Can we say that someone's
moral judgments are wrong or mistaken—like an incorrect solution to a math problem—without involving a moral judgment of our own? In a
new paper in the journal Philosophical Investigations, philosopher Zed Adams of the New School of Social Research asks that very question. Most philosophers, Adams argues, believe that you can criticize another person's moral judgments without making a moral judgment of your own, by criticizing the way that person comes to his or her judgments.
For instance, suppose someone, call him Dan, proclaimed that blue-eyed people are more deserving of respect then brown-eyed people. Assuming we didn't dismiss him out of hand, we might ask him why, and there are several things Dan could say in response. He could say, simply, that blue-eyed people are just obviously better, but that will just lead to another "Why?" Or, he could claim that blue-eyed people are smarter, stronger, faster, more compassionate, or more attractive. All of these are factually questionable, of course, but even were they to be true, we could still ask why these qualities make blue-eyed people deserving of more respect. In other words, we need to get to the bottom of why Dan believes that blue-eyed people are more deserving of respect, using a morally relevant factual difference between blue-eyed and brown-eyed people. I think we would all agree that he'll be hard-pressed to provide an answer that satisfies us, given that there is no commonly accepted moral difference between blue-eyed and brown-eyed people.
But does this inability of Dan's to give us a "satisfying" answer mean that he's incorrect to feel this way about blue-eyed people, in the same way that he would be incorrect to say 2+2=5? It is tempting to say so, but that would imply that moral judgments have to be argued and defended in certain ways, and that our intuitions count for nothing. People do not all make moral judgments in the same way, much less in the way that philosophers say they ought to (a moral judgment in itself!). For example, most people believe that killing and lying are wrong in most cases, but may be hard-pressed to give a logical defense of that position. Does this make them incorrect in holding these common moral judgments? Of course not (though they may be poorly equipped to consider "hard cases" such as killing in defense of another person or lying to proect other person from greater harm).
Think of the contentious moral debates of the day: abortion, same sex marriage, torture, the proper role of government, and so on. Emotions run hot over all of these issues, and people on both sides often accuse their opponents of not having an argument rather than just having one they disagree with. But Adams' point is that it's very difficult to tell the difference: just because you disagree with someone's argument, or you think that it's oversimplistic or ignorant or ill-formed, that doesn't imply that he or she doesn't have an argument. There isn't much agreement, even among philosophers, on what qualifies as a good moral argument (that's the more technical point of Adams' paper), so we can hardly use the source of someone's moral judgment as an argument against the judgments themselves.
Seeing that, it may be more kind and generous to our fellow human beings to give them the benefit of the doubt regarding their convictions, then debate with them as equals, without succumbing to the temptation to belittle them on supposedly objective grounds. If we can give each other that minimal degree of respect, I think we can cut through the angry rhetoric and get down to the core issues that separate—and moreover, I suspect we'll discover we disagree over a lot less than we think.
And you can't tell me I'm wrong!
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