WHAT ARE COGNITIVISTS DOING WHEN THEY DO NORMATIVE

ETHICS?

Frank JacksonAustralian National University

1.

My answer to our question is the picture of moral reasoning that comes tous frommoral functionalism. I’ll say what that is near the end. It will be a certainamount of ‘saying over again’ (but quickly).1 My main aim in this paper is tosurvey the various possible answers to our question as a preliminary to advanc-ing moral functionalism as the only cognitivist theory left standing. I grant thatmoral functionalism has its problems; so does physicalism as a philosophy ofmind. Nevertheless, most of us are physicalists of some stripe about the mind.The reason lies in our conviction that we have no choice. However hard we findthe qualia problem for physicalism, we hold that there must be a solution to itbecause the alternatives to physicalism are so unattractive.2 It would be toomuch to hope that I will be able to make the alternatives to moral functionalismas unattractive as the various dualist theories of mind, but I hope all the same tomake them seem pretty unattractive.

I start by saying how we will be understanding cognitivism. This enablesus to give a schematic account of the remit of normative ethics given cognitiv-ism. This schematic account allows us to identify three general ways cognitiv-ists can go in seeking a normative ethic. I argue that only one way withstandsexamination and that this way leads us into the moral functionalist camp.

2.

Some define cognitivism as the doctrine that ethical judgements are aspecies of belief, as opposed to, as it might be, a species of desire.3 This is

Philosophical Issues, 15, Normativity, 2005

not very helpful. Aren’t ‘judgement’ and ‘belief’ all but synonyms? Thedoctrine is better stated as that there are ethical judgements, perhaps withthe addition of ‘properly so called’ to reinforce the point, and maybe thatwas what was meant all along. But what is it to hold that there are ethicaljudgements? There is a distinctive kind of psychological state that underpinsthe considered production of sentences like ‘Abortion is wrong’, ‘You oughtto keep your promises, other things being equal’, ‘It is sometimes right torestrict freedom of speech’ and so on. This state type is certainly judgement-like. For example, we express its tokens in indicative sentences and regardthem as matters for debate and reasoned consideration in a way that a likingfor vanilla over strawberry ice cream is not. But the key question forcognitivism is whether these states are judgement-like in the sense of beingstates that represent things as being thus and so. To hold that there areethical judgements (properly so called) is to hold that the states that under-pin the production of the sentences listed above and their kind are statesthat represent that things are thus and so. And these judgements will be trueif and only if things are as they are being represented to be. The cognitivsts’contention, then, is that the psychological state that underpins the produc-tion of ‘Abortion is wrong’ represents that abortion is a certain way, and istrue if and only if abortion is the way it is being represented to be. Mutatismutandis for other ethical judgements.

This characterisation implies nothing about the subjectivism versusobjectivism debate in ethics. Maybe the way things are being representedto be is quite independent of the judger’s—or anyone’s—attitudes, actual oridealised; but equally maybe it is not. Our characterisation also impliesnothing about realism in ethics. The belief that God exists is a representa-tional state but that does not imply that God exists. Equally, a cognitivistmay hold that there are ethical judgements while holding that how theyrepresent things to be is invariably mistaken, the only ethical judgementsthat are correct being ones like that x is not wrong (right) for the uninter-esting reason that x fails to be either right or wrong. We will, however,presume that our cognitivists are realists, that they hold that the waysethical judgements represent things to be are sometimes the way things infact are.

It turns out to be helpful to put what we have just said in the languageof properties. There is a wide use of ‘property’ that covers any way thingsmight be, including relational ways and ways that are not especially unified.There must be some degree of unification though. But the degree of uni-fication may vary greatly from case to case. All that is required is that therebe a pattern that allows projection. There is no implication that we aredealing with properties in the sense of that which carves at nature’s joints oranything like that. On this usage, we can express the view that there areethical judgements as the view that the psychological states that underpinthe production of our sample sentences and their kin represent that some

Cognitivists and Normative Ethics? 95

action, say, has such and such an ethical property. For instance, when wejudge (or say) that abortion is wrong we are representing that abortion hasthe property of being wrong, and our judgement (or saying) is correct if andonly if abortion has the property of being wrong.

3.

We can now give our schematic account of normative ethics from theperspective of cognitivism.

