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1 Logical Realism

1. The Logical Realists’ Method of Linguistic Analysis

The first phase of analytic philosophy is sometimes called the phase of logical realism and is characterized by a platonic theory of universals, direct realism in perceptual theory (we directly perceive physical objects), and intuitionism in ethics (ethical values are directly intuited). It is arguable that the three most definitive works in this phase all appeared in 1903, Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics and G. E. Moore’s “Refutation of Idealism” and Principia Ethica. Because this is the first phase of analytic philosophy, there is a sense in which 1903 is the beginning of the movement known as analytic philosophy. In other senses, this movement began earlier; for example, it might be said that it began on the evening in late 1898 when Moore convinced Russell (in conversation) that monism and idealism are mistaken and logical realism is true. It is also justifiable to say that in terms of recorded evidence the movement began a few months earlier in August 1898, when Moore first conceived its basic ideas and expressed them in an exultant letter to Desmond MacCarthy that began, “I have arrived at a perfectly staggering doctrine.”[1] However, the first published expression of the theory was Moore’s “Nature of Judgement” (1899).[2] But in still another sense, the analytic movement began in 1879 with the publication of Frege’s Begriffsschrift, in which appeared the first characteristic doctrine of analytic philosophy, quantification theory (Frege’s logical analysis of “some,” “all,” and related expressions), although Frege (unlike Moore and Russell) was not sufficiently influential during his lifetime to begin a movement.

            My initial concern is with the particular version of the method of linguistic analysis that was used by many of the main representatives of logical realism. This version is well summarized in the following passage from Russell’s Principles of Mathematics:

In the present chapter, certain questions are to be discussed belonging to what may be called philosophical grammar. The study of grammar, in my opinion, is capable of throwing far more light on philosophical questions than is commonly supposed by philosophers. Although a grammatical distinction cannot be uncritically assumed to correspond to a genuine philosophical difference, yet the one is prima facie evidence of the other, and may often be most usefully employed as a source of discovery. Moreover, it must be admitted, I think, that every word occurring in a sentence must have some meaning: a perfectly meaningless sound could not be employed in the more or less fixed way in which language employs words. The correctness of our philosophical analysis of a proposition may therefore be usefully checked by the exercise of assigning the meaning of each word in the sentence ex pressing the proposition. On the whole, grammar seems to me to bring us much nearer to a correct logic than the current opinions of philosophers; and in what follows, grammar, though not our master, will yet be taken as our guide.[3]

This paragraph evinces the most methodologically influential tenet in the philosophy of language pertinent to logical realism, the tenet that to every word in a sentence there correlates a sense (what Russell calls a “meaning”). Russell calls each of these senses a term, and terms divide into things, such as persons or trees, and concepts, such as properties or relations. This tenet about sense uses “sense” to mean referent, such that the senses of concrete names are the things to which they refer, and the senses of adjectives and verbs are the concepts to which they refer.[4] (Russell talks of “indication” rather than reference, but I shall treat these two words as being synonymous.)[5] The tenet appeared in an earlier form in Moore’s “Nature of Judgement,” where the correlated senses are called not terms but concepts. This tenet is used in a methodological sense by logical realists (as their “method of linguistic analysis”) in that it is both a major thesis in their philosophy of language and a premise of significant arguments in other disciplines. For example, it is a crucial premise in Russell’s metaphysical argument that there are things that do not exist. This argument may be illustrated as follows: If all words have referents, and the referents of concrete names are things, then “Pegasus” refers to a certain thing, namely, Pegasus, the flying horse. This implies there is a referent of “Pegasus,” even if this referent does not exist. This argument generalizes to any A of which there is a name or definite description. As Russell writes, “For if A were nothing, it could not be said not to be [that is, A could not be the referent of ‘A’ in the sentence ‘A is not’]; ‘A is not’ implies that there is a term A whose being is denied, and hence that A is. Thus unless ‘A is not’ be an empty sound, it must be false—whatever A may be, it certainly is.”[6] This thesis about linguistic sense can also be used to justify theses in other disciplines, such as ethics. It can be argued that the adjective “good” does not refer to any natural property and therefore—because every adjective refers to some property—”good” must refer to some nonnatural property, some property that we grasp by a special sort of intuition. The alternative that “good” refers to no property but merely expresses the speaker’s approval is tacitly ruled out by the tenet that every word has a sense and its sense is its referent.

