Hilzoy on Brooks' view of morality

A writer at one of my favorite political blogs is a professor of ethics, and she writes a trenchant analysis of Brooks' column that I mentioned the other day:

Consider an analogy: if you're a good tennis player, you make a lot of judgments about the future trajectories of tennis balls. You are probably not aware of making them: you see your opponent hit the ball, and start running to meet it without thinking. Moreover, it's very lucky that we have the ability to do this: if we did have to stop and work out the trajectory of each shot our opponents took, we would never manage to hit them at all, and there would be no more tennis.

Suppose that someone took note of this fairly obvious fact, and wrote

"The rise and now dominance of this perceptual approach to mechanics is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way physics is conceived by most people. It challenges the Einsteinian tradition, with its hyper-rational formulae and equations. It challenges those scientists who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning."

That would be pretty dumb, right? Just because we do not work out the future path of the ball using equations when we are playing tennis does not mean that those equations are pointless, or that there is no role for physics. It just means something we already knew: that whatever the point of physics is, it is not: being used by Venus Williams while she is playing.

The same is true of moral reasoning. It's one thing (and a very interesting thing) to ask: how, exactly, do we make moral decisions on the fly? But while that's useful to moral philosophy in a number of ways, it is not directed at the questions moral philosophy tries to answer. Those questions include: which actions should we perform? What kinds of people should we try to be? What principles should we try to live by?

One reason to try to answer those questions is if you find yourself wondering: what, exactly, should I make of all those moral judgments I make every day? Are they just expressions of taste, or artifacts of my upbringing? Or could they be right or wrong? If they can, how exactly would one go about showing that they were? -- You don't have to be in doubt about your ordinary moral judgments to be interested in these questions; you just have to be curious about whether or not it's possible to say more about them than: they're the judgments I make.

Exactly.