Accepting Without Believing, or Two Systems of Belief?

(Joe)

In the last few chapters of The Myth of Morality (2001), Richard Joyce lays out a potential system of "moral fictionalism", whereby we could accept moral premises without truly believing in them. This follows a lengthy argument for why we should be "error theorists" about morality, which means that we should consider moral realism to be false. If this is the case, then the most obvious conclusion would be that we should discard morality entirely, whatever that might mean. Instead Joyce wants us to take a fictionalist stance towards morality. By doing this he hopes that we will be able to continue making use of moral discourse, with all the advantages that it brings in terms of social cohesion, but without compromising our epistemological integrity.

This is Richard Joyce. Unfortunately I couldn't think of a better picture to accompany the post.

In Joyce's words, "to make a fiction of p is to 'accept' p whilst disbelieving p" (2001: 189). Without going in to too much detail, Joyce thinks that merely accepting a proposition means something like assenting to it, and employing the discourse that it facilitates, without believing it to be true. In the case of moral propositions, this will retain some of the useful imperative that they impart to our actions, in what Joyce seems to characterise as an almost unconscious manner. So when I, as a moral fictionalist, say "It is wrong to harm another", I am not expressing a belief in some moral truth, but rather in a sense reminding myself that harming others is usually bad for me in the long, despite any apparent short term benefits.

In fact, it may be the case that at the time I make that statement, I do truly believe it - what makes me a fictionalist is that when I'm questioned under serious philosophical pressure ("Do you really believe that?"), I will express my disbelief. This leads me to think that we might be able to more accurately model a possible moral fictionalism by talking about in terms of two seperate belief systems. Rather than saying that accept something without believing it, we could say under x-conditions we do believe something, but under y-conditions we don't. This seems to me to reflect my own attitude to morality fairly well - most of the time I'm a kind of libertarian-utilitarian, but when I sit down and think hard about morality I find it impossible to truly justify that position.

Humans aren't particularly good at logic, and our irrationality is fairly well documented, so this kind of holding of contradictory beliefs might not be uncommon. Furthermore, I currently believe that consciousness is a fragmentary and dis-unified process, which (if true) could make it even easier to hold radically different beliefs under different circumstances. It might be possible to design experiments that test this kind of two-belief structure, perhaps by looking at how the brain behaves when different kinds of belief are being expressed.

For the most part I agreed with Joyce's book, and on the whole I think that some kind of moral fictionalism will be necessary if we are to retain any kind of morality in the future, but I'm still not sure how exactly that might be realised, and what it might look like.

Joyce, R. 2001. The Myth of Morality. Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge.