Nonmoral Explanations

Author(s): Nicholas L. Sturgeon

Source: Philosophical Perspectives , 1992, Vol. 6, Ethics (1992), pp. 97-117
Published by: Ridgeview Publishing Company

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2214240

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Philosophical Perspectives, 6, Ethics, 1992

NONMORAL EXPLANATIONS

Nicholas L. Sturgeon
Cornell University

Moral explanations of nonmoral facts, including moral explanations of our

holding the moral views we do, often look plausible. But so do nonmoral
explanations of the very same facts. My aim here is to pursue farther than
I have elsewhere the question of what difference this makes.1

Nonmoral explanations sometimes strike us as undermining moral ones.

For example, the thesis that moral condemnation of homosexuality is just
due to the condemner's unacknowledged fears about his or her own sexual
identity seems to undermine any suggestion that the judgment is due to there
being anything really wrong with homosexuality-a point perhaps implicitly
acknowledged by friends of the latter explanation in their uniform rejection
of the former. So one question is whether nonmoral explanations always
undermine moral explanations in this way. The answer, I believe, is no. Con-
sider another explanation easily read as an undermining one. David Donald
has maintained, in a study of the militant abolitionism that emerged suddenly
in the United States of the 1830's, that "it was the reaction of a class whose
leadership had been discarded." The abolitionist leaders came primarily from
a former New England professional elite displaced by such social changes
as industrialization, and their "abolitionism should be considered the an-
guished protest of an aggrieved class against a world they never made." So,
on this account, the evil of slavery played no role in explaining why they
thought it an evil.2 But if this explanation undermines a moral one, it does
not do so simply in virtue of being nonmoral. For contrast it with another
possible explanation, equally nonmoral, of someone's coming to think slavery
a great evil. This time, let us suppose, our abolitionist notices, as she had
not before, that slaves are fully as human as she, subject to the same hopes,
affections and vulnerabilities; that slavery is a source of immense and

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98 / Nicholas L. Sturgeon

avoidable misery to them; that slavery prevents them from realizing capacities
for self-development and self-respect that they in fact have; that it encourages
in the (male) master class tendencies towards cruelty, arrogance and massive
self-deception, dispositions not then easily confined to relations with slaves;
and that this last is only one among many reasons that slavery is incompatible
with democracy, even democracy among those not enslaved.3 This second
explanation is hardly an undermining one. Indeed, if it were in question
whether a particular abolitionist's opposition to slavery was actually due to
the evil of that institution, it would be as natural to take a nonmoral
explanation of this latter sort to support an affirmative answer as it would
to take a nonmoral explanation in Donald's style to support a negative one.
Nonmoral explanations do not always compete with moral ones, and as often
corroborate as undermine them.4 The point can be seen, in fact, even in my
initial example. If one's judgment that homosexuality is wrong is due just
to fears about one's own sexual identity, then it isn't due to anything really
wrong with homosexuality, but, plausibly, it is then due to a moral flaw in
oneself, that of letting one's judgments be influenced by such feelings. Our
nonmoral explanation undermines one moral explanation, the one that would
explain the judgment by its approximate truth; but it does not conflict with,
and even appears to support, a different moral explanation of why the
judgment is made.
Nonmoral explanations also often stand in another important relation to
moral ones which they do not undermine and may or may not support For
lack of a better term I shall say that these explanations amplify the moral
ones. There are cases in which we are at least provisionally more confident
of the truth of a moral explanation than we are of any precise view about
which nonmoral facts the explanatory moral fact supervenes on or consists
in; and we appeal to nonmoral explanations of the same explanandum to
help settle this question. This can happen when it is central to our idea of
a moral quality-as it is, I believe, to our idea of the virtues, individual and
social-that it play a certain causal role. If we expect social justice to be a
condition that will stabilize a society in normal circumstances, and without
undue reliance on deceit or coercion, then we can test competing conceptions
of justice by investigating the (nonmoral) question of which conditions will
have this effect, and amplify our provisional moral explanation accordingly.5
It can also happen when we trust someone's moral judgment, assuming that
the explanation of his thinking some act wrong is probably that it is wrong.
Investigation of his standards-that is, of the nonmoral determinants of his
judgment-may then shape or reshape our own. This may sound like a
situation in which no philosopher of a skeptical temper would ever find herself
In fact, it appears to be the situation of anyone whose arguments in normative
ethics appeal at any point to the moral judgments, at any level of generality,
that we do or would make under favorable and (as we think) nondistorting

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 Nonmoral Explanations / 99

conditions-that is, of just about everyone who debates normative ethics. For
the relevance of this appeal looks to depend on the assumption that it is under
these conditions that our judgments stand the best chance of being explained
by their approximate truth, thus making an investigation into their nonmoral
grounds a reasonable guide to moral theory.6
Interesting complications are possible. We may start out looking for an
amplifying explanation and find instead only an undermining one, one that
undercuts our initial moral explanation. And there can be disagreement about
whether this has happened. I can illustrate with one of Gilbert Harman's
arguments for his relativism about "inner judgments" (Harman 1975, 12-13;
1977, pp. 110-11, 1980, p. 114). According to this thesis certain moral judg-
ments ascribe to agents reasons they have in virtue of practical conventions
they accept, conventions that typically result from implicit bargaining. On
behalf of this thesis, Harman argues that it provides the only reasonable
explanation of our common view that duties not to harm are more stringent
than duties to aid, a view that would otherwise seem "irrational and
unmotivated" (Harman 1977, p. 111). The explanation is that (1) our moral
judgments are sensitive to the actual practical conventions to which agents
subscribe; and (2) that it is predictable that such conventions place a higher
priority on not harming than on bringing aid. This is predictable because the
conventions are a compromise among people who vary greatly in power and
wealth. The strong and wealthy have much to lose and little to gain from
a strong principle requiring mutual aid; but the poor and weak, who would
benefit greatly from such a principle, might refuse to agree even to refraining
from harm, which benefits all, unless there were some commitment to aid.
The result is the mixed convention we have and the moral judgments that
reflect it.
I can see no way of making sense of Harman's argument as an argument
for his relativism unless he is presenting it as what I have called an amplifying
explanation, the use of a nonmoral explanation to fill in a moral one. He
begins, on this understanding, with the assumption that our common moral
judgments about aid and harm are well-founded, caused by the very facts
that make them true; he then proposes his nonmoral explanation for these
judgments, that they are responsive to a practical convention that has the
structure it does because it has emerged in the way he describes; and he
concludes that the existence of conventions that agents accept is all that makes
such judgments true-that is, that his relativism is correct.7 My own view of
his accomplishment, however, is quite different. I do not know whether he
is right that his is the only reasonable explanation for our common view.
But if it is, then that view looks to me to be in serious trouble.8 If our
according greater moral weight to duties not to harm than to duties to aid
is really nothing but the influence on us of a convention that reflects the much
stronger bargaining position of the rich and powerful, an advantage they have