For the cognitivist, abortion is wrong just if abortion has the propertyof being wrong. But the moral status of abortion is an issue in appliedethics. What cognitivists seek when they do normative ethics is some generalaccount of how it comes to be that abortion has or does not have theproperty of being wrong, an account that is general in the sense that wecan apply it to settle, or at least bear on, the distribution of moral propertieselsewhere; in this sense, the account gives the reason abortion is wrong. Ifthe reason abortion is wrong is because it involves the intentional killing ofthe innocent, that implies that a whole range of actions involving theintentional killing of the innocent are wrong. If the reason abortion issometimes right is because sometimes abortion maximises happiness, thisimplies that actions that maximise happiness are right. If the reason abor-tion is sometimes right is because sometimes it would be the choice of a fullyinformed person of virtuous character, this implies that actions that are thechoice of fully informed persons of virtuous character are right. And so on.

Now to say it less roughly. The extent to which claiming that x has suchand such a moral property because it is so and so commits to actions otherthan x which are so and so having the same moral property is a very liveissue in normative ethics.4 Some say that if (if) we choose the ‘so and so’carefully enough we can arrive at something exceptionless: every actionwhich is so and so will be alike in having the moral property in question.Once upon a time this was close to orthodoxy but recently some insist thatthe best we can ever hope for is that so and so is generally relevant to thepossession of a moral property, but nothing exceptionless is possible. As amatter of principle, there are always defeaters. There will be an illuminatinganswer as to why x is wrong (right), an illuminating answer that goesbeyond saying that x is wrong (right) because it is wrong (right). But thereis no F such that 1) ‘x is wrong (right) because it is F’ and 2) ‘Every actwhich is F is wrong (right)’ are both true. There is, on this view, always adefeating G such that some act which is F and G is right (wrong).5

We can say a little more about normative ethics without begging toomany live questions. Very many hold that ethical properties supervene onnon-moral properties. Sometimes they do this while holding that there issome reasonably clear distinction between the moral and the non-moral. We

96 Frank Jackson

can all agree that being right and being bad are moral properties and thatbeing heavy and being an electron are non-moral properties. Our theoristsgo further and insist that we can sensibly divide in a principled way allproperties and not just the paradigm cases I have just mentioned, into themoral versus the non-moral category. We will not need to take a position onthis contentious position. For us, it will be enough if there is some interestingdivision of properties into two categories, A and B, such that 1) all the non-controversially moral properties belong to A, 2) all the non-controversiallynon-moral properties belong to B; and 3) any two acts that agree in regard toevery property in B (there is no property in B such that one act has it and theother lacks it) agree in regard to every property in A.

The claim that we can so divide properties is to some extent controver-sial. But we cannot steer clear of all controversy and the claim is widelyaccepted and we will be taking it for granted in what follows. I will oftenexpress the claim by saying that moral properties supervene on non-moralproperties and sometimes put this, borrowing from discussions of super-venience in the philosophy of mind, by saying that an act’s non-moralproperties determine without remainder an act’s moral properties. But it isimportant to appreciate that this is a simplifying manner of speaking. All Iwill be using in the argumentation is the claim as expressed above, whichtakes no stand on how precise the distinction may or may not be betweenmoral and non-moral properties.

I can now give our schematic account of normative ethics for cognitiv-ists. The, or anyway one, very important aim of a normative ethic is to findtruths that link an act’s moral properties with its non-moral properties,truths which are as informative and general as is possible. In what followswe will not be concerned with the particular offerings from one or anothernormative ethic (though we say something at the end about how to under-stand the different normative ethics from the moral functionalist viewpoint).We won’t be discussing the merits or otherwise of, for example: ‘if an actmaximises expected happiness, it is morally right’, or ‘if an act falls underone prima facie duty and does not violate another prima facie duty, it ought tobe done’. We will be concerned rather with the kinds of connections that anormative ethic might affirm in its search for interesting, as general as possibletruths linking the moral and the non-moral.More particularly, to keepmatterswithin bounds, we will be concerned with the class of right acts in our worldand asking, in very general terms, how their property of being right mightrelate to the non-moral properties they possess. We will look at the threepossible views about the general nature of this connection, seeing the issueseach raises and, to anticipate the direction of the discussion, end up suggestingthat the only viable position leads on to moral functionalism.

