Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:55 — 29.3MB)
This is a short preview of the full episode.
Transcript
0:00 Speaker: This is a Partially Examined Life episode preview. You can purchase the full episode individually or support the podcast. To get all of our episodes, review your options@priallyexaminedlife.com support.
0:20 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 58 is something like what is the relationship between facts and values? And we read G.E. moore's Principia Ethica chapter one from 1903, Charles Leslie Stevenson's essay The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms from 1937, and chapters one through three of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue from 1981. You can get more information about those texts, join a discussion of this episode, and listen to lots more stuff@priallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmeier speaking to you from Madison, Wisconsin.
1:00 Seth: This is Seth Paskin being in coherent in his post Enlightenment haze in Austin, Texas.
1:06 Wes: This is Wes Alwan Emoting from Boston, Massachusetts.
1:10 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, Naturally Ethical in Middleton, Wisconsin.
1:16 Mark: Very nice.
1:17 Wes: Naturally Ethical. I like that.
1:19 Mark: Hey, if you have not looked at the website recently, partiallyexaminedlife.com it has a huge makeover. It looks awesome. With the new design, I'm sure you'll see more articles by each of the other podcasters as well as by our many wonderful guest bloggers.
1:35 Dylan: Yes, I've actually been a little bit mad at myself because there have been a couple of good opportunities if you guys paid any attention to this thing with Kraus and his book about saying philosophy is dead. Yeah, Buzz thing going.
1:48 Mark: I know this is something that Wes has blogged on a few times of Stephen Hawking and other folks who, you know, it seems like it's usually scientists and they're dissing primarily metaphysics that if you're going to be figuring out what the nature of space and time now. Yeah, you do science. So philosophy has nothing to say about that? Well, we'll get to that. I mean, we already had the one on physics. There's plenty more that philosophers do have to say on that kind of thing. But it is timely to me, as I'm starting to even the stuff we read this week, which is not really ethics, it's meta ethics.
Right. It's about the foundations of ethics. Right. The question I had posed was what's the relationship between facts and values? So it's an ontological question, it's a metaphysical question. What kind of stuff is there in your world that would allow values to be there, that would allow ethics to be possible. Some of the stuff that MacIntyre say was saying, at least when we get a little farther into the book, as we will for next episode, had to do with that. The problem is their metaphysical assumptions that there was something in. He is a big Aristotle fan, which is why his book After Virtue has the picture of what, Athena on it, that every single book about classics has the same damn picture of Athena, side view head with her big helmet on, leaning on a staff in there.
He cites Aristotle's Ethics and Politics as containing some insights that we've now lost in the modern age. And that's really his whole problem with what he considers the failure of ethics, including all the folks that we have read, the Utilitarians and Kant's. He talks a little about Nietzsche as well, even though Nietzsche is also like Aristotle, a virtue ethics guy. So he's sort of on the right track. But still there were things about Nietzsche himself as reacting, the guys like Kant and Mill. And so if those guys made a mistake in rejecting this edifice that Aristotle created, which you really can't separate out his ethical thoughts, which all have to do with human potential having a sort of correct way in which to grow.
And that is what virtue is. You can't separate that from his metaphysical conceptions, from his views of what an organism is. So we're going to be reading some of that soon. It's gotten me in the mode of diving a little farther in some of our future episodes into some of these metaphysical issues. One could start a philosophy class talking about them, but I think it's much more difficult. When I was looking through Aristotle a little this week to prep for a couple episodes from now, there's a lot of stuff that just jumps out at you as being archaic.
And isn't it great that we've progressed beyond this? So if you were approaching it like let's do metaphysics first, you might think either we're just doing history, so, you know, we don't care how wrong these pre Socratics are. We're just going to, for scholarship purposes, figure out what they say, or you just go right to the modern stuff, which is mostly science and not philosophy.
4:29 Seth: Was that the summary? Are we in the summary mode?
4:31 Mark: That was a transition, I think that
4:34 Dylan: you have to be really careful about, especially for someone like Aristotle, of having a kind of simplistic, knee jerk reaction about things that he said that seem or are wrong in a particular way and not pay attention to the way they relate to one another. There just are often a lot of cases where their mistakes are as fruitful as the things that seem right about it. And I think that you have to also, when you read original works of any sort, whether they're old or new, you have to come at them with a kind of generosity. Because the fact is, it's much easier to be a critic than it is to be somebody who's coming up with something on their own. If it's worth your time, it's worth trying to sort of sort out in itself.
5:18 Speaker: Right.
5:19 Mark: Even if it was just for historical purposes, Aristotle was so influential that of course, you need to figure out his language in order to understand a lot of stuff that came after. So there's plenty of reasons we can get into when we actually talk about him.
5:31 Dylan: I think we could also have a long discussion about what we mean by for historical purposes. I know that that's a big thread through things.
5:38 Wes: We don't just read Aristotle or the pre Socratics for historical purposes. There are insights there, and there are still people willing to defend those insights.
5:47 Mark: Well, but even if it is history, I mean, this is again on topic for MacIntyre. So MacIntyre has an approach that's a little like Foucault's that we read recently, who, remember Foucault, is actually following in the footsteps of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, that he's giving this history of the evolution of ethical concepts. When we set up this episode, his was the book we wanted to read, which is why we're doing a little bit of it this time. In the next episode, we're actually going to get to his positive account of how he thinks Aristotle can be revived for the modern world, but today is kind of the negative.