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100 / Nicholas L. Sturgeon

for no morally relevant reason, then our belief appears to me no more to

be shaped by moral facts than are the beliefs of Donald's abolitionists. In short,
Harman's explanation looks to me like an undermining explanation rather
than an amplifying one.
This example naturally raises the question of how we decide when
nonmoral explanations conflict with, or support or amplify moral ones. The
answer, I believe, is that abstractly the procedure is no different from that
used in answering similar questions about chemical and biological explana-
tions, or about psychological and sociological ones. Conflict between explana-
tions is virtually never a matter of outright contradiction. We locate such
conflict, rather, when against a background of theoretical assumptions we
accept about the fields in question we find it hard or impossible to see how
both explanations could be true. (And we see one explanation as supporting
another, similarly, when on these same assumptions the truth of the one
makes the other more likely.) All that is special about the moral case is that
some of these background assumptions will have to be about morality.
Donald's explanation appears to us to conflict with one ascribing moral insight
to the abolitionists because, on our moral views, we can see no way in which
the cause cited, the displacement of a certain New England elite, was either
a part or a symptom of the evil of slavery; whereas we can easily see this
about the nonmoral features cited in the contrasting, more flattering
explanation that I mentioned. If two people differ in their assumptions about
morality, therefore, they may differ also about the relation of nonmoral to
moral explanations. That appears to have happened to Harman and me. I
see a conflict between explanations where he sees none, because we bring
to the assessment different pictures of what moral facts could be like.
This conclusion will disappoint anyone who hoped to find in our judgments
about the relation of nonmoral to moral explanations an entirely independent,
unassailable foundation for moral theory. There is no such foundation, here
or anywhere else. Even so, our intuitions about such questions often do
provide an important purchase in argument, that may contribute to resolving
disputes. As an example, someone who has read Mackie 1977 may find himself
initially convinced that real moral facts would have to be very special,
guaranteed to influence the will of any rational being who is aware of them.
If he also thinks (as Mackie does, and I do) that no natural facts could be like
this, he will be committed to the conclusion that any fully naturalistic, non-
moral explanation of a moral belief must be an undermining one: it will display
a moral belief as caused entirely by facts of a sort that could not possibly
constitute moral facts. He may find this conclusion less plausible when he
looks at its applications, however. He may for example agree that my second
imagined nonmoral explanation of moral opposition to slavery seems to
support rather than undermine the view that the opposition was due to
slavery's really being an evil And this agreement may continue-I find it

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 Nonmoral Explanations / 101

often does-even if we add that slavery had, in addition to the natural features
cited, no magic ones such as Mackie describes. If so, then someone initially
persuaded by Mackie's view may be convinced to adopt a less extravagant
general conception of what moral facts would have to be like. In this way
confident views about the relation of particular nonmoral to moral explana-
tions may help shape our general theories, even if those theories also shape
them in return.
(Since Mackie's thesis is a metaethical one, this example illustrates another
point worth noting. Reasoning in metaethics, as much as in normative ethics,
typically involves moving dialectically in this way between plausible general
theses and plausible views about cases, seeking a reflective equilibrium. Those
philosophers who are confident that this procedure can yield nothing objective
in normative ethics should ask themselves, therefore, whether they are pre-
pared to draw the same conclusion about metaethics. They should especially
wonder, perhaps, whether they are prepared to apply this conclusion to their
own thesis, itself metaethical.)

II

Not all nonmoral explanations appear to undermine moral ones, then. But
some do, and that leaves open one further troubling possibility, to which I
shall turn for the remainder of my discussion. For the doubts that some
philosophers have about moral explanations would not be allayed, I suspect,
by the observation that many nonmoral explanations, viewed locally, appear
to support or amplify moral ones. Their concern is more global and founda-
tional. They appeal to some plausible, comprehensive naturalistic explanation,
not just of this or that moral judgment but of our moral thought as a whole;
and this most basic explanation they see as an undermining one. There are
suggestions of such a view in Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and, if not Darwin, then
in some Darwinists. Local nonmoral explanations appear to corroborate or
amplify moral ones, on this view, only because they are incomplete; as they
are filled in they will be seen to conflict with moral explanations, whose
plausibility will then vanish.
Doctrines of this sort appear to support skepticism not just about moral
explanations but about all our moral views. When we become convinced,
about a particular moral view, that the only possible explanation of it would
undermine any that explained it by appealing to its truth, we seem to be
required to reject not just the undermined explanation but also the view
itself-for we cannot see ourselves in any instance as holding it because it
is true. Many of us think, for example, that the only plausible explanations
available for anyone's thinking homosexuality immoral are undermining ones
of this sort (even if more complex than the stereotype mentioned above),
and see this as undermining the view itself, not just moral explanations of

