//There are some kinds of things that can be meaningfully described as good or bad, and some kinds of things that can’t be. A knife, for instance, can be a good knife or a bad knife, but (to use an example from Thomson herself) a puddle is just a puddle. The reason for this divergence is that a knife can be meaningfully described as defective or exemplary, while a puddle can’t be.//
I'm a normative antirealist. I don't grant any of this. Knives can be good or bad for various purposes, and so can puddles. I see literally no relevant difference at all.
// If someone told you they bought a knife that turned out to be defective, you’d immediately have a good guess at what went wrong with it, and if they told you the replacement was an exemplary one, you’d understand that too.//
Antirealists, including subjectivists, have no problem accounting for this. We have considerable knowledge (largely inductive) of what most people use knives for most of the time: for cutting things. And most people want knives that are good at cutting, durable, don't slip when you use them, and so on. So we can (and I think, do) presume to know what people's goals are when using knives. If one were part of a torturer's guild, and the best knives were jagged and rusty, one's default assumption might be, if a coworker said they just got a "good knife," that it's a really nasty, jagged, brittle thing. I don't think it's remotely plausible to think of knives being good or bad in some non-subjective way; I think it only makes sense to speak of knives being good-for-this or bad-according-to-that-standard, and so on.
//But if someone told you the puddle outside their house was either exemplary or defective, you’d have no idea what they were talking about. //
I don't have any prior familiarity with people using puddles. If I were a frog or a mosquito, and so were they, I might have a very good idea of what they mean. I think these examples do very little (if anything) to make a case for realist conceptions of value. Those who take antirealist views like mine don't struggle in the least to account for why speaking of good and bad knives makes sense but speaking of good and bad puddles doesn't: we tend to use knives but we don't tend to use puddles, so we're familiar with evaluations of the former but not the latter. This would change if we used puddles. If anything, I think these examples highlight the value-dependent, goal-directed, and, (to me), obviously subjective nature of all evaluation.
A couple months ago we were headed to the Public House restaurant in Springfield, OR and had to park across an undeveloped lot in the rain. Our youngest daughter (3) is a puddle-splasher and doesn't care about soaking her shoes; our older ones (7 and 9) are more careful, but still enjoy splashing, and used "here's a good one!" to herd our youngest to a shallow one they could splash in without soaking themselves.
Thinking back on it, I realize that "not a puddle right next to Mama" was probably an additional litmus criterion for puddle "goodness" here, even if it wasn't top-of-mind as they surveyed for candidates.
//He grabs a cheap, flimsy hammer and takes a few swings at a board until the handle snaps and the nail goes in sideways. In this scenario, was the hammer a good hammer? Any remotely plausible theory of goodness should say obviously not.//
This remark seems to beg the question against the subjectivist. I don’t agree that any remotely plausible theory should say “obviously not.” If I am a subjectivist, I wouldn’t think this. I’d think it would be a good hammer relative to some standards and a bad hammer relative to others. Insofar as the criteria for a “remotely plausible theory” simply presupposes that such a theory must tell us whether a hammer is good or bad in some non-subjective sense, such a standard amounts to saying that any plausible theory of goodness will be non-subjective. That’s what you’re supposed to argue for! Not presume!
You also say:
//But the hammer was definitely useful for the shop teacher to demonstrate the dangers of low-quality tools, and crucially it was useful in that respect as a hammer.//
The hammer can be good or bad for some goal or with respect to some purpose. A cheap hammer prone to breaking is useful relative to the goal of demonstrating its flimsiness, and bad relative to the goal of effectively striking nails. A sensible subjectivist would simply observe this point. Yet you say:
//According to goodness subjectivism, then, we should say not only that the hammer he used was a good hammer, but also that, bizarrely, a bad hammer in this situation would be one that pounded the nails in perfectly (because a hammer like that would have ruined the demonstration). //
That doesn’t seem right. A subjectivist would simply say that the hammer in question was bad for pounding nails and good for demonstrating the danger of low-quality tools. There’s nothing mysterious or troubling at all about something being good for some things and bad for others. The only confusion or mistake that may emerge is if one attempts to force a non-subjectivst appraisal onto the hammer: is it a good hammer or a bad one? Well, for a subjectivist, the answer is “it depends”: any appraisal of goodness or badness would need to be made relative to some standard. It can be both good-for-x and bad-for-y at the same time, but it’s never both “good” and “not good” full stop, because nothing is good or not good full stop.
