How should we deal with metaethical uncertainty? By “metaethics” I mean the metaphysics and epistemology of ethics (and not, as is sometimes meant in this community, highly abstract/general first-order ethical issues).
One answer is this: insofar as some metaethical issue is relevant for first-order ethical issues, deal with it as you would any other normative uncertainty. And insofar as it is not relevant for first-order ethical issues, ignore it (discounting, of course, intrinsic curiosity and any value knowledge has for its own sake).
Some people think that normative ethical issues ought to be completely independent of metaethics: “The whole idea [of my metaethical naturalism] is to hold fixed ordinary normative ideas and try to answer some further explanatory questions” (Schroeder, Mark. “What Matters About Metaethics?” In P. Singer ed. Does Anything Really Matter?: Essays on Parfit on Objectivity. OUP, 2017. P. 218-19). Others (e.g. McPherson, Tristram. For Unity in Moral Theorizing. PhD Dissertation, Princeton, 2008.) believe that metaethical and normative ethical theorizing should inform each other. For the first group, my suggestion in the previous paragraph recommends that they ignore metaethics entirely (again, setting aside any intrinsic motivation to study it), while for the second my suggestion recommends pursuing exclusively those areas which are likely to influence conclusions in normative ethics.
In fact, one might also take this attitude to certain questions in normative ethics. There are some theories in normative ethics that are extensionally equivalent: they recommend the exact same actions in every conceivable case. For example, some varieties of consequentialism can mimic certain forms of deontology, with the only differences between the theories being the reasons they give for why certain actions are right or wrong, not which actions they recommend. According to this way of thinking, these theories are not worth deciding between.
We might suggest the following method for ethical and metaethical theorizing: start with some set of decisions you’re unsure about. If you are considering whether to investigate some ethical or metaethical issue, first ask yourself if it would make a difference to at least one of those decisions. If it wouldn’t, ignore it. This seems to have a certain similarity with verificationism: if something wouldn’t make a difference to at least some conceivable observation, then it’s “metaphysical” and not worth talking about. Given this, it may be vulnerable to some of the same critiques as positivism, though I’m not sure, since I’m not very familiar with those critiques and the replies to them.
Note that I haven’t argued for this position, and I’m not even entirely sure I endorse it (though I also suspect that it will seem almost laughably obvious to some). I just wanted to get it out there. I may write a top-level post later exploring these ideas with more rigor.
Musings on Metaethical Uncertainty
How should we deal with metaethical uncertainty? By “metaethics” I mean the metaphysics and epistemology of ethics (and not, as is sometimes meant in this community, highly abstract/general first-order ethical issues).
One answer is this: insofar as some metaethical issue is relevant for first-order ethical issues, deal with it as you would any other normative uncertainty. And insofar as it is not relevant for first-order ethical issues, ignore it (discounting, of course, intrinsic curiosity and any value knowledge has for its own sake).
Some people think that normative ethical issues ought to be completely independent of metaethics: “The whole idea [of my metaethical naturalism] is to hold fixed ordinary normative ideas and try to answer some further explanatory questions” (Schroeder, Mark. “What Matters About Metaethics?” In P. Singer ed. Does Anything Really Matter?: Essays on Parfit on Objectivity. OUP, 2017. P. 218-19). Others (e.g. McPherson, Tristram. For Unity in Moral Theorizing. PhD Dissertation, Princeton, 2008.) believe that metaethical and normative ethical theorizing should inform each other. For the first group, my suggestion in the previous paragraph recommends that they ignore metaethics entirely (again, setting aside any intrinsic motivation to study it), while for the second my suggestion recommends pursuing exclusively those areas which are likely to influence conclusions in normative ethics.
In fact, one might also take this attitude to certain questions in normative ethics. There are some theories in normative ethics that are extensionally equivalent: they recommend the exact same actions in every conceivable case. For example, some varieties of consequentialism can mimic certain forms of deontology, with the only differences between the theories being the reasons they give for why certain actions are right or wrong, not which actions they recommend. According to this way of thinking, these theories are not worth deciding between.
We might suggest the following method for ethical and metaethical theorizing: start with some set of decisions you’re unsure about. If you are considering whether to investigate some ethical or metaethical issue, first ask yourself if it would make a difference to at least one of those decisions. If it wouldn’t, ignore it. This seems to have a certain similarity with verificationism: if something wouldn’t make a difference to at least some conceivable observation, then it’s “metaphysical” and not worth talking about. Given this, it may be vulnerable to some of the same critiques as positivism, though I’m not sure, since I’m not very familiar with those critiques and the replies to them.
Note that I haven’t argued for this position, and I’m not even entirely sure I endorse it (though I also suspect that it will seem almost laughably obvious to some). I just wanted to get it out there. I may write a top-level post later exploring these ideas with more rigor.
See also: Paul Graham on How To Do Philosophy