I have made the unfortunate mistake of dabbling in metaethics, a subfield of ethics in philosophy that’s convinced that there is an urgent problem to be solved about whether moral “facts” exist and whether humans can track them, and that an interesting discovery would be made on whether normative language (deontic modals like “ought” and the different expressions of the predicates “good” and “bad”) was found out to be “cognitive” or “non-cognitive”.

The Misuse of Language

Metaethicists may counter this line of reasoning by saying: “there is no objective assessment on what constitutes a ‘problem’. What philosophy deals with are not ‘problems’ per se but unexplained phenomena, thus the “hard problem of consciousness” or “the problem of induction” or “value in a world of facts” aren’t really problems in the way that lacking a cure for cancer is a problem. The superficial dismissal of philosophical problems based on verificationist premises [that because there is nothing that would count in favour or against a solution to these problems is a reason to ignore them] fails to recognise what Thomas Nagel described as “the existence of facts beyond the reach of human concepts””.

The rejoinder is: the problems in metaethics are not unexplained phenomena that are outside of the grasp of language (there isn’t anything of that sort, and if there is, then that needs to be spelled out), but they rather arise based on a misunderstanding of language altogether.

Thus questions that metaethicists ask such as “are there stance-independent moral facts?”, are what Wittgenstein called “nonsense” because they are literally meaningless insofar as they presume the correspondence theory of truth in areas where that theory of reference simply does not apply. So when non-philosophers utter “abortion is wrong” the presumption taken by philosophers is that there is some essence hidden behind the sentence, that the word ‘wrong’ must stand for something in the world just the same as when someone utters “the cat is on the mat”. This mistaken presupposition about meaning and language causes metaethicists to think that words like ‘right’ ‘wrong’ ‘good’ ‘bad’ and other deontic modals are capturing essences ‘out there’; that there is a fundamental, correct and fixed meaning to these words and that if only we figure out that meaning we will then know the answer to the question ‘are there stance-independent moral facts’ and other metaethical questions.

But language does not work this way. The most that can be said about the meaning of the sentence “abortion is wrong”, just as much as about the sentence “the cat is on the mat”, is its actual contextual use in language and the communicative intent of the speaker i.e., by looking at the transcript of the conversation in context and the pragmatics. Language is a tools for people to communicate their intentions and ‘do stuff’ with, words do not have these communicative intents baked into them. This ties in with the next objection, the methodological errors that underly metaethics and analytic philosophy more generally.

Meta-ethics is Ahistorical and WEIRD

Analytic philosophers muse long and hard about these questions in an ahistorical way and use their spider senses (“intuitions”) or platonic magic skills (“conceptual analysis”) without ever bothering with empirical work (about how people use words like “should” “must” “good” “bad” etc.), effectively conducting experiments with a sample size of n=1 (for examples, see: ‘phenomenal conservatism’). A prominent author in the subfield, for example, recently published a paper entitled ‘An Ontological Proof of Moral Realism’ which argues that the mere possibility that stance-independent moral facts exist means that …stance independent moral facts do exist!

This ahistorical, unempirical way of doing metaethics takes for granted that morality is a distinctive psychological capacity underpinned by meta-normative characteristics, and makes no effort in understanding it from a socio-historical point and its variable cross-cultural expressions. I suspect this is because that if metaethics was done in the latter way, it would be found that most of the seemingly intractable questions the subfield asks would have trivial answers, making most of the subfield itself largely …bunk. That is, it would suggest, as Marchery (2018) argues, that there is no difference in kind between “morality” and other norms, and that certain issues that have been labelled ‘moral issues’ are culturally specific to largely western audiences. For instance, a socially and historically sensitive metaethics would look like Ian Hacking’s ‘The Making and Molding of Child Abuse’ (1991) where he historicises the concept ‘child abuse’ and traces how it was imbued with significant moral meaning beginning from the 1960’s and its construction into an absolute moral wrong, worse than murder.