The three possible positions can be labelled as follows: extra propertypositions, no extra property positions without patterning in the non-moral,and no extra property positions with patterning in the non-moral.

Cognitivists and Normative Ethics? 97

4.

An extra property position holds that in common to all the right actsthere is, in addition to their many and various non-moral properties, anadditional property—that of being right. It is a position in the metaphysicsof ethics of a broadly anti-Occamist, Moorean flavour. How does this extraproperty relate to the non-moral properties of right acts?

One answer is that the connection is contingent. It could not plausibly beheld that the connection is contingent by being causal. No-one thinks there isa small time lag between an act’s acquiring the relevant non-moral propertiesand its becoming right. But the view might be that it is like the connectionbetween breaking the four minute mile on 6 May 1954 and being the first tobreak the four minute mile. No causation, no time lag, but a contingentconnection all the same. However, breaking the four minute mile on 6 May1954 did not determine without remainder being the first to do so. It had tobe conjoined with the failures that went before 6 May 1954. By contrast,supervenience tells us that an act’s non-moral properties do determine with-out remainder an act’s being right. Nothing more needs to obtain. Here it isimportant that we read an act’s non-moral properties widely, as encompass-ing the relevant non-moral relations the act has to other happenings in theworld. The thesis that the moral supervenes on the non-moral is not plausibleif one refuses to count, for example, the resulting equity or inequity of adistribution of goods as a non-moral property of some act, but whether aresulting distribution of goods is equitable or not is a highly relational, globalproperty of an act. But if we include all an act’s non-moral properties widelyconstrued, the determination without remainder thesis is very plausible.

This means that the only plausible version of the extra property positionholds that the connection between the non-moral properties of the set ofright acts and their having the allegedly extra property of being right is anecessary one—the necessitation holds precisely because, from super-venience, it follows that nothing more needs to obtain than non-moralnature to ensure moral nature.6 But now we have a raft of familiar prob-lems. The view is anti-Humean (some will care more about this thanothers). The epistemology of the position is very obscure. The extra prop-erty does no causing and is not needed to explain our use of the word ‘right’to describe the act. Given this, how could we ever be entitled to believe in itsinstantiation? Some argue that rightness is no worse off than truth in thisregard. Truth causes nothing but we believe in it. The analogy is, however,not a happy one. If you are a correspondence theorist about truth, it is falsethat truth causes nothing. When seeing rain makes me say that someone’sclaim that it would rain is true, I observe the correspondence and am respond-ing to it. If you are some kind of deflationist, what does the causing—therain—is all that the truth of its raining amounts to. For deflationists, its being

98 Frank Jackson

true that it is raining is nothing more than its raining. Either way, theattribution of truth gets a causal underpinning.

5.

The no extra property without patterning in the non-moral positionagrees with the conclusion we have just reached that positing an extraproperty is metaphysically implausible. The property of being right sharedby all right acts is not an extra property over and above their various non-moral properties; to hold that it is would be double-counting. The positioninsists, however, that there is no pattern in the non-moral properties of allright acts (or if there is, it is an accident and not the pattern that makes theacts right). What does this mean? It does not mean there is no simple or easyway to grasp pattern. It means that there is no pattern full stop. Look ashard as you like at the non-moral properties, you will never find anythingprojectible; it is all a mess at the level of the non-moral. As it is sometimesput, there is no shape at the non-moral level; you need moral concepts tofind the shape.7 We can, perhaps, think of a moral property as an infinitedisjunction of non-moral properties but it will be a patternless disjunction.8

A familiar objection to the no pattern view is that it conflicts with acentral feature of ethical reasoning. When we come to different moraljudgments in cases that are similar in non-moral respects, the obligation ison us to cite a relevant non-moral difference. This is the feature of moralreasoning famously exploited by Peter Singer when he links speciesism tosexism, racism and chauvinism.9 We may or may not agree with his con-clusion that meat eating is of a piece with sexism, racism and chauvinismbut it is very plausible that we are obliged to identify the relevant non-moraldifference between the cases if we wish to dissent. How so if there is nopattern in the non-moral properties of right acts?

