<i>Answering Moral Skepticism</i>

The central goal of Answering Moral Skepticism is to defend moral realism against antirealist challenges. It is an excellent introduction to metaethics, ideal for use as a textbook for undergraduates or beginning graduate students, either on its own or as a supplement to primary texts. The book will also be engaging to professional philosophers interested in metaethics. In the preface, Kagan explains that the book was inspired by his experiences teaching an undergraduate course dedicated to answering challenges to moral realism. This is reflected in the fact that the challenges he considers include not only the challenges that professional philosophers tend to focus on but also the versions of those challenges that often come up in class discussion.The book is divided into fourteen chapters that can be read separately. Chapter 1 offers a job description for morality—what would have to be true for morality to be real—in terms of (among other things) content, function, and the possibility of error and knowledge. Chapter 2 provides a basic overview of positions in metaethics such as noncognitivism, nihilism, and realism; chapters 3 and 4 go into greater detail explaining nihilism and noncognitivism respectively. Chapter 5 discusses arguments from disagreement; chapter 6 discusses moral relativism. Chapter 7 defends relying on intuitions in ethics; chapters 8 and 9 concern evolutionary debunking arguments and no-explanation arguments. Chapters 10 and 11 explain how realism relates to motivational and reasons internalism. Chapter 12 is about reductionism and the open question argument. Chapter 13 discusses the prospects for nonnaturalist realism. In chapter 14, Kagan takes stock of the dialectical situation, and concludes that the “rough and commonsense” conception of the moral world—one that he takes to be the realist conception—can be vindicated.Fans of Kagan’s Normative Ethics (1997) may wish to know how Answering Moral Skepticism compares to that (wonderful) book. One welcome similarity between the two is that Kagan keeps the flow of the text clear and compelling by relegating references to the relevant literature—and its distracting complications—to the notes section at the back. In both books, Kagan’s own original takes on the issues enrich the discussion page after page. One interesting difference between them is that Answering Moral Skepticism feels more like an opinionated guide than does Normative Ethics. Normative Ethics, on a natural way of understanding it, is an attempt not to defend common sense morality but rather to problematize it. Seasoned readers may detect a consequentialist flavor to the arguments, but Kagan does not explicitly come out as a consequentialist in the book. By contrast, Answering Moral Skepticism explicitly takes the side of moral realism against an onslaught of skeptical challenges.This review can only touch upon a small portion of the material in the rich and densely argued Answering Moral Skepticism. In what follows, I highlight portions of Kagan’s discussions of moral relativism, moral knowledge, and moral explanations. I hope this will provide some sense of what the individual chapters are like.On Kagan’s way of taxonomizing views in metaethics, moral relativists are moral realists, because they think that in any given situation there is a fact about what a person should do. (Of course, some theorists would classify the relativists as among the enemies of realism, as Kagan acknowledges.) Kagan clearly prefers absolutist forms of realism, and his conclusion about relativism is that, while it hasn’t been ruled out, the relativist hasn’t provided a reason to prefer it over absolutism. He focuses the discussion on cultural relativism. In section 6.3, he asks: How might the descriptive claim that different cultures have different moral codes figure in an argument for the normative claim that people ought to do what their culture says that they ought to do (144)? The discussion here nicely emphasizes the questions: (1) Can the relativist explain why moral dictates have normative force? (2) Is the relativist making the normative claim that people ought to do what their societies dictate? If I were reading this chapter with students, I would explore these questions by contrasting the cultural relativism Kagan discusses with the relativism of Gilbert Harman’s “Moral Relativism Defended.” Kagan’s cultural relativist answers question (2) in the affirmative; Harman (1975: 1–3) says that moral relativism is a “soberly logical thesis … that morality derives from an implicit agreement and moral judgements are true or false only in relation to such an agreement.” The connection between what one has implicitly agreed to and the reasons one has supplies the answer to (1). Since Harman thinks this is the only kind of answer that can explain morality’s normative force, and Kagan disagrees, these texts taken together would provide excellent background for discussion of what, other than my own commitments, could determine the reasons that have force for me.The central task of chapter 7, “Moral Knowledge,” is to explain how we can have knowledge of basic moral principles. Kagan’s answer is “we gain moral knowledge by making careful use of intuitions” (159). This answer is motivated by an analogy with empirical science: intuitions stand to moral theories as empirical observations stand to empirical theories. The version of intuitionism that Kagan favors is phenomenal conservatism: “If it seems to us that such and such is the case, then what we are tentatively justified in believing is that very proposition—that such and such is the case” (163). The bulk of the chapter defends this position against a variety of skeptical challenges.Given that Kagan considers many different answers to questions in moral metaphysics such as What is the