2. The Logical Realists’ Theory of the Religious Meaninglessness of Human Life

This example leads us directly to the theory of the objective meaning or meaninglessness of human life implicit in some of the ideas of the logical realists. According to the logical realists, God cannot be known to exist, but we do know there is a good in itself. The objective meaning of human life involves the referents of certain ethical adjectives; this meaning is knowable given the linguistic thesis that there are referents of ethical adjectives, a thesis the realists derived from their more general linguistic thesis that every word has a sense which is its referent. If this linguistic thesis is false and ethical adjectives merely express emotions, then these adjectives do not refer to anything, and human life thereby does not have the objective meaning the realists ascribed to it.

This theory of ethical meaning and religious meaninglessness is given a poetic expression in Russell’s essay “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903), which states that there exists no God meant by human acts of worship but that there is a good in itself meant by acts of valuation. Russell writes,

purposeless, . . . void of meaning, is the world which science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only in the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother.[7]

There is no God but “the God created by our own love of the good” (57), and thus the locus of objective meaning in our lives must reside in “that energy of faith which enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good” (58). Thus, Russell suggests that the desire for an objective religious meaning is unsatisfied and that in this respect human lives must be devoid of fulfillment. But there are moral ideals of which we have knowledge, and whatever fulfillment, regarding objective meaning, we are capable of achieving must involve the valuation of these ideals.

Russell offered little by way of argument for these claims about objective meaning and meaninglessness, and one must turn to the writings of Moore to find a more precise and well-argued statement. Another reason for redirecting our attention to Moore is that Russell’s views on the objective meaning/meaninglessness of human life (like his basic metaphysical and linguistic positions) were largely shaped by earlier writings of Moore, which makes Moore the original figure in this connection. Moore’s essay “The Value of Religion” (0900) determined the main contours of the logical realist theory of the meaning/meaninglessness of human life, much as his article “The Nature of Judgement” (1899) determined its basic metaphysical and linguistic positions. In the later essay, Moore avows that human life is religiously meaningless because “there is no probability that God exists,” but that objective meaning can be found in ethical ways of life, and therefore we should “divert the feeling which the religious wish to spend on him [God] towards those of our own kind, who. . . are worthy of all the affection we can feel.”[8]

Before examining Moore’s arguments for these theses, one might ask whether he is right in implicitly suggesting that an objective ethical meaning can satisfy desires not only for ethical meaning but also for religious meaning. This suggestion seems to me dubious. For one thing, it may be questioned whether humans are worthy of all the affection we can feel and whether “we might perhaps with advantage worship the real creature a little more, and his hypothetical Creator a good deal less” (120, my emphasis). It is arguable contra Moore that humans are not appropriate objects of worship or of such other religious emotions as piety, adoration, awe, and reverence. This is connected with the notion of metaphysical worth and of great-making properties. Humans are simply not great enough beings to be worthy of worship. Perhaps they are deserving of respect and in some cases even admiration, but worship is inappropriate. Humans are not all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly free, perfectly happy, perfectly good, and permanent beings, and they are not the cause of the universe, and thereby do not deserve the religious emotions that are appropriately directed to such a being. If there is no God, then certain emotions in the repertoire of human emotions cannot be appropriately felt, and the aspect of human nature that desires to relate emotionally to a metaphysically perfect being must remain unfulfilled.

If Russell’s and Moore’s position is correct, namely, that human life is religiously meaningless but ethically meaningful, then only part of the human desire for objective meaning can be fulfilled. We should side with Russell rather than Moore and hold that the emotional fulfillment of an ethically meaningful way of life should be built on “the firm foundation of unyielding despair” about religious meaning. But this also is not quite accurate, because the desire or need for religious meaning is not universal; if somebody has no desire for religious meaning, then God’s nonexistence will not produce despair in him. Accordingly, we should say that for any person who has a desire for a religious and an ethical meaning of life, the happiness he attains through his ethically meaningful life should coexist with his despair at the lack of a religious meaning. This appeared to be Russell’s attitude at the time he wrote “A Free Man’s Worship.”

What arguments does Moore give for the claim that human life is religiously meaningless but ethically meaningful? Regarding the religious question, Moore begins by assuming that “all the arguments to prove the existence of God rest upon evidence like this” (110), namely, statements about daily facts such as “This hand moves.” The question is whether the existence of God can be inferred from such facts about the world. According to Moore, the crucial argument is the so-called argument from design, which goes as follows: “From the nature of the world, as it appears on observation, we can infer that it or parts of it were or are caused by a being immensely intelligent, wise or good” (111). The argument (as Moore states it) goes,

1. Certain useful and beautiful things in the world were caused by humans.

Therefore,

2. “Anything useful or good we find in the world, that is not a work of man’s designing—man himself, above all, the most useful and beautiful of all—had also for its cause a person of intelligence and goodness [viz., God]” (II).