//It just means what the shop teacher needed, in that moment, was a bad hammer, which is something goodness subjectivism struggles to express. //
If I were a subjectivist, I simply wouldn’t grant this. There is no such thing as good or bad hammers, in some nonrelative sense, there are only hammers that are good or bad relative to some standard or other.
The same issue emerges when you talk of approval. You say, “Again, any plausible theory of goodness should say that yes, he was a very good thief; if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to successfully fleece me.”
This again looks to me to be begging the question, if by “good” you mean good in some non-subjective sense. The thief would be good relative to some standards and bad relative to others.
//Once again, goodness subjectivism is committed to the bizarre position that the thief who was capable of pulling off such a perfect heist was not only a bad thief, but also that a good thief here would be one who was bumbling, inept, and unsuccessful.//
There is nothing bizarre about the subjectivist’s position. The thief was good at thievery but bad in the sense that the subjectivist disapproves of their thievery.
//Goodness subjectivism runs into even more problems when we apply it to judgments that have nothing to do with us. Imagine coming across two oak trees, one with strong, healthy roots that reach down five feet and the other with withered roots that reach down one foot. Obviously, we should be able to say that the first tree has good roots and the other tree has bad roots.//
This again just seems to beg the question against subjectivists. I don’t grant that it’s obvious that we should be able to say that the first tree has good roots and the other tree has bad roots: what do you mean by “good,” and “bad”? If you mean them in a non-subjective sense, this looks like your objection to subjectivism largely turns on stating that it’s obviously wrong. I don’t find it obviously wrong. Once again, a subjectivist can provide a subjective appraisal of this scenario: a tree with strong, healthy roots is good relative to the standard of being a healthy, growing tree, and bad relative to being a withered, dying tree. The reverse holds true of the withered tree. Subjectivists have absolutely no problem with appraisals of this kind.
//But no one approves or disapproves of particular oak trees, and most people have no goals that are furthered or thwarted by oak tree roots. //
A subjectivist need not construe all evaluative claims exclusively in terms of the actual preferences, goals, or standards of themselves or other actual agents. They can always make hypothetical appraisals relative to goals or standards even if nobody has those goals or standards. This simply isn’t a problem for subjectivists. It might only appear to be a problem if one has an overly narrow and constrained form of subjectivism.
You provide this example:
//And even if they did, it shouldn’t matter; it makes perfect sense for someone who wants to dig up the first tree to say, “Damn, it’s a shame this tree has good roots.”//
A person who makes this claim can construe it exclusively in descriptive or relativized, indexed evaluative terms without any issue at all. Trees are living things, and we can talk about what is good or bad “for the tree.” Trees don’t have actual goals or desires, but since they are adapted via natural selection so as to act in a quasi-intentional way, i.e., they “try” to live, we come to recognize that there are trees that flourish relative to their “goal” of living and those that fail to do so. When we speak of good roots, we can simply speak of roots being good relative to the “goal” of a tree. We need not think that the roots are good in some non-relative sense.
You address this here:
//Should goodness subjectivism be taken, then, to say we’re ascribing goodness to the roots from the perspective of the tree? Are they good roots because they serve the tree’s “goal” of growing? But even this is vulnerable to counterexamples in the exact same way. If the groundwater four feet below the surface is seriously polluted, then the tree with strong, healthy roots might be poisoned and die while the tree with withered roots would survive. //
I don’t think this is successful, either. That a tree that does what normally benefits a tree might incidentally be harmed in some circumstances doesn’t mean that we can’t meaningfully speak in subjectivist/relativistic terms about a tree with strong, healthy roots being a “good tree.” It’s simply that being good in this respect usually works in a trees favor. It need not always do so. I don’t see a problem for subjectivism here, either.
