Begging the Question and Justification

As previous posts indicate, we're discussing a piece by Russ Shafer-Landau in my class this term.

He there discusses an objection to moral realism involving moral disagreement.  Consider a case in which two agents are embroiled in a moral dispute that seems intractable--neither can convince the other to change her mind.  Shafer-Landau contends that one agent could be justified in believing that X is wrong even if her defense of the view that X is wrong begs the question.  As he put it, "...one's belief might continue to be justified, even if defending it to others has one begging questions."

This is only part of his reply to the objection and I don't consider the point I'm about to make to be much of a criticism of Shafer-Landau's response.  Indeed, I think he successfully shows that the objection is extremely weak.  I'm here simply expressing my confusion and hoping that others will weigh in on the issues that I'm about to raise.

Suppose that an agent believes that slavery is wrong and she believes this for various reasons (e.g., that people have a right not to be enslaved, that slavery is not conducive to overall utility, that it violates the categorical imperative, etc.).  Suppose that her opponent does not believe that slavery is wrong and she believes this for various other reasons (e.g., that some groups of individuals are morally inferior to others, that there's no such thing as a right not to be enslaved, that both utilitarianism and deontology are false, etc.).  So we have a moral disagreement about slavery.  And we might imagine that neither party will budge.

Of course, this case is distinct form the one which Shafer-Landau apparently has in mind.  His case (it seems from his very brief discussion) is one in which one of the agents is only able to offer question-begging arguments when trying to convince her opponent.  His claim is that such an agent can nevertheless be justified in thinking that, say, slavery is wrong.

Now, what would justify her belief that slavery is wrong?  Is it these question-begging arguments?  How can a question-begging argument confer justification?  One of my students suggested that such arguments are only question-begging when presented to the other agent.  And when "presented" to the agent herself, they are not question-begging.  I'm not sure what to make of this suggestion.  It seems to me that arguments are question-begging in virtue of their structure, not in virtue of the audience.  (Well, maybe that's not quite right, since begging the question is taken to be an informal fallacy---But one way to think about arguments that beg the question is as a type of circular argument where an explicit or implicit premise of the argument entails the conclusion and so the argument should be seen as entirely unsatisfactory.)  So, again, why think that the agent is justified in believing that slavery is wrong if she isn't able to offer anything but question-begging arguments?  Perhaps she could be justified because, on one way of thinking about them, question-begging arguments are valid.  Here's an example of a question-begging argument:

(1) Y.
(2) Therefore, Y.

It's valid, but is it the sort of argument that could confer justification (even when you "offer" the argument to yourself)?  I suppose you might be confident of the truth of Y and you could think that you are justified in believing Y on the basis of such an argument.  But the question is whether you could actually be justified in believing Y on the basis of this question-begging argument.

The case I gave seems like a paradigm case of moral disagreement.  I take it that what usually happens in such cases is that agent A finds agent B's arguments unpersuasive because she thinks B's arguments are not sound (and vice versa).  Of course, an agent might be justified in believing that slavery is wrong even if she cannot provide reasons that her opponent finds compelling.  Her reasons might be good ones even if her opponent doesn't agree that they are good.  Of course, the reasons the agents in my case have for their beliefs don't involve arguments that beg the question.

But Shafer-Landau's point is about a different kinds of case than the one I've offered.  It's a peculiar instance of moral disagreement and I'm having trouble making sense of how an agent can be justified in believing something when she is stuck with only question-begging arguments.

Our conversation in class got cut short and I found it really interesting, so I thought I'd open it up to folks reading this blog.  Comments on these issues are most welcome.        

A Reply to Shafer-Landau

**This is from guest blogger, Aaron F.**

In, “Ethics as Philosophy: A Defense of Ethical Nonnaturalism” (Ethical Theory: An Anthology 62-71), Russ Shafer-Landau defends ethical nonnaturalism. His first step is to convince us of moral realism which he defines with a set of three theses. They are, “(i) moral judgments are beliefs that are meant to describe the way things really are; (ii) some of these beliefs are true, and (iii) moral judgments are made true in some way other than by virtue of the attitudes taken towards their content by any actual or idealized human agent” (62). Thus, moral realism as defined here is incompatible with emotivism, subjectivism, and error theory. It may not be immediately clear that error theory is ruled out (it was not to me) since one might think that a statement such as, “there are no true moral statements,” is a negative moral principle. However, since moral principles must be about what is right or wrong, good or bad, etc., and the thesis of error theory is about what is true (or, in this case, false), the claim that there are no moral truths is not itself a moral statement. With his in place, he presents the following argument.