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102 / Nicholas L. Sturgeon

it. Or, again, if Harman is right that his is the only plausible explanation of
our views about aiding and not harming, and if I am right that his is an
undermining explanation, then the consequence appears to be (as I indicated)
that the view itself is discredited along with any moral explanations of it.
So any convincing story that undermined all moral explanations would appear
to have achieved a triumph for moral skepticism. We might find for
psychological reasons that we could not abandon moral thought entirely as
we might a particular judgment, but it would be hard to see this inability
as a vindication against the undermining challenge.
There are too many proposals of this latter sort for me to canvass all of
them. I shall focus on a suggestion that has been advanced by a number of
writers over the last decade, that plausible Darwinian explanations of our
moral faculties undermine moral explanations of their exercise and so cut
against moral realism. The suggestions have been diverse and often hard to
pin down.9 Sometimes they appear to mean only that Darwinism supports
metaphysical naturalism (as I agree) and that naturalism in turn leaves no
room for objective moral properties. I believe that this latter assumption has
been dealt with adequately elsewhere.10 But often the appeal is to more
specific hypotheses about the origins of moral thought, motivation and
language, some of which merit attention. I shall consider one of the clearest
and most carefully worked out, by Allan Gibbard. Gibbard takes his story
to yield "a kind of noncognitivism" (Gibbard 1982, p. 43), a view according
to which (a) moral discourse serves merely to express sentiments rather than
moral beliefs, and (b) moral thoughts represent no real uniform sort of fact.
Since I believe that there are (as I shall explain) objections to (a) that are largely
tangential to Gibbard's argument for (b), I shall focus more on his argument
for (b), his irrealism. I do not deny that we could have evolved, genetically
or socially, to use moral language as noncognitivists or irrealists claim, but
I shall deny that Gibbard's story supports the conclusion that this has in fact
happened. Such difficult issues in metaethics as the choice between realism
and irrealism, in my view, depend on details that a general Darwinian outlook
leaves quite undetermined.
Some will doubt that noncognitivism in any form is a proper target for
my discussion. For Simon Blackburn has recently maintained that "pro-
jectivism" (as he calls noncognitivism) can straightforwardly accommodate
moral explanations, and can even attribute causal efficacy to moral properties
(Blackburn 1991a, 11-13). If this were so, then it would seem that accepting
Gibbard's evolutionary story about the origin of our moral faculties should
in no way preclude our accepting moral explanations for the same develop-
ment or for moral judgments we now make; and his story would thus
undermine neither moral explanations nor the views themselves. This is not
Gibbard's understanding, however. He sees his project as competing with any
attempt to explain our moral judgments as detecting moral facts (Gibbard

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 Nonmoral Explanations / 103

1990, p. 107). Nor, in fact, can it be Blackburn's understanding. For he, too,
argues for noncognitivism, and against moral realism, by claiming that from
a suitably naturalistic perspective, one that relies on all we know of ourselves
and our place in nature, no plausible explanation of our moral thought (or
of anything else) will postulate moral facts or properties.1" Accommodating
moral explanations means, for him, finding a principled way for a non-
cognitivist to mimic accepting them without actually doing so. I have argued
elsewhere that neither Blackburn nor any other noncognitivist has succeeded
in this project; but success would not in any case bring noncognitivism any
closer to accepting moral explanations.12
Gibbard emphasizes that his story about the origins of our sense of justice
is "highly speculative" (Gibbard 1982, p. 39) and I agree: I am undoubtedly
more suspicious than he of evolutionary stories in this genre. But a story like
his could be true, and I would not have it thought that the case for moral
explanations depends on denying it. So, for the sake of discussion, I shall
not challenge its main outlines. I assume that Gibbard's claim is modest in
another respect as well. When he describes a recent elaboration of his views
as illustrating "how biology could settle whether there are normative facts,"
I take him to be allowing not only that the biology (which here means:
surmises about selection pressures on the psychology of our distant ancestors)
is speculative, but also that the moral irrealism follows from the rest of the
story, not deductively, but rather with the kind of plausibility characteristic
of scientific inference.13 On this understanding, it will be no objection just
to point out that his story leaves it conceivable that realism is true. I shall
claim much more. What I shall argue is that noncognitivism is implausible
for independent reasons, and so is best put aside; that, for the evolutionary
environment he is considering, Gibbard's story is more plausibly read as a
realist than as an irrealist one; that it is as easily elaborated to support moral
realism as irrealism, when extended to apply to contemporary thought and
discourse; and that the evidence for deciding among any of these options
will not come from evolutionary biology.

III

Gibbard's story centers on what he calls bargaining situations, which surely

confronted our ancestors as often as they do us. These are situations in which
it helps everyone get what they want for there to be some scheme of
cooperation rather than none, but in which there remains a conflict of interest
over which cooperative scheme to adopt. On the plausible assumption that
in the evolutionary past getting what you wanted would normally also
promote your biological fitness, there would have been a selective advantage
for psychological capacities and dispositions enabling people to do as well

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 104 / Nicholas L. Sturgeon

as possible for themselves in these situations. What capacities and dispositions

might these have been? Gibbard knows that there are numerous possibilities,
but introduces his favored proposal by noting a difficulty with one of the more
obvious ones. What is obvious is that this would have been a good time for
the evolution of intelligence and conscious self-interest. Smart, self-interested
bargainers could then solve these problems using the kind of "high rationality"
explored by Thomas Schelling (Schelling 1960): "because of past experience,
it is common knowledge that everyone expects a certain outcome, and so
everyone insists on that outcome because he expects to benefit by doing so
and expects to lose by insisting on more" (1982, p. 36).
The problem with this solution, unsupplemented, according to Gibbard,
is that

purely self-interested bargaining often breaks down there is too much

advantage to be gained from altering expectations in one's favor, and once
expectations are confused, it may happen that each party insists on more
than he can get (1982, p 36)

So he proposes an alternative that involves what he calls "attaching a moral

sentiment" to an outcome. What is crucial is mutual knowledge of certain
behavioral dispositions.

Instead of everyone's wanting as much as he can get in a bargaining

situation, suppose there is some outcome such that everyone cares very
much about getting his share under that outcome, but cares very little, not
at all, or even negatively about getting more Suppose also that each person
prefers carrying out his threat to settling for less than his share under that
outcome If these facts are known, the situation will be very stable. there
will be no advantage to altering expectations

"Sentiments" come into the story as emotional dispositions supporting these

behavioral ones: "a disposition to be resentful or angry if one gets less than
one's share under that outcome, and to be satisfied if that outcome does
obtain" (1982, p. 37). Finally, there is a facilitating role for language, with
some word used to express this constellation of behavioral and emotional
dispositions. The words involved, Gibbard suggests, are "just" and "fair." "To
regard something 'as fair,' then, simply is to attach this moral sentiment to
it." More precisely, since none of these distant ancestors spoke English, his
suggestion is that although there are various possibilities-a theological term
might have served-"the words 'just' and 'fair' do the job in our language,"
and so to that extent translate whatever term served in this evolutionary
scenario (1982, p. 38).
This is the heart of Gibbard's proposal. But the story is still indeterminate
in a crucial respect, as we can see by considering two more precise versions.
For reasons that will become clear, neither of these versions can be Gibbard's;
but we can learn something important from seeing why, and from seeing
how each approximates to his final account.

