There are features of things which make moral judgments about them true.  For instance, in a certain case it may be that the fact that a given act is an act of killing-for-fun is the feature of it which makes it wrong.  It might be thought that there are some types of things which never have these sorts of features.  For instance, it might be thought that the motions of inanimate objects never have these features.  If so, then whereas any given human action might be wrong, or right, or permissible, or obligatory, or supererogatory, or whatever, the motion of any given inanimate object is never any of these things; such motions are "outside the moral domain," as it were, and no moral judgment is ever true of them.  So for instance, on this view, while there are true moral judgments about Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, there are no true moral judgments about the motions of Mars, since there are no features of that motion which would make any such judgment true.

A short argument against this view can be written as follows:

1. Either (a) the motion of Mars is morally permissible, or (b) the motion of Mars is not morally permissible.
2. (a) is a moral judgment.
3. (b) is a moral judgment.
4. Thus, there is at least one true moral judgment about the motion of Mars.

We can obviously extend this argument into any "domain" we please, and therefore we can show that there is no kind of thing about which there are no true moral judgments. 

If we want to avoid the conclusion, what should we do?  1 has got to be true.  2 seems true enough; if I say something is morally permissible, I have certainly made a moral judgment (even though in the present case I’ve clearly made a false one).  So 3 seems to me to be the premise we’ll need to attack if we want to avoid 4.  To deny 3 is to say that (b) (i.e. the claim "the motion of Mars is not morally permissible") is not a moral judgment.  But there seem to be genuine moral judgments which take this form; for instance, it seems clear that (c) "Killing innocent children is not morally permissible" is a moral judgment.  So we should want to say that (c) is a moral judgment, even if (b) isn’t one.  But there seems to be no principled way to get away with this.  That is, there seems to be nothing about (b) which would keep it from being a moral judgment without keeping (c) from being one, too.  It seems to me that if any sentence of the form "______ is not morally permissible" is not a moral judgment, then none of them are.  If so, then a principled 4-denier should say that sentences of the form "_______ is not morally permissible" are never moral judgments.  But that is an unpleasant thing to have to say.

A similar set of problems may obtain in other areas.  We may be tempted to say, for instance, that while there are some sorts of things about which there are true "color judgments" (e.g. there are true color judgments about ketchup, such as the judgment "Ketchup is red"), there are other sorts of things about which there are no true color judgments.  For instance, molecules are colorless, "outside the domain of color," so we might be tempted to say that any "color judgment" about a molecule has to be false.  Similarly, no number has a color, so we may want to say that all judgments about the color of, say, 7, are false.  But any molecule, and any number, is either green or not, and in either case it seems to follow that there is at least one true color judgment.  So we’ll be faced with the same pair of options: either (1) "X is not green" is not a color judgment, or (2) there are true color judgments about molecules and numbers.   

I expect that, with regard to color judgments, it will not matter very much which of the two options we choose.  Nothing much hangs on whether "X is not green" is classified as a color judgment or not.  I am not sure, however, whether anything important hangs on the corresponding question about moral judgments.  If we say that there are true moral judgments about dogs and planets and so on, it will follow that the sorts of features which make moral judgments true are features had by every type of thing.  This might be an interesting result.  Or, if we say that there aren’t any true moral judgments about dogs, planets, etc., then we may be committed to say that "negative" judgments of the form "____ is not [permissible, obligatory, right, wrong, etc.]" are not genuine moral judgments.  This again may be an interesting result.

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10 responses to “What’s outside the domain of moral judgment?”

  1. zwichenzug Avatar

    It seems to me that each of 1 – 3 is a premise that should not be accepted, but I’ll direct my comments at 1.
    1 is unacceptable because ‘the motion of Mars’ isn’t the sort of thing which can be, or fail to be, morally permissible. Another way of putting this is to say that 1 doesn’t make sense.
    Later, you write that, “if any sentence of the form “______ is not morally permissible” is not a moral judgment, then none of them are.”
    This is true. The question is, when you fill in the blank with ‘the motion of mars’ is the output of the function a sentence? My claim is that it is not.
    Let me stress, by the way, that I am asserting without argument a conception of the proper domain of moral discourse. That conception underlies my practice of denying that sentences like “The motion of Mars is morally permissible” make sense. This may look question begging, but I don’t think that it is.
    In order for such sentences to mean anything, we must have practices in place for using them. When I say that 1 fails to make sense, what I’m noticing is that 1 is so radically disconnected from our practice that it can’t be interpreted in a meaningful way.

