Comments on Hagop Sarkissian's "Well Functioning Daos and Moral Relativism"

Every author cares about being understood, but for reasons that Hagop Sarkissian has explained, I can be expected to care more than most. I'm delighted to say that Sarkissian has understood my book thoroughly and provided an accurate and charitable summary. I am also delighted to learn from him how closely my view echoes strains of classical Confucianism.

I was especially interested by Sarkissian's characterization of my view as implying that "morals do indeed seem to collapse to mores, or perhaps mores rise to the status of morals." I wish I had put it that way myself. I didn't put it that way because I assumed that mores are generally understood as normative only derivatively, because they depend for their normative force on an agent's desire to fit in or to avoid social censure, whereas the normative force of morality is generally understood to be independent of an agent's contingent motives. In other words, I assumed that most philosophers are normative externalists about mores but internalists about morality.

The main aim of my book is to establish the possibility, even plausibility, of normative internalism about mores, by showing that they guide action via a motive that is not at all contingent but rather constitutive of normative force itself. The motive in question, as Sarkissian explains, is the drive toward intelligibility—or, more specifically, interpretability. I contend that reasons in favor of an action are considerations in light of which the action would make sense, considerations that become supplementary motives for the action given our drive to be interpretable. That's how reasons exert action-guiding force. If having internal normative force is what Sarkissian means by rising to the status of morals, then I agree with his characterization of my view.

Sarkissian is right that I refuse to define the subset of mores that constitute morality: I say that they are recognizable by family resemblance to paradigm cases. I would add, by the way, that Jonathan Haidt's work supports a policy of modesty about defining the moral realm by showing that even within the United States different groups draw the boundary of morality differently, disagreeing with respect to whether it includes, for instance, matters of purity or group loyalty.¹

Although I refuse to define the moral realm, I do have a bit more to say about it, in a chapter that Sarkissian understandably omits from his summary. In that chapter, I try to show that the feature of personhood that makes us capable of practical reason—that is, reasoning about what it makes sense to do—is something we naturally value, because it provides us with our capacity for both sociality and solitude, the distinctively human ways of being together and being alone. That feature of personhood is what I call objective self-awareness: a simultaneous awareness of the world from an egocentric perspective and of a creature in the world whose perspective it is. Objective self-awareness is what enables us to see ourselves from the perspective of others and thus to see the possibility of being interpretable or uninterpretable to them, a recognition that precludes us from treating interpretability as a private matter. For if one tries to make oneself understood to others in terms radically different from those in which one understands oneself, then one will have a less coherent, less parsimonious self-portrayal in either case than if one understood oneself and others in similar terms. Making sense is therefore a matter of making sense in the terms current in one's social milieu. It requires participation in a shared way of life.

I try to show that objective self-awareness is crucial to our ability to pass the Turing Test—and in that sense crucial to personhood—as well as to our capacity for joint action and joint attention, love, friendship, even human sexuality, all of which are valued by persons everywhere. Hence, any group of people who share mores will tend to have mores that place a value on an essential element—I would say the essential element—of...