Moore claims that there is reason to believe (I) only if it is necessarily true that “every natural event has a natural cause” (112), which Moore takes to have the force of

3. Necessarily, every natural event has only a natural cause (and no supernatural cause).

Now (3) is clearly inconsistent with (2) because (2) implies that some natural events, the beginning of the existence of some useful or good things, have a super natural cause. If( is true, then God, since he is not a natural cause, “is not a cause of anything at all” (112), which, given the definition of God as the cause of the universe, is tantamount to the claim that God does not exist. Consequently, Moore concludes, the argument from design fails.

But Moore’s reasoning here is open to several objections. I shall consider one problem, his failure to distinguish adequately between principles of deductive and of probabilistic inference. Moore on the one hand treats the argument from (i) to (2) as a probabilistic argument, as an attempt to answer the question, “Have we any evidence rendering it probable that God exists? . . . Is his existence at all probable?” (108-09). But Moore’s objection to the argument from (I) to (2) is that we “cannot be sure of” (112) (I) unless (3) is true; if (3) were not true, it would be possible that the good and useful things we believe are caused by humans are caused not by humans but supernaturally—”the hospital might have been made by miracle and not made by man” (112). We might well respond to Moore that an argument for the probable existence of God requires only that its premises be probably true, and that the possibility of their falsity is consistent with the argument being successful. And (I) is probably true. We observe hospitals and the like to be caused by humans, and we have no reason to think they are not. Thus, if we take (I) as meaning

I’. It is probable that some useful and beautiful things in the world were

     caused by humans (but possible that they are instead miraculously   

     caused),

we need not assume (3), and Moore’s objection to the argument from design can

be met.

But this is not to say, of course, that the probabilistic argument from design is successful, that (i’) makes (2) probably true. This argument encounters a host of other problems; for example, it fails to include in its premises all relevant information. Some relevant information is that there is observational evidence that the useful and good things in the world that are not caused by humans have other natural causes, for example, of the sort specified in the Darwinian theory of evolution and the big bang cosmological theory. For instance, we have observational evidence that human beings are caused by a process of natural selection operating upon our prehuman ancestors, and that these ancestors in turn have other natural causes.[9] The addition of this information to the premises of the argument blocks the probabilistic inference to (2) or at least renders it seriously problematic.[10]

But in the earlier essay, “The Nature of Judgement,” Moore offers what may be taken as a backup argument for (3), namely, that it is one among the synthetic a priori principles about existents that are intuitively or immediately evident. The justification for believing (3) does not reside solely or even primarily in the fact that it is (allegedly) presupposed by (I) or other empirical statements, but in its self—evidence. Synthetic a priori propositions about existents “would, in fact, be true, whether any such propositions [empirical propositions such as (I) or “This hand moves”] were true or not. Kant has only taught us that, if any of them are true, it must be so likewise. He failed to see that its truth may be asserted immediately on the same ground as theirs.”[11] But this argument—or rather, assertion—runs into problems of its own. Many people, theists in particular, find (3) to be intuitively false, and many others who are agnostics or who do not share Moore’s brand of atheism[12] would disagree with Moore’s claim that (3) is intuitively self-evident. If we accept Moore’s contention that intuition is to be taken as a justification for belief or disbelief in (3), then the occurrence of conflicting intuitions suggests that it is justified to believe (3) and justified to disbelieve (3). Consequently, there is no means of knowing whether (3) is true or not, because there is no method of deciding between the conflicting intuitions. An impasse such as this raises fundamental questions about the adequacy of Moore’s intuitionism and the linguistic method upon which his intuitionism is based, questions that will arise again over Moore’s ethical theory.

