Dispositional Ethical Realism

Dispositional Ethical RealismAuthor(s): Bruce W. BrowerSource: Ethics, Vol. 103, No. 2 (Jan., 1993), pp. 221-249Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381521Accessed: 22-04-2016 21:43 UTC

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Dispositional Ethical Realism*

Bruce W. Brower

The empiricist tradition has left many with the impression that we have only two choices regarding ethical truth: either realism is true, in which case there are ethical facts and properties that are independent of our attitudes, or nonrealism is true, in which case what appear to be ethical facts and properties are mere "projections," or mere "expressions" of a "non-cognitive attitude." In the face of this unfortunate choice, some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British moralists, and several contemporary philosophers, provide a compromise which holds that ethical facts and properties must be understood in terms of our dispositions to respond.

The forms of dispositionalism that have been offered, however, are antireductionist versions of moral intuitionism, conceptual analyses, or revisionary definitions. I wish to argue for a different dispositional theory, which treats ethical truth as both reducible and empirically discoverable. This theory is more consistent with empiricist attacks on analyticity, linguistic intuition, and truth by definition.' I shall call the theory "dispositional ethical realism," or "DER." Section I introduces DER and briefly explains how it differs from similar views. Section II takes up objections brought against other dispositional accounts, in each case showing why there is no problem for DER. Section III argues that DER is a form of realism. The final section states considerations in support of DER. My rationale for defending the theory against objections before giving reasons in its favor is that DER is best clarified by considering responses to criticism.

* Support for writing this paper was partially funded by a Tulane University Senate COR Summer Fellowship. Earlier versions of this paper were read at the 1991 Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association and at the Tulane University Philosophy Department's Seminar on Current Research. For their very helpful comments, I would like to thank Susan Brower, Peter Vallentyne, David Zimmerman, and an anonymous referee for Ethics.

1. In other words, the older theories depend on positivist or empiricist accounts of the analytic-synthetic distinction. The theory I propose fits a more Quinean view, although it could be accepted by standard empiricists.

Ethics 103 (January 1993): 221-249 C 1993 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/93/0302-0002$01.00

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222 Ethics January 1993

I. THE THEORY

Dispositional ethical realism is the view that ethical properties are specified by empirically discoverable, reductive accounts that treat moral properties as constitutively dependent on evaluators' responses or dispositions to respond. Any such account can be represented by a biconditional of this form:

1. X has value V if and only if evaluators would, under appropriate conditions, respond to X with reaction R.2

Dispositional ethical realism is a metaethical theory. It does not presuppose or imply a particular normative view, and it is consistent with many first-order ethical theories. Familiar theories claim that we form the appropriate moral response when (a) we are fully informed, or (b) we are in reflective equilibrium, or (c) we undergo cognitive psychotherapy, or (d) we vividly imagine a situation, or (e) we are in an ideal speech situation, unconstrained by domination.3 Most philosophers who have developed such views would not endorse DER; but their theories, with or without some modification, fit the pattern given by 1.

Since DER endorses only the basic pattern, we can consider the elements of 1 quickly. First, let us allow X to be an action, person, situation, or fact. Second, for V, let us consider ethical values, such as being good or right, and not aesthetic values, epistemic values, etc.4 Third, for evaluators, let us allow all human beings or broad cultural groups. Dispositional ethical realism would be uninteresting if it permitted moral properties for each subject, that is, if it gave accounts

2. This biconditional may also be used to represent theories that do not treat moral properties as constitutively dependent on responses but that instead treat responses as tracking an independent property under specifiable conditions. See the response to Crispin Wright in Sec. II below.

3. Many of these kinds have had several representatives. The following are typical: for full information (interpreted as all relevant available information), vivid awareness, and cognitive psychotherapy, see Richard Brandt, A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); for another account employing vivid imaginative awareness, see David Lewis, "Dispositional Theories of Value," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. ser., 63 (1989): 114-37; for reflective equilibrium, see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971); for ideal speech situations, see Jurgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt: Suhrk- amp, 1981); and for the ideal spectator, see Roderick Firth, "Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer," in Readings in Ethical Theory, 2d ed., ed. Wilfrid Sellars and John Hospers (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970), pp. 200-221.

4. Thus, I am not concerned with Lewis's view, which is about nonethical value. See Mark Johnston, "Dispositional Theories of Value," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. ser., 63 (1989): 139-74, for an examination of why Lewis's view cannot be extended to ethical value. I take concepts referring to concrete properties, such as courage, not to be evaluative (see my "Virtue Concepts and Ethical Realism,"Journal of Philosophy 85 [1988]: 675-93), so I will consider only general ethical properties.


Brower Dispositional Ethical Realism 223

of properties such as being good for John. Yet an advantage for DER is

that it permits modest relativism. Dispositional ethical realism can grant that those from radically divergent ways of life, even when in

the best conditions, may disagree about values. Many ethical realists

allow for such modest relativism. Nevertheless, ethical realism is always an optimistic position. It assumes that as we get to know each other

better, our differences will be less extreme than they initially appear.5 Fourth, R may be an emotion, a "pro-attitude," an act of commending,

a disposition to commend, a feeling of motivation, a taking oneself to have a reason, or even an action of the form being evaluated. Ethical

realists hold that there are ethical beliefs, but to avoid circularity, R

cannot be taken as the belief that X has value V.6 Finally, let us defer discussion of "appropriate conditions," since it is here where much of the battle between DER and others is fought.

A traditional view would treat biconditionals of form 1 as conceptual

analyses. According to DER, however, accounts of pattern 1 are empirically discoverable. General moral principles, and also particular moral judgments, play an important epistemic role, but they do not play that role on the basis of conceptual insight into the realm of meanings. The insight is rather into the nature of our dispositions to respond to morally evaluable situations. To be sure, as Gilbert Harman

has stressed, we do not typically gain that insight by testing our theory

against the world in the way that a physicist would.7 Our primary mode of determining that an action or agent has a moral property is not to examine whether our best explanations of human actions require

5. For another view that makes clear the requirement of optimism, see Richard

Boyd, "How to Be a Moral Realist," in Essays on Moral Realism, ed. Geoffrey Sayre-

McCord (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 181-228. In this paper, I

do not claim to deal with the problem of relativism. My main goal is to develop a

position that contrasts with other forms of realism and antirealism, whether or not they

are relativistic. For a clear discussion of these issues, along with an interesting argument

for combining realism with relativism, see Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, in "Being a Realist

about Relativism (in Ethics)," Philosophical Studies 61 (1991): 155-77. Realism combined with relativism is also accepted by Johnston; by John McDowell, in "Aesthetic Value,

Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World," in Pleasure, Preference and Value, ed. Eva

Schaper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 1- 15; and, on one interpretation, by David Wiggins, in Needs, Values, Truth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).

6. See Firth, p. 207. This crucial constraint is violated by Johnston and by Crispin Wright in "Moral Values, Projection and Secondary Qualities," Proceedings of the Aristotelian

Society, suppl. ser., 62 (1988): 1-26. Wiggins accepts another form of circularity (see esp. "A Sensible Subjectivism," in Needs, Values, Truth, pp. 185-214). For discussion of analogous circularity regarding secondary quality analyses, and a devastating account

of the problems it creates, see Paul Boghossian and J. David Velleman, "Color as a

Secondary Quality," Mind 92 (1989): 530-47. 7. See Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1977), pp. 3-10, and "Moral Explanations of Natural Facts-Can Moral Claims Be Tested against Moral Reality?" Southern Journal of Philosophy 24, suppl. (1986): 57-67.



reference to that property.8 We more often engage in thought experiments in order to determine what is right or wrong.

Nevertheless, the fact that we sometimes engage in thought experiments does not show or imply that we are not engaged in empirical moral inquiry, especially since, if DER is correct, what we are investigating is our own dispositions to respond. Our best guide to how we will respond is often to imagine a situation and then to examine how we respond to what we have imagined. (I say more about this in answering the first objection below.)

