Metaethical Fiat and Moral Outrage

An interesting metaethical situation presented itself to me today. It is important to note that I have not yet done any research on metaethics, so these are virgin thoughts. It is likely that many (or possibly even all) of my points have been made by other people somewhere, but I do not know who or where.

Sarah and I went to the Renaissance Festival in Hammond, LA today. As far as Renaissance festivals go, it was quite mediocre, but this is not the point. We and some of our friends had purchased a heaping plate of Mediterranean food and were picking at it by ourselves on a set of wooden bleachers. We were having what counts, by any standards, as a lighthearted adult conversation. Being who we are, we spoke vulgarly at times and with sparse use of swear words for emphasis. As it turned out, a rather typical middle-class family had seated themselves next to us. As soon as I noticed them (and was surprised by their presence), I decided to stop using language that might be deemed inappropriate in front of children. However, I let this decision slip my mind, and incidentally uttered the word "fuck" without thinking about it. The father of the family had, apparently, had enough of our swearing and, with a note of irritation, asked if we could cool it with the "f-bombs". We were done eating, so I asked my friends if they were ready to leave the area.

These are the facts of the situation prior to any ethical judgment. What I wish to do now is explicate the events ethically. Clearly, my decision to stop swearing was an ethical claim that I made upon myself; this much is obvious. Loosely speaking, I probably made the judgment based on an ethics of personal reciprocity: I imagined myself bringing my young kids to a Renaissance Festival and dealing with the burden of them picking up new vocabulary words. It is important to observe that I was not necessitated to make this decision. That is, my ethics could have been different. I could, perhaps, have used an egoist ethics (which one of my friends did). In this case, I would observe that I had paid to attend the Renaissance Festival and had not agreed not to swear. Therefore, I was not ethically bound to not swear. Perhaps other plausible ethical assessments are also possible, but it is enough that there is more than one.

The father's reaction is also important. The father actually made two speech-acts when he asked my to stop dropping F-bombs. One speech-act is the actual request that he made: he was genuinely asking a favor of me. This speech act is not an ethical speech act, because he did not make a claim over me with it. Had this been his only speech act, it would be as benign as if he had asked me to pass the salt, which is generally considered an ethically neutral request. And by any plausible ethics, he would not be wrong to ask me to do so.

The second speech-act that the father made with his single question was moral outrage. His irritation revealed that he had expected that I would come to the ethical conclusion that I would come to and adhere to that conclusion. This irritation that this expectation had produced is evidence that he was holding me to an ethical standard (his own ethical standard) and that he was disappointed that I had failed.

What I find interesting about this contrast is that the father had imposed his ethics upon me before finding out what my ethics was! He did not simply ask if I would stop swearing, and judge from my reaction whether my ethics agreed with his -- that I should stop swearing. If I were adhering strictly to what I had agreed to do, then I might have said no. To elaborate this ethics further, I intend an ethics, here, of egocentrism. Such an ethicist might agree to do things that he was not bound to do by law, but only on the basis that it benefits him. For example, in this case, if I really thought that the children learning swear-words from me would not harm me or my world in any way (especially considering that they will learn them anyway), then I might be well justified in telling him that I would not stop swearing. As a matter of fact, I really do believe that his children learning swear-words from me, in particular, will not affect my world in even the remotest way. I could have been such an ethicist. Nevertheless, he did not pause to find out whether I was an egoist ethicist or a reciprocation ethicist.

Now not only did I make a mistake in forgetting to adhere to my own ethics; he made a mistake in holding me to his own ethics before determining whether such a metaethical claim even made sense. That is, in order for him to be able to ethically make an ethical claim upon me, his ethics must first demand that it is the only legitimate ethics. Naturally, there are many ethical systems which make this claim (many extreme religious systems, for example), but it is difficult to determine whether this appropriate. What we would find, should it be acceptable, metaethically, to demand universal acceptance of one's own ethical system, is that the entire field of metaethics would reduce to fiat. That is, the only metaethical principle is: 'All persons ought to share my ethical system'. Let us call this the Principle of Metaethical Fiat ("Fiat" for short). It is quite clear that such a metaethical move is simply implausible, because it would preclude the possibility of a peaceful plurality of ethical systems: we would always be at each other's throats forcing our own ethics down each other's throats. Therefore, if there exists any further metaethical principle, this additional principle would preclude the Fiat. For if there were any other metaethical principle, then it would be a principle of toleration, but the Fiat is a principle of non-toleration. Therefore, the Principle of Metaethical Fiat is inconsistent with any other metaethical principle.

These considerations on the Fiat entail that this principle is, effectively, a principle that there is no metaethics. If metaethics is determined publicly (and I believe that it is because metaethics is much more useful to the public than to individuals), and there are public contributors to the definition of metaethics who hold any other metaethical principle (and it is obvious that there are), then the Fiat is false. Simply put, if there exists a public metaethics, then the Fiat is false.

Thus, the father was bound by metaethics to discover my ethical system before he could be ethically justified in holding me responsible for having violated an ethical code (the code, that is, not to swear in front of children). He simply assumed that my ethical system was the same as his. This is evidence of a shift of blame. As soon as the father revealed his irritation, he broke his own ethical code just as surely as I broke my own. The most interesting thing about this dual violation is that in pointing out my personal error, he made an error of his own. And his error, as an offense against me, is an error for which I was justified in expressing moral outrage toward him. In fact, he was not justified in his moral outrage, whereas I would have been justified had I been morally outraged. In fact, had I been outraged, I could simply point to the fact that he sat next to us, and that there were plenty of equally comfortable places he could have taken his family. Thus, I could show him that he was presumptuous in expressing moral outrage to me, since he is equally responsible for sneaking up so close to a group of adults. Indeed, adult conversation is not surprising to hear from adults in a casual atmosphere.

But I did not express any outrage at all. Instead I was embarrassed because when he accused me of acting unethicaly, he was accurate in the accusation. In other words, the father was epistemically unjustified in his assessment of my ethics, and because his epistemic misstep factored into his action, he is guilty of epistemic irresponsibility. But despite this guilt on his part, I admitted my own guilt and we left his family because I decided I was likely to forget about the decision against swearing again.

Thinking back on this event, it is quite surprising to me that he was unjustified in being morally outraged, but became morally outraged anyway. One might find it equally surprising, on the other hard, that I was justified in being morally outraged, but did not become morally outraged. I'm not sure why I was so quick to forgive his presumptuousness. I should note that there are often times when I get morally outraged by the presumptuousness of others. Even when someone assumes that I believe something that I actually do believe, I am still prone to moral outrage because of presumptuousness. To the reader, this fact about my own ethical code is rather insignificant, but to me, it is evidence that there is something different about assuming ethical reciprocity.

But is it really a plausible ethics to adopt egoism rather than reciprocity? If moral outrage is the indicator of an ethical claim over others, then I invite the reader to examine her own instances of moral outrage, and determine whether it diminishes when one finds oneself as guilty as the accused. Intuitively, it seems that a person faced with such a fact would be likely to calm down, though this could again me a simply oddity about myself.

In closing, I would like to note that I believe that what I did is what Jesus actually meant by the phrase "Turn the other cheek" (assuming he ever said it). I don't think he was suggesting the slave-ethics that Nietzsche accuses him of. Unfortunately, many of his followers seem to believe that he did suggest this slave-mentality, but that is neither here nor there.

-Priam's Pride