A Naturalist’s Meta-ethical Question:

            The classic meta-ethical question ‘why should I care about being good’ can mean substantially different things to different people, who then set about answering it in different ways.

            Some people (like Scanlon) take this question to mean ‘why ought one (rationally, self-interestedly, naturally etc.) do what one morally ought to do?’ In this case the question can be answered by finding some non-moral norm for behavior and showing how actions which satisfy the moral norms for behavior satisfy this norm as well. So, for example, one might say that being good is often rational since many immoral activities are illegal and severely punished as well, or that all morally good actions are pious, or that if you do what is morally good you can justify your actions to other people. It is true that often different norms for behavior endorse the same actions; especially for people living in a good society it will often be self interestedly rational to do what is just or kind to do what is virtuous or come naturally to humans to do what makes everyone better off. This is an interesting and fortunate phenomenon but I don’t think it is the most interesting take on the classic question ‘why should I care about being good?’

            I will now describe what I take to be the more interesting problem posed by this question. People in every known society have a practice of talking about what one ought to do, where the word ‘ought’ refers to various standards of morality, rationality and the like. This normative practice has an interesting close relation to action, which makes it very different from descriptive talk. If person A convinces person B that a cup is red or a piece of litter this may have many different effects on person B. But if person a convinces person B that B ought all things considered to pick up the cup then (barring certain rare conditions like extreme depression) B will try to pick the cup up. And if A convinces B that he morally ought to pick up the cup then B will at least be somewhat inclined to pick the cup up. And this relation between normative belief and action, curious as it is, only scratches the surface of the various connections between action and talk of norms.

            To this extent normative talk looks like talk about what a person wants to do. Because of the general transparency of desires it will usually be true that whenever a person believes that they want to do something they will be somewhat inclined to do it. But when we consider another aspect of our practice of talking about what people ought to do it becomes clear that talk about what a person ought to do functions quite differently from talk about what they most want to do. For one thing person A often gather any information about what B wants before they claim that B should do something, and even more tellingly it’s often the case that B has no present desire to do something before A convinces him that he ought to do it so that the convincing somehow generates the desire. Another difference is that A can be convinced that B ought to do something while being aware that (at least for the present) B is at all motivated to do it. This makes it sound like ought(x) means something like ‘I would prefer that x’ (this would be why if B thinks he ought to move the can then he will). But even this doesn’t capture the full oddity of normative talk since we say that two people are disagreeing if one person says ought(x) and the other says ~ought(x) while we don’t say they are disagreeing if one person says ‘I want x’ and the other says ‘I don’t want x’.

            Thus I think that the really interesting question for the naturalistic philosopher or social scientist is very similar to the big question in philosophy of math. How can we simultaneously account for all these special features of moral talk which even seem to be in tension with one another?