Jonah Bossewitch	PHI 307

Professor Elijah Millgram	October 13, 1994

Who Cares What I Think?

The investigation of morals since Moore has been guided/shaped by the problem of moral authority. It has been assumed/presupposed that if a justification could be found for believing in a moral authority then people would be compelled to act morally. The question then remaining is What is the source of moral authority? It seems as if there are only two categories of answers to this question. Either moral authority comes from outside the subject, or moral authority comes from inside the subject (a third possibility that moral authority comes simultaneously from both the outside and the inside, as with a community, will not be discussed here). However, to understand exactly how the moral authority compels people to act morally requires us to first construct a model of moral reasoning that includes all these components. Once this has been done, we find that even if we can determine the source of moral authority, our problems are just beginning. As analysis of the model will demonstrate, there are still some very tricky issues remaining that need to be resolved.

How are moral judgements made? Although this is an empirical question that has not yet been answered scientifically, it is still helpful to consider a model of how this process might work. This model may provide us with new insights and may also help us find flaws in our reasoning. A plausible model of the process of making a moral judgment was suggested by Kant1. According to Kant, the first step in making a moral judgment, or any judgment for that matter, is forming an internal representation of the external object/action that is being judged. He then imagined a set of formal rules that take a representation as an input and produce a moral evaluation as an output. In order to make a moral evaluation, all you have to do is match the representation to the appropriate rule and the rule will then dictate what the appropriate evaluation is. Exactly what form these rules might take is not really relevant to this investigation. They could be a set of formal statements, they could be some sort of pattern matcher, or a number of other alternatives. What is important is that whatever form the rules assume, there should exist some meta-rule from which all of the other rules are derived. In this model, what we have previously called the moral authority we can now call the justification for believing that this meta-rule is correct. To surmise, a moral judgment is made by first forming an internal representation of the external object/action, then applying the rules that are ultimately justified by the moral authority, and then determining the evaluation that the application of the rules yields.

Is the search for moral authority a specific instance of a more general problem? Once we recognize that what we have been calling the "moral authority" is actually the ultimate justification of our set of moral beliefs (it actually justifies our meta-belief which in turn justifies our whole set of moral beliefs) it becomes apparent that there is a question that we must answer before we can specify what constitutes a moral authority. What constitutes a justification for any belief? As it turns out, this question is more difficult to answer than we might hope. In fact, the problem of justifying beliefs was addressed by Aristotle2 and has not yet been resolved. While much jargon has been introduced in relation to this problem (Foundationalism, Coherentism, Contextualism, etc . . . ) they are unnecessary in understanding the fundamental nature of the problem. Bonjour3 shows that there are only four possible ways that a belief can be ultimately be justified: (1) The belief is justified by another belief which is not justifiable; (2) The belief is justified by an infinite chain of other beliefs; (3) The belief is justified by a chain of beliefs that are eventually justified by the original belief (circular); (4) The belief is justified by another belief which does not need to be justified (pyramid). Each of these methods of justification have distinct flaws which will not be addressed here. What is important to note is that the question of moral authority cannot even be addressed until the issue of justification has been resolved.

Is the problem of justification the only difficulty we have in understanding morality?