The possible divergence of justification and causation enables a further source of confusion: the failure to distinguish between justifying an act and justifying its particular motivation. A kind act may be justified, even when motivated by greed, an unjustified motive. No true principle may support the general cultivation of greed, nor even its occasional empowerment, and yet greed may cause a fully justifiable act (surely many a justifiable gift-giving has occurred because of some greedy hope for reciprocity or vainglory: behold the names on hospital wings and contemplate the cause of their funding. Yet the gift was justifiable).
The dance of explaining justifications, justifying explanations, explaining explanations, justifying justifications, has no end of steps and moves. After a few basic turns, most people are made dizzy by the dance, that goes on (to their mind) ad nauseam. Philosophers are obsessive choreographers of the explanation/justification tango and are exhilarated at a dance that makes others wish to throw-up.20
7. The Soundness of Practical Justifications
When applied to action, the phrase “sound justifications” rings hollow in the ears of the denigrators of morality. If this skepticism regarding the justification of action is correct, then there is no such thing as practical reason, for justification is the heart of practical reason, as it is of theoretical reason. But the skepticism is unwarranted; justifications of practice operate as sure-footedly in their own domain as justifications of belief do in theirs. True, the domains are at a remove, but there are no grounds for judging practical reason the lesser realm. Each domain is a human capability composed of similar types, functioning in similar ways; it is apt that they share the name of Reason. But some central inhabitants of each domain belong to different species, neither of which can directly produce the offspring of the other. Nonetheless, the kinship relationships within each species are the same, and they live a common life, the life of Reason, in constant intercourse and mutual support. Although they do not breed the other type, their union is not barren. Their progeny is the rational made real. Sound justifications, theoretical and practical, causally empowered, combine to create a more rational world.
Being a sound justification in either domain is a matter of logic and truth. If the premises of the justificatory argument are true, and by the rules of standard logic they entail or make probable the conclusion, the justification is sound. This is the conventional account of soundness: true premises and good logic. The use of logic in practical reason is standard and involves nothing contentious. It follows from the principle that one ought not cause avoidable suffering, and the fact that eating animals causes avoidable suffering, that one ought not to eat animals. The logic of practical reason is no more at issue than the logic of theoretical reason.
The possibility of sound practical reason is questioned not on its logic, but on the grounds of its premises’ truth, with the skeptics arguing against the very possibility that all of the premises needed for a justification of a practice can be true. The moral skeptic denies that a principle of action can be (objectively) true, and no justification of an action can be sound without including a true principle of action. This radical claim should not be confused with the commonplace observation that moral disagreement is found at every level of moral discourse. We often dispute the truth of particular premises of the prudential and moral arguments of daily life and politics, and also when we contest the normative theories that posit adjudicating principles. The moral skeptic’s point, however, is a metaethical one: no principle of action can be true, and so no practical justification can be sound. The “ought” statement, the “imperative” claim, the principle of action which is a necessary premise in any justification of practice is simply, according to the moral skeptic, not a candidate for truth. Some skeptics say this is so because the principle “says” nothing, others because what it says is metaphysically false.21 So, beyond the question of whether it is true that one ought not to cause any avoidable suffering, is the question of whether any proposition expressing a principle of action can be true. If it cannot, then there are no practical justifications with all true premises, and therefore no sound ones. And that would mean that in the realm of action there can be no rationality, for if there are no sound justifications of practice, there can be no sensitivity to sound justifications of practice. That would be a lethal result for my project of rooting goodness in Reason. Fortunately, practical principles can be true, but unfortunately defending that claim requires an excursion into the theory of truth.
NOTES
1. A vast oversimplification of a diverse philosophical/religious intellectual realm that contains a large range of subtle views on selfhood. See Garfield (2015) for an excellent, concise account of this range. Still, I think it fair, if somewhat broad-brush, to characterize the core of the Eastern philosophical view of the self as I do, even if some streams in that tradition come close to the view of the self I will presume.
2. Cf. Parfit (1984).
3. See Silver (2002).
4. When I say “Who you are is conceptually independent of how you became who are” and “It matters not a whit how the self came to include the elements constituting self-hood,” I am not denying its necessarily social origins and nature, I am only asserting that given the reality of those properties which constitute selfhood, a reality which perhaps could have only emerged from a certain history, the powers of the properties are immanent in the present.
5. In contemporary philosophical taxonomy, the position I take on free will is “comptibilist,” or “soft-determinist.” Hume (1748) is the classical source for this position. I think Dennett (1984, 2003) provides its most subtle and thorough justifications.
6. For example, Marks (2013), Garner (1994). Marks and Garner don’t deny there is widespread, and consequential belief in morality, but they hold that belief to be false, and think it better if morally inflected terminology disappeared. Others find some positive uses for moral terms, but in my view still qualify as amoralists, for example, Mackie (1977), and Joyce (2001).
7. Relativists, an older and more common breed than amoralists, come in even more varieties than do amoralists, and some varieties I consider relativists might bristle at the “relativist” label.
8. That we have this capacity is nicely asserted by Robert Nozick: “We are creatures who are amenable to being inducted into a world of norms.” Nozick (1993, 27). I’ll use the term “rationality,” to refer to the capacity to engage in Reason, the semantic process that renders truth. I’ll use the upper case “R,” to distinguish Reason from a reason which is an element in a bit of reasoning. Partfit (2011, 111) call’s rationality “responsibility to reasons” rather than my “sensitivity” to reasons.
9. An IBM computer that plays Jeopardy well and a chimpanzee that spoke ASL poorly.
10. As the reader who continues for a while will see, I take talk of beliefs and sentences being “about things” and “propositions” as a convenient shorthand. See chapter 4 for the sense in which beliefs and sentences are, and are not, “about things,” and for further details regarding meaning.
11. Although we might treat any argument for a belief or action as a prima facie “justification,” it is best to reserve the term for those overall arguments making a claim for truth or rightness.
12. We can think of “argument” as labeling the locutionary content and “justification” as the illocutionary, or perhaps the implicature of beliefs were those beliefs to be manifested as speech. See Austin (1962) and Grice (1961).
13. If it is unsound then, strictly speaking, it is only a purported justification. I am using “sound” as synonymous with “good” when modifying arguments. Valid deductive arguments with all true premises, are sound, as are (in my usage) inductive arguments with all true premises that are logically stronger than any arguments to contradictory conclusions. Although most logicians reserve the term “sound” only for good deductive arguments, here I follow Paul Herrick (1994) in applying it to inductive arguments with true premises and sufficient logical strength.
14.