Introducing Fictionalism (Take Two)

After sleeping on yesterday’s post, I’ve decided that it wasn’t just putting the cart before the horse, but in fact was pretty pointless. After all, nothing about my topic depends on moral fictionalism being true–the issue at hand is simply whether fictionalism and expressivism are viable, coherent and distinct metaethical options. So I’m going to start over, and instead of running the argument for fictionalism, simply try to pin down exactly what fictionalism is claiming about moral beliefs and discourse. (As before, I’ll be following Richard Joyce’s 2005 essay “Moral Fictionalism,” with some help from Selim Berker’s excellent lecture handouts.)

So to recap: moral fictionalism begins from the premise that moral nihilism is true–that is, that there are no objective moral facts, and nothing that we are required, morally speaking, to do or refrain from doing. To the question “What now?”, the moral fictionalist says that we ought to hang on to our moral judgments, because they’re practically useful, but that we should give them the status of fiction. When we talk about what is right and wrong, the fictionalist says, we should think of ourselves as engaging in an extended session of make-believe. The question, then, is how we should understand our moral beliefs and moral discourse once we see them in this new light. The fictionalist has to make some basic choices about his position, and running through them will help us pin down exactly what it is to have a fictive belief, or to make a fictive assertion.

First, the fictionalist has to decide whether or not his view is descriptive or prescriptive–that is, whether fictionalism is an attempt to describe how we have been thinking and talking about morality all along, or whether it is arguing that we should revise our understanding of our moral beliefs and discourse and move forward with a newly fictionalized understanding of morality. The former option is usually called hermeneutic fictionalism, and the latter is revolutionary fictionalism. Joyce is a revolutionary fictionalist, which gets him out of having to argue that even the most committed moral realists (religious fundamentalists, say) have only fictive moral beliefs, even if they insist wholeheartedly that their beliefs are sincere. But arguments for both strands exist, and the difference between them might have some bearing on the comparison with moral expressivism. (Expressivists, for instance, face roughly the same choice, but tend to come down on the hermeneutic side–that is, they tend to see themselves as giving an alternate account of what we should be taking ourselves to have been doing all along.)

Another choice concerns exactly how to understand what is going on, in the fictionalist picture, when someone makes an assertion about a putative moral fact. One option is to hold that any fictionalist sentence includes an unspoken clause that changes the content of the assertion–something along the lines of “According to the moral fiction…”. On this view, someone who says that wanton cruelty is wrong is in fact sincerely asserting the proposition that according to the moral fiction, wanton cruelty is wrong.

As Joyce points out, there are real problems with this characterization. For one thing, it elides the meaningful distinction between “describing the story and telling it” (291). Describing a story involves making sincere assertions about the contents of the fiction. Telling a story involves pretending “that we are a person who has access to a realm of facts that we are reporting,” that is, it is a different speech act entirely (291). The distinction can be illustrated thus: someone telling a story about Sherlocke Holmes, when pressed, will “emerge” from the fiction and admit that it is not literally true that Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street. But if what she was asserting was “According to the story, Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street,” it should always be true, even from a perspective that is external to the fiction.

(There’s another worry, which is that adding a tacit clause to every moral sentence means that they don’t embed correctly in complex contexts, and perform strangely in logical arguments. This is complicated and I won’t get into it now, but it’s interesting in that it’s a version of the Frege-Geach problem, the main argument against moral expressivism.)

Joyce’s account takes the distinction between describing and telling a story seriously, and so he argues that when the fictionalist uses moral discourse, he’s not talking about the contents of the moral fiction but rather actively engaging in it. That is, he is pretending to assert moral truths. In everyday life, in the grip of this fiction, he puts forward moral propositions as something he believes, and as something his audience should believe, but in more “critical contexts” (including the philosophy classroom), he is able to assume an external perspective and admit that he’s not actually serious.

In my last post I summarized Joyce’s argument for fictionalism. The idea is that sincere moral beliefs are useful in that they help us coordinate our actions and emotions–that is, they help us live in the world together, and give us psychological incentives (such as guilt) to cooperate with others. Fictive moral beliefs, he argues, can give us the same practical benefits, as bulwarks against weakness of will and temptation to lie, steal, and cheat. Joyce sees moral beliefs as precommitments, ways of “binding ourselves to the mast,” as Jon Elster puts it in his book Ulysses and the Sirens. This practical value, on Joyce’s account, is reason enough to maintain moral discourse as a fiction, rather than jettisoning it entirely in the face of moral nihilism.

There’s one other element of Joyce’s fictionalism that’s worth mentioning. Joyce thinks fictionalism is most fruitfully thought of as being a strategy that a group of people use to deal with a problematic discourse. If one imagines a single fictionalist in a world of sincere moral realists, Joyce acknowledges that there’s an open question about whether the fictionalist and the realists can really communicate at all, or only talk past each other. Even if you think they can (since, as a practical matter, everyone would understand each other, and the realists might never even realist that there is a fictionalist in their midst), you might wonder whether the fictionalist, in pretending to have moral beliefs and pretending to assert them to an audience of realists, is being disingenuous, or even whether his fictionalism can get off the ground at all. Joyce’s response is that it’s better to think of fictionalism as something adopted by a community of speakers. He compares fictionalism to sarcasm, another instance in which we withdraw or warp the apparent assertoric nature of our claims. A single sarcastic person in an otherwise irony-free world runs into the same set of problems as the lone fictionalist. But that doesn’t mean that a community can’t successfully establish conventions and norms of sarcasm.

So there’s my not-so-brief introduction to fictionalism. I still haven’t said much about how it relates to expressivism, but that’s to come. In my next posts I will briefly (briefly, I promise!) summarize two arguments: that expressivism is reducible to fictionalism (David Lewis), and that fictionalism is reducible to expressivism (Matthew Chrisman). Until next time.