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 Nonmoral Explanations / 105

Story One. There is a property of possible bargaining outcomes that humans

are able to detect. What evolved is a tendency to favor, in the manner
described, outcomes with that property and to reject others. Humans, being
language-users, had a term (which we might translate as "just" or "fair") for
this property, and the ability to identify the property linguistically was no
doubt essential to the evolution of the tendency to care deeply about it.
Story Two. Humans evolved a tendency to favor, in the manner described,
some bargaining outcomes and reject others: not, however, the same
outcomes or kinds of outcomes, for some favored one sort of outcome, some
another. Being language-users, they naturally had a term (which we might
translate as "just" or "fair") for expressing this special sort of favorable attitude,
and possession of this term no doubt facilitated the evolution of the attitude
itself.
These are both accounts of why humans should have come to care about
justice-that is, about what they think of as, and call, just. But they differ
strikingly in several respects.
1. The first story is a cognitivist and, potentially, a moral realist one,
according to which it is crucial to humans' coming to favor the property they
call justice that they be able to detect it and have a term referring to it. (The
story is only potentially realist because nothing in it guarantees that, when
we find out more about the property in question, the story will not strike
us as undermining rather than amplifying the suggestion that our ancestors
sometimes called bargaining outcomes just because they really were. I have
explained how this could happen. On the other hand, there is nothing at all
in the story to preclude our finding it compatible with, or corroborative of,
this moral explanation, either.14 In a discussion of whether an evolutionary
view of human origins supports moral irrealism, the latter of these points
seems the salient one: it explains, among other things, why this story cannot
be the one Gibbard ultimately intends. So I shall, with this much warning,
call this story a realist one.) The second story, by contrast, is an explicitly
noncognitivist and irrealist one, according to which attributions of justice
express attitudes rather than moral beliefs and ascribe no single property
to anything. It insures that everyone "cares about justice" only by requiring
that the caring form part of any state of mind recognizable as the thought
that some bargaining outcome is just.15
2. The second story is more vulnerable than the first to doubts about
whether we would happily translate as "just" or "fair" a term used as the
story describes.16 A general doubt applies equally to both stories, but could
largely be met, I shall assume, by supplementing both in an obvious way.
For we might be reluctant to accept these translations for terms applied to
bargaining outcomes in the ways described, if their application was in no
way guided by what we think of as standards of justice or fairness. So assume
in both cases that it is so guided.17 There remains a more specific doubt that

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106 / Nicholas L. Sturgeon

applies to the second story but not the first. I can press it most forcefully
by first noting a point easily accommodated, that we apply our term "just"
in related ways not only to outcomes and procedures but to institutions and
persons. Just institutions are, perhaps, those that embody just procedures and
secure just outcomes, and just persons those with the right dispositions to
support just procedures, outcomes and institutions. These formulas are too
simple, but it is enough that something like them be true. For the problem
for the second story is that the justice of persons and of institutions are often
appealed to in explanations of their flourishing.18 The justice of a society,
as I noted above, is supposed to stabilize it; and people are alleged to prosper
precisely because of their justice. Of course, there is also a tradition that attacks
this latter claim as a pious fiction. But the most prominent opposing view
also treats justice as explanatory. That justice always pays, and that justice
sometimes costs, are both views that cast justice as a property with causal
efficacy.
We would not regard as satisfactory, I think, any translation that precluded
these claims or debates. As I have remarked, however, noncognitivism must
reject all such moral explanations on their straightforward readings, and no
one has displayed a satisfactory alternative way for the view to accommodate
them. Insofar as the second story is a noncognitivist one, then, I conclude
that it would involve a term or family of terms applied expressively to
outcomes, procedures, institutions and persons, but never used to frame
explanations. I believe that we would not regard any term limited in this way
as translating ours.
There is another way to see this point. Recall that Gibbard allows that "a
term with theological meaning might do the job" accomplished by the term
he proposes to translate as "just" or "fair" (1982, p. 38). So suppose that our
ancestors evolved as in Gibbard's story, but came to say of the relevant
outcomes not that they were just but that they were favored by the gods.
If these gods were then thought to act on this preference, or indeed to do
anything at all, then a noncognitivist account of this assertion would be
implausible; reference to the gods is here thought to be explanatory, and
this assertion about bargaining outcomes is linked to the explanatory network.
(Noncognitivist analyses of theological discourse have of course been
proposed. But one of their costs has always been that they have to say of
much that looks explanatory that it is not-not even intended as explanatory,
whatever other functions it may fulfill as well.) But ascriptions of justice and
injustice fit into an explanatory network, too, and that makes noncognitivist
analyses of them implausible as well.
Of course, as a glance at this theological analogy illustrates, this argument
for moral cognitivism is not yet an argument for moral realism. I favor a
cognitivist stance toward much theological discourse, but I do not believe
in any more gods than Gibbard does. So I entirely grant that from the fact

