Relative Moral Certainty

Many judgements about the morally impossible will remain epistemically ambiguous and subject to change over time. Many philosophers who do not share my metaethical perspective will think this is a problem for any claims about moral necessity. But I think the issue of epistemic ambiguity actually reinforces my point, rather than weakening it, because this epistemic ambiguity is always relative to something more certain.

The question ‘does 2547 + 2376 = 4943?’ is relatively epistemically ambiguous compared to simpler questions like ‘does 1 + 1 = 2?’. But making an attempt to answer the relatively ambiguous question only makes sense if you are happy to accept the answer to the simpler question. If you don’t know that ‘1 + 1 = 2’ then what business do you have calculating anything more complicated than that?

Some of these questions and answers are so epistemically simple that they become paradigmatic. They express the limits of meaningful thinking in that case. They in part determine what we mean when we say that someone has a capacity for judgement on such matters. If you cannot answer, off the top of your head, whether 2547 + 2376 = 4943, I won’t hold it against you. But if you cannot answer, off the top of your head, whether 1 + 1 = 2, then I doubt your capacity for mathematical judgement.

Mathematics is a confusing case because it is so clear. Take a muddier and more realistic example like empirical evidence.

‘Does x count as good evidence for y?’ This can be asked of many different things and the answers can sometimes be very difficult to discern. Unlike mathematics, we have to talk in terms of the weight of evidence rather than categorical proof: there is no absolute certainty here.

Even so, the distinction between relative certainty and ambiguity remains. If someone were to defend the efficacy of a certain medical intervention on the basis of one inconclusive study that suggested there might be something in it, ignoring the ten studies that told against, I might dispute the truth of their claim and question their empirical judgement in this case, but I wouldn’t necessarily doubt their capacity for empirical judgement. They are playing the right game, just doing it badly, perhaps.

Likewise if a fellow juror were to deny that DNA evidence placing the suspect at the scene constituted good reason to convict, I might question their judgement, but not necessarily their capacity for judgement. Perhaps they are just keen to uphold the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ and are exercising due diligence.

But if someone were to tell me that the Holocaust was a Zionist fabrication, or that the Earth is flat, and refused to acknowledge all evidence to the contrary, I wouldn’t just dispute the truth of the claim and question their judgement, I would doubt their capacity for judgement on these matters. Their errors show that they are not just playing the ‘history’ game or the ‘cosmology’ game badly, they are doing something altogether different.

Likewise when people defend absurdly pseudo-scientific claims: they might think they are citing evidence, but in truth they are not talking in terms of evidence at all, because they clearly don’t understand how evidence works, because no one who did would defend those ridiculous claims.

Empirical claims – whether medical, historical, criminal, or cosmological – are always going to be more ambiguous than mathematical claims. They will never be necessarily true, as any good Humean knows. But that doesn’t change the structure of the limits of meaningful thinking on these matters. There will always be paradigmatic cases of ‘certainty’ that must be held as such in order for the rest of the way of thinking to make any sense.

We take these paradigmatic cases to be clear indicators and even determinations of someone’s capacity for judgement on these matters. Don’t know whether 1 + 1 = 2? Then you can’t have a capacity for mathematical judgement. Don’t know whether the Earth is flat? Then you can’t have a capacity for cosmological judgement. Don’t know whether what Jimmy Savile did was wrong? Then you can’t have a capacity for moral judgement.

Moral Matters

It’s controversial to say so, because people disagree wildly about moral matters in a way that they do not (so much) about mathematical and empirical matters, but is the structure any different with moral judgement?

If someone says there’s nothing wrong with amassing great personal wealth, avoiding tax where you can, and remaining indifferent to the poor, I dispute the truth of the claim and question the moral judgement, but I don’t necessarily question the capacity for moral judgement. I suppose they are just different to me; I shrug and move on.

If someone were to say that there’s nothing wrong with physically disciplining a child, when it is warranted, then I might dispute the truth of the claim and doubt this moral judgement, but I wouldn’t necessarily doubt the capacity for moral judgement. It seems they are trying to do the right thing as a parent, as they see it; perhaps their experience of growing up was different from mine.

But if someone were to say that Jimmy Savile was, on balance, a good bloke, my reaction is different. I don’t just dispute the truth of the claim, I consider it beyond the conceptual space of reasonable moral judgement. I would be incredulous. I would assume they haven’t heard about the revelations of child abuse. If I found that they were fully aware, and simply thought that the charity work he had done was enough to make-good his behaviour, then I wouldn’t be able to believe that anyone could make that moral judgement with such an awareness. They cannot think such a thing. No one in their right moral mind would make such a judgement. The judgement is so wrong that it is no longer a ‘moral’ judgement at all, simply a lack of it. To agree with them would require me to not only modify the picture of my moral world but throw it out entirely.

There will be paradigmatic cases in any sphere of thinking. In all cases, one function that these paradigmatic cases perform is to establish the limits of reasonable thought. They are like the rules of the game, rules that you cannot reject without rejecting the game as such. You cannot reject a rule in chess and remain playing chess, for example, because the game is defined by its rules. Similarly, you cannot reject that 1 + 1 = 2 and remain doing ordinary arithmetic. You cannot say the Earth is flat and remain doing cosmology. You cannot say the Holocaust didn’t happen and remain doing history. And you cannot say that Jimmy Savile was a good bloke and remain doing morality. You can do different things and operate in different spheres of thinking, obviously, but you cannot make those kinds of judgements, judgements that transgress the limits of reasonable thinking, and remain in that sphere of thought. And so if you do then we say ‘now you are doing something altogether different’.