Another way to bring out the empirical nature of moral inquiry, as construed by DER, is to consider the possibility that we share a moral response that is not determined by the concepts involved. We might all have in common a certain response to a parent who beats a child for the failure to do a minor chore. There is no need to argue that the wrongness of such punishment is a conceptual truth; it is better construed as the result of our having a common sensibility. The discovery that we share that sensibility, along with the discovery of exactly what judgments that sensibility delivers, should both be regarded

as empirical. How does DER differ from other forms of dispositionalism, which

are often presented by construing moral properties as analogous to secondary qualities? Dispositional ethical realism differs from the noncognitivist secondary quality model of Hume in that it takes moral claims to have truth-values.9 It differs from John Mackie's "error theory," which holds that all moral claims are false because they treat projected properties as objective categorical imperatives'10 It differs from revisionary proposals for new definitions or "explications," such as Richard Brandt's, in that it claims to produce accounts that are the result of empirical investigation into existing dispositional properties." It differs from other "realist" views, such as those of John McDowell, David Wiggins, or Mark Johnston, in that these accounts either (1) treat evaluative responses as noninferential judgments that form the basis for an intuitionist epistemology or (2) provide explicitly nonreductive

8. This line has been stressed by Nicholas Sturgeon; see his "Moral Explanations," in Morality, Reason and Truth, ed. David Copp and David Zimmerman (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985), and "Harman on Moral Explanations of Natural Facts," Southern Journal of Philosophy 24, suppl. (1986): 69-78.

9. See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 468-69. I take it that I can still get away with holding that Hume endorsed noncognitivism, where this is understood as the view that ethical expressions are neither true nor false.

10. See John L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin, 1977), pp. 15-49.

1 1. See Brandt, esp. pp. 1-23.



"'analyses."'2 McDowell, for instance, holds that moral properties are not those which are actually given a particular response but are, rather, those which merit a particular response; yet he admits that the notion of meriting is itself a part of moral discourse, and he expresses no desire for further reduction. Wiggins, in a similar vein, writes of what makes a sentiment of approbation "appropriate." Johnston also gives an nonreductive account and supplies, as we shall see, what he believes is an argument against reduction.

II. OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES

I will discuss what I take to be the three most powerful objections to the reductive dispositionalist enterprise.13

First objection. -This objection is from Crispin Wright, who bases it on a discussion of "appropriate conditions" clauses for secondary quality analyses. A dispositional theory of secondary qualities holds that

2. x is red if and only if normal human beings would, under perceptually normal conditions, form the belief that x is red.'4

Although primary qualities are not usually treated in a dispositional fashion, we may give similar conditionals for them, such as:

3. x is square if and only if normal human beings would, under perceptually normal conditions, form the belief that x is square.

For primary qualities, Wright holds, we also have nondispositional analyses, which Wright calls "canonical biconditionals." For square, the canonical biconditional is

3b. x is square if and only if: if the four sides and four interior angles of x were to be correctly measured, and no change were to take place in the shape or size of x during the process, then

12. SeeJohnston; Wiggins, "A Sensible Subjectivism"; andJohn McDowell, "Values and Secondary Qualities," in Morality and Objectivity, ed. Ted Honderich (London: Rout- ledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 110-29.

13. There are now many objections to secondary quality versions of moral realism. For some of the most important, see Simon Blackburn, "Errors and the Phenomenology of Value," in Honderich, ed., pp. 1-22; and Colin McGinn, The Subjective View (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 145-55. Wright defends the secondary quality view against many of these attacks, though, as we are about to see, he goes on to reject the model.

14. See Wright, pp. 14-15. Several qualifications are needed, including that the human beings are attentive to what they observe and are free of doubts about their normality. Such qualifications, which we can ignore here, are necessitated by the fact that Wright concentrates on dispositions to believe rather than dispositions to have sensory experience. I have shortened Wright's biconditionals in order to get to the core of his argument.



the sides would be determined to be approximately equal in length, and the angles would be determined to be approximately right angles.'5

Wright holds that secondary quality analyses are a priori.'6 He claims that "normal" in such analyses means "statistically usual." He holds, on the other hand, that appropriate conditions for dispositional accounts of primary qualities are settled by whether proposed conditions yield correct responses to members of an extension that is already determined. Since discovering such appropriate conditions is an empirical matter, dispositional accounts for primary qualities are a posteriori. They state how predetermined extensions can be "tracked." Wright claims, for instance, that we know prior to giving 3 that ver- ification of an object as square demands viewing it from various angles. Using this knowledge, we specify that the appropriate conditions require the object to be stable in shape during observation.

For secondary qualities, let us call responses and appropriate conditions clauses "extension-determining." For primary qualities, let us call responses and appropriate conditions clauses "extension-determined." Wright claims that for moral properties, the appropriate conditions clauses seem extension-determined. His example would be something like this:

4. Action x is morally correct if and only if for any S: if S scrutinizes the context and consequences of x, and embraces all morally relevant considerations; and if S is a morally suitable subject, then S will judge that x is morally correct. 7

Wright's concern is not that 4 is circular but that, no matter how we refine 4, our account of appropriate conditions will be guided by a prior determination of the extension of moral predicates. For instance, when specifying who is morally suitable, we will be guided by prior beliefs about the judgments a morally suitable subject makes. Thus, we can eliminate the term "morally suitable," but our view of appropriate

15. Wright, p. 19. Wright does not claim that the extension of "square" must be

determined via 5, but this is consistent with his view. Note that instead of a biconditional

such as "x is square if and only if x has four equal sides and four equal interior angles,"

Wright's canonical biconditional specifies procedures for verifying that an object is

square. His general verificationist antirealism, which he defends elsewhere, pushes him in this direction.

16. Could not our visual systems break down such that the typical perceiver becomes

color-blind (for instance)? The usual reply to this worry is to index typical response to

the capacities for response that speakers actually have. For further discussion, see

Wright, p. 9, n. 22; and Martin Davies and Lloyd Humberstone, "Two Notions of

Necessity," Philosophical Studies 38 (1980): 1-30; see esp. pp. 22-25.

17. See Wright, p. 23. Again, I have simplified and shortened Wright's biconditional

in ways irrelevant to his central argument.



conditions will be extension-determined. Wright concludes that any

refinement of 4 treats moral properties as if they were primary. And

he claims that there is no hope of arguing that they are primary.'8 Since, then, they are not primary, yet they appear to be, some form

of error theory or projectivism is in order.19 Reply. -Wright conflates two senses in which an extension may

be "predetermined." In one sense, an extension is predetermined

when the facts that determine what is in the extension are completely

distinct from any facts about how we would respond. In another sense,

an extension is predetermined if we have beliefs about what is in the

extension, and we use those beliefs to guide our theory. Let us say

that such beliefs are "theory-guiding" and reserve talk of "predetermined

extensions" for the first sort of case. In the first sort of case, our

responses and the appropriate conditions are more aptly labeled

"extension-determined. "

Wright's critique of dispositional analyses, illustrated by the claim that accounts such as 4 must be guided by prior moral beliefs, only

shows that moral beliefs are theory-guiding. Their theory-guiding

character, however, is consistent with DER. Wright's objection, even

interpreted in terms of claims about theory-guiding, is applicable only

to analytic dispositionalism. If dispositional accounts were analytically

true, then our prior beliefs about what is in the extension of a moral

predicate would play no role either in guiding our present theory or

in helping us to determine whether proposed theories capture the

proper extension. Analysis alone would suffice.

If, on the other hand, dispositionalism is empirical, there is no

problem with accounts guided by beliefs about what falls in the extension

of ethical predicates. Dispositional ethical realism treats 1 as a pattern for a posteriori reduction from ethical discourse to discourse involving

no ethical terms. We will come up with such reductions the same way

we arrive at other reductions. In determining that heat is a level of

mean molecular kinetic energy, for example, we begin with a speci-

18. Wright does not say in detail why moral properties could not be primary. He

confines his argument to a footnote (p. 25, n. 36). First, he claims that primary qualities have effects on other kinds, but that moral properties do not. Here he denies what

Sturgeon and others affirm: that, for instance, moral depravity can play a role in causing

someone to kill. I see no reason to accept Wright's view, though I do not hold that the fact that moral properties occasionally play explanatory roles is an adequate ground

for moral realism. Second, he claims that we have no account of how opinions about primary moral qualities are the result of detecting facts about those properties. This is

the worry about how moral opinion tracks moral truth, with which Wright deals in his main text. I consider it below.

