The Metaethics of Cognitive Non-Dualism
The field of metaethics is divided between two broad views about moral truths; the moral realist versus the moral anti-realist. If you are a moral realist, you believe that moral facts are essentially objective and mind-independent, whereas if you are a moral anti-realist, you believe that moral facts do not exist because moral judgements are subjective and minddependent. These views of metaethics are based on dualistic notions of metaphysics and epistemology regarding cognition which roughly divides the world into either empirical objective facts or subjective mind dependent opinions.
In this essay, I will first unpack these dualistic metaphysical and epistemological assumptions, as well as clearly layout how moral realism and moral anti-realism follow from that dualistic ontology. Then, I will reject those foundational dualistic assumptions via arguments from embodied cognitive science. In its place, I will argue for a non-dualistic view of cognition, which supports the notion that morality arises from the transjective relationship between cognitive agents embedded within a world for the sake of orienting and navigating social relationships. This argument can be viewed as a type of sensibility theory, where moral judgements are merited human responses to the world; morality arises from both the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ side of the equation. Hence, transjective. In the concluding section, I will respond to various potential objections and unpack some implications for this argument.
Dualistic Ontologies and Metaethical Theories
Arguably, since the beginning of the early modern period with Rene Descartes, and especially after the scientific revolution and the enlightenment, we have broadly adopted a representational epistemology in regard to cognition. Representational epistemologies argue that the mind-independent world is objectively real, and then we create a mental representation of that world subjectively through cognition. From this type of inquiry, the distinction between subjective and objective forms of knowledge emerge. Because objective forms of knowledge can be quantifiably verified and measured, whereas subjective knowledge remains qualitative and phenomenological, we have epistemically prioritised objective knowledge. We regard it as the only method of inquiry to yield any sort of truth, whereas subjective knowledge at best is representational of the objective world, and at worst is an epiphenomenal mind-dependent illusion which cannot ground any notions of truth. These representational epistemologies entail a view of metaphysics that whatever is real is ultimately open to empirical and objective inquiry or a priori rational investigation.
To see this distinction clearly, consider moral realism. Moral realism’s fundamental claim is that moral truths exist and that they can be expressed as truth-apt judgements which are based on mind-independent moral properties. By this very definition, human responses are set aside as a basis for morality. These moral facts that moral realists claim exist are either natural features of the world open to scientific inquiry, or non-natural features of the world that can be understood through reason. However, in either case, the basic presupposition is that what is real is by nature mind-independent properties which either exist in the objective world as facts which can be quantified, or as a priori facts which can be rationally discovered. Objectivity is given priority for moral realists, and any subjective/human dependent emotions or opinions are out of the question.
By contrast, moral anti-realism’s fundamental claims are either that 1) moral judgements do not report any facts that can be verified as true or false (non-cognitivism), or 2) that moral judgements report beliefs which are truth-apt, but that moral claims are not factually true (error theorists). Anti-realists are divided about whether these moral judgements are truth-apt propositions, but they are united on the idea that moral judgements arise from subjective human experiences which do not track any kind of facts. The basic presupposition for moral anti-realism is the same as the moral realist; that what is real is by nature mind-independent properties. Since moral anti-realists argue that moral judgements are purely mind-dependent phenomena, moral evaluations become relativistic.
Assumptions that underpin metaethical theories do not necessarily follow this kind of representational model of cognition, but by and large the ontological dualism between subjectivity and objectivity does form the basis of metaethics today.
The Non-Dualistic approach to Metaethics
Instead of following the same set of dualistic assumptions about the ontological status of the mind that representative epistemologies manifest, let’s consider what holism regarding cognition would look like.
Embodied cognition has become an increasingly acceptable alternative to the orthodox representational theories of mind. Previous theories treated “the mind and the world as separate and independent of each other, with the outside world mirrored by a representational model in the head” (Thompson, 2007, p. 10). Embodied cognition calls these assumptions into question. It argues that the mind emerges from the dynamic coupling that occurs between an agent within an environment. As Verela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) state in their seminal book The Embodied Mind, “living beings and their environments stand in relations to each other through mutual specification or codetermination” (p. 198). Thompson (2007) explains further in his book Mind in Life that “cognitive processes emerge from the nonlinear and circular causality of continuous sensorimotor interactions involving the brain, body, and environment” (p. 11). From these definitions, we can see that embodied cognition theories reject representational epistemologies which give rise to Cartesian style dualism (mind vs. world), and instead presuppose what I will call a contact epistemology (mind in world).
This contact epistemology entails a non-dual ontology of ‘relational holism,’ where the meaning of judgements come from the relationship of cognitive agents embedded within a world, with both the agent and the environment mutually specifying the development of each other in reality (Thompson, 2007). Thus, cognitive agents are intertwined with their environments, fitted to them specifically for the sake of orienting and navigating their existence. What is salient ‘subjectively’ for a cognitive agent arises from the co-determined fittedness of the agent to their ‘objective’ world; the meaning of judgements arises from a transjective relationship, a relationship which transcends merely objective or subjective notions of reality.