This leads me to suspect that the subfield suffers from a strong western cultural bias that is influenced by Judaeo-Christian metaphysics, one that posits a Manichean division between good and evil and inclining analytic philosophers to “intuit” that there is something interesting to be said about metaethical questions—it would be interesting to conduct a survey on how many metaethicists come from non-western backgrounds, if anyone is has the time and will. This Judaeo-Christian mythology was later secularised and given currency in the works of Immanuel Kant, the forefather of the modern philosophy, who argued for a distinct Moral Law, unlike anything else, that ostensibly pulls us into its direction despite our desires and to which special experts must interpret. I think this predisposes many philosophers, who are socialised into a Kantian language game during undergraduate training, to intuit that there is such a thing as a “moral domain” that is totally separate from prudence or other normative domains and not historically constituted. This is evidenced by the fact that non-English speaking philosophers often clueless about the questions which English speaking philosophers are interested in, and vice-versa.

It is exactly as if an entire field of experts was constructed in the 13th century with the task of investigating the true nature of ‘chivalry’ without reflecting on the parochialism of the concept. From our lights, the inventive nature and cultural specificity of ‘chivalry’ makes it obvious that the experts’ investigations is a bootless endeavour; it is obvious that the collection of marks, noises and actions described as ‘chivalrous’ are social constructs. Likewise, the philosophers’ notion of ‘morality’ as an independent domain can be thought of as existing in a highly culturally situated episteme in which a bunch of people socialised into Kantian language games talk to each other in a kind of closed circuit interaction, without asking the meta-questions on whether there isn’t such a thing as the true and intrinsic nature of such a domain outside our collective effort in conceiving of it.

Cross-cultural Plurality of Norms

As can be seen in the figure above, most WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialised Rich and Democratic) populations emphasise dignity (a more individualist concept) and put comparatively little emphasis on face and honour, whereas other populations—the majority of the world’s—emphasise more collectivist concepts.

Being Arab and growing up in the Middle East but also having immersed myself in the “Western” world, it was self-evident to me that normative judgments take on multiple forms, including as regulations of shame, honour, dignity and face. Notions of “right” and “wrong” that are so common in the ‘Anglo-American world’ and taken for granted as being relevant to “the moral domain” do not translate as such in the ‘Arab world’. For instance, let’s look at the transliteration of those terms in Arabic (“الصح” and “الخطأ”). These terms do not comport to a moral domain as traditionally conceived by analytic philosophers, but are instead infused in religious language and scarcely involves any deontic modals. Crucially, they comport to the norms of customs and traditions that regulate shame and honour. Because they are recognised as elements of customs and traditions and that there isn’t anyway to go beyond ones customs and traditions, adherents also recognise that the standards that regulate those same behaviours vary, sometimes quite radically, across demographics, even among Arabs themselves. In short, “when in Rome do as the Romans do”. That is to say, many Arabs seem to view action-guiding norms as culturally situated and derived from historically conditioned human beings, not a separate “moral domain”.

For example, there are a set of norms that guide actions in line with Islamic standards of shame, face and dignity. These clusters of norms motivate the actions of individuals in my country more than norms of harm or utilitarian considerations. A violation of these norms is labelled عيب Aib (something like ‘taboo’) and this term Aib (along with counterpart Haram) dominates normative debates. But shame, face and dignity are elements that are irreducibly social. That is, one cannot lose face, feel shame or have dignity in vitro, things that are shameful in one society are praiseworthy in other ones. But now imagine Arabic philosophers gather around and espouse there being an Aib domain that is distinct from other normative domains and go on to generalise this domain to all populations. How absurd would that be?

