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Scepticism and Morality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Christopher Cherry
Affiliation:
University of Kent at Canterbury

Extract

In an article called ‘Moral Scepticism’ Professor R. F. Holland displays in a pointed and often impressive way both the virtues and the vices of a tempting approach to certain fundamental issues in moral philosophy. The appeal to sanity and honesty may, when directed towards chronic philosophical perplexity, cease to be a virtue and become the vice of disingenuousness. And when a philosopher writes that ‘no clear idea is available to us of what moral scepticism amounts to’, that moral scepticism would, if it were possible at all, have to be a ‘specially cooked-up affair’ by contrast with other varieties of scepticism, it is hard not to accuse him of just such a vice.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1973

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References

1 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume XLI (1967), 185199.Google Scholar

2 Op. cit., 185.

3 When, and how, he says what he says are crucial too, of course. I have attempted only to sketch one necessary condition of one interpretation of ‘intellectuality’, not to anatomize it—and a fortiori not to set out the sufficient conditions of that interpretation. ‘Vulgarly’, because strictly speaking behaviour can give the lie to nothing, and especially not to sceptical posturings.

4 Even if Holland's thesis were basically correct, it remains puzzling that he should see just one type of past experience—the ‘left holding the baby’ type— as more or less the only source of an alleged intellectual moral scepticism. People deceive themselves for many reasons; and the man who half-acknowledges that he has been habitually responsible for and yet never on the receiving end of misery and exploitation would be as likely (or unlikely) as anyone else to have recourse to the sort of scepticism which Holland brands as spurious. If anything, one is more inclined to surround with sophistry the awareness of harm done to others than harm received from others. At least one has more of a motive.

5 An investigation might be undertaken into the logical limits of coexistence in one and the same subject, not just of intellectual with moral attributes but also of moral attributes with each other. The domain of the intelligible is more extensive than might at first sight be apparent. In addition to the familiar and unremarkable, it will comprehend the incongruous and eccentric. The investigation would be Aristotelian and not Cartesian: for Descartes as for Hume (who saw ‘no contradiction in supposing a desire to producing misery annexed to love, or of happiness to hatred’) the domain simply has no boundaries. Amongst other things, the enquiry would have to distinguish the incongruous from the merely unfamiliar (libertinism conjoined with sour primness is an instance of the first but not the second); and the complementary from the harmonious (marriage between opposites is likely to be profitable, but less likely to be agreeable).

6 For my parallel between moral scepticism and determinism, see in particular ProfessorStrawson, 's Freedom and Resentment (The Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume XLVIII, 1962)Google Scholar. In connection with a general determinist thesis Strawson writes ‘… when the suspension of such an attitude [sc, the personal reactive attitude] or such attitudes occurs in a particular case, it is never the consequence of the belief that the piece of behaviour in question was determined in a sense such that all behaviour might be, and, if determinism is true, all behaviour is, determined in that sense. … In fact no such sense of “determined” as would be required for a general thesis of determinism is ever relevant to our actual suspensions of moral reactive attitudes’ (Ibid, 203). Analogously, no sense of moral scepticism is ever relevant to actual suspensions of the sentiment of humanity. This means, among other things, that moral scepticism is a quite different affair from religious scepticism.