Blackburn, Virtue, and Southeast Asian Perspectives on Moral Judgement — Epoche B2
What Quasi-Realism Cannot Say About Our Own Mistakes A judgement we need to be able to make Between 1942 and 1945 British bomber command pursued a policy of area bombing: attacks aimed not at factories or railways but at the built-up centres of German cities, with the destruction of housing and the killing of civilians as the intended means. The policy had broad support. Most of the people who authorised, planned and carried it out were not monsters, and their considered moral convictions endorsed what they were doing. A few objected while the war was still being fought — the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, said in the House of Lords that the policy could not be defended — and were treated as cranks. Most people now think area bombing was wrong. That verdict is not merely a change of taste. It is the judgement that a community's settled moral convictions, at a time when they were held with confidence by decent and thoughtful people, were mistaken. Now turn the judgement on ourselves. Some of our own settled convictions are presumably mistaken in the same way, and we do not know which. That thought is not an idle piece of scepticism; it is what makes moral inquiry worth conducting. This review asks whether Simon Blackburn's quasi-realism can accommodate it [1] , and argues that it cannot. Quasi-realism earns a great deal of what it sets out to earn [2] . It does not earn this. Where the difficulty starts Hume argued that moral distinctions do not come from reason [3] . Examine a murder as closely as you like and you will find the blow, the intent, the death, but no further property of wrongness. What you will find, on turning your attention inward, is a sentiment of disapproval. The projectivist adds a claim about language: when we call the act wrong, we express that sentiment rather than report a property. The difficulty is immediate. We do not treat moral judgements as expressions of feeling. We argue about them, embed them in conditionals, call them true and false, and take them to be about the act rather than about us. If the projectivist story is right, all of this looks like a mistake we systematically make. What Blackburn earns Blackburn's response [4] , in Spreading the Word (1984) and the papers collected in Essays in Quasi-Realism (1993), is that the projectivist need not concede any of it. Quasi-realism is the project of earning the right to the realist-sounding features of moral talk from an expressivist starting point, by showing why a creature that expressed attitudes in the way the projectivist describes would need exactly those features. The results are impressive. Consider mind-independence. If moral talk expresses our attitudes, one might expect the expressivist to be stuck with 'if we had approved of area bombing, it would have been right'. Blackburn shows why not. In evaluating that conditional I use the standards I actually have, and those standards condemn the bombing whatever anyone thinks of it. So the expressivist not only may but must reject the conditional. The dependence of moral judgement on attitude is a fact about the judgement, not a claim made inside it. Consider disagreement. When two people take opposed views about the bombing, expressivism gives an account of what they are doing: they hold opposed attitudes, and each is trying to change the other's. Nothing about that requires a fact for one of them to be getting wrong. Consider error. I can say that I was wrong ten years ago, because my present standards condemn what I then approved. I can say that Bomber Command was wrong, for the same reason. I can even say that I may be wrong now about some particular question, because my own standards are complex and I may not have worked out what they imply. The judgement he cannot earn Now take the judgement we started from, in the first person and about fundamentals: not 'I may have misapplied my standards' but 'some of my most basic standards may themselves be mistaken'. Andy Egan set out the difficulty in 'Quasi-realism and fundamental moral error' (2007 [5] ). On the quasi-realist account, to call something wrong is to express the disapproval that my standards embody. So 'that standard of mine is mistaken' expresses disapproval of that standard. This works perfectly for standards I do not hold. Applied to someone else it says: my standards condemn his. Applied to my earlier self, likewise. Applied to my present fundamental standards it cannot be said at all. To use my standards to condemn my standards is not possible while they remain mine; the moment I disapprove of a standard, it is no longer one I endorse. The result is an asymmetry. I can coherently think that others are fundamentally in error, and I cannot coherently think it of myself. My present outlook comes out, on this account, as necessarily correct at the level of fundamentals. That is a bad result, and the wartime case shows why it is bad rather than merely odd. The people who supported area bombing were in the position quasi-realism says we are all in: their fundamental convictions were what they used to assess everything, and from inside those convictions there was no coherent thought to be had of the form 'these convictions are wrong'. What they needed was exactly the thought quasi-realism cannot supply. A metaethics on which the necessary humility is unavailable has failed at a place where it matters. Attitudes that can be assessed It is worth seeing that the difficulty does not follow from taking attitudes to be central to morality. It follows from a particular semantic claim about what moral sentences do. The Theravāda tradition of mainland Southeast Asia is attitude-centred in an uncompromising way. Its canonical statement is that it is volition that the Buddha calls action — the passage in the Nibbedhika Sutta of the Aṅguttara Nikāya — so that the moral weight of what one does lies in the state of mind from which it is done and not in the outward event [6] . On the face of it that is a