It is admittedly not clear from the above discussion how Moore’s theory of the religious meaninglessness of human life is based on his method of linguistic analysis, specifically, upon the logical realist tenet that every word has a sense which is its referent. But there is a connection, as I shall make apparent after I discuss Moore’s theory of the ethical meaning of human life. The relation between the linguistic method and the theory of life’s meaning/meaninglessness is most explicitly manifest in the ethical writings of Moore, which constituted the focus of his concern with objective meaning or meaninglessness. Moore wrote one article on religion but four articles and two books on ethics.[13]

3. The Logical Realists’ Theory of the Ethical Meaning of Human Life

A suitable transition from the logical realists’ philosophy of religion to their ethics is best made by showing how the logical realist method of linguistic analysis determined different conclusions to be reached in each of these disciplines. This difference arises from a common position they take about God and the good in itself Our attention shall remain with Moore’s statement of this theory, given that he originated and developed it to the greatest degree. As we have seen, Moore argues that God’s existence cannot be inferred from facts about the world, but he goes on to say the same about the good in itself: “Our religious belief stands in the same position as our moral beliefs. These moral judgements, too, it may be said, are independent of beliefs about the world: their truth also can never be inferred from that of daily facts.”[14] Given this claim, one might question why Moore draws different conclusions about the good in itself and God. We may ask, if we car infer the existence neither of God nor of the good from “daily facts,” should we not in fairness adopt a skepticism about the good as well as about God?

The answer to this question pertains directly to the method of linguistic analysis the logical realists used. The thesis that every word has a referent that constitutes its sense entails that both “God” and “goodness” have referents. If we adopt Russell’s and Moore’s terminology, this means that the referents of “God” and “the good” are beings.[15] But Pegasus is also a being, and the religious question is whether God is not merely a being, but also an existent, something that (for example) enters into causal relations with the universe. Moore’s position is that the principle of causality (3) precludes any inference from natural events to a non- natural cause, but the situation with the good in itself is different, because the good in itself is defined not as an existent individual that has causal relations with other existents, but as something that has the ontological status merely of being. Thus, the fact that we cannot infer the existence of the good from natural events does not count against the truth of our moral beliefs, for these beliefs presuppose not that the good exists but merely that it has being. And that the good has being follows from the thesis about linguistic sense that is definitive of logical realism; if every word has a referent, ethical adjectives have referents, namely, the ethical properties in the class of properties that belong to the class of intrinsic goods.

But one should not pretend that Moore’s distinction between existents and mere beings has a clarity that it does not in fact possess. According to Moore’s theory in Principia Ethica, something’s being located in time is a sufficient condition of it having existence. If, however, there is something not located in time, it does not follow that it is a mere being. Moore holds that there are many timeless beings—numbers, propositions, and the like—that are mere beings, but he also allows that there may be atemporal beings that exist (100-12). A prime example is God. But Moore believes there is no proof of such atemporal existents and no reason to believe there are any. Unfortunately, however, Moore is less than clear about the distinctions involved. His theory would be tolerably clear if “exists” meant or implied “has being and is located in time” and if “has mere being” meant or implied “has being and is not located in time.” But once timeless existents are allowed as possible, the distinction between existence and mere being becomes blurred. In fact, Moore never says exactly what the distinction between a mere being and a timeless existent comes to. Perhaps one could say that a mere being is a universal and a timeless existent an individual, but such a statement would be an addition to, rather than an explication of, Moore’s philosophy.

I shall reconstruct in some detail Moore’s argument for the being of the good in itself. To begin with, consider the property of goodness that all intrinsic goods possess. Moore holds that goodness is not a natural property. Examples of natural properties are mental and physical properties such as pleasure and roundness. A natural property is located in time and is part of the object of which it is a property, whereas a nonnatural property is timeless and is not a part of the objects to which it belongs (41). One might wish that Moore would elaborate further upon this distinction, but we may assume for purposes of argument that this distinction is tolerably clear.[16] Moore wants to argue that “good” does not refer to a natural property and that goodness is a nonnatural property and has mere being rather than existence. His argument has this structure:

4. Every word has a sense, which is its referent.

5. The sense of adjectives is a property to which they refer.

6. “Good” is an adjective.

7. “Good” does not refer to a natural property.

Therefore,

8. “Good” refers to a nonnatural property.

Clearly, the linguistic theses about sense, (4) and (5), are crucial to the conclusion, (8), because without them one cannot derive (8) from (6) and (7). As I mentioned earlier, one could instead infer from (6) and (7) that “good” does not refer to anything at all but merely expresses the speaker’s emotion or approval.

Also crucial to this argument is (7). Moore supports (7) by noting that if “good” referred to a natural property, such as pleasure, then certain sentences which are clearly not tautologies would be tautologies. For instance, “Pleasure is good” would be a mere tautology, meaning pleasure is pleasant, whereas “Pleasure is good” is clearly not a tautology but a synthetic assertion, an assertion whose denial is neither implicitly nor explicitly self—contradictory. “Pleasure is good” is synonymous with the synthetic assertion “Pleasure ought to exist.”[17] A similar argument may be constructed against any other attempt to define “good” in terms of a natural property.