And when we got into it, I felt like his method is very broad strokes, kind of like us discussing some of these figures where he maybe pulls out a quote or two, but in one chapter is taking three or four figures and talking about the historical progression between them and sort of what that means for, in this case, the breakdown of traditional moral vocabularies and why things don't make sense now, why we're in the situation we are now, where everything is driven toward relativism or nihilism or the kind of moral debates that we see now. So he, for one, sees going through the history as not only a part of diagnosing the problem like that, but also in coming up with a solution.
So the second part of the book, you know, he goes through Homeric virtues and then virtues as Aristotle considered them and the other Greeks considered them. And then in the Middle Ages and gets the whole picture out there and seems to think that knowing that story then puts you in a great position to actually, you know, it's not even just a matter of we can learn from the various insights that were sprinkled through the past to then come up with a good theory now, but a theory that disregards the history, that disregards the Genesis, I think he thinks is a fundamental philosophical mistake.
And that was the connection that we had mentioned between him and Wittgenstein, who was somebody he was very aware of.
7:41 Wes: And he thinks that the discussion of some of this history can tell us how and why some of these people were wrong. So, for instance, with Moore, for Moore's most fundamental argument, he just says, it's obviously wrong and doesn't really give a philosophical argument.
7:56 Mark: Yes. So that forced us to have to put some of that into the syllabus here.
8:01 Seth: So either what he has to say in the second half of the book is so exciting we should just skip what we read for, or perhaps we should explain why we read the first chapter of Principia, Ithaca, and that ridiculous article by Stevenson in order to set up MacIntyre's sweeping and devastating critique of 20th century moral philosophy.
8:23 Wes: Maybe we could give a very brief overview of what we read in these three chapters of MacIntyre and then Dovetail into more detailed conversations of the Stevenson and Moore readings.
8:34 Seth: I was thinking you could probably summarize the two articles pretty quickly before you did that.
8:38 Wes: But I want to get at why we were motivated to read those Moore and Stevenson articles, which is. So MacIntyre's argument is that there's this grave disorder in modern moral language, that basically we use moral language, but there's no substance to it. And he wants to give a history of why this is so. His big argument is going to be that something called emotivism has taken over and is culturally accepted and implicit in a lot of moral theories, even though the proponents of those theories don't realize it. The emotivist idea under MacIntyre's summary is just that.
Evaluative expressions, including moral judgments, are not descriptive statements that have truth values. They're not about the world in any way. They're really prescriptive, or they're a way of endorsing something or saying, I like this and you should too, or not you should too, but more like an imperative, you like this too. So what's interesting is that he's going to trace this to G.E. moore's notion that the good is this indefinable non natural property, which is sort of an extension of what we've discussed with Hume, where Moore's basic argument is that evaluative judgments or our concept of the good can't be reduced to any descriptive statements about the natural world, including, for instance, we can't just say that the good is the pleasant.
So the way the pleasant is this natural term, or that the good is the welfare of the greatest number, as in utilitarianism or something like that, Moore gives an argument for that which we'll discuss. But MacIntyre's idea is that because Moore's argument was generally accepted, people sort of lost faith that there was any legitimacy to moral language. So Moore is a moral realist. He believes that ethical judgments have truth values and that they say something about the world. But to some, his theory will seem to demand so much that we believe in these non natural properties that we might just become skeptics altogether about moral language and say, well, it really isn't about the world.
And moral judgments really don't have truth values. They're not descriptive, they're just about our preferences in some sense. And so that's the connection between more and emotivism that MacIntyre sketches.
11:03 Seth: It's called emotivism because, as Stevenson puts it, a moral statement is really an attempt to convince the other person to agree with your point of view about what is good. It's not about your intuition that a thing is good. It's that moral or ethical statements are intended to change other people's opinions or elicit reactions from them. And that's why you distinguish it from intuitionism.
11:33 Wes: Moral judgments are something like expressions of emotion, even though they're not exactly that.
11:38 Mark: Right. It's not just that I have an opinion about some matter of fact, fact in the world, and I'm trying to convince you of it. And so they're persuasive in that way. It's that they're not about something in the world at all. They're really about my own feelings about this. And I want to spread that to you. And so the closest if we're going to translate this is good into something else, it's something like we like this. But that's not going to capture it because why is that supposed to persuade me? So it's got this subtle emotional connotation. It's like anything you call good is going to sound nice. It's like calling something murder as opposed to killing that murder has this evaluative component built into it. So the word good is different than saying, I like it, or we like it, in which case, well, fine, you like it. I don't give a crap. No, it's trying to snare you in as well.
12:25 Dylan: So it would be a statement of value. But that has utterly no correspondence, I guess, with the world, or maybe better, it has only correspondence with your idiosyncratic
12:38 Mark: opinion or your feelings. Yes, opinion just still sounds like it could be an opinion about something, but it's not about anything. It's just an expression. So it's just like saying, yay.
12:47 Wes: But it's not enough for Stevenson that it be an expression of your particular preference. It's not a descriptive statement about, hey, I prefer this, or hey, this is what the group prefers, this is what society prefers. That would be to miss the character of the emotive that Stevenson is trying to get at. What's important is that it's prescriptive in some sense. It commends. So it says, I do like this, do so as well. Or there's an imperative aspect to it. So it can't simply be, I'm describing my own preferences. It has to be more than that. It has to be an exhortation for you to like as well.
