, so that it was not necessary for him to suppose the real existence of such mathematical entities as points and lines in order to make useful use of them.
One important contribution Ockham made to modern science and modern intellectual culture was his principle of ontological parsimony in explanation and theory building, which has become better known as "Occam's Razor" (or, less commonly,"Ockham's Razor"). Essentially, the principle states that one should not multiply entities beyond the necessary ("Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate"). Or, alternatively, one should always opt for an explanation in terms of the fewest possible number of causes, factors or variables. Or, again, one should always take a bias towards simplicity when constructing a theory, and not construct unnecessary and over-elaborate explanations.
Theologically, Ockham was a Fideist, maintaining that belief in God is a matter of faith rather than knowledge and, against the mainstream, he insisted that theology is not a science and rejected all the alleged proofs of the existence of God. He believed that human reason can prove neither the immortality of the soul nor the existence of God (nor his unity and infinity), and that these truths are known to us by Revelation alone. For Ockham, the only truly necessary entity is God (everything else being contingent).
In Ethics, he was a supporter of Divine Command Theory, a deontological and absolutist approach to Ethics which believes that an action is right if God has decreed that it is right, and that that an act is obligatory if and only if (and because) it iscommanded by God. Thus, in answer to Plato's question: "Is something good because God wills it, or does God will something because it is good?", Ockham (against the majority view) resoundingly asserts the former. In his view, God does not conform to an independently existing standard of goodness; rather, God himself is the standard of goodness.
He contributed to an important development in late medieval Epistemology with his rejection of the Scholastic theory of species(which he held was unnecessary and not supported by experience), in favour of a theory of abstraction. He also distinguished between "intuitive cognition" (which depends on the existence or non existence of the object) and "abstract cognition" (which "abstracts" the object from the existence predicate). In effect, he defended direct realist Empiricism, according to which human beings perceive objects through intuitive cognition, without the help of any innate ideas.
In Logic, he came very close to stating what would later be called De Morgan's Laws (expressing pairs of dual logical operators in terms of negation), and also considered the concept of ternary logic (a logical system with three truth values: true, false and some third value), a concept that would only be taken up again in the mathematical logic of the 19th and 20th Centuries.
Ockham is also increasingly being recognized as an important contributor to the development of modern Western constitutional ideas (especially the idea of government with limited responsibility), and to the emergence of liberal democraticideologies. He was one of the first medieval authors to advocate a form of Church-State separation, and was important for the early development of the notion of property rights and freedom of speech.

Ockham also wrote a great deal on natural philosophy, including a long commentary on Aristotle's physics. One important view he held, contrary to the contemporary theory, was that motion is essentially self-conserving in itself, without need of anycausal force (an application of his "razor" or the principle of parsimony).

By Branch / Doctrine > Ethics > Moral Anti-Realism Ayer

Sir Alfred Ayer
(Bromide print by Steve Pyke, 1988)

Introduction

Sir Alfred Jules ("Freddie") Ayer (better known as Alfred Ayer or A. J. Ayer) (1910 - 1989) was a 20th Century British philosopher in the Analytic Philosophytradition, mainly known for his promotion of Logical Positivism and for popularizingthe movement's ideas in Britain.
He saw himself as continuing in the British Empiricist tradition of Locke and Humeand more contemporary philosophers like Bertrand Russell, and is often considered second only to Russell among British philosophers of the 20th Century in the depth of his philosophical knowledge.