I find myself making the same point in response to most of these points, so I’ll stop here. I do not think you’ve successfully demonstrated any problems with subjectivism. I’m a moral antirealist, and my own moral claims amount to something like a subjectivist account (though I’m not a “subjectivist” in the traditional sense). I don’t think you’ve shown that I can’t speak like a subjectivist, or that there’d be any problems (incoherence, etc.) when I do. I’m not quite sure if the description of subjectivism you provided is simply a weird form of subjectivism I wouldn’t accept and would find less defensible than other forms, or whether you are representing (what I consider) a defensible form of subjectivism, and think that it faces certain problems. If the latter, I simply don’t think it does face any clear problems, especially not ones that could be easily circumvented by relatively minor modifications to the subjectivist’s account.
There are a lot of good arguments against moral subjectivism. This is not one of them. The problem is that you are conflating two different usages of the word "good": Moral goodness and "being a good X." But the argument itself shows that these qualities are not the same. Being a good thief is morally bad, for example. There is no reason whatsoever to conflate moral goodness with being a non-morally good member of a particular category.
Also, the argument isn't even strong enough to undermine subjectivity of non-moral goodness. Just because I would rather be targeted by a bad thief than a good thief doesn't mean that a subjective standard for evaluating thiefs would force me to say that a bad thief is a good one and vice-versa. By the subjectivist's lights, it just means that my standards for evaluating thieves have nothing to do with what is personally good for me.
The post isn't about moral goodness, though (although Thomson argues, convincingly I think, that the goodness involved in moral goodness isn't actually something distinct from the goodness involved in general evaluation). I'm just interested in laying out a broad framework for how we should think about evaluation generally.
But on the second point, what standard for evaluating thieves would you have that doesn't relate to your own approval or utility? It would have to be an objective one, right?
I know the post is mostly not about moral goodness, but the end tries to apply the conclusions about goodness qua X to moral goodness as well by arguing that theories of moral goodness fail if they can't account for what makes a good X. This only works if moral goodness is the same thing as goodness qua X, which it clearly isn't - a good mafia boss is morally worse than a bad one. Ethical theories can't be penalized just because they can't explain facts that aren't about morality.
As for thieves, my standard for evaluating them is based on whether they have abilities and use strategies that are likely to result to result in successful thievery. This is objective at least in the sense of not being indexed to the self, which I don't really have a problem with. I think you're probably right that the standards for a good thief are at least mostly objective. I think the same thing about moral goodness too, I just don't think this is a good argument for it. I also think that if you follow this argument to where it leads, you'll end up with a very (objectively) bad moral theory.
I think you're misunderstanding my point. I'm not saying that being a morally good X just means being good qua X. Obviously that would be absurd! What I'm saying is that being morally good is just a *specific kind* of goodness qua X, specifically goodness qua person or goodness qua human being. But that's not really even the point of the piece itself - even if you believe there is some other, distinct sense of moral goodness that does not relate to goodness qua some kind, you should still accept that analysis in terms of the normal, "uncontroversial" evaluations agents make in the course of their daily life. I really am just concerned here with goodness generally, and the last bit is just explaining why I think it's a mistake to throw out and objective conception for cars and blenders and all that just because you think it might not work for moral issues.
Fair enough regarding the purpose of the original piece. I agree with most of what is said in the piece, and you're right that just because someone doesn't accept this analysis of good when discussing moral issues doesn't mean they shouldn't accept it for goodness qua X.
I know you want to say that moral goodness is goodness qua a specific category, like person or human being, not just "goodness qua X" with X unspecified. I just don't think it works. If moral goodness means goodness qua human being, then we come up to some problems:
- This seems arbitrary. Why does the biological species we happen to be determine what is moral for us? Why not some other category we're part of? It's also not truly objective - moral standards are relative to species, rather than the same for all moral agents.
- Categories for which goodness is defined are categories that are at least implicitly defined to have some goal or purpose, and goodness is just conformity to that purpose. This is the common factor in all the examples of good X's that were discussed - a hammer is a tool used to pounding nails, so a hammer that can't pound nails effectively is a bad hammer; roots are the part of a plant that reaches down into the soil to get water, so roots that don't reach down into far into the soil are bad roots; a thief is a person who steals things, so a thief who is unsuccessful at stealing things is a bad thief, etc. But if the category of human has any implicit purpose, it would be something like "whatever specific things the human body and mind evolved to be good at" or "reproductive fitness", neither of which are plausible candidates for moral goodness.