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 Nonmoral Explanations / 107

that some talk is intended as explanatory it does not follow that the entities
or properties it postulates actually exist, or that it fully succeeds in any function
but a noncognitive one. But it does follow, I believe, that an irrealist account
of such an area must be an error theory, according to which users of the
discourse are mistaken about what they are doing and about the world. And
an important implication of my argument in this paper is that error theories
about morality are harder to defend, from a naturalistic standpoint, than are
error theories about theology. Moral explanations often appear supported
or amplified, rather than undermined, even by very full naturalistic, nonmoral
explanations. Of course, whether they are nevertheless globally undermined
by some plausible, and fundamental, naturalistic explanation is the very
question I am discussing, and I cannot fully settle it here; but I am arguing
that no evolutionary explanation like Gibbard's will have this effect.
The upshot, then, is that if we are to recognize any terms as translatable
by our terms "just" and "fair", they or closely connected terms must be put
to explanatory use; but in that case the story of their use, even if it is irrealist,
must be cognitivist. This applies to my second story but also to any other,
including the more elaborate version that serves, for reasons I am about to
explain, as Gibbard's final account So, although Gibbard calls his account
noncognitivist, I shall take the live, interesting issue to be, not whether it
supports noncognitivism, but whether there is anything in it to favor irrealism
over moral realism.
3. A third difference between the two stories is that, of the two, only the
first, the realist version, describes a solution to the problem of instability that
Gibbard thinks evolution might have set out to solve by giving us a sense
of justice. The second story, in fact, not only describes no solution, it describes
what is surely an exacerbation of the original difficulty. We were to imagine
smart, self-interested bargainers who too often upset established expectations
by miscalculating and holding out for too much; but now we picture bargainers
whose preferences for competing outcomes are driven not just by self-interest
but by anger and moral indignation at those who disagree. We have replaced
competing egoists with competing fanatics, and that is no recipe for peace.
Gibbard knows this. "If different people attach their moral sentiments to
different outcomes...bargaining can break down in ways much more intract-
able than in rationally self-interested bargaining" (1982, p. 38). That is why
neither of these two stories can be his. The first is ruled out because it is
realist, the second because, though irrealist, it provides no solution to the
evolutionary problem. To get moral irrealism out of evolution, therefore, he
needs a more elaborate version of the second story, which he provides by
suggesting a more complex role for moral language. His suggestion is, he
admits, schematic (1982, p. 39), and we shall see that it requires interpretation.
The requirement is for "a mechanism for adjusting the objects of moral
sentiments to make them compatible. That mechanism could be provided

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108 / Nicholas L. Sturgeon

by language and the workings of small group consensus which language

makes possible" (1982, p. 38). People may start out with conflicting views
about justice, and so with emotional and behavioral dispositions attached to
incompatible outcomes. But if they had also evolved a tendency to discuss
issues of justice with others, and to adjust their views in discussion in the
direction of consensus, then this whole package of psychological dispositions
would have provided a solution to the evolutionary problem after all.
This is, I believe, a fair statement of Gibbard's considered proposal. But
it still leaves some questions we need to settle. The main problem is that it
is still not clear how the proposal will serve his philosophical purposes. For
either these discussions normally produce agreement about what is just or
they do not. If not, then we still have no solution to the evolutionary problem.
But if they do, then we are entitled to wonder why Gibbard's story is not
just an elaborate version of realism: that is, why it has not now become a
version of my first story rather than just my second. If the problem is not
apparent, consider that the most common and persuasive argument against
moral realism is an argument from disagreement. Many disagreements about
justice and other moral issues are, it is claimed, too deep to be rationally
resolvable, irrealism would explain why. But Gibbard's story requires that,
in the evolutionary environment he is considering, disputes about the justice
of bargaining procedures and outcomes have been not just resolvable but
regularly resolved. So it doesn't sound like a story that would support
irrealism. If people who have come to care about justice are also able to
resolve disputes about it, why doesn't this mean that they are, in those
discussions, referring to a real property that they care about, and about which
their views are often correct?
Gibbard does not address this question as I have framed it. This may be
partly because he overlooks the possibility that achieving consensus in debate
might be a way, in this case even an especially appropriate way, of detecting
a property.19 It can be. Consensus among experts is often an indicator of at
least approximate truth on many topics, and if moral expertise is as widely
shared (on ordinary cases, and barring special distorting factors) as many
think, then on these issues a broad consensus should count for something.
Justice seems a special case even among moral properties, moreover. Notice
the sort of property, if there were such a property, that it would be. On any
plausible account it will involve balancing the competing interests of different
parties; and the parties will be ones who (1) know that respect for justice
is a shared motive of some importance, but who (2) are also strongly
concerned about their individual interests. A familiar consequence is that they
will all (3) have a standing motive for seeing the requirements of justice as
favoring their own case more than they actually do. If there really were such
a property, therefore, and if human beings were to evolve, either genetically
or socially, a strategy for countering these predictable biases and determining

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 Nonmoral Explanations / 109

where it really lies, it is hard to see how they could do much better than
to aim at consensus in a debate in which all the competing interests are
represented.20 That is another reason why Gibbard's story, according to
which natural selection has got us to do just that, looks like one a realist might
tell. We still need to know how it is supposed to support irrealism.
The answer appears to be that Gibbard is relying on an assumption about
what would solve his evolutionary problem that he barely states, and that
looks implausible once it is made explicit. He notes quite correctly that what
is essential to preventing destructive conflict in bargaining situations is just
that for (almost) every such situation there be a resolution, based on some
agreed standard or other. What he assumes is that this solution could obtain,
stably and over time, without there being any single set of standards, however
abstract, on which the members of a population (usually) agree, however
implicitly, and which they bring to bear to resolve individual cases. That is
why he emphasizes the usefulness of language in achieving "small group
consensus" (1982, p. 38, emphasis added), and says that although his story
"predicts a strong concern for justice and substantial small group consensus
on what is just," it nevertheless "offers no reason for expecting that the same
standards will direct the sense of justice in all people" (1982, p. 39). There
is no single property being detected and referred to in people's discussions
of justice, as they regularly resolve disputes about it, because the resolutions
are merely piecemeal.
This story is logically possible. But I believe that it is not very plausible,
for a couple of reasons that depend on things we know about human
psychology. One is that any individual will be party to different disputes, and
human psychology does not seem flexible enough for A to have a strong
emotional attachment to ranking, say, effort over output in her dispute with
B, but output over effort in her dispute with C, unless she can see both rankings
as the application of some reasonable but more abstract principle to differing
circumstances.21 The other depends on another interesting feature of our
sense of justice, one for which Gibbard admits that his basic story provides
no explanation, though various emendations might serve (1982, p. 39). This
is that we are often deeply concerned about injustice among third parties,
including strangers. So it will not guarantee peace simply for A and B to
resolve their dispute by mutually agreed standards, if C regards their standards
as unfair to one of them and is prepared to intervene 22 These are features
of our current psychology; it is conceivable that they were different in the
past. But unless they were, it seems to me quite unlikely that our moral
emotions could have evolved as Gibbard suggests, for their advantage in
stabilizing bargaining, except in a population that was at the same time coming
to have (mostly) shared standards of justice. So the story still sounds realist,
in its most plausible version. It explains why people would come to care about
a complex social property they call justice, at the same time that they are

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110 / Nicholas L. Sturgeon

learning to identify it through discussion and debate.