Iwant, however, topress adifferentpoint.10The talkof levels ismisleading inthe ethical context. Aggregations can display patterns that aremissing at the levelof that which is aggregated. Houses are alike in ways it is hard to put into wordsbut which we all latch onto quite quickly when we master the word ‘house’. (Idon’t mean we have no words for the pattern. I mean we would have troublecoming up with a neat statement that covered all bases.) The alikeness does nothold of their parts, however. It emerges when the parts are assembled aright.Similarly, faces are alike and different in ways that do not hold of their bits. If bylevels, we mean levels of aggregation, we should all agree that there can bepatterns at higher levels that are missing at lower levels. This, however, is notthe casewith actions and their properties. The entities which have the property ofbeing right are the very same ones as those that have the non-moral properties,namely, a certain class of actions (and characters, motives, laws etc. but we arefocusing on actions). But now the difficulty in the no extra property without

Cognitivists and Normative Ethics? 99

patterning position is clear. Either there is or there isn’t a pattern that the rightacts fall under. If there isn’t, there is noproperty of being right.Wehave a ragbag,not a class of actionswith a commonproperty. If there is a pattern, ex hypothesi itis not in the non-moral properties. Ergo, we must have an extra property—thepattern that exists but not in the non-moral, contrary to hypothesis. The samegoes for the appeal to moral concepts. It is inconsistent with the view underdiscussion. Ifmoral concepts deliver a pattern in the non-moral, there is a patternin the non-moral—the one delivered—contrary to the claim that there is no suchpattern. If, on the other hand, moral concepts deliver a pattern in the right actsbut not in their non-moral properties, we have an extra property view. The extraproperty is the pattern that obtains though not in the non-moral.

The key point against the view under discussion can be put as a destructivedilemma. Either there is a pattern common to all the right acts or there isn’t. Ifthere isn’t, there is no property of being right. Properties and patterns are twosides of the same coin. If there is, and the claim is that there is no pattern in thenon-moral properties, the pattern can only be an extra property.

6.

The position that remains as the only tenable one is the no extraproperty with patterning in the non-moral. This position agrees with theno pattern view that the property of being right shared by all right acts isnot an extra property to be added to their non-moral properties; that wouldbe double counting. However, it insists that there is a pattern in the non-moral properties. It may be a simple pattern: maximising happiness orhaving some simple relation to a list of prima facie duties or being com-manded by God or whatever. It may be a moderately complex one likehaving the property that fills the rightness role in folk morality (more onthis later in the discussion of moral functionalism). It may be a highlycomplex one that takes years of training and considerable moral sensitivityto appreciate. The details don’t matter here. What matters is that there is apattern in the non-moral properties in the sense of something projectiblethat unifies the right acts, and that it is the property of being right. If itwasn’t, we’d have an extra property view.

As this is the only tenable position of the three, we can conclude that forcognitivists the task, or anyway one important task, of normative ethics is tofind the various patterns in the non-moral to identify with the variousethical properties. We cognitivists seek a series of theses of the form:

being right¼ being such and such a pattern in the non-moral

being good¼ being so and so a pattern in the non-moral

. . .

100 Frank Jackson

Is this reductionism in some worrying sense? It is hard for me to say as I findthe strength of feeling sometimes displayed against reductionism puzzling. Ican say this much however. As they stand, rafts of property identities of thiskind do not imply that ethical sentences can be analysed in non-moralterms, which is the kind of reductionist position in ethics many are anxiousto distance themselves from. However, it should be noted that it is hard tosee what cognitivists could achieve that is important by their own lights byinsisting that ethical sentences cannot be analysed in non-moral terms. Forcognitivists, the role of ethical sentences is to represent how things are, andthey do this by ascribing ethical properties to actions (well, the simpleethical sentences do and that is enough for our point). But if ethical proper-ties are patterns in the non-moral, all there is to say about ethical nature canbe said using the right words for those non-moral patterns. So there existsentences framed entirely in non-moral terms that do exactly the job ethicalsentences have on the cognitivist picture. How can it matter too muchwhether or not we have an analysis on one or another account of analysis?

