ASEBL Journal – Volume 13 Issue 1, January 201 8
Sparks argues that direct perception of moral properties is problematic because these
perceptions may preclude people from parsing a circumstance’s moral from non-
moral properties. “Sensitive moral agents,” as Sparks puts it, will not be able to ex-
plain why one action is right and another is wrong if these agents cannot distinguish
the morally relevant features that constitute a particular moral judgment.
One factor not discussed closely in this essay, which may be relevant to this debate, is
whether moral perceptions can be incorrect. If I judge, knowing all the relevant moral
factors of a circumstance, that some act is unjust, it is open to question whether my
judgment can be wrong. If, however, one adopts the cognitivist view that sentences
expressing moral content are true or false, Sparks’s complaint seems valid: the sensi-
tive moral agent, although educated in what is good, cannot explain why a particular
action is right or wrong, assuming direct moral perceptions are possible. The capacity
for perceiving moral properties suggests that the non-moral features of a particular
action are irrelevant when making a moral judgment.
But what if the truth-value of a sentence that may determine moral judgments is not
fixed? Take, in a non-morally relevant example, Charles Travis’s question of whether
painting an evergreen tree’s leaves gold leads to the truth or falsity of the proposition,
“those leaves are gold.” 1 In his defense of radical contextualism, Travis contends that
it is possible to utter the same sentence with the same meaning on two different occa-
sions – though on the first occasion the statement is true and on the second the state-
ment is false. What determines the truth-value, according to Travis, is the occasion on
which the statement is made.
In Everything Flows, Vasily Grossman describes how the Soviet State was so effec-
tive at determining how its citizens thought and behaved. 2 Of a particular informer
who is responsible for the imprisonment of hundreds of fellow Russians, Grossman
says:
The faith that lived in him was another faith: faith in the mercilessness of the
chastising hand of the great Stalin. In him lived the unhesitating obedience of
the believer…In some ways he disliked his dark work — except that it was
his duty!…‘Remember,’ his mentors used to tell him, ‘that you have neither
father nor mother, neither sisters nor brothers. You have only the Party.’
When, however, Stalin’s reign of terror ended after his death, Grossman describes
how the beliefs of those previously living in his regime adopted vastly different views
about what was right or good: in the eyes of the State and the people, informants were
now villains, not heroes. How should we determine the truth-value of the statement,
“the informer is guilty,” when uttered by a state official of the Stalinist regime on the
one hand, and of the post-Stalin era on the other?
The answer would not, according to Travis, lie in whatever the informer may be guilty
of, but rather how the occasion on which the sentence is uttered determines whether
the statement is true or false. We can retain the same meaning for each of these words,
and yet whether the phrase is uttered before or after the death of Stalin affects whether
it is true.
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