An Illustration of Limits and Meaning

My favourite teaching illustration was a contrast between rugby and football. (For the benefit of Americans I will say ‘soccer’ for football.)

Imagine you are playing football (soccer), and a defender is standing on the goal line defending a corner kick. The ball comes in and is hit goalwards by an attacker, and in an instinctive reaction the defender throws their hand up to block the ball. It is a penalty, because you’re not allowed to handle the ball in soccer unless you’re the goalkeeper, and because it prevented a goal it would certainly be a red card for the defender, meaning they would be sent off. It is a very clear violation of the rules. They have played soccer badly.

Contrast this with another game of soccer where, in open play in the middle of the pitch, an attacker picks up the ball with their hands, charges towards the opposing goal line, smashing into defenders along the way, before placing the ball down behind the goal line and throwing their arms up in celebration. Everyone is confused. The infringement is the same in both cases – it is a hand ball – but it is clearly more than just a violation of the rules. It is a ‘blunder’ so big that it shows they are doing something altogether different. Their ‘mistake’ shows that they are playing a different game entirely. They think they are playing rugby (or American Football). They are not just playing soccer badly. Their behaviour shows that they have stopped playing soccer altogether.

Though it is against the rules of soccer for a defender to use their hands to stop a ball crossing the goal line, it’s within the bounds of sense that someone might do so and still be playing soccer. It’s the kind of mistake that shows only that they are not very good at sticking to the rules, but it doesn’t show that they lack a fundamental understanding of the rules. But if an attacker does what to all intents and purposes is play rugby when they are in the middle of a soccer game, then this is not just a mistake, this makes no sense: it is not properly called a ‘mistake’ at all but a radical separation from reality. It shows that they are doing something altogether different. It causes us to question whether they understand the game they are playing.

If they were playing rugby it would be different. But that alone doesn’t make it any less absurd in the context of soccer. Some judgements show that you are playing the game badly; some judgements show that you are not playing it at all. Like mounting an economic defence of Jimmy Savile, arguing that his professional and charitable work made more money than was lost by the loss of earnings suffered as a result of the damaging effects inflicted on his victims. Whilst this might be true, no morality worth its name could consider it a legitimate moral reason. In defending Savile on economic terms, you would be doing something altogether different from moral reasoning.

Within soccer, you cannot sensibly speculate about the virtues of mauling over the line; within morality, you cannot sensibly speculate about the economic advantages of Jimmy Savile’s behaviour (or slavery, genocide, or dropping an atomic bomb over civilian populations). Anyone who did so would show themselves to have lost contact with soccerring/moral reality.

Similarly, I’m sure there were perfectly sound military reasons for the course of action taken at Nagasaki, but good military reasons do not always fall within the sphere of moral reasoning. Likewise, there might even be sound pedagogical reasons to beat children: it teaches them a lesson like no other. And if you get hung up on your moral duty to teach your children, you might get led down a certain path. But the power of moral necessity is such that it reaches over into all our morally-relevant decisions and stands in judgement over them. It specifies what we are allowed to do in pursuit of our (military, economic, hedonistic, pedagogical) purposes. It acts as a limit on our will.

This is what I mean by the morally impossible. They are the paradigmatic cases of the inexcusable or unjustifiable. Everyone who reasons morally has these at the limits of their moral thinking, even if those limits might differ. They are the points at which we stop looking for reasons. They are the points where we start ruling certain things out of consideration.

If you cannot do this, then you are like a chess-player who cannot stop considering illegal moves, or a mathematician who cannot begin to calculate 2547 + 2376 because they cannot decide whether 1 + 1 = 2, or a cosmologist who keeps looking for more evidence that the Earth is round, or a historian still trying to convince themselves that the Holocaust really happened. These are not pictures of the sound exercise of judgement but of a distinct lack of it. In extreme cases, they are pictures of madness, like a man walking around seriously convinced he doesn’t have feet. In less extreme cases, they are at least pictures of inconsistency, such as a philosopher putting down their sceptical argument about the sun rising tomorrow, thinking ‘I’ll try again in the morning’.

An understanding – we might say ‘mastery’, though I don’t think that’s necessary because it connotes too much – of a particular domain of reasoning is marked by an ability to discern what does and doesn’t make sense in that domain. For someone who understands, it makes no sense to ask certain questions. For Socrates, anyone who asks at what price you ought to stop being virtuous shows themselves to not understand what virtue is: anyone who understands virtue, as he understands it, would not ask that question. For me, anyone who asks at what price child abuse (or slavery, genocide, etc.) becomes acceptable shows themselves to not understand something important about morality. Not everything is rightly thought of as being for sale. The connection with the problem of evil ought to be clear.

Read more: The Problem of Evil as an Ethical Problem

Read more: Think Well, Live Well: A Free Introduction to Philosophy