[Good As Usual: Anti-Exceptionalist Essays on Values, Norms, and Action by Timothy Williamson. (Oxford University Press, 2025; xv + 238 pp.)]
Is morality objective? Rothbardians would answer “yes.” The right of self-ownership and individual property rights aren’t just subjective preferences; there really are such rights. But many libertarians find this baffling. They say, “Given that people want to survive and prosper, we can show that they need to establish and maintain a free market. This isn’t subjective: it’s an objective matter of fact.” If you ask, though, whether people ought to want to survive and prosper, that is meaningless. Their wanting this is what Mises calls “an ultimate value judgment.” That is as far as you can go with justification.
Before turning to arguments that Rothbardians can use to defend our position, one preliminary question: Why isn’t the hypothetical judgment, “If you want to survive and prosper, you should establish a free market” enough? Why shouldn’t we be satisfied with it?
One answer to this is that the hypothetical judgment doesn’t always lead to support for the free market. Suppose that in a particular case, you can steal something in conditions in which no one else can find out about it. Is it morally permissible to do it? The person who relies exclusively on the self-interest argument couldn’t answer this question. He might point out that if everybody steals when no one else is looking, the free market, which depends on stable legal property rights, would break down. That is true, but what if the conditions under which you steal are so restrictive that in fact very few situations could meet them, so legal property rights wouldn’t break down? Would it then be morally all right to steal?
There is another reason we shouldn’t be satisfied with the hypothetical judgement. People want to find out the truth about things. Wanting an answer to the question of objectivity is not dependent on the view that there is, in fact, an objective morality. Subjectivists want the answer to this question and indeed think that they have it. Their answer is, in Rothbard’s opinion wrong, and demonstrably so; but it isn’t self-contradictory for them to hold their position. In philosopher’s jargon, they are defending a position in metaethics, not ethics.
Many people think that there are strong reasons to reject objective moral truth, and here is where Timothy Williamson can be of help to us. He is definitely not a libertarian, but he accepts moral objectivity. He is a formidable philosopher, adept at highly rigorous arguments and a major figure in contemporary analytic philosophy. He has responses to some of the standard arguments against moral objectivity, and this is what I’m going to discuss in the remainder of this week’s column. (One further clarification: when I talk about objective morality, I’m not referring to Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand).
One objection people have to moral objectivity is that what people think is morally all right depends on the way they were brought up and on the practices of their society. Most people in our society think it’s wrong to steal; but in some societies, it’s regarded as permissible—and sometimes even commendable—to steal from people who are strangers. If we had been brought up in such a society, that’s what we would think too.
Williamson doesn’t deny this. But, he says, this isn’t a reason to be more skeptical of our moral beliefs than about other beliefs that we hold. As he puts the point:
…in assessing putative moral knowledge, one must take care to apply normal standards for knowing, not specially raised standards whose general application would imply widespread skepticisms even outside the moral domain. For, in this dialectical context, widespread non-moral knowledge is granted: the issue is whether, if there were moral truths, they would be at some special disadvantage in epistemic accessibility, compared to ordinary non-moral truths. . . Thus, one cannot refute claims of moral knowledge simply by describing actual or possible social groups with contrary beliefs—false beliefs, according to the moral realist. Our fallibility on moral issues is quite compatible with having plenty of moral knowledge, by non-skeptical standards for knowledge.
Another common objection to moral objectivity is that it’s mysterious how we are supposed to find out what the moral truths are. Do we have some special sense or “intuition,” equivalent to seeing things, which enables us to perceive moral truths? It sounds very odd.
Williamson says that there is no special sense. We use what he calls a “recognitional capacity,” and we use this in ordinary judgments, not just moral judgments. As he explains,
We have recognitional capacities for properties and kinds of many types, enabling us to recognize whether a given case instantiates them. Most people have recognitional capacities for many species of plants and animals and for many types of artefact. . . They can recognize various types of weather, various types of art and music, and various types of behavior: hasty or leisurely, careless or careful, confident or timid, rude or polite, cold or warm, serious or humorous, hostile or friendly, cruel or kind.
When we exercise a recognitional capacity, we don’t use deductive reasoning or rely on a mysterious faculty of intuition.
In applying them [recognitional capacities], we do not use conscious step-by-step reasoning, but our judgment is still evidence based. To describe recognitional capacities in all these cases as based on a faculty of “intuition” merely obfuscates what sort of pattern recognition is going on.
These are only a few of Williamson’s arguments. There are many more, and I have chosen only a couple that are easy to understand. You have much to gain by reading the book, but you will probably find it very tough going. If you think reading Hayek is hard, wait until you try Williamson. Reading the book made my head spin.