Life

Alfred Ayer was born on 29 October 1910 in London, England, into a wealthy family of continental origin. His mother, Reine, was from a Dutch-Jewish family; his father, Jules Louis Cyprien Ayer, was a Swiss Calvinist. He grew up in the well-to-do St. John's Wood area of London, and was educated at the exclusive Ascham St. Vincent preparatory school for boys at Eastbourne, and then at even more prestigious Eton College.
A precocious but mischievous child, Ayer always felt himself to be something of an outsider. From an early age, he tried to convert his fellow students to Atheism, and at the age of at he 16 started to show aserious interest in philosophy, duly impressed by his reading of Bertrand Russell's "Sceptical Essays" and G. E. Moore's"Principia Ethica".
In 1929, he won a classics scholarship to Christ Church College at the University of Oxford, where one of his philosophy tutors, Gilbert Ryle (1900 - 1976), introduced him to Wittgenstein's "Tractatus". Ryle, who became a major figure in the Ordinary Language Philosophy movement, also enabled the young Alfred to study for a time with Moritz Schlick (1882 - 1936), then leader of the influential Vienna Circle, out of which the Logical Positivism movement grew. From 1933 to 1944, he was a lecturer andresearch fellow at Christ Church, Oxford.
During World War II, Ayer served in the British military, working for the Special Operations Executive (a secret intelligence and espionage unit) and helping to organize the French resistance movement in London. He was popularly known after the War as a participant on the BBC discussion program "The Brains Trust". He was a noted social mixer and womanizer (he wasmarried four times), and enjoyed dancing and attending the London clubs, as well as being a well known face in the crowd at his beloved Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, where he was known as "The Prof". Despite his reputation for aloofness and vanity, his circle of friends included many famous names in the fields of politics, literature and philosophy.
Ayer was the Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at the University College London from 1946 until 1959, when he became Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, a position he retained until 1978. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1947 until his death, president of the Aristotelian Society from 1951 to 1952, and president of the British Humanist Association from 1965 to 1970.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Ayer kept up a hectic schedue of lecture tours throughout Europe and South America, and then later in China, Russia, India and Pakistan. He taught and lectured several times in the United States, including serving as a visiting professor at Bard College in New York State. In 1963, he had a son, Nicholas, by his second wife, Dee Wells, an experience which apparently had a profound effect on him. Throughout this period, he continued to be active the British Labour Party, which he had first joined before the War. Among other honours, he was knighted in 1970.
He is generally considered to have been an outspoken atheist, although "igtheist" (a person who believes that "God" denotes no verifiable hypothesis) may be a better description. However, in 1988, shortly before his death, he received much publicity after an unusual near-death experience, which weakened his inflexible attitude that there is no life after death, and prompted him to write an article called "What I saw when I was dead". He died of a collapsed lung in London on 27 June 1989.

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A. J. Ayer had a crisp, clear and informative writing style, in which he could lay bare the bones of a philosophical difficulty in a few paragraphs of strikingly simple prose. He is often considered second only to Berrand Russell among British philosophersof the 20th Century in the depth of his philosophical knowledge.
In addition to two autobiographies, he wrote books on Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, David Hume and Voltaire, all of whom had a lasting influence on his own work. He saw himself as continuing in the line of British Empiricism established by Lockeand Hume and more contemporary philosophers like Russell.
Ayer began the book that made his philosophical name, "Language, Truth, and Logic", at the tender age of 23 as a young lecturer at Oxford, and it was published three years later in 1936. The book is regarded as a classic of 20th Century Analytic Philosophy and Logical Positivism, and is still widely read in philosophy courses around the world. In it, he popularized theverification principle (an issue at the heart of the debates of the Vienna Circle at the time), that a sentence is meaninglessunless it has verifiable empirical import (see the section on Verificationism).
He also claimed in the book that the distinction between a conscious human and an unconscious machine merely resolves itself into a distinction between "different types of perceptible behaviour" (a contentious argument which anticipates the 1950Turing test of a machine's intelligence or consciousness). He also put forward an emotivist theory of Ethics (a kind of Moral Anti-Realism or Non-Cognitivism, which holds that that ethical judgments are primarily just expressions of one's own attitude and imperatives designed to change the attitudes and actions of others), which he never abandoned.
His later works include "Foundations of Empirical Knowledge" (1940), "The Problem of Knowledge" (1956) and "Logical Positivism" (1966). In 1973, his "Central Questions of Philosophy" was published. The book was a comprehensive confirmation of his Logical Positivist outlook that large parts of what was traditionally called "philosophy" (including the whole ofMetaphysics, Theology and Aesthetics) were not matters that could be judged as being true or false and that it was thusmeaningless to even discuss them.

These claims, and his complete rejection of the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, made him rather unpopularamong other British philosophers. For many years he kept up a highly public ongoing battle against the Ordinary Language Philosophy of J. L. Austin (1911 - 1960) and Peter Strawson (1919 - 2006) in particular.

