Re: “Applying the objection to empirical and prudential claims”:
Analogizing ethical to empirical claims here only makes sense under a “naive moral realist” view of ethics. Otherwise, the notion that “morality can be any old way” (by analogy to “reality can be any old way”) is, at the least, not obvious, and possibly just stops making sense.
Re: demandingness of prudential (but also moral) claims:
“I have some terrible disease that will cause me to lose my legs if untreated, and the only available treatment for it is very expensive. But if losing my legs were very bad, that would imply that I should pay for this treatment. This is evidence that losing my legs isn’t so bad.”
There is, of course, a missing (but implied) step in this reasoning, which is something like “if something very bad is going to happen to me unless I pay for treatment, then I should pay for treatment”. This seems obvious, but if you omit it, then the reasoning no longer works, because this is the crucial connecting link between the ‘is’ of “losing my legs is very bad” and the ‘ought’ of “I should pay for this treatment”. What makes it important to notice this, is that such connecting links “screen off” the ‘is’ part of the chain of reasoning from evidence about the ‘ought’ part. In this case, the corrected reasoning goes something like this:
“I have some terrible disease that will cause me to lose my legs if untreated, and the only available treatment for it is very expensive. But if something very bad is going to happen to me unless I pay for treatment, then I should pay for treatment. Therefore, if losing my legs were very bad, that would imply that I should pay for this treatment. This is evidence that it is not the case that ‘if something is very bad for me unless I pay for treatment, then I should pay for treatment’. (It cannot be evidence that losing my legs isn’t so bad, because that’s an ‘is’ claim, screened off from evidence that bears on ‘ought’ claims by the ‘connecting link’, which is the earliest part of the chain of reasoning that can be brought into doubt by such evidence.)”
Now the reasoning is not obviously suspect. (Perhaps it is still suspect, but if so, it is only in a more subtle way.) Indeed (and unfortunately), many people in this country find themselves reasoning in just this way all the time—and, given the circumstances, I find it difficult to blame them.
Re: how to understand “demandingness objections”:
As I see it, demandingness objections are best understood as some combination of two reactions to a moral claim:
If you demand so much, many/most/almost-all people simply won’t do it, and a moral rule that (almost) no one follows is vacuous. (This response implicitly takes it as axiomatic that the purpose of ethics is to guide action, and if an ethical rule does not in fact work to guide anyone’s actions, then it may as well not exist.)
“Should implies can”. You demand more than people can do. This is a fairly straightforward intuition that ethical rules that call for impossible actions cannot be “right”. It can be extended/generalized to something like “the rightness of an ethical rule varies (in part) proportionally to how successfully it can be followed”.
In short, a “demandingness objection” to a moral claim is a response that says “people can’t and/or won’t follow the ethical rule you posit [and therefore the rule is invalid and the claim is false]”.
Re: continuity of moral claims with “caring about stuff”:
This idea does not seem to take into account second-order desires / values / etc. One perspective on ethical theories is that they are ways to systematize our values, including our higher-order values, so as to make it easier / more effective to satisfy them. On this view, I might “really care” about something, and thus “really want to” accomplish or gain that something, but on the other hand, I might also care about other things, and care about what sorts of things I care about, and whether I’m a caring person, etc., etc. A moral claim that places upon me an unlimited demand of some sort thus wouldn’t be a mere extension of caring about the things I supposedly (morally) value; it might well oppose some competing or higher-order value of mine.
Some comments, in no particular order:
Re: “Applying the objection to empirical and prudential claims”:
Analogizing ethical to empirical claims here only makes sense under a “naive moral realist” view of ethics. Otherwise, the notion that “morality can be any old way” (by analogy to “reality can be any old way”) is, at the least, not obvious, and possibly just stops making sense.
Re: demandingness of prudential (but also moral) claims:
There is, of course, a missing (but implied) step in this reasoning, which is something like “if something very bad is going to happen to me unless I pay for treatment, then I should pay for treatment”. This seems obvious, but if you omit it, then the reasoning no longer works, because this is the crucial connecting link between the ‘is’ of “losing my legs is very bad” and the ‘ought’ of “I should pay for this treatment”. What makes it important to notice this, is that such connecting links “screen off” the ‘is’ part of the chain of reasoning from evidence about the ‘ought’ part. In this case, the corrected reasoning goes something like this:
Now the reasoning is not obviously suspect. (Perhaps it is still suspect, but if so, it is only in a more subtle way.) Indeed (and unfortunately), many people in this country find themselves reasoning in just this way all the time—and, given the circumstances, I find it difficult to blame them.
Re: how to understand “demandingness objections”:
As I see it, demandingness objections are best understood as some combination of two reactions to a moral claim:
If you demand so much, many/most/almost-all people simply won’t do it, and a moral rule that (almost) no one follows is vacuous. (This response implicitly takes it as axiomatic that the purpose of ethics is to guide action, and if an ethical rule does not in fact work to guide anyone’s actions, then it may as well not exist.)
“Should implies can”. You demand more than people can do. This is a fairly straightforward intuition that ethical rules that call for impossible actions cannot be “right”. It can be extended/generalized to something like “the rightness of an ethical rule varies (in part) proportionally to how successfully it can be followed”.
In short, a “demandingness objection” to a moral claim is a response that says “people can’t and/or won’t follow the ethical rule you posit [and therefore the rule is invalid and the claim is false]”.
Re: continuity of moral claims with “caring about stuff”:
This idea does not seem to take into account second-order desires / values / etc. One perspective on ethical theories is that they are ways to systematize our values, including our higher-order values, so as to make it easier / more effective to satisfy them. On this view, I might “really care” about something, and thus “really want to” accomplish or gain that something, but on the other hand, I might also care about other things, and care about what sorts of things I care about, and whether I’m a caring person, etc., etc. A moral claim that places upon me an unlimited demand of some sort thus wouldn’t be a mere extension of caring about the things I supposedly (morally) value; it might well oppose some competing or higher-order value of mine.