Fictionalism – A Brief Introduction
As a reminder, my first paper topic is this: is moral fictionalism in some way reducible to moral expressivism? or vice versa?
To start, I’m going to grind through some exposition, largely because I’m having quite a bit of trouble articulating my own views on the subject, and this lets me put off having to stake out a position and simultaneously will serve as some good groundwork for when I do have to take a side. (Productive procrastination is the best kind…) So, what is moral fictionalism?
To start more broadly: to be a fictionalist about some domain is to believe that we are deeply mistaken about it (all our sentences about it, and maybe even all our beliefs about it, are false), but that we should continue talking about it as we do because it is a useful fiction. You can be a fictionalist about anything, really, and in fact various philosophers have argued for fictionalism about mathematics, possible worlds, events, colors, and religion, to name a few. I’m going to be focusing on what it is to be a fictionalist about morality, and so when I say “fictionalist” in what follows, that’s what I mean.
As introduced by Richard Joyce (2005), moral fictionalism starts from the same premise as expressivism. (This is, as we’ll see, just one of the many formal parallels between the positions.) Fictionalists assume that moral nihilism is true, and thus that there is no such thing as objective, out-there-in-the-world right and wrong. In Kantian terms, there are no categorical imperatives, nothing that we must do irrespective of our beliefs, desires, or inclinations. The question that fictionalists (and some expressivists) are interested in is: what now? What do we do with the countless everyday ways in which we think and speak as though there were moral facts? Joyce lays out four options:
- Conservativism: keep going just as before–hang on to all our moral beliefs and discourse.
- Eliminativism: get rid of our moral beliefs and stop talking as though there are moral facts.
- Propagandism: admit in private that moral nihilism is true, but keep it a secret so that the general public continues on unaware.
- Fictionalism: give up the sincerity of our moral beliefs and discourse, but continue to have fictive beliefs and make fictive assertions about moral facts, because participating in such a fiction is useful somehow.
Joyce dismisses conservativism and propagandism without giving them much attention. Even assuming we could hold onto our moral beliefs, Joyce thinks that hanging on to so many false beliefs would come with a prohibitive cost. (Would we have to somehow forget the argument for nihilism? Would we have to simply mark off whole areas of life as unfit for critical inquiry?) Promoting a conspiracy in which the philosophical elite manipulates and lies to the rest of the general public would be, for obvious reasons, even worse.
The main competition, then, is between fictionalism and eliminativism. Why keep moral beliefs and discourse around at all, if they are fundementally in error? Joyce’s strategy is to try to identify the value of our moral beliefs and discourse, in order to figure out what would be lost by eliminating them, and to see if maintaining a moral fiction would preserve some practical benefits, if not completely then at least in part.
In a move that should seem familiar to readers of Gibbard and other expressivists, Joyce argues that we have strong pragmatic reasons to act cooperatively, i.e. to coordinate our actions and emotions in order to live together in the world. One benefit of moral beliefs, he argues, is that they act as bulwarks against weakness of will.
When a person believes that the valued action is morally required—that it must be performed whether he likes it or not—then the possibilities for rationalization diminish. … The distinctive value of categorical imperatives is that they silence calculation, which is a valuable thing when interfering forces can so easily hijack our prudential calculations. In this manner, moral beliefs function to bolster self-control against practical irrationality.” (301)
Joyce argues that this is a benefit that is preserved, at least to some extent, when one pretends that one has moral obligations. His example is of doing sit-ups. It is likely true that doing roughly fifty sit-ups almost every day would have essentially the same benefit to my health as doing exactly fifty sit-ups every day. “But by allowing myself the occasional lapse,” Joyce writes, “by giving myself permission sometimes to stray from the routine, I pave the way for akratic sabotage of my calculations–I threaten even my doing more-or-less fifty sit-ups on most days.” Joyce argues that it is better, as a practical matter, to convince himself that he must, in a non-negotiable sense, do exactly fifty sit-ups every day. There’s no need to be wedded to these beliefs (or as he puts it, to “believe in these thoughts”). When not doing sit-ups, Joyce is happy to acknowledge that doing forty-nine sit-ups would get him into just as good shape. But while exercising, saying to himself “must… do… fifty!” is at least a partial defense against weakness of will.
That, then, is what Joyce is proposing we do with morality. In the philosophy classroom and other critical contexts, we should avow our sincere beliefs–that categorical imperatives do not exist. But in everyday life, we should pretend that they do, in order to reap the practical benefits they have for our ability to get along with others and resist the temptation to lie, cheat, and steal.
There’s much more to be said about what it’s like to be a fictionalist in practice. In fact as I write this I’m realizing that I’ve sort of put the cart before the horse. I’ve run through Joyce’s argument for choosing fictionalism from among the other alternatives without laying out his account of fictionalist psychology (what is it to have a fictive belief?) and fictionalist speech act theory (what does it mean to fictively assert something?). The answers to those questions will start to make clear why fictionalism and expressivism are so intimately related, and how we should understand that relationship. To be continued…
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