Is Metaphysics Immune to Moral Refutation?
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Is Metaphysics Immune to Moral Refutation? Alex Barber 1 Received: 3 July 2019 / Accepted: 12 November 2019/ # The Author(s) 2019
Abstract When a novel scientific theory conflicts with otherwise plausible moral assumptions, we do not treat that as evidence against the theory. We may scrutinize the empirical data more keenly and take extra care over its interpretation, but science is in some core sense immune to moral refutation. Can the same be said of philosophical theories (or the nonethical, ‘metaphysical’ ones at least)? If a position in the philosophy of mind, for example, is discovered to have eye-widening moral import, does that count against it at all? Actual responses by philosophers to the question of whether unanticipated moral consequences of metaphysical theories have evidential force are scattered, implicit, divergent, under-argued, and sometimes even self-undermining. The present discussion is, most immediately, an attempt to sort out the confusion. Beyond that, it exploits the new perspective this question gives us on a familiar topic: the relation of philosophy to science. Keywords Naturalism . Metaphysics . Metametaphysics . Moral immunity
1 Introduction To what extent and in what respects should philosophy assimilate itself to science? In this discussion, I aim to shed new light on this familiar question by addressing a less familiar one: to what extent if any is philosophy immune to moral refutation? Science is, it seems, immune to moral refutation. Moral opinion, no matter how profoundly held, has no evidential force in the empirical domain. As I argue elsewhere, even moral realists are unwilling to use the moral import of a scientific theory as evidence for or against it. Is philosophy also immune to moral refutation? The question has only been addressed in a piecemeal way, always in the context of dealing with the unexpected ethical implications of some particular philosophical position. The negative claim in what follows is that these isolated discussions are unsatisfactory, mainly because they
* Alex Barber [email protected]
1
Philosophy Department, The Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK
A. Barber
fail to consider the question at a general level. My first positive goal, then, is to tackle the question head-on. My second is to use the topic of immunity to moral refutation to develop a fresh perspective on the subtle relation between philosophy and science.1 As per the title, I will talk of ‘metaphysics’ rather than ‘philosophy’. Moral philosophy is susceptible to moral refutation more or less trivially, so I will set it aside by using the word ‘metaphysics’, stipulatively, to describe all those parts of philosophy not generally seen as sub-branches of ethics. Metaphysical theories in this (loose but functional) sense can have moral ramifications, certainly, or the question of their moral refutability would never arise; but as with scientific theories, this moral force is not overt within the theory. Explicit discussion of immunity to moral refutation (henceforth: moral i
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