It has been put to me in discussion that the thought is that we cannotfind the non-moral words to do the job. Although ethical properties arepatterns in the non-moral, which patterns they are cannot be given in non-moral words. This is an interesting suggestion.11 But it is not a suggestionanyone who seeks the rafts of identity sentences can make: they must holdthat the words on the RHS of these sought-for sentences give the patterns innon-moral words.

7.

How are we to carry out the search for the raft of true identities of thekind cognitivists need to make a normative ethic? No extra property withpatterning in the non-moral theorists—the theorists with the correct theoryif what we have said so far is right and as we will from now on assume—must see this search as part of the theory of reference and not as part of aninvestigation of what our world is like. Despite the fact that, given cognitiv-ism, the question of whether some act is right is a question about how thingsare, in particular about how that act is, the question of which pattern in thenon-moral is being right is not a question about what our world is like. It isinstead a question in the theory of reference of our term ‘right’ (or of ourconcept, but we will develop the argument in terms of the word). The reasonis that we are dealing with a no extra property view. Given a completeinventory of all the patterns that there are in the non-moral, exactly thewrong way to look at the question now before us is as the question as towhich feature in addition to those inventoried is rightness. There is no inaddition about it. Rightness is there in the inventory. That is what no extraproperty views hold. The task that remains is rather to say which of the

Cognitivists and Normative Ethics? 101

patterns is rightness, and that task is not, had better not be, a matter ofadding to the account of how things are. All it can be is saying which of theinventoried patterns is named by our term ‘right’ (or falls under the conceptof rightness).

We have reached the conclusion that normative ethics is inextricablybound up with the theory of reference. This makes things hard because thetheory of reference is so controversial. Must we adjudicate the debatebetween, say, descriptivism and the causal theory before we can take thenext step? In a sense yes, but I think things are not as bad as one might thinkand for a reason Kripke gives. Here is the crucial passage:

The picture that leads to the cluster-of-descriptions theory is something like

this: . . . one determines the reference for himself by saying—‘By ‘‘Godel’’ I shall

mean the man, whoever he is, who proved the incompleteness of arithmetic’.

Now you can do this if you want to. There’s nothing really preventing it. You can

just stick to that determination. If that’s what you do, then if Schmidt dis-

covered the incompleteness of arithmetic you do refer to him when you say,

‘Godel did such and such’.12

Kripke’s (surely correct) point is that we implicitly decided not to use‘Godel’ for the person who proved the theorem: ‘implicitly’ because therewere no meetings to discuss the matter, and ‘decided’ because we had achoice. But we could have used ‘Godel’ as short for the person who provedthe theorem. The debate between the causal theory and the descriptiontheory of reference is not over what must be the case. It is over what we infact use certain words for. It is an empirical issue about how we use propernames whether or not the description theory is correct for them, not a deepissue about reference per se.13 The same goes for names of natural kinds like‘water’. It is plausible that we use ‘water’ for the natural kind common tocertain exemplars of our acquaintance but we could have used it in such away that it refers to XYZ on Twin Earth.

This makes life easier for us in the following sense. We do not need toadjudicate the deep question of the correct theory of reference. We only(only!?) need to adjudicate the empirical question of what we in fact usemoral terms for, and in a way that allows us to see how they pick outpatterns in the non-moral.

8.

What can we say about how the moral terms are, as a matter ofempirical fact, used, and can we say it in a way that delivers patterns inthe non-moral to be the properties picked out by moral terms? The beautyof moral functionalism is that it allows us to do both jobs at once in aplausible way. Here is how the story goes, in outline.

102 Frank Jackson

It is plausible that our mastery of moral notions is our mastery of anetwork of interlocking concepts. How best to describe the network is notimportant here; what matters is that there is a network to be mastered whenwe master the moral vocabulary. Why is this plausible? Think of what youwould say to someone who did not appreciate such things as: that there issome close connection between goodness and rightness, between rights andduty, between conceding a right to do x and allowing x to be done, betweenthe propriety of punishment and the punished being guilty, that equitymatters for what ought to be, that morality connects intimately with action,that there is a non-accidental connection between what justice requires andwhat ought to be done, that the demands of morality have a special status,that there is close connection between an act’s having awful results andbeing wrong, and so on. Isn’t there only one thing to say to such a person,that they simply don’t get it? There is a way of conceptualising our world,the moral way, that has passed them by. Or think of the way we display ourgrasp of the network when we argue in such familiar ways as: ‘People have aright to free speech. Therefore we ought not to support censorship exceptwhen there are very bad consequences like the promotion of racial hatred’.Here we have an interplay between the notions of a right, what ought to besupported, and bad consequences.

