Morality without Categoricity

2.1. Weakly Categorical Imperatives

Firstly, some imperatives apply to agents in a ‘weakly’ categorical sense. This amounts to not much more than being a description of a set of rules, or perhaps a description of what the speaker would prefer for the agent to do. Joyce gives an example of the rules of gladiatorial combat (such as not to throw sand in your opponent’s eyes), and an unwilling gladiator called Celadus.

He says,

He also refers to these weakly categorical kinds of rules as the “non-evaporating” kind: the kind of rule that doesn’t evaporate just because the agent has none of the relevant desires.

It’s also the same kind of ‘categorical’ that Foot (1972) addressed when she makes an analogy between morality and rules of etiquette. Just because someone doesn’t care about the rules of etiquette, that doesn’t mean that the rules don’t apply to them. But these kinds of weakly categorical imperatives don’t—on their own—seem to come with any “practical oomph” (Joyce 2006, 63) of normativity. They seem to be descriptive more than prescriptive. This isn’t what my opponents are looking for.

2.2. Strongly Categorical Imperatives

The alternative for my opponent is to say that some imperatives apply to agents in a ‘strongly’ categorical sense. This is the sense that goes further than weakly categorical imperatives, further than just describing rules that apply to certain agents. Strongly categorical imperatives apply regardless of an agent’s desires (just like weakly categorical imperatives do), but they also come with the oomph of normativity that’s missing from weakly categorical imperatives. Joyce doesn’t say much more to explain what that extra step looks like, and for good reason—he doesn’t think it exists. Foot (1972, 314), too, talks about it as a feature that’s “missing”.

According to the error theorists, morality needs to consist of imperatives that apply in this strongly categorical sense. Morality needs something stronger than weakly categorical imperatives can supply, and that something is a “non-negotiable” (Joyce 2001, 8) part of our moral discourse. That is, without that necessary feature, our moral discourse turns out to be in error. Because the error theorists think that this extra ingredient does not exist, that we can only understand normativity as being related to an agent’s desires, they also think there can be no such thing as morality after all—our moral discourse is all predicated on a mistake.11

Unfortunately, most moral realists tend to agree that morality must be strongly categorical in Joyce’s sense. In a recent paper on error theory, for example, Lofitis says “Pretty much everyone accepts the unconditionality of moral requirements (…). Crucially, both error theorists and moralists accept the reason-supplying force of morality” (Lofitis 2020, 40). Shafer-Landau argues against desire-based theories of normativity in ‘Moral Realism’.12 He, like the error theorists, seems to think that such theories do not make room for some key concepts that are important to moral realism. It’s these key concepts I’ll turn to now, as I begin my defence of this hitherto unpopular view.

3.1. Authority (and Inescapability)

The first feature of morality to discuss is its inescapable nature.13 This is the idea that our moral imperatives have an authority over us: an authority that we can’t escape from or choose to ignore.

Before I begin, I’ll briefly say something about what I mean by imperatives a) having authority over us and b) being inescapable. I take these to be similar ideas, as they aim to explain a way in which the imperative is important, and something that we cannot opt out from. Imperatives have authority over us when they come from an (authoritative, important) source, and they are inescapable when they apply to us whether we like it or not. I aim to show that both of these ideas can be the case for hypothetical imperatives, and I’ll flesh out more about what I mean as I show why this is so.

First Mistake: Escapable Desires

Firstly, agents can no more ‘escape’ moral hypothetical imperatives than they can ‘escape’ their moral desires. I can’t stop wanting to be a good person when that want is inconvenient for me. That’s why we feel pangs of guilt when we do (or we’re tempted to do) something we know is wrong, and why we’ll often at least consider doing what’s right, even when the less morally good option is so appealing.

Suppose that Bren has to choose between going to a protest for a good cause and staying in to have a quiet day at home. Suppose as well that the right thing to do is to go to the protest, and that she knows it, but the better thing for her and her happiness would be to stay at home. Despite this, she still wants to help others, and she would best do this by going to the protest. This desire isn’t something that Bren can opt out of. It might be raining outside and her flat is warm and cosy. Her cat is asleep on her lap and there are games that she wants to play. The protest is a crowded bus journey away, and the weather is cold and uninviting. All of these facts might be running through her mind as she decides what to do, and the temptation to stay at home can be incredibly strong. But the reason that it feels like a difficult decision at all is because her desire to help others is still there, the moral imperative still hangs over her. And if she’s made her decision and she wants to stop feeling bad about it, she might have to trick herself into not thinking about it any longer, or kid herself that it wasn’t really the right thing to do after all. Perhaps, she thinks to herself, her presence wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. And it really wouldn’t be right to move the cat.