But the conclusion that “good” refers to a nonnatural property is not sufficient to establish that human life has an objective ethical meaning. For the fact that there is such a property does not entail it is exemplified, that is, that there is anything that possesses goodness. If human life has an objective ethical meaning, then there is a class of intrinsic goods, a class of properties and relations that possess the property of goodness. Moore believes that there is such a class and that the two greatest goods that we can know to belong to it are aesthetic enjoyment and personal affection. The endeavor to instantiate these complex properties or relations is the focus of the ethical purpose of our lives. Thus, Moore writes,

That it is only for the sake of these things [aesthetic enjoyments and personal affections]—in order that as much of them as possible may at some time exist—that any one can be justified in performing any public or private duty; that they are the raison d’etre of virtue; that it is they—these complex wholes themselves, and not any constituent or characteristic of them—that form the rational ultimate end of human action and the sole criterion of social progress: these appear to be truths which have been generally overlooked. (189)

Moore’s argument that goodness is possessed by aesthetic enjoyment and personal affection is not straightforward, but it may be reconstructed in part as follows. We begin with thesis (8), which is based on the logical realist theory of linguistic sense:

8. “Good” refers to a nonnatural property.

9. “Aesthetic enjoyment” has a referent, a certain complex property. Therefore,

10. The ethical words in the sentence “Aesthetic enjoyment is good”

(along with the copula “is”) guarantee that this sentence’s parts have sense and that the sentence expresses a proposition.

11. Every proposition is either true or false.

Therefore,

12. The proposition expressed by “Aesthetic enjoyment is good” is either

true or false.

According to Moore, propositional truths or falsehoods are mere beings and obtain nondependently upon humans (iii). Thus, if there are ethical truths and false hoods, then there is a class of intrinsic goods, even if we do not know them.

But this thesis is only halfway to Moore’s position that aesthetic enjoyment is a member of this class, that is, that the proposition in question is true. How do we know that the proposition expressed by “Aesthetic enjoyment is good” is true? According to Moore, we know this simply through intuition; by grasping the proposition the sentence expresses, we understand that it is true. In other words, the reason we believe the proposition to be true is that it appears to be true. In answer to the obvious objection that there is a diversity of opinions and “appearings to be true” about ethical matters, Moore refers to his linguistic method as a means of solving such conflicts. He notes that “in all those cases where we found a difference of opinion, we found also that the question had not been clearly under stood” (145). Moore is implying that if we clearly distinguish the different senses of words we shall clearly grasp the relevant ethical propositions and thereby achieve a uniform belief in their truth or falsity. This intuitionist theory is based on the thesis that the sense of adjectives is their referent. This thesis is taken to imply that adjectives have a semantic reference that is distinguishable from the speaker’s reference. “Aesthetic enjoyment” stands in a semantic relation to the property of aesthetic enjoyment of referring to it, and the speaker who utters this expression (with a clear understanding of its sense) stands in a psychological relation to this property of referring to it. The psychological relation is an act of consciousness but the semantic relation is not. When Moore gives an example of a deliberate case of a divergence between speaker’s and semantic reference, namely, that it would be foolish if “I were to announce that, whenever I used the word ‘good,’ I must be understood to be thinking of that object which is usually denoted by the word ‘table’” (6), he is using “thinking” to mean speaker’s reference and “denoted” to mean semantic reference. Moore’s contention is that once we distinguish clearly the senses (semantic referents) of different words or of different uses of the same word, then the speaker’s referents will be intuitively clear, and we will thereby be able to recognize and agree about which propositions are true or false. This gives us the additional premises needed to establish the conclusion that the objective ethical meaning of human life involves valuing aesthetic enjoyment as one of the greatest intrinsic goods. Let us follow Moore and call the speaker’s apprehension of the proposition expressed by “Aesthetic enjoyment is good” (which includes the speaker’s reference to the properties of aesthetic enjoyment and goodness) an “intuition.” The additional premises are

13. The intuition of a proposition as being true is a justification for

believing the proposition to be true.

14. Disagreements about the truth or falsity of the sentence ‘Aesthetic

enjoyment is good” are due to different propositions being associated with this sentence (which is itself a consequence of the words being assigned different referents).

15. If people use the sentence “Aesthetic enjoyment is good” to express

the same proposition, they will share the same intuition.

16. If this sentence is used to express the proposition Moore argues that it

properly does express, then there will be an intuition of this proposition as true.

Therefore,

17. The belief that the mentioned proposition is true is justified.

It follows from (17) that we are justified in believing that valuing the goodness of aesthetic enjoyment is a part of the objective ethical meaning of human life.

Premise (15) maybe taken as following from (14). Given that Moore reports that he has the intuition that the mentioned proposition is true, (16) and (17) are true if (14) and (15) are true. So the crucial issue comes down to whether (13) and (14) are true. In effect, Moore’s theory that aesthetic enjoyment is part of the objective ethical meaning of human life hinges upon whether intuition is a justification for ethical belief and whether people will share the same intuition if they assign the same ethical proposition to the sentence.

4. The Implication of Logical Realism that Life is Meaningful but Absurd

It is very difficult to accept that people have the same intuitions about the same ethical propositions. Moore writes,

No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, ha ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves; nor, if we consider strictly what things are worth having purely for their own sakes, does it appear probable that any one will think that anything else has nearly so great a value as the things which are included under these two heads. (188-89).

Yet other examples of great goods in themselves come to mind, such as an act of philosophical understanding. Now Moore intuitively finds it false that

18. Philosophical understanding is at least as valuable as aesthetic

enjoyment,

but there is a long tradition in Western philosophy that is based on the intuition that (18) is true. Plato, Aristotle, and many other traditional philosophers find (18) true, as do such twentieth—century ethical intuitionists as Max Scheler and Panayot Butchvarov.[18] Other counterexamples to Moore’s claim about the uniformity of ethical intuitions can be found. So (14) is false. This also casts doubt on (is), the claim that the intuition of an ethical proposition as being true is a justification for believing it to be true. For if Moore intuits (18) as true and Plato intuits (18) as false, then it is justified to believe (18) is true and justified to believe it is false. Because there is no known method of deciding which of these conflicting intuitions is the correct one, it is difficult to see how knowledge of such ethical propositions is possible at all.

Note that if we are to distinguish the intuition from the belief and regard the intuition as an alleged justification for the belief, then by “intuition” we must mean the appearing to be true of the proposition. This would allegedly justify the belief in that the proposition’s appearing to be true would justify the belief that it is true. But given the conflict among the various intuitive appearances, these appearances can not justify the beliefs.

The problem of conflicting ethical intuitions cannot be solved by introducing the concept of relative ethical justification which represents ethical justification as relative to a particular person. If Moore is justified by his intuition in believing (18) to be false and Plato by his intuition in believing (18) to be true, then each is justified in taking himself to know the truth-value of (i8). But this solution does not solve the problem of the unknowability of ethical propositions because it merely entails that Moore and Plato are each justified in believing that he knows the truth-value of (18); it does not entail that Moore knows the truth—value of (i 8), and it does not entail that Plato knows this truth-value. We are still in the dark about who knows (18) and about whether (18) is true or false. We are also in the dark about whether or not any ethical proposition about which there are conflicting intuitions is true or not; we merely know that the people with the conflicting intuitions are relatively justified in believing themselves to know the truth-value of the proposition. In a word, the irresolvable conflict among the ethical intuitions entails that these intuitions cannot be absolute justifications for the ethical beliefs, and absolute justifications are required if there is to be knowledge of ethical propositions and not merely relatively justified beliefs that one has a knowledge of ethical propositions.

Perhaps a suggestion by H. A. Prichard might solve this problem and provide us with the absolute justifications that are needed. Prichard is the second most influential ethical philosopher among the logical realists (after Moore), primarily owing to his classic article “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” published in 1912. Prichard argues that moral philosophy rests on a mistake because it assumes that there needs to be a proof that we ought to do what in our nonreflective ethical consciousness we immediately apprehend as our obligations. There needs to be no proof, Prichard contends, because our nonreflective ethical consciousness is an intuitive knowledge of self-evident obligations.

Prichard responds to the objection that “obligation cannot be self-evident, since many actions regarded as obligations by some are not so regarded by others,” by asserting that “the appreciation of an obligation is, of course, only possible for a developed moral being, and ... different degrees of development are possible.”[19] But this brief response won’t do because it involves a vicious circularity. How do we know which persons are more morally developed than others? Is the person who intuits capital punishment to be immoral more morally developed than the person who intuits it to be morally permissible in some cases? How can we decide without knowing which intuitions are true? It seems we have a vicious circle: the criterion for determining which of two conflicting moral intuitions is true is that the intuition held by the more morally developed person is true, but the criterion for determining which of the two persons is morally developed is that the more morally developed one is the person with the true intuition. It does not appear, then, that Prichard has offered us a means of solving the problem of conflicting intuitions.