13:22 Dylan: One thing that was interesting to me when I was reading Stevenson and more on this was that, at least in what we read, which I mean, admittedly, was a small piece of what they had written, neither of them took the next step down the road, which would be that all moral disagreements are fundamentally
13:39 Mark: political, which is MacIntyre's conclusion of the way things are now.
13:43 Speaker: Right.
13:43 Mark: Because Moore's was really the logical consequent, I think, of all this previous thought, and yet the way that it was enacted, and Stevenson was actually a student of Moore's, that the negative story, why pleasure can't be good, why whatever the categorical imperative is, can't accurately represent morality. Those things, the negative things Moore was on the money on, according to MacIntyre. But then when Moore actually tried to say positive things, he's just pulling it out of his ass. He's just using the worst kind of intuitionism because that's all that's left.
If you think that the good is just this undefinable thing that can't be argued for in terms of people's purposes or desires or anything like that, then it's just, well, when I sit back and I think about what I think is really good, well, this is what I come up with. And not surprisingly, people's opinions differ on that kind of thing. And the way that the students of more, according to MacIntyre, when they would lecture on this, it was very much. They would use their own strong personalities to put forward what they thought was, in proceeding with Moore's project of actually spelling out what the good things are, now that Moore has done the work of defining the good, or rather saying it's indefinable that they were emoting.
So Stevenson was giving an accurate description of what Moore and his students were doing.
15:03 Dylan: We should probably say at some point a little bit about this articulation of theory of meaning that More has, because that I think, rightly, MacIntyre points at as being underlying his account of ethics. And MacIntyre also dismisses it as being utterly fatuous.
15:23 Wes: Let's finish discussing Stevenson and then Moore and then get into MacIntyre.
15:27 Dylan: So can we say in a couple sentences that the nickel tour of Stevenson and the nickel tour of Moore, Moore
15:32 Mark: is chronologically first, and Stephenson actually accepts a lot of what More has to say in it. So let's do Moore first. So the Principia, Ithaca, 1903. Hugely influential in Britain, America at the time, for the first half of the 20th century. I owned the book from some philosophy class that I took. But it's not a standard thing like utilitarianism now that everybody has to read. But I think 1950 or before, certainly everybody would have had to slog through this. And it is a great paradigm example of what analytic philosophy looks like. We had this discussion right before the Wittgenstein episode of We're Getting Back into Reading the Analytic Guys.
But then Wittgenstein himself is a terrible example of that sort of clarity and spelling everything out like it's a geometry text kind of thing that analytic philosophers do that Wittgenstein is hopeless in that respect. He reads much more like at least the Investigations, like Nietzsche giving these sort of aphorisms almost. So this one and the Stevenson. Really, though, if you want to know what analytic philosophy is about, take a look at this. I also. This was the first one for me that I listened to it. Somebody had done a Librivox recording that's a podcast that you can get that people volunteer and they read books.
So I actually listened to the whole book over the last few weeks, and it's read by some guy from the Middle East. So he has cute errors in pronunciation like ideal for ideal and prejudice for prejudice. And just they're. They're all over the place. So if you've never Heard some of the technical terminology before. It might make it a little more difficult, but in any case, it was one of those kind of things that I feel like audiobooks are for. The reason I use audiobooks, like, for novels or something, is because it's something that kind of is long and sloggy and I would probably just stop if I was just reading it, but because somebody else is reading it to me.
And in fact, I did the first chunk of it, the first chapter here on normal speed, but then I felt like, ah, no, I could go to double speed so that everything was hyper fast too. So if it wasn't giving me a headache, it actually worked okay. MacIntyre characterizes Moore as having just famously bad arguments all over the place, and some of them are pretty miserable. But it seems like it's as good a place as any to jump into the ethical back and forth that is the outcome of the British moralists that we were talking about in the Human Smith episode.
There's just a series of people that have these long books and they go through all the different virtues and patience and chastity and all that kind of stuff. And more responds to all these guys, but is focused on the metaethics part, so it's at least a little more. More cut and dried than that. So the bulk of his book is arguing against utilitarianism and things, but in detail, responding specifically to things that Sidgwick and other guys said. But all of the groundwork is all right here in chapter one that we all read. Some of chapter one is not so useful by itself.
Like the stuff at the end about.
18:21 Seth: Yeah, that would.
18:22 Mark: The sum.
18:22 Seth: That would be completely not useful.
18:26 Mark: Yes. But he has a whole chapter later where he's talking about how now that we know that the parts are all good, can we say that the sum of the parts is good? And sort of doing this, you know,
18:36 Wes: the whole reading is absolutely excruciating. You thought so. If it doesn't drive you to the edge of suicide, then you're. Then you should definitely apply to your analytic philosophy department.
18:49 Mark: I kind of liked it. I do think there are a lot of bad arguments in here, but at least they're more transparently bad than somebody like Wittgenstein who you can't tell what he's trying to say. You know what Moore is trying to say at every step of the way, because he spells it out and then he reaches the end of the chapter and he spells it out again. Yet it's not so. Some of these that you just could Never get through it.
19:08 Dylan: This guy was the cat's meow for more than half a century. Right? This book was. Okay, so when you say something like it's clear that it's just full of these really terrible arguments, you're also saying that a laundry list of really wicked smart people bought them, right? Yeah, I didn't see that.
19:29 Wes: That's full of bad arguments.
19:31 Mark: I'd like to hear a little bit
19:33 Dylan: more about that part. For instance, what's the difference between a really bad argument and one that you just don't agree with anymore?