19. Wright, pp. 24-25. For the error theory, see Mackie. For projectivism, see

Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 181-223.



fixation of the extension of the predicate "is hot." We then check whether the extension of the proposed reducing predicate matches the extension of the everyday predicate.20 So reduction guided by

beliefs about what is in the extension of the reduced predicate is not

surprising.

Wright himself throws doubt on whether beliefs about the extensions of secondary quality predicates are determined independently of prior beliefs about secondary qualities. He notes that in statistically normal conditions we often cannot determine color, since objects are

often unilluminated. He suggests that we specify the "perceptually normal conditions" in 2 as "conditions of illumination like those which

actually typically obtain at noon on a cloudy summer's day out of doors and out of shadow."2' So we have:

2*. x is red if and only if normal human beings would, under conditions of illumination like those that actually typically obtain at noon on a cloudy summer's day out of doors and out of shadow, form the belief that x is red.

Here, Wright's revision of the appropriate conditions in 2 was based

on a prior account of what is in the extension of "red." But, if 2 must be modified in the light of our prior beliefs about red, and the resulting modified formula 2* still analyzes a secondary quality, why not treat

a worked-out version of 4 the same way, even if our account of the appropriate conditions is determined by prior moral beliefs? Wright's discussion suggests that the secondary quality treatment of perceptual qualities is not the result of a priori analysis.22 Moral properties should be treated in the same fashion.

Wright may grant this. His worry is that by appearing to "track" a predetermined extension, moral predicates seem primary. This, he claims, they cannot be. They are at best secondary. The problem is that Wright's examples show only that dispositional moral theories

are guided by prior moral beliefs; they do not show that moral predicates have extensions that are determined in complete independence of our

20. A necessary condition for reduction is that the extension of the reducing predicate be roughly equivalent to the extension of the reduced predicate. The extensions may be "roughly equivalent," since there is allowance for slack. How much slack is permitted depends on whether the reducing theory can explain how mistakes in iden- tification of extension are made in the reduced theory.

21. Wright, p. 16.

22. Reflection on 2* shows there is more work to be done by prior beliefs about the extension of "red." For any object and perceiver, the chances are slim that the perceiver is able to determine color, since the perceiver is likely to be far away from

the object. So 2* must be augmented with a clause demanding proximity of the perceiver to the object. This, in combination with Wright's point about lighting, shows that the "statistically usual" perceiver will not form the belief that the object in question is red. Numerous further modifications are also required in order to make 2* at all plausible.



responses. Once we sort out Wright's conflation of claims about predetermined extensions with claims about the theory-guidingness of beliefs, his argument will not work.

Nevertheless, Wright raises a crucial question: How can our moral beliefs track moral truths? A plausible epistemology associated with DER will hold that moral predicates do track properties. When I use a moral predicate correctly, I track the disposition of an object to cause a response in me under certain conditions. To track this property, I must be attuned to the world and my responses, but I track my best response, which I may not have actually given. The idea behind the notion of tracking is that, when we track a property, our true beliefs about that property are typically caused by instantiations of it or, if you prefer, by events playing a causal role that is partially determined by instantiations of it.23 Dispositional ethical realism can account for this. Our beliefs about an object's disposition to cause a response in us under certain conditions are often best confirmed by imagining those conditions, putting ourselves in them, or putting ourselves in conditions close to them, and then noting our responses. Thus, the property specified by analyses of form 1 plays a causal role in bringing about our true beliefs that something has that property.

An understanding of what is involved in such tracking accounts for the role of thought experiments in ethics, and it explains why it is often best not to test an ethical theory by examining our responses to real life situations. Appropriate conditions for evaluation typically include such requirements as that the evaluator be impartial or that the evaluator consider all relevant information. When we reflect on possible actions that are not actually facing us, we are likely to be aware of how we would respond under these conditions. When we consider actions we must actually decide upon in the near future, or when we have already acted, we are less likely to respond in accord with the appropriate conditions. We are more likely to favor ourselves, to lack time to consider available information, or to fail in some other way to be under the appropriate conditions. Thus, thought experiments performed when we have time for reflection are usually a better guide to actual ethical dispositions. Since our dispositions determine ethical truth, thought experiments often provide a guide to ethical truth.

Use of thought experiments answers another worry about DER. That a theory is consistent with accounts of form 1, it will be noted, does not guarantee that it is dispositional. Dispositionalists hold that dispositions determine what has value. More "objectivist" theories identify values with completely nondispositional properties; but they

23. A more complicated analysis is in Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); DER also fits this analysis, but a discussion here would be too lengthy.



may accept accounts of form 1, so long as there are conditions under which evaluators can detect objective properties. The response to Wright, it will be argued, shows that if dispositional accounts are empirical, then we may use prior beliefs in developing theory. Wright's complaint that 4 will be refined in the light of prior moral beliefs does not show that objectivism must be in the offing. But since biconditionals of form 1 are consistent with empirical yet objectivist theories, the fact that our ethical beliefs can be codifed by such biconditionals and are guided by prior beliefs does not provide evidence that a dispositional theory, rather than an ojectivist theory, has been provided.

The problem is that objectivism cannot explain the importance of thought experiments. If value is totally independent of responses, how could thought experiments play a role in finding out about value? Typical thought experiments test a theory against moral judgments about particular cases. Many philosophers and nonphilosophers feel that such experiments have epistemological weight. Dispositional ethical realism explains this by taking thought experiments as guides to dispositions that determine ethical truth, but the objectivist can give no such account. Objectivists can, of course, give some role to thought experiments. They can be used to illustrate or to test a subtheory against an already accepted theory. But these are atypical uses of thought experiments; in the usual cases we give great weight to our intuitions about particular situations that are described without appeal to prior theoretical commitments.

On the other hand, almost everyone recognizes that the results of thought experiments are sometimes questionable. Dispositional ethical realism can account for the limitations of thought experiments. In certain cases we can find out what should be done only by entering a concrete practical situation. This is often because we cannot obtain adequate information when merely performing a thought experiment or because we are reflecting on a situation so unlike those we have previously encountered that we are not sure how to respond.

It is also because our moral sensibility is complex, such that any given judgment may be overriden. This complexity shows what is misguided about the presupposition that all dispositional theories must be versions of what I shall call "simple subjectivism." A theory represented by an account of form 1 is a version of simple subjectivism if and only if it holds that the value V is determined by actual responses. The appropriate conditions clause will then sort out the subset of actual responses that determine what has V. One way to do this is to follow Wright and treat the appropriate conditions as statistically usual conditions. Other forms of simple subjectivism may sort out a smaller

subset of actual responses.24 What is important is that some subset of

24. Wright should have taken this line, even in the case of secondary qualities; see n. 22 above.



actual responses is taken to confer value on objects. For simple subjectivism, responses are clearly extension-determining.

Any plausible dispositionalism will move beyond simple subjec-

tivism. That is largely because of three factors: (a) As already noted, we have dispositions to revise and reject responses in the light of new information. (b) We have not only first-order dispositions but also

second-order, and perhaps higher-order, dispositions to revise and regulate first-order dispositions. A particular response can be overridden by a more theoretical disposition. (c) The higher level of a disposition does not guarantee its ability to override lower-level dispositions. Our lower-order and higher-order dispositions interact in a complicated

fashion, such that sometimes higher-order dispositions trump lower- order dispositions (as when a theoretical disposition demands that we make two particular responses consistent in some way), sometimes lower-order dispositions trump higher-order dispositions (as when a strong intuitive response to a particular case outweighs a higher-order disposition), and sometimes dispositions at the same level conflict such that one of them overrides the other (as when we have two intuitions

about a particular case e.g., an action is seen as both just and unkind but one intuition overrules the other). Thus, any response

can be overridden as a result of the complex interaction of our dispositions.