The above considerations about the unknowability of ethical truths suggest that human life is objectively meaningful but absurd. Human life is objectively meaningful because there is a good in itself, and some of our beliefs about the good in itself are true, but human life is absurd because we cannot know which of our beliefs are true.

This conclusion hinges in part upon the definition of “absurdity.” Generally speaking, something is absurd if it is grossly disproportionate with what it is supposed to be, such that this disproportionateness renders the thing or activity clearly contrary to reason. The notion of absurdity as applied to human life implies that human life is grossly disproportionate (in a way that is clearly contrary to reason) to what it is supposed to be. There are at least two ways that human life can be absurd, namely, through being objectively meaningless and absurd or through being objectively meaningful and absurd. In the philosophical literature, only the first sort of absurdity has been discussed, for example, by Albert Camus and Thomas Nagel. I shall illustrate the first sort of absurdity in terms of Nagel’s theory because he discusses a specifically ethical sort of absurdity, and this is directly relevant to our present concerns (Camus’s theory is of a religious absurdity). I shall then explore the meaningful absurdity that is arguably implied by the logical realist ethical philosophy.

In his essay “The Absurd,” Nagel suggests that an absurd situation involves a discrepancy between reality and the pretension and aspiration of the people in that situation. He regards our lives as absurd because we value our plans and projects (the pretension) and on this basis strive to realize them (the aspiration), and yet in reality our plans and projects have no value. We normally adopt an internal perspective in which our plans and projects seem to have value, but when we adopt an external perspective and see that nothing really has value we recognize our lives to be absurd. Nagel assumes that there are no intrinsic values of things and that there are no necessary or synthetic a priori ethical truths; he assumes our value—presuppositions are “arbitrary” and reflect “all the contingency and specificity of our [individual] aims and pursuits.”[20] The absurdity is that from the internal perspective these presuppositions do not seem arbitrary, contingent, and subjectively relative, and this seeming is indispensable to our normal endeavors and passions.

This sort of absurdity, the conjunction of objective meaninglessness and the normal but tacit pretension that there is objective meaning, could be alleviated if we ceased to pretend there is objective meaning. Our situation then would be not an absurd one but a nihilistic one: there is nothing worth striving for and there would seem to us to be nothing worth striving for. Nagel believes a sustained nihilistic attitude is impossible for humans—we are valuing creatures by nature— and hence that we are doomed to absurdity.

This is not, however, the sort of absurdity in which we are interested at present. (Meaningless absurdity shall be examined in later chapters.) Rather, we are assuming the logical realist view that there are synthetic a priori ethical truths and hence that some value-presuppositions are necessary and nonarbitrary and that they manifest an intrinsic moral order of reality. We are also assuming the general linguistic and epistemological framework of logical realism, that there are intrinsic value-properties of things designated by “goodness” and “evilness” in relation to which we are (or at least seem to be) in intuitive contact. Given these assumptions, life is objectively meaningful. But it is nonetheless absurd because we cannot know this objective meaning, despite the fact that we normally if tacitly assume we do know it. Normally, we tacitly take our value-intuitions as absolute justifications for our beliefs about what is good or evil, as giving us knowledge of good and evil, but these value—intuitions are not in reality absolute justifications for these beliefs. The tacit “pretension” is that the value—intuitions are absolute justifications, and the “aspiration” is to instantiate the ethical principles about which we have intuitions, but the “reality” is that these pretensions and aspirations involve a delusion. In this respect, the reality of human life is grossly disproportionate to what it is tacitly supposed to be and this disproportionateness is clearly contrary to reason, for it is clearly irrational to live on the basis of a tacit and false assumption that we have knowledge about which moral beliefs are true.