Researcher who do study “the nature of morality” historically or empirically, especially when using cross-cultural data, efface the metaphysical spookiness that meta-ethicists insist on there being. A well known paper by Jonathan Haidt entitled ‘Moral Dumbfounding: When Intuition Finds No Reason’ shows how this works with incest taboos in western societies, where respondents labelled incest as immoral even in circumstances where there are no victims involved or harms done. There is also growing evidence from social linguistics and linguistic anthropology that some populations, as opposed to native English-speakers, simply do not lexicalise moral terms in their language or lack deontic modals altogether (Berniūnas, 2020; Stich, 2018; Wierzbicka, 2007) and that the “moral domain” shows significant variability across demographics within the same populations (Levine et al., 2021).

Anthropology in place of Metaethics

This intra/cross-cultural variability, far from suggesting that different populations are somehow in error about the ‘true’ nature of morality, might rather reflect that “morality” merely expresses the cultural norms and systems of etiquette a society has developed. If so, then there is no difference in kind between the set of rules of table manners VS the set of rules on stealing that different societies have developed and continuously redefine (or between ‘thou shall not kill’ on the one hand, and ‘look twice before crossing the street’ and ‘do not talk with your mouth full’ and ‘a lady should cross her legs when sitting’, on the other hand).

Learning the “morality” game is thus learning those social rules—even though many of those rules overlap cross-culturally and vary in degree of ascribed importance—just the same as learning the rules of chess or football (again, they are analogous in kind (i.e., in metanormative characteristics), not equivalent in degree of ascribed arbitrariness). Labelling an action “immoral” in the West today seems to take on a more performative character, acting as a table-thumping rhetorical move in communicating that “this rule is not a culturally specific social rule which is a product of historical contingencies, but rather a metaphysically privileged rule that is super duper important!”. The philosopher Oakeshott put it perfectly when he wrote”

A morality is neither a system of general principles nor a code of rules, but a vernacular language. General principles and even rules may be elicited from it, but (like other languages) it is not the creation of grammarians; it is made by speakers. What has to be learned in a moral education is not a theorem such as that good conduct is acting fairly or being charitable, nor is it a rule such as ‘always tell the truth,’ but how to speak the language intelligently ... It is not a device for formulating judgments about conduct or for solving so-called moral problems, but a practice in terms of which to think, to choose, to act and to utter.

There is nothing wrong with that, in fact, it is quite useful in communicating how important the speaker holds the rule to be, but the mistake is to think that it translates to a distinctive dimension of meta-normativity.

As such, it is plausible that the job of “understanding the nature of morality”, which metethics is tasked with, is, as Paul Johnston (1989) had argued long ago, better given to cultural anthropologists than metaethicists. The authority traditionally given to morality may just be better explained anthropologically, rather than invoking mysterious entities such as ‘moral facts’ for philosophical investigation. Our best bet, in other terms, could be observing the social practices and rules of different societies and their transcripts which contain alternative ways of talking about those rules. This means studying morality descriptively—as anthropologists do—rather than metaethically by asking “but what is its true nature?”, as if there is something mystical and mysterious about its nature or about normative language which laypersons are confused about.

The most bizarre aspect of the subfield is not that it ignores the possibility that “morality” may just be a historical and culturally-specific construct or that metaethical questions rarely make a difference to practice, but that the majority of philosophers within the subfield are moral realists; they believe that there are moral properties which exist “out there” external to us, and that we have the cognitive capacities to detect them and to which, in turn, these properties give us “reasons” for acting one way rather than another way. Serious business!

Year by year this sub-field grows and increases in “sophistication” and “professionalisation”; variants of old arguments are proffered to which variants of old responses are given, generation after generation. The question, therefore, that metaethicists should pointedly be asked:

Why should taxpayers subsidise your “intuitions”?

More and more publicly funded conferences are held, presentations given, journals established, publications written, courses taught …all investigating the question of whether things are really okay or just okay. Is there a societal need for high minded “experts” of this kind, let alone an army of them? Would a consultancy that only employs metaethicists as consultants receive any clients? Why are the views of meta-ethicists to be privileged than the average layperson on the street?