- If I created a species (let's call them murderans) whose sole purpose was to murder as many people as possible and who were designed to be very good at it, then a good murderan is one that is good at murdering people. So this theory would imply that it's morally good for murderans to commit murder.
- I don't know how this notion of goodness could actually confer the normative character associated with moral goodness. Why should I be a "good human"? This analysis of goodness already showed us many examples where it's bad to be a good X. Moral goodness should give me reasons for action based on what truly matters, and I don't see why the evaluation criteria that correspond to the category of human would truly matter. Surely it's the effects my actions have on people that truly matters, not their goodness qua a category.
Perhaps goodness qua person is a better candidate. But is there even such a thing as goodness qua person? The category of person doesn't seem to have any implicitly defined purpose to it. Maybe you could argue that people have goals and therefore goodness qua person means effectively achieving those goals. But this seems to imply egoism. How can goodness qua person be defined in a such a way that we should take all people's interests into account?
These are all good objections, but I do think Thomson refutes them well. Briefly:
1) "Objective morality" doesn't have to mean "morality that is totally uniform across all possible conditions." There are situations where any plausible moral theory should be responsive in some way to what kind of creatures we are, and the moral facts in those cases are still objective even if they rely on contingent facts about evolution, etc. I think it would be really bad if we could only have moral principles that applied just as well to some octopus hive-mind that reproduced by budding on a planet a thousand light-years away.
2) I wouldn't say the hammer is defined in terms of a goal so much as a function - and while the question of how to account for function in humans is obviously a very complex one, I think there are a lot of good accounts that plausibly link it to a notion of flourishing, which is very much an objective concept that can be measured and theorized over.
3) I think the murderans would just not be the sort of beings to whom moral concepts applied, but I guess the situation here is sorta underdescribed in terms of their psychology so I can't really be sure how I'd conceptualize it.
4) You should be a good human because a human person is what you most fundamentally are - even if you don't buy the rest of the theory, I think that's pretty obviously a solid conclusion. Other roles are contingent and temporary, but your fundamental nature as a human person is not, so it makes sense that would ground ultimate questions about how to act.
Finally, I can't give a full account here of how Thomson would say you can draw out good features of an X from knowledge of X more generally but in her book Normativity she spends some good time going through it. I think all these objections are very reasonable but many come from a general approach to normativity that is very distinct from Thomson's and I think from her more Aristotelian perspective, they don't work.
I think 1 is correct, I suppose the theory is still objective in the sense that there's an objective fact of the matter as to whether someone behaves rightly or wrongly. But it still seems very bizarre that the fundamental moral facts could be different for different people. A theory that can give completely different and even diametrically opposing moral prerogatives to people of different species may technically be objective, but it seems a lot more similar to subjectivist theories like cultural relativism than objective ones.
2 A function really just means the purpose for which something was made, if "purpose" is interpreted broadly enough to include the reasons certain traits evolved. But evolution didn't create us for flourishing. And even if it did, I wouldn't want to promote flourishing just because I was made for that purpose. I think flourishing itself is what matters, not my function or purpose, which I would rather violate if it doesn't promote flourishing.
3 Why wouldn't moral concepts apply to them? Is there a principled reason to exclude them based on what the theory says about goodness? If the situation depends on their psychology, that means that there is at least one possible version of the murderans for which it would in fact be right for them to murder. So either any possible version of the murder answer is excluded, regardless of psychology, or the theory implies that it would be morally right (obligatory, in fact) for some beings to murder innocent people for no reason.
4 I don't think there is any good basis to say that a human being is "what you most fundamentally are." Why is that more fundamental than my being a mammal? Or a life-form, or a person in general? All of those categories seem like natural kinds to me. If it's because they're not specific enough, why not an even more specific category. Why can't the thing I most fundamentally am just be me (i.e., I am most fundamentally myself as an individual, rather than the member of a broad category)?
The Aristotelian theory disagrees with some of my objections, but I think that's because they're objections to Aristotelian theory in general (particularly 4 here). I think Aristotelian theory falsely treats everyday physical objects as if they are ontologically fundamental when they're not, and it arbitrarily assigns one of the infinitely many categories that each object belongs to as the unique type of thing that the object is.