Not all of our decision-making will be like this, but the example’s familiarity is indicative of the persistence of some of our desires. In many more cases, our moral desires will still affect us but be less obvious to us. Think back to the breadth of desire—including those that the agent isn’t conscious of at the time. For many of us, the desire to be good is not a whim or a short-term desire that just pops into our heads in certain situations and then goes away again; it’s a long-term preference, a standing desire. We tend to want to be good people throughout our adult lives, and this can persist even when the alternative actions seem much more tempting for one reason or another. It’s something many of us want for ourselves overall, when we get the chance to sit back and think about what’s really important. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that such a desire can sometimes fail to translate proportionately into a strong motivation, or even into a noticeable feeling. But when the desire isn’t manifesting in those ways, it doesn’t mean that the desire isn’t still there, or that the moral imperatives would cease to have a hold on us.14 Bren still ought to go to the protest, and the tired philosopher still ought to get out of bed and do some work.

It’s important that a theory of normativity be able to explain what it’s like to feel conflicted about our obligations, and to account for how some of our strongest obligations can be the ones that seem to apply to us despite the fact that we really don’t want to fulfil them. But having an agent’s imperatives be contingent on her desires doesn’t mean that there’ll never be conflict and struggle, that there’ll never be tough situations, or that there’ll never be times that she is compelled by moral imperatives to act against what her strongest desires seem to be. With morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives, the struggle is (still) real.

Second Mistake: A Relative Morality

A related point is one about whether there can be objective moral standards, which exist independently of ourselves. The existence of such principles might be the kind of thing that concerns some people when they think about the ‘authority’ of morality—the fact that we must be held accountable to a standard beyond what we happen to desire.15

The existence of strongly categorical imperatives isn’t necessary for an objective moral standard itself to still exist. Morality can still form an independent standard without everyone always having reason to follow it, without moral imperatives applying to every creature out there. Only people with the right moral desires will have moral imperatives apply to them, but there can still be an objective truth about which desires are moral. An analogy here might be with other weakly categorical rules, like the law. The law of a country (we can suppose) is a defined set of rules that exist independently of that country’s citizens and their desires. This doesn’t mean that everyone has a reason to follow all of the laws of that country. Some laws might be unjust or irrelevant (the former being something less likely to be the case in morality), or some people might have cares, projects or other reasons that prevent the law from being reason-giving. Perhaps most significantly, not all people are even going to be citizens of that country.

Morality is like the law in that way. It can be an objective standard and authority, one that exists whether or not there are any agents in the world to whom the moral obligations apply. For example, it might be the case that moral goodness consists in agents exemplifying the virtues of compassion and wisdom, or it might be when people work to improve the well-being of others. And if there are agents who are capable in at least some sense16 of doing these things, who have the right desires, then those are the people who this objective law applies to, the people who have moral obligations. Fortunately, these are all real desires that people have. The normativity of morality is explained.

There’s one more important point I want to make before I move on. An account of hypothetical imperatives doesn’t imply that moral principles change with the desires of the agent, but rather the extent to which the objective principles apply to the agent can change with the agent’s desires. Now is a good time to argue why that’s plausible, and I’ll do so here making particular note of marginal cases.

In the legal analogy there are people for whom the laws don’t apply. The law doesn’t apply to babies, to animals, or to people who live outside of its range, for example. The same applies in the case of the moral law. There are lots of entities without moral obligations: definitely rocks and trees, for example. Animals probably don’t have moral obligations either, at least certainly not most animals. Babies also don’t seem to start out with any, but will usually get closer and closer to being moral agents the older they get and the more they develop (or you might think that they acquire them all at once at a certain point in their lives; either way they tend to start out with none and end up with some).17 An account of moral ‘oughts’ that connects them necessarily to the agents’ desires gives us an explanation as to why this is: moral oughts apply to entities if/when those entities start to

have moral desires.18 And that answer seems to track the marginal cases in the right way.19 Here I’ll go through some of them.

