Are There Unresolvable Moral Disputes?

Peter Glassen, “Are There Unresolvable Moral Disputes?”, Dialogue 1(1962) 36-50

ARE THERE UNRESOLVABLE MORAL DISPUTES?

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HOSE who uphold what is commonly called the "emotive" theory of ethics are apt to maintain, as a consequence of that theory, that at least some moral disputes, if not all, may be in principle unresolvable, no matter how much time is allotted to the disputants to enable them to try and come to an agreement. The reason is this: Moral judgments, according to the emotive theory, in its most extreme form at any rate, do not assert anything but merely express attitudes of approval and disapproval. When two people apparently affirm contradictory moral judgments— Smith, for example, saying "Divorce is wrong" and Jones saying "No, divorce is not wrong"—they do not, in the last analysis, disagree in belief, they disagree in attitude. And hence when they engage in what appears to be a dispute on some moral issue, they are not really trying to change each other's beliefs, but each other's attitudes. To be sure, attitudes do to some degree depend on beliefs, and so the parties to a moral dispute may try to change each other's beliefs, but only as a means to changing each other's attitudes. In some cases it may happen that when agreement in belief is achieved, agreement in attitude wi'l result, and so the moral dispute will be resolved. But there seems no reason to think that attitudes depend wholly on beliefs, or that there is a perfect correlation between beliefs and attitudes; it would seem quite possible, for example, that though Smith and Jones held exactly the same beliefs about divorce, the one should disapprove of it, and the other approve of it. Hence achieving agreement in belief will not guarantee that agreement in attitude will be reached; and hence though the parties to a moral dispute may come to agree in their beliefs about the subject under discussion, their attitudes to it may continue to differ, and so the moral dispute between them will remain unresolved. Now I do not in this paper propose to question the correctness of the emotive theory. I shall grant for the sake of argument that moral judgments do not assert anything, but merely express 36

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attitudes, attitudes of approval or disapproval. But I want to show that if this view is to be at all plausible, we must state it with a certain qualification; and that if this qualification is granted, then the above-mentioned consequence of the emotive theory does not follow. Rather, on the qualified view it follows that once agreement in belief is reached, there must be agreement in attitude, and hence there must be a resolution of the moral dispute. But to show this it will be necessary to note certain facts about approval and disapproval. When we are told that someone, A, approves or disapproves of something, O, one of the first things we want to know is, why does A approve, or disapprove, of O. In reply to our question, Why does A approve (or disapprove) of O ?, we may be given an answer of one of two kinds, which I shall call for the moment " I " and "II". Let us consider some examples of answers of kind I: 1. He approves of the war because he believes that wars bring out the noblest qualities of man. 2. He approves of the new civic auditorium because he is convinced that it will greatly stimulate the musical life of the city. 3. He disapproves of communism because of its opposition to religion. 4. He disapproves of republicanism because it will result in the abolition of all hereditary titles. 5. He disapproves of educating the poor because he thinks that class distinctions must be preserved, and if the poor were educated they might come to think that they were as good as their betters. 6. He approves of that painting because, as he says, it has something new to show us. Now if we examine the reasons given here for A's approval or disapproval, we find that they have to do with the nature or characteristics of, or some fact about, the object of approval or disapproval. It is the tendency of wars to bring out the noblest qualities of man that makes A approve of them; the fact that 37

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communism is opposed to religion that makes him disapprove of it; the originality of the painting that makes him approve of it; and so on. Hence we may say, using an expression of George Pitcher's,1 that the statements from i to 6 inform us of the basisin-the-object of A's approval, or, for short, the objective basis of A's approval. It must be noted, however, that the objective basis of A's approval (henceforth I shall let the reader tacitly supply the words "or disapproval" where necessary) is constituted, not by the actual nature or characteristics of the object of approval, but by the nature or characteristics which A attributes to the object—which he believes it to have, knows it to have, perceives it to have, or something else of the sort. If A had no beliefs about the nature of the object, or no awareness of it, the object would presumably be powerless to make A approve or disapprove of it, no matter what characteristics it might possess. It is for this reason that altering A's beliefs about the object may result in a change in A's attitude to it. If A, for example, were to become convinced that wars bring out the most brutal qualities of men instead of their noblest, his attitude to wars might well change to one of disapproval. And in general, in the case of any particular agent it may be expected that, other things being equal, if he comes to believe that an object has features the opposite of those which he originally believed it to have, then, if his original attitude was one of approval, it will be replaced by an attitude of disapproval, and vice versa; a change in the objective basis of his attitude will be reflected in a change in his attitude. If, however, we consider two different agents, A and B, it seems quite possible—at least there seems no reason to believe the contrary—that the total set of A's beliefs about some object O may coincide with the total set of B's beliefs about O, and yet A may approve of O and B disapprove of O. In other words, if we inquire into the objective basis of A's approval of O and the objective basis of B's rfwapproval of O, we may find that the one is the same as the other. It is this point that emotivists have in 1

