More on Secular Ethics

Continuing with Singer and Hauser...

"What was good for our ancestors may not be good today." (ibid)

So, they're simply relativists.

And all this bluster about a viable alternative to Christian ethics was just a bunch of hubbub, then.

If a moral principle was truly good, how can it not be good today?

Of course, they may mean that some applications of principles are not good today. But in that case what they've said is superfluous since every ethical tradition would agree with that. Thus, the comment can't do any relevant work in justifying a specifically secular ethic.

If they mean that an ethical principle can be good and then not good because some cultures regard them as such, then they're cultural relativists (as opposed to subjectivist).

But if they're cultural relativists, then problems follow. For example, Singer argues for rather counter-intuitary moral practices, e.g., infanticide. But of course since this is out of step with his larger culture, then he's actually being immoral. He may think himself some kind of moral reformer, but on cultural relativism, moral reform is actually an immoral usurping of the moral standard of the day. Hence someone like Martin Luther King was something like a moral monster. A moral reformer acts as if there is a standard that transcends culture by which culture can be judged. Unchanging standards. But then we've undermined the Singer-Hauser claim that moral standards can change.

But perhaps he means that what some particular people regarded as good is now regarded as "not good" by other particular people. And that this regarding is what makes the moral principle, x, true or false that x is good or not good. In this case he trades in a cultural relativism for a subjective relativism.

But if they're subjective relativists, then problems follow. For example, they've left the moral game altogether. All subjectivism boils down to is a description of a psychological state. So all the moral fact like:

[1] Torturing children for fun is wrong.

boils down to is a description about a particular subjects psychological state, like:

[1*] Peter thinks torturing children for fun is wrong.

But [1*] is a description and ethics have generally been concerned with prescriptions.

Other problems follow from this observation. For example, it seems clear that people can be wrong about their ethical claims

For example, say Peter believes [1]. All that is required for [1] to be true, is that Peter believes it. If he accurately reports his psychological states, then whatever he belies is right or wrong, is right or wrong, just in case he believes that it is. So, subjectivism entails infallibalism. But that seems clearly false.

There are other problems. Another is that moral disagreement is rendered moot. All the time arguing about who is right or wrong about (say) animal rights seems pointless.

To see this, let's look at another moral proposition:

[2] Torturing animals for fun is wrong.

Presumably Peter believes this. On subjectivism, then, we have:

[2*] Peter thinks torturing animals for fun is wrong.

Now take another person, call him Dahmer. He disagrees with Peter. So, we have

[2*] Peter thinks torturing animals for fun is wrong.

and

[2**] Dahmer thinks torturing animals for fun is not wrong.

So long as Dahmer really believes [2**], then it is not wrong.

But presumably Peter thinks Dahmer is wrong. So he engages in vociferous debate with him. Spills hundreds of gallons of ink writing about how wrong those like Dahmer are.

But what does that mean? On subjectivism, so long as Dahmer believes it is not wrong to torture animals, then it isn't. So long as he has accurately reported his internal psychological state, he right. Peter would have to argue that Dahmer doesn't believe that torturing animals for fun is wrong. But so long as he does, there's no need to disagree.

In an uninteresting way, for Peter to say that Dahmer is wrong, is just to recognize the truism that Peter disagrees with Dahmer. Neither of them can be mistaken, though. And to the extent that they're both telling the truth, they're both infallible. Thus, real moral disagreement presupposes the falsity of moral subjectivism. So as Shafer-Landau writes,

Right off the bat, we can see that moral skepticism is a doctrine of moral equivalence. If there are no right answers to ethical questions (nihilism), or what right answers there are are [sic] given by personal opinion (subjectivism), then any moral view is just as (im)plausible as any other. If relativists are right, then the basic views of all societies are morally on par with one another. On all skeptical theories, the basic moral views of any person, or society, are no better that those of any other. (Russ Shafer-Landau, Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?, Oxford, p.18)

And so it's hard to see that there's any serious moral theory left when Singer and Hauser say things like: "What was good for our ancestors may not be good today." On one view, it’s superfluous as to providing any muscle for a uniquely secular case for ethics; on another, it has serious metaethical problems.