19:42 Wes: Give your example, Mark. But I just want to say I didn't have that reaction of, oh, these are bad arguments. It's just, oh, this is just excruciatingly detailed and about things. I just don't care about that kind of reaction.
19:54 Mark: Well, here's the kind of thing that I had in mind. And it's not transparently bad, but given what else we've read. So this is page two. We find that many ethical philosophers are disposed to accept as an adequate definition of ethics the statement that it deals with the question of what is good or bad in human conduct. They hold that its inquiries are properly confined to conduct or to practice. They hold that the name practical philosophy covers all the matter which has to do. Next paragraph. Ethics is undoubtedly concerned with what the question of good conduct is.
But being concerned with this, it obviously does not start at the beginning unless it is prepared to tell us what is good as well as what is conduct. For good conduct is a complex notion. All conduct is not good for some is certainly bad, and some may be indifferent. And on the other hand, other things besides conduct may be good. And if they are so, then good denotes some property that is common to them and conduct. And if we examine good conduct alone of all good things, then we shall be in danger of mistaking for this property some property which is not shared by those other things.
What is your reaction? Before I tell you what seems transparently wrong about that to me, he continues on.
20:54 Dylan: He says, this is a mistake which many writers have actually made. I find it just pompous bullshit. Every philosopher through the ages goes around saying, well, you know, they really don't understand what they're saying. I mean, this is the same argument that Socrates makes, you know, and in that way, it's tiresome. And the fact that you would have a whole section of your book saying, well, it's really. Because they don't really understand their terms. And they make this mistake all the time. And now, because I'm Such a smart guy, and I really know what's going on, that I'm not going to make that mistake. It's both a tired technique to me and one that doesn't seem to really take me as a reader seriously.
21:36 Mark: But it's not just a pompous introduction he has established right there. He thinks in those two sentences that consequentialism is the way to approach ethics. And the way we had presented ethics in our earlier podcast is some people doing ethics are consequentialists. They start with what the good is. Some are deontologists. They start with what the right is. Some are virtue ethicists. They start with virtue. He's just saying, look, obviously because good conduct is a compound noun, then obviously good and conduct are not the same thing. He's pointing at a verbal thing and saying that indicates directly what the root of the matter is.
And he then uses that as a bedrock principle for a whole chapter. Later. He dismisses rule based approaches because obviously the best rules are going to be the ones that will produce the best outcomes most of the time, but since we can't know all the circumstances, they're at best going to be probabilistic. So anything like Kant's ethics is just out the window. Likewise, virtues. Virtue is really just whatever it is. The qualities that make us more likely to produce the most good, those are all definitional. Even though he takes himself to look how careful I'm being.
I'm parsing all the notions here. And yet he just makes this stupid mistake. Which, you know, maybe this is just historical hindsight. The fact that we read the Saussure and things and say, oh well, maybe in our language good conduct is two words, but maybe in another language it's just. It's just one thing. And actually parsing them apart, you wouldn't talk about ice cream as also being good. You would call it something else. Good conduct is moral goodness, and that is a single irreducible term.
23:19 Seth: Not that I want to jump ahead, but MacIntyre at least makes the effort to explain why this had such an impact. Page 16 of After Virtue this is great silliness, of course, and he's talking about Moore's argument for good being indefinable, but it is the great silliness of highly intelligent and perceptive people. It is therefore worth asking if we can discern any clues as to why they accepted Moore's naive and complacent apocalyptism. One suggests itself it is that the group who were to become Bloomsbury had already accepted the values of More's sixth chapter, but could not accept these as merely their own personal preferences.
They felt the need to find objective and impersonal justification for rejecting all claims except those of personal intercourse. And of those. The beautiful MacIntyre, prior to this, talks about the prioritization of the aesthetic at some point. So that's what he's referring to there. He says, what specifically were they rejecting? Not, in fact the doctrines of Plato or St. Paul or any of the other great names in Wolf's or Strategies catalog of deliverance. But those names are symbols of the culture of the late 19th century. So what he's basically saying is More provided a justification and maybe an articulation of something that was in the air at the time, which was a desire to break from a certain kind of tradition, whatever that tradition was, you know, the Enlightenment, the classical tradition, what have you, and proclaim a new era that fit their cultural and aesthetic model.
MacIntyre is saying that because, of course, he's going to later argue that you can't divorce the language of morality from historical context. And so this movement really set the stage for this 20th century abuse and misuse of terms, the language of morality sort of abstracted from context. So we've talked about it numerous times on this podcast where we read, what are they called? Neologisms of these philosophers making ridiculous claims about other races and, you know, bile. If we read Galen today, Right. We'd all be laughing hysterically, I suppose.
But it's indicative of something in the historical context, and that's the point that MacIntyre wants to make about it.
25:36 Wes: Well, More is there is an argument that is still taken seriously, and that is his naturalistic fallacy and open question argument. We get a little bit of it in that first chapter. I think Moore is not just an anachronism, and I think it bothers me that MacIntyre doesn't really argue against Moore and just dismisses him, because it's an argument that was taken very seriously and argued about in great detail, and it's not so easy to dismiss.
26:01 Dylan: I think there's some important ways. It seems to me that MacIntyre at least practically agrees with Moore.
26:08 Wes: Should we give a little summary of what Moore's naturalistic fallacy thing?
26:11 Seth: Have we clearly stated what Moore's position is?
26:14 Wes: Let's do that.
26:16 Seth: So the good is indefinable, right?