In an article entitled "On Approval", The Philosophical Review, April, 1958. 38

ARE THERE UNRESOLVABLE MORAL DISPUTES?

mind when they say that though two agents may reach agreement in belief, they may yet fail to reach agreement in attitude—and hence, that there may be unresolvable moral disputes even though the parties to the dispute may agree as to what the facts of the case are. What the emotivists overlook, however, is that an attitude of approval or disapproval has not only an objective basis, but another basis as well, as becomes clear when we consider a different kind of answer that may be given in reply to a question as to why A approves or disapproves of O, an answer of kind II: 1. He approves of the war because he hates the Germans. 2. He approves of the new civic auditorium because he is a great lover of music and the drama. 3. He disapproves of communism because he is afraid that under that system he would have to work for a living. 4. He disapproves of republicanism because he is strongly conservative by nature and upbringing. 5. He disapproves of educating the poor because he likes to feel himself superior to the mass of mankind. 6. He approves of that painting because he has a passion for novelty in art. If we examine the reasons given here for A's approval or disapproval of O we find that they pertain, not to any characteristic of the object, but rather to certain characteristics of the subject, that is, of the agent whose attitude we are talking about. It is A's hatred of Germans, or his love of music, or his fear, or his conservativeness, or something else of the sort, that leads him to approve or disapprove of O. Presumably if A did not hate the Germans he might not approve of the war; if he did not love music, he might not approve of the new civic auditorium; and so on. Hence we might say that the preceding statements 1 to 6 inform us of the basis-in-the-subject of his approval or disapproval; or, for short, of the subjective basis of A's approval or disapproval of O. Now the fact that when we ask why A approves of O we might be given in answer a statement as to the objective basis of A's 39

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approval or, alternatively, a statement as to the subjective basis of A's approval, does not mean that the attitude of approval might have an objective basis or a subjective basis; for it has both an objective basis and a subjective basis. I do not know how to prove this statement, but I think that I can make it plausible by referring again to the reasons for approval and disapproval given in lists I and II. Let us begin with list I. It would seem to be unlikely that if A were totally indifferent to man's noble qualities his belief that wars bring out these qualities would lead him to approve of wars. If A did not like music, or stand to gain in some way from increased musical activity (i.e., by way of increased sales of musical instruments if he happened to be in the music business) his belief that the new civic auditorium would stimulate the musical life of the city would surely not lead him to approve of it. If A did not cherish religion, or at least the freedom to follow one's religious convictions, he might well be aware of communism's opposition to religion without therefore disapproving of it. And so on. Similarly with the items in list II. The fact that A hates the Germans would not lead him to approve of the war unless he knew or believed that the war was against the Germans and not against, say, the French. The fact that A does not want to work for a living would not lead him to disapprove of communism unless he knew or believed that under that system he would be compelled to work for a living. Again, the fact that A has a passion for novelty in art would not lead him to approve of that painting unless he were aware of that painting and of its novel features. And so on. An attitude of approval or disapproval, we may say then, is a product of two factors: the subject's knowledge or awareness of, or beliefs about, the nature or characteristics of O—the objective factor; and some other condition (to be discussed presently) residing in the subject—the subjective factor. When we inquire into the reasons for A's approval of O, we may be given information either about the objective factor or about the subjective factor, depending on whether we are presumed already to be familiar (either from the context or otherwise) with the one or the other. Thus if the person we ask knows that we are unfamiliar with the doctrines of Marxist communism and we want to know 40

ARE THERE UNRESOLVABLE MORAL DISPUTES?

