Moral Properties: Some Epistemological, Ontological, and Normative Dimensions

Abstract

Moral properties lead a double life. We invoke them as high authorities when we feel mistreated or want to redirect others; but we also doubt their authority—or even their existence—when we seek to understand them philosophically. Some philosophers would say that even this open-ended contrast between respect and skeptical doubt presupposes too much: ontological neutrality requires speaking not of moral properties but instead of moral predicates. Nonetheless, even if we confine the contrast to those, a comparable duality is evident. For nearly everyone, moral terms are apparently quite well understood when it comes to bringing up children—an activity in which our true colors surely show—but deeply puzzling when it comes to the attempt at analysis. In this, to be sure, moral language is not so different from many other kinds: we learn how to use moral terms, much as we do psychological and other “descriptive” terms, and in that crucial way we know what they mean, yet even most philosophers are unable to give definitions that capture their meaning. This plainly applies to psychological language embodying action-explaining terms, and it clearly applies to at least a great many physical terms, perhaps all those not ostensively “definable.” This kind of parity between moral and descriptive language is one among many reasons to explore the moral domain on the tentative assumption of realism. This paper does not argue directly for moral realism, but if the framework it presents for understanding moral discourse and practice is plausible, that will perhaps constitute an indirect argument for the view that moral judgments belong to the realm of the true and the real, not simply to that of attitudinal expression and behavioral regulation.