Thought experiments, then, will play a varying role, which is determined by our dispositions themselves. In easy cases, a simple thought experiment will make clear what our response should be, and further information or time for reflection will not lead us to reject our

actual response. In other cases, we will not be so lucky; and there may be cases in which our dispositions are in such great conflict that even full information and unlimited reflection will not lead to a single unambiguous response.

The epistemological picture that emerges is the following: we

have a moral sensibility, constituted by a complex set of dispositions. In the formation of moral beliefs, we rely on that sensibility. Thought experiments and actual responses play a role, the extent of which is determined by that sensibility, that is, by our dispositions and their interactions with each other. When we develop dispositional philosophical theories, we ground them on prior moral beliefs. Such grounding is legitimate, since the prior moral beliefs track facts determined by our dispositions. Our prior moral beliefs, based on actual responses or thought experiments, do guide theory. Yet they are de- feasible and therefore are not to be accepted as a priori or infallibly correct. Our actual responses are not straighforwardly extension-determining, as would be the case with simple subjectivism. If something is to be specified as extension-determining, it is our whole moral sensibility, or, to put it another way, it is the responses we would give, under the appropriate conditions, as determined by our moral sensibility.



On the other hand, our responses, actual or counterfactual, are not extension-determined, where that is taken to presuppose that the extension of moral predicates is determined independently of our dispositions.

Another limit to thought experiments is also better accounted for by DER than by analytic dispositionalism. We generally form our moral theories against a background of what Rawls calls "standard assumptions."25 These are general assumptions about the nature of human beings and the world. Thus, according to Rawls, the utilitarian may respond to the objection that utilitarianism allows slavery by claiming that people have similar utility functions and that these functions satisfy the condition of diminishing marginal utility. Whether or not this example is correct, the point is important, since any thought experiment will lose its evidential force if the world imagined is too unlike our own. Conceptual analyses, however, should apply at all conceptually possible worlds. Defenders of analysis can explain the role played by standard empirical assumptions only by stating them as ad hoc constraints on when moral concepts apply. The advocate of DER, on the other hand, can plausibly claim that our moral sensibility was developed in response to a certain environment, about which certain empirical assumptions are plausibly made. Instead of looking at the assumptions as somehow supplied within a realm of meaning, DER treats our moral sensibility as part of a broader empirical theory. Thought experiments are meant to test theories against what we would find acceptable in this world, not against what we would find acceptable in a radically different world.

Second objection. -This objection, which is similar to the first, is given by Allan Gibbard. He deals with full information accounts, such as:

5. Action x is morally correct if and only if human beings who were vividly aware of all relevant information regarding x would treat x as morally correct.

Gibbard considers a civil servant who, if she were to imagine the full details of the luxurious life she would lead after accepting bribes, would succumb to temptation and accept them. In order to do what is moral, such a person may choose not to imagine the consequences of an action.26 Gibbard takes this example to show that full information

25. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 159; cf. all of pp. 158-61. 26. See Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-

versity Press, 1990), pp. 18-22, 183-88. In fairness, I note, first, that Gibbard deals with "rational," not more clearly moral predicates, and second, that his main argument is against Brandt's proposals, not DER. For similar objections to Brandt, see Nicholas Sturgeon's illuminating "Brandt's Moral Empiricism," Philosophical Review 91 (1982): 389-422.



accounts cannot be a standard for what is rational. He argues that a similar problem arises for all dispositional analyses, since for any given

specification of appropriate conditions, we can always "imagine some-

one" who "disagrees coherently." Such a person "makes no mistake of language or logic. Rather, he has a different account of what conditions for normative judgment are ideally favorable."27

Reply. -Gibbard's examples merely show that certain types of dispositionalism are incomplete. A full information theorist can give two responses to the civil servant case. First, the full information re-

quirement can be amended. To do this, we need more details about the civil servant. Suppose, for instance, that under full information,

the civil servant would at some level treat taking bribes as wrong, even though she would explicitly claim that it is acceptable. Then we should add to the appropriate conditions clause that the evaluator not be self- deceived. If, on the other hand, she stresses what happens to herself, as opposed to what happens to others, then we must add that the evaluator should be impartial. Such familiar constraints remove many counterexamples.

The second response is that since dispositional reductions are empirical, it is not enough to imagine logically possible counterexamples. Gibbard claims that for any account of appropriate conditions, we can imagine someone who "disagrees coherently" without making a "mistake

of language or logic." Yet, whether anyone will disagree is an empirical matter. Dispositional ethical realism requires that we have what McDowell calls "a shared sensibility" but not one that is shared as a matter of "logic" or "language."28 In the appropriate conditions, we may all treat taking bribes as wrong. It is true that our best guide to how we will respond to taking bribes is our response based on thought

experiments; but this response should not be confused with an intuition of logical or linguistic truth. It is simply the best way we have to verify

an empirical matter. So, DER is not committed to the view that responding favorably to taking bribes is incoherent. As with Wright's objection, Gibbard's point holds only against a priori analyses, not DER.

Gibbard also objects that appropriate conditions are normative.29 If his claim is that appropriate conditions clauses must contain normative

terms, then he needs further support for this view. I doubt that is

what he had in mind. Instead, he appears to be arguing that the choice of appropriate conditions is guided by prior beliefs about what is

27. Gibbard, p. 186.

28. It could turn out that we share no sensibility, but, as already noted, all forms

of moral realism are optimistic on this score.

29. Gibbard, p. 186.



normatively correct. This worry has already been considered in the response to Wright.

Third objection. -To call something moral is in part to commend it. Now, suppose that we analyze the predicate "is moral" in terms of

responses made under a specification C of appropriate conditions. If

C is not itself stated in normative terms, then we leave out the com- mendatory function of "is moral." If, however, we state C in terms that commend, then we have not reduced being moral to something nonnormative.

This objection is from MarkJohnston, who defends a nonreductive

form of dispositionalism. Johnston gives another version of the objection, based on an argument from Gilbert Harman.30 Consider the view that an action is right just in case it would be valued by an ideal observer, where conditions for ideal observation are stated in descriptive terms. Now suppose that I think creating employment is preferable to lessening pollution but that the ideal observer disagrees. Johnston holds that I can legitimately respond, "So what?" I am not in the ideal observer's conditions, so why should I care about his view? Johnston dubs this

"the 'So what?' argument." The point, again, is that one can acknowledge that an evaluation would be made in certain circumstances without thereby commending anything.

Reply. -This objection may be looked at as a variation on G. E. Moore's "open question" argument. Moore's argument is based on

the claim that for any "naturalistic analysis" of "good," we can always ask, regarding an object of evaluation that meets the conditions laid down in the analysis, whether the object is good.3' Johnston would claim that for any proposed analysis of an evaluative property, we can always ask whether an object of evaluation that meets the conditions laid down in the analysis should be commended.

Of the problems facing open-question arguments, perhaps the most challenging arises from the apparent requirement that reducing locutions have the same potential illocutionary force as reduced locutions. This is a severe constraint. It is even more excessive when the proposed "analysis" is not the result of semantic inquiry but is modeled, as with DER, on intertheoretic reduction in the sciences.32 Instead of directly arguing against this constraint, however, I will concentrate on whether DER can accommodate some sort of tie between morality and commendation.

30. See Johnston, pp. 156-57; and Gilbert Harman, "Moral Agent and Moral Spectator," The Lindley Lecture (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1983).

31. See G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), esp. pp. 7, 16-17.

32. For more on applying open-question arguments to nonsemantic reductions, see David Brink's Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 149-63.



The word "internalism" is often used to refer to the view that being motivated is somehow built into moral judgments. Johnston presupposes another internalism: the view that commending is somehow built into expressions of moral judgments.33 A central objection to internalism has been that it does not allow amoralism. In the present case, the objection would be that a Johnstonian internalist rules out the possibility of an amoralist who recognizes what is moral but does not commend it.

