The Southern Journal of Philosophy (1990) Volume XXIX, Supplement

TRUTH, JUSTIFICATION AND THE INESCAPABILITY OF EPISTEMOLOGY: COMMENTS ON COPP Bruce Russell Wayne State University

Professor Copp’s main thesis is that moral propositions are true only if some relevant moral standards are appropriately justified. This claim seems initially implausible since it seems to conflate truth with justification, whether epistemic or pragmatic. It may be false that God exists even if there is good reason, or it in some way pays, to believe he exists, and conversely. So why could not moral beliefs, or moral propositions, be true even if there were no appropriately justified moral standards? Would it not be enough if there just were these standards?

Perhaps the reply is that the relation between truth and justification is different for normative claims. But consider the following normative claim: it is irrational for Smith to believe that p. Won’t that be true if there is a n appropriate epistemic s tandard that condemns Smith’s belief as irrational, regardless of whether that standard is, in any sense, justified or not? Of course, no one may be justified in believing that Smith’s belief is irrational unless he is justified in believing that some appropriate epistemic s tandard condemns it.’ But what is a t issue are the conditions for a normative claim’s being true, not the conditions for someone’s being justified in believing it is true.

Copp’s discussion of the case where he claims it is good to belch after meals, but can give no grounds for his claim, does not establish his point. He rightly says that it is “difficult to know how to assess’’ his claim in these circumstances (p. 194).2 But that is because we cannot see any reason for his holding that it is good to belch after meals. If he is justified in believing it is true, then we expect him to be able to give some justification.3 Our difficulty in being able to assess Copp’s claim about belching does not imply that it’s truth depends on there being a n appropriately justified standard. We can hold that it’s truth only depends on there being such a standard and still explain the difficulty. Our difficulty lies in seeing why he thinks his claim is true when he can offer no justification for it.

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Suppose, for the sake of argument, it is granted that for a moral proposition to be true there simply must be some appropriate moral standard. Still, someone might ask what is it for there to be such a standard. The first response that comes to mind is that for there to be such a standard is for there to be a true statement that expresses that standard. Take, as an example, the moral proposition that slavery is wrong. This will be true, for instance, if it is true that no one should deprive another, who poses no danger to anyone and who has committed no crime, of his liberty without that person’s consent, and slavery involves doing just that.

There are two parts of this view that Copp would likely find problematic: (1) it implies that moral standards, or the statements that express them, have a truth-value and (2) it offers no account of the normativity of such statements.

Copp offers several arguments for the claim that moral standards are not propositions, that they do not have a truth- value. He notes that in another paper he has argued that moral standards are not empirically confirmable and that the best explanation of that fact is that they are not proposition^.^ While I accept his arguments that moral standards are not empirically confirmable, his claim that the best explanation of that fact is that they are not. propositions is unconvincing. Another explanation, which I think is the correct one but which Copp does not consider, is that they are propositions but not empirical propositions.

Another argument Copp gives to show that standards are not propositions is the following:

Since commands are standards and are clearly not propositions, it seems reasonable to conclude that standards in general are not propositions. (p. 201)

But this is like arguing since robins are birds and are clearly not web-footed, it seems reasonable to conclude that birds in general are not web-footed. From the fact that some standards are clearly not propositions, it does not follow that it is reasonable to believe that none are. This is especially true given that some standards can be expressed in terms of what a person should or should not do and those claims seem to have a truth-value.

Copp’s other argument to show that moral standards are not propositions rests on the claim that it does not make sense to describe someone as conforming to or violating a proposition while it is part of the nature of standards that they can be conformed to or violated. As Copp has noted elsewhere, this argument is “not conclusive, for people often

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have differing intuitions about what ‘makes sense,’ and philosophical arguments may seek to show that some of our intuitions are mistaken.”5

Suppose “torture is wrong” is equivalent to (a) “everyone has sufficient reason to refrain from torturing others”6 or to (b) “everyone has sufficient reason (in his actual or some hypothetical situation) to subscribe to the prescription, ‘Don’t torture anyone!’ ” Then to say that someone violated the moral proposition that torture is wrong would mean that he acted in a way contrary to what reason requires-perhaps in some hypothetical situation.

There will not be much difference between the view Copp defends and the one that interprets “torture is wrong” as (b) since Copp probably would equate the moral standard with the prescription itself, with “Don’t torture anyone! ” and the justification he talks about would be referred to by the phrase, “everyone has sufficient reason . . . to subscribe to.” But the advantages of the view I have offered are that it does not conflate truth with justification, it can explain how even the most fundamental moral claims about what should or should not be done seem to have a truth-value and it accounts for the normativity of moral judgments in terms of what people have reason to do or subscribe to.’