Inanimate objects don’t have desires, and they don’t have moral obligations. That one’s fairly simple, but also not particularly informative. There are lots of other things, after all, that inanimate objects don’t share with humans and which might explain why they don’t have moral obligations. They also don’t act, for example. Animals, then, might have desires, but they’re unlikely to have the kinds of desires that would satisfy an ethical theory’s conditions for being moral desires. Animals don’t generally desire to be good in the way that we take to be morally relevant. But what if they did? If there are intelligent animals out there who form genuine friendships or loving relationships, who are able to understand some concept of goodness that’s recognisably moral and to then intrinsically desire to act in good ways or bring goodness about, then it seems like there would be a good case for those animals being subject to moral oughts. This all depends, of course, on our understanding of the psychology of animals and what our preferred ethical theories take to be the right kinds of moral desires. But so far, having moral desires is a plausible criterion for moral agency.

The case might be easier to imagine with children, who regularly do turn into functioning moral agents. Again, according to my account, they do so not when they want to tell the truth or resist drawing on the walls only in order to avoid getting into trouble (because that isn’t likely to qualify as a moral desire), but when they start wanting to do so just because they want to do what’s right, or they understand the harms involved and want to avoid them, or because they see truth as having value (depending, of course, on the details of what you think a moral desire looks like).

Until people have these desires (if they ever do acquire them), when we tell them that they ought to do what’s right, and talk to them about their moral reasons, it doesn’t seem like we’re using the terms in a seriously morally normative sense, as much as it seems like we’re training them. The imperatives seem only to be weakly categorical. We’re showing them the kinds of things that we want them to desire, that we want them to take to be important. We’re describing the moral law as we see it and we keep doing it until they can see it for themselves. Until then, we’ll make do with the fact that they still ought to avoid drawing on the walls because it will get them into trouble when they’re caught.

To complete the picture, we should think about what happens when humans really never do acquire the right kinds of moral desires. Firstly, it’s worth saying that these sorts of people are very rare. They’re who we might find ourselves describing as amoralists. They’re people who are set up in such a way that they don’t have the right kinds of moral desires, and therefore cannot do what’s good for the right kinds of reasons. My account here says that these people are not subject to moral oughts or moral reasons, and I’m more than happy to agree with that. (They might become subject to them at a later date. Perhaps with a good education or a good friendship, they might change.)

Before moving on I want to emphasise that this account is not trying to be particularly revisionary. In fact, I’m arguing for the opposite: that this account of morality, including of who is subject to moral oughts and who isn’t, is in keeping with what we should expect. In the same way that it wouldn’t be fair to view (most) very young children as being subject to normative moral requirements, the same is true of the rare cases of agents with no moral desires. The desire-based account is stronger for its way of explaining these marginal cases.

Anyone who claims that morality applies categorically will have some caveats, but there’s just some disagreement about what those caveats are. Presumably for now it only applies to things that are alive. Perhaps, for some, it applies to creatures with a certain ability to reason or a rational capacity. For the desire-based account, it’s creatures with certain desires. I’ve shown here that these accounts aren’t so different.

3.2. Moral Condemnation

Another important feature of the moral system is moral condemnation. I’ll begin by explaining why it’s taken to be an important part of moral discourse, and why my opponents might worry that such criticism isn’t possible on my account. This time I’ll respond to the worry in three parts.

Usually when we see an immoral action we condemn it, we think it worthy of our criticism. There’s a moral standard (that can be universal, as just discussed) and if an agent in question fails to meet that standard then we can criticise them on that basis. It seems like something more than just personal disapproval of that agent’s actions, but a more substantive criticism that’s supported by a real morality.20 This kind of criticism might seem like an important part of moral discourse.

Moral realists might worry about the status of moral condemnation if we accept a moral system that’s only made up of weakly categorical imperatives, instead of strongly categorical imperatives. The latter, after all, are those that apply to agents regardless of what they desire, and that come with some kind of normative force. If moral ‘oughts’ only apply in a strongly categorical way to people who have moral desires, then my opponent might worry that we cannot morally criticise exactly the people who are the most in need of our criticism.

