An Error in the Error Theory

On the 16th and 17th of November I posted here discussions of the "error theory" in meta-ethics [hereafter ET in ME]. This is nihilism by a somewhat fancier name. It is the view that our statements about right and wrong mean what they sound like they mean to untutored ears, they mean that we are making claims of knowledge about actions, situations, duties, etc. -- but they are always wrong, because we never really have such knowledge.

I put off the matter of my own evaluation of error theory. But here we go. Note that a key argument is simply how ":queer" a sort of thing a moral fact is if it exists. Why does the error theorist think moral judgments are inherently "queer"? Mackie put it this way, to say that they are knowable facts is also to say that they are "intrinsically action guiding," independent of the "desires or purposes" of the one who is guided.

Of course it is open to the opponent of ET/ME to say "it doesn't seem queer to me." This is a fair response to the simple argument from perceived queerness, but it gets us nowhere further than a stand-off. To get further, let us consider the fact of emergent properties. It is a fact, and a familiar one, that properties emerge from a compound that were not predictable from even perfect knowledge of the elements. Take those words in a literal chemist's sense, or an a metaphorical extended sense.

In a literal sense, consider water. It has the peculiar property of expanding when the freezes. Chemists are familiar with lots of other liquids that become solid at given temperatures. They all contract when they freeze. Water, though, expands. Fill up a glass of water and leave it in your freezer overnight. When you awake, you will have a block of ice and a broken glass. Why did the ice take up more volume than had the water? The human species has been familiar with water forever, and systematic chemistry of the sort now practiced has been around for three centuries now. But why is water the only compound that expands as it freezes? No one really knows. It just is.

So there are qualities that emerge from the combination of elements, and sometimes they are unpredictable qualities. According to some plausible views, life itself is an example. The self-replication of molecules became possible only once molecular matter has compounded and complexified itself through whatever were then the conditions of the planet. Thus this compounding and complexification must (again, on a plausible view) have passed a critical threshold and ... voila! certain molecules started making copies of themselves with the assistance of raw materials. One might call the result a "queer" property if one likes, but one can hardly call it an error to speak of life as an object of knowledge.

Of course if you dear reader are a Theist with a creationist view of life you will not agree with that account. Or you might be a non-theist who believes that the universe has always existed and it has always hosted life, which periodically colonizes new planets. My point above is simply that there is nothing illogical about entertaining the possibility that life (a) had a beginning, (b) which can be explained without the invocation of the supernatural and (c) which involves properties that emerge from the unpredictable complications of the underlying chemistry.

ET/ME is in error simply because it excludes a quite analogous possibility. This is an exclusion for which there is no good argument. What Mackie calls the "supervenience" of moral facts doesn't seem so queer at all, I submit, if we keep such analogies in mind.

My own cognitivism is simply this: the view that natural facts sometimes combine in a way that would a priori have been unpredictable in order to create good and bad, which in turn make possible right or wrong.

With that much said, I believe that cognitivists can go about their/our business in trying to figure out what these emergent properties are, without worrying about any nihilistic wand of wrongness being waved above the whole enterprise.