Having argued that there is a way of understanding moral standards as having a truth-value tha t avoids Copp’s objections, and a way of understanding how the truth of moral propositions is connected to the t ruth of moral standards, not to appropriately justified moral standards, I now want to take a different tack. I want to grant, for , the sake of argument, that Copp is right in thinking that no standards are propositions, and vice versa, and that a moral proposition is true only if some relevant standard is justified. He concludes that “if standards are not propositions, then the kind of justification at issue is not epistemic” (p. 203). I will argue that in a deeper sense the justification at issue is epistemic.

Of course, if standards are not propositions and so do not have a truth-value, it makes no sense to talk about anyone’s being justified in believing they are true. Suppose moral s t anda rds a re prescriptions which indicate wha t is prohibited or required in certain circumstances. Still, claims about what justifies a moral code, a set of prescriptions to govern the behavior of a group or society, seem to be propositions. And as Copp points out, Brandt’s view about what justifies a moral code differs from Gauthier’s, and both differ from Kant’s and Rawls’s. These differences are

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analogous to differences between epistemologists, such as Goldman, Lehrer and Chisholm, about what justifies a person’s believing something. And the question arises in both ethics and epistemology, “Which, if any, of the accounts is it reasonable to accept as true?” And this is a request for epistemic justification of some view of moral or, say, empirical justification. So even if the kind of justification of moral standards that Copp has in mind is not epistemic, but practical, the justification of some particular theory of moral justification will be epistemic. The philosophical defenses of wha t Copp calls practical theories involve epistemic justification.

Of course, not everyone will accept this view. Some will think that the question of which theory of moral justification we should accept is also a practical matter, thinking that which theory we should accept depends on which practical goals will be best served by accepting some particular theory. But then we will want to ask, “Why should we accept as true the view t h a t the question of which theory of moral justification to accept is a practical question?” And epistemic justification will be at issue once again.

There’s no getting around it; epistemic justification is at the root of it all even if we do not see it when looking only above ground. And the reason it is problematic in moral philosophy is the same reason that it is problematic in any branch of philosophy: it does not seem to involve empirical justification. The problem of moral epistemology is the problem of philosophical epistemology; it is the problem of a priori justification.

NOTES

1 I do not believe that even this is true, for ordinary people can be justified in believing ordinary things about the world even if they are not justified in believing that there is some epistemic standard that sanctions their belief.

All pagination in the text is to Copp’s “Normativity and the Very Idea of Moral Epistemology.”

Even though it is not logically necessary for someone to be justified in believing p that he be able to give a justification of p (think of my believing I now have a pain or that 1 l), that ability is logically required, or at least normally expected, for certain kinds of propositions.

4 In his “Explanation and Justification in Ethics,” Ethics 100 (January

5 “Explanation and Justification in Ethics,” p. 256. 6 I reject the interpretation given by (a) but not because I think reasons

are necessarily tied to motivations, as many believe, and that some people may not be motivated to refrain from torturing others. See my “Two Forms of Ethical Skepticism,” Ethical Theory: Classical and Contemporary

1990), pp. 237-58.

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Readings (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1989), ed. Louis Pojman, p. 469.

In the revised version of his paper that appears in this volume, Copp writes that “Propositions about the rationality of choices, actions and beliefs are type-two normative” (p. 195 and see, also, p. 205). Perhaps he means that propositions about the rationality of specific or particular choices, actions and beliefs are type-two normative because they appeal implicitly to putatively authoritative standards. But propositions of the form, “it is rational for S to believe (choose, do) A if and only if seem to express, rather than appeal to, any such standards. If so, then the kind of justification at issue will be epistemic, not practical. For moral standards, it will be a question of the epistemic justification of propositions about the conditions of practical rationality.

7 Copp’s discussion of the “theoretical advantages” of his position (p. 202- 203) did not appear in the version of his paper on which I commented. I agree that if standards are propositions we would still have to explain their normativity. Copp sees it as a virtue of hie position that it can explain normativity without coming down in favor of either internalism or externalism. But that virtue is due to the schematic form of his theory. As soon as he specifies the nature of the justification the relevant “authoritative” standards must have, he will have to come down either in favor of internalism or externalism. The virtue he claims for his theory will be shared by a view that says that standards are propositions and tries to explain their normativity by claiming that they are in some way related to what a person has reason to do, or to what rules he has reason to subscribe to. If vagueness is a virtue of his theory, it is a virtue of that other theory, too.

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