Within this view of transjective meaning, I would argue that moral judgements track what is most salient for the agent in regard to social dynamics. It is our social nature that necessitates moral judgements; our mental faculties track what would be most beneficial for facilitating cooperation amongst individuals in order to create societies. This gives us the capacity to empathise with and care for other human beings. And, although these developments most likely evolved for increasing cooperation amongst individual humans, it has more broadly imbued us with the capacity to care for beings other than ourselves. In any case, it is the transjective relationship that we have with other agents, and our nature as social animals, which gives rise to our moral evaluations.
I would argue that this leads to a view of moral judgements where objects of evaluation depend on natural and empirical features of the world (the environment) and which the processes and products of the evaluations can be described via neuroscience and psychology, but where the evaluations themselves are non-reducible phenomenological aspects of the mind which arises from the transjective relationship that an agent has with its environment. Therefore, metaphysically, the conditions of values judgements can be naturally 6 described, but ultimately the subjective mind-dependent phenomena of moral perceptions is irreducible to naturalistic explanations.
To help get a grasp of transjective morality, consider the classic primary argument given by sensibility theorists which contrasts human experiences to their objects in the world (McDowell, 2013). Take colour for example: our mental experience of perceiving ‘redness’ is contingent on both an agent having certain perceptual capacities and them perceiving something in the world that under certain normal conditions presents the qualities of being red. Within this analogy, we can see that our experiences of ‘redness’ is both dependent on our minds and the objects we perceive in the world. Colour arises from the transjective relationship of our minds and the world; it is a blend of both objectivity and subjectivity.
Although a physicalist could point to the objective properties of the object that is red and state that it is the reflective properties of the object which cause it to be perceived as red, the quality of ‘redness’ itself is determined by the qualia presented in our subjective conscious experience. If we are comfortable with entertaining the explanatory gap of consciousness in light of embodied cognition’s arguments which support the idea that consciousness emerges from matter and is qualitatively irreducible to matter, then we can affirm the ontological status of redness and its irreducibility to empirical descriptions (Thompson, 2007).
However, the fact that there is still an objectively verifiable causal idiom within the colour example, namely an object having the reflective properties to produce the qualia of red undermines the justificatory analogy between colour perception and the perception of moral properties.
In turn, sensibility theorists have offered analogies to other human experiences, like humour (Sneddon, 2013). The analogy would go: something is funny if and only if it merits being considered funny. This analogy preserves the justification between our subjective 7 experience of objective conditions due to the lack of any kind of reducible causal idiom. Therefore if we accept contact epistemology and ontological holism which is empirically supported by embodied cognitive science, and the transjective nature of reality argued for here, then we can secure moral realism while acknowledging both its mind-dependent and mind-independent nature.
To help illustrate transjective morality further, consider the following examples, including their ontological and semantic status:
Mary, uttering the sentence, “Ignoring the needs of the desperately poor is morally wrong.”
According to my arguments, Mary’s judgement comes from both the relevant features in the world, namely ignoring the needs of desperately poor people having the moral property of wrongness because it is counterproductive to social cooperation and prosperity, which leads her to have the mind-dependent qualitative experience of perceiving that as a wrong thing. Ignoring the needs of the desperately poor merits the response that it is morally wrong because it is counterproductive to social cooperation and prosperity. Ontologically and semantically, this judgement is a truth-apt statement which could be either true or false depending on Mary's capacity to perceive moral properties in the world. Also, by my lights, although transjective morality is a constructivist theory, it still asserts the ontological reality of moral judgements; what is real is not merely mind-independent phenomena.
Also, above I alluded to the idea that this argument is able to explain moral considerations beyond strictly concerns of human sociality. To show this, consider another example, one that doesn’t include humans as the object of moral evaluation:
Gloria tells Nil, “Eating kangaroo meat is morally wrong.”
At first, it might seem difficult to connect this example to morality being about our minds meriting a response to the world that helps social cooperation. But, as stated above, our social nature to care for one another has plausibly led to our capacity to care for beings and even objects beyond ourselves. Within this view, one might conclude that Gloria is responding to moral properties in the world about caring for other beings which gives rise to her moral judgement that eating kangaroo meat is wrong. If anything, this example shows that this argument for transjective morality allows for a great degree of flexibility regarding what we consider moral. Morality can and does extend to caring for beings and things other than humans (e.g., animals, the environment, etc.), although it has its evolutionary source in human cooperation.
Objections and Implications
There are three general implications for views like this one which do not make rigid distinctions between subjectivity and objectivity. First is how we should understand the nature of right and wrong, good and bad. What grounds these evaluations?
I would emphasise that moral judgements come from our perception of relevant and salient properties within social dynamics that facilitate social cooperation. In this view, we have innate evolved access to identifying properties that are good or bad, and this intuition evaluates different social conditions in accordance with what behaviours would produce the most social cohesion.
