Schopenhauer and Non-Cognitivist Moral Realism

Abstract

I argue that Schopenhauer's views challenge the widely-held belief that moral realism requires cognitivism about moral judgments. Schopenhauer's core metaethical view consists of two claims: that moral worth is attributed to actions based in compassion and that compassion, in contrast to egoism, arises from deep metaphysical insight into the non-distinctness of beings. These claims, I argue, are sufficient for moral realism, but are compatible with either cognitivism or non-cognitivism. While Schopenhauer's views of moral judgment are not obviously consistent, I show how various passages suggest a form of non-cognitivism. This non-cognitivism, I claim, is compatible with moral realism.Schopenhauer has been ignored in contemporary metaethics, and Schopenhauer's commentators rarely attempt to analyze his metaethical views in contemporary terms. This is unfortunate. Schopenhauer has something important to teach us about moral realism. 1 I have both philosophical and interpretive aims in this paper. My philosophical aim is to show how Schopenhauer's views challenge the contemporary understanding of moral realism.The challenge arises from the fact that while Schopenhauer's view implies that morality is "real" in a metaphysically-and epistemologically-robust sense, that view denies (or at least, is compatible with denying) a central piece of the contemporary definition of moral realism: the 1 For references to Schopenhauer's work in what follows, I will use the following abbreviations: The World As Will and Representations (WWR), On the Freedom of the Will (OFW), On the Basis of Morals (OBM), On Will in Nature (OWN). Page numbers will be to the English translation listed in the Works Cited. Since several translations of OBM, OFW, and the first volume of WWR are widely used, for these works I also provide the relevant volume and page numbers from the collected works edited by Arthur Hübscher, indicated with an 'H.' cognitive (i.e. truth-apt or belief-expressing) character of moral judgments. For while Schopenhauer sometimes seems to deny that moral judgments are truth-apt, he nonetheless holds that they have a certain profound epistemic value. Their having this value ultimately implies that malice and egoism can arise only from an epistemic lack. If such a view is consistent, I hold, then the contemporary understanding of moral realism is too narrow. 2The broader implication of this challenge is that contemporary metaethics has focused too narrowly on moral judgments. If Schopenhauer gives us reasons to widen our metaethical perspective, then his views deserve more attention than they have received.My interpretive aim of this paper is to show that Schopenhauer is a moral realist, and that some elements of his views suggest a novel form of non-cognitivism about moral judgments.While many previous commentators have discussed Schopenhauer's metaethics, there are as of yet no published attempts to explicitly classify his metaethical views, especially with respect to moral realism vs. anti-realism. 3 In §1, I d...