 1. Ethics is a species of inquiry; philosophy is its genus.
 2. A species inherits the essential traits of its genus.
 3. One essential trait of philosophy is the realistic status of its truths.
 4. Therefore, moral realism is true. (62)

The first two premises are taken for granted (it is difficult to see how they could be false), and Shafer-Landau argues for the third with the remainder of the article. However, I believe that the argument is not complete. In particular, it does not follow from the premises that error theory is false. This also means, of course, that the premises do not entail the conclusion.
 

Error theory is true just in case all moral judgments are false, and all moral judgments would be false if there were no basic ethical principles. Let us see if we can make error theory consistent with premises one to three. We are told by premise one and premise three that philosophy is a genus of inquiry whose truths have realistic status. I find that the most natural way to interpret this is to think of philosophy as a discipline whose
aim is to discover the elements of a set P of philosophical truths and principles. Then, species of philosophy attempt to discover the content of subsets of P.

But it is the case that every set has the empty set as a subset. Hence, it is possible that the subset E of ethical
truths and principles is empty. If this is so, then all ethical statements will be false because there will be no principles according to which anything can be judged to be good or bad, right or wrong, etc. As for consistency, that E be empty clearly does not conflict with premise two. Premise one simply says that E is contained in P,which is true if E is the empty set, and premise three only mentions the status of elements of P. Hence, it does not follow that E is not empty, which means that the conclusion of the argument is not entailed by its premises.

The solution to this problem is obvious. Simply add two premises: first, “‘such-and-such’ is a true ethical principle,” and second,“therefore the set of ethical truths and principles is not empty.” Given these premises, and the ones in the original argument, it would follow that moral realism is true. However, we are now required to have at least one true moral principle. Moreover, it seems that we must have at least one realistic moral principle (in the sense of moral realism), for if it were, for instance, a subjective moral principle, premise three of the original argument would disqualify it as a potential element of E.  On the other hand, one might solve the problem by presenting a non-set theoretic interpretation of the relationship between philosophy and ethics. However, I do not know what such an interpretation would be.

Is the Realistic Status of its Truths an Essential Trait of Philosophy?

**This is from guest blogger, Lawrence D.**

Russ Schafer-Landau, in "Ethics as Philosophy: A Defense of Ethical Nonnaturalism," sets out to defend moral realism against a number of criticisms. 

His primary, positive argument is as follows:

1.  Ethics is a species of inquiry; philosophy is its genus.
2. A species inherits the essential traits of its genus.
3. One essential trait of philosophy is the realistic status of its truths.
4. Therefore moral realism is true.

While I find this argument to be logical, I still feel that something is wrong with it. I think all he has managed to do is prove moral realism is possible, not that it's necessarily true. I think the problem here is with premise 3 (which he acknowledges is likely to be the premise most contested). I think philosophical truths have a possible realistic status, not necessarily a flat-out realistic status. I think it’s possible to philosophize about entirely non-real things in a manner that is coherent and rational, and if this is true then his argument does nothing to prove the validity of moral realism, only to prove that it is possible with the bounds of this argument. Ancient Greek philosophers disagreed upon the natural substance of things; some claimed it was water, others fire, or some mysterious Apeiron. They all seemed to be making rational arguments on why they thought each substance to be the foundation, and yet today we believe them all to be wrong. If it is possible to philosophize about non-real things, then to say that ethics is a species of philosophy does not do anything to prove its realness. While I think his arguments against moral disagreement and the causal inefficacy of moral facts are effective for dismissing those arguments, I think the argument still stands simply that entirely rational arguments within philosophy can be made about non-real things, and thus his general argument does not prove moral realism to be true.