IV

Must anyone who accepts Gibbard's story be a moral realist, then? No.
It is not hard to extend his story to support irrealism, by taking advantage
of a familiar point: that Darwinian solutions do not foresee future
environments, and that the human social environment, since the advent of
agriculture, has changed far too rapidly for natural selection to keep pace.
It might be, for example, that human beings evolved standards tolerably
sufficient for picking out a single outcome in the sorts of bargaining situations
that confront hunter-gatherers, but that these same standards proved woefully
inadequate in more complex societies. Different cultures and individuals, on
this story, have developed supplementary but conflicting standards, so
hopelessly diverse that their talk of justice fastens on no one property.
Attempts to reach consensus often fail, so the evolutionary solution Gibbard
describes has broken down.23 It could be, as Gibbard seems inclined to
maintain, that through these differences there remains a constant, intrinsic
emotional attachment to whatever one regards as just; or it might be allowed,
I think more plausibly, that among the conceptions of justice are some (think
of Marx, or Thrasymachus, or just of what Glaucon and Adeimantus offer
as "what people consider the nature and origin of justice" to be (Republic,
358b)) that would undermine most people's commitment to it for its own sake,
while leaving room for some to have an instrumental concern for it. Either
way, thought and talk of justice would have no determinate reference, nothing
to divide truth from falsehood in any of the pervasive and interesting
disagreements about it. So the indicated metaethic would be irrealist.
It is just as easy, however, to tell a more optimistic story. Gibbard's
evolutionary solution has broken down: the pervasiveness of unresolved
disputes about justice establishes that. But perhaps we are nevertheless left
with the resources for resolving most of them. The varying conceptions of
justice that have arisen may have been sufficiently shaped by the
commonalities of human life to make this much true: (1) that under the
pressure of rational argument and with adequate nonmoral information, these
varying conceptions would mostly agree in their application to actual cases,
however much they continued to disagree about mere thought-experiments,
and (2) what makes this so is that, in the actual world, the different features
to which these conceptions attach importance stand in relations of mutual
causal support.24 (Thus, to illustrate, the idea would be that the sort of equal
liberty that proponents, after sufficient argument, would agree is worth
valuing, and the sort of equality in other respects that others would likewise
defend, prove each in fact sustainable only with a good measure of the other.
And so with other goods.) We may add that this conception of justice would

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 Nonmoral Explanations / 111

probably strengthen rather than undermine most people's intrinsic attachment

to it. If all this were so, then the best account of moral thought and talk would
be what I and many others regard as a realist one.
As an account of our current situation I incline to the second, realist story.
Many readers will strongly disagree. The only point about the disagreement
that I mean to establish here, however, is that Gibbard's account of the
evolution of our moral sentiments-itself speculative, but accepted here for
the sake of discussion-does nothing whatever to favor the first, irrealist
extension of his story over the second, realist one. Evidence in this argument
will have to come from the sources from which it has always been drawn:
from our experience of what moral argument can accomplish, and of how
human social systems work. Gibbard's story seems neutral between the two
possibilities. If we were pressed to find some asymmetry in its relation to
the two extended stories, however, so as to let it suggest a working hypothesis,
then we might note that it is the second story rather than the first that
preserves the realism implicit (I have argued) in Gibbard's own, for the
environment that it deals with.
As I explained, I have selected Gibbard's story for this detailed examination
because it is by far the clearest and most carefully worked out of the accounts
that begin with an evolutionary story about our moral sentiments and
conclude with an irrealist view of moral thought and discourse. If it shows
no clear path along which evolutionary considerations should steer us from
the former toward the latter, we may reasonably doubt that there is any to
be found. Although I have not argued the point, I should record that I find
Gibbard's story typical in a broader respect as well. When historical and
contemporary evidence leaves room for serious debate about aspects of
human psychology (including ones that would underlie possible cognitive
relations to moral facts), evolutionary speculation is unlikely to contribute
much, if anything, to resolving the issues. To the question whether biology
matters to ethics, my reply is that psychology matters a great deal to both
metaethics and normative ethics: not because ethical positions can be deduced
from psychological ones, but because in the sort of dialectical argument
characteristic of both metaethics and normative ethics, psychological premises
significantly restrict the conclusions we can find plausible. Biology will matter
in turn if it helps us learn about psychology.25 Although our basic psycho-
logical makeup is an evolved one, however, what we know of our
evolutionary history is so sketchy, and evolutionary theory is so flexible, that
together they provide almost no basis for settling debates among what we
already knew were the reasonable options about how humans have turned
out.26 The more promising disciplines on these issues are history,
anthropology, sociology and, of course, psychology itself.
My conclusion comes in two parts, then, one confident, the other more
tentative. What I am sure of is that, viewed locally, nonmoral explanations

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112 / Nicholas L. Sturgeon

do not always appear to undermine moral ones. They often corroborate them
instead; and their role in amplifying moral explanations is central to much
philosophical argument in moral theory. About whether there nevertheless
remains some basic and convincing naturalistic explanation that will
undermine moral explanations globally, I am more tentative because I have
not surveyed all the candidates. But I take my discussion of Gibbard to have
shown that nothing we know of our evolutionary history supplies such an
explanation, or makes moral irrealism any more plausible than the moral
realism I am prepared to defend.

