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.
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.
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.
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.