26:18 Wes: Well, let's not just say the good is indefinable, because that's kind of a consequence, I think.
26:23 Seth: Okay.
26:24 Wes: I mean, Moore's Idea is that in the tradition of ethics, people have been trying to define the good in terms of some sort of natural quality, say pleasant, or the greatest happiness for the greatest number or something like that. And his idea is that that's a fallacy. So, for instance, even if it were true that all pleasant things are good, that doesn't mean that the properties of good and pleasant are identical to each other. That's the fallacy. He thinks that they can't be identical because anytime you grant something that these properties, let's say, are co extensive that you found something where in every case anything that is pleasant is also good, you can still wonder whether being pleasant is the same thing as being good.
You could still question that. And that questioning wouldn't mean that you're just simply incompetent with the concepts. That's a crucial step. Meaning I can know how to use good and I can know how to use the word pleasant and still wonder if they're the same thing.
27:20 Mark: I think it's important to say why he wants to cast this as a theory of the meaning of the word good. Because the counter that everybody gives is, what if it's not a theory of meaning? What if it's about the nature of the good? But the people that he's reacting to like Mill did consider that the way we use the good in normal speech might be a little confused. But the project of Mill and many others was to systematize our common sense. Right? So both Mill and Kant at the end of the day said, all I'm really expressing is just what common sense tells us.
It's just that common sense doesn't think in this sophisticated and universal way. And now that we've codified it, now that we can clean up the imperfections. So it really was supposed to be getting at the underlying linguistic meaning of what good or right is. It's just that, again, it's a corrective meaning. It's not just saying what the many think about it, it's improving upon it.
28:16 Wes: Right. It's a conceptual analysis, let's say.
28:18 Mark: Yes. So that's very different than what, say, a scientist is doing. Like, what is water really? I'm going to examine it and find the molecular structure. That's never been what philosophers have been trying to do with the good. It's always been some kind of conceptual analysis because it's our concept, we use it. You know, I don't know what the correlation is for water. I mean, you could say, like, what is the essence of, you know, like the commercial the essence of shaving. What is the essence of water? It's cool and refreshing and you could write a poem to express the essence of water. In that sense, you'd be a conceptual analysis of water. But it's so obvious that that's different than what the scientist is doing.
28:53 Wes: Yeah, so Moore's basic idea is that if the good, and let's say the pleasant or any other natural property you want to choose were the same thing, it would be obvious. It would be obvious through conceptual analysis and it wouldn't be a point of dispute. Just the fact that it can be a point of dispute suggests that there in fact is no identity.
29:13 Dylan: And that turns on him. Categorizing what this term good means in his theory of meaning. It ends up being a term that is just different than other kinds of. It's a class of terms that don't have natural correlates but also have a different relation to their parts.
29:31 Seth: Actually, he says it's a concept, not a term. Okay, your point is still taken.
29:35 Mark: So you're saying the various ethical concepts have a relationship to each other. That's the part whole. But it seems the good itself not referring to the number of individual things that are good. But the good is simple. It doesn't really have parts. Right.
29:48 Dylan: I think you're right. I was just trying to make the point that underlying his analysis of the good is a meta analysis of the good as an example of a kind of concept, not a term. I guess that there's a kind of semiotic analysis going on for him.
30:06 Wes: So the idea is that you can't analyze the good into a natural predicate or a number of natural predicates and that it itself is non natural. Right. Good is not a property like yellow that we find out there.
30:19 Seth: Actually, that's exactly.
30:20 Wes: I mean, it is like yellow. Yes, it is like yellow in its. It is like yellow in its simplicity and its unanalyzability. But it's not like yellow in being natural.
30:30 Dylan: Yeah, it's a non natural simple.
30:31 Seth: Okay, A non natural simple. Yes. And by simple it just means there's nothing else to which you could make recourse to explain it to somebody else. I mean, that's kind of the gist of what he's saying is that you can't explain yellow to somebody. They just have to know what yellow is.
30:46 Dylan: Yeah, but the key there, right, is that yellow or chocolate or other simples have sensory correlates that you can appeal to a kind of pointing. He doesn't say it this way, but you can appeal to a kind of pointing that would be characteristic of natural science and say, well, look, this is what I mean by yellow, and hold an example out and everybody can stand and look at it, and you might have some discussion of the subtleties involved, but you all basically know what you're talking about. And I think he means that to be the case with the good, except it is absent this characteristic of it being natural.
31:28 Speaker: Thanks for listening to this episode preview. You can purchase a full episode at our store page, get it by supporting us through Patreon, or become a partially examined Life Citizen. We provide supporters with ad free access to our full catalog, including new exclusive content. Configure our Citizen feed to get it all beamed straight to your Apple or Android device. Learn more at partiallyexaminedlife.com support.
in terms of covering the readings this is one of the best podcasts to date!
here is A-Mac “on having survived academic moral philosophy”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbmPXXO8jpA
Love the new layout
I listened to the episode, and regarding the discussion of Moore, I agree that his attempts to understand what is good as an indefinable non-natural property is not well-grounded on a kind of semantic argument for how people use the word ‘good’ in the English language. In some respects, however, I don’t think the appeal to natural language is misguided, rather just the trajectory he took. I mean, for example, even if it is a fact, like if a person looked at an English language corpus and discovered, that people do not use the word ‘good’ to mean that which maximizes happiness or that which conforms to a maxim that is in principle capable of being universalized it does not follow that an ethical theory cannot be built from this identification, as you mentioned in passing. Any serious attempt to know (that is, anything attempting to be a kind of science) makes use of commonsense notions and abandons them as soon as they do not prove useful for a theory–that is, as soon as they do not seem to be explanatory, predictive, economical, etc. So even if a person could not identify the vernacular usage of ‘good’ with any of the things that could come along in an ethical theory, it does not follow that a person could not formulate an ethical theory that uses this term in a different way, of course provided that the term, if used, be defined as a technical notion that differs from the vernacular. Or, if the term be not used at all, Moore’s criticism regarding using the term or concept holds less water.