Notes

1 I have touched on this issue in Sturgeon 1985, 1986, 1991.

2. Donald 1956, pp 31, 36 A careful reading suggests that Donald does not see
his explanation as undermining entirely one that imputes moral insight he says
that his aim is to explain why a longstanding evil was only then recognized (p
22) And it is important to notice that it is actually rather difficult to construct
completely undermining explanations, that are at all plausible, for moral judgments
that seem obviously correct (Sturgeon 1985, p 76, n 23) Even if the abolitionists
attacked slavery only (unconsciously) to have a pretext for expressing anger about
something else, for example, there is the question why they found this a plausible
pretext Perhaps only because they sensed that some of their audience would,
but then why was that so? So long as our explanation leaves open the possibility
that the evil of slavery accounts in some measure for any of these things, it is
not completely undermining Still, without being certain of the truth of the matter,
I shall assume that with imagination one could construct, under Donald's
inspiration, a story that would make the actual wrongness of slavery entirely
irrelevant to the explanation of these abolitionists' thinking it wrong.
3 A list compiled from accounts opponents of slavery themselves gave of factors
moving them For a recent study attributing considerable truth to these allegations,
including the last two (which were politically very important), see Freehling 1990
4 For complementary suggestions see Miller 1985, 526-29. 1 have benefitted from
Miller's discussion of the topic of this paragraph, on which I touched only
tangentially in Sturgeon 1985.
5 See Sturgeon 1991, 27-30 John Rawls argues (Rawls 1971, Sec 76) that, given
certain psychological assumptions, a society just by his standards would be
significantly more stable than one just by utilitarian standards (This is not merely
a claim about the effects of the society's being thought just, for that factor is held
constant in the comparison ) He does not offer this as one of the "main grounds"
favoring his view, but does regard it as helping to rebut possible doubts.
6 See Sturgeon 1986 Of course, this is not the description that all philosophers give
of their method R. M. Hare, for example, denies any "probative" force to ordinary
moral judgments, no matter how carefully filtered (Hare 1981) There is some
irony, therefore, in the fact that Hare's argument for utilitarianism from first
principles (about the meanings of some moral and psychological expressions)
appears to have convinced almost no one, whereas his (and, to be fair, others')
resourceful deployment of a "two-level" strategy, to show how utilitarianism can
accommodate many ordinary judgments apparently unfavorable to it, has
contributed importantly to keeping that view among those taken seriously.

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 Nonmoral Explanations / 113

7. Two caveats (1) First, Harman's view is that a "full-fledged" inner judgment not
only states a proposition capable of truth or falsity but also expresses the speaker's
endorsement of the agent's reasons This latter feature he appears in fact to treat
as no more than a kind of cancelable implicature, since the same words can be
used just to state the proposition if one indicates appropriately that the
endorsement is absent (Harman 1975, 8-1 1). If it is supposed to be more integral
to the judgment than that, however, then the assumption I attribute to him must
be, more precisely, that our common moral judgment, insofar as it is capable
of truth, is caused by whatever facts make it true, and his relativistic conclusion
is that what makes such judgments true, insofar as they are capable of truth, is
just the agent's acceptance of the relevant convention. (2) Harman of course does
not say that his argument rests on initial acceptance of a moral explanation for
our moral belief, but I claim that there is no way of getting from his explicit
premise-his nonmoral explanation of our belief-to his relativism, without relying
on this additional assumption Whether I am right matters to another disagreement
between Harman and me He has argued in criticism of my views that a
philosophical naturalist will rely on moral explanations only after establishing
a naturalistic reduction for moral judgments (Harman 1986, 63-66) I have argued
in reply that there is no way to establish any naturalistic reduction without
accepting some moral explanations to start with (Sturgeon 1986) If the reading
I suggest here is correct, then Harman's practice fits my view rather than his
For his relativism is his favored reduction for "inner judgments", but his argument
for the reduction rests partly on the assumption that the explanation of our thinking
duties not to harm more stringent, is that they are
8. As others have alleged on different grounds see, for example, Glover 1977, pp
92-112
9 See, for example, Murphy 1982 and Ruse 1986 Neither of these writers even
mentions the sort of ethical naturalism that I and a number of others have
defended, according to which moral terms refer to natural properties that matter
to us because of their role in human life, so neither explains how evolution would
undermine this thesis Simon Blackburn does address this view by implication
in Blackburn 1988, arguing that philosophical naturalism "demands" his
projectivist, noncognitivist view of ethics partly because "only if values are
intrinsically motivating, is a natural story of their [evolutionary] emergence
possible" (p 363). But Blackburn defends this claim with only one example,
concerning the evolution of cooperation "Evolutionary success may attend the
animal that helps those that have helped it, but it would not attend an allegedly
possible animal that thinks it ought to help but does not " It is easy to think of
examples that appear to cut in the opposite direction. The ability to tell, of
unfamiliar people, whether they have a morally decent attitude toward strangers,
can be a matter of life and death And if morality is even in part (as Blackburn's
example suggests) a system of cooperation for mutual advantage, it is not hard
to say why knowledge of what it requires would be useful even if not intrinsically
motivating Glaucon and Adeimantus provide part of the explanation in Republic
11, Hobbes and Hume the rest. On all these issues Allan Gibbard's metaethical
conclusions are similar to these authors', but his argument is more patient and
detailed.
10 See Sturgeon 1985, Brink 1989, Boyd 1988, Railton 1986, among others, also my
comments, above, on Mackie
11. "The projectivist holds that our nature as moralists is well explained by regarding
us as reacting to a reality which contains nothing in the way of values, duties,

