Speech and Morality: On the Metaethical Implications of Speaking by Terence Cuneo

Author:Terence Cuneo [Cuneo, Terence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198712725
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

This passage is interesting, because Joyce tends to slide between talking about what is necessary for a discourse or system of concepts to count as moral, on the one hand, and what it is for a system of values or set of prescriptions to count as moral, on the other.

Let us suppose that when Joyce speaks of a system of morality being a system of values and prescriptions, he means that it is a system of putative rights, responsibilities, and obligations. If so, then Joyce’s claim is that if a system of putative rights, responsibilities, and obligations were not to include categorical reasons, then it could not count as a moral system. In principle, this might be correct. But we need an argument to believe it. Joyce’s argument, recall, is that moral discourse could not play a silencing function if the system it purports to describe were not to include categorical moral reasons. I have argued that this is not so. For all we reasonably believe, our moral thinking could carry on pretty much as it always has even if our system of rights, responsibilities, and obligations included no categorical reasons. Of course, ordinary thought about this system would be erroneous in certain respects. But it might be both difficult and undesirable to avoid the error.

Suppose, by contrast, that Joyce means by a system of morality a system of moral concepts. If so, Joyce’s contention is that a system of concepts could not count as moral if it did not include the concept of a categorical moral reason, which is such that it has (or is taken to have) genuine application. Now, however, we need to distinguish. On the one hand, the system of concepts in question might be that which is employed by most ordinary people in their everyday moral deliberation. Call this the ordinary moral system. On the other, it might be that system that is employed by Humean realists when describing the nature of moral reasons. Call this the Humean moral system.

If by “moral system” we mean the ordinary moral system, then we should not reject realism of the Humean variety on the grounds that it offers a distorted picture of our ordinary moral concepts. For realists of this sort are not offering an account of such a system at all. Rather, they are offering us an account of the nature of reasons. And, so, it cannot be said that, if their view were true, our ordinary folk concepts would cease to play a silencing role. To say it again, Humean realism has no implications whatsoever regarding which concepts ordinary agents employ when engaging in moral deliberation.

However, if it is the Humean moral system that is at issue—the system of concepts that Humean realists use when describing the nature of moral reasons—then there is, admittedly, a point to press against the Humean realists. For when describing the nature of reasons, Humeans employ the concept not of categorical but of Humean reasons. By doing so, it might be

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