Moral fictionalism, cooperation, and motivation
Gerritsen 2023 raises a good worry about revolutionary moral fictionalism, as advocated in Joyce 2001.
The (revolutionary moral) fictionalist says that our naive moral practice rests on the mistaken assumption that there are mind-independent moral facts. There are no such facts. But this doesn't mean that we should stop caring about morality. It is in our personal interest, according to the fictionalist, to adopt a fiction of morality and continue talking and acting much like before.
Gerritsen points out that there is no good reason to think that the moral fiction that best serves our personal interest would resemble our pre-revolutionary moral beliefs. In particular, it is hard to see how giving moral status to non-human animals or future generations could promote our personal interests.
This seems right. And the problem goes deeper.
Joyce asks what moral fiction we (as group) should adopt, to promote our personal interests. Gerritsen grants that this is the right question. But it isn't.
Compare a Prisoner's Dilemma – one-shot, with purely selfish players. The collective choice that would be best for the group of both players would, obviously, be cooperation. In the original scenario, this means keeping silent and getting a mild prison sentence. That would yield the best total (and average) utility for the two players. But it doesn't follow that each player, individually, should cooperate. In a Prisoner's Dilemma, each player does better by defecting.
So we have to distinguish between the collective action that would best promote the interests of everyone (in some group) and the individual action that would best promote the interest of a given individual (in the group).
The choices we actually face are individual choices. I can't decide what moral fiction you will adopt. I can only decide what I will do. So the practically relevant question isn't what moral fiction we should adopt, but what moral fiction I should adopt, and maybe also what moral fiction I should publicly support, if I have reason to think that this may influence the choice of others.
But if we ask what moral fiction best serves my personal interests (when adopted by me), it's not just non-human animals and future generations that seem to drop out of the picture. Other people in my community share the same fate. The moral fiction that best serves my interests is one according to which I am the ultimate location of moral value: something is good iff it serves me.
If that's right, revolutionary moral fictionalism is even more revolutionary than Gerritsen suggests. It would call for a dramatic change to the content of our moral attitudes.
Not only that. The resulting change would make us all worse off. Morality requires caring about others. The Prisoner's Dilemma illustrates that a community in which people care about each other often fares better than a community in which everyone only cares about themselves. It's better for everyone if there are norms against cheating, free-riding and promise-breaking, even though everyone would be better off if they alone broke those norms.
One might respond that this is only a theoretical problem. Some have argued that in ordinary interactions, cooperative behaviour happens to be in our personal interest – for example, because non-cooperative dispositions are detectable or would be remembered. I don't buy this.
One might also respond that a non-selfish moral fiction is somehow easier to adopt and live by than a selfish moral fiction – perhaps because advocating for a selfish moral fiction is against our interest and it's cognitively hard to live by one fiction while advocating for a different fiction. I don't buy that either.
There's a better response, but it points to a deeper problem with fictionalism.
The better response is that it's not the business of fictionalism to prescribe what we should desire. The fictionalist recommendation is that we should adopt whatever fiction best furthers our desires, whatever these may be. And our desires aren't just selfish. I care about other people, and animals, and future people. I desire that they do well and aren't subject to wanton cruelty. The moral fiction that best furthers these desires won't be selfish; it may well attribute moral value to the well-being of others.
(This would also help with Gerritsen's worry.)
But wait. We need to know why I care about other creatures. After all, I believe that they have moral value. Perhaps my desire for their well-being is grounded in this belief, which the fictionalist wants me to drop (and replace by a fictionalist quasi-belief). If so, we can't hold that desire fixed: it rests on a mistake.
So, do my cooperative desires rest on my moral beliefs? This is a vexed question. The question is especially difficult for the fictionalist, as they are committed to the following two claims.
Moral beliefs are genuine beliefs with a peculiar subject matter. They aren't desire-like attitudes in disguise. This distinguishes fictionalism from expressivism.
Moral beliefs motivate: they affect our desire-like states. Otherwise nothing would be lost (practically speaking) if we simply drop our moral beliefs.
The simplest way to make sense of these claims is to assume that we all have an innate and unchangeable desire to bring about whatever is "morally good", where moral goodness is a peculiar unobservable (and "non-natural") property.
One can imagine agents like this. They resemble people with a deep desire that God's commands are obeyed, whatever these might be: if they believe that God commands fasting on Fridays, they fast and get outraged at anyone who doesn't; if they come to believe that God actually requires eating pretzels on Fridays, they eat pretzels and chastise anyone who doesn't. Agents like this would be "moral fetishists", as described in Smith 1994.
Most of us aren't moral fetishists. Our moral beliefs are more intimately entangled with our desires and reactive attitudes. When I watch a movie about factory farming, I want this practice to be stopped, but not because I think that it lacks a peculiar non-natural property whose presence I desire.
The fictionalist needs an account of how our desires can be divided into those that rest on our (mistaken) moral beliefs and those that don't. I don't see how this can be done.