Geoffrey Sayre-McCord on Free Will

by Will Wilkinson on April 27, 2008

That’s “appearing on” not “talking about”. This week on Free Will, I chat with philosopher Geoffrey Sayre-McCord about the nature of metaethics in general and moral realism in particular. Since metaethics was, at one point, my academic specialty (I went into the Ph.D. program at Maryland with a mind to work on the nature of moral concepts), I really, really enjoyed this chat. I hope to have Geoff back on to talk about issues of naturalism and evolutionary thinking in moral philosophy.

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    You guys at least seemed to grasp that aesthetics is subjective. You noted that there are some normative issues that strike you as more than just a matter of taste but possible for someone to simply get wrong. There are people who feel the same way about aesthetics. Probably because they spend as much time on and have as strong feelings about their field as ethical philosophers do about theirs.

    You seemed to be grasping at a Darwinian explanation of morality when you mentioned that the purpose of it was to allow people to interact in a thriving society or something like that. That is "good of the species" talk that one would have hoped died with the advent of neo-darwinism and the selfish gene. You signal your own morality so that others will have high regard for you. Also, not all morality is social. Islam morality about praying five times a day and ritually purifying onesself hold constant even in Robinson Crusoe situations.
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    "That is “good of the species” talk that one would have hoped died with the advent of neo-darwinism and the selfish gene."

    Not really. When the benefits of the collective -- and the costs of its absence -- redound to individual gene carriers, so-called "facts of collectives" deform the fitness landscape of the gene and thereby become selective forces in evolution.

    Human beings began their evolutionary careers with the grouping legacies of genus Australopithecus (or, alternatively, an as-yet-identified common ancestor of Homo and Australopithecus); our "moral" instincts tended to small intimate bands, hierarchically organized, with strongly-enforced in-group "culture" and "taboos" (this is an uncontroversial statement).

    Using the principle of parsimony, we then assume that, rather than whole-sale replacements of this "morality" with new schemata, what we recognize as "modern morality" grew "on top of" rather than "in spite of" these primitive instincts, creating a new moral "language" by combining, modulating, and suppressing the largely unconscious automated drives that, when aggregated, tended to support a thriving collective for our primitive ancestors.

    Now, you can say all this every time you broach the subject, filling your speeches with extended caveats to ensure the integrity of your point, or you can shorten it to "keeping us together to keep us alive" and move on. Sometimes it's okay to do the latter.
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    TGGP, I said nothing at all about "good of the species" which I think is silliness. I was talking about institutions, conventions, systems of norms, etc. that facilitate the flourishing of the individuals who abide by them.
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    In this video you struggle with the "temptation" to pass a pure moral judgment on someone who's preferences contradict yours, to say of them that they are not merely contrary or malevolent, but morally EVIL

    The premise behind this temptation seems to be that your preferences are weak justifiers, and "no better" than someone else's. You seek out stronger justifiers that operate beyond the realm of clashes among preferences. (This I call the "moral urge".)

    I understand the urge. I experience it myself. But I can't really follow through because I'm a non-moralist (meta-ethical agnostic, more precisely). Morality still makes no sense to me. So instead, I accept that my preferences are the best I have. No. More than that. My preferences are are sufficiently strong justifications. I overturn the moral urge by reminding myself that I'm completely comfortable with my preferences as justifiers.

    I suspect I can do this so well because I've become acutely aware that my preferences are dominated by benevolence. Since my preferences are in fact benevolent, I don't worry that justifying by way of my preferences will harm others.

    To me, benevolence is a sufficiently strong justifier. I don't need morality telling me to help others.

    You might enjoy reading my essay about this topic in which I try to overturn the notion that benevolence must be a weak justifier. I discuss morality in it as well. I call it "Benevolence as a Weak Justifier" and this is the URL for it:

    http://forum.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=m...

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