I could give many more examples with lots of detail but there would belittle point. Everyone reading this paper will know of suitable examplestaken from leaders in serious newspapers, the last dinner party argumentabout Iraq, the discussions of equity and tenure policy at departmentalmeetings, their own reflections on important decisions, and so on. Whatmatters for the argument of this paper is that these examples make the pointthat a grasp of the interconnections that underpin moral debate are part andparcel of understanding the language of morality.

Of course, the precise interpretation of every item on our list is contest-able. Consequentialists give a somewhat deflationary reading to thedemands of equity; the connection between moral judgement and action isread very differently by internalists and externalists about morality; theproblems with punishing the innocent are treated very differently by differ-ent theorists; and so on. All the same, the significance of each item is shownby the fact that it has to be debated. Consequentialists downplay equity andrights, but all sides agree that a major topic for them is to justify theirdownplaying, and the idea that even the most enthusiastic utilitarian couldsimply ignore the issue about punishing the innocent would be regarded asbizarre. Each item is, if you like, a compulsory question on the ethicsagenda. Everyone has to make some sort of good sense out of each ofthem. That is why a standard way of objecting to a moral theory is toargue that it fails that test for one or another item on the list—and how elsecould this be a (the?) standard way unless something like the network viewwere correct?14

Cognitivists and Normative Ethics? 103

Moral functionalism is the view that to be right is to have the propertythat fills the rightness role, and so on mutatis mutandis for all the moralproperties. The analogy is with functionalism in the philosophy of mind,where to be in pain, say, is to be in the state that plays the pain role. Thisallows us to identify each moral property with a pattern in the non-moral byexploiting the Lewis-Carnap-Ramsey method for defining theorecticalterms.15 To sketch the familiar story. Let T (M1, . . . , Mn) be the sentencethat gives the network, where the ‘Mi’s are all the moral terms. We think ofMi as defined by its place in ‘T’, so that to be Mi is to be that which is in thei-th place. That is to say, y is Mi iff (Ex1) . . . (Exn) [y has xi & T (x1, . . . , xn)],where each xj is in Mj’s place in T. As the RHS of this biconditionalcontains no occurrences of any Mj, the network story specifies in non-moral terms what it takes to be right, good, just and so on. We have theneeded identification of moral properties in terms of patterns in the non-moral.

We also have a potential ambiguity. In the philosophy of mind case, theambiguity is over what to identify pain, for example, with. Some want to saythat pain is that which fills the ‘pain’ place in the network for psychology;some want to say that pain is being in the state of having the role filled; andsome want to say that we should distinguish pain and being in pain and thatthe first is the filler state and the second is the state of having the role filled.A similar debate is possible in the ethics case. According to moral function-alism, an act is right if and only if it has the non-moral property that fills theplace of ‘right’ in the network. We can think of rightness as the propertythat fills the place or as the property of having the property that fills theplace whatever it may be. I once felt strongly that one decision was betterthat the other. I now cannot understand how I came to care. In any case,either decision identifies being right with falling under a pattern in the non-moral and that’s what is important here.

9.

Discussions in normative ethics are dominated by arguments for andagainst virtue theory, consequentialism, contract theory, prime facie dutytheory, natural law theory, and so on. How does moral functionalism makesense of this, and if it cannot, how can it speak to normative ethics astraditionally conceived?

We can distinguish optimism and pessimism concerning our ability tomake systematic sense of the complex network that interconnects the moralnotions. Optimists think that there is some reasonably simple, over-archingconception of morality that delivers the network, give or take some wrin-kles. Take a simple form of act utilitarianism that says that the moralgoodness of an action is its consequent expected happiness, and that the

104 Frank Jackson

right act is the one that maximises expected happiness out of the availableset of options. That delivers the relation between goodness and rightness ina nice simple way (too simple, some say). We are then given accounts ofrights, justice, the virtues and so on that sees their relations to right action asexplicable in consequentialist terms. Of course many argue that utilitarians’accounts of, for example, rights seriously underplays their role in determin-ing what ought to be, but this is confirmation of the picture I am painting aswe’ve noted already. The fact that utilitarianism’s ability or otherwise tomake sense of the network is crucial to its acceptability confirms thecentrality of the network.

