Emotions and desires, including the motivations that lead us to act when we go astray by our own lights.
This dimension of moral thought needs to be accounted for in an adequate development of the subjectivist position.
The challenge is to explain how we can achieve critical distance from our motivating attitudes, within a framework that understands moral thought essentially in terms of such attitudes.
One way of responding tp this challenge would be to modify the simple version
of expressivism by restricting the class of subjective attitudes that moral and normative
language is taken to express.
In this spirit, normative discourse might be supposed to give voice to our second-
order attitudes, including above all the preferences we form about our first-order desires[10].
When you act against your better judgment concerning he permissibility of keeping the wallet, for example, you have a first-order desire to hang onto the money that the wallet contains.
But you also form a distinct attitude about that desire, preferring that it should not prove effective in determining what you do. The subjectivist might say that
it is second-order desires of this kind that that it is the distinctive
function of normative language to express.
On the resulting picture, practical attitudes are subject to criticism by something outside themselves; but the standards for
such critical assessment are fixed by further practical attitudes of the agent[11].
A natural question to ask about this more sophisticated expressivism, however, concerns the standing of higher-order attitudes to constit
ute a basis for critical assessment.
Suppose you form a second-order desire that your desire
For money should not prevail in determining whether you keep the wallet you have found.
This higher-order desire is an attitude of the same basic type as the first-order attitude that is its object; it is just another desire or preference that you are
subject to. If there is a real issue about the credentials of the first -
order attitude, it is hard to see how it can be resolved simply through the formation of further attitudes of the same basic kind.
Won’t those attitudes be prone to further iterations of skeptical undermining? You could, after all, step back from your second-order desire regarding the original temptation to keep the wallet, and call that desire into question in turn, forming a third-order desire to ignore the scruples of conscience. Nothing in the nature of your second-order preferences seems to block such
critical questions from being raised about them.
The sophisticated expressivist might respond by noting that we generally don’t
Extend the process of reflection to such extremes. We step back from our first
-order attitudes to subject them to critical scrutiny, but we rarely take
this process further scrutinizing our second-order attitudes in turn.
What matters, fundamentally, is that normative thought is a reflective process,
in which we step back from our subjective attitudes and engage in reflection on them; this reflective character is what confers on higher-order attitudes their standing in situations of critical assessment.
Higher-order attitudes function as standards of normative assessment, in other words, not because of their nature as desires, but because of the reflective procedures that lead to their formation.
This approach works, however, only in cases in which agents have actually
undergone a course of reflection about their first-order desires.
Prior to such reflection, the approach suggests there are no standards for the critical assessment of our motivating attitudes, and this is an awkward result.
Suppose that in thinking about the question of whether to hang onto the wallet or turn it in at the lost-and-found office, you reach the conclusion
that personal financial advantage is not a good reason to keep property that is not rightfully yours. In arriving at this conclusion, you will probably
think that you are making a moral and normative discovery, about something that was true all along.
It is not that your arriving at this conclusion somehow makes it the case
that it is wrong to keep other people’s property when it falls into your hands; rather, it was wrong even before you started thinking about the question.
But how can the subjectivist make sense of this aspect of moral thought?
One possibility is to appeal to the agent’s dispositions. What matters to the
normative standing of a given first-order attitude, we
might say, is not that the agent has actually endorsed or rejected it through critical reflection, but that the agent is disposed to endorse or reject it through such reflection (i.e. that they would endorse or reject the desire if they were to engage in critical reflection on it).
Building on this idea, some philosophers have
proposed a different way of developing the subjectivist approach, which
we might call dispositionalism.
The dispositionalist holds that normative discourse functions not to express our higher-order attitudes, but to make claims about the higher-order attitudes we would arrive at through rational reflection.
To say that a lying promise is wrong, on this approach, is to say that one would desire
that one not give in to the temptation to make a false promise, if one were to reflect rationally on the matter.
When we affirm a normative claim of this kind, we might be expressing our practical attitudes, but we aren’t merely doing that; we might also be making true statements about a normative subject matter[12].
Dispositionalism seems to be an advance on expressivism in at least one important
respect. It allows us to say that there are normative facts that moral discourse makes claims about, facts that are capable of being discovered when we engage in normative reflection.
Moreover, it does this without violating the naturalistic metaphysical commitments of subjectivism.
Thus, the normative facts that dispositionalism posits do not involve any weird non-natural properties, of the kind that would be difficult to locate in the world that the natural sciences describe.
Instead, they are facts about the attitudes of human agents, in particular facts about
the dispositions of those agents to form higher-order attitudes through critical reflection.
Your act of betraying a secret is wrong, on this approach, just in case the following conditional
statement is true about you: that you would want yourself not to act on the temptation
to betray thesecret, if you were to reflect fully on the matter.
Dispositional facts of this kind define standards for the normative assessement
of the agent’s practical attitudes, but the standards are in the relevant sense subjective;
return false">ссылка скрытаthey are a matter, fundamentally, of the dispositions of the agents whom the standards regulate.
It is an open question, however, whether dispositionalism can really dispense
with normative standards that are independent of the person whose attitudes are subject
to assessment.
To see this, let’s go back to the motivational side of moral thought. Suppose
I have arrived at the conclusion that I would want myself to refrain from deception, if I were rational. The dispositionalist says: this judgment just is the moral judgment that it would be wrong for me to lie.
As we have emphasized, however, moral judgments of this kind are supposed to provide standards not merely for the criticism of our practical attitudes, but for their control;
they are practical not just in their subject matter, but in their effect, giving rise to new
motivations.
But how are judgments about our dispositions to desire things supposed to
have this practical effect?
The dispositionalist puts motivation into the content of moral judgments, construing them as
claims about what we would desire if we were rational. One could form a judgment
with this content, however, without having the desire that the judgment is about; how
can the dispositionalist bridge this gap?
The natural answer is to appeal to rationality to do this job. That is, dispositionalists often
propose the following principle of rationality(or some variant of it):
It is irrational to judge I would want myself to do X if I were rational, but to fail to have a desire
to do X.
Applying this principle to the case at hand, we get that it would be irrational to judge
that it would be wrong to tell a lie for personal advantage, but to fail to desire
to act accordingly.
Our responsiveness to this standard of rationality, the dispositionalist might then say, is what
enables normative reflection to generate new desires.
This suggestion is plausible, furthermore, because cases in which we fail to have desires that
accord with our normative judgments seem to be paradigm cases of irrationality.
If you really believe that you shouldn’t lie to your teacher to get an extension on the paper, but you end up doing so anyway, then you are going astray by our own lights; what could
be more irrational than that[13]?
The problem, for the dispositionalist, is to explain where this principle of rationality comes from.
It looks to be a substantive normative standard, one that is prior to and independent of
the attitudes that are up for assessment. The postulation of normative standards that are in this way objective, however, violates the subjectivist’s most basic metaphysical commitments.
Moral thought involves the application of rational standards, standards that are
normative for the agent, in the sense that they properly regulate the agent’s critical
reflections.