//There are some kinds of things that can be meaningfully described as good or bad, and some kinds of things that can’t be. A knife, for instance, can be a good knife or a bad knife, but (to use an example from Thomson herself) a puddle is just a puddle. The reason for this divergence is that a knife can be meaningfully described as defective or exemplary, while a puddle can’t be.//
I'm a normative antirealist. I don't grant any of this. Knives can be good or bad for various purposes, and so can puddles. I see literally no relevant difference at all.
// If someone told you they bought a knife that turned out to be defective, you’d immediately have a good guess at what went wrong with it, and if they told you the replacement was an exemplary one, you’d understand that too.//
Antirealists, including subjectivists, have no problem accounting for this. We have considerable knowledge (largely inductive) of what most people use knives for most of the time: for cutting things. And most people want knives that are good at cutting, durable, don't slip when you use them, and so on. So we can (and I think, do) presume to know what people's goals are when using knives. If one were part of a torturer's guild, and the best knives were jagged and rusty, one's default assumption might be, if a coworker said they just got a "good knife," that it's a really nasty, jagged, brittle thing. I don't think it's remotely plausible to think of knives being good or bad in some non-subjective way; I think it only makes sense to speak of knives being good-for-this or bad-according-to-that-standard, and so on.
//But if someone told you the puddle outside their house was either exemplary or defective, you’d have no idea what they were talking about. //
I don't have any prior familiarity with people using puddles. If I were a frog or a mosquito, and so were they, I might have a very good idea of what they mean. I think these examples do very little (if anything) to make a case for realist conceptions of value. Those who take antirealist views like mine don't struggle in the least to account for why speaking of good and bad knives makes sense but speaking of good and bad puddles doesn't: we tend to use knives but we don't tend to use puddles, so we're familiar with evaluations of the former but not the latter. This would change if we used puddles. If anything, I think these examples highlight the value-dependent, goal-directed, and, (to me), obviously subjective nature of all evaluation.
A couple months ago we were headed to the Public House restaurant in Springfield, OR and had to park across an undeveloped lot in the rain. Our youngest daughter (3) is a puddle-splasher and doesn't care about soaking her shoes; our older ones (7 and 9) are more careful, but still enjoy splashing, and used "here's a good one!" to herd our youngest to a shallow one they could splash in without soaking themselves.
Thinking back on it, I realize that "not a puddle right next to Mama" was probably an additional litmus criterion for puddle "goodness" here, even if it wasn't top-of-mind as they surveyed for candidates.
//He grabs a cheap, flimsy hammer and takes a few swings at a board until the handle snaps and the nail goes in sideways. In this scenario, was the hammer a good hammer? Any remotely plausible theory of goodness should say obviously not.//
This remark seems to beg the question against the subjectivist. I don’t agree that any remotely plausible theory should say “obviously not.” If I am a subjectivist, I wouldn’t think this. I’d think it would be a good hammer relative to some standards and a bad hammer relative to others. Insofar as the criteria for a “remotely plausible theory” simply presupposes that such a theory must tell us whether a hammer is good or bad in some non-subjective sense, such a standard amounts to saying that any plausible theory of goodness will be non-subjective. That’s what you’re supposed to argue for! Not presume!
You also say:
//But the hammer was definitely useful for the shop teacher to demonstrate the dangers of low-quality tools, and crucially it was useful in that respect as a hammer.//
The hammer can be good or bad for some goal or with respect to some purpose. A cheap hammer prone to breaking is useful relative to the goal of demonstrating its flimsiness, and bad relative to the goal of effectively striking nails. A sensible subjectivist would simply observe this point. Yet you say:
//According to goodness subjectivism, then, we should say not only that the hammer he used was a good hammer, but also that, bizarrely, a bad hammer in this situation would be one that pounded the nails in perfectly (because a hammer like that would have ruined the demonstration). //
That doesn’t seem right. A subjectivist would simply say that the hammer in question was bad for pounding nails and good for demonstrating the danger of low-quality tools. There’s nothing mysterious or troubling at all about something being good for some things and bad for others. The only confusion or mistake that may emerge is if one attempts to force a non-subjectivst appraisal onto the hammer: is it a good hammer or a bad one? Well, for a subjectivist, the answer is “it depends”: any appraisal of goodness or badness would need to be made relative to some standard. It can be both good-for-x and bad-for-y at the same time, but it’s never both “good” and “not good” full stop, because nothing is good or not good full stop.