why A disapproves of that philosophy, we may be told that A disapproves of it because of its opposition to religion—it being left to us to assume that A cherishes religion or at least the principle of freedom of religion. If we want to know why A approves of the war we may be told that A hates the Germans, it being taken for granted that we realize that A knows the war is against the Germans. And similarly in other cases. Sometimes in order to understand why A approves or disapproves of O we have to be explicitly informed of both the objective and the subjective basis of his attitude, as the following two pieces of dialogue indicate: (1) Why does A disapprove of communism? Because he doesn't want to work for a living. (Subjective basis) But why should that make him disapprove of communism ? Well, because A believes that the communists would make him work for a living. (Objective basis) (2) Why does A approve of the new civic auditorium? Because he believes that in the long run it will result in increased sales of musical instruments. (Objective basis) But why should that make him approve? Oh, I see, you don't know. Well, he's in the music business, and of course he hopes to make a bigger profit. (Subjective basis) As the foregoing examples of dialogue might suggest, given the same objective basis, an agent might approve of O because of any one of several possible subjective bases, and given the same subjective basis he might approve of O because of any one of several different beliefs he might have about O. That is why we sometimes need to be given information about both the objective and the subjective basis of the agent's attitude before we can understand it. Thus A's believing that the new civic auditorium will stimulate the musical life of the city may lead him to approve of it because he loves music, or because he wants to make a bigger profit, or because he has civic pride and wants his city to shine in the sphere of culture, or because his son is studying music and he wants him to have the greater opportunities that an enriched civic musical life would afford; or because of something else of the sort. Similarly A's love of music might lead him to 41

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approve of the new civic auditorium because he believes more concerts would be available to him, or that better musicians would be attracted to the city, or that the level of musical taste would generally be raised in the city, and so on. From the point of view of our problem what makes these facts important is this: it is quite possible that A and B may have the same beliefs about O, and yet differ in attitude to O because the subjective factors determining their attitudes might differ; and it is quite possible that though the subjective factors determining A's and B's attitudes are the same, their attitudes might differ because of different beliefs they have about O. If, however, both the objective basis and the subjective basis of the attitudes of A and of B are the same, then their attitudes must be the same; or, at any rate, there would then seem to be no reason why their attitudes should differ. If the attitudes of approval and disapproval are products, as they seem to be, of two sorts of factors, namely, objective ones and subjective ones, then if there is no difference among the factors, there ought to be no difference between the attitudes. If anyone were to contend that there might still be a difference between the attitudes of A and B he would have to show, I think, in order to make his contention at all plausible, that there may be a third sort of factor at work: but I, at any rate, am unable to imagine what this might be; nor, in trying to explain an agent's attitude, do we ever refer to a kind of factor other than the two I have been discussing. Hence I think we are entitled to assume that whenever we encounter a case of two agents' having the same beliefs about O but differing in attitude to it, there must be a difference in the subjective bases of their attitudes;2 and once we know what the subjective basis of each agent's attitude is, we can 2

It might seem that there are instances where this would not be so. Suppose that A and B have exactly the same beliefs about O, including the belief that O will be conducive to A's interests but will be detrimental to B's interests. In that case A might well approve of O, the subjective basis of his approval being self-interest, and B might well rfuapprove of O, the subjective basis of his disapproval also being self-interest—i.e., the same subjective basis as that of A's approval. But in fact the subjective bases of their attitudes would not be the same. The subjective basis of A's approval is, true enough, self-interest, but that in the case of A, is his interest in A's welfare, and the subjective basis of B's (foapproval is his interest in B's welfare. 42