Here I’ll begin by conceding a point. For the agent who has no desires at all to be a good person, it might just not be the case that they ought to do what’s right. There are a range of criticisms unavailable to us about such an agent: she’s not being irrational, for example, and she’s not failing to do what she ought to do. We cannot criticise them in the kind of way that Kiesewetter seems to want to, when he talks about moral criticism and says,

He goes on,

This objection also comes up against desire-based theories of what we have reason to do. Williams, arguing in favour of such a theory (‘reasons internalism’) discusses such a case, of a man who has no desire to do the right thing. Williams says,

But I still think that accounts of desire-based normativity have enough tools to deal with this problem, and I’ll show how in three ways.

Response One: Most Agents Will Still have Moral Oughts

My first response is this: agents have a variety of desires, and what they desire most overall will often be different to what they feel most strongly at any given time. This has become a familiar theme in this paper: I don’t stop wanting to be a productive philosopher when I’m in bed in the mornings, and I don’t stop wanting to do what’s right when I’m faced with an incredibly difficult moral decision. Because of this, we can often criticise people for failing to do what’s right, and we can do so on the grounds that they’re not correctly adhering to their desires or to what they ought to do. When an agent fails to do something good we can criticise them because they’re too busy paying attention to their shorter term desires over their longer term ones, choosing the easy options over those that will help them fulfil what they want the most overall.

Brink makes an important point here, following Hume. He says,

It seems, fortunately, like most people do have moral desires, even if we’re often bad at acting on them, bad at prioritising them, or bad at seeing how to act on them. It seems like it just happens to be a fact that most people, therefore, ought to act morally, even if what they ought to do is contingent on what they desire.

At other times, the reason why people fail to do what’s good will be down to an epistemic mistake of some kind. I might have moral desires but be really bad at recognising good actions when I see them, for example. Here it would still be the case that I ought to do what’s actually right, because, presumably, I’d still want to do what was right and I’d be failing to do it. If someone mistakenly thinks that the right thing to do is to catcall the woman walking past (“I’m such a thoughtful person,” they think, “I’ll just give her a quick boost to her self-esteem”) then it’s still open to us to criticise them for not getting the facts right.

Response Two: Criticism on Other Grounds

Perhaps that was a bit too optimistic an answer, to declare that we do have strong moral desires most of the time. But luckily I have two more responses in stock. Secondly, then, even when an agent’s desires, correctly weighed, don’t give them the most reason to do what’s morally right, we can still criticise them on other grounds. Indeed, I’ll argue that on these occasions it would be far more appropriate to criticise them on these other grounds, rather than on the grounds of irrationality.

As a reminder, we can’t criticise these agents for not following their reasons correctly, for being irrational or for failing to do what they (normatively) ought to do. (We can, of course, still say that they ‘failed to do what they ought to do’, but in a way that acts more like a description of moral rules or of our own preferences than a normative prescription—the rules that apply to them in a ‘weakly categorical’ sense.) But there are other significant criticisms that we can make. Perhaps most notably, we can criticise them for not having the right (moral) desires in the first place.21 We can call them cruel, thoughtless, callous, selfish, mean-spirited. The most relevant criticisms that we tend to use in these times seem like they’re descriptions of the agent’s psychological state: criticisms of their priorities, their desires.

Suppose we want Marlene to join us at the protest today, but she doesn’t care about the political issue that’s riled us up. Morally speaking, it seems to be the case that she has an obligation to get involved—she’s a member of a privileged group and there is a clear injustice that she could help to prevent by attending. But, on balance, she just doesn’t want to help—and certainly not more than she wants to stay at home and re-organise her bookshelf. She has no good excuses or mitigating factors: she’s not socially anxious, she’s not tired, and she would be in a good position to make a difference. Just because we can’t criticise her for being irrational, we can still criticise her in a variety of more important ways. Marlene is being selfish, she’s failing to adequately care about the plight of those less fortunate than her, and she doesn’t have a strong enough desire to do what’s right. It doesn’t matter that she’s not failing, by her own lights and according to her own desires, but it matters that she’s failing to meet our standards, and failing to meet the objective moral standards that are important to us.