//It just means what the shop teacher needed, in that moment, was a bad hammer, which is something goodness subjectivism struggles to express. //
If I were a subjectivist, I simply wouldn’t grant this. There is no such thing as good or bad hammers, in some nonrelative sense, there are only hammers that are good or bad relative to some standard or other.
The same issue emerges when you talk of approval. You say, “Again, any plausible theory of goodness should say that yes, he was a very good thief; if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to successfully fleece me.”
This again looks to me to be begging the question, if by “good” you mean good in some non-subjective sense. The thief would be good relative to some standards and bad relative to others.
//Once again, goodness subjectivism is committed to the bizarre position that the thief who was capable of pulling off such a perfect heist was not only a bad thief, but also that a good thief here would be one who was bumbling, inept, and unsuccessful.//
There is nothing bizarre about the subjectivist’s position. The thief was good at thievery but bad in the sense that the subjectivist disapproves of their thievery.
//Goodness subjectivism runs into even more problems when we apply it to judgments that have nothing to do with us. Imagine coming across two oak trees, one with strong, healthy roots that reach down five feet and the other with withered roots that reach down one foot. Obviously, we should be able to say that the first tree has good roots and the other tree has bad roots.//
This again just seems to beg the question against subjectivists. I don’t grant that it’s obvious that we should be able to say that the first tree has good roots and the other tree has bad roots: what do you mean by “good,” and “bad”? If you mean them in a non-subjective sense, this looks like your objection to subjectivism largely turns on stating that it’s obviously wrong. I don’t find it obviously wrong. Once again, a subjectivist can provide a subjective appraisal of this scenario: a tree with strong, healthy roots is good relative to the standard of being a healthy, growing tree, and bad relative to being a withered, dying tree. The reverse holds true of the withered tree. Subjectivists have absolutely no problem with appraisals of this kind.
//But no one approves or disapproves of particular oak trees, and most people have no goals that are furthered or thwarted by oak tree roots. //
A subjectivist need not construe all evaluative claims exclusively in terms of the actual preferences, goals, or standards of themselves or other actual agents. They can always make hypothetical appraisals relative to goals or standards even if nobody has those goals or standards. This simply isn’t a problem for subjectivists. It might only appear to be a problem if one has an overly narrow and constrained form of subjectivism.
You provide this example:
//And even if they did, it shouldn’t matter; it makes perfect sense for someone who wants to dig up the first tree to say, “Damn, it’s a shame this tree has good roots.”//
A person who makes this claim can construe it exclusively in descriptive or relativized, indexed evaluative terms without any issue at all. Trees are living things, and we can talk about what is good or bad “for the tree.” Trees don’t have actual goals or desires, but since they are adapted via natural selection so as to act in a quasi-intentional way, i.e., they “try” to live, we come to recognize that there are trees that flourish relative to their “goal” of living and those that fail to do so. When we speak of good roots, we can simply speak of roots being good relative to the “goal” of a tree. We need not think that the roots are good in some non-relative sense.
You address this here:
//Should goodness subjectivism be taken, then, to say we’re ascribing goodness to the roots from the perspective of the tree? Are they good roots because they serve the tree’s “goal” of growing? But even this is vulnerable to counterexamples in the exact same way. If the groundwater four feet below the surface is seriously polluted, then the tree with strong, healthy roots might be poisoned and die while the tree with withered roots would survive. //
I don’t think this is successful, either. That a tree that does what normally benefits a tree might incidentally be harmed in some circumstances doesn’t mean that we can’t meaningfully speak in subjectivist/relativistic terms about a tree with strong, healthy roots being a “good tree.” It’s simply that being good in this respect usually works in a trees favor. It need not always do so. I don’t see a problem for subjectivism here, either.