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readily understand the difference in their attitudes. Thus suppose that A and B have the same beliefs about the projected new civic auditorium—that it will stimulate the musical life of the city, that it will attract better artists, that it will increase the profits of certain merchants, that it will result in an increase in property tax, etc.—but that A approves of the project and B disapproves of it: we could readily understand why this should be so if we were told, for example, that A loves music and is willing to pay for it, but that B is indifferent to music and resents any increase in taxes. But what has all this to do with moral disputes? At this point the reader may be tempted to conclude that what has been said so far confirms the emotivist view that there may be unresolvable moral disputes and, furthermore, explains why there should be such: there may be unresolvable moral disputes because though two agents might agree in their beliefs about, say, a suggested course of action, yet their attitudes to it might be irreconcilably different because the subjective bases of their attitudes were different. But this conclusion would be mistaken. To see why it would be, we must enter into certain considerations concerning the nature of the subjective basis. What I have to say on this matter will not be very thorough nor very exact, but it will, I trust, be sufficient to establish the point I wish to make. The objective basis of an attitude of approval or disapproval, we have seen, consists in the agent's beliefs about, knowledge of, or perception of the qualities of the object. Factors of this sort we might refer to, for the sake of convenience, as cognitive conditions of the agent. What does the subjective basis of an attitude consist in ? If we consider the explanations given above of an agent's attitude that have reference to the subjective basis of his attitude, we find that the subjective basis may consist in a kind of feeling or emotion or sentiment (e.g., hate, fear, love), a kind of wanting, desiring, liking (e.g., the desire to make a profit, the liking to feel superior), or a trait of personality (e.g., conservativeness). The traits of personality however, that may be mentioned as being the subjective basis of someone's attitude turn out, on examination, to be dispositions to have certain feelings or emotions or sentiments or certain likes or dislikes, desires or 43

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aversions—e.g., conservativeness is a disposition to feel averse to any proposed or actual changes in customs, social and political institutions, etc.; hence, the traits of personality that may be the subjective basis of an attitude are reducible to one of the first two sorts of factors mentioned above. For the sake of convenience we may refer to these, in turn, as emotive and motivational conditions, or, using an older terminology, as affective and conative conditions; and since there seems to be an intimate relationship (though one that is difficult enough to describe exactly) between these two sorts of condition, we may j'oin the two terms naming them, and state our point succinctly thus: the subjective basis of an attitude consists in a certain emotive-motivational, or affective-conative, condition of the agent. This terminology makes it possible for us to talk either about the objective or the cognitive basis of an agent's attitude, whichever is the more convenient, and either about the subjective or the affectiveconative basis of his attitude. We are now at last in a position to turn to a consideration of moral judgments and moral disputes. Moral judgments, it is alleged, are expressions—and let us for the moment admit that they are merely expressions—of approval and disapproval. But if this is plausible of moral judgments, it is no less plausible of other sorts of evaluational judgments—of aesthetic judgments; of judgments in terms of such words as "vulgar", "refined", "boorish", etc.; ofjudgments in terms of such words as "wise" and "foolish"; and so on. Hence, although moral judgments may be expressions of approval and disapproval, not every expression of approval and disapproval, even if it has the syntactical form of a moral judgment, is a moral judgment. "David Copperfield is a very good novel" is certainly an expression of approval as much as "Albert Schweitzer is a very good man" is, but no one would say that it was a moral judgment; and similarly with other kinds of evaluational judgment. If an evaluational judgment is to be a moral judgment, it must at least be an expression of a certain kind of approval, namely, of moral approval. It is in fact quite common to distinguish among moral approval, or as we often alternatively put it, "approval on moral grounds"; prudential approval, or approval on prudential grounds; and aesthetic approval—and 44

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no doubt there are other kinds of approval as well. But what constitutes the difference among kinds of approval? It would seem that the difference among kinds of approval must be constituted by differences either in the objective bases or in the subjective bases of approval. For since approval seems to be a product of these two factors—and so far as I know, of these two factors only—if both the objective and subjective bases of one instance of approval are the same as those of another instance of approval, the two instances of approval must be the same in kind, since there is nothing left to make for a difference in kind between them. Now it does not seem that differences in kinds of approval are constituted essentially by differences in the objective bases of approval. It is true that, for instance, the object of aesthetic approval—in other words, that which the agent is aware of, perceives, has knowledge of or beliefs about when he approves of something aesthetically—is characteristically different from the object of moral approval, so that one might be tempted to think that it is the difference in objective basis that constitutes the difference between these two kinds of approval; but in the case of moral approval and prudential approval, the objective basis of the one is often indistinguishable from the objective basis of the other. Thus two agents might have precisely the same beliefs about, say, the keeping of promises, and yet the one might approve of promise-keeping morally and the other approve of it on prudential grounds, so that the difference in their approvals would have to be constituted by differences in the subjective bases of their approvals. There is, moreover, independent evidence for this conclusion. It is quite clear that we are not prepared to admit any sort of affective-conative condition as the subjective basis of moral approval or disapproval, but rather, that we expect the subjective basis of moral approval or disapproval to be a certain kind of affective-conative condition. If, for example, someone, A, expresses disapproval of another, B, by saying "B is a wicked man", but we happen to know or believe that A hates B because B bested him in a fair competition for some cherished goal, we are ready to suspect that A's disapproval of B, in spite of the words he used, is not a moral disapproval, but some other kind; and we 45