This doesn’t seem to be an uncommon view; it’s what we do when we call people callous, rude, or selfish. Brink makes this point,

Foot, too, makes a similar point, when she says “The fact is that the man who rejects morality because he sees no reason to obey its rules can be convicted of villainy but not inconsistency” (Foot 1972, 310). Being convicted of villainy seems like plenty, for the limited number of situations in which that’s all we can do.

This response is also relevant to other forms of criticism that might seem at first to be criticisms of irrationality. Take ‘thoughtlessness’ for an example. My opponent might worry that on my view it’s difficult to criticise moral agents as being thoughtless, because it’s a criticism that seems to aim at agents who have failed to notice certain things, failed to think or deliberate properly. The one kind of criticism that my system can’t account for is to criticise people on the basis of failing to follow their own reasons when they have none of the relevant desires. But to fail to think and attend properly to certain things can be a result of not having moral desires. Arpaly and Schroeder (2014, 227), for example, list four ways that desire can affect cognition other than through directly affecting action.

Because our desires affect the way we learn and recall things, our confidence, our attention, etc. they affect what we do beyond just affecting what choices we consciously make. Criticising someone on the basis of having the wrong desires encompasses a lot.

Perhaps this response just puts the problem one step back. How do we criticise an agent for their desires, when it’s not the case that they ought to have different desires? But here we can just put our feet down. We can criticise others without needing to criticise them by their own lights, in a way that is authoritative for them (as Kiesewetter thought was important). We can just criticise them, full stop. And there are still standards by which these agents can be wrong, other than the standards of rationality. The immoral agent with no moral desires is doing something wrong by moral standards, even though she’s not doing something irrational. We can still use weakly categorical oughts when we talk about them, it’s just that this is describing a set of rules (such as the moral law) that they’re failing to meet, rather than saying what they normatively ought to do.

It might be the case that some people think of this as something more akin to a descriptive claim, rather than criticism as such. But this seems to have too narrow a view of what criticism is. Think of other things I can criticise: I can criticise a bird for being too loud, an artwork for being boring, or a tree for being ugly. I can criticise a person for being bad at sports, or a storm for causing damage to the trees in my local park. It seems unnatural to say that I am merely describing these things, when what I am really trying to do is to be critical, to say something negative about them. Even when none of the targets of my criticism ever had a reason to be otherwise, and don’t care about what I have to say—the words can still serve the purpose of expressing my own disapproval. I think that our moral criticisms are often closer to this kind of criticism, and that’s ok.

Furthermore, our criticisms can often have an important effect even when we’re not using them to persuade people to follow their moral obligations. For example, suppose I see someone throwing litter on the street and I call them out for it. This person might not care at all about clean streets or nature or keeping the local area beautiful for people and animals to enjoy, etc. But my criticism might serve to motivate them in other ways. Perhaps by criticising them, I might appeal to reasons they do have — such as reasons to avoid looking bad in public. It’s unlikely that this would be an appeal to a moral desire, and that they would therefore be acting moral as a result, but my moral criticism here can still serve a purpose of getting them to pick up their litter. Perhaps it might even lead to a change in attitude down the line that eventually leads them to have the right moral desires after all. If enough people show you what they value, perhaps that can give you reason to consider taking those values on yourself.

Response Three: When the Criticism is Inappropriate

I have one final defence of the ability to morally criticise people under a system of hypothetical imperatives. I’ve already argued that we can criticise agents with no (or not enough) moral desires in a number of ways, and that we can still criticise people in a lot of cases for failing to do what they ought to do. Finally, I’ll say that the people for whom the last category doesn’t apply—the people without the correct moral desires—are simply not the people who normative moral imperatives should apply to. This is something that I argued for more in the previous section, but is also relevant here.

When we criticise a very young child for causing someone pain, we’d be wrong to criticise them as being irrational or for failing to follow their own reasons. It’s not the case that the moral law already applied to them and they just failed to act in accordance with it. After all, they don't have the moral maturity yet to have moral reasons. And it’s plausible to say, I think, that this is because they don’t have the right kinds of moral desires yet. In criticising people without adequate moral desires for being irrational we’d be making the same kind of mistake. Better to criticise them in a different way, and/or do our best to instill and encourage the right kinds of desires in them in the future.