This is kind of an old article but here is Steven Pinker’s “Moral Instinct” in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?pagewanted=all. I will briefly summarize the position, which tries to give a kind of naturalistic ethical theory. Human beings are born with a moral faculty, about which people reason about what constitutes harm, fairness, community, authority, and purity. This moral faculty initially favors kin and clan, but as this moral faculty interacts with the environment (broadly speaking) human beings increase the extent to which moral concerns affect groups outside the purview of kin and clan, over millenia, centuries, and decades, eventually extending to races, the human race, other animals, and the environment. This naturalistic account might not be true, but supposing that it is, and suppose that it is part of the human design that people reason in this way, is there much more needed to create an ethical theory? If you also add in for good measure the consideration for other perspectives and a tendency toward cooperation to make normal human affairs go smoothly, the line of reasoning from Moore to MacIntyre becomes irrelevant, doesn’t it? Moral reasoning is then on par with any other kind of natural process. If someone wants to ask, “Well, even if I’m designed this way, why should I feel morally obligated to other people?” the response might be on par to what you could say to someone who asks, “Even though I’m designed to be hungry, why should I care about eating?” The answer is of course that that person doesn’t have to care if she doesn’t want to but she should consider the very serious and real consequences that arise if she doesn’t.
thanks for the link to pinker’s essay, billie.
i am a fan of both steven (the blank slate was pivotal in my development into the teacher i became) and robert triver’s work, having an interest in why/how/when/for what purpose cultural assimilation happens to us as children, whether it be human or non/human primates.
triver’s most recent work, ‘a folly of fools’, goes one step further and attempts to explain why we lie, if we choose to.
attempts to explain…there really is no rationale, if for other than survival, imho.
@Billie
We have built in, “intuitive” moral values that contradict each other. Not all our moral reasoning, from a naturalistic view, is harmonious. With different framing of the Trolley problem, experimenters are manipulating the answers they receive by playing off of the subject’s competing moral intuitions.
The naturalistic approach to morality presupposes the values which the researcher assumes to have moral relevance. Which of our bodily motions are moral? What is the qualification? They may say, “our survey says a lot of people consider smoking to be a moral issue”, but any argument which depends on popular vote is really no argument at all.
When we decide which naturalistic properties are relevant to morality, we are making value-based – non-“factual” claims. Dido for when we theorize for our competing moral intuitions.
I find moral psychology, experimental philosophy and the likes, to all be very informative. No doubt, how we view morality should not contradict the facts of our moral evolution. When Hobbes bases a moral theory on our supposed internal values, we should juxtapose that with our anthropological, psychological discoveries. But lets not pretend that an fMRI can tell us right from wrong. No natural value theory can solely be natural. The most we can get is, “here is why we might think something is wrong”, when we are looking for, “Here is why something IS wrong”.
When the hungry person refuses to eat, which consequences should she then value and consider? Couldn’t all the people who act immoral then simply say, “I was designed to act in this way”? Your naturalistic account makes the value-based assumption that we should consider our consequences, and implies a further value-based assumption that we should prefer some consequences over others.
There is no contradiction in stating some of our moral intuitions are immoral.
Hello,
I’m the Chilean who wrote a while ago about the humor.
As you can see, I’ve stayed with you people a while now.
I’ve listened to about half your talks. I find the stuff about ethics more interesting, but that’s just my personal preference: I have no interest in metaphysics or in science either, while ethics moves me to reflect.
I find nothing about strange about being interested in questioning things at my age, 66. In fact, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more impatient with superficialities and with small talk, even with most of the stuff that appears in journalism. I always try to read one serious book, either fiction or philosophy. Currently, I’m reading or rather rereading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.
Next on my rereading list is Aristotle’s Ethics. Your podcast on Aristotle is very insightful.
With time, I’ve gotten to have a sense of who is who among you three or four, although I still don’t find your humor to be funny.
If I might make a suggestion about the humor, when you edit the podcasts, eliminate the laughter.
Jokes (in my experience) work better if they stand on their own without laughter on the sound track.
Jokes (in my experience) work better if they are not signaled by laughter.
Now it could be that some people prefer the sound track laughter because it sounds more “natural” and because they are looking for clues about how to “feel one of your group”. I can see that and perhaps I’m wrong about editing out the laughter. So finally I can see both points of view.
In any case, thank you for so many thoughtful and reflective conversations.
I’m a 65 year old Californian (no I have not thrown in the towel), and I may have poor taste in humor, but I happen to appreciate your humor and laughter (and even philosophical bantering). In fact, I do not trust people without humor and do not like people without laughter. Humor is much more foundational to good ethics than good behavior, since you know when to laugh, but who knows what the f$%k we should do. Laugh on, even when you are 60+ 🙂
P.S. I know being from California probably got some good laughs. We have had some dictators here, one got shot, but lived and didn’t die in a motorcycle crash. By the way, did you hear the one about Plato and a Platapus walking into a bar one time and . . .