metaphysical nature of moral facts? and What makes them true? it is somewhat surprising that he only considers intuitionism as an answer to the question of where moral knowledge comes from. If I were reading this chapter with students, I would (1) raise questions about the cogency of a view that makes intellectual seemings the central notion of moral epistemology, and (2) consider alternatives.Regarding (1): intellectual seemings come cheap. In principle, it is possible for someone to have an intellectual seeming toward any proposition she understands. Consider the proposition, It is morally required to occasionally kill at random. I have the intellectual seeming that this is false, but someone else could have the intellectual seeming that it is true. Is she just as justified in thinking that it is true as I am in thinking that it is false? If the phenomenal conservative agrees that the answer is no, she might say that in this case there is a defeating condition. But then I suspect that what is doing the epistemic work is the defeating condition, not the intellectual seeming. To put pressure on the idea that the state of having it intellectually seem to you that p adds justificatory force to the state of believing that p, imagine that one day, I find myself believing that it is permissible to treat people differently on the basis of their skin color. According to some epistemically conservative views, the mere fact that I find myself believing p can, by itself, provide justification for my believing p. This view strikes many people as too generous—and presumably, phenomenal conservatives agree. Phenomenal conservatives would say: it is not enough that I find myself believing p; it must also be that p seems to me to be the case. But does this really make a difference? If my believing that p is not justified by the fact that I find myself believing p, does it help if we add: “Well, she doesn’t just believe it—it seems to her that it is true!” Here, I think the analogy with observation breaks down. For if we ask why someone believes that p, and we add, “she was there and she saw what happened,” that clearly adds something with justificatory force.Regarding (2), the consideration of alternatives: on page 187, Kagan does note that “despite [its] important virtues there are indeed moral realists who nonetheless reject intuitionism.” Interestingly, he does not mention as an alternative the method of reflective equilibrium—the view that has, over the last seventy or so years, been the view to beat. It would be useful, I think, to compare Kagan’s phenomenal conservatism with the method of reflective equilibrium as it is standardly conceived. It would also be useful to compare Kagan’s view with the view that Timothy Williamson (2023) has recently dubbed “moral anti-exceptionalism.” On my own preferred version of moral anti-exceptionalism, any source of nonmoral knowledge is a potential source of moral knowledge.1 I think that a fruitful question to explore with students would be: In what ways does Kagan depart from the view that any source of nonmoral knowledge is a potential source of moral knowledge, and on what grounds does he disagree?At least part of the answer is that Kagan doubts that moral principles can be confirmed/disconfirmed by empirical observation. This brings us to chapter 9, “Explanation.” Kagan begins the chapter by saying, “Here’s a plausible thought about reality: things that are real make a difference to what is the case. They are explanatorily ‘potent.’ They help explain why things are the way they are” (225). This principle—sometimes called “the Eleatic Principle”—features in discussions of ancient metaphysics. Kagan’s response to the explanatory challenge for moral realism that he discusses in chapter 9 is that moral facts can’t explain observations but can explain other moral facts (244–46). But the claim that moral facts explain other moral facts would be relevant only if the interesting explanatory challenge for realism were based on the Eleatic Principle rather than on “Harman’s Principle”—the principle that our evidence for p consists in the observations that p would explain. (According to Harman, that’s just how confirmation works.) Harman’s (1977) introductory metaethics textbook, published almost fifty years before Answering Moral Skepticism, begins with the question: “Can moral principles be tested and confirmed in the way scientific principles can?” Harman’s answer is no—because moral theory, unlike, say, subatomic particle theory, does not explain any observations. Would Kagan agree with this answer? Given the tight analogy that Kagan sees between the epistemological role of moral intuition in moral epistemology and the epistemological role of empirical observation in science, and given that he expresses sympathy in section in 7.4 for the idea that evolution selected for creatures with accurate moral intuitions, it is at least open to Kagan to say that moral facts explain our moral intuitions, where our moral intuitions are not further moral facts but rather psychological events. (Kagan does think moral intuitions justify belief in moral facts [246].) The explanatory relation might not be the same as it is in the empirical case. But if we take seriously the idea that evolution is somehow selecting for accuracy in moral intuitions, then it is natural to think that we have the moral intuitions we do because the moral facts are what they are.Both students and professors will enrich their understanding by following Kagan’s clear and scenic path through the thicket of metaethical positions and debates—positions and debates that might, under the direction of a lesser-skilled guide, seem dry and impenetrable. It is astonishing how much ground he covers and how consistently he keeps things accessible and exciting. This is a highly welcome addition to the metaethics shelf.