OBJETIVOS ESPECÍFICOS a) ¿Diagnosticar el nivel de escala

There is a stock argument for realism – closely related to that given in Section 6 – which claims that we should believe that there are real moral properties, because of the role that these properties play in certain kinds of explanation. This debate is particularly important: it is not only that the ability of moral properties to feature in certain explanations gives us reason to be moral realists, but that this is a necessary condition for moral realism to be even moderately plausible. This is so, because the realist holds that some of our moral beliefs are true. If so, then they can either be true accidentally, or non-accidentally. If the former, then it would be a miracle were any of our moral beliefs to be true. Worse, the realist would have no

reason to think that any of her moral beliefs were true (in the absence of any good reason to

70 _{With some notable exceptions: first-year undergraduate philosophy students, for instance, often lean}

strongly towards some form of moral subjectivism, relativism, or nihilism. But I take it that these are deviant cases: for instance, first-year undergraduate philosophy students also display a greater than average inclination to doubt the existence of tables, chairs, and other medium-sized dry goods.

think that a miracle has occurred, we should presume that it has not). Hence the realist must suppose that some of our moral beliefs are non-accidentally true, and that entails that the moral facts must be able to play a part in the explanation of these beliefs.

As mentioned above, the suggestion is that moral facts are sometimes involved in perfectly good explanations of non-moral occurrences. We might explain the cessation of slavery by reference to its moral wrongness, the people’s dislike of the tyrant by reference to his evil nature, and so on. 71 _{This is uncontroversial; what is controversial is what follows from this.}

There are at least two problems with the attempt to move from moral explanation to moral realism. The first is that the explanation in terms of some moral property may be rephrased in terms of non-moral properties.72 _{We could rephrase the earlier explanations as follows: the}

downfall of slavery was due to the changing intellectual, political, and economic trends of the time, and perhaps to changing beliefs about the nature of other persons; the dislike of the tyrant was due to his infliction of harm on the populace coupled with the absence of facts which might have placated the people, etc. Given this, it is not clear that the moral properties being invoked are doing any real explanatory work. The second objection is that these properties possess a very narrow‘cosmological role’.73 _{That is, the explanations in which}

moral properties feature deal with agents’ psychological states, or only explain occurrences

via agents’ psychological states.

There are at least two kinds of explanation which trade in moral terms; those which explain our moral beliefs in terms of moral properties of events, actions, etc., and those which explain

‘brute facts’ (e.g. the downfall of slavery) in terms of moral properties. Consider a case where we see children pouring petrol onto a cat, and burning it for recreational purposes.74 _{We form}

the belief that their action was wrong; ostensibly, the wrongness of their action explains our belief that it was wrong, just as the physicist’s observation of a trail in a cloud chamber explains his belief that a proton was in the chamber. What are we to make of such

explanations? The case of the proton is straightforward: had the proton not been there, the trail would not have formed. We can give a counterfactual account of the explanatory force of the physical event. In the moral case, however, things become more complicated. Suppose that the moral facts were different; what would our beliefs be in that case? This counterfactual is difficult to evaluate, for the simple reason that the moral facts (such as they are) supervene on the non-moral facts. So to imagine a situation in which the moral facts differ is to imagine

71 _{See Sturgeon 1988.} 72 _{Harman 1997.}

73 _{Wright 1992: 195-197.} 74 _{Harman 1997.}

a case in which the non-moral facts differ. The relevant counterfactual, in the burning-cat case, is:

(D) If setting fire to cats were not wrong, then we would not believe that it was.

But if burning cats for recreational purposes is morally impermissible, then the counterfactual turn out to be true, due to supervenience (if setting fire to cats was not wrong, then the non- moral facts would also be different, and hence our beliefs would be relevantly different, provided that our moral sensibilities remained constant). The moral property of wrongness does, therefore, pass a counterfactual test of explanatory relevance, and an explanation which cites it does indeed seem to be a genuine explanation.75

This counterfactual test, however, seems too lax. Sayre-McCord offers the following

example. Suppose that your peers begin to engage in witch-theorising: they throw women into ponds and explain their failure to sink (or otherwise) in terms of their status as witches, etc. Suppose that you learn how to give these ‘explanations’; being philosophically inclined, you develop a story according to which witch-properties supervene on non-witch properties. Then witch-explanations do start to pass the counterfactual test for explanatory value: if she hadn’t been a witch, she wouldn’t have floated. But none of that commits you to believing in witches: rather, we have shown that the counterfactual test is not by itself a good indicator of explanatory value, because witch explanations, moral explanations, and straightforward physical explanations all pass the test, but differ in their explanatory worth.76

Returning to case of the burning cat, one might think that what best explains moral belief formation is the background moral theory with which the observer operates. So the reason we form the belief that what the children did was wrong is because we have a background moral theory which tells us that burning cats for recreational purposes is wrong. Against this, Sturgeon retorts that the physicist’s belief-formation is also informed by background theory:

the reason why the physicist forms a belief that there was a proton in the chamber is because his theory tells him that photons cause vapour trails. Yet there still seems to be a difference between the two cases. In the moral case, it seems that the moral facts are not required to

explain our reactions; but the physical facts are required to explain our observations of events. Moral facts are not required in the sense that we could provide an adequate explanation without them. But that won’t do: we can explain various macro-phenomena in terms of the

75 _{Sturgeon 1988, esp. 249-252.} 76 _{Sayre-McCord 1988: 276-279.}

microscopic parts involved, but that doesn’t lead us to be irrealists concerning, for instance, tables, chairs, or earthquakes.

A second suggestion has already been touched on, and that is Wright’s challenge concerning ‘width of cosmological role’ – the extent to which citing certain facts is potentially

explanatory of events which do not involve our intentional attitudes. In response, I want to sketch two claims. The first is that the criteria for positing moral facts are not the same as those for positing physical facts. In the physical case, we are concerned with physical explanations, so a harsh restriction on the ability of posited facts or entities to provide physical explanations seems reasonable. In the moral case, however, we are not simply concerned with explaining physical events. That is simply not what moral practice and discourse is for. There are other grounds, some of which have already been covered, for

positing moral facts, or properties, and which are not ruled out by the lack of width of cosmological role of these facts. However – and this is the second claim – one upshot of the substantive theory which I will develop is that moral properties do have a fairly wide

cosmological role. The reason for this will be fairly straightforward: moral properties are non- accidentally connected (in some cases, at least) to states of affairs which are themselves causally efficacious in ways which can be generalised over in law-like ways. More

specifically, part of morality (the part which I will label ‘constructivist’) deals, amongst other things, with co-ordinating human behaviour. In these cases, constructivist goodness is connected (non-accidentally) to successful solutions to co-ordination problems, and can therefore be used to explain the growth, success, etc., of a society, and its absence to explain other consequences. A case in point would be the moral character of slavery: failure to abide by rules which enable agents to co-ordinate their actions and attitudes will lead to certain predictable consequences, one of which is that the society will fail to function in various ways, and these failures will have far-reaching consequences. Put another way, moral goodness of a certain sort is necessary for the success of social groups, and can play a role in explaining their fate, even where there is no mediation via intentional attitudes.