I’m a 65-year-old Canadian who’s hanging onto my towel, and, like Wayne, enjoy the humour, laughter and bantering. However, I’m with Swallerstein that there’s nothing strange in finding the questions because more interesting and stimulating as you get older. Like him, I’m becoming more impatient with superficial chatter, which is one reason I’ve been with you youngsters since Episode 4. PEL sets a fairly high standard for listeners and that’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned. I’ve found most episodes are worth a second listen and some are worth repeated listenings (Aristotle, Plato and Machiavelli in particular). Laugh on and keep on questioning.
I think Wes’s comment about age just reflects his world weariness and was mostly jocular. Of course Plato was all about only older folks being fit to do philosophy, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if folks often spend more time on such things after retirement or as one’s peers start dying off in increasing numbers.
I made a comment about age? I remember laughing at someone else’s comment.
Must have been Seth, then.
Before getting too upset, I think the podcast is good and a very positive thing: however, that does not mean it is not without flaws.
I agree with the Chilean gentleman about the humour – even living in an English speaking culture I find it very culturally American: also the banter is particularly undergraduate and tedious.
I enjoy the podcast – it is an easy way to listen to other views and insights about particular topics. There are a couple of observations:
a. when someone is a guest such as Owen Flanagan or Lawrence Ware, it is much more interesting and the discussion on the blog is also better (these are the two best episodes);
b. in some of the discussion, the presenters are very defensive, both on air and in the blog – an example is the comments replying to the Chilean gentleman – which I think are attempts of humour but are rather defensive. People offering criticism or correction are often mocked in the “banter”, and this is a little distasteful and closed.
Meh, somewhere between 1 hour and 1 hour 15 mins, the podcast turns itself off on my iPod (just after Mark says ‘sui generis’. Anyone else having this problem?
Great topic and talk, though. It wasn’t as obtuse as some of the ‘difficult’ German stuff, and I definitely enjoyed it more than the Flanagan episode, which was more of a presentation than a discussion, IMO.
Thanks all for reporting this. I’ve replaced the file, and you can re-download if you’d like.
Thanks Mark, that fixed the problem.
First time listener and this episode is right on track with my current professional interest. I’m researching the Dutch translation of the Virtues In Action (VIA) questionnaire from Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology.
The questionnaire aims to screen what virtues are important to us. It’s theoretical underpinnings at this moment are fairly immature and superficial and could have learned from this podcast or the philosophers that you speak about.
Then again, it’s interesting to see that both Seligman and someone like Shalom Schwartz (who surveyed over 60.000 people) found that around the world, people value the same kind of behaviour and outcomes. That’s a finding that, in my opinion, should be interesting for philosophers that are thinking about this subject.
Keep up the good work, I’ll be listening to the next episode for sure.
This is Moore’s “open question” argument, which expresses his objection to the “naturalistic fallacy,” which states that you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is.”
Hey,
Not trying to be picky, but i think the above sentence is misleading. Isn’t he objecting to these fallacies, rather than the concept of them? I almost skipped this thinking Moore was an idiot, when it turns out i agree with him. : )
Thanks, Mike; I’ve tweaked the wording in the post to make this clearer.
Aargh….turns out i don’t agree with Moore. I’m sure he’ll lose sleep over it.
I’m not sure how he goes from natural fallacy, to a more natural fallacy. “intuitive”, my god.
Dan? Asked this as to why they didn’t take the next logical step down the road….. why didn’t they? If they had i wouldn’t have had to make this second post. LOL
I listen every episode, however this topic made me fall asleep at my desk. How about some Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida or discussions of Star Wars?
With all respect, Fred, I couldn’t disagree more strongly! I loved this episode – I haven’t been more riveted since Mark led me through Cantor during the the Bertrand Russell discussion. I actually yelled at Wes while listening to this one (despite the fact that he wasn’t present), such was my involvement with the discussion.
Please keep doing what your doing – don’t change a thing.
Just a couple of observations now that I have finished listening to this episode…
I was glad that you finally mentioned Freddie Ayer – he was one of the first to refute Moore and calling out the fact that it was simply a statement of preferences. Unless you have a Metaphysical concept of the Good, then Ayer is correct is pointing out that you are simply stating preferences.
As for people looking at different accounts of the Good and accepting different Ethical systems – this part of MacIntyre’s project, and his book following “After Virtue” – “Whose Justice, Which Rationality” – explores this further.
A footnote to this is to consider Mediaeval European (or rather French) Jurisprudence. An assumption was that everyone belonged to a group or community and that one should be tried within one’s own community. So when the Franks set up the Kingdom of Jerusalem in Palestine, the locals were expected to have their own courts and manage justice within their own community. Clearly, other courts were used for inter-community disputes.
So this is a practical example of an acceptance of more than one account of Justice or Ethics: interestingly, Thomas Aquinas was exposed to this type of thinking, since he taught in Paris for a number of years.
This lead to an interesting feature of English courts having different competences to try cases: and there used be a processes called “Pleadings” which would determine in which court a case would be heard. This had mostly disappeared by the 1970s.
As a final note, MacIntyre began his project before he became a Catholic. Although you may view him as being “Conservative” (whatever that may mean), his rejection of Kantian Ethics has been a significant shift within Catholic Ethics – putting him directly in conflict with the last Pope and the conservatives within the Church.