I find myself making the same point in response to most of these points, so I’ll stop here. I do not think you’ve successfully demonstrated any problems with subjectivism. I’m a moral antirealist, and my own moral claims amount to something like a subjectivist account (though I’m not a “subjectivist” in the traditional sense). I don’t think you’ve shown that I can’t speak like a subjectivist, or that there’d be any problems (incoherence, etc.) when I do. I’m not quite sure if the description of subjectivism you provided is simply a weird form of subjectivism I wouldn’t accept and would find less defensible than other forms, or whether you are representing (what I consider) a defensible form of subjectivism, and think that it faces certain problems. If the latter, I simply don’t think it does face any clear problems, especially not ones that could be easily circumvented by relatively minor modifications to the subjectivist’s account.
There are a lot of good arguments against moral subjectivism. This is not one of them. The problem is that you are conflating two different usages of the word "good": Moral goodness and "being a good X." But the argument itself shows that these qualities are not the same. Being a good thief is morally bad, for example. There is no reason whatsoever to conflate moral goodness with being a non-morally good member of a particular category.
Also, the argument isn't even strong enough to undermine subjectivity of non-moral goodness. Just because I would rather be targeted by a bad thief than a good thief doesn't mean that a subjective standard for evaluating thiefs would force me to say that a bad thief is a good one and vice-versa. By the subjectivist's lights, it just means that my standards for evaluating thieves have nothing to do with what is personally good for me.
The post isn't about moral goodness, though (although Thomson argues, convincingly I think, that the goodness involved in moral goodness isn't actually something distinct from the goodness involved in general evaluation). I'm just interested in laying out a broad framework for how we should think about evaluation generally.
But on the second point, what standard for evaluating thieves would you have that doesn't relate to your own approval or utility? It would have to be an objective one, right?
I know the post is mostly not about moral goodness, but the end tries to apply the conclusions about goodness qua X to moral goodness as well by arguing that theories of moral goodness fail if they can't account for what makes a good X. This only works if moral goodness is the same thing as goodness qua X, which it clearly isn't - a good mafia boss is morally worse than a bad one. Ethical theories can't be penalized just because they can't explain facts that aren't about morality.
As for thieves, my standard for evaluating them is based on whether they have abilities and use strategies that are likely to result to result in successful thievery. This is objective at least in the sense of not being indexed to the self, which I don't really have a problem with. I think you're probably right that the standards for a good thief are at least mostly objective. I think the same thing about moral goodness too, I just don't think this is a good argument for it. I also think that if you follow this argument to where it leads, you'll end up with a very (objectively) bad moral theory.
I think you're misunderstanding my point. I'm not saying that being a morally good X just means being good qua X. Obviously that would be absurd! What I'm saying is that being morally good is just a *specific kind* of goodness qua X, specifically goodness qua person or goodness qua human being. But that's not really even the point of the piece itself - even if you believe there is some other, distinct sense of moral goodness that does not relate to goodness qua some kind, you should still accept that analysis in terms of the normal, "uncontroversial" evaluations agents make in the course of their daily life. I really am just concerned here with goodness generally, and the last bit is just explaining why I think it's a mistake to throw out and objective conception for cars and blenders and all that just because you think it might not work for moral issues.
Fair enough regarding the purpose of the original piece. I agree with most of what is said in the piece, and you're right that just because someone doesn't accept this analysis of good when discussing moral issues doesn't mean they shouldn't accept it for goodness qua X.
I know you want to say that moral goodness is goodness qua a specific category, like person or human being, not just "goodness qua X" with X unspecified. I just don't think it works. If moral goodness means goodness qua human being, then we come up to some problems:
- This seems arbitrary. Why does the biological species we happen to be determine what is moral for us? Why not some other category we're part of? It's also not truly objective - moral standards are relative to species, rather than the same for all moral agents.
- Categories for which goodness is defined are categories that are at least implicitly defined to have some goal or purpose, and goodness is just conformity to that purpose. This is the common factor in all the examples of good X's that were discussed - a hammer is a tool used to pounding nails, so a hammer that can't pound nails effectively is a bad hammer; roots are the part of a plant that reaches down into the soil to get water, so roots that don't reach down into far into the soil are bad roots; a thief is a person who steals things, so a thief who is unsuccessful at stealing things is a bad thief, etc. But if the category of human has any implicit purpose, it would be something like "whatever specific things the human body and mind evolved to be good at" or "reproductive fitness", neither of which are plausible candidates for moral goodness.
