PROPERTIES MORAL AND COMIC.(response to review of James R. Flynn's book 'How to Defend Humane Ideals')(Critical Essay)

How terrifying and glorious the role of man if, indeed, without guidance and without consolation he must create from his own vitals the meaning for his existence and write the rules whereby he lives.

--Thornton Wilder, speaking on behalf of Julius Caesar

ALAN OLDING'S generous review (Quadrant, April 2001) of my recent book, How to Defend Humane Ideals (University of Nebraska Press), s much appreciated. However, readers might be interested in an exchange of views on a position he believes to be at least unrefuted. I refer to the notion that humane ideals are objective because they refer to psychological states (or actions) to which moral "predicates" are "attached"; while anti-humane ideals are false because they commend actions that lack such predicates.

This raises the whole question of the viability of what is called "moral realism". When I comment on the literature in that area, I sometimes address points that should not be attributed to Alan. However, his repeated references to "moral facts" show that he believes in a moral reality of some sort. Therefore, no doubt, he will want to meet my basic demand: that moral realists must actually argue for their position on its merits, as distinct from simply lamenting the consequences they believe an absence of moral objectivity entails.

I am going to discard talk of moral "predicates" in favor of discussing whether actions (or psychological states, if you will) have moral "properties". Doing this does not, in my opinion, weaken any argument moral realists would use in their defence. It is just that such talk offends me. I cannot see how anything but sentences can have predicates. My trousers have the property green and therefore I call them "green", but they do not somehow possess that word.

By way of background, my book attempts to refute anti-humane or anti-egalitarian moral positions by arguments such as these: showing racists that they distort facts about the distribution of desirable human traits; showing Social Darwinists that their sociology and ethics conflict; showing Nietzsche that he cannot operationalise his ideal of a ruling elite of supermen; showing that the meritocracy thesis of The Bell Curve is both psychologically and sociologically incoherent. In the process, I attempt to show that humane-egalitarian ideals succeed where anti-humane ideals fail. Humane ideals can meet the tests posed by logic, evidence, and the need for an operationalisable scenario.

As Alan states, I do indeed reject the notion of moral properties. He makes three points. First, without something like this, our moral principles have no objectivity. Therefore, we cannot say to those who are anti-humane or to those who reject morality entirely that they ought to be humane. We can only point to our humane ideals and say, "Here I stand". Second, that my approach puts us at risk: what if the debate about reason and evidence turns against us--would we not then face the terrible prospect of having to give up our ideals in favour of some anti-humane alternative? Or what if both humane ideals and something like Nietzsche's ideals both prove defensible in the light of reason and evidence? How could we commend our ideals over his? Third, and this is a supposed consequence of the first, that without objectivity, morality withers away and leaves us with no moral dimension to our lives.