However, this explanation could remain relativistic; it finds its footing again in the notion that these perceptions are tracking what is helping social cooperation in the world. The circularity of causation here informs behaviour and action in real time and across time. This 9 does not mean invoking a type of ideal observer. The standard for moral evaluation happens through circular causation of intuitively interpreting what evaluations helped social cohesion, and which ones didn’t. More effective behaviour is noted as virtuous and morally upright, while less effective behaviour for facilitating cooperation is noted as vices or moral sins. It is the active coupling of cognitive agents, who have evolved innate moral sensibility capacities embedded within social environments that gives rise to behaviour being perceived as either virtuous or corrupt. This behavioural feedback loop over time develops our moral judgments, refining our capacity to tell good and bad apart, contributing to moral progress. Over time virtuous behaviour is enacted and perceived, discerned from vice, and moral progress unfolds despite constant disagreement in the present due to its emergence as a process of social interaction. Applied to the Mary example above, she has intuitive capacities which enable her to detect moral properties of the world, and it is her dynamic coupling to the world which includes the historical context she lives in that informs her judgement in that moment.
Another implication is what happens to moral rationality? Reasons need consistency: rationality requires a standard to evaluate things in light of. This seems to mean that rationality is beholden to mind-independent standards — but this would fly in the face of transjective morality. It would seem that either rationality plays no substantial role in transjective morality which seems counterintuitive, or this argument has a major objection.
In reply, similar to McDowell’s sensibility theory, I would reject this notion of rationality. In line with Wittgenstein, I would argue that standards of rationality are internal to ways of living (Sneddon, 2013). Rationality does not track some mind-independent reality, but instead tracks the reasons and truth’s necessary for a living being to orient and navigate within the world. This view of rationality is further supported by embodied cognition; cognitive agents are self-organising systems which negotiate several reasons for action in the world (Thompson, 2007).
Furthermore, I would argue that the content of our moral judgments work in tandem with our rational faculties, allowing us to have a more precise and less self-deceptive understanding of the world and our evaluations of it so that we can navigate in accordance with what is true. Our rational faculties refine our intuitions about what is meaningful.
Let's continue with the colour analogy to help clarify how our rational faculties can help us understand and refine our moral judgements. According to colour theory, although our conscious experience is where the qualia of red is manifest, and presumably all human beings under normal conditions have the experience of ‘redness,’ cultures historically do not have an innate concept of red — instead, they had simpler colour terms which only distinguished between light and dark (Berlin & Kay, 1969). Our rational faculties can help refine and categorise our qualitative experience. Although qualia are the object's values, like colour or moral affect, it doesn’t mean that reason has no part to play. Rational reflection on our moral affect can help us refine, conceptualise, and express our moral judgements.
The final objection refers to the logical structure of this argument; it appears that sensibility theories, as this one, are circular arguments. We could formally express a simplified version of my argument as:
x is good/right if and only if x is such to be the correct attitude in a given social situation to facilitate social cooperation.
We can notice that in this formulation, there are evaluative notions on both sides of the statement. We are saying that x is correct if and only if x elicits the response for correct things. This creates a circular argument, where neither the mind nor the world are given logical priority. We expect that explanations should follow a linear genealogical structure.
However, in light of embodied cognition arguments which entail a contact epistemology and relational holism, this logical flaw becomes a virtue of transjective moral theory and sensibility theories more broadly. This is because the agent and their environment codetermine and mutually specify each other, which occurs through a relational process of the agent’s emergent features fitting to the constraints specified by the environment. Embodied agents are self-organising systems that rely on circular causation between specifying themselves and their needs, while conforming to an environment which they are embedded within that they must orient and navigate (Thompson, 2007). Neither the mind nor the world are given priority within embodied cognition. This is a feature of sensibility theories, and given embodied cognitive science, transjective notions of morality are given empirical weight due to their circularity.
Considering the Mary and Kangaroo examples from above again, we can see this metaethical perspective is circular; it does not provide linear or reductive explanations for how we arrive at moral knowledge. They simply describe the common-sense experience of making moral judgements — we perceive the property of wrongness in the world and make a subjective judgement based on that. However, this is argued to be a feature of this view; transjective morality is an attempt to set sound foundations for morality without reducing them to merely subjective or objective explanations. In line with other sensibility theorists, this argument is doing a different kind of intellectual job: its job is not to deliver understanding of moral phenomena in question, but instead to supplement the understanding we already have (Sneddon, 2013). Both our minds and the world play an integral role in making value judgements, and considering the ontological parity of both for making moral judgements, moral truths themselves become irreducible to simpler descriptions. Transjective morality attempts to ground moral judgement in our common sense understanding of living in the world.
References
Berlin, B., & Kay, P. (1969). Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley, US: University of California Press.
McDowell, J. (2013). Values and Secondary Qualities. In R. Shafer-Landau & T. Cuneo (Eds.), Foundations of Ethics: An anthology (pp. 137–144). Malden, US: Blackwell Publishing.
Sneddon, A. (2013). Sensibility Theory. In H. LaFollette (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics (pp. 1–10). Malden, MA: Wiley.
Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and The Science of Mind. London, UK: Harvard University Press.
Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press.
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