Dispositional ethical realism allows a compromise between John- ston's view that moral judgment is tied to commending and the intuition that amoralism is possible. Let us grant that part of the response R to be specified in a refinement of 1 is the disposition to commend x.34 So DER will hold that, when a person is in the appropriate conditions, he or she will commend what is moral. Thus, there is a tie between being morally valuable and commending. When something is actually valuable, and one is in the appropriate conditions, one will commend it. If, however, one forms the belief that something is moral under

inappropriate conditions, DER does not require Othat one commend it. There is not a tie between every moral belief and commending.35

This view acknowledges that one could assert a true statement of the form given on the right-hand side of 1 without thereby commending x, the object of evaluation. But the only people who will not commend x in this situation will be those who have formed a belief under inappropriate conditions. (Consider Gibbard's civil servant. She might be informed of a dispositional account, including the requirement that one be impartial; but since she is not herself impartial-since she is not in the appropriate conditions-she will express a belief about what is moral without commending it.) Those who have encountered the object of evaluation under the appropriate conditions will commend it. This position is highly intuitive. It allows that amoralism is possible but requires us to look at the amoralist as considering the moral realm from a mistaken perspective. Anyone who has the proper perspective will commend what is moral. This account of the moral realm is preferable to Johnston's position, which completely rules out the possibility of amoralism.

To what extent, then, is DER committed to internalism? Dispo- sitional ethical realism is consistent with internalism or externalism,

33. An objection similar to Johnston's can be raised in terms of motivation: one can recognize that a positive evaluation of an action would be made in certain circumstances without being motivated to perform the action.

34. Analogous remarks to those I make about commending could be made about being motivated, as long as we grant that where x is an action, part of the response R is being motivated to do X.

35. Compare Christine Korsgaard's claim, in "Skepticism about Practical Reason," Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 5-25, that internalism requires only that all reasons motivate insofar as we are rational.



but the above response to Johnston requires a modest internalism. Above, I characterized internalism (regarding motivation) as the view

that being motivated is somehow built into moral judgments. But what is meant by saying that motivation is "somehow built" into moral

judgments? Let us distinguish three grades of internalism. The first, "externalist internalism," requires only that as a matter

of fact, "empirical necessity," or "causal necessity," agents who have awareness A of value V in conditions C will also have motivation M. The second, "weak conceptual internalism," holds that the concept of moral value appropriately applies only when awareness leads, as a matter of fact, to motivation. So if, as in the case just described, it is a matter of fact, empirical necessity, or causal necessity, that agents who have awareness A of V in C will also have motivation M, then

the awareness A of V is appropriately called a moral value. The third, "strong conceptual internalism," requires that the concept of moral value appropriately applies only to those objects the awareness of which conceptually requires that the agent be motivated. In this case, it is not enough that as a matter of fact, empirical necessity, or causal necessity, the awareness A of V in C leads to M. Rather, there must be a conceptual requirement that anyone aware of V in C will have

M. Perhaps the conceptual tie will be provided by the very understanding of the content of A, or by the fact that the awareness A of V in C is the result of practical reason being structured in a specific way.36

Strong conceptual internalism has been the most common. The

response to Johnston, however, requires weak conceptual internalism,

at the most.37 Consider the civil servant case again. Suppose the empirical investigation advocated by DER shows that an act is good if and only if those who are impartial and have all relevant information will be

motivated to perform it and (to cover Johnston's concerns) disposed to commend it. Dispositional ethical realism need not require that the civil servant who is impartial and informed of all relevant information, will, as a matter of conceptual necessity, be motivated to decline bribes

and disposed to commend such declining. (This is the second point made in response to Gibbard.) But an advocate of DER who is attracted to internalism can require that an account of goodness in terms of

36. One way to read the difference between the two kinds of internalism is to treat

the difference between the two sorts of conceptual internalism as something like the

difference between de dicto and de re necessity. Compare the difference between "E (x)

(x is a moral belief -* x motivates)" and "(x)(x is a moral belief -* D x motivates)." See the excellent discussion in Francis Snare's Morals, Motivation and Convention (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 44-64, and esp. pp. 61-63. 37. The Quinean empiricist spirit that motivates DER may make it seem odd to

take seriously any conceptual requirement that links motivation to recognition of moral

truth. I am, of course, sympathetic to a quick rejection of all conceptual requirements.

My goal here is only to make the theory seem plausible to those who wish to endorse

some form of conceptual internalism.



impartiality and relevant information is an adequate account of the moral value of goodness only if evaluators judging under appropriate conditions (i.e., when they are impartial and have all relevant information) are as a matter of fact motivated or disposed to commend. If the world does not turn out to be that way-if those who are impartial and have all relevant information are not as a matter of fact motivated or disposed to commend-then the proposed account can be rejected. The link between judging under appropriate conditions on the one hand and motivation or commendation on the other hand is an empirical tie. The advantage for DER, then, is that it can be combined with both weak conceptual internalism and the view that amoralism is possible.

Ultimately, I have said, DER is not committed to any form of internalism. In addition, it is not committed to either a Humean or non-Humean picture of motivation.38 The Humean holds that all ethical attitudes must motivate, that beliefs alone, or reason alone, cannot motivate, and that therefore ethical attitudes must depend on desires, rather than merely beliefs and reasons, in order to acquire their motivational force. A variant of this holds that practical reason motivates, but this is then taken to show that practical reason must involve desires: an agent has a reason to act only if his acting can be explained in terms of desires. To make the picture fully instrumentalist, the claim must be not merely that the agent has to have a desire in order to be motivated but that the desire itself cannot be based merely on reason or belief.39 Desires must be the ultimate source of motivation, even if, in combination with beliefs, they lead to further desires. Desires cannot arise out of practical reasoning that does not appeal to other desires.

An advocate of DER may require, as part of the appropriate conditions, that agents have certain desires and that they are motivated to give response R on the basis of these desires; or it might be required that moral beliefs, analyzed along the lines of DER, motivate agents to act only if they have a prior desire to perform moral actions. But neither of these positions need be attached to DER, and the most interesting version of DER arises if one gives an analysis more in line with weak conceptual internalism.

On this account, there may be two ways in which motivation (or a desire that motivates but that is not derived from a prior desire) can arise from belief. First, it may be that evaluators, acting under the appropriate conditions, will form nonevaluative beliefs about the object of evaluation X such that those beliefs, as a matter of fact, empirical

38. See Hume, bk. 2, pt. 3, sec. 3, pp. 413-18, and bk. 3, pt. 1, secs. 1 and 2, pp. 455-76.

39. See Thomas Nagel's influential discussion of motivated and unmotivated desires in his The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), chap. 5, pp. 27-32.



necessity, or causal necessity, motivate the evaluators to act (independently of their prior desires). For instance, evaluators acting under the appropriate conditions may save drowning babies, without having prior desires to do so. Such evaluators form certain beliefs (e.g., that a child will die if they do not act and that saving the child involves minimal effort), and they are straightaway motivated to save the child. Their motivation on the basis of belief, however, is not explained by conceptual analysis, or by its logically following from the content of the beliefs, or by the necessary structure of practical reason. It is simply an empirical fact that those in the appropriate conditions will be motivated to act.

The second way in which motivation may arise from belief occurs when beliefs with ethical content (as construed by DER) as a matter of fact, empirical necessity, or causal necessity, motivate agents to act (independently of their prior desires). On this view, someone who becomes aware that saving drowning babies is good will be motivated, merely on the basis of that belief, to save drowning babies. They need not be motivated by a prior desire, such as the desire to do what is good. As in the first case, their motivation is not explained by conceptual analysis, the logical content of their beliefs, or the necessary structure of practical reason.

III. IS "DER" A TYPE OF "REALISM"?

Ultimately, if the commitments of the theory are clear, the label does not matter. Nevertheless, many philosophers would be hesitant to call the dispositionalism advocated here a form of realism. Their hesitancy would be based on the fact that dispositional accounts spell out moral facts and properties in terms of our attitudes. I will argue that their hesitancy is misplaced and that DER meets the central criterion for realism that has been affirmed in other areas of inquiry.