The system builders in normative ethics are optimists. They seek somesimple, central insight that together with suitable add ons allows us to makesense of the network. Those who don’t like the consequentialists’ picture tryto do the job with the idea of obligations generated by implicit contracts, orwith the concept of actions that display the virtues as the touchstone forbeing right, or some list of prima facie duties, or the actions of ideal beings,or action that is rational, or whatever. The core notions vary from one toanother attempt to systematise, but what unites the otherwise diverseapproaches is the conviction that, somehow or other, there is a way ofriding herd on the complexity, where sometimes riding herd includes someculling and repackaging.

Conclusion: far from being unable to make sense of the traditionaldebates in normative ethics, moral functionalism makes sense of what’sgoing on in those debates—but then I am biased.

Notes

1. See Jackson 1992, 1998, Jackson and Pettit 1995.

2. For reasons too familiar to repeat here but see almost any philosophy of mind

text.

3. See, e. g., Smith 1994, ch. 1.

4. See, e.g., the introduction and papers in Hooker and Little 2000.

5. See, e. g., Dancy 1993.

6. I make the point quickly as it is widely granted and was by Moore, see, e. g.,

1942, p. 588.

7. See, e. g., Little 2000, p. 279 for this way of putting the idea. Little credits Simon

Blackburn, saying ‘moral properties are, to use Simon Blackburn’s felicitous

phrase, ‘‘shapeless’’ with respect to the nonmoral’. However, Blackburn’s use of

the phrase is for the doctrine that there is no pattern if we abstract away from

our reactions. That is consistent with there being a ‘shape’ if we include our

reactions. See Blackburn 1998, p. 98. For more on this issue, see Jackson, Pettit

and Smith 2000.

8. I hesitate to cite anyone as holding this doctrine. I come across it often in

discussion and it is certainly suggested by some things particularists say, see, e.

g., Little 2000.

Cognitivists and Normative Ethics? 105

9. Singer 1975.

10. And different in turn from the objection from language learning in Jackson,

Pettit and Smith 2000.

11. But see Jackson, Pettit and Smith 2000, for argument that the suggestion cannot

be true except in uninteresting cases where, as a contingent matter of fact, we

lack the needed words.

12. Kripke 1980, p. 91, my emphasis.

13. For what it is worth, I think following Locke that the deep issue about reference

is the intentionality of mental states. There is of course a great deal more to say

here including whether or not the causal theory of reference is really a special

kind of description theory with causal descriptions being given a special place.

14. In Jackson 1998, I call the network folk morality and give a role to something I

call mature folk morality. Nothing here hangs on the issues raised by this

distinction.

15. Lewis 1983.

References

Blackburn, Simon. 1998 Ruling Passions, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Dancy, Jonathan. 1993 Moral Reasons, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Hooker, Brad and Margaret Little. 2000 Moral Particularism, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Jackson, Frank and Philip Pettit. 1995 ‘Moral Functionalism and Moral Motivation’,

Philosophical Quarterly, 45: 20–40.

Jackson, Frank. 1992 Critical Notice of Susan Hurley, Natural Reasons, Australasian Journal of

Philosophy, 70: 475–487.

Jackson, Frank. 1998 From Metaphysics to Ethics, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Jackson, Frank, Philip Pettit and Michael Smith. 2000 ‘Ethical Particularism and Patterns’, in

Hooker and Little, 2000.

Kripke, Saul. 1980 Naming and Necessity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Lewis, David. 1983 ‘How to Define Theoretical Terms’, reprinted in Philosophical Papers, Vol.

I, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 78–95.

Little, Margaret Olivia. 2000 ‘Moral Generalities Revisited’, in Hooker and Little 2000, pp.

276–304.

Moore, G. E. 1942 ‘A Reply to My Critics’, in P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of G. E. Moore,

Chicago, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, pp. 535–677.

Singer, Peter. 1975 Animal Liberation, New York: NY Review of Books/Random House.

Smith, Michael. 1994 The Moral Problem, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

106 Frank Jackson