- If I created a species (let's call them murderans) whose sole purpose was to murder as many people as possible and who were designed to be very good at it, then a good murderan is one that is good at murdering people. So this theory would imply that it's morally good for murderans to commit murder.
- I don't know how this notion of goodness could actually confer the normative character associated with moral goodness. Why should I be a "good human"? This analysis of goodness already showed us many examples where it's bad to be a good X. Moral goodness should give me reasons for action based on what truly matters, and I don't see why the evaluation criteria that correspond to the category of human would truly matter. Surely it's the effects my actions have on people that truly matters, not their goodness qua a category.
Perhaps goodness qua person is a better candidate. But is there even such a thing as goodness qua person? The category of person doesn't seem to have any implicitly defined purpose to it. Maybe you could argue that people have goals and therefore goodness qua person means effectively achieving those goals. But this seems to imply egoism. How can goodness qua person be defined in a such a way that we should take all people's interests into account?
These are all good objections, but I do think Thomson refutes them well. Briefly:
1) "Objective morality" doesn't have to mean "morality that is totally uniform across all possible conditions." There are situations where any plausible moral theory should be responsive in some way to what kind of creatures we are, and the moral facts in those cases are still objective even if they rely on contingent facts about evolution, etc. I think it would be really bad if we could only have moral principles that applied just as well to some octopus hive-mind that reproduced by budding on a planet a thousand light-years away.
2) I wouldn't say the hammer is defined in terms of a goal so much as a function - and while the question of how to account for function in humans is obviously a very complex one, I think there are a lot of good accounts that plausibly link it to a notion of flourishing, which is very much an objective concept that can be measured and theorized over.
3) I think the murderans would just not be the sort of beings to whom moral concepts applied, but I guess the situation here is sorta underdescribed in terms of their psychology so I can't really be sure how I'd conceptualize it.
4) You should be a good human because a human person is what you most fundamentally are - even if you don't buy the rest of the theory, I think that's pretty obviously a solid conclusion. Other roles are contingent and temporary, but your fundamental nature as a human person is not, so it makes sense that would ground ultimate questions about how to act.
Finally, I can't give a full account here of how Thomson would say you can draw out good features of an X from knowledge of X more generally but in her book Normativity she spends some good time going through it. I think all these objections are very reasonable but many come from a general approach to normativity that is very distinct from Thomson's and I think from her more Aristotelian perspective, they don't work.
I think 1 is correct, I suppose the theory is still objective in the sense that there's an objective fact of the matter as to whether someone behaves rightly or wrongly. But it still seems very bizarre that the fundamental moral facts could be different for different people. A theory that can give completely different and even diametrically opposing moral prerogatives to people of different species may technically be objective, but it seems a lot more similar to subjectivist theories like cultural relativism than objective ones.
2 A function really just means the purpose for which something was made, if "purpose" is interpreted broadly enough to include the reasons certain traits evolved. But evolution didn't create us for flourishing. And even if it did, I wouldn't want to promote flourishing just because I was made for that purpose. I think flourishing itself is what matters, not my function or purpose, which I would rather violate if it doesn't promote flourishing.
3 Why wouldn't moral concepts apply to them? Is there a principled reason to exclude them based on what the theory says about goodness? If the situation depends on their psychology, that means that there is at least one possible version of the murderans for which it would in fact be right for them to murder. So either any possible version of the murder answer is excluded, regardless of psychology, or the theory implies that it would be morally right (obligatory, in fact) for some beings to murder innocent people for no reason.
4 I don't think there is any good basis to say that a human being is "what you most fundamentally are." Why is that more fundamental than my being a mammal? Or a life-form, or a person in general? All of those categories seem like natural kinds to me. If it's because they're not specific enough, why not an even more specific category. Why can't the thing I most fundamentally am just be me (i.e., I am most fundamentally myself as an individual, rather than the member of a broad category)?
The Aristotelian theory disagrees with some of my objections, but I think that's because they're objections to Aristotelian theory in general (particularly 4 here). I think Aristotelian theory falsely treats everyday physical objects as if they are ontologically fundamental when they're not, and it arbitrarily assigns one of the infinitely many categories that each object belongs to as the unique type of thing that the object is.