The word "realism" is used with dozens of meanings. A core notion shared by many realisms, however, is that an entity is real if it is independent of the human mind. Let us consider three interpretations of the requisite notion of independence, and in each case ask whether the interpretation provides the sense of independence central to realism, and whether moral properties as understood by DER can be treated as independent.

1. The causal independence thesis: An entity is causally independent if facts about it are causally independent from what we think and choose. The world is causally independent of thought. The way we think about something does not bring it, or facts about it, into existence. My merely thinking there is a chair in the room does not cause the chair to be there. Even if all agreed there was a chair here, that would not cause it to be here.

Since we causally influence many things, there is a sense in which our thoughts can cause a chair to be in the room, as when we choose



to move the chair. Moreover, people invented chairs and manufacture them. Other examples include all facts constituted in some way by what we think. For instance, whether a person has a character trait, such as being shy, is clearly not independent of what he or she thinks. These simple examples suggest that the best cases of causal independence involve entities not influenced by us. Thus, realists like to talk about entities distant in space or time.

Yet the cases of the chair and of shyness should give us pause over whether causal independence captures the sense of independence important to realism. For even if we bring about facts about chairs, or facts about shyness, we wish to treat chairs and shyness as real.

Dispositional ethical realism treats moral properties in a similar

fashion. Facts about moral properties are determined by our dispositions, but they are not in worse shape than chairs or shyness. Moreover, since our actual overt responses do not determine whether something has a moral property, the fact that we react a certain way never causes an ethical property to be instantiated.

Nevertheless, perhaps the main worry is not whether, when p is a fact, there are thoughts that brought about p. Rather, the concern is that the fact that p might be brought about by the thought that p. Of course, the fact that I am thinking may obtain because I am thinking that I am thinking. But ignoring such limited cases, the concern is central. Some believe (quite mistakenly) that Wittgenstein held that

since community responses determine when the word "pain" is correctly applied, what community members say determines whether someone is in pain. It is a short step from this to the view that the fact that a person is in pain is brought about by what others think. That is a kind of dependence on thought that realists want to reject.

Dispositional ethical realism may seem committed to such a thesis, for is it not part of DER that if evaluators would be disposed to believe that an action is good (for instance) under the appropriate conditions, then that action is good? The answer is that DER is not committed to

this view and should reject it. As noted above, the dispositionalist must not hold that the response R, to be specified in a fleshed out version

of 1, is the belief that X has value V. This form of response was ruled out because it leads to circularity. We can now also reject it because it leads to an objectionable form of nonrealism. Particular versions of

DER must spell out R without making use of the belief that X has

value V. That is not easy, but it is not part of my task here.40

40. In this regard, DER can employ results that are part of noncognitivist projects. An emotivist, for instance, cannot simply hold that an action is called "good" if it gives rise to positive emotions or pro-attitudes. The concepts of "positive emotions" and "pro- attitudes" are far too broad: one may recognize that something is good and yet have negative emotions about it. (Consider a spouse who holds that it would be good to end an extramarital affair, but who has positive emotions about it.) Emotivists must say which attitudes form ethical responses, without explaining the attitudes in terms that



2. The constitutional independence thesis: The existence of the world, entities in the world, and the way the world is are not reducible to or constituted by mental phenomena. The world is constitutionally in-

dependent of thought. The core case is "the external world." We want to say tables and trees are not made out of sensory ideas or sense data. If they are reducible to sense data, then, even if they exist in some sense, there is good reason to hold that realism about ordinary objects is false.

At the other end of the spectrum are cases in which the thesis holds but we do not reject realism. The clearest example is that of mental states themselves. Another example is sociological or economic

facts and properties, which may turn out to be reducible to psychological facts and properties. Construing them in this fashion demands argument, but viewing them along these lines is not a form of nonrealism.

Since DER can be construed as denying the constitutional independence of ethical properties, we must ask whether ethical properties are similar to material objects or to sociological properties. If ethical

properties are reducible to dispositional properties, would we take this to be a nonrealist conclusion, or would we treat it as an acceptable reductive realism?4'

The answer depends on how much one's pretheoretic intuitions incline one to think of ethical truth as independent of attitudes. Some, such as J. L. Mackie, maintain that ordinary practice commits itself to

a realm of objective values.42 He believes that ordinary ethical practice requires belief in objective categorical imperatives that intrinsically prescribe what ought to be done by each person, regardless of his or her attitudes toward values.

Let me attempt to dispel Mackie's central claim. First, we must not confuse the constitutional independence thesis with the epistemic independence thesis, which I discuss below. Even if ethical facts are determined by dispositions, they are independent of our current ethical justifications and beliefs. Now, Mackie believes dispositionalist realism cannot account for the purported independence of ethical facts from ethical attitudes.43 But where "attitudes" applies to inclinations to act and propositional attitudes, including ethical beliefs, DER can grant that ethical facts are independent of ethical attitudes. First (to repeat yet again) overt dispositions may be misguided because agents are not

presuppose ethical judgments. Dispositional ethical realism can borrow such accounts

of ethical responses, employing them in a way noncognitivists reject.

41. Jan Narveson claims that since DER is reductive, it is "naturalism," not "realism."

But reductionist realism has been broadly accepted, due to the arguments of Michael

Dummett; see, e.g., Dummett's Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1978), pp. xxi-xliv, 156-58.

42. Mackie endorses this line in chap. 1.

43. See ibid., p. 33.



in appropriate conditions. Second, for similar reasons, one's propo-

sitional attitudes with ethical content may be false.

We are free, then, to treat "common sense" as making no commitment about the extent to which moral facts are constitutionally

determined by attitudes. Consider economic facts again. In the same way that common sense can plausibly be argued to lack an opinion

about the constitution of economic facts, it is reasonable to claim that common sense lacks an opinion about the constitution of ethical facts.

For example, common sense may have no view about whether economic

facts are determined only by psychological facts, or whether physical facts (about, e.g., the scarceness of resources) also play a role. Never- theless, an economic theory may make a constitutional commitment

beyond common sense (e.g., in favor of treating economic facts as

partially constituted by physical facts) without thereby revising ordinary economic beliefs. Similarly, DER makes a constitutional commitment

not made by common sense; yet it is not therefore revisionist. Dis-

positional ethical realism is consistent with common sense, even though it is more explicit.

Mackie, despite what was said above, would not yet be convinced

that this line is correct. Something deeper troubles him, which is brought to light by his brief remarks about Aristotle. He claims Aristotle clearly thought of eudaimonia as "intrinsically desirable, not good simply because it is desired."44 Mackie endorses this as the standpoint of ordinary practice. The question Mackie wishes to press is, I believe, an updated

version of the question Socrates raises at Euthyphro IOA. Socrates asks, Is the holy holy because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is holy? The contemporary version goes like this: Is the good good

because we treat it as good, or do we treat it as good because it is good?45 Mackie would claim that ordinary ethical practice is committed to treating the good as good because it is good, whereas DER must be committed to holding that the good is good because we treat it as good. Hence, DER is committed to nonrealism about ethical values

as understood in everyday life. I cannot discuss the Euthyphro challenge completely here, but I

can, I believe, cast doubt on whether ordinary practice is committed to a particular response to the challenge. Let us begin by considering what is troublesome about answering Socrates' original question by

claiming that the holy is holy because the gods love it. If the gods' love makes something holy, two unfortunate consequences appear to

44. Ibid., p. 31.

45. This question is discussed in Wiggins, "A Sensible Subjectivism"; Johnston,

pp. 171-74; Nozick, pp. 552-70; and Simon Blackburn, "How to Be an Ethical An-

tirealist," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 12 (1988): 361-75. Part of the response given

here is similar to Johnston's response. It may be seen as an elaboration of the point

made in n. 16 above.



follow. First, there is nothing about holy things themselves that makes them holy. Second, it would seem that what makes things holy is arbitrary: the gods could have made anything holy, including things, such as wanton killing or worshiping earthworms, that many would take to be very unholy. The second of these consequences follows

from the first. The question is whether DER must accept analogous

consequences regarding ethical values.