Moral Nihilism is the meta-ethical view (see the section on Ethics) that ethical claims are generally false. It holds that there are no objective moral facts or true propositions - that nothing is morally good, bad, wrong, right, etc - because there are no moral truths (e.g. a moral nihilist would say that murder is not wrong, but neither is it right).
It differs from Ethical Subjectivism, and Moral Relativism, which do allow for moral statements to be true or false in a non-objective sense, but do not assign any static truth-values to moral statements. Criticisms of Moral Nihilism come primarily from Moral Realist doctrines like Ethical Naturalism and Ethical Non-Naturalism, which argue that there are positive moral truths. It is related in some ways to the metaphysical doctrine of Nihilism.
The philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli is sometimes presented as a model of Moral Nihilism, but that is highly questionable as he was largely silent on moral matters and, if anything, he presented an alternative to the ethical theories of his day, rather than an all-out rejection of all morality.

Error Theory

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Error Theory is a form of Moral Nihilism which combines Cognitivism (the belief that moral language consists of truth-aptstatements) with Moral Nihilism (the belief that there are no moral facts). It is the view that ordinary moral thought and discourse is committed to deep and pervasive error, and that all moral statements make false ontological claims.
Error Theory holds that we do not know that any moral claim is true because (i) all moral claims are false, (ii) we have reason to believe that all moral claims are false, and (iii) because we are not justified in believing any claim we have reason to deny, we are therefore not justified in believing any moral claims at all.
The Global Falsity form of Error Theory claims that moral beliefs and assertions are false in that they claim that certain moral facts exist that do not in fact exist. The Presupposition Failure form claims that moral beliefs and assertions are not truebecause they are neither true nor false (i.e. moral beliefs and assertions presuppose the existence of moral facts that do not exist).

The most famous moral Error Theorist is J. L. Mackie (1917 - 1981), who defended the metaethical view in his 1977 "Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong". Mackie argues that moral claims imply motivation internalism (the idea that an individual has a motivation to perform an action which they see as morally obligatory), which is false, and therefore so too are all moral claims. He also argues that moral claims necessarily entail a correspondent "reasons claim" (e.g. if "killing babies is wrong" is true, then everybody has a reason to not kill babies), but this is refuted by a psychopath who sees every reason to kill babies, and no reason not to do so, therefore all moral claims are thus false.

Moral Skepticism is the meta-ethical theory that no-one has any moral knowledge (or the stronger claim that no-one canhave any moral knowledge). It holds that we are never justified in believing that, and never know whether, moral claims are true. This is not the same as arguing that all moral claims are false, which is the position of Moral Nihilism or Error Theory. It isrelated to, and takes its general reasoning from, Pyrrhonian or Academic Skepticism traditions in Epistemology.
Some commentators would argue that the label Moral Skepticism includes positions such as Moral Nihilism and Non-Cognitivism on the grounds that these theories also entail doubts about the validity of moral claims, but they are often considered quite separately. All of these positions, however, are particularly opposed to any type of Moral Realism.
Some see it as absurd and an abdication of intellectual responsibility to hold that any moral theory can be refuted merely by showing that it leads to Moral Skepticism. Skeptics who deny that we have reason to believe or obey ethical claims like "slavery is morally wrong" (or "terrorism" or "child abuse") are seen as misguided and dangerous, contrary to common sense, and likely to lead to immorality.
Perhaps the most famous Moral Skepticist was Friedrich Nietzsche, and more recent proponents include the Error Theorist J. L. Mackie (1917 - 1981), the philosopher of science Michael Ruse (1940 - ) and Richard Joyce (1966 - ).

Types of Moral Skepticism

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Different versions of Moral Skepticism deny or doubt moral knowledge, justified moral belief, moral truth, moral facts or properties, and reasons to be moral:

Pyrrhonian Moral Skepticism is content to merely doubt that moral knowledge is even possible.
Dogmatic Moral Skepticism claims that no-one ever knows that any substantive moral belief is true, nor can bejustified in holding any such beliefs.
Practical Moral Skepticism denies that there is always enough reason for moral action (as opposed to the more dogmatic denial that there is ever adequate reason).

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