This conclusion about life’s absurd meaningfulness is partially implicit in the premises of the logical realist ethics. One premise is that there are ethical truths. This premise is based on the logical realist theory that “good” refers to a property and the associated claim that ethical sentences express propositions, construed platonically (so that they possess their truth or falsity nondependently upon their being believed or disbelieved by humans). A second premise is that if our ethical beliefs are absolutely justified, they are justified by our intuitions, that is, by ethical propositions intuitively appearing to us to be true. These two premises are implicit in logical realism. The third premise comes from our own observation that there are conflicting value—intuitions even after the sense of the words in the relevant ethical sentences has been clearly understood by the parties in the dispute (some thing Moore denied). The fourth premise is that this conflict entails that value- intuitions do not absolutely justify our beliefs in ethical propositions, from whence it follows (given the second premise that our ethical beliefs, if absolutely justified at all, are justified by value—intuitions) that our ethical beliefs are absolutely unjustified. This gives rise to an absurdly meaningful situation given the fact that we normally if tacitly take our value—intuitions as absolutely justifying our ethical beliefs and aspire to realize various goals based on this false assumption.

The idea that human life is meaningful but absurd can be made more understandable if we make some related distinctions. One is that life is meaningful but absurd only if it is not meaningful but tragic. Life would be tragic if evil triumphed over good and we knew this. Our lives cannot be tragic because even if evil triumphed over good we could not know this, given that we do not know what is good and what is evil. The Jews could not say with truth that life was tragic as they were being imprisoned in labor camps and exterminated by the Germans, because (1) it appeared to the Jews that the German treatment of the Jews was evil, (2) it appeared to the relevant Germans that the German treatment of the Jews was good (“because necessary for the purification of Aryan Europe”), and (3) there is in principle no means to decide which of these appearances is the veridical one. The Jews and Germans, had they been aware of the true situation, would have lived and died in the full knowledge of the absurdity of their lives.

Of course I am not to be understand as making definitive ethical conclusions here. At present, I am merely drawing out some of the implications of logical realist ethical theory. But I would point out that if it appears intuitively obvious to the reader that the Germans were doing evil to the Jews, then that does not refute the argument presented in this section for the meaningful absurdity of life, because the fact that there are such intuitive appearances is one of the very premises of the argument.

A distinction essential to the theory of meaningful absurdity is that between first-level ethical beliefs and second-level ethical beliefs. A first—level ethical belief is that something is good or evil or that something is of equal or greater value than something else, for example, that philosophical understanding is at least as valuable as aesthetic enjoyment. A second-level ethical belief is about some or all first-level ethical beliefs. The belief that “the intuition that the proposition that philosophical understanding is at least as valuable as aesthetic enjoyment is true does not absolutely justify belief in this proposition” is an example of a particular second—level ethical belief, and the belief that “life is meaningful but absurd” is an example of a general second—level ethical belief If logical realism is true, then some of our first—level ethical beliefs are true; for example, either it is true that philosophical understanding is at least as valuable as aesthetic enjoyment or it is true that philosophical understanding is less valuable than aesthetic enjoyment. But none of these beliefs is absolutely justified, and consequently we do not know which are true; that is, we do not have a second—level knowledge of which first-level beliefs are true. The absurdity of life does not appear as long as we experience first-level ethical beliefs. Rather, the absurdity of life consists in having first-level ethical beliefs and tacitly and falsely assuming they are absolutely justified by our intuitions. In contrast, the absurdity of life does not consist in our second—level ethical beliefs, but it appears to us once we experience the relevant second—level beliefs. Most of the people most of the time are not disturbed by this absurdity because most people most of the time remain on the first level of ethical beliefs.

But what should we do once we recognize our lives to be absurd?

The answer can only be, we do not know what we should do because if we did know, we would have ethical knowledge after all. We know the fact that our lives are absurd, but we do not know whether as a consequence we ought to commit suicide or trust blindly in whatever first-level ethical beliefs we happen to have or doubt all our first-level beliefs and try not to act or respond to anything on the basis of them or ignore the whole problem and play backgammon.

But we cannot ameliorate our situation by saying that it does not matter what we do or how we respond to our absurd situation because it does objectively matter; some responses are objectively right and others objectively wrong, even though we do not know which are which. It may be a synthetic a priori truth that we ought to trust our first-level ethical beliefs or it may be a synthetic a priori truth that we ought not to, and if we make the wrong decision here, then we will be living as we ought not to.

Our situation, then, is one of darkness and ignorance. The air of brightness, sunny optimism, and confidence exuded in Moore’s Principia Ethica is unwarranted because we do not in fact know the ethical truths Moore believes we know. Our situation is dramatically typified by two warring nations whose soldiers are killing one another on the basis of their passionately held intuitions that they are right and not the other side, whereas the reality is that neither side knows who is right or is even capable of knowing who is right. The soldiers live, kill, and die in ignorance and illusion. The sunniness of Moore’s book should be replaced by the night of Matthew Arnold’s poem:

the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.[21]