The answer is no. For DER, ethical truth is not determined ar-

bitrarily. We are constrained by our actual dispositions. Let me stress again that DER treats ethical facts as empirically determined by the character we actually have. We can imagine a world in which, for

example, our dispositions are to respond favorably to the random

torture of innocent people. But the mere fact that we can imagine ourselves this way does not show that random torture is acceptable.

Moreover, we can say which properties of random torture make it objectionable. To merely begin to get at the phenomenon, we can note that torture causes great pain and that we take causing pain to

be bad; we can note that random torture is worse, since it is not based on anything resembling desert or blameworthiness; we can note that performing torture reduces torturers to the level of brutes, and we take this to be bad; and so on. The fact that each such line of thought terminates in ethical judgments that are to be understood in terms of our dispositions does not show our responses are arbitrary. On the contrary, we respond to torture as we do specifically because of particular facts about it. Ultimately, we must appeal to our natures and social conditioning, and these are contingent. But much goes on before we get to this ultimate level.

Since DER does not permit arbitrary ethical decisions, much of the bite is gone from the Euthyphro question. It is true that ordinary practice does not endorse arbitrarily attaching values to any object one pleases; but once this possibility is rejected as a reason for accepting

a particular answer to the Euthyphro question, it is unclear that ordinary practice endorses or presupposes a particular answer. In any case, the burden of proof has shifted to those who claim that ordinary practice makes such a commitment.

We may come at these matters from another angle. Those impressed by the Euthyphro question might argue that the crux of the issue is whether ordinary moral practice endorses counterfactual conditionals such as:

6. If we approved of torture, torture would-be morally permissible.

Mackie and others could plausibly argue that ordinary practice would find 6 highly objectionable. Dispositional ethical realism, on the other hand, seems committed to 6, specifically because it holds that our



moral sensibility constitutionally determines the ethical truth. By now, I am sure it is clear that DER is not committed to 6 but, rather, to:

6*. If, under the appropriate conditions of evaluation, we approved of torture, then torture would be morally permissible.

One way to respond to the worry, then, is to claim that since ordinary practice would not know what to make of the appropriate conditions clause, ordinary moral practice simply would not know what to do with 6*. It could then be claimed, as was done above, that DER is not revisionary, since nothing is being said that is inconsistent with common sense.

I believe this is correct, but there is another, more informative response. According to the most popular reading of counterfactuals, they are not to be evaluated at all possible worlds but only at those worlds "closest" to the actual world. Thus, in evaluating a counterfactual, we should consider worlds similar to ours, but in which the antecedent is true. A counterfactual is true just in case the consequent is also true in all such worlds.46 If we accept this semantics for counterfactuals, 6 is false, even according to DER.

The key to understanding this lies in acknowledging the complexity of our moral sensibility. I noted above that our moral sensibility is constituted by a complex set of dispositions, of different orders, which override each other in various ways. I also noted that our moral sensibility is information sensitive, in that what is morally approved depends on nonevaluative information. Finally, I argued that when accounting for the impermissibility of torture, we would appeal to a number of other properties of torture and to our dispositional responses to these properties. When we evaluate 6, we should consider other possible worlds in which these facts about our dispositions and about the nature of torture are the same as at the actual world. The truth of the antecedent of 6 should be, as far as is possible, the only difference between these worlds and the actual world.

When we evaluate 6 in this manner, we find that, even if we did approve of torture, we would treat such approval as morally objectionable. Our approval of torture would conflict with our other dispositions and with empirical facts. Ordinary people would, for instance, object that approval of torture does not make it morally acceptable, since torture causes great pain, and since they find causing pain morally unacceptable. In a semantic analysis of their deliberations, we must

46. I give a very informal account here. For semantic accounts along similar lines, see Robert Stalnaker, "A Theory of Conditionals," in Studies in Logical Theory, ed. Nicholas Recher APQ Monograph no. 2 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), pp. 98-112; and David Lewis, Counterfactuals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973).



treat them as considering possible worlds in which we approve of torture, but in which a nonmoral fact about torture (that it causes pain) and a fact about our dispositions (that we are disposed to disapprove of acts that cause pain) remain the same as in the actual world. As we already noted, the list of facts relevant to the evaluation of torture will include more than these facts about pain and our disapproval of acts that cause it. The list of facts relevant to the evaluation of torture could be quite long. When we deliberate about 6, we consider worlds where all these facts remain the same. Far from being inconsistent with common sense, then, advocates of DER can agree with common sense that counterfactuals such as 6 are false.

Suppose we consider a world at which the antecedent of 6 is true, but at which many other facts are different from those that obtain at the actual world. To do this, we might consider the worlds at which we should evaluate the following counterfactual, in which clauses a through e refer to some of the various facts about our dispositions and the world that might lead to a different evaluation of what is morally acceptable.

6**. If we approved of torture, and we lived in a world at which (a) we did not disapprove of acts that cause pain, (b) we did not disapprove of acts that allow agents to manipulate others' behavior by force, (c) we did not care about what others wanted, (d) torture did not lead to changes in the character of torturers, (e) the ability of people to function normally was not affected by a history of having been tortured, (f) human beings did not expect others to treat them in accord with basic minimal standards that could be accepted by all, then torture would be morally acceptable.

I think it is clear that common sense would not know what to make of this conditional; yet it is this conditional, and perhaps one that has even more qualifications in its antecedent, that is more likely to be accepted by advocates of DER. The only worlds at which torture would be morally acceptable are those at which either the nonmoral facts are very different or we have a very different moral sensibility. Once again, the fact that we can ultimately appeal only to our dispositional makeup as the source of ethical truth need not be construed as contrary to common sense.

3. The epistemic independence thesis: What we believe about the world, even with adequate justification, could be false. The world is epistemically independent of thought. Under the influence of Michael Dummett, this is perceived by many as the central thesis- of realism.47 Given the limitations on the causal independence thesis and the constitutional independence thesis, this perception appears to be correct.

47. See Dummett, esp. in the preface, pp. ix-li; chap. 10, pp. 145-65; and chap. 21, pp. 358-74.



The notion that we can be wrong about ethical properties is consistent with DER. Even in very simple cases, we can be wrong about our dispositions. People often believe, on the basis of strong evidence, that they will respond a certain way to a situation. When the situation actually faces them, they find themselves responding in quite another way. I take it this is a common experience. In the case of ethical properties as understood by DER, we are much less likely to be right because of the complexity of our moral sensibility and because we can be wrong about what the appropriate conditions are and whether they obtain.

Further grounds for accepting the epistemic independence thesis in the case of DER are provided by the need for informational constraints, such as the requirement that the evaluator must have full information, or all the information available in his or her epistemic situation. Whenever the appropriate conditions include an informational constraint, the evaluator may make mistakes that arise from ignorance of nonnormative facts.

A dispositional theory that does not place some informational constraint on evaluators would allow that their dispositions determine ethical truth, no matter what they believe about the evaluated objects. Since this is farfetched, we can expect dispositional theories to include an informational constraint. Hence, we can be wrong about ethical properties not just because we are wrong about our dispositions but because we are wrong about nonevaluative properties of the entities to be evaluated. The epistemic independence of ethical properties is all the more supported.

We may still ask, after consideration of these three theses, whether DER is better called "projectivist" than "realist." It must be admitted that DER fits in the broadly Humean tradition, and I noted above that the label given to the theory is not of ultimate concern. Still, we are now in a position to reject the projection metaphor.

Suppose I run around projecting images with a slide projector. (To my knowledge, there was nothing like a slide projector in Hume's time; I hope I will be forgiven this example.) This suggests that I can project images wherever I please. As we have seen, that is not the case with ethical properties. I cannot arbitrarily call something ethically right or good.

This points toward the core problem with the notion of projection. Even if there are rules guiding projection (e.g., that one can project only on white surfaces), the projected image is not found there as the result of discovery. Projection is to be contrasted with detection. When asking whether DER is a version of realism, the question we should consider, in addition to questions about the three independence theses, is whether ethical properties are projected or whether they are detected by us. According to the model proposed by DER, they are detected



by us. To be sure, in detecting what is right or wrong, we are ultimately detecting something about how we are disposed to react, and so we are detecting something about ourselves. But our ethical knowledge is guided and regulated by a process of discovery of our own dispositions, it is not merely a creation of those dispositions.