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axe ready to suspect this precisely because we suspect that the basis of A's disapproval is frustrated ambition, disappointment, chagrin, or something else of the sort, rather than the particular affective-conative condition which we should have expected to be the basis of his disapproval in view of the word, "wicked", that he used to express his disapproval. Another example: If A expresses his approval of the proposed war with the Enemy by saying "This is a just war", but we suspect that A, being a manufacturer of munitions, approves of the war because, and only because, he expects to make enormous profits, then we are not prepared to admit that A approves of the war morally; on the contrary, we shall want to say that A's choice of words to express his approval is misleading, since it gives the impression that he approves of the war morally whereas in fact he approves of it for selfish reasons. And in general, any attitude of approval or disapproval that is believed to have as its subjective basis some selfish desire, or fear, or hatred, or any one of various other affective-conative conditions, will not be regarded as being an attitude of moral approval or disapproval; nor will a moral judgment be regarded as the appropriate expression of that approval or disapproval. There are three well-known phenomena of the moral life which testify to this fact: hypocrisy, rationalization, and cynicism. Hypocrisy is the practice of deceiving others by leading them to believe, among other things, that one approves or disapproves of something morally when in fact one either has no attitude of approval or disapproval at all, or when the basis of one's attitude is some selfish desire, fear, hatred, etc., rather than the particular affective-conative condition of which alone the moral judgment would be the appropriate expression. Thus A in the second example above would probably be accused of hypocrisy. Rationalization—a phenomenon long known to novelists and dramatists but only recently named—is the practice of deceiving oneself by, among other things, persuading oneself that one's approvals and disapprovals are moral whereas in fact their subjective basis is something quite other than what would entitle them to be so considered. Thus A's expression of disapproval in the first example might well be the result of rationalization. Cynicism, 46

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finally, is the tendency to suspect others of being guilty of either hypocrisy or rationalization. There would be no point in cynicism unless people sometimes pretended, either to themselves or others, that their attitudes of approval or disapproval were moral whereas in fact the basis of these attitudes was egoism or some other affective-conative condition incompatible with the attitudes' being moral attitudes. It would appear, then, that for an attitude of approval to be an attitude of moral approval, to be an attitude of which the appropriate expression is a moral judgment rather than some other kind of evaluational judgment, it must have a special sort of affective-conative basis; and what essentially differentiates one sort of approval from another would seem to be the particular affective-conative condition which constitutes its subjective basis. Thus the function of evaluational judgements is not merely to express approval and disapproval; they have, at the very least, one additional function, namely, to indicate what is the subjective basis of the approval or disapproval expressed. T h a t is why there are

different classes of evaluational judgments—moral, prudential, aesthetic, etc. Now what the subjective basis of moral approval is, is a question that we need not go into here3. It is enough for our purposes to realize that even if moral judgements are merely expressions of attitudes, they must, in order to be moral judgments, be, or purport to be, expressions of attitudes having a special sort of affective-conative basis. For this gives us all we need to answer the question, Can there be moral disputes that are in principle unresolvable? The answer should now be obvious: No, there cannot be. In principle all moral disputes are resolvable by the 8

Nor would there be sufficient space to do so. But the reader who is interested in this question should consult the writings of the so-called moral-sense school, viz., Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith. When these writers inquired into the "origin" or the "foundation" of morals, at least one of the things, and one of the most important things, they tried to find out was, what is the subjective basis of moral approval. Their answer (which I happen to think is correct) was, of course, that it is what they variously called "benevolence", "fellow-feeling", "sympathy", or "the sentiment of humanity". It is this, and not their (or at least Hutcheson's) conception of a moral sense, that constitutes their most important contribution to ethical theory; and yet this contribution is almost universally ignored by present-day writers in the field. 47

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disputants' coming to agree in their beliefs concerning the object about which they dispute and towards which their attitudes initially differ. For if their dispute is really a moral dispute, if the judgments they utter appropriately express their attitudes, and these are moral attitudes, then (let us suppose there are two disputants, A and B, and A approves while B disapproves) the subjective basis of A's approval will be the same as the subjective basis of B's