Transparency Arguments -- Eric Brown Ethical Theory and Moral Practice Conference 19 March 2008 What is a transparency argument?

A transparency argument charges that a third-person theoretical account of values must be abandoned or modified because it is incompatible with appropriate first-person responses to them. Generally speaking, the theory targeted by the transparency argument attempts to explain some value properties in terms of a abstract and indeterminate value property. T claims that things have value properties, or some one property, say, r, because of some other value property p. A possible objection to T is that the property p, purported to be the explanation for r, is transparent. A value property p is transparent when an agent, from his or her own point of view, cannot endorse that p is the basis of the evaluative weight or normative force of r because of how the normative structure of practical reasoning relates her to r. The problem, according the transparency argument, with the explanation of r in terms of p is that p is specified by a third-person account that misrepresents what it is trying to explain in the first-person perspective. If p is transparent, then theory T is flawed in as much as its explanatory claims cannot be accepted from the first-person standpoint of practical reasoning. Two examples of how transparency arguments work Scanlon and well-being as a master-value If well-being is a master value, then it defines the rationality of individual decision-making, is what benefactors qua benefactors are to try to promote for others, and determines what an individual's interests are for moral purposes. A master value provides a commensurating standard and an explanation for other instances of value. Scanlon believes that well-being is not rightly taken to be a "master-value" because from the firstperson perspective, it is transparent: "When we focus on it, it largely disappears, leaving only the values that make it up" (Scanlon 1997, 133). When individuals make choices about everyday or comprehensive aims, the appropriate reason for those choices are given by concrete features of those aims themselves not abstract considerations of personal or "subjective" well-being; that an aim contributes to a better life for the individual is not (normally) a reason to choose it. The "normative structure" here seems to be that the considerations that an individual ought to treat as reasons for the choice of some aim are reasons that are concrete, or are reasons stemming from concrete features of the aim, not from considerations of an abstract and "subjective" well-being. Wiggins and noncognitivism Non-cognitivism is a third-person position that explains the value of the world by appealing to the inner, first-person, participant point of view that involves conative and evaluative attitudes and pleasurable mental states. Intrinsic value lies in subjective states, not in the objects to which they are directed (or the objects to which associated intentional states are directed). Thus, there is no objective fact of the matter about value (or life's meaning), only a value projected on the factual properties that cause pleasure or satisfaction in subjects or that serve the ends determined by their will. However, from the standpoint of an inner view of lived practical experience, we deliberate about the value of options as objective. The inner view is, in part, defined by the fact that we encounter things as valuable and conclude on that basis that they are desirable or pleasant and not the other way around. The outer view (the view of the non-cognitivist theory) has an account of the inner view that imposes on it a conception of the distinction between the objective and the subjective that is alien to it. For the outer view, value is to be found in the agent's subjective states, not the objects to which those agent's likings and strivings are directed (their intentional objects). What is transparent, on this argument, is the third-person's conception of the first-person. It is transparent because, from the first-

person perspective, it is not the value of the pleasantness of the experience of seeing the sunrise that explains the beauty of the sunrise; rather the beauty of the sunrise is the object of the aesthetic response. The participant view has a conception of the objective which is distinct from that of the outer view (Wiggins 1987b, 99). From the first-person perspective of evaluation, states of satisfaction (or conation, etc.) "descry" properties in things and gain their significance from these concrete, specific properties (Wiggins 1987b, 105). The inner, first-person view's own conception of objectivity is based fundamentally on a distinction between careful scrutiny directed toward objects and states of affairs as the basis for objective evaluation and careless, arbitrary, or biased evaluation that is less guided by what the object presents to the agent and more by the agent's "subjectivity," not on a distinction between what is "in the mind" and what is "in the world." The appropriateness conditions of this perspective are shaped by the concreteness and mutual involvement of the properties and the responses of evaluative practice. Transparency, phenomenology, and practice Transparency arguments resist the reduction of our concrete practice of evaluation, etc. to a subjective and abstract "moment" in a third-person, "outer" perspective. Arguments such as for non-cognitivism and well-being as a master value proceed by abstracting from the practice of evaluation and deliberation and erecting a framework that attempts to understand that practice from a third-person perspective. What from the first-person perspective forms a kind of concrete unity of practice (my enjoyment of this musical performance, my family as a reason for my involvement in their affairs) is separated into a subjective and abstract side that is the basis of value and an objective side for which an explanation of its value must be sought. This way of understanding transparency arguments can lead us to conclusions about a form of argument superficially similar to them: phenomenological arguments. A phenomenological argument appeals to the raw feelings or phenomenology of moral experience to support a meta-ethical view. Raw feelings that moral properties are independent of our attitudes or authoritative for us, so phenomenological arguments go, are reflected in a meta-ethical position strongly enough that one has a good reason to think that the meta-ethical position is correct. Phenomenological arguments are similar in structure to arguments for welfarist consequentialism and non-cognitivism. A phenomenological argument makes a kind of distinction between seemings (or raw feelings, etc.) as a feature of the first-person perspective and how the world really is. However, this kind of distinction leaves us with an abstract and subjective phenomenology that does not reflect well our practice (moral practice or the practice of evaluation more generally). In contrast, our experience, understood in a way that is more acceptable from a first-person standpoint, is the experience of actually engaging in evaluation and deliberation. Practice is the context in which a particular "phenomenological feel" takes place; abstracting the phenomenology from the context of the practice is a falsification. A phenomenological argument, implicitly at least, takes up a third-person perspective analogous to that occupied by welfarist consequentialism and non-cognitivism. From this perspective, on one side, as it were, there is an abstract field of subjective raw feels, on the other (the possibility of) real moral properties or value properties. In arguing from the subjective side of as understood by this thirdperson perspective, the phenomenological argument gives a distorted view of the first-person perspective. Further, given its abstractly subjective, etiolated character, it is not surprising that any attempt to understand the phenomenology of, say, the experience of moral authority, as offering evidence for meta-ethical realism about moral authority will look like an over-interpretation or a restatement of realism that begs the question.