Recently, (November 22, 2017) the international criminal tribunal at the Hague sentenced Ratko Mladic to life imprisonment for genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws or customs of war.
The charges arose in connection with events in the former Yugoslavia through the first half of the 1990s. For example, in July 1995 troops under Mladic command overran UN established safe areas in Srebrenica and Zepa. More than 8,000 Moslem Bosniaks who had sought sanctuary there were murdered on his orders.
Not long ago I discussed in this blog the "error" theory of meta-ethics, the view that ethical statements try to assert some moral realities, but they inevitably fail because there are no such realities.
One argument sometimes advanced for the error theory is an argument from dissension about morality. The underlying idea is this: when a subject is important to a lot of human beings for a long time, and thus comes under intense study, we would expect disagreements, but we would also expect that over time these disagreements would lessen. Some views would be undermined by experience or by all this inquiry, the remaining views would be found to have some features in common, and people would learn to build on the common features. This happens (so one might argue) in both physics and economics, because there is an underlying reality in the physical world and in the world of traders, producers, consumers etc, which limits the extent of disagreements sustainable over time.
Yet (the argument continues) this reasonable expectation is contrary to what we see in the realm of morality, where disagreements are stubbornly persistent. Thus we are entitled to conclude that moral disagreements are different from disagreements over, say, physics or economics. Moral disagreements are disagreements over something that doesn’t exist. They are disagreements in which all sides are in error.
I think that Mladic's actions serve as a rebuke to that argument. His conviction, and the very existence of the tribunal that secured it, are evidence that there has been a convergence on the proposition that some things are wrong, that using war as a cover for the killing of non-combatants, for example is wrong. The dissension in these matters is not quite so great as the premise of the argument I just paraphrased would require.
Moral judgments, like aesthetic judgments, fall in between matters of fact and matters of taste. By "matter of fact," I refer to science; putting the brain-in-a-vat question aside, scientific findings are matters of fact about reality, about which one can be right or wrong. By "matter of taste," I refer to likes and dislikes, such as chocolate or vanilla, about which one cannot argue.
ReplyDeleteMoral judgments and aesthetic judgments are in between matters of fact and matters of taste because, although they are not matters of fact, they are based on shared premises about which we can reason and therefore argue about. Moral judgments share the premise, for example, that pain and death are undesirable and must be justified before they may be inflicted. Starting from such premises, we can argue whether particular conduct is moral or immoral. Thus, moral realities do not exist in the sense that scientific realities exist, but disagreements can lessen. Few people, for example, any longer believe that slavery is moral. At this very moment, a consensus that sexual harassment is immoral is growing.
Christopher, in your third paragraph, "asset" should be "assert."
Henry, thanks for the copyedit. I've fixed that. Also thanks for your thoughts on moral and aesthetic judgments. I'm preparing a ms that will discuss this issue at greater length and with greater rigor than I've ever attempted before. I'll be making it generally available very soon.
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