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  2. david Avatar
    david

    Well, 1 is a pretty straightforward application of the principle of excluded middle, so if you deny 1, you have to get rid of that principle. That seems to me a pretty high cost — we seem to have very good reasons to want to affirm excluded middle. I don’t think it’s worth paying that cost just to save the idea of a proper domain of moral discourse.
    I don’t know whether you’re saying we should deny 1. You say that 1 doesn’t “make sense.” Does that mean that 1 isn’t true? If so, then I take it your view is inconsistent with excluded middle, because according to excluded middle anything of the form “P or not-P” is true.

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  3. zwichenzug Avatar

    Just a quick note — denying 1 would only be a rejection of the law of the excluded middle if it were granted that the clauses in 1 made sense.
    Consider a similar case: “‘_________’ is larger than three.”
    Now, there are some words that can be plugged in here to make a sentence, but you can’t plug in just any word. ‘Seven’, ‘One’, ‘2+2’, all of those, to use Frege’s phrase, saturate the formula. But what if you plugged in ‘Fish’ or ‘Mars’? It just wouldn’t make sense. That’s what I’m saying is going on with 1.

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  4. david Avatar
    david

    Hmm, that’s a fair point. I’ll have to think about that.

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  5. BlueNight Avatar

    Choice happens within a moral context, just as truth happens within a logical context. Fish is only larger than three when fish and three are defined within the same context.
    1. Either (a) the motion of Mars is morally permissible, or (b) the motion of Mars is not morally permissible.
    2. (a) is a moral judgment.
    3. (b) is a moral judgment.
    4. Thus, there is at least one true moral judgment about the motion of Mars.
    Watch your conclusion! 4 is properly: Thus, there is at least one moral judgement about the motion of Mars.
    Premises 2 and 3 are true: (a) and (b) are both moral judgements. However, neither of these true premises says that (a) or (b) are true. For all this argument says, they might both be false.
    Let us seek at least one more conclusion: (c) The moral permissibility of the motion of Mars cannot be determined.
    Within the general Western intuitive moral context/framework, morality is based on choices and consequences. Within this moral context of “things that can choose and things that can’t”, Mars is one of those “things that can’t.”
    1. No things that can be judged morally are things that cannot choose.
    2. Mars is a thing that cannot choose.
    3. Therefore, Mars is not a thing that can be judged morally.
    EIO-2, conditionally valid.

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  6. david Avatar
    david

    You are right that premises 2 and 3 do not imply that “that (a) or (b) are true”. But you’re ignoring premise 1. Premise 1 just is the claim that either (a) is true or (b) is true.
    I’m mostly in agreement with your idea that moral ideas have to do with “things that can choose” (although I’m not sure how exactly consequences are supposed to fit into the picture). The problem is that you have to deny one of the premises of the argument in order to consistently hold that.

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  7. conchis Avatar
    conchis

    (i) I’m not sure I buy the argument that “fish is larger than three” doesn’t make sense. I don’t see why it’s not just false: fish is not larger than three, because being larger than three is not a property fish can have.
    (ii) I think the real problem with the argument is that (3) is false. It seems to me to conflate two separate forms of (b).
    (b) X is not morally permissible; and
    (b’) X is morally not permissible.
    (b’) entails (b). But (b) does not entail (b’). (b) could also be true because:
    (b”) X is not morally anything
    i.e. it’s outside the domain of moral judgment.
    Noting this conflation avoids the problem with (c). We think (c) is a moral judgment because we think that:
    (c”) killing innocent children is not morally anything
    is obviously false, and therefore read (c) implicitly as:
    (c’) killing innocent children is morally not permissible.
    Now, you might either want to say that (c) is a moral judgment, on the basis that it’s based on (c’), which is a moral judgment; or that (c) is not, in and of itself a moral judgment, and that only (c’) is. But I don’t think that particularly matters for the point.

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  8. Mike Artherton Avatar
    Mike Artherton

    Nice stuff… tough to keep track of all that is happening. I end up reading 100 odd blogs daily. Plus there is news. You could also enrich your blog by adding current news on your blog… try out the news widget from widgetmate.com

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