This may seem an oversimplification. We sometimes face moral conflicts in which the taking of any action appears to force us to do something wrong. We may then simply choose, or we may engage in a more complicated weighing up of values. We also often have a harmless choice between two or more ethically acceptable alternatives, or a choice between an ethically acceptable alternative and an ethically unacceptable alternative. There will be much room, then, for choice and decision. Yet none of this detracts from the idea that, if DER is correct, there are good grounds for treating ethical properties as something we learn about largely through detection.

IV. WHY ACCEPT "DER"?

Dispositional ethical realism holds that we have a moral sensibility, molded by nature and culture. It treats moral truth as determined by the empirically discoverable output of this sensibility. This will not appeal to those of every major ethical tradition. It will not appeal to Kantians because it treats moral truth as contingent and does not pretend to argue that the nature of practical reason requires that all rational agents be moral. Dispositional ethical realism will not appeal to "Hobbesians," who typically begin with a severe moral skepticism and then treat morality as the result of an agreement between self- interested individuals seeking mutual advantage.48 It will not appeal to Aristoteleans and others who posit an objective good for human beings. It will not appeal to "rational intuitionists," who posit an independent moral order into which we have intuitive but inexplicable insight.

Instead, it will appeal to those tempted by one of the alternative positions regarding moral realism. Much of the debate over moral realism has been between cognitivists and those who wish to come close to noncognitivism but want to make room for moral truth, moral belief, and moral properties. The roots of this debate are in the British moral tradition. The present paper should be seen in the context of this debate. For those who are already drawn into the debate, there are four central reasons for accepting DER.

The first is that, as noted above, many, ethical theories fit the pattern of 1. This is a distinct advantage of DER, especially over other forms of moral realism. A problem with many versions of moral realism

48. On the Hobbesian metaethical attitude, see esp. David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 46-59.



is that one has no idea which normative theories are consistent with the proposed view. Indeed, in the case of many nonreductive dispositional realisms, the proposed moral theory is, or appears to be, a version of intuitionism and brings with it all the objections that in-

. . . * * a 49 tuitionism has invited.

The theories that can most clearly be treated along dispositionalist lines are those that identify moral truth with what we would accept if we were to take some hypothetical viewpoint. Such theories are consistent with DER if they are not treated as conceptual truths. Suppose, for instance, that the following simple theory is offered:

7. An action A is morally obligatory if and only if fully informed, sympathetic evaluators, who took into account each person's interests equally, would be disposed to perform A.

If it is claimed that the very meaning of "moral" or "the moral point of view" requires us to treat each person's interests equally, then such an account is not consistent with DER. On the other hand, if those endorsing 7 ground it not in an analysis of meaning but are, instead, willing to test 7 against our responsive dispositions to actual and possible particular cases, then the resulting account may well be compatible with DER.

More important, "moral contractarian" views, such as those of John Rawls and Thomas Scanlon, may be made consistent with DER.50 Without going into the complexity needed for a statement of Rawls's theory, consider:

A set P of principles for the basic structure of society is just if and only if evaluators who ignore facts particular to themselves (including facts about their abilities, life-plans, economic and social class, and conception of the good) but who nevertheless act in their rational self-interest and who know that a certain set of primary goods are important to the fulfillment of their life- plan, would choose set P.

Or, in a much simpler version:

A set P of principles is just if and only if evaluators who adopt the hypothetical standpoint of the original position would choose P.

49. For intuitionist realism, seeJonathan Dancy, "Ethical Particularism and Morally Relevant Properties," Mind 92 (1983): 530-47; David McNaughton, Moral Vision (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988); and Mark Platts, Ways of Meaning (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 243-63.

50. See Rawls, A Theory ofJustice; and Thomas Scanlon, "Contractualism and Util- itarianism," in Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. A. Sen and B. Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 103-28.



There is, of course, much more to Rawls's position than this, and I am sure that many readers will note points at which his views apparently diverge from DER. The only claim I wish to make here is that something similar to Rawls's theory can be stated in dispositionalist terms.51

The second reason to accept DER is that it explains the role of

thought experiments. Thought experiments help us determine what is ethically correct because they allow us to track our own dispositions to respond to the world. For many, the fact that thought experiments are a legitimate means of inquiry is by itself an indication that the object of inquiry should not be treated in a realist fashion. But according to DER, what we are investigating is not totally independent of ourselves, so thought experiments have a more legitimate role than they would have in investigations of phenomena totally external to us. An investigation into ourselves is an investigation nonetheless. As noted in the response to Wright, the objectivist cannot explain the legitimacy of appeal to thought experiments, while the analytical dispositionalist must resort to ad hoc maneuvers in order to justify the standard empirical assumptions that limit the scope of thought experiments.

The third important point in favor of DER is that it has no unfortunate ontological implications; moral properties are not queer or strange. They fit fairly well into a standard scientific ontology.52 Some philosophers maintain that properties exist only if an appeal to those properties plays a role in the best explanations of observable phenomena.53 This principle seems to me far too strong. But it is reasonable to accept a weaker principle, to the effect that even if reference to a property does not play a role in the best scientific explanations, the existence of that property must be compatible with true scientific ex-

planations. The best way to demonstrate compatibility, I would argue, is to hold that a property may be admitted into our ontology only if each particular instantiation of that property is identifiable with or

51. What about Rawls's "Kantian constructivism," which is, roughly, the view that moral truth is constructed by agents who adopt a particular social point of view? Rawls

claims that "apart from the procedure of constructing the principles of justice, there are no moral facts" ("Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory," Journal of Philosophy

77 [1980]: 515-72, p. 521). In A Theory of Justice, Rawls claims his view is "a theory of

the moral sentiments" (p. 51), and he stresses that it is not based on analyses of meaning. His constructivism may be looked at as in accord with this. He is describing the moral

sensibility of those in democratic societies, whom he believes share certain moral ideals

("model-conceptions") of self and society. Although I cannot go into a comparison between Rawls's views on reflective equilibrium and the epistemology recommended

by DER, I believe readers will find that DER is surprisingly consistent with Rawls's

methodology, as expressed in sec. 9 (pp. 46-53) of A Theory of Justice. 52. See the "argument from queerness" in Mackie, pp. 38-42. 53. Both Harman and Sturgeon seem to approve of a principle similar to this and

use it as part of their debate over moral realism.



constituted by an instantiation or set of instantiations of properties that do play a role in the best scientific explanations.54 If DER is correct, we should be able to do this. Each instantiation of an ethical property should be identifiable with or constituted by some dispositional property or set of particular dispositional properties. Each such dispositional property should be identifiable with or constituted by some property or set of properties that is referred to in scientific explanation. I do not pretend here to have done work that I have not done, but DER offers hope for further research in this area which is much superior to that offered by the mere claim that ethical properties supervene on the properties accepted in a more clearly naturalistic ontology; and DER is much more plausible than objectivist forms of realism that treat values as independent of our own moral attitudes. Mackie is right that if one holds that objective values must be causally and constitutively independent, and yet intrinsically motivating, the commitment to objective values appears inconsistent with the scientific worldview.

The fourth, and perhaps most important, reason to accept DER is that it is (like some other dispositionalist views) a position midway between extreme subjectivism and extreme objectivism. We do not wish to think of value as totally a matter of our fancy or as something that we merely project onto the world. Dispositional ethical realism does not treat moral properties in this way, and it accounts for our everyday rejection of conditionals such as 6. On the other hand, it is very hard to make the case that values are out there in the world in the same way that having a negative charge or being a planet are out in the world. Morality seems more subjective than that. Dispositional ethical realism allows us to be cognitivists, to hold that there are moral properties, and to admit that we might be incorrect about what is moral, but it preserves the crucial intuition that morality is ultimately to be spelled out in terms of human responses.

54. Compare the view that each particular mental state must be "token-identical" with a particular physical state.


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Dispositional Ethical Realism