Do our moral beliefs need to be consistent?

I'm sorry, but this is a really dumb argument. The supposed inconsistencies the author describes aren't inconsistent with anything but the shallow moral premises they concoct themselves.

Take the example of epileptics being barred from driving. The author relates this to a moral premise that "everyone should be treated the same." Only a child–or someone building a rhetorical strawman–would accept this premise. Anyone who's given a minute's thought to morality and ethics knows that equity is at the heart of a rational moral framework rather than equality. Take "treat people the same where they are the same, and differently where they are different" as your bedrock principle and suddenly there's no inconsistency in revoking the driving privileges of epileptics: epileptics are treated differently because they pose a greater risk to others due to something entirely beyond their control.

We don't value consistency in morality for its own sake; the suggestion is so stupid it actually makes me a little angry. We value it because life routinely presents us with novel situations for which we have no ready-made moral answers. We assess such situations and try to compare them with previous moral problems we've faced and resolved, and then apply similar reasoning to the new situation. We likewise expect consistency from others because their behavior affects us, since we are social creatures.

The alternative to moral and ethical consistency is arbitrariness. If we accept that, we have no way to gauge how others may behave, nor what is expected of us as social beings. The value of moral and ethical consistency isn't some abstract fetishization of logic, it's an entirely practical and reasonable thing.

There are times when our attempts to justify an apparent inconsistency in our judgements or practices look suspiciously like disingenuous rationalizations of ways of thinking or acting that we have become comfortable with, or that it would be problematic to abandon, or that we think carry significant practical benefits, or to which we can't think of a decent alternative. Consider, for instance, the laws regarding alcohol compared to other recreational drugs, or US foreign policy regarding various undemocratic countries, or court rulings that rest on dubious appeals to precedent or questionable interpretations of the constitution.

This absolute silliness on the part of the author. For many people all of these latter example are indeed examples of inconsistency that ought to be rectified.

But an alternative approach is to cut the Gordian knot by not worrying about that and simply asking instead: what are the likely consequences of allowing or prohibiting abortion? If prohibiting it is likely to produce more dangerous backstreet abortions, more unwanted children growing up in deprived circumstances, more single mothers mired in poverty, and so on, then these are reasons for ensuring that it be legal and available. If, on the other hand, its ready availability tends to put a heavy economic burden on the health care system, diminish our respect for human life, and foster less careful attitudes to sex which in turn increases the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, then these are reasons for banning abortion.

Okay, so there are practical arguments both for and against legalization of abortion. This just puts us back at step one of having to weight those against each other. And unless someone can enlighten me, I don't know of a formula for converting "diminish[ed] respect for human life" to/against "more dangerous backstreet abortions".

So in the end we will have to conduct a determination based on ethics of which of the above outweighs the others.

I like this article, thank you for sharing it.

After spending some time wrestling with the authors ideas, I've come to wonder what the value of normative ethical frameworks like utilitarianism or Kant's categorical imperative are if our own moral intuitions are used to argue for/against a particular framework. It seems like we tacitly privilege our moral intuitions over frameworks that to some degree exist to solve the problems associated with trusting our moral intuitions. If a framework is objectively correct, then feeding utility monsters and telling killers where our kids are should be the correct course of action regardless of a massive mismatch with our moral intuitions.

But even still, I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater regarding arguments from logical consistency.

An advantage of not insisting on logical consistency as a sine qua non of any acceptable moral position or ethical theory is that we will be more likely to give due weight to pragmatic considerations.

So I think emotivism best maps on to what I think ethics are, and a common critique of any non-cognitivist (i.e. ethical sentences cannot be true or false) meta-ethical view is that it prevents one from engaging in moral argumentation (i.e., what basis could you have to say one's morals are correct or incorrect?)

A common rebuttal is that one can make arguments from logical consistency, contrasting ones moral intuitions with their actual moral beliefs. If one says "anyone who kills a human is a murderer", "Mike killed a man in self-defense" and "Mike is not a murderer" can be shown to have a logical inconsistency. Showing someone that their moral beliefs are inconsistent is a powerful tool for changing beliefs. Logic often winds up being somewhere in the ballpark of "things impossible to doubt." I can't possibly believe P & !P. Some people will have their beliefs changed, or at least qualified, within a very short period of time from a consistency being introduced.

There are other lines of argumentation available to emotivists, such as arguments about the facts that underlie a particular moral belief (e.g., whether or not Mike killed a man is an objective matter that could be debated even if morals are not.) There's also just using persuasive rhetoric, but I doubt there's a more effective tool to change ones moral beliefs than demonstrating logical inconsistency.

An advantage of not insisting on logical consistency as a sine qua non of any acceptable moral position or ethical theory is that we will be more likely to give due weight to pragmatic considerations. Consider the abortion debate again. Much ink has been spilled constructing sophisticated arguments to show that allowing abortion is or is not consistent with certain other precepts we adhere to. But an alternative approach is to cut the Gordian knot by not worrying about that and simply asking instead: what are the likely consequences of allowing or prohibiting abortion?

The advantage is that by evaluating actions according to their consequences, we no longer have to worry about moral dilemmas? Is consequentialism free of moral dilemmas?