You guys were strongest in this episode, as most philosophy is, when you were talking about how children understand what is good and bad. This is why Dewey and the pragmatists were so strong: they understood children. To quote the legendary John McDermott, “There are no children in Descartes.” Stay with the kids and they will bring us closer to the truth of this matter, I’m sure of it.
Hey all, haven’t had a chance to read through the comments, but I posted a few thoughts on my blog: http://nathanschock.tumblr.com/post/26438761949/after-virtue. I’m looking forward to the rest of the discussion and I love the new web design.
I have some serious objections to many of her ideas, but I think she also has some really good points that many people are unaware of or dismissive of (partly because of her choice of terms/wording).
The article has a couple points that lean toward libertarianism which can be debated/objected to, but as I said above it has some really good points.
“A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.” Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand’s Theory of Rights: The Moral Foundation of a Free Society
audio/pm3
http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/audio/ayn-rand-theory-rights.asp
I am bothered by the example of “this is water” and “this is H/2O” as being equivalent statements and statements unlike “this is good.” This example comes up repeatedly in Episode 58. Not once was ‘ “this is water” and “this is H/2O” are equivalent statements’ challenged. This example was taken as utterly unexceptionable.
If I hold up a container of water and say ‘This is a container of H/2O,’ this would only be accurate if it is a container of distilled water and only if I intend on putting the statement in a context of models drawn from physical science.
The ordinary use of “water” would apply to distilled water, tap water, pond water, ocean water, or even water so polluted that it could be set on fire. That is, ordinarily “water” is applied to a whole rage of instances where H/2O is a major constituent, but by no means the only constituent.
Further, most instances where H/2O is a major constituent would not be called “water” by proficient users of English. If there is a glass of tea and a glass of coffee on a table, and I ask someone to hand me the glass of water on the table and that person is fluent in English, that person would not hand me either of those.
“H/2O” is a way of talking about a molecule of pure water and puts it in the context of the discourse of physical science. “Water” is a way of talking about a whole range of functionally defined substances and puts it in a social context, for which the percentage of H/2O content is only marginally relevant.
So if the example used as a touchstone for what is an instance of a simple and utterly obvious demonstrative use of “this is X” is, in fact, rather a whole minefield of levels of what “this is X” involves, it should not be used to contrast with “this is good” as being complicated in contrast.
Point taken. It’s just one of those standard philosophy examples…
Thanks for pointing this out Jerome. I also remember being bothered by it.
The prevalence of such “standard philosophical examples” show how deeply ingrained the names-are-labels-for-external-objects idea is, despite Saussure, Wittgenstein et al.
I came away from this episode with the same nagging question that I have come away from others with, the one that, more than any other made me think better of perusing philosophy as a career, namely, why must philosophical propositions always need to justify themselves by an appeal to “naturalism”. It seems to be a prejudice of “modernity”, or more like the old adage in business that what gets measured gets done. The idea that anything REAL must be measurable. If it isn’t measurable, it isn’t real and therefore of no consequence to human life and activity. If art were judged in this way there wouldn’t be any (which might explain why are is regularly defunded in the public education system).
OK I know that was a bit of a rantlet-sigh.
It seems to me that discussions of the good are a lot like discussions of the beautiful. People seem to fall into two camps. Either the beautiful is simply conventional or it is some metaphysical property that can’t be fully unpacked because it is the very WAY in which things are packed and unpacked. The first camp seems to win a lot of the time. I think it is because if you can reduce beauty to convention then you can designate the context in which you are speaking about beauty and thereby always be certain exactly what you are talking about.
The “conventionalist” view of beauty seems to go something like this. People from different backgrounds might disagree about whether a woman, or a painting or what ever is “beautiful”. Since there doesn’t seem to be anything “down there” to ground one or the other’s opinion, the opinion of each must be simply a cultural artifact. The trouble with this view is that if people can argue about what is beautiful there must be something they both MEAN by beauty. If this something were merely conventional they wouldn’t even be able to understand what the other person is talking about. The sense of beauty is a certain RESPONSE to an object. When I disagree with someone about what is beautiful we are not disagreeing about the contents of perception, we are disagreeing about the FEELING that the object elicits. The feeling is what beauty IS, or is at least the sensation of what beauty is. For example, in the case of sexual attractiveness, cultures differ somewhat in what constitutes this but not in what is is to find someone sexually attractive.
I think good is just like this. To say that an object or action is good is to say that it elicits a certain response in the individual. People might differ in what moves them to that response but the response is the same. it would be tempting to say at this point to simply inquire what this response is at the level of the organism. This is, in fact, what much of the philosophy of mind seeks to do. But this doesn’t tell us what good is any more than the study of the retina helps us know what light is. Worse in fact because at least we can find some material agent outside of the retina to explain visual phenomena. The good and the beautiful seem to share more with our intuition of geometric forms. Lots of different things are round but few are perfect circles. The perfect circle is a “way things might be”. I think the good is something like that, a WAY (with all the Taoist implications of the word in tact) things are.
Moderns don’t like such ways because they suggest that one gains understanding of things like the god and the beautiful through a practice of some sort, a way of life. This is where Aristotle comes in (as well as Jesus, Buddha and all others who suggest that we become good by being in a certain way). It is like the practice of music or poetry, as you do it you become better at it. It is like health in that the things one does to become healthy are not ends (diet, exercise, etc. are not what health IS, they are WAYS in which one becomes healthy.This is different from the natural sciences where we assume that what we seek to understand is a THING. Good is not a thing, it is a way in which a thing can be.