Question

Which of the following best fits the reasons why Simon Blackburn sees morality as in some sense mind-independent?

a) The facts that we use to support our moral judgments are not dependent on our feelings.

b) Non-cognitivism is inherently a view that supports the non-objectivity of moral thinking.

c) Facts cannot motivate us to take action, but emotions can.

d) Mackie’s error theory would force us into a stance that it would be impossible to live by.

e) None of the above

Answer 1

A) The facts that we use to support our moral judgments are not dependent on our feelings.

Three things most of us think. First, that our moral convictions are beliefs about facts that are independent of our own will or desire or motives (such as the fact that ethnic discrimination is morally wrong) and that our moral convictions are true when they report those facts correctly and false when they do not. Secondly, that these moral beliefs have their own inherent motivational force, that is, that no one really believes that an act is morally compulsory (except, perhaps, if he suffers from some mental pathology) unless he feels at least some real motivational tug towards that act, whatever other, independent motives he might have to choose or avoid it. Thirdly, that no belief in a mind-independent state of affairs can have any inherent motivating force of its own: that, for example, it is only contingently true that my belief that a liquid is a poison moves me to avoid drinking it, as I may not be so moved if I want to die.

But one of the most popular responses to the motivation problem is another, skeptical one: that we abandon the first proposition and treat our moral convictions not as hypotheses about mind-independent moral reality, but as "projections" of motives that we already have. That would explain immediately the close connection between moral conviction and motivation stated in the second proposal in a manner perfectly consistent with the third proposal. However, as it stands, the difficulty in that solution is that we can not believe it. It makes no sense for us to treat our moral convictions as mere projections of emotion rather than as reports of mental - independent moral facts unless we have already decided that our convictions do not have mental - independent moral facts to report, and we can not believe that there are no such mental - independent facts because we can not believe (for example) that genocide will cease to be wicked if it does not happen.