Abstract
This paper considers whether proposition (P1) – “x is not immoral but it is in poor taste” – is morally contradictory when considered from the standpoint of constructive ecumenical expressivism (CEE). According to CEE, pronouncements about poor taste and immorality have the following in common: they each convey a negative attitude towards x and intimate that x ought not to be done. Given this, P1 is vulnerable to a charge of contradiction, as it intimates that x is both something and not something that ought not to be done. To avoid the putative contradiction, it is argued that an accusation of poor taste amounts to a negative attitude towards the treatment of a morally pertinent matter, thereby making the former parasitic on the latter. A morally relevant means of distinguishing between poor taste and immorality is therefore provided that (i) endorses the expressivist tradition, and (ii) provides an account of societal norms.
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Notes
By way of an illustration of the latter example, consider the following joke which some may(?) find to be in poor taste. A doctor, a lawyer and a fundraiser arrive at the pearly gates of heaven. St. Peter tells the doctor that he will grant him one wish before he enters heaven so the doctor asks for a million dollars. St. Peter grants the wish and the doctor enters into heaven. This generosity did not go unnoticed by the lawyer so when St Peter asks him for his wish the lawyer asks for a billion dollars. St. Peter grants the wish and the lawyer enters into heaven. When St. Peter asked the fundraiser what she would like, she says, “If it is not too much trouble could I please get the business cards of the two people who entered heaven just ahead of me? Taken from:
http://www.bemonsterful.com/index.php/easyblog/entry/fundraising-humor . Of course, one might argue that the joke is not intended to target fund raising per se, but the perceived ‘pushy’/aggressive nature of some fundraisers.
By way of an example, a World Wildlife Fund advertisement was condemned for being offensive and tasteless because of its alleged downplaying of the 9/11 attacks; see https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6131150/WWF-advert-condemned-for-downplaying-911-attacks-on-New-York.html. Similarly, in Australia, the ‘Operation Bomerang’ advertisement – designed to coincide with the Australia Day celebrations – was considered to be in poor taste by some. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/operation-boomerang-antivegan-australia-day-lamb-ad-featuring-lee-lin-chin-gets-the-allclear-20160120-gm9yqm.html
See Ridge (2006) for discussion on the forerunner to CEE – namely, ecumenical expressivism – to which CEE is indebted.
To further clarify the term, a “kind of objectivity”, it means simply that the moral standard is externalized beyond our individual (subjective) preferences (Goodwin and Darley 2012; Stanford 2018), and is therefore independent of any one individual; yet, the moral standard is not completely mind-independent (Brey 2003; Searle 1995) in the sense required for moral objectivism.
It may be that S has a negative attitude to murder because she believes it violates one’s duty to others and creates more harm than good (negative utility) and is a vice: all things of which S disapproves. It is likely that S will prioritize one of these over the others, although not doing so does not undermine CEE.
This issue is part of a larger challenge for expressivist approaches to morality: namely, the moral attitude problem (Miller 2003), whereby it is claimed that an expressivist approach lacks the resources to differentiate between a negative, non-moral attitude – say, one’s dislike of one’s favourite team’s new away strip – and a negative moral attitude towards cheating in sport. In the latter case, it is (allegedly) unclear which specific kind of conative attitude constitutes moral thinking, specifically (which is why it is also known as the specification problem; see Björnsson and McPherson 2014). It is, however, beyond the scope of this paper to address the moral attitude problem in its more fundamental form (for a detailed discussion, see Köhler 2013, who argues that the ‘problem’ is not unique to expressivism). Instead, I seek to tackle a particular subspecies of this problem: namely, differentiating between attitudes constitutive of poor taste and immorality, respectively.
Given the position I am adopting, it could be that S3 disapproves of murder and considers it to be immoral because they believe that murder violates the instruction of the alien prophet, Zog. As already noted, I do not consider the diversity of reasons (de dicto attitudes) to be a weakness of CEE. The fact that different reasons can be given for why something is immoral (based on different beliefs about what counts as a measure of morality) means that the shared belief that x is immoral is more robust, given that a number of reasons for why it is immoral would need to be challenged in order to challenge the overall claim, even where the validity of some reasons may be more easily disavowed than others.
Saying this does not rule out the possibility that one could find it offensive despite being amused by it, or that one could be amused by it whilst recognizing that it would likely offend others (see Woodcock 2015, for a detailed discussion on these and related points).
For a detailed discussion on different forms or components of moral reasoning, see Saunders (2015).
Sinnott-Armstrong (1987, p. 265) refers to those things “it would be morally wrong not to act on without any moral justification or excuse” as requirements.
Both examples refer to what might be called, broadly construed, a practical ought (characteristic of Kant’s hypothetical imperative) or more specifically a teleological ought in the former case and (possibly?) a prudential ought in the latter (see Chrisman 2016, for a detailed discussion).
One could go further and say that the concept of immorality necessarily contains this obligatory feature – namely, that x must not be done – such that, analytically, when stating “x is immoral”, the further announcement that x “ought not to be done (in the obligatory sense discussed)” is redundant. Moreover, even if it could be argued that the same analytic feature is available in the case of “x is in poor taste”, the nature of the ‘ought’ that necessarily flows from this analysis remains ambiguous.
Example courtesy of an anonymous reviewer.
I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for this example.
Although obscenity is often associated with immorality, it is legal term.
I am not suggesting that this is the only means by which someone might judge the artwork to be immoral.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback. I would also like to thank those who attended the University of Melbourne philosophy seminar for their comments, particularly Karen Jones and Andrew Inkpin.
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Young, G. An Expressivist Account of the Difference between Poor Taste and Immorality. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 22, 465–482 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-019-09998-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-019-09998-2