Is there an underlying, master-preference that controls preference changes?

It is not only scientific knowledge that informs people's preferences and determines how they choose to behave. There are also, for instance, moral criteria, which assign attributes such as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ to possible actions. Such values have been notoriously difficult to accommodate in the scientific world-view. They seem to form a closed explanatory structure of their own, disconnected from that of the physical world. As David Hume pointed out, it is impossible logically to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Yet we use such values both to explain and to determine our physical actions.

The poor relation of morality is usefulness. Since it seems much easier to understand what is objectively useful or useless than what is objectively right or wrong, there have been many attempts to define morality in terms of various forms of usefulness. There is, for example, evolutionary morality, which notes that many forms of behaviour which we explain in moral terms, such as not committing murder, or not cheating when we cooperate with other people, have analogues in the behaviour of animals. And there is a branch of evolutionary theory, sociobiology, that has had some success in explaining animal behaviour. Many people have been tempted to conclude that moral explanations for human choices are just window-dressing; that morality has no objective basis at all, and that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are simply tags we apply to our inborn urges to behave in one way rather than another. Another version of the same explanation replaces genes by memes, and claims that moral terminology is just window-dressing for social conditioning. However, none of these explanations fits the facts. On the one hand, we do not tend to explain inborn behaviour — say, epileptic fits — in terms of moral choices; we have a notion of voluntary and involuntary actions, and only the voluntary ones have moral explanations. On the other hand, it is hard to think of a single inborn human behaviour — avoiding pain, engaging in sex, eating or whatever — that human beings have not under various circumstances chosen to override for moral reasons. The same is true, even more commonly, of socially conditioned behaviour. Indeed, overriding both inborn and socially conditioned behaviours is itself a characteristic human behaviour. So is explaining such rebellions in moral terms. None of these behaviours has any analogue among animals; in none of these cases can moral explanations be reinterpreted in genetic or memetic terms. This is a fatal flaw of this entire class of theories. Could there be a gene for overriding genes when one feels like it? Social conditioning that promotes rebellion? Perhaps, but that still leaves the problem of how we choose what to do instead, and of what we mean when we explain our rebellion by claiming that we were simply right, and that the behaviour prescribed by our genes or by our society in this situation was simply evil.

These genetic theories can be seen as a special case of a wider stratagem, that of denying that moral judgements are meaningful on the grounds that we do not really choose our actions — that free will is an illusion incompatible with physics. But in fact, as we saw in Chapter 13, free will is compatible with physics, and fits quite naturally into the fabric of reality that I have described.

while Hare was, no doubt, a critic of the [emotive theory], he was, in the eyes of his own critics, a kind of emotivist himself. His theory, as a consequence, has sometimes been depicted as a reaction against emotivism and at other times as an extension of it.

My sitting quietly in a chair in my own home ‘harms’ everyone on Earth who might benefit from my going out and helping them at that moment; and it ‘harms’ any number of thieves who would like to steal the chair if only I went elsewhere for a while; and so on. To resolve such issues, I adduce further moral theories involving new explanations of my moral situation. When such an explanation seems satisfactory, I shall use it tentatively to make judgements of right and wrong. But the explanation, though temporarily satisfactory to me, still does not rise above the utilitarian level.

But now suppose that someone forms a general theory about such explanations themselves. Suppose that they introduce a higher-level concept, such as ‘human rights’, and guess that the introduction of that concept will, for a given class of moral problems like the one I have just described, always generate a new explanation that solves the problem in the utilitarian sense. Suppose, further, that this theory about explanations is itself an explanatory theory. It explains, in terms of some other strand, why analysing problems in terms of human rights is ‘better’ (in the utilitarian sense). For example, it might explain on epistemological grounds why respect for human rights can be expected to promote the growth of knowledge, which is itself a precondition for solving moral problems.

If the explanation seems good, it might be worth adopting such a theory. Furthermore, since utilitarian calculations are impossibly difficult to perform, whereas analysing a situation in terms of human rights is often feasible, it may be worth using a ‘human rights’ analysis in preference to any specific theory of what the happiness implications of a particular action are. If all this were true, it could be that the concept of ‘human rights’ is not expressible, even in principle, in terms of ‘happiness’ — that it is not a utilitarian concept at all. We may call it a moral concept. The connection between the two is through emergent explanation, not emergent prediction.

There is no doubt that emotivism represented an advance over simple subjectivism. This was not, however, the end of the story. Emotivism also had its problems, and they were sufficiently serious that today most philosophers reject the theory. One of the main problems was that emotivism could not account for the place of reason on ethics.

A moral judgement--or, for that matter, any kind of value judgement--must be supported by good reasons. If someone tells you that a certain action would be wrong, for example, you may ask why it would be wrong, and if there is no satisfactory answer, you may reject that advice as unfounded. In this way, moral judgements are different from mere expressions of personal preference. If someone says 'I like coffee', he does not need to have a reason -- he may be making a statement about his personal taste, and nothing more. But moral judgements require backing by reasons, and in the absence of such reasons, they are merely abitrary. This is a point about the logic of moral judgement. It is not merely that it would be a good thing to have reasons for one's moral judgements. The point is stronger than that. One must have reasons, or else one is not making a moral judgement at all. Therefore, any adequate theory of the nature of moral judgements should be able to give some account of the connection between moral judgements and the reasons that support them. It is at just this point that emotivism falters.

Emotivists like C.L. Stevenson gave a prominent place to our freedomto make moral judgements based on our own attitudes. If they were right, no one could tell us that we had simply failed to see some moral truth that a person of sharper moral insight knew to be true, for there were no such truths, only emotions or feelings to be expressed. This liberating view seemed firmly grounded in G.E. Moore's famous argument against that "naturalistic fallacy" which involves defining morality in terms of natural properties (like happiness, for example), and in the evident oddity of the claim that we can just "intuit" non-naturali moral truths. But emotivism is open to the obvious objection, that if morality is simply a matter of emotions or feeling, then your own view is no better than that of anyone else. In saying that Nazism is wrong, we want to say something more than "Boo to the Nazis!" But the emotivist has eliminated all other possible meanings that the condemnation of Nazism might have.

Hare agreed with the emotivists that moral judgements are not descriptions, and hence cannot be straightforwardly true or false. He argued that they are prescriptions, that is, judgements that entail imperatives, but like imperatives, they are subject to logical rules.

A moral judgment--or, for that matter, any kind of value judgment--must be supported by good reasons