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114 / Nicholas L. Sturgeon

rights and so forth; ""Moral 'states of affairs,' above all, play no role in causing
or explaining our attitudes, their consequences, their importance to us " (Blackburn
1981, pp 164-65, 185-86) Compare Blackburn 1984, pp 256-57, and Blackburn
1988, p 370
12. Sturgeon 1991, 27-33 In response, Blackburn has objected that he does not "deny
outright" that there are moral properties or that events occur because objects
possess these properties. these are things he denies when he starts out, but
nevertheless ends up allowing himself to say (Blackburn 1991b, 4142) Presumably,
however, he does not end up contradicting what he says at the outset, for that
would be to withdraw his opposition to realism So I take the claims affirmed
at the end to mean something different from the ones denied at the beginning-
an interpretation confirmed by his ever-more-elaborate searches for something
acceptable to a noncognitivist that these affirmations could mean That leaves
the initial denials standing, outright and robust
Will noncognitivism's rejection of moral explanations for our moral views
undermine the views themselves, as I have suggested? I believe so, but this thesis,
too, will be sharply contested by Blackburn and others, and the issue is too complex
to pursue here. (Gibbard discusses it in Gibbard 1990, pp 153-250.) My argument
here is just that the moral explanations are not undermined.
13 Gibbard 1990, p 107 In Gibbard 1982, Gibbard considers only judgments of justice
or fairness (mostly interchangeably, as I shall, but see his n. 5) His view there
would be consistent with a different treatment of other moral judgments. But in
Gibbard 1990 the argument is generalized The conclusion is also more complex
Though judgments of justice are not specifically mentioned, he would now
presumably treat them as expressing norms one accepts about emotions directed
towards actions or outcomes, rather than the emotions themselves, for example.
Despite the greater scope and subtlety of the more recent discussion, I believe
that the most general points I make about the earlier discussion will also apply
to it Consideration of its positive proposals and rich detail will have to await
another occasion
14. 1 here assume the conclusion of the arguments cited in note 10, that the property
is not precluded from being moral merely by its being natural
15 Strictly, the second story does not have to be noncognitivist. As stated, it leaves
the possibility that attributions of justice are belief-stating but ambiguous, in that
different speakers use them to attribute different properties, perhaps without
realizing that this is so. This option is usually held by noncognitivists to conflict
with intuitions about univocality. I think that some of these intuitions are
challengeable and that this relativist view deserves a serious hearing, but I follow
Gibbard in ignoring it here
16 Gibbard does not claim that the term would have to be a good translation of "just"
or "fair", he thinks his example of a theological term would not (1982, p. 38).
But he appears to think that any term that merely served this function, without
importing additional meaning, would translate ours, I deny this He also clearly
thinks that some term that played the role described could be translated by ours,
but my second doubt, especially, is about whether any term that functioned as
the second story describes could be a translation of ours.
17 This assumption ought not to appear to noncognitivists and other irrealists to
rule out the second story for since they regard our current standards as insufficient
to settle disputes about justice, they should allow that they might also have been
insufficient in our ancestors' environment. On the other hand, this assumption
goes some way to support the reading of the first story as a genuinely realist

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 Nonmoral Explanations / 115

one, though without, I concede, guaranteeing this interpretation

The most obvious omission in Gibbard's schematic story is any explicit reference
to fair procedures rather than outcomes. For we judge, and care about, the fairness
of procedures not only when we view them as determining that of outcomes but
when we do not (that is, in cases of what Rawls (1971, pp 84-86) calls perfect
and imperfect procedural justice, as well as pure procedural justice) I doubt that
we would recognize a notion of justice that attached no importance to procedures,
Gibbard might allow this if, as I suspect, he is using "outcome" broadly
18 So is the justice of outcomes, like any other moral property, thought to explain
something why, under proper conditions, people think them just I find it fatal
to noncognitivism to fail to accommodate explanations of this sort, moreover,
for they are, I have argued, central to our reasoning about ethics But many
noncognitivists, I discover, remain convinced that these explanations are
peripheral to moral thinking, that it can somehow be reconstrued so as not to
rely on them Hence my emphasis here on other explanations that are obviously
not peripheral
19 Our sense of justice might be responding to a single real property, he allows,
were we genetically programmed to possess "moral sentiments which are rigidly
directed so as to be compatible. say, toward leaving possessors in possession and
the like", but he objects that this solution "might well be too inflexible to cope
with the variety of bargaining situations hunter-gatherers faced" (1982, p 38).
He then presents his own suggestion, that we are programmed to work towards
consensus, as an alternative to the view that we are responding to a property
The natural first response to his objection, however, is surely that the evolutionary
solution would be more flexible if the property to which our sentiments were
directed were more abstract, and all the reasonable candidates are, plausibly,
properties well detected by debate aiming at consensus.
20 They might also seek the opinion of a disinterested but appropriately informed
third party, of course-as they often do
21. In more recent presentations of his view Gibbard has emphasized that a
susceptibility to being pressured towards normative consistency is central to the
psychology whose emergence he postulates (1990, pp 74-75) But more than
consistency is at stake in the example, for there is no inconsistency in thinking
merely that justice requires one ranking in the one case, a reverse ranking in
the other. We seem to care here-as in other intellectual endeavors, any cognitivist
will point out-not just about consistency but about explanatory generality, about
why the different rankings are appropriate
22 We seem most easily to identify with victims who themselves feel aggrieved, but
real life is also full of cases in which we regard people as oppressed despite their
having accepted the standards of their oppressors.
23 The adaptive value of a sense of justice as an evolutionarily stable strategy
depends, Gibbard says, on this that "either all will regard the same outcome as
fair and settle on it, or language will enable all to reach a consensus on which
outcome is fair" (1982, p. 38) But recorded history is full of disputes for which
neither disjunct obtains, and in the contemporary world they are commonplace,
with moral emotions nevertheless engaged on all sides. Whether this makes a
sense of justice now maladaptive would depend on what one is comparing it to,
what seems clear is that it could hardly emerge, by the mechanism Gibbard
proposes, under contemporary circumstances.
24. For a similar account of moral properties and of many other natural properties,
and a naturalistic semantics to fit, see Boyd 1988

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 116 / Nicholas L. Sturgeon

25 Of course it matters in other long-recognized respects, too Humans are vulnerable

to harm from one another, they need food and shelter to survive; that infants
take so long to mature requires societies to make some provision for raising them,
and more. But crucial to all of the recent philosophical suggestions about the
relevance of evolutionary biology to ethics, as to most human sociobiology, are
attempts to predict features of human psychology from evolutionary scenarios
26 Someone asking whether biology matters to ethics might have in mind not
evolutionary history but current neurophysiology (though they usually do not).
I have no doubt that increasing knowledge of neurophysiology may throw light
on some psychological questions related to ethics.
On the relation of evolutionary biology to psychology I draw on many
conversations with Richard Boyd, with whom I have for a dozen years jointly
taught a course on Darwin, Social Darwinism and Human Sociobiology We hope
to publish a more systematic discussion, which would provide needed qualifications
and, of course, argument.

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